American Monster Read online

  – Just go back up dear, said Mommy. He could be the Guy. I should go too, I think. The pool man is on his way. He has to. Uh.

  –The pool man? Mommy? Mommy?

  Norma banged the phone again. And again.

  But Mommy was gone. Norma slammed the receiver back down on its cradle so hard that it swung out over the sidewalk impasto-ed with blood and matter. She stepped out trying to avoid the broken glass and almost tripped over a street kid slumped against the wall of the pharmacy. A faint spattering of applause erupted from the crowd that had gathered to watch the big lady screaming at someone she called Mommy. Again.

  – Lights on baby, nobody home, chortled one of the hookers.

  It never got old.

  – Leave a message after the beep, muchacha.

  – Bitch talking to God, put in a good word for me.

  Their fist bumps and musical laughs were less incongruous against the meaty shuffle of the day workers than you’d think.

  – That phone’s been dead since the twenties.

  The street kid sitting against the wall muttered and shifted in a voluminous and filthy blue parka. Norma got a glimpse of pale flesh and hair the color of dirt. She shouldered her way through the crowd and walked across the Boulevard. She wasn’t doing this for Mommy, she was doing it for her shoes. Vintage Manolos. From before.

  Night had fled from the streets, but the morning mist still clung to the sparse traffic flowing down the highway. The stairs to Bunny’s apartment felt tacky underfoot. She pushed open the door and stood in a room washed in pink light from a flag pinned across the one window. Bunny snoring on a mattress on the floor. Without the wig and eyelashes, he looked like what he was. Son of a taxi driver. She’d turn tranny, too, if her old man drove an End of Days tuk-tuk. Small chin. Pale mouth slack in sleep. Fine receding hair like the loan officer who beat on her way back when in Barstow. Bunny’s horn was suitable, that much was true, but he had an obese brood he supported somewhere in the Valley, kept their picture in his wallet. She bent down to pick up the wallet from the floor and pulled out the picture—his youngest in a wheelchair. Bunny carried a creased coupon for Head and Shoulders Shampoo in there too—for luck he said—and left her to wonder why, when the world ended, he’d be thinking about his scalp condition. She stuffed fifty bucks in there too, knowing he’d never take it otherwise. Scanned for her shoes, kicking aside his satin sheath and tights. He stirred and opened his eyes. Stared at her. She froze, blinked back at him. His lips curled in a bitter smile and he closed his eyes again. She tiptoed past, pulled his boa off her Manolos and bailed.

  5//: twins

  The only things still running down in Spill City were the trains. The old Caltrak Surfliner, which still ran up and down the coast from Sacramento down to the old border, and the little Coasters. The Cartels had originally claimed the Coasters for their smuggling routes and over the years these had evolved into an efficient and economical public transport system. Fares were collected by self-employed ‘conductors,’ who in turn survived by acting as informants for either the Cartels or the Consortium or both. Bottom line: you could attempt to evade the fare, but you ran the risk of never making it to your destination.

  After leaving Bunny, Norma took the Coaster north ten miles to Birmingham Beach. The cold kernel of the risen sun was swallowed in mist, her own stomach a husk. She alighted and was immediately caught up in the chaos of the 101 market sprawl which followed the coastal highway—and the railway line—the entire length of the Catastrophic Zone, as if to assert that in the slim space between the slick palpating slug of the spill out to sea and the devastation east of the interstate, life must go on. Worn out by her conversation with Mommy, sore in her parts from fucking and fighting, Norma made her way barefoot through the breakfast trucks and quake-trash to the old strip mall. Her reflection in the VG’s window was a shock—self-recognition not even an issue anymore and that, too, was part of the problem.

  Mommy said that the others who had come before her served as an example of what not to do. The horn hunters who’d gone native, become too human to go back, too alien to stay. Where had they gone, Norma wondered. She felt someone behind her and turned, but there was no one. It got her every time. There were too many presences that brushed against one in this place, too easy to hear whisperings. To mistake a shard of light for a sign of life. Norma inhaled the salty-sweet smells of the markets—piles of picked-over clothes and quake-trash, steel vats of chitlins and churros and chapattis, readers of tea-leaves and talkers in tongue—and exhaled. She would not fail. The pain of the dentata was there to remind her of what she was. A basic daemon protocol required to track and mark the human horn.

  Mark it with what?

  She smoothed down her hair, zipped the jacket up over her heavy breasts and went in. She waited, flatfooted, for Noe the baker to come out from behind the racks of bread and muffins. He counted six churros into a bag and passed them to her over the glass counter. His pinky was a clay-colored stump.

  – Been out dancing? Noe said with a glance down at the high heels in her hand and the grime between her toes.

  – Something like that.

  Noe’s face flushed. His lashes fluttered in confusion.

  – Raining already almost, look, he said. I thought it might clear there for a while.

  – No chance, said a bandy assistant behind him squeezing pink frosting onto a cake.

  Noe wiped floury hands on the apron across his paunch.

  – They got Zumba at the gym down at the Factory. You ever tried that? Zumba.

  Norma shook her head, feeling the churros’ slimy heat against the pads of her fingers, conscious of her hands, the clawed grip.

  – It was the wack back in the 20s, said the assistant over his bag of frosting. Norma watched the slimy sack of sugar paste in his hands birth pink petals and green leaves.

  – For sure going to try it, Noe said. A light sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  The assistant stole an adoring look at Noe’s ample behind and went back to his frosting.

  – Smells good, she said jiggling the bag and backing away.

  – Come back soon, said Noe.

  The door closed behind her with a tinkle. Mist hung low over the tracks. A Surfliner howled north. A tribe of drab Cruids with their shaven tattooed heads streamed past on their boards. A Consortium goon on his Flyer with his hands outstretched across the wide handlebars and the white insignia stark on the lumpen nano pack. She’d had her own Flyer in LA, a deep blue FL-60 which she’d left behind in the apartment with Bop Bags and old consoles. She could have brought it on the train, but she was glad she didn’t. She liked walking in Spill City. Plenty of time to fly when she got home.

  The twins were at their place under the towering pine that marked the entrance to the camping grounds. Raindrops garlanded the clustered needles. The tree was guarded round-the-clock by a staunch Ecoist, clothed in rags, only eating when people fed him, like the Sadhus of old. Norma tossed the Ecoist a churro and another she tossed to the twins who fell on it like coyotes. The boy twin tried to push his sister aside, hands tearing at her lips, his tongue licking crumbs off her cold sores. Their white hair and blind eyes were waxen in the first light.

  – Mommy, mommy, they called after her. How’s Mommy you fuckin’ schizo? shrieked the girl, pawing and sniffing at the air.

  With the shoes in one hand and the pastries in the other, she stepped through a tear in the chain link and made her way down the beaten path toward her trailer, flinching at the stones and rubble underfoot but she didn’t want to soil the inside of the Manolos with her filthy feet. Her arches had fallen since arrival. Another side effect? She could have worn her combat boots last night but Bunny loved a girl in heels. The grease on her fingers from the churros made it awkward to slide back the bolt on the trailer door. She went in, thought about the tea she didn’t have and dropped the bag of pastries by the sink. In the bathroom she bent down to the mirror, pressed a finger against a small bruise
on her cheek. Her eyes were bloodshot, vitric beneath the heavy brows. She started to undress. One item of clothing at a time, splashing water on the precious skin and drying it carefully with a clean cloth. Her stomach growled. She took off her panties and splashed more water around her crotch, fingertips cleaning out the soft hole and the patch of hair encrusted with the tranny’s cum.

  The bioswitch swung from a necklace of tensile-strength chromatrope membrane that grew out of her cervical spine. It glistened like spider silk in the rain. It would open the door to the secrets that Mommy craved and was Mommy’s hold on her, a time bomb that would only be disarmed when Norma delivered the perfect horn, so to speak, into its hands. The longer she took, the stronger the dentata got, all the way to eternity, a little piece of Mommy inside her that grew over time.

  – Honest Injun, said Mommy. I’ll never let you die.

  Mommy had said Norma would know the Guy when she saw him. And Mommy was right. It was always right. She had seen him on the train to LA and she’d let him go, all the way down to Spill City, the dentata howling inside her for what it had lost.

  – I’ll find him again, she’d promised Mommy. Or die trying.

  Meanwhile the device dug in its nucleotide claws, taking up alien residence inside her, more or less permanent, like a Russian doll in reverse. Getting bigger inside her instead of smaller. And yes, goddammit. It hurt like hell.

  Naked, she limped into the kitchen to nibble on a pastry, saving one for later. She’d selected the Cheyenne from the trailers that were abandoned across the camping ground in the mass exodus after the 2033 spill, when a convoy of Alaskan tankers washed up on uncharted rock thrown up by the aftershocks. The trailer was small, not entirely overrun with bugs and vermin, and didn’t stand out. She went back into the bedroom and drew the curtains across the window that looked over the ocean north to Swami’s headland and south to Solana Beach. She drank from a bottle of water, leaving a pink backwash. You bled sometimes from your gums in Spill City. It wasn’t an uncommon condition. Under the mattress was the stash she’d taken from the pockets and backpacks of the men who visited her in Gene’s apartment after he left. Xanax and Valium to ease her comedown. E-done for pain. Rediem to rock her into orbit. An assortment of anti-virals and antibiotics to keep infection at bay, or pay the rent should a representative from either the Cartels or the Consortium come by to collect it. She fell backwards onto the mattress, drew the sleeping bag up, and slept dreaming not of home, not exactly. Her human superconsciousness could barely access those memories anymore. Sometimes the silver of the sand or a particular pink in the sunset jogged a nostalgic response. But she was usually awake when that happened. No, it was because occasionally and only in her dreams, she remembered something else entirely.

  Or someone.

  6//: fixed

  Gloria was part wolf, part something else and Gene had been allowed to keep her without a special license because he and Jesse were part Iroquois, part something else, and back east if you were a registered Native American you could have a wolf.

  – You’ll check up on the old place? said Jesse, by which he meant Auntie back in Bakersfield whom neither had seen since the Big Shake three years ago.

  – Not sure I’ll get that far, said Gene. But if I do.

  Back east all through that spring he and Gloria had hung around with Jesse and his Japanese girlfriend at slash/back, the vintage clothing cafe they ran together, and Jesse seemed to be doing okay. At least for a gimpy Indian. He had his guitar and the band, and he had his girlfriend who he’d met on a volunteer stint at an orphanage in Osaka and even if Gene thought she was a little young for Jesse, who was he to say? There was plenty they couldn’t talk about these days, although he tried, but then his brother would say what about this reggae backbeat or try to fix Gene up with some friend of theirs and that was never going to fly. Besides he felt the pull west, always had. So come summer he decided to head back out there again in their old man’s beat up Chevy with Gloria in the back.

  The big animal slept in the back seat or rode up front beside him and things went okay for a while. He’d pull over to let her run off some steam, and she’d lope back to the truck with her muzzle slick with squirrel blood sometimes, burrs matted in her thick dark pelt. They’d sleep rugged up in the truck camping grounds or parks, sneak in behind the drifters’ SUVs, everyone gone by morning, leave the park for the moms and kids. Sometimes he’d check into a motel to get cleaned up. He’d spent so long doing this, finding room to move between one coast and another, that he forgot sometimes where he came from, where he really belonged.

  When Gloria started acting up in Colorado, Gene thought maybe it was because she could smell her extinct timber wolf cousins in the silvery air, and then he thought maybe she didn’t like him stopping at those bars at the edge of town. Big as he was, she’d keep an eye on him from out the windscreen, worry knitting her shaggy brow at a man of his size letting himself get pushed around like that, the way the truckers would lead him giggling into the back seat of their cabs, the marks they’d leave on his body and his face, of their loose-fisted love. But that wasn’t it. Gloria got worse, howled all the way through New Mexico where he diverted to visit a friend of Jesse’s they’d both known in Ontario. When the man came out of the barracks to open the Chevy door for Gene, Gloria lunged across and almost took his head off. So Gene mostly kept her in the truck after that, her pelt shedding all over a blanket he’d spread for her, and by the time they got to Phoenix, she was so rank with a weeping mange that he had to fork out $250 for a vet to tell him she was getting old.

  She was homesick, that was the thing. For the cold clear streams back east, the dark arcades of fragrant pines, overhead the high whistle of a drifting hawk. And the way a paddock would jump out at you unexpectedly, thistles and goldenrod at its edges. The further they drove away from that, the worse she got and the guiltier he felt. And there was something else. She seemed scared, skittish, and he’d never known her to be this way. Her hackles lifted all the time and a high musk emanated from her, so that the windows had to be wound down all the way, the roar of the road filling his head with the old bad thoughts. About how the devil had gotten into their daddy and had taken him away, about cousin Ty and what he did to Jesse’s leg, about the boy at the roadhouse with the strawberry mark below his right buttock. The road cracking out of the black like a whip, Gloria taut and farting beside him. Fixing him in her terrible yellow-moon stare.

  That minute they crossed down into the Catastrophic Zone, Gloria began to bark and bang her rump up against the passenger door, scratching at the dash with her foreleg. And Gene thought he could turn back, maybe work at the store with his brother back east, finish that game he’d started with the sale of the farm maybe, but it was too late. The land fell beneath them, the highway dipping steeply as they crossed the Nevada state line.

  – Well, he said, pulling over to calm the animal. We’ll go back soon. I’ll talk to Auntie about selling the farm. Nothing’s going to happen without that.

  He tried to make himself believe this and make Gloria believe it too, taking her great head in his hands and finding her amber gaze in his own. But it was more than that and he knew it. He felt the pull, the eyes of another watching his approach. Could Gloria see it too? That they weren’t alone?

  Gloria didn’t need to know Auntie to fear her. That was it and they both knew it, felt it. The fear. Even if the farm were still there after the quakes and the drought and the Secessionist wars, and even if there was anyone left in Bakersfield to buy the place, it would take as long as Auntie wanted it to take. It always had. Auntie had this quality: she could make a minute seem like years, and a lifetime pass in an instant.

  – You have an aunt? Jesse’s girlfriend had generously said. Bring her back with you, she can live with us.

  Jesse and Gene had just looked at each other over the girl’s shiny black hair.

  – In Osaka maybe, said Jesse, not here.

  Meaning not Auntie.
Not ever.

  Out of the grimy windows of the truck, Gene saw the West Coast, not of his early youth, but of the intervening years. Heading toward Barstow over the bridge (already beginning to crack) that they’d built across the rift spreading south from Death Valley, Gene sensed how low the land had sunk. No wonder Washington had let it go. Easier than trying to hang on. The crumbling strip malls and shuttered neighborhoods and parking lots transformed into shanty towns. Folks living in shipping containers. The charred hills behind. Getting lost one too many times on the streets beneath the twisted freeway, Gloria had set up a low keen, stopping only to snarl once in a while at the unfinished housing developments, the liquefacted fields.

  But it was Auntie, standing on the porch of the old farm outside of Bakersfield, who set her off completely. Gloria strained at her leash, her lip pulled back in a black grin and Gene, big as he was, had to hold her down with two hands. Auntie, shriveled some since the funeral, took off one slipper and hit the animal right between the eyes without spilling a drop of her Keystone. Gloria yelped and Gene led her round to the back, Auntie saying after them, That fleabag shit on my squash I’ll shoot it.

  Uncle Earl had been a merchant sailor in his younger days. He died in the rubble of an aftershock on Christmas morning two years ago. Since then, Auntie survived on palm readings and the proceeds from her vegetable garden. For Auntie, the varnish-red peppers, pale bubble-skinned squash and corn of course, were about survival, the white way and the Indian way. She wasn’t Six Nations, claimed to be Salinan or Coso or some such, and had met Earl, a white man like Gene’s father, when he was stationed at Monterey. Gene watched her kneeling in the verdant rows at all hours of the day or night, gray hair streaming down her back, her small diamond ring catching the moonlight.