Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  Their disagreement had escalated to name-calling, the name-calling to shoving, and the shoving to slaps. Mazarak attributed the escalation to his own tension. For two months he had been redirecting his fear as feeble static, and their argument had amped it up insupportably. When he brought a fireplace tool down on Ruth’s head, the release of his tension glowed within him like the coils of an electric heater, but coolly, very coolly, and he began to brood about pain.

  Pain, he decided, was like matter—it could be neither created nor destroyed. This rare excursion into metaphysics left Mazarak feeling as if he had discovered a universal maxim. He had felt oddly philosophical even as he silenced Ruth’s screaming gray-green eyes with the black-iron poker. In fact, the pain flaring in her eyes diminished the ache in his intestines. Standing over Ruth’s body, Mazarak cursed her helplessness. He cursed her father. He cursed the pain that had prodded him out of his usual introspection into so ugly an act. And, finally, he cursed the kindly man who, only a few hours ago, had said the word cancer with such studied tenderness.

  Now, irrationally, Mazarak fled that inescapable pain as the shadow of a crystal-thin bird fluttered in his windshield curve.

  When would he reach the main highway? How long would it take to pass into the dense woods of Alabama? He had decided to flee westward, always westward, but would he ever find an exit from the maze of Radium Springs, his and his dead wife’s shabbily upscale neighborhood? Would he ever see the weather-carved granite mountains toward which necessity drove him? Admonitorily, beyond two fairways and a line of loblollies, the house where Ruth lay dead gapped into view again.

  Then his headlamps picked out the shape of some small living thing in the middle of the asphalt.

  Pain flared in Mazarak’s gut.

  Whatever the creature was, under the headlamps it presented a form of surprising plasticity. Advancing from the left-hand shoulder, it moved via a series of filliping jerks until it reached the center of the road.

  Mazarak ran over it. With a nearly inaudible plip, it exploded against the auto’s heavy chassis.

  Two more of the creatures appeared on the asphalt—cream-colored excrescences in the yellow light, mere distortions on the paving. Soon, though, they metamorphosed into shapeless lumps juggling one another without the aid of a magician. Mazarak also ran over these critters, which made faint but audible plipping noises beneath his tires—brittle explosions, like the lungs of a diver at too great a depth. Then, as far as Mazarak could see by the shimmering wash of his headlamps, the roadway accommodated endless swarms of these filliping things: amorphous lumps of migrating protoplasm. The night teemed with their pilgrimage.

  Toads, Mazarak thought. The road is full of toads.

  It was. In the midnight dampness, they had come out to let cool moisture seep into their hides. Now they were on the move from the lawns of his neighbors, across the asphalt, to the fetid ditch water on the edges of the golf course. Over this mad exodus fireflies winked like lanterns at sea, and Mazarak ran over toad after toad, toad after toad. Under his tires the vital amphibian plasma spilled in life-quenching gouts; it spurted away with each thumping revolution. But, grimacing at each thump, he forgot the agony plaguing him. That agony subsided. It diminished. In its place came a faint awareness permitting him to recall, with something like disinterest, Ruth’s preoccupation with a toad that had lived in their backyard.

  Just two evenings ago—how could Ruth no longer exist in any guise but that of memory?—the Mazaraks had walked together beside the patio wall simply to be walking together. Ruth detected a movement under her foot, gasped, and clutched at Mazarak’s arm.

  What’s the matter? he asked.

  A toad, she said. A toad pretending to be a lump of dirt.

  He’s not much of a pretender, kiddo, if he doesn’t know how to keep still.

  He knows he doesn’t have to be a pretender.

  Very analytical of the toad. How does he know?

  Because he knows that I know him, Ruth said. He lives under the cinderblock by the water faucet and knows that nobody here plans to evict him.

  Oh, good.

  And he eats insects.

  Too bad for the insects.

  But good for the flowers, and good for us, too, Pete.

  Ruth faced away, to lean against the wall. Mazarak watched the toad hop through the flowerbed and disappear under its cinderblock.

  When I was a little girl, Ruth said, Daddy Coy attended a conference in eastern Colorado. He brought me home a horned toad, from the prairie.

  Daddy Coy has always had a knack for giving you just what you want.

  Do you know what happened to it?

  It died, Mazarak said. All your fond memories about pets have tragic endings.

  He had not attempted levity in a long time. Ruth turned from the wall and stuck her tongue out at him. He reciprocated. Then she threw her head back and laughed—a hard, dry laugh that altered the contours of her face.

  Smart aleck, she said. Do you know why it died?

  Mazarak lifted an eyebrow.

  Well, when I first saw it, Ruth said, I thought it was suffering from a skin disorder of some kind—dishpan body, I guess. All those bumps and ridges and spines on its back, you know.

  I know. A horny toad.

  So I covered its body with a thick layer of hand lotion, just to smooth away the blemishes and render the poor critter attractive to his girlfriends.

  Commendable.

  I covered it with hand lotion every day for three days, and it died. It died in spite of my benevolent intentions.

  How about that, Mazarak said. How sad.

  Ruth had looked at him with enigmatic gray-green eyes, eyes that sometimes seemed to hide behind a nictitating film, and fondled his shirt collar. Then she had said:

  The colored man who worked for us when I was little—did you know that he once ran over a toad with our power mower?

  No. It’s been a while since Daddy Coy regaled us salesmen with an amusing anecdote about the help.

  Do you know what happened?

  I can imagine.

  The blades chewed up that toad and spat him out in hundreds of horrid pieces—gray, white, and red.

  Mazarak tried to shush her, but she shook her head and clasped him fiercely about the waist.

  It hurt, Pete. It hurt to watch that happen. The blades made one abrupt thumping sound and …

  And the toads died under his tires. Even so, they continued to hop unperturbedly across the roadway, perishing by the dozens. With his windows down, Mazarak heard every impact, every burst, every plipping implosion. The toads’ flattened carcasses lay strewn across the asphalt behind him, and he knew himself a latter-day avatar of the lawn man of Ruth’s childhood, but to a higher and more heinous power.

  He clenched the steering wheel and kept driving. When the toads’ danse macabre at length came to an end, he found a highway that would carry him westward and pressed the gas pedal hard.

  Small towns flashed into view and swept away, pasteboard tickets on the wind: Cuthbert, Eufala, Comer, Three Notch. In their dark town squares, Mazarak stared out on the empedestaled heroes of the Confederate dead. The rough-hewn piebald faces of the statues stared back. Their empty eyes haunted Mazarak, and the pain in his gut reasserted itself so severely that he cursed all heroes, living and dead alike. At last the statues vanished in the night’s lacework wisteria, and the floodlit glare of a truck stop emerged from the roadside pine thickets ahead.

  They can’t be after me yet, Mazarak thought. It could take her folks another five or six hours to find her, maybe even more.

  He pulled in. As an attendant filled his car with gas, Mazarak ate a half-melted chocolate bar. Hard brown beetles battered the floodlights around the pumps. Country music buzzed from a jukebox behind the café’s screen door. Among the trucks, truckers, and haggard day laborers, Mazarak felt hugely out of place.

  Just before he climbed back into his car, a trucker banged out of the café, stopped
by a gas pump, and crushed three peanuts between his hard fingers. The man tossed the shells down as if they irked him and then stared over the oil-display racks straight into Mazarak’s eyes. The trucker’s mouth twisted, and his eyebrows deformed themselves into a hostile glower. Mazarak glanced away.

  That guy looks like Daddy Coy, he thought. But a Daddy Coy made grim and glassy-eyed by long hours in an eighteen-wheeler’s cab.

  When Mazarak looked up again, the trucker was mounting to his mustard-colored cab for another leg of his haul. Before he could back out of the lot, Mazarak paid for his gas, started his car, and fled. For miles, the pungent stink of a paper mill followed him, but so intense was his resurgent pain that he hardly cared.

  He drove all morning and into the first light of a colorless dawn. He encountered almost no traffic, and the warm asphalt seemed to melt to the consistency of licorice, impeding motion. The world slowed, and Mazarak began having hallucinatory flashes in which he saw—of all unlikely visions—his own backyard. The farther west he traveled the more frequent became the flashes.

  Christmas Day: a bright, blue, wispy afternoon, as if in Indian summer; and he and Ruth stood by the soot-blackened incinerator behind the patio wall. They had built the incinerator shortly after their marriage. A pile of loosely cemented stones, it was the only “improvement” to their property that they had ever made: an improvement that also served, with its mortared chimney and removable steel grate, as a barbecue pit. But on that Christmas Day—how many had since intervened?—they had gone out back not to grill a pair of steaks but to finish an argument. Then, no sinister animal had gnawed his bowel, no nameless organic hurt had needed concealing, and, even in his rage, he had not once considered striking his wife.

  In the shadow of a tall blue conifer, Ruth had fidgeted behind his back. He was busy, though, and made no pretense of listening to her.

  Pete, this doesn’t make sense.

  He did not reply, but obsessively dropped the contents of a large Manila envelope onto the broken coals under the incinerator grate: policies, bonds, stock certificates, sheet after sheet of ornately stenciled paper. Each sheet turned crimson along its edges, curled, and crumpled like an otherworldly flower. When Mazarak had disposed of them all, he tossed the envelope onto the coals.

  I suppose you think you’ve redeemed your manhood, Ruth said.

  Instant psychoanalysis, Mazarak said. Too damned easy.

  Well, it doesn’t make sense—tossing everything on the fire.

  To me it does, Mazarak said. Daddy Coy can take his twenty-year harvest of insurance policies and half-ripe bonds and lug them back to his deposit box. Who does he think he is, sending us this patronizing crap?

  He thinks he’s my father, Pete. He thinks he’s your father-in-law.

  That’s crap. You have a shallow grasp of the relationships at work here, babe. Daddy Coy ain’t so much your father as you are his cleaving offspring, ever and always under his wing.

  You’re trying to make me cry. This is your egotistical notion of a noble gesture. Actually, it’s insane.

  Thus speaks an insane victim of her own Electra complex.

  Burning those documents proves nothing, Ruth said. Except that you indulge in self-deception as an adolescent hobby.

  Adolescent? Butterfly McQueen calling road tar black.

  You know Daddy Coy keeps copies of everything, Ruth said. You’ve had it both ways this afternoon.

  He turned and said, At least it’s a gesture. It’s better than nothing.

  Then, as they watched, the incinerator’s updraft carried the charred remains of her daddy’s papers into the sky—through the puzzle-piece blue fringed with pine needles, up into the incandescent afternoon. When Ruth spoke again, she said only a few anguished syllables:

  The ashes, Pete—they look like dying birds.

  As Mazarak remembered, the brutality of the outside world shattered his reverie. Something struck his windshield—with a frightening thud. It was a bird, of course. Even though he had been dreaming of a lost time, he knew that a bird had hit his windshield, penetrating his farsightedness, appearing at sudden close range (as if bursting through the membrane of another continuum), and smacking against the glass. Then, bringing him fully awake, the bird ricocheted into oblivion. Mazarak sat up behind the steering wheel and endured a stinging jolt of pain.

  The air above the highway had filled with wings. He had never seen so many floating scraps of plumage, like ashes billowing on the sky. All the wings belonged to mockingbirds. Mobile abstractions, the mockingbirds glided out of the tar-smeared pines on each side of the road, inscribing huge interlocking circles of descent. A paperweight snowstorm of feathers gently engulfed him, except that an occasional violent thwok killed for him the illusion of gentleness.

  Three, four, five, six, or more mockingbirds struck his car. Oriental in their hovering beauty, they immolated themselves with all the ruthlessness of little kamikaze intelligences. Mazarak watched, unbelieving. Unbelieving, he tried to keep track. One bird undulated over the highway in chiaroscuro suspension and then rushed forward to die against the glass. Mazarak, horrified, saw that the creature had no fear, none, and that just before it struck, one of the bird’s opalescent eyes reflected back at him, in blood-red microcosm, his own flawed panic. Then the thwok.

  And still Mazarak had in his nostrils the stink of the paper mill. It had followed him all day, growing stronger rather than weaker.

  How many birds died in their unreasoning attacks on his automobile? It seemed that the entire species had participated in ritual suicide. Russet smears obscured his view of the road. Mazarak turned on his wipers and discovered his mistake at once. Fluid grime swept back and forth in crimson semicircles. Soon he was looking not through the glass but at it, for a gray quill had lodged beneath one blade. It hypnotized Mazarak with a fluttery klihkklihk, klihk-klihk.

  His car rocked and skidded. It bounced forward like a guttered bowling ball. His tires caught the shoulder and churned through gravel. Mazarak slammed the brake pedal and, in a moment, sat quivering at a dead stop, half on the asphalt, half off. Shaking, he stared disconsolately at his cigarette-lighter knob and asked it with no sense of absurdity, Where does all the pain go?

  That night, Mazarak found a motel and holed up in it like a lizard seeking shelter under a rock. Holed up. Those melodramatic Western-movie words encapsulated his predicament, for the pain in his bowel had again begun to flame, causing him to picture himself as a reptile hiding from every human eye.

  But he drove all the next day without incident—blessedly without incident. The evening found him quartered in another nondescript roadside inn, and the following day he continued his westward trek. He spent much of his road time, though, thinking of the nightmare of his first day’s travel. Killing mockingbirds struck him as the antithesis of running over toads—a crime more reprehensible, more poignant, to take part in. After all, a cold-blooded toad was so removed from humanity’s rational spectrum that Mazarak could not seriously regret murdering one.

  But the mockingbirds …

  They presented a different case. In their choreographed aerial beauty, they seemed specimens of a higher life form. That they could enlist him in their destruction offended Mazarak, affording a murky clue to his own crassly motivated flight. It made his intellect touch on, if only briefly, the circumstances from which he was fleeing—and pain coursed through him.

  But if he could reach the mountains, or even the shadows of the mountains, he would preserve himself; he would prevail. His pursuers might not follow him into that hard masculine country where the grain fields and the arroyo-riven prairies provided a natural sanctuary. Or they might. In point of fact, no sanctuaries existed. Some acts did not admit of escape. Some acts demanded merciless retribution, and there were always people ready to carry it out.

  Mazarak began to fear roadblocks. His pursuers might capture him in the open prairie east of the mountains, before he could abandon his car and clamber into the safet
y of the Sangre de Cristo foothills. What would he do then? He had a few imprecise ideas about his life after eluding his pursuers and so kept driving even after stars had appeared in the tarnished pewter sky. The thought of holing up again, of crawling into a three-dollar-a-throw flophouse, scared him. So he kept driving, always toward the mountains, and the plains surrounded his vehicle like an ocean beneath which something persistently insidious trawls.

  Then it happened again, before Mazarak could make any sort of adjustment to the onslaught. Creatures leapt through the prairie grasses—tiny creatures, the sort that you could squeeze between thumb and forefinger until their skulls crumpled in capitulation.

  Kangaroo rats.

  Mazarak had never seen kangaroo rats before, but he identified them as soon as they appeared on the highway in a disorganized parade of singles: fragile little animals with palsied forelegs and eyes that winked amber. Each rat tested the asphalt with a series of hops before his headlamps mesmerized them upright in the path of their own destruction.

  Not again, Mazarak thought. Dear God, not again.

  Then he began to count, involuntarily recording the deaths. It required focus and work. The rats made so little noise when his auto’s undercarriage drove their bodies to the paving or clipped off their heads. And there were so many. How could he—how could anyone—keep count? But he tried, for he had a building suspicion that each rat’s death put a debit in the register of his own precariously salvageable life. An even more telling IOU already weighted that register, so he had to keep count—merely to determine his place in purgatory.

  Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen …

  Congregations of little bodies, all tentatively leaping, crowded forward. They resembled naked little men, with undeveloped arms and flash-frozen eyes, and each death pained him, pained him deeply, even as the successive collisions drew him closer to the painless state of a crash-test dummy. Free of all rational control, his automobile rushed mindlessly forward.