Corrosion (11 page)

I watched her as she tied her apron, watched her as she wiped a wisp of hair from her face, watched her as she joked with Eli Wyatt, watched her as she walked toward her customers, smacking on gum, flipping through her notepad.

And for the next hour or more I drank root beer after root beer until my stomach ached and every once in a while she’d glance my way and for a moment things weren’t so rotten and I didn’t think about Mom’s disease and Dad’s rats and my life.

CHAPTER 15

During those days, I spent a lot of time reading, only it wasn’t any school books, it was a comic book called
Fight to the Finish
, and it featured the Soldier, a kick-ass motherfucker who wouldn’t hesitate to blow up every last Arab if it meant making America a safer place to live. He didn’t play by the rules and when the other soldiers were hiding in their barracks, the Soldier would gladly walk into a mosque filled with jihadists and give each one of them sons-of-bitches a bullet to the brain, and there wouldn’t be 72 virgins waiting for them, I can tell you that much. But he wasn’t just a destroyer, he had a heart of gold too, like when he saved that little Iraqi boy from the crumbling building, now how many soldiers would do that, not too many if you ask me!

I figured I’d enlist in the army just as soon as I turned eighteen, figured I’d get the hell out of Silverville and go off and fight all those terrorists in the desert and I’d be sure to write home to Constance: Dear Constance, I hope things are good with you, Iraq is hard to describe, there’s a lot of carnage. Just the other day we drove down the highway and I saw a dead Iraqi woman in a car, eyes wide open, mouth frozen in a silent scream. Seems like all I do is wait and worry about getting killed, but I hope you’re happy in Silverville and I hope little Timmy is doing well. Tell him I’ll be home soon, God willing, I love the both of you more than life itself!

Meanwhile, the old man remained hard at work in the basement, poking the rats with needles, mumbling results into his tape recorder: Morphological and electrophysiological alterations in striatum and cortex. Reduced membrane capacitance and increased input resistance in neurons from symptomatic mice. Decreases in somatic size, dendritic field, and cortical pyramidal neurons. And the Christ Rat, in a cage by itself, symptom free for nearly a week.

As for Mother, she was now just a series of tics, the beginning stages of chorea. Her jaw was clenched, her speech was slurred, and swallowing was difficult. When she spoke, it was confusing and I couldn’t always follow. When she cried, it was the sobbing of a little girl, and I cried too while the blackened lodgepoles swayed menacingly out the window.

Dr. Tanner came to examine my mother. He wore an oversized gray suit and had an oversized gray beard. He carried an oak-tanned leather Upjohn medicine bag but I doubted anything was inside. He entered my mother’s room jovially, joking with my father, laughing Ed McMahon-style. My father, hunched over like Quasimodo, mumbled on and on about Tetrabenazine and Peroxetine, but the doctor paid him no mind.

They were in that room for a long time. I could hear my mother screaming and I sat in a rocking chair and thought about cherry pie and root beer and Constance Durban. And then the doctor and my father came out and the doctor wasn’t laughing anymore. He spoke to my father in hushed tones, and he squeezed my shoulder and told me to take good care of myself, and I remembered when Mother was healthy and the world was less sad.

An hour later, I was inside Lucky’s Liquors chatting up old Henderson, the fellow with the golf ball goiter. I told him that I needed to get a bottle of whiskey for the old man, but he wasn’t buying it. He said: I’m not going to risk losing my liquor license for a little punk like you and he laughed like he was just joking, but I knew that he wasn’t. I told him no hard feelings, that I’d just tell Dad to come down to the liquor store and get the bottle his own lazy self, and the Goiter seemed satisfied, and I waited until he turned his head and then I grabbed a bottle of something and stuck it under my shirt and said, well, I’ll be seeing you around, Mr. Henderson, hope it doesn’t snow too hard tonight.

When I got outside, I looked at the label on the bottle: Jelínek’s plum brandy. I unscrewed the top and took a long swig. It tasted terrible, but after a few more drinks I started to get used to it and then I started to feel better and the frigid air started to feel warmer.

Well, I got a little drunk and I wandered through Silverville, by all the cabins and shacks, and I was singing Christmas songs and stumbling over fallen branches and laughing at some secrets.

And I must have been distracted because soon I was deep in the mountains and maybe a little bit lost and the rain was falling and the wind was blowing. I didn’t panic because I knew that the worst thing that could happen was that I’d die and that wasn’t much worse than my present state of being, so I kept walking and kept singing, but now my singing was slower and softer.

And then an amazing thing happened. In the middle of nowhere, I came across an old collapsed mine and then just a little farther I saw a little mining cabin and I had the very strange sensation that I’d been there before, that I’d lived there before, maybe in another life, in another century, and the things that I’d done there were terrible. Slowly I walked to the cabin and I felt scared but then I thought about the Soldier and I grabbed a walking stick and pretended it was a rifle and shouted out: All right, you piece of shit towel heads, come on out with your hands held high or I swear by the real God that I’ll blow you straight to Kingdom Come! But there was no answer except the wind and the rain, so I stepped inside the shack and there was dust everywhere and there was a wood-burning stove and a gas lantern and a busted chair and a small cot. Next to the fireplace was a brush and a shovel and a poker, all a hundred years old at least. I walked back and forth across the shack, the floor sounding like dead leaves beneath my feet, and then terrible images started bouncing around my skull at breakneck speed and I felt scared again and this time the Soldier couldn’t do a damn thing to make me feel better. So I left that shack but I knew for certain that I’d be back. It was my new hideaway and nobody would know about it, not ever, except maybe for Constance, I’d tell her anything.

Well, it took me a good long while, but eventually I did manage to find my way back home but I wished I hadn’t because when I got inside, my father was sitting in the kitchen all by himself, drinking bourbon, his head in his hands, a man defeated. I stood in the doorway and said is everything okay, Dad, you’re looking a little green. He looked up and shook his head and pulled his right hand from his lap and that’s when I knew that hope was dwindling fast because he was gripping a rat and it was dead and it was the Christ Rat.

CHAPTER 16

Dad wouldn’t dispose of the Christ Rat because he was waiting for its resurrection. Meanwhile, the bedroom door stayed locked and there was no way of getting in and don’t think I didn’t try! Oftentimes I could hear the old man behind the door sobbing and praying and I knew it was pretty bad because Dad never prayed, at least not that I knew of, and he wouldn’t let me see her, wouldn’t let me see my own mother. If you ask me to tell you the God’s honest truth, I think he’d given up on finding a cure, because his basement laboratory stayed untouched and those rats were left to fend for themselves. Rats can only survive for so long without food before they resort to cannibalism, but that’s no different from you and me if we’re really honest with ourselves.

And each time he came out of the room I pleaded with him to let me see Mother, that it had been weeks since I’d been in her room, but the old man wasn’t having any of it. She’s sick, can’t you see? The more you bother her, the sicker she’s going to get! You just mind your own business, you hear?

And meanwhile, a woman whose name I didn’t recognize kept calling and telling me that I sure better start attending school or else social services would come and that would be the end of me, so I made up my mind to give it a chance, not forever, but just for long enough to get this awful woman off my back. Of course, I hadn’t been to school in some time, and I worried that my teachers wouldn’t even know who I was, but I shouldn’t have worried about that, no sir! They all knew my name, they all knew my story, and they all seemed put out that I was back, like I was making their lives extra difficult. Well, it’s been a long time, Benton Faulk, said the teacher with the bird nose and dandruff-covered sports jacket, and I agreed it had been a long time. I’ve been caring for my ill mother, I said. I’m so sorry to hear that and blather, blather, blather.

So I sat in the back of each of my classes and it was a terrible experience, I tell you, because I have no interest in sine and cosine, or subjects and pronouns, or World War I and World War II. And at lunch I had nobody to sit next to and then I saw a few kids that I knew from way back when: Edward Kelly with his Polo shirt and arrogant grin; Tanner Fitzgerald with his military buzz and faggot lisp; Billy Gallegos with his acned face and dull-eyed stare. Do you mind if I sit here, I said holding a tray of meat loaf and apple sauce and chocolate milk, and they all looked at each other and laughed nervously, and then I started laughing too, and it was like we were sharing a great big fat joke, the four of us buddies from way back when. And that gave me an idea. I started telling them the jokes that I knew, just to see if I could keep the moment going. Said I: Did you know that the average tit weighs a pound and a half? Well, it’s true! And do you know how much a pussy weighs? They were stumped, absolutely stumped. Well, Billy, I said, why don’t you go step on a scale, and we’ll find out!

Yeah, that was a funny one, but none of them thought so, and after a short while they left the table, so it was just me sitting by myself and soon I decided that I wasn’t feeling hungry anymore so I dumped my tray and left the cafeteria and sneaked out of the building and didn’t come back the next day or the day after that.

* * *

But I spent a lot of time at the Miner’s Café, and Constance was more than a little bit nice to me. She had heard about my mother—news travels quickly in small towns—and she told me that she was so sorry, told me that she knew what I was going through, that she had lost someone not so long ago, and that her heart hurt every second of every day. And she had a locket around her neck that she squeezed and I wondered what picture was inside and then her eyes turned moist and red because she was sad thinking about loss and whatnot and I got my courage up and asked her if she wanted to go out and get a drink sometime, that she was the prettiest and kindest woman in all of Silverville, but she thought that Little Benton was just joking and she wiped away the tears and smiled a little and then walked away, her body swaying slowly.

And the minutes seemed like hours and the hours like days, and at some point it dawned on me that it would be a good idea to find out where Constance lived, so one day I waited until she finished work and cashed out her tips and then I followed her, staying a ways back, ducking behind trees now and then, and it turned out she lived nearby because she didn’t even have to drive, and if she had seen me, I would have said, Oh, hi, Ms. Durban, I was just on my way home, wasn’t following you, wasn’t following you at all!

She lived in a little log cabin buried in the woods. I watched as she reached beneath a mat and pulled out a key and unlocked the door, and then I crouched behind a pine tree all covered with powdered sugar and waited and watched and waited some more. I thought about my mother and the Soldier and the Christ Rat and that got me good and emotional and I started crying just like a goddamn little girl, and I couldn’t stop, and then I looked up and saw an orange glow from behind the curtain, and I stopped crying, and then I heard the sound of a piano, soft and lovely, and I imagined her sitting on the couch listening to the music, thinking of love, thinking of me. I watched the cabin for a long time, hoping against hope that she’d pull back that curtain, and Jesus must have been looking out for me, because eventually she did open the curtain and I could see her standing there, gazing into the darkness and cold, the same piano piece playing for the third time at least. She wore a yellow nightgown and her red hair was long and straight and beautiful. I pulled her close, wiped a tear from her eye, and said, nobody’s going to hurt you anymore, Constance, I promise you that much. Oh, Benton, she said. I just can’t stand it anymore. This world is such a terrible place! I kissed her lips, soft and sweet. We’ll leave it behind, I said. Every last drop of sadness and meanness. We’ll leave it behind. Then the curtains closed and the music stopped and she was gone and I started crying again, goddamn it all to hell.

* * *

And now I should tell you about Horace Faulk because he plays a major role in this story, and not in a good way as you might have guessed. He was my dad’s brother, which made him my uncle. He was tall and serious and religious and had a mustache. My father didn’t much like him and he didn’t much like my father. I didn’t know him well enough to have an opinion, but typically I don’t have a problem with people unless they’re scheming to get me or my dad.

Well, this one morning he stood on the front porch, pounding on the door, calling out my dad’s name, peeping in the window like a goddamn Tom. My father was off somewhere and my mother was locked in her room, so it was just me and my bad thoughts, as they say. The old man would later tell me on numerous occasions to not let that self-righteous bastard inside, but at this point I hadn’t heard his warnings and so I opened the door, figuring family, family.