Outwit the place. Ha! As long as there were no people, safe ones he could not get to, the other side of the glass, the door, as long as there were no people anywhere in this world, Rat Time would leave him the fuck alone.
He sat quiet, belly full, in good soft light. The window reflected him back at him. He saw Alex in the dark glass, Alex in the room. Alex, quiet. Maybe, in the distance, a tiny chatter, a shutter clacking (maybe). Open-shut. Open-shut. Ultra. Slow. Motion. Was it? There. Yes it was. A shutter. Each click, a picture. Each picture, a moment. Pictures mean people, people watching. Smart guys, scared guys, fat guys, beautiful women, pimply girls, tough guys, and guys just trying to help. Guys who’d disappear into the mass of rats around them. He hardly recognized himself among them in the flickering frames and pictures, those watching, and him, another rat in plenty.
Only his teeth moved. He chewed rich, slippery cheek meat, blood-salt seasoned. It hurt. Hurt like.
It’s supposed to.
Each bite was a revelation of what pain, idealized, might aspire to. Each bite an apotheosis (Good word, a word to chew over. Thank you, Miss Kerkauff). Each bite a shot to take you to the stars on cold fires of dead-eyed physics. So far to go and so little of him, so little of this flesh to carry him.
Well, not so little. He still had (he counted): his lips, his tongue to work with. There were fingers, miles of fingers. Each hand had, count them, one, two, three… Fourteen. Fourteen knuckles, each one a meal, each, an ocean of pain to cross. He studied: a hand was a future, a planet of undiscovered pain to explore. And before the knuckles, the fingernails, each one hugging its meat. Each could be mined. Oh, yes, fucking Hillegas, yes.
Who were they, the watchers in the museum? Among those who would not be there: the Baseball Family, the Empty-Eyed Girl in the Ladies’ John, the Sweaty Kid Who Would Be a Man, the Beauty Piece of Kagen’s Island, his Partner, Fat What’shisname. And What’shisname, the Manager Mister, Mister Hillegas. They’d never be there.
He ran the trip in his head. Start to finish. There were more he’d forgotten. Where was he now? The beginning? Was he always here? No, no, he’d just arrived. Ah, that kid on the bus, the Greyhound out of Berdoo, the Doofus kid he’d left to breed, alive in the breathing world, he was out there. Could he be watching? And the Chrysler Lady. Oh, Chrysler Lady! He’d pay for them, oh the sins of so long life were not the deaths, oh no. The sins were those he’d left to live. So many. So, so, many. He’d pay for those, all those.
For now, he joined them. He looked at his image in the black glass: a small man, seated, quiet, a perfect gentleman. A man at rest on square-one, and, like everyone alive, watching. He was very, very, very, very, very, very good. And, he’d get better. He’d see to that.
THEN, JUST A DREAM
A kid walks. Late afternoon. All alone, he walks the rail line. Trees push close to the tracks, one side; the other, a graveled drop-off leads to more trees. Pine trees cover the hillside down to a river, maybe a lake, but something watery is off that side of the tracks and down there. He smells it, the water, the mud, fish, mosquito eggs; those smells rise from that side. He’s walked miles. As long as he can remember the day, he’s walked it. It’s summer, late summer, not hot, but warm. Nice. No place to go from here but home. The smells, the feel of the gravel underfoot, the scent of creosote bubbled from the ties, it smells, yes, like home. Near-home. He’s wanted to go there for…
Then, a soft click, metal, or a sound that would be metallic if it weren’t smothered by leather and a soft foot, and he isn’t walking. His foot is stuck. Now, he looks. The boot, his foot and ankle in it, is caught in a switch. A spur of a spur, the rails split at just where he was walking and a switch that he never noticed and hadn’t seen closed just as his foot arrived there. Jesus Christ. Along some track, middle of nowhere, a guy’s walking along, and the thing just closes, thump, like that. It doesn’t hurt; it simply holds him. Fact is, he couldn’t tell if it closed on him or if he just stepped in it and got wedged there. Doesn’t matter. Point is he cannot get out.
The line, this spur, he’d been walking hasn’t been used in…
He looks. Well, not for a long time. Grass, small trees and brush grow in the middle, between the ties, up from the rails; and the rails, they’re rusty, like nothing had rolled on them in months, years.
So the guy… Call him what he is, a kid… The kid’s not scared, not right away. Not of being run down and shoved to furious pieces by a train. Only thing worries him, how the hell’s he getting out? How’s he getting home? How’s he going to eat? The more he twists his foot, the stucker he is.
He laughs. “The stucker.” The switch, though, that’s not moving, not opening. It’s holding him like a retriever holds a duck: soft, but that’s one duck that is not flying.
Takes him most of the afternoon to realize that unless someone comes, unless the switch opens, he is there, part of that track, for the duration.
Now the fact that this is most likely an abandoned spur of some out of use line is starting to scare the hell out of him. He could die there, a really dull, pointless death.
By the time the dark starts, he is halfway convinced this is a dream. He hopes it is, anyway, one of those things that, once you realize you’re in bed, safe and stupid, you’re going to wake up, go down and get you a sandwich and a beer from the PX.
He starts to believe the day, the place, the rails, the switch, his foot, really are pieces of a dream. He imagines a rabbit.
Doesn’t a damn rabbit run across the track in the moonlight!
He imagines a howling wolf.
Yep. Beyond the trees, a pack takes up the cry.
He looks into the now-night sky. He knows a meteor will flash. And one tears a bright silent crack across the dipper.
He plays with the night, adjusting it.
Then he imagines a dinosaur nearby.
Nearby, the woods creak, crash, thunder. Trees groan, then explode. A hundred feet down the line a shadow like the world lumbers from the woods, crosses the track as a flesh-wrapped pile driver might and slip-slides the gravel down into darkness, the trees below. The dream shakes as it passes.
“Wow,” the guy says, thinking of what he’d brought to the world, this dream. The damn rails still shiver. With the shiver, without wanting to, he imagines a train, a metal and fire thing, abroad on this abandoned, this unused, spur line. Can’t help that. In the distance, the dinosaur cannonballs into the water and bubbles away, forever.
Into its place slides the sorrow of a steam whistle. In a few moments, pitifully few, the puff and chug of an engine rides the curve of rails. It’s coming from ahead. The steel races toward him; the rails that hold him quiver, they breathe against his leg, tightening, loosening, but never giving up on him.
He pictures the train. It is an old friend, the train, black, a steam giant at full blaze, shadow and fire in night. He sees the length of it; the cars run bright with people, eating, dozing, talking, planning, dreaming. A hundred at least, a hundred people, all with places to go, promises to keep, business, things they’ll do and undo at the end of the line.
The boy? He’s still stuck. He imagines the switch opening, releasing him.
It does not. He comes quickly now to realize that in this dream, this world, you can’t unmake the life you made. You can’t take back the dinosaur, can’t rezip the sky, unhop the bunny, unhowl the wolf.
And the train is near…
He thinks, maybe there is a bridge.
There is a bridge. Yes, he remembers. And he dreams it out. Dreams the gorge and the bridge across it a sliver of broken wood, down-bending steel, emptiness hung between the train and his trapped self! Then…
Then, he thinks, maybe. Maybe this dream is only the dream of someone. Someone on the train, the train heading his way is dreaming this. Maybe he’s on board, home from the war, safe, and waking…
And the world is soft and too small, a compartment of a train, the train. It’s night, his leg is asleep, the world is
a window, a black mirror with only him and this little rushing room in it. Ahead, the engine whistle blows. They’re going so fast that his compartment catches the shriek, devours, spits it pastward. The whistle blows again. His body presses into the seat at his back. The train screams with stopping, trying to at least, the whistle rushes on, 80, 90 miles per hour, all the steel and flesh around him strains toward zero. Working for stillness in a length of track too small to catch that much quiet.
Christ, what the hell? The young man looks out the window. He wonders. Is the bridge out? Ahead? Is there a bridge? A bridge, or something else, something on the track? And without thinking, he knows there is. He knows for sure there is a bridge but does not want to think about it. He knows for sure something else is there. The bridge and something. How high, how long, how deep, how rocky, how intact? And has he left the war, that place… Is THIS the dream…? Could this be THE dream? Could this be where he’s not? Could THIS be something he should wake from? Or not? What the hell would happen if… if this is still not home, not a ride, not…
Then he wakes. And it was. A dream, a Goddamn…
SO MANY TINY MOUTHS
When the wind freshened, the mouths climbed the sky, played among the trees.
Earl Sooey sat in his shack, writing down. Like always. He wrote, They eat top-down well as bottum-up. Don’t matter nun. He wrote like once, like long ago when he was barely a coot, back when the government claimed men were going to the moon. Th whole damn world snackered by this bullshit. Cap Hainey, too.
Earl saved that newspaper. Still had the damn thing somewhere. That was how many years ago? Earl was writing even then.
Now, he watched dark creep. Sand drifted in dog-high waves under and around his shack.
Dammed by sand and dark, he wrote, then added, Forever dark is cumming. Didn’t matter, he figured. He figured the damn mouths couldn’t see. Even tho they got one of my eyes! He swigged a little Beam and added Ha-ha! to what he wrote.
His eyehole itched and hurt at the same time. So many mouths, even blind, all they had do was open and bite, bite so quick and often that something would be there by and by to eat.
Blind mouths agenst a haff-blind man. That make an even fite? he wrote on The Toms River Sentinel.
“Even?” he said to no one, laughing. Nuthins even wen th end is shur! He wrote that down.
Earl wrote things down. Sometimes he didn’t, but he had years of the Sentinel saved, saved to write on, writing his own wide lines of truth with black crayon overtop their damn gray lies. Always sumthin gon to kill you, he wrote over a story about some president and Water-whatever. “Now there’s truth in that damn paper,” he said to no one and swigged again.
He listened.
The air clacked, clicked, hissed. A dry rain of sand sifted over the shack’s tin roof when the wind died; when it blew it scoured roof, walls, everything.
“Gobble, hobble, bobble,” he said when the sand brushed the window. “Sweet nothings,” he said. Sand making loving whispers to the glass.
Soon his windows were gone. Turned! he wrote. All my windaglass gone back to sand! He wrapped the plastic tarp around him tighter, hugged the bottle of Beam closer.
He wrote, There’re noyses in the air where they eat. They are… He listened to noises in the air. By and by he wrote, …are not like squirrel scratches inunder the eaves. Sand’s eating noyses are… He put on paper the sounds in the air. Nik, nik, nik, he wrote, A millyun niks, is nite tonite.
There were no squirrels now. No squirrel in the Barrens, he wrote. An pretty soon, no Barrens, then no squirrel everware, was the afterthought. “Do without squirrel, anyways,” he said to his Beam.
The air was cool. His breath dripped down inside of the plastic he’d wrapped around himself. That cold day in July everone talks of, he wrote.
The mouths had come with the Fourth of July. He wrote, Everone missed the end of the world. Then added, Cap Hainey an Buster Leek too... too much FUN I gess howlin at the moon.
Moon! There had been a picture—made him laugh—he cut it from The Sentinel years ago, showed it around over by Chatsworth. The damn picture was the astronauts standing on the moon in their suits. And there it was. The damn moon in the sky of the damn picture!
“Now, how can they be on the moon when the moon’s in the sky, there?” he said. “You answer me that.”
Folks, real folks, shook their heads. “Good catch, Earl,” they said.
Cap Hainey looked. “Damn, Earl!” he said. “That’s them practicing in their space suits there, out on the desert. See, it says them astronauts practicing for when they’re on the moon, for crineoutloud. Sure that’s the moon in the picture, that’s where they’re heading, Earl. Christ, it says right there.”
Earl shook his head and saved the damn picture. If ther on the moon how can the moon be in ther sky? he wrote under it. Still made him laugh. Cap Hainey!
The end of the world started with the folks from “Filthydelphia,” west of the Barrens. The family stopped on the day, Fourth of July itself, canoe strapped to their roof and dead lost. They bought a couple, five gallons of gas from his dipping barrel and he’d pointed their way to Papoose Crick.
Earl’s old hunter dog ignored them. When their car had come crunching up the sand trail off the county road, the old bastard raised his head and sang a squeaky bass ruff. When the car stopped, he growled. When he saw their damn dumb faces, he farted and fell asleep.
The young dog was off on the causeways, in the wood. He didn’t bother homing to see what the hell was with these folk.
“Help us with a little gas, there, can you?” the driver called. “Service station’s closed over.” The man turned to the little woman.
“‘Chatsworth’ was it?” The woman bent to the map crinkled in her lap.
“Yeah, Chatsworth. Buster Leek. Too Goddamn rich to work hollydays,” Earl said. He squinted at the car folk. “Us Pineys gotta take our fun, too, you know?”
Two ton of plastic camping shit but forgot good sense. These folks were good and lost. The daddy’s sausage hands were sweat-tight on the wheel. Pretty fingernails. Shiny.
“We’re looking for, is it, the Wading River?”
“Yeah, the Wadin’.”
“And the, what’s it? Papoose Creek,” Daddy said it like he didn’t want to say it. “You heard of a ‘Papoose Creek’?” He gave Earl a little nervous chuckle like he for sure didn’t want to say it a second time.
The woman leaned over Daddy to look up at Earl, a white strip of sun grease war paint ran down her nose. She yelled slow, like talking to a damn Mexican. “We hear about Jersey’s Pine Barrens in Philadelphia. So much history here.” She shook her head like she couldn’t believe it. “We want, you know, want the kids to see it, before, you know? To see the Pines before…”
“’Fore Cap Hainey cuts ’em down and rolls out them little prefabulous houses to sell?” Earl said.
The lady smiled. In the back seat, the kids did nothing, looked nowhere.
Earl started in. He gave them a little shit, spun tales, and charged a pretty penny for the gas. Penny? Hell, Earl charged what they call “an arm and leg” for a short five gallons of dewy low-test because Buster was closed for Independence. Son-of-a-bitch was good for something.
After dipping and shitting, Earl pointed them to the Crick. “That papoose-bottom water is good for what ails you.” He winked at the man. “Make you strong. You know what I mean?” He looked at the woman. She snapped a picture of Earl with her little yellow camera box from the store. They paid and were gone. Like that.
Earl was going to tell them, “Watch out for that Jersey Devil.” He was going to say, “What’s the Jersey Devil? Why, doesn’t he carry off folk in the night, his hundred teeth like needles clicking!” He’d written down that story years before.
He could’ve warned them to watch their damn campfires. Could have said, “Might look swampy wet there, but it ain’t! Been dry for Christ knows how long. I don’t want my shack and me bur
ned through careless ways. Built this myself, aw Christ, back when Cap Hainey was a little shit. Back in the damn Depression, I been here that long, Cap getting richer, me getting older.” He would have told them about Cap, his damn bogs, the nigger day-labors he jobs in for ’berry seasons.
But the damn people drove off, left all that unsaid. The car kicked a rooster tail of sand, slewed onto the trail and into the pines. Like that.
The old dog slept.
Earl laughed.
Then he kept watch through his back window. From sundown-on, Earl leaned against the glass, looking, looking toward the Crick, watching for sparks and tale-tell red-glowing the sky.
Night snuck from under the trees, across the sand between him and the woods. Tree shadow touched his wall and the dark crawled over him and into the shack, over Hainey’s bogs, then was everywhere. The air stayed day-hot and the sky was pale and watery. That could have been his damn eyes, still, all he saw of earth and heaven that last night of the world was the forest and a few stars wiggling in the heat. Them and the Thing.
If there had been no folk in the woods, Earl would have sat his porch and taken the breeze off Hainey’s bogs. He would have rocked, listened to the crick-crack and buzz of bug and the wing moan of the swallows as they fed; he could have sat and drew pinewood scent through his own and the dogs’ familiar stinks mixed with the nearby whiff of frog, carp, and decaying water-life bubbling from the bogs and the far-away mossy sphagnum breath of cedar swamp steeping in the deep wood.
Drink for the Thirst to Come Page 23
