American Monster Page 25

  – Norma leaned forward. Listen. That Guy? You can’t beat him. No one can.

  – Except maybe you, said Raye carefully.

  – Maybe. Maybe not.

  – Where would we go?

  – There’s a Franciscan mission up north, Mission San Miguel. Wait for me there.

  Raye put the beer down and pulled the sunglasses off her head. She scratched her scalp with both hands, shoved the glasses back onto the tufts of filthy hair. San Miguel. Michael Archangel. The one who defeated Satan.

  Norma’s wing stumps knifed and she stood up to be sick in the bathroom. Hunched over the toilet bowl, her chest in spasms, hurling chunks of cat and donkey and straw and filth out of her and felt as though someone had her heart at the end of a fish hook. When she finished, she pulled her stash from the cistern where she kept it wrapped in plastic. Dry-swallowed her trusty trinity—Xanax, Oxy and Zithromycine—and put the stash into her jacket pocket.

  When she came back, Raye was picking at a scab on her wrist.

  – What if you don’t get up there? Raye said. You might not make it. You don’t look so good.

  Norma swayed but managed to stay upright. I’m not there in a couple of weeks, you and Mac get out of the Zone. Right out.

  – You mean back to Oregon? Raye looked up at her.

  – Wherever. Get back to the States.

  Raye looked out the window, an all but opaque square of white, the surf growling somewhere beyond that white screen, like a live thing wanting in.

  – Yeah, I keep forgetting, Raye said. This isn’t America anymore. It’s like some kind of monster we made somewhere along the line. All-American monster.

  – Look after your own, said Norma, one hand against the wall so it wouldn’t hit her in the face. One thing I learned.

  – Is that what I am? said Raye softly. Is that why you brought me back? Why do I have to leave, then?

  – Well, said Norma, gently now. With you gone, my enemies have less leverage.

  – Leverage, said Raye. A pickle. Only thing you got wrong was the innocent bit.

  – Two out of three, said Norma with a indulgent smile.

  She lowered herself onto the seat again, sunk into the old vinyl upholstery. There was a crack on the table in the shape of a Y from the last time she’d punched it.

  – What about your fella? He won’t leave, said Raye. Not ever.

  – I know, said Norma. I know that.

  – What you going to do about it?

  – I’ve got a plan, said Norma.

  – You’re going to leave him, Raye said, her fingers skidding all over the can, writing and over writing some futile message to a god who would do less for any of them than he had in his heart. All of us. You’re not coming to San Miguel, are you? Not any time soon. Not ever.

  Norma looked away from the restive scrawl. Gene’ll be okay. He’s got Bunny here. Little Barry.

  – A balding transvestite and a cross-eyed dwarf, said Raye. Jesus.

  – Him too.

  The trailer lurched and keeled. The light had drained from the room leaving traces of gold in the corner, on the contours of the girl’s face. The beer and the meds taking effect. Norma’s vision blurred. Her legs wooden. The cuts and bruises throbbing a little. A lot. She could still taste salt and chemicals, smell them on her skin. So tired. The oft-summoned dream of saffron hills and a lowering sky.

  She heard Raye’s voice coming to her from a great distance. Hey, big lady. Your eyes are, like, smoking.

  She pulled the sunglasses off her head and reached them across to Norma. Norma put them on, regarded Raye through the scratched and tinted lens, a problem of her own making, the girl way too smart for her own good.

  – Leave tonight, said Norma. There’s money. Here. She reached into her pocket. And I got you a new goddam coat. It’s here somewhere. Take anything you need.

  – Anything?

  – What’s mine is yours. Take it. And stay off the trains. Take a bus.

  Raye put aside her beer. Her damp strong fingers sought Norma’s dry and trembling claws. Darkness fell outside, the trailer transformed into an insubstantial trick of the wavering light. Norma’s gaze met Raye’s wary eyes and soft mouth, the clueless pity of the very young. Little wonder that retrievals were forbidden. Giving something life had nothing to do with appetite. This had to do with a secret kind of care and self-crushing love. Raye started humming haphazard snatches of melody that dragged at Norma’s eyelids and she felt her grinding jaw relax, the pain in her shoulders lessened with every breath. A slight breeze fanned in from the window, cooling her split lip and burning scalp. The curtains fluttered. The red glare from a passing recombo flared against the walls and the inside of the trailer glowed and spun. She could still hear Raye’s demented singing, but softer now. Something about dancing barefoot. The girl’s hand in hers was cool and knowing. A good hand. Strong. Raye had turned to the window and her hair fell in stiff heavy tufts across her face. Lights came on in the camping ground. More trailers pulling up every day. The lights shone through the curtains like star systems and Norma, so sleepy now, thought she might look at these for a while before she left. The way the colors shone on Raye’s hair and the tusk stumps just beginning to jut from the girl’s narrow shoulders.

  PART IV

  The Impass/able

  The dying sun around which Kali I8 orbited, WD 236-10, expanded until it consumed everything in its path. In its death throes it demolished the Edda galaxy, leaving nothing but darkness through which the ghost (see below, aporafex) of Kali I8 was cursed to drift. Kali was no longer a Brainworld. It was just a brain, separated from itself. The closer Kali drifted to cosmic madness the more it realized that you don’t have to be alive to die. Its lightless dreams were filled with wings and horns.

  It is said that the true nature of the Brainworlds’ curse was to die before they were alive. Because to die before you are alive is to spend eternity yearning for what you never had.

  (Fascicle 25.4 Nilea AQt., trans. L.Shay 2656)

  49//:neverland

  – Daddy? Are you there?

  Mac was feeling better, Raye could see that straight away. There was even a little color on his bleached face. Maybe it was bringing Norma to see him that time or maybe it was the new meds. She’d looked for him everywhere, finally found him in the attic of the store. A windowless panic room up a ladder above a Rediem lab on the second floor no bigger than the treehouse she had up north, up at the farm. He’d lugged the surveillance console up there and everything. He had been surviving on expired M&Ms and peeing in a Drink ’N Wet doll potty.

  – Come on, she said. You ready?

  She’d seen one of the Rediem packers come out of the back door in the dead of night. Waited until he’d finished making a call beside a dumpster and then slipped back inside behind him. Followed him upstairs and then it was just a matter of exploring on her own before she found Mac, hunched and muttering in his hidey hole in the manner of a trapped squirrel. She’d talked him downstairs with the promise of pancakes at Cafe 101 for breakfast, his favorite. And a bus ride after that. He liked buses. Wherever you want to go, Pop. LA maybe, yeah? He’d like that. Hollywood. Rodeo Drive. Old stomping ground.

  He was so small. Smaller than MaryElizabeth Taylor who Raye had met that one time. Mac said Raye shouldn’t be able to remember, that she just thought she did because of all the times he’d told her about it. But Raye did remember. She remembered everything and every day now there was more. Not just her own memories but others too, like the desert where she’d never been and cold clear rivers that she’d never seen and yellow boiling seas beneath the towering flames.

  But the time on Rodeo Drive that they met MaryElizabeth Taylor, just walking down the street. Or it could have been one of those lookalikes, but it didn’t matter. Raye was real little and in Mac’s arms, she remembered what it felt like being up there. Safe as houses. Up so high to touch the sky because to her Mac Daddy was a giant among men and always would be
. Never another to take his place.

  Raye was already too old to be carried but it had been a long day and Mac was already late for, what, the tenth audition? His face drawn and a hopelessness threading the corners of his eyes into bunches and it filled her with sorrow. She pushed his mouth into a Jokers grin with her fingers. And then there it was, that moment on a sunny day in June, Rodeo Drive City of Angels, when everything changed. They met MaryElizabeth Taylor. She was walking toward them flanked by minders, all frail and bejeweled with her hair in some crazy striped bouffant.

  – Look, said MaryElizabeth in that famous cut-glass voice she had. What a beautiful child.

  Her minders exchanged glances and tried to stop her but before they could, MaryElizabeth reached across and touched Raye’s hand. The varnished fingernails, swollen knuckles ringed in glitter. Mac gone all to trembling like it was a real angel down from heaven, wouldn’t let Raye wash that hand for a week. Raye felt even then how that encounter with MaryElizabeth Taylor changed everything. The subtle shifting of odds and not a dealer in the house of Mac good enough to beat that game. Because of what MaryElizabeth said to him and how she said it.

  – And you, sir, said MaryElizabeth, dimpling, and with a dainty intake of breath. You could be Michael.

  Well, given his Stanislavskian fixation on the late star, and taking inventory of his god-given high cheekbones, wide set eyes and wounded gash of a mouth, Mac practically peed himself. Miss Taylor saying that changed everything. It was like a blessing she’d given him. Go forth and be Michael.

  So here he was in Spill City, a few too many procedures down the track, The Mighty MacMichael. How much further now to fall? Yet, Raye was in Norma’s killer heels and they were going to have Sunday breakfast. Like a normal family. It was Raye’s treat from the money she’d earned herself, not Norma’s stash. That was an important distinction. Had nothing to do with Norma. Raye had earned it fair and square. It had been tough and had taken time, and truth to tell, she didn’t like Norma or anyone to see her that way, on the job. It was a Zen thing, needed her total concentration. Like the john last night. Nice little Veelo with a trailer on the back, warm as toast and when his zipper jammed he didn’t hit her or anything. Not hard.

  Norma had given her money, lots of it, but Raye needed that to buy bus tickets to San Miguel, have enough in reserve for the checkpoints. You never knew what was around the bend. Sometimes you thought you could see the whole picture but there were tiny little holes in the whole. Holes big enough to crawl through, big enough to let in a worm or two, a bug.

  Which is why you had to have a Plan B.

  Norma Gene. She liked to call them that. They made such a cute couple and Raye didn’t know why she’d gotten so mushy lately. Just thinking about them brought a lump to her throat. Hormones maybe. She’ll be sixteen next year. She’ll have to get herself a boyfriend by then or die trying.

  Norma Gene, yeah. Sounds right. Some people are meant for each other from day one even though they don’t know it. That the future depends on them getting together, not just their future but everyone’s future. Humanity. Someone Gloria. Mommy this and mommy that. A broken piece of comtrash went off in the trailer after Norma dozed off and Raye picked it up. The voice on the other end in Raye’s ear like a cold tongue of night.

  Mommy.

  Sad shrunken skull-mother dangling at the end of the line. A person’s up against a hard game if they have to die to beat it.

  – Beat it, said Raye, and hung up on the bitch.

  – Look, Raye said. The rain’s stopped.

  It hurt when she smiled. Mac locked the shop door and turned around.

  – What happened to your face? he said.

  – I fell.

  – Nice shoes, he said looking her up and down approvingly. Manolos. Fakes but good ones at that.

  People stared, those who didn’t know him. Locals said, Hey Mac. Say hi to Michael.

  Moonwalk for us Michael.

  Raye bared her teeth. Daddy’s girl all grown up, keep away from the Grimey in those hella-heels, freak-daddy by her side. Powdering her nose in Norma’s trailer earlier she’d seen two alien eyes staring back at her. Extraterrestrial storms.

  –We’ll catch the Coaster, she said sweetly, taking his arm.

  Norma had said to stay off the trains, but technically the Coaster wasn’t a train. The buses up the coast ran at random, and it was just one stop. Raye towered over him in Norma’s heels. Mac’s arm was like an old stick in the velvet jacket, the gloved hand trembling against his leg. He wore gold-framed aviator glasses over his parchment skin and his mouth beneath the glasses was a deep shade of Wacko red. She could have done without the gold codpiece, though.

  – Why do we have to get the Coaster? he whined. Perfectly good food trucks at the market.

  – We’re going to Cafe 101 up the coast, she said. Blueberry pancakes, remember? Like old times.

  Plus the Greyhound station was right behind the cafe. She’d thought of everything, yeah. The whole thing mapped out in her mind, all the angles.

  The conductor on the platform regarded them with watery yellow eyes, came up for their fare right away and then walked off to pick up garbage, a skinny Mexican-looking guy with bleached blond hair in ancient Mariachi boots. Raye felt her pulse quicken and looked up at the safari-suit sky. Cotton ball clouds.

  – Spring in Spill City’s a cock teaser, Mac said.

  – You hungry? she said for the tenth time.

  *

  Mac didn’t like the trains. Folks that came in on the train gave him the skeevies. Cartel trash and quake-baggage. He liked the bus. Nothing wrong with the Greyhound, good old American institution.

  – Hungry enough to eat a dead secessionist, he said to Raye for the tenth time, because he knew that’s what she wanted to hear. The uneven scrape of the conductor’s boots on the platform. Mac agreed to the Coaster. Agreed to everything. He was doing this for her. And hadn’t it always been that way between them? That stuff about love conquering all was a crock, he thought. It wasn’t about conquest, or shouldn’t be. Guilt, sure. No getting around guilt. That came with the territory. But not conquest. Love had nothing to do with conquering anybody and he did love Raye, loved her as his own, the pain of his love right there in his chest at the way she stood there with her arms folded and her back to him watching for the train, thinking she had to take care of him, shmancy heels and long skinny legs like a colt he had up at the farm in Portland.

  Legs to here.

  Slut.

  The white eye of the train coming toward him. He clapped hands to his ears to stop the ringing and the white knife across his iris, the bell tolling, push her in. Nononono.

  Spare her please, Michael, she’s innocent. The pain behind Mac’s eye knife-white, spreading and colonizing him, replacing him with itself, Please Michael, you know everything, do you mean to do less than is in your heart? Anyone who had a heart, Michael—Mac looked around the platform for a sign, a daisy growing out of the slag, maybe, a single star up there in the teasing blue sky. He was an eye of pain that had no beginning or end, that stared out unsentimental and seething with such a terrible truth. Say it again, Mac. Slut. A bitch cunt hole in the whole, no good two-dollar bunk bunny. Liar, and there’s the truth of it. But that Raye, child of pain, should die for loving me? The sky stayed hard and blue—he could have been anybody, anything (slut held you back) he looked just like Michael, and Neverland, Mac. It doesn’t take everybody. No one knows why, but you don’t get a second chance. Is that you? Michael? We could have come together you and I, I am the hole in the whole, and I searched the whole for you, waited alone and speechless, the flames and the toxic bubble, until there was nothing, nothing but want, Mac, don’t call me Wacko, Mac, or I will hound you to hell, Daddy. Word for word, wound for wound, the pain of pain remembered here again.

  Michael?

  Push her in, Daddy. One more step to go, no

  one will see no

  one will care or

>   know not to care

  how far the fall

  Now, Mac. Your second chance. Never another.

  Now.

  50//: charity.2

  Norma watched Gene dream on their mattress tucked behind the partition in the little container hut. The two little wolf’s teeth he had left pulsing against his wrist. She dozed off again, floating on the wet breathy waves of pain. Was woken by the Silence snaking in under the door of the little hut, dark finger of night. It’s time.

  Gene mumbled into his pillow. Her shoulders buzzed and bled. He noticed the ugly ridges. They were more pronounced since she’d come back from Mexico, since she’d tried to drown Mommy in a sea of lies. The rest of her healed even faster than usual and she felt stronger than ever, her belly a hard plate of muscle, womb of death. The chunk of plasma pulsing around her neck like a tumorous Siren, calling Gene to his fate. Gene who had to die for loving her.

  They’d had sex. Slow and floaty and Norma had asked him to hold her wrists over her head—so she wouldn’t activate the bioswitch—and he’d covered her with his body and his huge hands around hers, their synchronized cries had completed the long chain of understanding between them.

  – I found Raye, she said later. I put her and the old guy on the northbound bus.

  He nodded with his eyes closed. We could think about going South, into Mexico, away from Spill City. With the money from the driving gig I could get a new truck. Chevy maybe. Get Jesse down there. So many beautiful beaches. The cold back east kills his leg. Maybe we could get someone down there to have a look at that thing grafted to your spine—

  She put one hand over his mouth and the other over her own, tears flowing over her knuckles.

  – Yes, she said. Mexico.

  He drew her to him and kissed her hand, her salty lips. A hard curtain of tears between them.