American Monster Read online

  – Are you happy in your body now?

  She thought about it. About how in the Before there had been a yellow river. The silence and the flaming edifice beneath which she’d cowered, a-drool and a-gibber. She ran her tongue over her teeth. Her other teeth—her real ones—grew long and pierced her lips, fused over her mouth and left her speechless. Blood crusting. And across her eyes a torn veil of flesh, burning with mucus and tears.

  – As happy as I’ll ever be, she said.

  Maybe it was that. Whatever it was, when Norma stood up and led him to the trailer she knew what she had to do and how. Astride him on the mattress beneath the window, she made him hold her wrists in his hands and not let go because this one was for her. And the next one for him, pinning her to the wall, with his vast sorrowing body, the pain and pleasure fused and unending.

  34//:hush

  Norma made sure to keep away from comtrash just in case Mommy called. She kept the jacket zipped and wore it all the time except when they made love and sometimes even then. It wasn’t the answer but it bought her some time. It was easier than she thought it was going to be to keep her hands off the bioswitch because Gene took up too much space in the Whole, in Norma’s configuration, for Mommy’s will to override it. But that too, was just a matter of time. Spring held off. They caught rides in tuk-tuks on rainy nights, like old times, the two of them. Or took the coaster. A little drunk before they started. D-Cup, ten pounds thinner than she should be and bald as a badger, played at the Brew Box and when Norma danced with Gene, she held him around his broad waist and he held back, his horn hard against her thigh, his mouth icy from the cold beer when he kissed her. Around his wrist, the three little wolf’s teeth blinking on and off in the strobe light.

  They ate breakfast in bed at the trailer. She let the sheets fall from the hard swell of her breasts, and he pulled her on top of him, jiggling lewdly. She followed him into his morning shower. She followed him everywhere. Rivulets of suds down the knots of muscle like waterfalls down a mountain. His big, sad-boned face lifted to the stream, his hair was a cape of dark silk down his back. Laughing when she got in there with him, wearing nothing but her combat jacket.

  – Don’t worry, she said, pulling him into her. It’s waterproof.

  She made coffee for them on the little ring stove in the trailer. The blue shimmer of the flame in the afternoon half-light. Once she thought she heard Raye’s footsteps outside, and quickly pulled on Gene’s shirt, but when she opened the trailer door, only the rush of the surf came in, the smell of dirty rain.

  That night, moonlight reflected from the ocean parried on the ceiling. A reflection of a reflection. The entire trailer rippled like the inside of a giant roller. To crash down on her, pulling her in. Time was against her, she could feel the ebb and flow of humanity all around her, carrying her on its currents.

  She woke arcing from a dream in which she heard the ring of steel heels on blood-soaked sawdust. Metal claws between her legs. A cold sweat burned across her belly and her lips were barred in a grimace wide enough to open up fissures in the grown-over scabs from the fight at Killers. Gene reaching across to hold her down with a heavy hand, saying hush.

  Monafex: (n) i. A being, usually but not always an ephatik, said to haunt the liminal area between space-time worlds, specifically colliding galaxies. ii. A shady being who inhabits a crossroads or border area either to prey on or protect desperate travelers or fugitives. iii. A messenger or go-between. iv. A miraculous event or being said to inhabit or be instrumental in the collision of realities. v. A fugitive, escapee from or creator of illusory worlds and loyal to none, for example an artist, or the devil.

  (Saurum Nilea, AQ., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  35//: ear ear

  Even if the guard, Curly, had been able to see Guy Manly on the monitor (if Guy Manly had a reflection, or a shadow, which he did not) Curly was too preoccupied on his phone to notice. In fact, he had his back to the monitor as he typed a series of urgent texts to cronies relating to the failed Dianabol caper and Curly’s own plans to go south, stay one step ahead of Augustine or die trying. The whole thing had gone sour after what happened to boss Phatty Thin in that Escondido barn. Just the mention of barns brought the terror back to Curly, and if there was some psycho out there taking it as his personal responsibility to clean up the mean streets, maiming crims and leaving them to die in barns like that, well that’s all she wrote, as far as Curly was concerned. He’d been there before and once was enough.

  So after Phatty came up all chopped and dead in the barn, Curly texted Augustine that he had too much personal baggage for this gig and wanted out. Besides, it was one thing to cut the D-bol with Ronicol, but strychnine was too messy and Curly would have nothing more to do with it. His thumbs were a blur across his keypad, even though, deep inside, he knew it was just a matter of time before Augustine and his fag lackey caught up with him. It didn’t matter that Curly had tried to explain to Augustine—and himself—what happened. Augustine said he was ‘conflating the two events.’ Conflating the two events. What the hell did that mean? What it meant to Curly was that once you’ve been to hell and back with one psycho who takes you to a barn so he can hack your ear off—and even if you survive (especially if you survive)—all barns are one barn and all psychos are the one psycho. After something like that you got the devil riding shotgun for life, screaming directions, and there’s nothing you can do about it except make sure he doesn’t just try to reach across and take the wheel.

  It happened just outside of Bakersfield and Curly didn’t like to talk about it. Not even to his shrink. He didn’t like to talk about how last year, just after the first brushfires and before the Big Wet, this driver had picked him up on Route 119 near the state park. He drove an immaculately restored Ram Charger. Curly was traveling broke and thought the driver might be a good mark with a gas guzzler like that—they were all too few and far between on the road these days. The truck stopped and Curly got in. Turned out that the driver was just a Navy veteran, which would mean that his fuel was subsidized and he wouldn’t have a cent to his name. Curly thought he might waste him anyway just to make up for his disappointment, and because even a truck he couldn’t afford to ride was better than no truck at all. Strip it and sell off the parts. And then the Navy guy showed him the diamonds in the glove box. Curly was so entranced that he didn’t stop to wonder why he was being shown and how there are some things in this world better off not seen. There they were in one of those cheap plastic cases for mouth guards or what have you. A dozen or more diamonds in there sparkling like stars.

  – Shit, Curly said and he discretely inched his hand to his own left ear, the one pierced with the diamond stud that Phatty had given him from the whorehouse job in Vegas. And that’s when a sudden white light splashed between his eyes and was the first thing he remembered when Curly woke up tied to a chair in the barn. An almighty headache, and a scream in his chest that seemed to have begun a century ago.

  The Navy guy all dressed up in officer’s drag and hacking at Curly’s diamond-studded ear with a Bowie knife. Night had fallen, the only light coming from a hurricane lamp on the ground. Curly screaming behind the strip of clear packing tape which turned vermillion from the blood it tore off his lips and tongue. Once the Navy guy got the ear off, he dangled it bleeding bright blood in front of Curly’s face and started talking to it. ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.’ He actually said that, kept talking to the ear about how the VA therapist was on crack; how he didn’t have a cent of his own anymore, ever since his wife made him put everything in her name and she was crazy as fuck, a Salinan woman and a damned fine gardener if he did say so himself, you never tasted a tomato so sweet or a tater so creamy. Then he leant in close to Curly’s chopped-off ear, blood running down the white sleeve of his officer’s blazer, and whispered, She fertilized them with her own feces, he said. Pass it on.

  Over his considerable pain and beneath the Navy man’s babble, Curly heard some Flyers pull
up outside the barn, and kids outside with their jokes and tech talk. Navy guy froze mid-rant and then backed out to where his truck was parked behind the barn, shoving Curly’s ear with the diamond stud into his pocket. The kids piling in through a big wash of headlights, bristling with consoles and wires, lugging amps and instruments. They found Curly and untied him, drove him to A&E, and he survived, one of the lucky few, supposedly, but how lucky Curly wasn’t sure because something in him didn’t make it and he never got it back.

  So he thought maybe that was it, his missing ear, that enabled the guy to sneak up on him like that at the Sanctuary, because there he was, standing without warning beside the monitors with his leather hat and smoke wisping out his eyes. Maybe it was the smoke, maybe the guy’s yellow eyes, but the wet fart that squished out into Curly’s jocks caused the guy to sniff in disgust and take off his hat, his hair brassy in the light.

  – I’m looking for a girl called Raye, said the guy, his voice like a million manholes sliding open.

  – Mommy! Curly croaked even though the last time he saw his mother was in a trailer park in Flagstaff.

  The guy shook his head and pulled his black lips back in a sad smile.

  – That’s what they all say.

  Curly stared at the huge Bowie knife in the guy’s bony hand (another thing he hadn’t noticed before) and started to speak but then a phone went off.

  Brrring. Brring.

  With blood streaming from the neck of Curly’s severed head, Guy Manly dripped a red and steady path up the steel steps to the Sanctuary. He keyed himself in and walked down the hallway past the bulletin board (Thursday night’s quake-stress group cancelled) and past a kitchen, dark apart from a dim wash of light from a skylight trained on a hissing Crock-Pot on the counter. He stood at the door of the TV room. Blood from Curly’s head pooled on the linoleum. A couple of gutter punks making out on the sofa with their backs to him. Guy Manly kept going down the hallway to the bunk room but the urchin’s bed had not been slept in, which didn’t surprise him. Sometimes they sensed him coming, which was for him—the hunter—part of the rush, the power. The power to produce suspense was addictive, a game, and different from surprise, which was just a cheap trick as far as Guy Manly was concerned. He didn’t like surprises. They were beneath him. Suspense. That was the challenge. He turned around, his heels clacking softly on the linoleum, and went back to the kitchen, sniffed the Crock-Pot, which gurgled once, spitting a continuous stream of brown glop over its edge.

  Looks like feces, thought Guy Manly. He cocked his head, trying to place the smell. Sour and sweet, hot and cold. If he’d had a gorge it would have risen. But he did not. His insides, if you could call them that, were neither flesh nor blood, dust or clay, solid or liquid. Imagine a special sauce of atom-stripped electrons and protons, T = 7,000 Kelvin and counting. Imagine something unleashed between the hunter and the hunted. Guy Manly’s yellow eyes scurried across the darkness of the kitchen. For the second time tonight, his nostrils quivered. That smell. It came from somewhere in his past, although in point of fact he had no past but was born every minute anew from the collective human memory of sights and smells and sounds and fears. Resting from the hunt now, he took a haggard comfort in the vile smell of the stew and looked down at Curly’s severed head, as if it would tell him what it was. He tenderly adjusted a strand of matted hair and noticed for the first time that the head was minus an ear, the black hole ridged with red and angry scar tissue. Curly’s face looked back at him, not exactly but just beyond, at the ragged moon glimpsed through the kitchen skylight, pale with shock.

  36//: besta-wan

  Pink sunlight waterfalled over a steep bank of cloud. Early-March and still no sign of spring. Norma shrugged into her jacket. There was a new cigarette burn on one of the sleeves. Something in the jacket’s material, or the titanium zipper continued to jangle Mommy’s transmission somehow and the effect was to shield her contact with Gene from Mommy. Norma didn’t know why, it just was. She was careful to wear it whenever she and Gene were together, careful never to mention it to Mommy.

  She crossed the tracks and climbed the hill toward Besta-Wan, the pizza place at the edge of the market. Came up the porch steps of the restaurant, past the cellophane windmills and bottle-top chimes. The rustling and rattling all around her, a random melody blown on the wind and rain. She stood for a moment on the threshold, pushing aside that passing shadow of trepidation she felt every time she returned to him. As if she’d brought something in with the rain, something stuck to her soles. She’d wiped down her boots with a rag and some spit, polished the rivets up the side and the T-caps on the toes and heels. She was wearing a clean tank top under her jacket and new jeans that she’d bought on the Coaster. She could see him through the sparse crowd, sitting at the bar with his back to her, and the guilt and fear evaporated at the sheer strange wonder of his presence. Here, in Spill City. His shoulders looked a yard across, his oaken hair in a ponytail. He’d been back less than a week and they had been together every night. The dentata injuriously gnawed at her parts but she wouldn’t activate it. She couldn’t give Gene to Mommy. Not yet.

  She zipped the jacket up over the bioswitch and went to him, moving tall and heavy-breasted through the Mexicali knickknacks and quake-kitsch and posters of dead rockers. Slashes—male and female—moved aside for her and licked their lips. She avoided their dilated gaze. A waiter in a pork pie hat poured them silty beer in Mason jars. Wisps of silk had pulled loose from Gene’s ponytail and he’d gained weight and looked very good. They held hands at the bar, giggling, and read the menu printed on the back of an album cover, Dark Side of the Moon.

  – What to eat here? he said.

  – The chili frog is okay.

  – Okay.

  – What about some bread? said Norma. I’m so hungry I could eat the cock off a dead Secessionist.

  – Excuse me? he said, his beer suspended midway between the counter and his mouth.

  – Just an expression I picked up from a kid I knew. Know.

  He asked her about it and she told him a little about Raye, not the bit about probing her brain, and not the bit about Mac. But the bit about the bet and skewering Augustine’s balls to the bar. She left that in. She said how the kid had gone missing and Norma was worried about her. Unlike Bunny, Gene didn’t seem to think it was strange that Norma had gone soft over a child. Just nodded and said he’d help her find her. When Norma asked how, Gene just shrugged.

  – I found you, didn’t I?

  She reached behind him and took his ponytail in her hand, drew the tip across her lips. He leaned across and kissed her right temple and her belly contracted.

  – I want to take you to my place tonight, he said. Okay?

  – Sure. Why?

  He chugged his beer before he answered. Sounds like some folks are looking for you, maybe good to lay low for a while. No one’ll ever find you at my place.

  – What about the kid?

  – She’ll keep.

  Norma was about to say something about how maybe kids don’t keep too well, not in Spill City, but Gene nodded over his jar as if that decided things.

  – What do they put in this beer, anyway? he said.

  – I think it’s fermented from hashish and kudzu weed.

  Norma watched him lick foam off his protruding upper lip. Mommy was picky as hell. It didn’t take everybody. Maybe Gene wasn’t its type after all. But how could he not be? He was everything that Mommy wasn’t.

  – Do you still like Edamame salsa? she said.

  – Does the pope shit in the woods?

  The restaurant was half-full of quietly optimistic surfers and garage rockers returning to the fold. It grew dark and rainy outside. Drops rattled against the windows. After their meal, Gene and Norma weaved through the rain for coffee and pie at VGs and Gene poured whisky from his flask into their paper cups. The rain had thinned by the time they finished and he wiped his mouth and pulled her to her feet, laughing. He’d bought new b
oots from a surplus store aboard the Surfliner. The steel toes and massive Flexion soles gave him a Paul Bunyan gait.

  They walked through the rain with arms entwined, striding over puddles. Giants of the earth. Ahead of them was the high spiky mass of a bamboo grove creaking in the wind. He led her through a narrow pass in the bamboo that opened out in a small yard. A shipping container conversion sat before a charred A-Frame home, weeds growing through the shingles, and atop the roof, the torn petals of a satellite dish. A weathered surfboard sticking up bone white from the fescue. The only sky visible was through a ragged hole in the bamboo branches thirty feet up. Norma knuckled one of the thick stems, four inches in diameter. The noise was crazy but melodic somehow, like an orchestra tuning up.

  – Scrambles any signal you throw at it, said Gene, nodding up at the hollow, groaning stalks.

  He thumbed his console, then keyed some code into the security pad he’d installed, undid half a dozen bolts and padlocks and stepped inside. She followed and stood dripping on the linoleum. Gene’s consoles and cords and projectors lay scattered about the place along with dogeared paperbacks and an Elvis Bop Bag swaying eerily in one corner.

  – You brought that? she said, gaping.

  – It reminded me of you, he said.

  The shade on the only window was pulled down. Gene went around the space cracking flouros. Above the couch hung a pee-colored longboard. The big console on the opposite wall played the basketball game. The Laker-Suns had a real shot at the championship for the first time in two decades. She caught the clean towel he tossed to her and started to dry her hair, smiled at the clink of bottles from behind a partition.

  – You’ve got quite a setup here, she said.