B003UYURTC EBOK (13 page)

From reading the Book of Watchers, Cabot began to understand what he believed Benton had written about in his scribbled note. He read about the fall of the angels, God speaking to Noah,
the Great Flood. He read from his Bible and the Ethiopian one as well. He went back and forth from one to another, Genesis to Enoch. Enoch to Genesis. He read that the angels had taught humans the art of war, had taught them astrology, anatomy. He read that the angels’ children became unruly, savage beasts. He began to put the pieces of Benton Sage’s puzzle together in his mind. The one thing he’d found in Benton’s journal that he’d yet to fit together with the rest of this puzzle was how Benton’s vision of God, the angel Gabriel, and some large bird fit into the picture. All he knew was that he had to carry on the work that God had, in the vision, ascribed to Benton. He had to somehow change the world.

“I’ll tell you why Noah had to build the ark,” Cabot said to his new roommate some time that next semester.

“What?” Chuck Stoppard asked from his bed, where he lay playing a video game.

“The
flood
. I’ll tell you why God sent the flood and had Noah build the ark.”

“Okay.” Chuck Stoppard never looked away from his game.

“It’s because we were getting too smart. See, these fallen angels—”

“Fallen angels?” Chuck interrupted.

“That’s right. These fallen angels came down, started sleeping with the women here on Earth, and then started teaching us all these things like how to fight and how to understand science and the stars and our bodies, and God looked down and was like, ‘Those humans are learning too much from the angels. This has to stop before they get too powerful.’ So then he sends Gabriel
down to kill the angels, and sooner or later he talks to Noah and sends the flood to kill off all the humans who had gotten too smart.”

“Oh,” Chuck Stoppard managed.

“Yeah. It’s crazy. I know.”

“Pretty crazy,” Chuck said sarcastically.

“Just think. If Gabriel hadn’t stopped them, humans could be so much smarter now. We’d know everything. We’d know how to stop wars, how to cure diseases and all that shit.” Cabot flipped through the Bible resting on his chest as he lay in bed.

“Cabot,” Chuck Stoppard said from his bed.

“What?”

“I’m an atheist,” Chuck said, lying simply to keep from having to hear any more of Cabot Searcy’s theories on the potential of humankind.

           We stood in a field, one where trees had been clear-cut and what remained was nothing more than what looked like some sad, ancient war zone. The grass was mostly dead, the dirt had gone from brown to gray, and the one tree that did still stand was bare and leaning like a creature over a small child’s nightmare bed. Vilonia Kline stood before us, her hands outstretched, her eyes closed again, her lips quivering, mumbling something either very important or completely full of shit. Lucas was looking at me the way someone does when a psychic is standing in a field in front of him and talking to the earth. Mena Prescott was now holding my mother’s hand, and my father was leaning against the truck, his
eyes fixed on the mumbling woman. She walked out about a hundred yards, stopped, and then turned around. Her eyes flew open. Her shoulders jolted back. She put her hands to her sides.

“He is here,” she said quietly, but loud enough to be heard, pointing to the ground below her.

“Here”—my mother waved her arms around to encompass the entire field—“or there?” she asked, pointing to the ground beneath Vilonia Kline.

“Here,” Vilonia said again, pointing beneath her.

No one, to my surprise, was crying yet. No one was talking, either. Lucas looked over at my father, who looked at me quickly before reaching into the back of his truck and bringing out a shovel. He tossed it onto the ground in front of me. He then brought out another one and propped it against his right shoulder, walking toward the woman. Lucas Cader walked over and grabbed the shovel, looked up at me, and said, “Go sit in the truck.” I did, and Mena Prescott went with me. My mother sat on the hood of the truck, watching as they began to dig into the dead earth. Vilonia Kline sat down on the dirt beside them, watching the hole get wider and deeper with each jab and throw.

When one is sitting in the backseat of his father’s truck beside his best friend’s girlfriend, who has her head resting on his shoulder, and watching as his father and best friend slowly puncture the world to find his little brother, he imagines Vilonia Kline standing up, dusting off her long skirt, and walking down into the hole. He sees her come back out, a dirty, bloodstained T-shirt in her hands. She unwads the shirt, holding it up to her chest the way a mother would hold it up to her child in
a clothing store, and it is black, with a big white angel in the center. It is the last shirt that Gabriel Witter was seen wearing. He sees Vilonia Kline gently lay the shirt down on the ground and then walk back down into the hole as they continue to dig around her. She walks back out, now holding a pair of blue jeans, knees stained with grass and dirt, blood caked around the ankles, pockets torn with holes and unraveling. These were the last pants that Gabriel Witter was seen wearing. She sets the jeans gently down under the shirt and begins to walk in a slow circle around the outfit, chanting and holding her hands up in the air. Behind her, from out of the earth, emerges a naked and dirty Gabriel Witter, his hair matted with blood and grime. His skin is clean white in some places but nearly black in others. He turns toward the truck, looks straight at his older brother, and smiles the slightest of smiles.

“I can’t believe this!” Vilonia Kline said, frustratingly, to my father as we drove back home.

“What?” my mother asked.

“You didn’t dig deep enough. We should go back.” Vilonia crossed her arms.

“Ms. Kline, if it’s all right with you, could you please not talk for the rest of the ride?” my father said bluntly, dirt smeared across his forehead.

“We must’ve dug, like, ten feet,” Lucas said quietly, sweat still dripping from his nose.

My mother glared at my father the way a wife does, and then
she turned back toward me. She reached one hand back, set it on top of mine, moved it quickly up and down twice, and then turned back around. Mena Prescott was asleep with her head against the window. Lucas Cader was picking dried dirt from the knees of his blue jeans. Vilonia Kline stared out the wind-shield with her lips tightly shut. She sat between my mother and father like some child on the way to a barbecue. She reminded me of sadness.

Seeing my brother’s zombie, or whatever it was, made me think about Russell Quitman and how I probably would never see him again. He was still in Florida, still in a hospital bed, and I was still making out with his ex-girlfriend in the backseat of my mom’s car. Ada said to me once, just after we had begun to know each other, that Russell Quitman, though he was a huge asshole, was actually one of the most sensitive people she’d ever known. “He would cry over the strangest things,” she said, “like a dead dog on the side of the road or a smell that reminded him of his grandmother.”

“Did he cry when you two broke up?” I asked her.

“He wept like a baby.”

“Naturally,” I joked.

“Wouldn’t you?” she said.

“We’ll see,” I said plainly.

“Ha! What does that mean?”

“We’ll just see.”

Ada Taylor said that my friendship with Lucas Cader was probably the only thing getting me through all the madness of that summer. Here is more of what I knew about Lucas Cader:
His father was a drunk who used to pay him and his older brother to fight in the front yard. His mother was that sort of woman who rarely speaks and usually says something unintentionally very sad when she does. She let her husband hit her two small children, so I never really took the time to know her. Neither did Lucas. Lucas’s father left them in the middle of the night when he was nine years old. Lucas’s brother, well on his way to becoming the alcoholic that his father had been, burned to death in a car crash three years after that. Lucas Cader had dated every girl in our grade and most of the ones in our school by the time we were sophomores. He still spent most of his time with me and slept on my floor a good four nights of the week. I loved Lucas Cader, in a very nonsexual way, and this all suited me just fine. And Lucas Cader was as heartbroken over Gabriel as I was, if not more so.

Ada’s suggestion, that Lucas was saving me once again, made me wonder what I had ever done for him. I couldn’t remember a single time when I helped him out by giving him a ride somewhere or by defending him from some ass-hat punk or by consoling him over the loss of
his
cousin or the disappearance of
his
brother. I couldn’t remember Lucas Cader ever needing me for anything save for my unique ability to constantly need rescue from one thing or another.

“Lucas,” I said toward the floor from my bed one night.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you my friend?”

“That’s a stupid question.”

“Why? Because there’s no answer?”

“No, because that’s like asking why people stretch when they wake up or jump when they’re scared,” he said sternly.

“Huh?”

“These things just happen, Cullen. You just
are
my friend. That’s that. No explanation needed.”

“So, you’re my friend just because you’re my friend?” I laughed.

“That’s right. I just am. It’s the simplest thing in the world.”

Book Title #81:
The Nightmare Bed.

“Do you remember when Gabriel decided he didn’t like toys anymore?” Mom said to me one morning in that I’m-talking-about-the-past-and-being-eerily-nostalgic sort of way.

“Yeah.”

“We bagged up all those action figures. There must have been, I don’t know, a hundred of those things,” she said.

“At least,” I added.

“I think we sold about twenty of ’em in a bag for fifty cents at that garage sale. And he didn’t cry a wink. He was ready, I guess.”

“Ready for what?” I asked.

“Ready to be grown,” she answered.

“I guess so.”

“You never played with toys much when you were young. You were always out in the yard making up these strange scenarios and fightin’ imaginary pirates and monsters. It was the cutest thing.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Like watching someone with multiple personalities,” she said, laughing.

“Thanks, Mom.”

Before Lucas Cader moved to Lily and became my friend, I spent most of my time either with my brother or completely alone. Gabriel, though, didn’t really like going outside or swimming or anything like that. He liked to stay in, read books, watch TV, and pretend that he was grown up. I never wanted to feel grown up, to be like an adult. I wanted to scream until it hurt my throat and made me talk funny for the rest of the day, and I wanted to run through my neighbor’s sprinklers and track mud into the house and shake my wet hair like a dog would in the middle of the living room. In church, I used to try and get my brother to play tic-tac-toe on the bulletin, but he always refused, shushing me and pointing to the preacher. My brother once told me that God was like the best musician in the world, because he put together all the sounds of nature and gave people like Jimi Hendrix his fingers and John Lennon his brain.

“And he’s the best writer, too,” Gabriel said to me.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because he gives every good writer something to struggle with and try to work out by writing it down. That’s genius.”

My brother stood at about five-eleven and had brown, shaggy hair. He never used a comb, but always just dried his hair furiously with a towel until it seemed to all fall down in the right places. He usually wore some band T-shirt or a shirt that he’d found at a thrift store or something. I never remember seeing him in any pants other than his faded blue jeans or
his brown Dickies, which I think were meant to be work pants. He did not skateboard and he never once even tried to play the guitar. His eyes were about like mine, blue not like the sky but like plastic Easter eggs. He had dimples, too, just like mine, and if it hadn’t been for his somewhat thicker eyebrows and smaller nose, we would have been able to pass for twins. Because I was just about one inch shorter than him and my uncle Joseph had died, Gabriel was the tallest member of my entire family.

Since he had been gone, I had taken to wearing my brother’s T-shirts almost every day. I’m not sure exactly what compelled me to do so, but then again, I’m not sure exactly what ever compelled me to do or say any of the things I did and said back then. Because my brother didn’t have any friends except for Libby Truett, I decided to visit her one afternoon seven weeks after he’d been missing. The last time I’d seen her was a couple of weeks earlier, when she was sitting in front of me in church and, turning around slowly, had asked me how I was doing. During the preacher’s sermon, she drew a picture of an aardvark and passed it back to me.

Knock-knock.

The door opened and Libby stood before me, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her green eyes fixed on my face. She looked surprised, but not in that I-can’t-believe-you-are-at-my-house sort of way. It was more like
Oh, Cullen, please don’t tell me bad news.