The Dark Will End the Dark, page 10
Bumpy ride, bumpy ride. Aren’t you glad that we’re inside? Aren’t you glad nobody died?
She was singing.
•••
Physically, she was eleven. Maybe twelve. Maybe a teenager. The kids knew only that she wasn’t smart. She never closed her mouth, but she rarely spoke. She couldn’t write her name—couldn’t, perhaps, dress herself. She wasn’t a ghost; her pale complexion was all it had taken.
However, she levitated. Glancing to be certain no one was looking, her body rose six inches off the bus seat, a cautious balloon. Her cheeks flushed red, blue, and yellow; lights underneath her skin. Down she came, smiling. She touched a finger to her nose and winked.
•••
He saw her in the halls, on the playground, in the cafeteria. He was afraid to approach, flanked as she was by bigger children. Red-faced, cruel, they danced around her until chased off by grown-ups.
Only on the bus in the mornings was the ghost there like breath, waiting for him even though they never spoke.
He wanted to ask how she ignored their spitting, why she didn’t fly away to live on a cloud. But then he pictured his father guarding the water treatment facility, climbing into bed every day as the sun rose. He pictured his mother, slathering bread slices with red jam: Don’t be a coward. Everyone goes to school. He pictured big brother twisting his ear, imitating the father, delighting in the way the cartilage folded.
•••
One morning, she held his hand. She was shy, cupping a robin’s egg.
The next day, she was bold. She grabbed his hand when he sat down.
Her grip was strong. Sweat mingled. He absorbed the painful joy by ascending through the ceiling. Borne on a weightless wind, he gazed down at the yellow bus as it crawled along the street. The world shrinking, he became a balloon. He drifted into clouds. He searched for her there.
•••
She reeks, big brother said. Now your hand reeks.
He scratched big brother’s face. The mother sent him to his room.
In the darkness, little brother sniffed his hand.
Outside the bedroom, the mother reassured the father. It’s what boys do. No reason to get upset.
•••
Big brother demanded little brother stop sitting with her.
Her mom is nuts, he said, and the ghost is retarded. My friends think I like her. They stole my shoes.
Big brother has a few points, the mother agreed. Her lips smacked at her tuna casserole. For the third time today her makeup had been applied, thus the care inserting bites and pressing a wineglass to her lips.
For the father, eating was not to be interrupted. Boys and mother were surprised when he spoke:
There’s a genetic component to craziness, he nodded. The jutting Adam’s apple above his unbuttoned collar looked like a rock he’d tried to swallow. Want to know what’s wrong with the kid? Check the parent, he said.
I suppose I could drive him to school, the mother suggested, in a pillowy voice.
The father growled into his can of beer: There’s a direct way that doesn’t involve acting like a coward.
•••
The ghost wasn’t on the bus the next day. Or the next. Or the next. Little brother took his regular seat. In his mind, she touched him, and her songs lived like worms.
The other children pointed at the emptiness beside little brother. Now she really is a ghost, they said.
•••
One night, little brother awoke. The ceiling crawled with dark continents. He thrashed in his bed, feverish. The ghost knelt at his side, molding his hand like clay. I’m making a bird that looks like me, she said.
Then she became the father, unsmiling as he manipulated little brother’s hand. Little brother walked backwards into sleep. Out of the dream, he thought. I am backing out of this dream.
In the morning, his fingers were jointless. His left palm was swollen, and together with his unbendable fingers, it crowned his forearm like a deformed flower.
The hand was hideous and itchy. The aroma was of something pulled from the earth. He wrapped the hand in a bandage and told his family he had burned it.
When, exactly? The mother frowned, sniffing the air. She knew everything about her boys, or thought she should.
How does a kid who never touches anything get a burn on his hand? the father mused.
He’s full of it, big brother said, sneering across the table. Unwrap it for us.
We’re going to be late, little brother said. His heart, his ribs; labored breathing like climbing flights. There was a fire in the bones of his hand.
It hurts, little brother whispered. He’d thought he could keep it to himself, but the pain was too much. Tears drew lines down his cheeks. The world turned mouse-colored and blurry. He felt himself fall.
•••
How long he slept he didn’t know. He tried to raise his head. At the end of his arm was a great flesh suitcase, pores wider than pinheads. The hand occupied an entire coffee table next to his bed.
It’s wiggling, he said. His raspy voice came from outside his body, from the darkness. The drawn shades stood hot and unmoved.
I know what you mean, the mother answered with a laugh. But it’s a she, not an it. The mother’s complicated gaze fell on him. Forlorn. Smitten. Hateful.
Is it the ghost? he whispered.
Yes, a man answered. Doctor Foster materialized from a corner, his bald head alive with sweat. He dried it with a forearm. Of course it’s the girl. Curled up all snug and tight. Like she was swallowed by a snake. He and the mother laughed and exchanged a look.
Don’t play dumb, the father said to his son. He sat against the dresser, smoking. You know goddamn well why she’s in there.
Charlie, please, the mother said.
•••
Little brother lay in bed for weeks. His parents withdrew him from school.
Nights, little brother hummed her songs, trying to remember the words. The ghost was fading from his mind.
•••
Every morning, he heard big brother preparing for school, heard the mother handing out lunch, kissing a cheek. Little brother lived in fitful sleep.
Minutes or hours later, his father entered and crawled beneath a ragged blanket on the floor.
Why don’t you come clean? the father said. He dragged on his Camel and exhaled a smoky cone. What’s the point of lying? he continued. Everyone knows you fell in love. You let her in. You aren’t protecting anyone.
The hand was not a hand. It was enormous. It was a sleeping-bag housing a full-grown adolescent. The outline of her hips was plain under the skin, her arms nested against her sides, the bumps of her ankles, the individual toes. The rise and fall of her breathing.
•••
Nights, the father talked.
You confuse me. Blond hair and glasses. I used to ask your mother if you were mine. It didn’t matter so much when you were little. What did I care? I said: Let him sing all the stupid songs he wants. Let him finger-paint and feed every baby bird in the neighborhood. But you’re in school now, buster. Are you stupid? Those kids will eat you alive. When you grow up, the adults will do the same. So yes. I admit it. I did this to you. I don’t regret it. Your brother helped. We made this happen. There’s a lot you don’t know about me, and maybe you need to think about this fact as it relates to everyone in your family. Anyway, you wanted her, you got her. Crap in a pan, you eat it.
•••
When the ghost was born, nighttime was speaking. Sounds sifted through the window—a bark; a car horn; a triangle of wind chimes.
The hand swelled and kicked. The six feet of skin was an ocean, undulating. The ghost thrashed. Tissue and blood squelched like mouths kissing. A small rip in the skin became larger, a circle.
The father sat against the dresser. Moonlight blued his face. A Louisville Slugger rested on his lap. He’d sent big brother and the mother away. Three days, four nights at a hotel on the lake. He’d drained the bank account so he could be here alone when the ghost was born.
He heard the noise of birth and laid out the facts: I’m going to crush her skull. No questions. You’re going to know what disappointment feels like. Why am I warning you? Here’s the answer: so you can know what it feels like to know that disappointment is coming but can’t do anything to stop it. Two lessons for the price of one.
An hour later, there was a gush of clear fluid as the ghost spilled onto the carpet.
Songless, white, and naked, she sobbed. Her skin trembled. Her throat was clogged with viscous body.
Little brother lacked the strength to lift his head. He was also too afraid to look.
He winced as the muffled cracks resounded.
Dull thumps rejoiced in rhythm, like a heartbeat.
Eventually, the bat broke. The father tossed the handle onto the glistening corpse and then sat down on the floor to catch his breath.
Silence settled on the room. Little brother’s body relaxed. His hand lay ripped and splayed across the coffee table. No pain. He was aware that the hand was useless now and would be removed. He wasn’t sad. It was relief that he felt. The relief was unexpected. It crouched in his stomach like a new animal.
Unexpected, too, was the father, blood-dotted, crawling to little brother’s side and assuring him that the ghost would return. His eyes were dark. His breath warmed little brother’s cheek.
Headless or bodiless, the father said, she’ll find her way. She’ll climb into that other hand. He touched the blanket and smiled. He appeared to be sincere.
Happy Turkey Day
None of Jonathan Turkey’s friends, teachers, or teammates, nor in fact anyone at Cleveland Catholic Central, nor anyone else on Earth (besides Jonathan and his father Winnicott) knows the origin of Jonathan’s unusual surname.
Nor, however, would anyone care. They’ve heard the name shouted through gymnasium loudspeakers, heard it sung in commercials for the Rare Coin Emporium—they’ve heard it so often that it has no association anymore with the hideous farm animal that people kill, eat, and make wishes on while they break its bones.
•••
Jonathan Turkey would rather not die in an alley behind the Green Top Tavern on a blustery November night, bare-kneed with his Gap jeans bunched around his ankles, while the icy wind wreaks havoc on his boxer-briefs and the inhabitants therein.
Not like this, God, Jonathan prays silently, forced to stare at a stretch of black pavement strewn with lemon rinds and Styrofoam boxes resembling screaming mouths stained by barbecue sauce and bleu cheese dressing. The stench of worried chicken bones and ashy beer fills Jonathan’s nose and, in spite of his terror, makes him kind of hungry. Rain begins to fall, first softly, then hard.
•••
The two teenagers, Claude and Jonathan, had passed through the Green Top’s back door ten minutes earlier, arm-in-arm like platonic same-sex friends in certain Middle-Eastern countries. Jonathan was laughing abrasively in a sequence of high-pitched toots and caws that sounded (at least to the waitress unlocking her car in an IHOP parking lot half a mile away) like a bird being devoured by her tabby. The waitress drove home and found a dead blue jay on her porch, which seemed to prove her theory correct, although, when she really thought about it, it hadn’t sounded like a blue jay at all.
•••
Jonathan is the only child of widowed rare coin dealer Winnicott Turkey. Winnicott is a minor celebrity in Cleveland, a successful businessman who golfs for charity once a year and whose commercial jingle (“Winnie Turkey’s Rare Coin Emporium!”), while weak on melody and lazy on lyrics, is ingrained in the mind of any local who watches even a few hours of TV a week.
Jonathan is also Cleveland Catholic Central’s finest but most rash-ridden point guard, the winner of two MVP trophies (so far). He possesses the highest per-game rebound average (11) in Cougar history. To sexually-mature CCC junior Gloria Emert (whose parents own a yacht in the Keys and a summer home not far from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port) Jonathan is committed boyfriend, prayer partner, and soul mate. He will even mow, for free, your lawn. (If you live within a few blocks and have a physical problem with mowing your own lawn, and if you ask nicely while he’s in the presence of his dad. After all, like most of us, Jonathan believes at his core in the value of good deeds, but he often needs a little prompting.)
•••
When the blade nibbles at his throat, Jonathan envisions pivoting his torso, delivering a simultaneous left forearm sweep/right rib-punch, capturing the knife, and slicing open the belly of the fat gay bastard who is squeezing a fistful of Jonathan’s too-long hair.
(Just this morning Dad said, “Cut that mop, boy. You look like a woman.” Kneeling in the frigid rain, Jonathan scolds himself: when would he learn that Dad was old and, despite appearances to the contrary, wise? Sure, the Emporium was going down the crapper, and Dad had wrecked the car a couple times. And sure, there was that vial of cocaine in the cookie jar. But hell, even Michael Jordan probably hit a few rough patches on his way to the top.)
The hair-pulling intensifies. Jonathan’s face is forced skyward until he’s blinded by the flavescent bulb above the tavern’s back door.
•••
The boys met two hours ago, inside the Green Top Tavern. They arrived in separate cars—2005 Jaguar XJ8, 1996 Ford Taurus. Neither boy was old enough to enter, let alone drink, but the owner/bartender of the cruddy little craphole knew Winnicott Turkey, and therein laid the problem.
•••
Snugly fitted behind the wheel of his Audi A8 is Winnicott Turkey. Warm. Cocooned. Steve Miller on the stereo. Winnie draws a vial from his shirt (careless these days), taps a mound onto his palm, snorts it, closes the vial and re-pockets it. His hands feel dry and itchy. The Green Top Tavern, blurred by the pouring rain, waits beyond his windshield. He is here to get $1300 from the retarded bartender. Two hours ago, he received a phone message. The voice was obvious even after so long. The money had been a loan for the down payment because Betsy was barely underground when Winnie felt the urgent need to get this bar out of the Turkey family’s hands, no matter what the cost.
The Rare Coin Emporium that Serjo (“Joe” after 1955) lovingly bequeathed before his death has gradually become a husk of the empire Winnicott (yes, Winnicott, not Joe) built. Now it is merely a means of sustaining a drug habit. His house has been mortgaged twice. The Visa Exec, AmEx Titanium, and MasterCard Diamond are maxed out. Last summer, repo men hitched a tugboat to What’s Next while he and the kids were pulling up to the dock after a Lake Michigan cruise. In a panic, embarrassed, he’d told Johnny and Gloria that he donated the sailboat to a poor family. To be laughed at by his own son! And what kind of laugh was that, anyway? In his generation you could read a person’s laugh, but kids nowadays had thirty different ones for every occasion. In so many ways, Johnny had become like a foreigner—the odd odors, the bizarre language, the demanding and sneaky attitude. Like a beaten seal, that laugh.
•••
Claude Poopdick (Peuptic, really, but you know how nicknames go) grips the stumpy rope of hair and eases Jonathan’s face toward the yellow light. Claude yanks, but sadly gets neither scream nor squeal: Turkey barely grunts. Or maybe doesn’t grunt at all. The rain is noisy as hell.
Claude never counted on cacophonous rain. How can a prisoner be tormented effectively, Claude wonders, when the tormenter can’t hear the prisoner’s reactions? The situation is starting to feel like one of God’s fucked-up tricks, and it sends Claude into a quiet rage, which is his preferred kind of rage, one he has practiced for many years and which he will now, he promises himself, at last take advantage of.
He draws a deep breath before hissing, “Are you scared? Are you afraid to die?”
Before he utters these taunts, Claude imagines they’ll sound explosive, unbalanced, frightening. But spoken aloud now they seem like the prissy inquisitions of a 5-year-old. Claude’s are helpless, puppy-born-without-legs questions that invite answers, which is not, Claude knows, the way to terrorize. But then Claude, with relief, considers that Jonathan was unable (perhaps) to actually hear the questions. The rain rattles the tops of the garbage cans.
(Claude is petrified of death. “To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot”—he is haunted by this Shakespeare line from last year’s English class. The line is a part of him now; he’d like to forget it, but he can’t, any more than he can forget his feet. Every few days, he fends off a bout of dizziness when bulldozed by the realization that the shell of a body that is “him” will someday be rotting underground while his mind, his essence, will be sucked into crushing dark space forever. The world he knows won’t exist. He will metamorphose, like a character in a fairy tale, into a series of lines carved into a granite slab, lines forming the nonsensical phrase “Claude Peuptic.” Claude draws deep, concentrated breaths when the terror strikes; supine on the couch, he digests the white ceiling with his eyes and uses his fingers to count his pubic hairs. This distracts him well enough.)
•••
Winnicott Turkey hates himself. He has misdiagnosed his self-hatred, however, as self-pity, and so he does everything possible to eliminate self-pity from his life. Thus, when choking the throat of his popular and sport-gifted son, Winnicott translates this as the compulsion to murder his offspring so that others will feel sorry for him like they did three years ago. He desires others’ pity so he won’t need his own. For this same reason, Winnicott crashes BMWs into trees; he drives the family business into the ground; he blows $1100 a week on blow. His efforts to evoke pity leave his self-hatred intact while compelling no one to feel sorry for him.
All of this has something to do with Betsy, but Winnicott is never sober long enough to sort out his psychic wounds.
•••
Those who know Jonathan know he is a well-mannered, athletic, attractive teenager with a bright future in politics or law. (He has a 5—1 debate team record and gives motivational talks during children’s Bible study about the dangers of underage drinking.) Those who know Jonathan also understand that basketball is an epically difficult career to break into, and that a more prudent plan will involve departing the basketball court in favor of an appellate court.
