The Amputation
Part One
One
The boy, after a car accident that took the lives of his parents and tossed him like a football out the rear passenger window of their station wagon, amputated his right arm with a Swiss army knife and replaced it with an abandoned fence post (it should be noted that the boy had no need of amputation, having survived the accident unscathed). He found the post in a cow pasture not far from the highway while wandering among a herd of cattle as they slowly grazed a low hill. The boy had never surgically altered his body, nor watched surgery on television, but when his eyes came upon the post, he visualized the entire process in an instant, story-boarded, almost like a comic book. It took about twenty minutes. He wound barbed wire around his still-bleeding shoulder, the exposed bone, and the post, then, after removing the blood-soaked flannel shirt from his father’s carcass, tied off a tourniquet. He lay back in the tall grasses next to the wrecked car and, despite the pain that radiated from his new limb, despite the cold metal of his new arm, slept.
The next morning, the boy woke, yawning, and stretched his arm. The sky was clear and blue above him; an occasional cloud slunk through the stratosphere. The boy figured that eventually somebody would rescue him, perhaps return him to the city where he could seek medical attention, where could find a doctor to render his new limb permanent. Cars scuttled by, but none stopped. The boy stuck his post out like an overlarge thumb only to hear long, angry honks. When he stood in the middle of the road, right hand out, palm flat, cars didn’t slow and he had to dive to the gravelly roadside before he was smashed into oblivion. In this way, he spent his morning, until, when the sun was high, he realized his parents’ corpses, still lodged in the twisted frame of their station wagon, had begun to stink.
He had to bury them.
The post was an effective digging tool and the earth was soft, and soon, a long hole slashed through the thin grass. As he attempted to remove his parents from the wreckage, his new arm, having no elbow joint, caught in the narrow confines of the car. With no muscle, he couldn't move the arm without the aid of his right hand. Still, after hours of sweating and grunting, the boy had his parents’ corpses sprawled in the pasture, their slack faces smashed and misshapen. Their bodies were splotchy and pale where they weren’t covered with thick, black blood. The boy was thankful that he could no longer recognize their faces; he could pretend they were strangers, that he was a World War One medic, that he had duties, that sometime, after the war, he would return home at the head of a joyful parade with tickertape, buxom beauty queens, and triumphant, superhero-themed floats—and he would ride with Flash Gordon and Wonder Woman, crisp and neat in a uniform hung with ribbons and medals. There would be photographers and the mayor and dozens upon dozens of beaming citizens, cheering, thankful. He would make a speech about the good of the community, would thank his parents for teaching him right from wrong, good from evil, would raise his fists high in the air, then meet his parents backstage, hug them, drive home in their un-smashed station wagon, in the backseat where he could lay with the cool air on his face, and, after a tearful reunion and an hour of inconsequential talk, eat dinner, his mother's specialties—roast beef, mashed potatoes, and a green salad with cranberries and sugared cashews.
Two
The boy designed and built a hut. He removed the seats from the car, set them on either side of the mound beneath which his parents lay—all this with one arm. He found a tarp and a toolbox in the trunk, and with a ball of twine and three more scavenged fence posts, tented his shelter. The backs of the seats formed exterior walls while the seats themselves became twin beds just long enough for him to curl upon. He removed what he could of the car’s fenders and used them to shore up gaps in his outer walls. When he ran out of twine, he tied the walls together with barbed wire that he cut with pliers from his father’s toolbox. His hut finished, the boy sat cross-legged inside. In the dim light, he examined the post that had replaced his arm. Most of the scabby blood had flaked away. His shoulder seemed to be growing around the post and even the barbed wire that held it in place. His skin was pale and puffy, swollen here and there into narrow bubbles. He rubbed them and cut his finger on the barbed wire. Then he pushed to his feet and vaulted out of his hut. He imagined his new arm a sword, a permanent weapon he could use to defend others. He fenced the air, his arm a flexible French rapier, imagined a saber and slashed. A little farther into the pasture, cows mooed and trotted about, wild-eyed. His nostrils flared. He held his post with his good hand, glared at a hefty bovine with malformed white spots. A growl built in his chest, turned into a shriek, and he charged. The cow backpedaled, but it was too late.
This was how Saul found him, doused in crusted cow blood, roasting glistening beef over a small fire, sitting cross-legged on the mound. The boy huddled, hair mussed, right arm tight across his legs, his post aimed at Saul’s throat. Saul approached slowly, his arms wide, floppy hat pulled low over his face, and talked about cows—varieties, relative sizes, coloring. He expounded on the processes of pasteurization and homogenization, offering pet theories as fact. The boy nodded, not understanding, but listening to the words, their semi-meaningful sounds nothing more than a soothing breeze, a collection of tones not unlike music in their rhythm, and soft, yellow, unthreatening.
Three
Saul relocated the boy's hut into an empty tiger cage.
Every morning, Saul sprayed the boy with his garden hose, and the boy wriggled free of dirt and dust, then gulped the cold water before retreating to his shelter. At noon, Saul would leave a plate of steaming beans and potatoes. The boy would wait in his hut until Saul left, then devour his lunch alone. And, just as the sun slipped beneath the horizon, Saul would return, light a fire for the boy, then launch into a story or a lecture. He’d always start with same words. “Well boy,” he would say, “looks like it’s just you and me tonight…” And the boy would nod to the rhythm of Saul’s words. One night, Saul stared at the boy for a full minute, shrugged, and farted, before starting. “Boy,” he said. “Boy, you know I don’t even know your name. You could tell me your name, you know, if you wanted to, then I could stop calling you boy all the time, and maybe we could even have a goddamn conversation about something, because I’m sure you’re tired of just listening to me jabber on about cows and gas or whatever. I mean, what do you like? Cars? Comic Books? Fucking cowboys or some shit? Where are your goddamn parents? Shit…” Saul warmed his hands by the fire. “Not gonna answer, huh? Didn’t think you would. Maybe you’re mute or something. I knew a little mute boy when I was in school, maybe thirty years ago, but he could make these fucking signs with his hands, damnedest thing I ever saw, and he could move his hands so fast that he could say things faster than anybody, but of course, no one understood him except the teacher and she was almost blind so he always had to run to the front of the class and move those hands right in front of her big, thick glasses and half the time she’d make him do it over and over, translating on the chalkboard, and that took so long that I usually wasn’t paying attention anymore, and everyone forgot the lesson, which was usually about Paul Revere or long division. I always hated long division, but my uncle said I had to learn it so I studied all the time and now I never use it. I mean, my uncle was an okay guy but he didn’t like to talk much, not like I do, and he’d usually just stay up late at night listening to talk-radio and grunting and crossing his arms and growling ‘damn liberals’ and rocking back and forth, and his eyes would quiver, until he got angry and shut it off and went to bed. The only time he talked to me was at church when he wanted to show off what a charitable fucker he was for the congregation, then he’d ask me about my homework or whatever and tell me to do long-division, but what he really should have done was told me how to train tigers, because that would’ve helped a lot more with the business, and maybe he wouldn’t have died so suddenly because we would’ve both been a little more careful with this stupid cage and maybe I’d still have the tiger. Had to shoot it, you know, a five-hundred pound Bengal tiger, shot it fifty-three times, I think, had to reload a bunch, track it out into the pasture, ate one of my cows after it ate my uncle. Pissed me off, eating that cow, a good milk cow, like the one you ate. Maybe you and that tiger are kind of the same, but I guess you’re not as dangerous as a Bengal tiger, or as expensive, but damned if you don’t look a little a like. It’s the eyes, I think. Predators. I think I’m a predator too, see it in my eyes in the mirror when I brush my teeth usually, just looking in the mirror, and I say to myself, ‘you, are a predator, baby,’ and I know it’s true, but I got to stop doing that because it gets the toothpaste all over my shirt, and that shit stains, if you didn’t know. Not good for the wardrobe at all, and clothes can be expensive. I should know. I used to sell t-shirts at the gas station with pictures of a big fucking tiger on top of a ’56 Chevy—beautiful car, that one. Some people’ll tell you that the ’57 is the best, but the ’56 is the one with real grace and power, the kind of car people look at and say, ‘now that is one cool cat.’ But those t-shirts, I’m telling you, fucking goldmine, fifteen bucks a pop, and I made ‘em myself with an iron. Not too shabby. I should probably make some Fence-Post Freak t-shirts, but I don’t have that Chevy anymore, and besides, it wouldn’t make you look as ferocious as you really need to…suppose I should’ve taken a picture while you were still covered in blood from that cow because you looked absolutely brutal, just like that tiger that ate my uncle and made it so I didn’t have to practice long division anymore…” Saul stopped talking and watched the boy.
The boy vaulted around the cage, slashed with his fence post, danced near the fire, discerned what he could of Saul’s words, tried to imagine himself as ferocious as the tiger, thought perhaps that his superhero costume should mimic the hide of a tiger, that his fence post could be painted to resemble a strange and magnificent claw, or even a tooth, gleaming with spittle, a tooth to counteract all the evil in the world, to make things right and just. Saul began to speak again and the boy lay in front of the fire, watched the sky, listened to the occasional truck rumble down the highway. He picked out what constellations he knew, made up a few of his own: the Lion, the Sword of Doom, the Bat-mobile. He shivered, felt along the post with his hand, detected a new tone in Saul’s words, something important, and he thought yellow and orange, and imagined the tiger cresting a hill, blood leaking from its jaws and Saul before it, unafraid, gun in hand, and the tremendous sadness that twitched his finger, the resounding crack that laid the tiger out, nothing more than a bleeding hunk of meat, and Saul, still with the gun, pulling the trigger over and over, stepping closer with each reload, reiterating the process until no bullets remained, until the tiger, mangled and misshapen, lingered with the pasture and disappeared beneath the earth.
Four
When the first tourists arrived, the boy was hanging upside down from the top of the cage. He swung, released, landed in a cloud of dust. He watched the three tourists, two men and a woman, memorized their limp hair, the sweat that glistened their faces, the way their shirts hung in shapeless folds. The men chattered and laughed while the woman frowned and wandered toward the gas station. The boy approached, used his post as a walking stick, smiled wide, showed all his teeth. The men backed away, and laughed. They talked louder, still laughing, then tossed some wrapped candy into the cage, elbowing each other. The boy looked at the candy, thinking of the wrapper and the material of the wrapper, the way the plastic twisted around the candy, not unlike the towel his mother tied around her head after showers, and as he stared at the candy he felt he could almost see his mothers face in the wrapper’s yellows and reds and the wrinkles that stretched across it’s surface. He stooped, picked it up, held the candy close to his eyes, then slowly strode to the door of the cage, unlatched it. The men backed away. He held the candy out to them, offered it back, frowned, but the men continued to retreat, and soon were out of sight. The boy returned to his inspection of the wrapper, and again he noticed the wrinkles in the colored paper and the way they resembled the wrinkles of grandparents. He unwrapped the candy, placed it in his mouth, and folded the wrapper, careful to preserve it. He placed the wrapper in his pocket and, for a moment, felt as though he had placed his mother in his pocket and, for a moment, wanted to say something to the wrapper, to tell this thing that he was alright, that he had found his niche, that he understood his deformities and intended to use them in defense of humankind. He wanted clear words, wanted to chat with his mother, in some small way, through the medium of the candy wrapper, but he didn’t have the words, and couldn’t begin to imagine how to form them, to relearn them. He felt his stomach set, eyed the gas station, loped toward it.
His post dragged behind him and he felt the occasional jolt from a rock or clod of dirt. The gas station perched on the horizon, two rounded pumps, and a low, flat-roofed shack. A red truck waited next to a pump, and there the two men leaned against its hood, smoking. The boy smiled and quickened his peace, angling toward them. One man reached inside the truck, honked the horn three times, and the woman stepped out of the building, gaped at the boy, and jogged to the truck. She stumbled inside the truck and locked the doors. The boy waved his post, gestured with his other hand. The two men shouted, and the boy approached. One man hefted a rock, shouted again, then hurled it at the boy. The boy dodged. The men jumped in the truck and the boy started forward. Just as he reached the pumps, the truck sped off with a short squeal, the tires flinging gravel behind. The boy watched it disappear down the road.
Saul stepped outside, eyed the boy. “What’re you doing out here, scaring my customers, thought they were gonna buy something besides gas but there they go, scratching my pumps because they drive too fast. Fucking tourists.” Saul approached the boy. “You don’t have to be so scary. You could try smiling at them, beg for treats or something, do some cute tricks—maybe you could learn how to do a back flip or how to walk on your hands…” He stared at his fingertips. “Maybe you should come inside with me for a while, you can help with the stocking or something, with the cans or the register, I could show you the register, I have two of them, and if you push a button on each of them at the same time you can make a dial tone, its fucking amazing, you just do it at the same time and you can help me. Me and my uncle used to do that when there was no customers and that was most of the time, but you’re gonna have to talk sometime if you’re in the store because sometimes the customers need help finding the eggs or the condoms or, oh I don’t know, motor oil, vice grips. Around here, people just get most anything and it helps if you know where it is and sometimes pointing just isn’t enough because they can’t see too well, like me, and besides I like to talk a lot and if you’re never answering people will begin to think that one of us is crazy and then where will we be? Huh? Crazy, that’s where. And we don’t get all those fancy medications around here, even if we really really need them, but I do have some whiskey. Do you like whiskey? Doesn’t matter, you’ll acquire the taste, that’s what we do around here, acquire tastes. I even like the smell of gas now, and cow shit, I tell you, cow shit early in the morning, fresh, before you’ve milked the cow, that’s the smell, could make some goddamn potpourri out of it, market that, people’d love it, and we could be millionaires, maybe on the packaging together, you know. Mascots. Or you could be the mascot, I could put a leash on you or something, paint your face like a ghost and you could growl, maybe we give you fangs, I know a dentist in town, he makes the most perfect fangs, got some from him last year for Halloween, so I could scare the kids but no one came by. People don’t trick or treat anymore, at least not out here, they used to come before my uncle died but I guess they don’t know me as well, or maybe it’s because of the tiger because he was a fucking attraction, I’ll tell you, made me popular with the ladies, if you know what I mean, couldn’t get them off me at the bar, almost married three of them at the same time, but they didn’t want kids right away, least not with me, thought I wasn’t good with them, which makes a kind of sense because I’m usually not around kids and I talk too much and can’t stop swearing around them. But really, it’s just words and my uncle never talked at all and that’s a lot worse than saying fuck or shit or, I don’t know, stupid fucking cock in the grass. You should try saying shit like that, it’s a release. Better than a punching bag or televised sports.”
The boy nodded and tried to understand. He wanted all of those words. He opened his mouth, closed it, flicked his tongue, tried to form a sound, breathed deep, exhaled, and from his mouth came, “Oooh.”
“What the hell was that, you moaning or something?”
The boy tried again, his tongue brushing his palette, his teeth, his lips widening, circling, and he thought of the pasture, the cows, the shifting grain, and beyond, the tiger, sleek and bloody, flesh and earth, and he thought of the car, and the resemblance, the smooth and rough, the textures of rent metal, and the sparkles of glass that trailed up the road, into the pasture, toward the mound, and Saul was talking again, and the boy concentrated and moved his mouth, his tongue, his lungs, involving his whole body in the process, and he thought about his parents and their faces and the dirt. He felt along his post, its pitted metal, and the barbed wire that was now a part of his flesh, poking to the surface here and there, spiny, painless, a reminder he could read with his fingers. And Saul’s words were the same as that barbed wire, a reminder in the pattern of his speech, in the rise and fall, the cadence. The boy reached into his pocket, removed the wrapper, smoothed it on the counter, and examined it end to end, a reminder. His finger slid along its edges, over its surface, and, like his finger, Saul’s voice slid along the edges of him, in and out of his air, something more than sound, and perhaps, the boy thought, he could understand the words and he opened his mouth and exhaled and again said, “Ooh.”
“Boy, you are crazy. Can’t say nothing. I mean what the hell…”
The boy nodded and understood and he said, “Nothing.”
Saul stopped mid-word.
The boy banged his post against the counter and gestured at the candy wrapper. “Nothing,” he said. And he meant it. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, whispered the word to himself, watched his shoes, and the store, the gas station, and it seemed that everything was much like he remembered the pasture. But here, for him, memory was confused. The tiger waited in the pasture with his parents, the car, the slain cow, and behind all of that, a low fire, and perhaps Saul with his gun, cocked and ready, pointing at his head, and Saul all watery and weak and calling for his uncle and his cows, and the boy, alone, on the mound, or leaning against the car, marveling at the night sky and the disarray of his thoughts as they crept in and out of fantasy, now on comic books and heroes and costumes and the evil enemies he would vanquish once and for all. But when he looked at Saul, he saw no enemies and couldn’t remember who they might be, and even as his post wavered in the air, or brushed the counter, he could only think of the candy wrapper and the candy he had eaten and the words he would say to the wrapper if only the wrapper would listen, their, lying on the counter, between Saul and him. And so he repeated the word and looked at Saul, and the wrapper, and tried to think of the words he would say when he decided finally to speak, and who those words would be spoken to—perhaps Saul, here in the store, perhaps his wrapper, or a customer of the gas station. In his mind, those words, now unspeakable, rose like a craggy mountain, casting shadows that darkened the pasture, even at midday, blocking the sun, and beneath, the boy lay, the grasses brushing his face, his post scratching the earth, and the mound, almost flat now, curving with his ribs, a rock stabbing his side.
Five
Those first days in the store, the boy learned how to bide his time, how to remain motionless for hours, broken intermittently by the dial tone Saul insisted they create with the cash registers. When a bemused customer stumbled in, tired from hours of driving, covered in a thin layer of dust, the boy would point out the milk or the candy, the soda or the condoms, sometimes even the rack of ornate bandanas in a variety of blues, oranges, and greens. Often Saul and the boy would listen to talk radio for hours and every now and then Saul would slap the counter and shout, “damn liberals,” and cackle quietly, shaking his head and muttering “damn liberals…” over and over. Once he grabbed the boy’s shoulders, stared into his eyes and said, “do you know about Paul Revere, I mean really know? They tell you in school that he warned everyone, that he rode day and night to carry the message of invasion, but he didn’t really. I saw it on TV. He stopped when he got tired, but it didn’t matter. Travel was slower then. My uncle never believed me and I told him and told him, but he didn’t believe me at all, and every once in a while he’d repeat that Ride of Paul Revere poem to me and say ‘see, see’ as though that proved something, but I saw it on TV and I know. Then maybe he’d recite that Lincoln speech thing, you know ‘four score and three years ago…’ or whatever. Always reciting things. What an asshole…” Another time he showed the boy how to do long division on a portable chalk board he kept under the counter, and for his part, the boy nodded, said little other than, “nothing,” and didn’t bother to tell Saul that he had learned long division years before. The boy still slept in his shelter, inside the cage, but the weather grew colder and Saul gave him a pile of flannel blankets.
The store saw fewer than ten customers on a busy day, sometimes as little as one. The boy liked watching customers, contemplating what he might say if he were to say anything at all. Each customer had some characteristic—wandering eye, stooped shoulders, tattoo—that hinted at a mound of words, just on the edge of the boy’s consciousness, that might suddenly tumble out in a frenzy of inspired rhetoric, perhaps a speech, a politician’s screed, or a flurry of insults, a childish rant. In each customer he felt potential, as though he or she was merely composed of the words he would say, when he said them—a concoction of big, garish letters, with extra swoops and whorls that interlocked and tangled into strange landscapes of sans or serifs.
And there were the regulars.
Zeb Lincoln, who pulled up in his dusty white pickup every Saturday morning, his tightly curled beard a mishmash of white and gray, who often glared with dim greens eyes and a tight frown, who growled rather than spoke, clenching his gnarled knuckles into bony fists as he bartered with Saul, who never once asked after the boy’s strange arm, barely even glanced at it, and who coughed and spat on the floor after paying. His wife Bernice, who never arrived with Zeb, nor acknowledged his existence, who bought only bread and milk, never questioned the price, and who always patted the boy’s head as she left. And the collection of migrant workers (as Saul called them) who came in groups and bought all the food they could carry. The boy liked these people. He liked the flashes of recognition, the way they became used to him but didn’t talk to him, and he liked the feeling of words building in his mind like a distant skyscraper or pyramid, a grand architectural achievement moments before culmination, an awe-inspiring structure that, when finally shown, would devastate the world for miles and miles, would attract battalions of news-reporters, messiahs, and politicians of every political persuasion. They would break their bottles of wine, make stump speeches, smile for the lights and cameras that would surely surround them in an intricate matrix of fame and fortune.
The boy learned to coddle these feelings, to shadow the customers, to peek around corners or displays, to smile and lead them to the gumball machine or the magazine rack or the hidden videos he wasn’t supposed to see. Saul never punished the boy, though he often pantomimed threatening gestures, and the boy pretended to be fearful, but each day brought him new confidence, and each new confidence offered a moment of respite from his horrible silence, a moment wherein he could relax in the present with no care for the past or the future, for the pictures that awaited him at the end of each day.
The boy also learned about Saul. About his voice. His silence. The postures, gestures, expressions that often said more than his words—half a grunt for pleasure, a cough to suppress a sadness, a tightness at the edge of his eyes for confusion. And he learned the tones, the edges that protruded from his voice in sudden spikes or curving loops—like the readout of a heart monitor, but irregular and surprising. To the boy, Saul was an object of intrigue and study. Perhaps the boy felt that when he understood Saul, he would better understand himself. Perhaps he felt that Saul would emit a clue that would show him what to say and who to say it to. The boy wasn’t sure, but he felt that there was a purpose. He considered that purpose while he straightened potato chips or stocked beer or hungrily eyed the candy. And even as he did all of this, he learned not to stroke the wrapper he kept in his pocket, not to think about it at all, or the tiger, or Saul with his gun, or his parents and their mound; he learned to drown out such thought with analysis, with calm and considered points, with insights into his own behavior and Saul’s; he learned to hover on the surface of things, and as he did this, he felt himself relax, as though, before, he had cramped up, but now, after such analysis, he had worked out the kinks, massaged his muscles, relaxed. And when the boy remembered his mother, or his father, when he thought of the car, or rabbits, when he allowed his fingers a second with his candy wrapper, he felt a fear constrict his lungs, and he wondered if, somehow, he might have forgotten something very important.
Six
Every night, the boy traced his name in the dirt floor of his hut. Every morning he scratched it out with his foot. He felt it wasn’t his proper name.
Seven
The first time Zeb and Bernice Lincoln entered the store together, the boy dropped a bottle of soda. Saul slapped the counter and hooted, “What the hell, boy? Nice one. You gonna do that every time you want a soda. I mean, that’s what I used to do, when I was your age, and my uncle would just give me the soda, but it wouldn’t be fizzy anymore, and it didn’t taste quite the same, but eventually I became a connoisseur of flat soda, especially root beer, which has the best body of all sodas, but no caffeine. It’s a toss up, you know, between taste and caffeine. No, I usually drink coffee, then flat root beer, or maybe pour some root beer into the coffee to get a little of both worlds, but that’s only for special occasions, like a birthday or a funeral.” Saul glanced at Zeb. “Isn’t that right Zeb? I tried to get you to drink some at my uncle’s funeral, but you didn’t like it, and you called my a sucker and Bernice told you to stop it. I like your beard, by the way. Don’t think I’ve ever told you that before, but I do. Always wanted one myself, so I could look all distinguished like you, or Paul Revere, you know, my uncle always said that Paul Revere had a beautiful beard, perhaps the best this nation has ever seen, but did Paul Revere have a fence-post for an arm? I don’t think so. If this boy ever grows a beard it’ll be the best ever seen by anyone ever. I’ll stake my reputation on that, and you know I don’t stake my reputation very often, and if I do, I mean it, serious, you know, like lice or long division…”
Saul took a deep breath, opened his mouth, but Zeb held up his hand. “You got any shoe polish today? We need some shoe polish, before we go to church.”
“Shoe polish, have I got shoe polish. Black, brown, green, red. Okay, maybe not green or red, but this here is the best shoe polish this side of the Pacific Ocean, and I mean it. Imported from Italy or Germany, or something, and if it’s one thing Europeans know, it’s shoe polish. I mean it. And a deal, no a steal today, just a buck, and anybody can spare a buck these days, but glad I caught you before church cause they’ll probably shake you down, jingle those pockets—that’s why I don’t go anymore, can’t afford it. Miss the pastor though. Now he had a great beard, with those thick sideburns, half gray, half black, the perfect combination for some kind of apocalyptic revelation. Always thought he’d suddenly shout in Latin or something with, I don’t know, maybe, spiritu sancti, or something better than that, abusus non tollit usum…yeah, that’s what he’d say. Then we’d know to be properly chastened and to get down on that kneeler thing and sing like we meant it for once, and not like we wanted to watch football but came to church because we felt guilty about some body part or other, but he never did that, and my uncle probably would’ve choked on his biscuit if he did cause he never liked tradition and he didn’t know Latin so he’d think the pastor was making fun or something, then where would we be…” Zeb opened his mouth but Saul continued. “…burning the church, that’s where. I’ll tell you. My uncle would have struck sparks with his eyebrow, he was that kind of guy, a little like Zeus, a little like Thor, but no hammer or anything and when he wanted fire, goddammit, there was fire, I’ll tell you, and no kind of camp fire either, this was full-fledged, running in the grasses, call the fire department, forest fire, thirty feet high, with the sullen or whatever, flowing lakes and rivers, goddamn hydrologic cycle of fire, if you get my drift. Ask the boy, he won’t answer but he knows, we all know, but he really knows. Just look at him, some kind of mutant, but better, fitting, a tailor of men or some such, just look at him, always measuring you, always watching, never saying a goddamn thing, patient as cancer, patient as cancer, or bacteria, and bacteria is fucking patient…”
The boy sat cross-legged on the floor, crossed his arms, watched Zeb and Bernice, the set of their faces, their reactions, their open mouths, swallowing words one after another while Saul motored on, oblivious.
“…and is he self-replicating? Because that would be something to see, perfection, no need for human interaction, never again, could live out their with the cows or the wolves, the tigers, he’d live with the tigers, underneath the sky, a man, a mutant, a solitary friend of all things, maybe a dryad, a fencer, the next step, superhuman. You’ll see. It’s not all circuses and carnivals, not zoos or zookeepers, but monasteries for miles, you tell the pastor that, monasteries for miles, no need of any man, just the grasses, the barbed wire, the pasture, and cows and grazing and and and…”
Zeb bought his shoe polish. The boy leaned against the counter, watched Zeb and Bernice leave. Saul continued, his words expanding and contracting, his hands moving with them, between them, in and out of them, as though sound and gesture could form something solid. And the boy listened and watched, imagined a long and intricate scarf of meaning, wrapped tight around his neck, and warmth, though only imaginary warmth, suffused his body, and his eyelids drooped, and he fell to sleeping there, against the counter. Saul continued until his jaws ached, until his throat dried, until his lips cracked. Then he sat down, dropped a root beer to the floor, and drank it alone.
Eight
The boy couldn’t remember his dreams and often woke with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, as though encapsulated somewhere within him was a kernel—some memory or thought of importance, twisted and curled, but not quite hidden. He often woke, stepped out of his shelter, and stared at the sky, hoping he could bring that kernel forth, and he thought perhaps it resided in his dreams, a color or image, a sound. He examined the colors that surrounded him, the washed-out blue of the sky, the rugged brown of the pasture, the dim gray of the gas station, and Saul’s ever-present red flannel shirt. He examined the dinginess of his clothes and watched as the threads thinned and slowly fell away. Saul gave him a t-shirt, one size too big, with a picture of a tiger lazing on an old Chevy, tail poised above its head. The boy tucked it into his jeans and turned his ear to the road and the rumble of passing trucks, the whine of tiny sports cars, and below that, the hissing of tires on concrete, or the crunch of gravel as customers pulled up to the gas station, and late at night, when no cars passed, the wind through the pasture and the distant call of a train. And the boy thought that perhaps that train had stolen his dream, that, while he slept and dreamed, the horn, or whistle, had erased it from his memory, so that when he woke, he only had what he had always had, or so he thought, a vague dissatisfaction. And if, as he theorized, the train had robbed him of that kernel that he now knew was wholly necessary to his existence, and if that train repeated the process night after night, the boy felt that he must see it at least once, before he lost whatever it was forever. He didn’t know what he’d do when he saw the train, but he felt that he would know what to do. He would have recourse for its thievery, in whatever form he could, and when he was the train, when he understood its hidden language, he would sleep unhindered, brave and alone, whatever the night brought.
Nine
Saul gave the boy a comic book. The boy kept it in his pocket. He often pulled it out, paged through it, then folded it neatly and stuck it back in his pocket. He placed his candy wrapper in the center of the book for safekeeping.
Ten
The boy liked when Zeb came to buy milk. He would follow Zeb at a distance, silent, aping Zeb’s stride, stroking his chin as Zeb stroked his beard, beaming at Saul whenever he felt his mimicry had achieved some level of perfection. Zeb only smiled at these antics and bought his jug of whole milk in a glass bottle. “I don’t like plastics,” he would say. The boy didn’t like them either. “Plastic is evil, because it has hormone mimicking molecules that leech into milk and send a body haywire, growing hair almost anywhere, or destroying, one by one, the sperm in a man’s testicles.” The boy would nod solemnly with every word, though he wasn’t quite sure what the words meant, or how they might affect him or Saul, or even the store, plastics forming a large part of the product base. Zeb would grunt and finish with, “One day reasonable people will get word of the dairy industry’s malfeasance and put them out of business. It’ll be beautiful. Glass everywhere, and no more hormones.” The boy would move his mouth like he could say “hormone” but nothing would come out. The boy wasn’t particularly fond of milk anyway, or cereal, or anything that went with it. He didn’t like its placid milky surface, all white and thin, or the smooth way it poured, gurgling, into a bowl. He didn’t like its smell before or after it turned. He didn’t like the man who delivered the milk, often smelling of cologne, his hair greasy and unkempt, his face unshaven, his truck a smoking behemoth behind him. He didn’t like the cows and their stale floppy udders, their regurgitation of cud. He didn’t like their large unblinking eyes, their rank, spotted hides, their grave refusal to move. He didn’t like their long shadows as the sun trailed down in the evening, or the way the dogs chased them in. He didn’t like their empty, inhuman moos as he sat quietly behind the counter waiting for the day to come to an end.
Eleven
Saul closed the store on a sunny Sunday and told the boy to hop into his truck. There was something he had to show the boy. So the boy threw a pile of blankets in the truck-bed and sprawled, the wind streaming his hair as Saul zoomed along the road. The boy pulled his comic from his pocket and paged through it, careful to place his wrapper in his pocket before the wind could steal it. The comic was creased and wrinkled from its time in his back pocket, but the boy didn’t mind. Its colors were still sharp, its lines and figures still exciting and vibrant, and though the boy had now read the comic many times, he started again, surprised, as he was always surprised, at the heroes seeming lack of supernatural ability. The hero alone, of all the characters in the comic, wore dim, muted clothes, his face creased with age, his hair ragged and gray, and even as he fought crime, no flashy outfit appeared, no expression marred his face, no word passed his lips. His enemies, and the enemies of all that was right, clothed themselves in tight purple and black, and sometimes, as though to mock the forces of good, white flowing robes that billowed and waved as they flew in for aggressive passes at the hero, their words full of mocking delight. Sometimes the boy mouthed their words and shook his head. Sometimes he ignored them altogether, concentrating on some aspect of the hero—his shoes perhaps, or his hand, the angles, the definition.
The sun was bright above him, and its warmth caused sweat to seep at his armpits and waist, but still the boy studied his comic, and still Saul zoomed along the road, swerving to avoid the occasional bump, and soon, the land began to change, first hills appeared, then deep ravines and the sound of rushing water, then up ahead, a track, a train track, empty and long, trailing off over the horizon. The boy folded his comic and placed it in his pocket, then leaned over the side of the truck, his eyes focused on the track and its sinuous, almost imperceptible, line.
Saul swerved onto a deeply rutted road, shouted something incomprehensible and hooted. The boy smiled, caught himself, and just as suddenly as the drive had begun, it ended, the truck skidding to a stop, Saul hopping out, mouth already open, full of words.
“This is it boy, the place,” he said, jabbing his finger toward a hollow between two hills.
The boy couldn’t look away from the train track that ran past the edge of the left hill.
“Look boy. Look.” Saul gestured even more vigorously, jogging as he talked. “Over here, you got to see it, fucking important as cheese, if you know what I mean, and I know you do. It’s the place, I come here almost every week, when I’m not too busy, just so I can remember about the two of them together, like before, you know, with the Chevy and the blackboard and the math problems. It’s so perfect to remember them like that. We were like brothers then, except he was my uncle and the tiger was a big fucking cat with wicked stripes, but other than that, brothers, day in and day out, always brothers. It’s a tragedy really, like Shakespeare or Sophocles, or some such. Do you like Sophocles? I can’t abide with those Greek bastards, mainly because of the goddamn choruses, I mean who ever heard of choruses in a play, maybe a song, or in the church, you know with the choir, but they don’t belong in plays, always summing shit up like we can’t figure it out for ourselves. That’s the thing about Paul Revere, you know, he never needed to sum shit up, it was just a goddamn lantern, and ‘the British are coming!’ which doesn’t sound quite right, if you know what I mean, hah hah, but we’ll just keep that between us gents, right. Shit, who am I talking to? You never say a goddamn thing, but that’s okay. I like you anyway. We’ll talk one day, about long division, or choirs, or Shakespeare. Now he never used a chorus. Just words, you know, in that iambic pentameter shit. Never could understand that, a little too complex for normal speech, if you ask me, sounds a little too high priesty, stiff upper lip, etc…, and droning too, with all that da duh da duh da duh, seriously…but tragedy, isn’t that what I was talking about? Fucking animals eating people and people shooting animals in some kind of primal, bourgeois testosterone festival, vengeance this and vengeance that, and just spoiled, wasted meat, in the end, slack and immobile, and sweaty backs and a big fucking hole and nothing good to show for it, except maybe a nicely polished stone (I polish it almost every month). And now just this grass and a couple flowers every month and a very fashionable, hand-carved crucifix. Put them together, you know, in the same goddamn hole, had to cut the tiger up to fit him in, tried a skill saw and a jig saw, but what really worked was a good, old-fashioned hacksaw, of course, my uncle fit just fine, what was left of him, which was good because I don’t think I could’ve sawed him. A tiger’s one thing, and person is another. Anyway, I put them over here so they could be near the train, that tiger loved the train, damn thing’d make him roar at least three times a day, which was good for the customers, and my uncle would get out the whip to demonstrate the tiger’s lovability, don’t get me wrong, he never actually whipped the tiger, he loved that animal, maybe more than me, just cracked the whip a little to make a loud sound.”
Saul and the boy stood over the grave, a subtle mound rising beneath their feet. In the distance the train-horn blasted and the pair of them glared in its direction, searching for, but not finding the train. Saul tapped his foot and rubbed his arms. The boy merely leaned forward, all his muscles tensed, examined Saul’s face, growled, then leapt forward at a dead run.
“Wait boy, what are you doing?” Saul yelled, already following. “You got to stay here with me, see the grave…”
Soon the boy outdistanced Saul’s voice, and Saul himself. The train was up ahead, and the boy would see it, finally, this thief that blew through the countryside, its horn a sinister warning, its massive steel a hulking shadow on the horizon, huge and lightless, drawing all into its churning wheels in rumbles and vibrations, and in doing so, creating a sound to destroy all sound, to end the waves that reached and held through the summer air and pulled those slim slivers of something the boy couldn’t understand but wanted, at last, to hold, if only for second.
The boy crested the hill—Saul far behind, a fixed shadow in the distance, stumbling and climbing, but never quite moving forward—and looked down into the ravine, and the track, his eyes tracing its lines until he found, as he knew he would, the train, puttering along, distant and puny, not even a belt of smoke to signal its presence. The boy sat and stared, waited for the sound, that horn, that he loved and feared, and when it sounded, he felt nothing, and the call of the horn seemed mournful rather than sinister—the keen of crows as they flapped over their dead. He crossed his legs and arms and waited while Saul approached from below, a shade against the hillside. The train approached also, its caravan of cars slithering between hills, and slowly out of the ravine. Both seemed distant and lonely, and the boy didn’t understand either of them, the train’s horn no more comprehensible than Saul’s fountaining monologues. The boy wanted Saul to see this, to crest the hill and see the train, then swivel his head, and see himself approaching, distant and inevitable. Perhaps Saul had witnessed such a thing before, caught between his uncle and the tiger, cross-legged atop this hill, while they grew larger, imposing themselves on the landscape, then converging in a flurry of bad blood. Perhaps, through some kind of dream or reverie, the boy had witnessed this also, and the train, as he had suspected, had stolen that dream, returning it just now, because the boy could see it to the purest detail, and what stuck with him was the slope of Saul’s shoulders, broad but humped, so much like his father’s as he lay face down in the trough the boy had dug, a thin glow lighting the horizon, just like this moment, as the sun dipped below the hills, spilling itself in long tangents that almost touched him. The boy could see it, together, superimposed, and he wanted Saul to see it too, just the same.
Saul continued his ascent, his mouth gaping like a fish, his cheeks that puffed-out red. He stumbled and continued, stumbled and continued, slowly gaining on the boy, but still distant and low. The boy hugged himself and waited, without sound, on the bright hillside.
Twelve
Once, the boy saw Saul cry, just for a moment, silently. He hid behind a crate of eggs and understood.
Thirteen
So, a huge black hulk.
The boy’s father said that, just before the car careened off road, before the burial, the hut, and Saul, that night. So, a huge black hulk. The boy heard these words at the oddest of times—while he went to the bathroom, before he slept, when he sold eggs, when the register dinged, when an airplane buzzed overhead, when he cleaned the coffee grinder or opened the milk fridge. So, a huge black hulk. The boy thought of comic books and superheroes, imagined a shining robot-ship zipping through the sky dispensing justice and wisdom in neatly engineered packages to a thankful citizenry, its mechanical stomach groaning open—a gaping mouth—and the strange and wonderful machines that fell forth, their rockets firing in a shower of sparks, descending softly to land on gentle mounds of dirt. So, a huge black hulk. His father’s voice, grumbled and raw, sifting through the car, one hand guiding them, the other on his mother’s shoulder, and that strange robot-ship behind them, bigger than any blimp, rushing to help. If the boy could’ve told Saul about the robot ship, he would have described the almost invisible black rivets that held the panels together, the chain-powered mechanism that opened and closed the belly, the complex bed of circuitry that formed the ship’s brain and nervous system, its thousand wires, its copper tendrils, braided throughout the ship, more complex and organized than any neural network, than any ecosystem. He would’ve described its seething black girth and the way it perched over his father’s shoulder in the distance, a cloud destroyer, its mass, placed just so in the sky, a minor eclipse drifting with the jet stream. So, a huge black hulk. And not muscles, not brawn. He would describe the machines, how they calculated guilt, innocence, how their circuits fired, better than any synapse, impartial and unemotional, beyond words, at the level of ons and offs, ones and zeros, a simplicity of logic that would fix everything before it could possibly go wrong, calculating all vectors one million times a second, until the calculations became prophecy and their actions became corrections that, though unnoticed, would coalesce into a peaceful and happy future. They would save the threatened, the weak, the poor, with mere shifting vectors—a new sign on the roadway, a telephone book misspelling, a failed phone call. Saul would see it then. The boy would describe and gesture, his hand tracing broad arcs, his lips moving with meaning, until Saul understood, and they would lay together on the hillside, the sky blank above them, clean and calm and dark, and remember whatever there was to remember in times like these.
Fourteen
Perhaps the boy would never talk again. Perhaps Saul would try and try to make him talk, his cheeks and mouth pumping in vain for days on end, his words landing nowhere until even he stopped talking and condemned his voice, his words, to some dark oubliette. Perhaps they would live on in silence then, together, but alone, two clinking robots, preprogrammed marionettes, selling milk and eggs and gasoline and hamburgers. Perhaps they would bury the gas station as the boy had buried his parents, as Saul had buried his tiger and uncle, and hold a ceremony on the heaping hill, that massive mound, a priest presiding, his white collar a band of light. Perhaps Saul would never learn the boy’s name, rename him instead, Chevy, after his favorite car, and would forever say “vroom vroom,” “vroom vroom,” when the boy walked by, and the boy, for his part, would smile gratefully at this new identity, wear it like a uniform, redefine himself as a gasoline powered machine, a rusting metal hulk in the junkyard. Or perhaps the boy would leave, steal a basket of eggs, a jug of milk, and set off over the hills, carefully smoothing his trail so that no one could follow, so that he would disappear more completely than any magician, more completely than any superhero he’d admired in his few short years. Perhaps the boy would open his mouth and find that he had lost the power of speech forever and no matter how long he worked his jaws, no matter how he strained his tongue, no sound would ever emit from him again. Perhaps Saul would shoot him then, as he had shot his tiger, tears in his eyes, resolve in the set of his jaw, saying, “I’m sorry but you won’t talk and I need to talk to someone, why won’t you talk, why won’t you talk?” as he stepped forward and fired, stepped forward and fired, until the pasture was a sea of shell casings, until the boy lay motionless and fragmented, misshapen beyond recognition, a pool of nothing. Perhaps a man would come to the gas station, or a woman, dressed in a dark suit and shiny sunglasses, leather folder in hand, and that man, or woman, would know the boy’s name and he wouldn’t have to say it; instead he would hear it and as the man took his hand, he would know what came next and how to approach it. Perhaps that man would escort the boy, and Saul, to the airport, where they would find, to their surprise, the tiger and Saul’s uncle and the boy’s parents waiting hand in hand. Perhaps his father would tell them that it had all been test and they had passed and could now move on and they could all live together at the gas station and work the soil and milk the cows and sell petroleum until the end of time.
Fifteen
Saul bought the boy a bike. He showed him how to ride it, held it upright for the boy, though the boy learned quickly and sped about the pasture, a thin tail of dust wavering behind him. The bike was shiny, its tires knobby and thick. The boy rode it faster and faster and Saul watched from the gas station, his hand above his eyes, his mouth moving in constant exhortations. They sky reddened in the distance as the sun dipped behind the hills.
Sixteen
“When I was a boy I rode my bike everywhere, over the hills, town to town, faster than any car, out by the church, by the zoo, back to the gas station, to the tiger cage, and around the cage faster and faster, my feet glued to the pedals, and my uncle would work all day, with the cows or at the gas station, but he let me ride my bike no matter what, so I rode it, even to school or church. I shined it all the time, polished, cleaned the chain every day. Took it apart, put it back together, counted the parts, memorized their shapes, became an expert with washers and bolts and WD40, all so I could make my bike perfect, so that it could glide soundlessly through the countryside, so that I could cover miles and miles and only stop when I was tired, or wanted water, or to swim some warm day. Don’t you understand boy? The perfect bike, just shining there on the porch, ready to throw you through the edges of summer, like a compound fracture, you know, but no cast, no wait, no hours of boredom, with nothing to do but draw on yourself…”
Seventeen
The bike could hop mounds, catch air, the boy’s hair thin and streaming behind him. It could gain speed down a hill or, with proper peddling, zoom along the edges of the road, almost keeping time with passing cars. The bike could pull the boy from morning to noon, from noon to night, in a desperate amnesia, a sudden concentration on the moment, the track in front of him, its tiny bumps, its bent grasses, so that the boy was merely a jagged line, the pasture a map. And the boy could almost see himself from above, dipping and rising, twisting amid the grasses of the pasture, and from above he seemed infinitesimally small, a speck zipping around corners, disappearing in organic clumps, and he could see Saul too, far behind him, his hand still perched on his brow, his mouth still wide, caught midway in some all-encompassing word. The boy liked the whir of the chain, the click of the pedals as his feet lost and regained contact. He worried that his fence-post would catch on something, or get stuck in the chain, as he zoomed around. He tied it to the handlebars, straight out, like a rusty lance, and he imagined himself patrolling the countryside, challenging travelers to violent duels that ended after the first pass, after which he would collect a tax. He imagined himself dueling Saul, a trial by ordeal, but who was the accuser, who the judge? And weren’t they both criminals? The boy thought of this as he peddled, failing to concentrate on his complex line, coasting now, squinting as the sun edged down beyond the horizon. The boy watched Saul, waiting at the gas station, and wondered still if this itself weren’t some kind of trial, if his bike wasn’t some kind of malignant examination, and how he rode it, how he guided it, the arcs, the whorls, all together, only convicted him, brought him further into the dark pantry of guilt. And the boy could see himself among the shelves, chained and alone, next to a jar of olives and a stack of old magazines, or comics, an irregular drip behind him that he would forever try to locate, ever failing, ever maddened by its sound. He pedaled toward Saul, his back to the sun, the gas station looming ahead, and far away, he could hear the train’s whistle, shrill and weak now, hardly worth noting, and his legs pumped harder, the gas station grew larger, Saul’s mouth motoring on. The boy could imagine the words spilling around him in low sloping mounds until he was surrounded by mounds, a tangle of words, swelling and meaningless, sloshing waves that decried, if nothing else, an absence of sense. Saul waited ahead. The boy pedaled. His chest ached. He wanted Saul to feel that ache, to understand, but not for sympathy, not for anything, and the boy would show Saul this, all of this, if only he knew how, and then Saul would grasp his shoulder and stop talking. Saul and the boy would measure each other and the mounds would disappear, and even without Paul Revere, they would save themselves.
Eighteen
This is what Saul thought while the boy pedaled toward him: I saw the boy, saw it all, and didn’t call anybody, and nobody came, and that boy built himself a house and dug himself a hole and filled it with everything he came with and he kept going, when he could, killed my cow, all blood and filth and car parts, and he worked in the store, and sold milk and eggs, and I don’t know why he won’t say anything, even when I can’t stop talking, like when I was in school or church or with my uncle here, always filling up the silence, but never finishing it off, never finding it, never stopping, or even with the tiger, the only one that really listened, that really really listened and understood what I was saying, not that I have much to say, but I needed to tell somebody, and I could’ve told the boy, and maybe I did, or maybe I didn’t, who knows, but how can I tell if I did or I didn’t when he won’t talk, when he can’t take the time to move his mouth, even in a whisper, just one word, his name, just something, that’s reasonable, something besides those damned grunts and empty stares, maybe a word every now and then, half a syllable, just not those interminable soundless hours, stocking and selling and the registers and their tones, but no sense and no words, and not just riding that bike, over the pasture, back and forth, in that never-ending zigzag, not quite going anywhere no matter how fast he pedals…
Nineteen
Saul was close now. The boy could see him, the lines of his face, the whites of his eyes, everything, and the boy was moving fast right at Saul, his handlebars centered on Saul’s girth, and Saul was standing in front of the gas station, in front of that cracked concrete wall, that net of fissures, smoking a cigarette, his lips moving, but no sound coming, at least not that the boy could hear, even as close as he was. The boy thought of the mounds of words that Saul littered around them, with no regard for where they might gather or what obstacles they might create. The boy thought about the pumping of his knees, the burning in his chest, his thighs, his calves, and he thought of the gas station and the milk and the eggs, where they came from, where they went, the gasoline that burned in cars, and that train, distant, but chugging still, inexorably, just as he pumped the pedals, sped on toward Saul, toward the gas station, his face red in the wind, his eyes watering at the corners, sweat beading off his forehead, drifting, dripping in his eyes, and stinging there, a welcome reminder. He rode toward Saul, west, to the horizon and its faint red line, the track smooth beneath him, packed dirt rather than gravel, rutted as though meant for his tires and Saul was huge there, his mouth chattering, his cheeks rosy, puffed-out globes. The boy could see Saul’s tongue, his teeth, the faint shadows of cavities that dotted them, and the slow, glistening curve of his palette, and there, in Saul’s mouth, the boy could see a rabbit lying in the road, its pelt gray with dust, red with blood, and beyond that the shredded pasture, toppled wheat, regiments of fragmented glass, barbed wire and chain link fence, and then the back seat of his parent’s car, its gingham cover, its creaking springs, and just at the corner of his eye, a strand of red hair, curved and whipped. The boy opened his mouth, expelled his breath, arced his tongue, and released a sound, loud and long and guttural. It might’ve been a word. The boy didn’t know. But he continued anyway, his mouth open, his throat warbling, raw with the effort, his tongue sinuous in its manipulation of the air, his jaws stretched tight, and there was Saul, bigger than the horizon, his mouth open, his tongue wiggling gently, then he was gone, diving to the side in a cloud of dust, leaving the boy with the gas station wall and its fissures, its infernal complexity, its map of dust. His destination thus revealed, the boy closed his eyes, his bike tumbling forward, his post still attached to the handlebars, then the screech and cry of metal and the solid whump of flesh and concrete. The boy felt it as a trickle. He backed up, lifted his bike, put foot to pedal, twirling his bent front wheel, and hurled himself into the wall, then fell to the ground, pushed to his feet, and again at the wall, until he could no longer lift the bike or himself and there he lay, prone but still trying to rise, and watched as Saul’s hands slowly descended toward his face.
Twenty
Saul talked to the boy, held his head and talked, his eyes wide and fevered, until, word for word, he could say no more.
Part Two
Twenty-One
The boy lay immobile for seven days without even dreams for comfort before he opened his eyes and found himself in a room so absent of color that the corners disappeared from his line of sight, and only at the edges of vision, as his head swept side to side, could he discern the form of walls and ceiling. He squirmed on his bed and it cringed beneath him, its plastic sheets crackling, while a strap held him fast. He could hear nothing but the whirring fan near the door. So he lay there, immobile still, his every part aching, and watched the ceiling, its million dots patterned in swirls and curves that reminded him of the grasses of the pasture and how they bent in the wind, or perhaps of the sinuous tubes that ran from gas pump to spigot, curled as they were, around a hook on the pump, or even the whirring bicycle chain just before the crash as it propelled him onward. The boy curled toward the strap that held him, twitched his arms, and gasped at the pain of it, then looked down toward his post, toward the wounded arm.
Nothing.
The post, the barbed wire, all of it, gone. Nothing remained but a stub and beneath it an emptiness that didn’t feel empty. It made the boy sick, this emptiness, because he could feel his post, and he missed it, its sinew, though he knew it never had any, nor muscle, but he could feel it still in its absence as a warmth and a weight, as a sacrifice.
The boy thought of Saul and hoped he was well.
“Awake, are we?”
The boy turned to the voice. In the doorway, leaning against the frame, stood a woman, her baggy gray smock in waves that radiated around what the boy imagined was her belly. She batted at a wisp of hair and slid into the room, shuffling along the edges, dusting, tidying, her eyes never long from the boy. The boy inspected her grayness, her lines, the folds of flesh that circled her face, winding around her eyes, thin and cracked, but soft, almost symmetrical he thought, though he couldn’t tell at this distance.
“Should I remove that strap?” she asked. She moved closer, her heels silent on the tile. “You want to move around a bit? I know I would, after all that. But you’ll have to be careful. A good bunch of you is broken or cracked, and your, well, your arm…maybe you saw it already. We’ll do something about that soon.” She loosed the strap and the boy pulled himself upright, wincing, almost gasping, and tried his best to smile. “I’m Norma,” she said, “your nurse, for now anyway. How’re you feeling? Pain? You’ve got a visitor, but he can wait if you need some time?”
The boy nodded and smiled and winced.
“Are you hurting? There’s no shame in hurting, none at all, not after a crash like that.”
The boy shook his head.
“I’ll send him in then, your visitor, I mean. Don’t strain yourself.”
The boy smiled and opened his mouth. He breathed the word as best he could. He said it quietly. Thanks.
Twenty-two
In an effort to assess his situation, the boy prepared the following mental lists while lying in bed, awaiting his visitor.
Things missing:
1. arm
2. bicycle
3. Saul
4. pastures
5. mooing
6. train sounds
7. stars (and their constellations)
8. mounds of dirt
9. gas station customers
10. flat soda
11. cash registers
12. silence
Things found:
1. television
2. sterile bed (with various buttons)
3. second sterile bed, empty (with optional curtain)
4. bandages
5. nurse Norma
6. window (blinds drawn)
7. whirring
8. applesauce
It wasn’t a fair trade.
He thought about Saul’s old tiger, wondered if, somehow, it could’ve been brought to nurse Norma, or maybe if Saul’s uncle had come, would things be different? Would he be here now? Armless and bandaged. A wounded boy.
Twenty-three
“Hi Simon. I’m Doctor Burkhart. Your counselor.”
The boy didn’t know about this second person here, in his room—first nurse Norma, now Doctor Burkhart—it was too much. The boy didn’t like his thick, round glasses, his long white coat, its pockets speckled with pens, some shiny some not. The boy didn’t like his glossy hair, the way it waved ever so slightly away, foreshortened and strange, a twisted clump that ran too parallel. The boy didn’t like his shoes, how they clicked on the floor, how their toes shined while the uppers didn’t, as though he hadn’t polished anything but the toes for years and now the toes thought themselves special and separate from the rest of the shoe, a star—the heel, the tongue, the uppers, just their shadowy entourage, necessary but of a different caste. The boy didn’t like this Doctor Burkhart calling him Simon either; he knew that it wasn’t his true name and felt all at once that he was being tricked, that this Doctor Burkhart only wanted to brainwash him, and the boy wanted, more than anything, to hear Saul’s voice as it fomented discord along its way to crescendo so that it might dissolve the distasteful sound of the doctor. If Saul were here, the boy knew, he would talk so much and so fast that the poor doctor would run from the room shrieking for silence, his hairy hands clasped over his ears, his stupid shiny shoes scuffing the white tile, his shiny hair frizzing as though electrified. And perhaps then, the boy would laugh a low, hearty chuckle, and close his eyes and relax within the steady drone of Saul’s voice.
But Saul didn’t come and talk the doctor away, so the boy stared up at the doctor and frowned.
“Now, look here Simon,” the doctor said as he produced a box from behind his back. “I have a gift for you. Do you know what it is?”
The boy didn’t answer.
“It is your arm,” the doctor said. “You will have to learn to use it correctly, but it will become a part of you, no different than from your other arm, or your feet, or even your eyes.” The doctor set the box on the edge of the boy’s bed. “I won’t lie. It will not be easy, and you must work hard—every day with Nurse Norma. No one transitions into prosthetics easily, not with phantom limb syndrome, the pain, or even the, simply, the basic mechanics of it. But you’re a smart boy, I can tell, and you’re strong and agile, strong enough to succeed here, with our help. Just remember that everybody can use a helping hand. There is no shame in help.” The doctor stuck out his hand in such a way that the boy knew he was meant to shake it, but the boy shrunk away and shook his head. “Take a look at it, okay?” the doctor said. He began to open the box.
And the boy kicked. Kicked the box hard. Lashing out, his leg a whip. Pulled his blanket over his head. Pulled it tight and shut his eyes and told himself that “Simon” was not his true name and this box not his true arm. He wanted his post back. It was reasonable enough. It made him different, gave him strength. He could see himself with it, still attached, loping through the pastures, half-man / half-steel, running roughshod over ne’er-do-wells and their ilk (perhaps even Doctor Burkhart) until safety was no longer a question; like lance to knight, cape to hero, baton to police-officer, his post was the emblem that defined him and his strength to all those who would oppose it. The doctor would never understand this, stuck in his world of lab coats and clipboards, shiny toes and hair, and so the boy struck at him with feet and arms and teeth, forgetting momentarily his missing limb, thus hurling himself wildly off-balance until he plummeted to the floor, spinning now on the tiles, still thrashing his legs and arm, still gnashing with his teeth, tangled in his blanket and almost blinded, until the doctor retreated to the entrance, his form outlined and diminished by the doorway, his parallel hair mussed, his lab coat disheveled. The doctor huffed and leaned and eyed the boy wearily, making no move to speak. The boy disentangled his blanket and slid toward the bed, clutching his knee, ginger and sore, his tongue tracing the cracks of his teeth while his eyes shivered over the form of Doctor Burkhart.
The boy heard a swishing from the hall, behind the doctor. The doctor peered out the door, shook his head, and muttered quietly to himself before glancing at the boy and shuffling out of the doorway and down the hall, his heels clicking every now and then, a disjointed snare drum, its spring loosed.
Saul stepped into the room, resplendent in his Sunday slacks, a gray work-shirt strained over his belly and tucked in tightly. “Boy,” he said, “What the hell are you doing on the floor? You aren’t some kind of animal, some kind of trapped animal, are you? Cause I’ve seen a trapped animal, a bear or a raccoon or something, with one of these big metal spiky trap deals, all bloody and growling with huge fangy teeth, trying to gnaw its own leg off, just hideous, not to say that you’re hideous or anything, but it looked a bit like you there, except for the blood and the growling, and, well the size, cause, if you didn’t know, you’re kind of small, being only a boy I guess. I used to be small too, back when I was in school, and so I couldn’t play football or anything, didn’t want to get hurt, and besides, those pads are heavy to carry, and I’ve carried enough heavy loads in my time, enough to know not to carry them when I don’t need to, and besides you probably won’t be playing football. I mean, it could happen, but not in all likelihood, but you could play defense, I guess, if you get big enough, eat your vitamins and vegetables and big heaps of steak and potatoes, but first you got to get all healed up and learn that new arm.” Saul looked around. “Where’s your new arm?”
Twenty-four
