Eye, page 12
“Can you bend it? Like this?” Denny demonstrated with his own arm.
The lights drew it all in. Then Nozzle cranked his injured limb as far as he could without pain, which was a good two inches of swing more than the previous day.
“Outstanding.” Denny proffered the usual reward of a grape gumball, and dressed the leg fresh.
Nighttime, whenever Denny could stealth out to the Sanctuary, he burned candles, carefully, so as not to start a fire, and so Nozzle wouldn’t gobble the candles up. “You’re not from here. You’ve been to more than one planet in your life, and I’ll probably never get off this one, except for maybe a ride into orbit on a shuttle or something. But by then, that’ll be normal, like riding a really expensive bus. I want to stay in space for a while, and look through a telescope with no atmosphere in the way. You know, if you were in space and the whole Earth burned down, it wouldn’t bother you way up there. I sure wish Grace was here. I bet she wishes she was here, too ...”
Nozzle’s eyes were dark. He had drifted off to sleep while Denny talked. When Denny noticed, he sat there for another hour, cross-legged until his feet were numb and needly, so as not to disturb the rest of his small alien charge.
During the day, Denny’s parents accepted his tale of wandering the fields and seeking out the perimeters of the farm. By night, they had not a clue. Sometimes adults seemed to function according to entirely perverse standards. They all ate dinner at the same table, but Mom and Dad occasionally struck him like cats, reacting bizarrely to things he could not perceive, or obsessing disproportionately over other things like whether or not it was a pleasant day. They had turned into aliens themselves, beings who could discuss the weather for hours. He’d could probably drag Nozzle through the kitchen in a red wagon at high noon and they’d see it, but they’d never notice it. At least, this was the delusion with which Denny satisfied himself until his Dad finally caught him sneaking out, long after bedtime.
Hindsight teaches that casual sorties are the ones most fraught with hazard. The worst automobile accidents occur close to home, when the driver lapses into a bogus sense of security. Your parents only nail you on the one night you didn’t really need to sneak out the window, by the time you’d done it often enough to lapse into a lazy underestimation of the vigilance of those in charge. Being a kid could sometimes blow like a typhoon. Childhood was phantasmagoric only in expedient fiction and lying memory.
The press of school, looming poisonously fresh within mere days now, less than a week, easily subjugated Denny’s sleep. At night, he watched the stars, and after hours, he discovered more and more about Nozzle. The creature’s odd, quill-like “hair” had the capacity to change color and acquire or dissipate heat, apparently dependent upon his mood or how safe he felt. He did not have teeth, but ridged gray-black gums. The sounds he emitted seemed to have more to do with Denny’s proximity or ministrations than with outright communication … so when Denny actually heard the trilling noise cutting across the night air, he knew something was amiss.
By this time it was rote: Shirt, pants, sneakers, out the window, across the back yard, past the barn to the Sanctuary. Denny usually took his flashlight although he rarely clicked it on; he knew the route, and any use of the light before he rounded the barn might be spotted from the house. A big Frankenstein-sized light bulb in a rusted conical shade hung from a phone pole planted midway between the house and barn. It could be turned on from the screened-in rear deck, what Mom called a sunporch. It was the closest thing to a streetlamp within a mile of their property. Denny did not miss streetlamps so much as he keenly felt their absence, and lack of the sense of order and civilization they implied. Streetlamps, after all, interfered with telescopy.
He passed beneath the dark shade, which swung and creaked in a growing wind from the west. He heard Nozzle’s alarm sound again and broke into a dead run.
One of Denny’s board-ups had failed, and something big and doggy was trying to breach the chicken coop by excavation. Denny nearly charged it before he reconsidered their relative sizes and cast about for a rock. In the dark it appeared to be a full-blown Doberman with clipped ears. Denny dinged it soundly on the hip with the first stone, forcing it to pull out and swivel notice to him just as he cocked his arm with a second shot. The dog hesitated. Denny snapped on his light — if the dog was even momentarily dazzled that could be an advantage — and saw Nozzle holding forth from the rent in the side of the Sanctuary. There did not seem to be any blood on the Dobie’s muzzle. Yet.
“Get the hell outta here!” Denny yelled. The dog shied but held ground, and when Denny hurled the next rock it was ready to dodge. Now he’d have to throw the flashlight. The dog really wanted what was holed up in the coop, wanted it bad enough to persist. It retrenched, almost ignoring Denny, intent on its meaty prize. Denny had his arm cocked to throw the flashlight, to hell with it, when he decided to charge the dog and kick its ass, to hell with getting bitten, when it suddenly yelped, high and shrilly. It seemed to levitate straight up, paws completely off the ground, as though electroshocked.
When it thudded down in a loose spill of its own legs, jaw thonking hard on the ground, Denny sensed it was dead even before he reached it.
There was a dot of blood right between the Dobie’s eyes to mark its punctured skull. The tip of a curved, ebony stinger withdrew into Nozzle’s abdomen. Denny saw this in the chancy light, or thought he saw it, since everything had taken on the delirious air of a hallucination, or a fever. The next thing of which he was actually certain was the sound of his Dad’s voice, pumped up, indignant, asking what the hell was going on.
A bigger light blinded Denny; more powerful — their streetlamp. He was knocked aside or whisked up by the scruff. He heard the sounds of the chicken coop slats sundering. He tasted dirt. Many things happened too quickly to track, and by the time he was being roughly hustled back toward the house, all he could remember was the weird, set aspect of his father’s gaze, his reddened, almost furious complexion, and saliva speckling his chin almost as if he were tilting toward some kind of madness. He marched like a man with a mission, but his fixed, fright-mask expression was something Denny had never seen before, and this abrupt werewolf shift frankly scared him, for real.
In his Dad’s free hand, the shovel; on the edge of the blade, blood.
After being hollered at some more, Denny was exiled back to bed. He did not sleep.
The following morning, several of the ballcap-wearing locals showed up, summoned by phone. They scratched their brows and traded opinions on conversational terms with Denny’s parents. Then a garbage bag was hauled out of what was left of the coop and tossed into the back of a pickup truck next to the dead dog, which belonged to the owner of the truck. Denny saw him shake Dad’s hand. Then the truck drove off in a cloud of dust and Nozzle was gone.
Denny attempted a stab or two at explanation but it was hopeless. He finally fell back on the simpler story that he’d heard weird noises and ventured outside on that one night. This allowed his parents to dismiss his culpability as a bare minimum of misbehavior, and deactivated the stickier and more complex questions, which could very possibly get him grounded for the rest of his natural life.
The neighbors grew a bit more neighborly, in a desperate, time-delayed, Welcome Wagon trickle, dropping by with food, or lingering to shoot the breeze on the porch. These appeared, for the most part, to be many of the same rustics Denny had observed out in the cornfield, shooting guns. Soon one of them even gifted Dad with a brand-spanking-new gimme cap. Denny never spoke to the visitors, nor looked in their eyes for fear of seeing a murderer.
Denny never solved his father’s mysterious rage, though, years afterward, some of its quirks became clearer. The thing in the coop had been an aberration that jeopardized all the down-home things his parents had found so necessary and seductive. His father’s rash reaction had been purely emotional, a caveman response that had the hidden benefit of currying favor with the locals. He acted instinctively, the same as if he’d found a snake in the carport. Mom hated snakes to a nearly pathological extreme. None of this rationalizing helped Denny figure out an explanation, but it buffered the truth. Adults could be too weird.
The disapproving parental scrutiny boring into the back of Denny’s head did not relent until the first day of school. His Mom had dispatched him to his fate, saying, “It’s a new school, new people. It’ll be an adventure for you.” It was inadequate, but it was all she could think of to offer.
Popular myth had it that when you die, you “leave this world.” That was what people said, and that what was had happened, essentially, to Nozzle. He had left his homeworld and been deposited on Earth by accident; now he had left this world.
Denny’s first day in the new school was keynoted by an ambush laid for him by just-call-me-Stephanie, the counselor. He had committed no transgression, yet a summons remanded him to the administrative wing, where waited the punitive and unwanted attentions of principals, vice principals, school nurses, and counselors.
“I have some idea of those events that happened out past Harrow Road,” she said, referencing a visitation from outer space as obliquely as only unimaginative people can. “I understand how you must feel.”
Her simulacrum of sympathy was so duty-bound and hollow that Denny could not muster the anger or disgust that would yield a truly mordant comeback. Mouthing off would only get him in trouble. He followed the usual social protocols: Eyes down, keep quiet, wait for it to be over.
“Look at it this way,” she said in a more confidential tone. “At least this all means that we’re not alone.”
Dennis lasted a single academic year in his adventure-free new school. By the time summer vacation rolled around again, his mother and father had grown in sufficiently different directions to tire of each other’s company, and by mid-June Denny found himself bundled into his Mom’s car and bound for relatives he had never met, in Kentucky. In much the manner of Grace Pynchon’s leavetaking„ Denny was permitted only a box or two of his most treasured possessions. He kept the blacksnake skull with the lock of Grace’s hair and left most everything else of hers behind.
The comforts his Mom offered were inadequate then, too. Denny stuck with her, and eventually grew up, and admitted to himself that little kids could be notably stubborn when it came to cutting slack for the misbehavior of adults.
He kept the telescope, of course, to watch the stars, but he never saw them swarm.
Sixteen years later, Denny would discover that the reason for Grace’s dad packing the car and scooting with minimal baggage had been an impending bankruptcy, which seemed a stupid reason to lose one’s best friend. Dennis and Grace made contact after the span of years and agreed to meet for a cocktail. She had no memory of having called him “Den” when younger, and they found they had surprisingly little to talk about. After that one incident, never saw each other again.
Petition
Abel Swift bandaged up his hand as best he could, given that there were no dressings or hydrogen peroxide in the apartment. To buy that kind of stuff from a bodega he would have to hump down six floors of stairs, and Abel hated exerting himself to waste money. He mummied up his hand with one of his wife’s halter tops tied in a knot, which gifted him with a bonus twinge of revenge. It served her right.
He reminded himself to ask for more money. After careful consideration, Abel Swift adjudged that he had done no more wrong in his life than the average, basically good man. His flaws were forgivable; his transgressions, minor. He constantly strove to take stock of himself, subjecting his life to microscopic scrutiny, and this bargain-basement therapy spilled over into his prayers, every night.
“Oh Lord, I know you’re a kind and tolerant God, so I am hoping that you will understand about Lizbeth. I am not a violent man, Lord, you have seen that, because you see and know everything, but sometimes the Devil tries to get at me through that bottle, and sometimes I have what you’d call that moment of weakness, like I had tonight, and I swear to you that I never meant to hit her, not hard at least, and it was ole Satan himself who raised my hand in anger, because if it had been me I only woulda hit her once. Once is all Lizbeth ever needs. She’s slow, Lord, and I get frustrated when she can’t track what I am saying. Like how she lets them dishes pile up until they dry and get all crusty and it never occurs to her to scrape ’em or rinse ’em or anything; then she put ’em in the dishwasher and the hot water sort of vulcanized the food onto the plates, then later the chunks broke off and clogged up the dishwasher, and how now neither the dishwasher nor the disposal neither works, and after I came home she was whining about it, you know in that way she does, Lord, and then she can’t understand why I get mad, she just stares at me like some sort of befuddled animal, like she’s trying to smell what I want, and that makes her face get all squinty and puffy and, well, God, it just makes me want to never stop hitting it. Plus I told her to bring back an extra fifth of whiskey, you know, as a kind of backup, because I knew the cabinet was low, and she forgot, so in total I could not possibly have been drunk enough to actually abuse my wife, because thanks to her there was not enough liquor in the house to get drunk on, so I hope you can see your way clear to letting me slide on account of my hitting her just a little bit. Like she probably told you herself, Lord, I only hit her when she deserves it.
“Now, God, as to MaryRose, you have to understand that it was her that sinned and started up all that commotion by getting called to the principal’s office at school. Eighth grade girls ought not to wear that much makeup in school anyway; it makes them look cheap and tartish. Well, I figure all the boys were sniffing around and saying lewdness and it all sort of reached some kind of critical mass of sinning, or she would not have been called to the principal’s office in the first place. Since everybody’s screaming about capital punishment, you know the schools won’t do anything anymore, Lord. About all they can do is send her home, and when I found out Lizbeth had thrashed MaryRose without my say-so, well, first I had to wake up Lizbeth — you know, revive her, with water and stuff — and give her a stern talking to about striking our daughter, which is and should be a father’s responsibility. So I’m afraid I cracked Lizbeth a couple of more times, but when she fell and hit her head I found some Black Jack I’d forgotten about by the sofa, so I asked her to please forgive me for hitting her the first time.
“So I said, thank you, Lord — you remember that, right? — for the whiskey and by that time I really needed a drink, and I think you could understand and forgive me for just that one drink. Actually it was my own cowardliness, Lord. I think that I was afraid to face my daughter sober, and I took that drink — those drinks — keeping a weather eye out for the Devil, who by now I knew was looking to get a grab on me. MaryRose had been crying a lot and her makeup was all smeared. She looked kind of like a cross between a raccoon and one of those harlots, Lord. So I spanked her naked ass good, first with the hand, then with the belt. If she hadn’t been wearing all that tawdry slut’s clothing, nothing would have jumped off the tracks, I swear it, God. But her little tight ass was all red from me spanking it and she was bawling like a water fountain, and she just kind of, well, grabbed onto me is a good way to put it, Lord. It wasn’t the Devil of liquor but the Demon of lust that snuck in and took control. Preachers say you do this kind of thing as a test, Lord, and I admit that in this test I failed you in every way. I know you lay down the law, and I know what a sin is, and you probably think I’m a sodomite, but let me say in my own defense that I ain’t that much of one, and besides, the Bible doesn’t say anything about all that other stuff MaryRose committed on my weak flesh, but she sure didn’t learn those moves in no junior high school, and if there’s a sinner in this house, I think that she might be a bigger one than me.
“Now, Lord, about the farting …”
Bill Gray considered the jolt of heroin within the sterile syringe, all waiting for his go-ahead, and in a supreme act of discipline, left it where it was. The cacophony inside his head was threatening to push out the walls of his skull, and the drug would calm the storm … but not tonight.
The pain was like throbbing, necrotic pulp in every tooth, plus a needle driven through each eye, combined with a spiking cluster migraine, in addition to his sinuses being filled with hydrochloric acid. Heated. It caused him to twitch and jolt involuntarily, making him appear in the throes of some minor spastic fit or major brain anomaly. Pedestrians dismissed him as just another weirdo and strolled on.
With bloodshot eyes, Bill consulted a matchbook, and his sleep-deprived mind processed the address scribbled there. He leaned on the buzzer until a voice answered.
“Is this Abel Swift?”
“Yeah, who the hell is this at this hour of the night?” It was late enough that people felt compelled to say things like do you know what time it is? Bill detested rote.
“My name is Bill Gray and I need to see you.”
“I don’t need to see you; it’s the middle of the night.”
“Open the front door.”
“Fuck you, wino, go sleep it off.”
It was a heartbeat before that intercom click that terminates further discussion. Bill was able to slide right into the gap.
“I have money for you, Mr. Swift.” The pain in his head ebbed and offered him a small caesura in which to draw a single calm breath.
Among all the psychos and street flotsam that wander New York City in the dead of night, amidst all the incoherent ramblings and fever-dream monologues of the disenfranchised, within the unending stream of mad pronunciamentos issuing from the wild-eyed and lost, the average citizen may discern two select words that seem to be a part of every speech, by every grimy hostile one is likely to encounter.
