Everybody Sees the Ants (24 page)

“I think you should keep it up, man.”

“Thanks, I will.” I can barely pronounce the “w” because my grin is so tight.

We walk to the place where we split. She says, “Show’s at seven on Friday. I can sneak you in the backstage door if you want.”

“I hope I can make it,” I say.

“You should at least come and say good-bye,” she adds, and then puts up her hood and disappears into the backyards of Tempe.

I walk to Jodi and Dave’s house, still smiling. The door is unlocked, and no one is waiting up, so I lock it behind me and tiptoe into the guest room, where I slip into bed and think about
The Vagina Monologues
, and I feel that roller coaster of reality again. I think of all the reality I’m about to face. Two days until I fly back to Pennsylvania, where my father lives. Where Nader McMillan lives. Remarkably, this doesn’t kill my smile.

Nader McMillan is sitting in the corner, weeping. He rocks back and forth, barely hanging on to sanity. Good. I’m glad.

The small hut is filled with bananas. Heaps of them. Frankie, Granddad’s guard, and his two young guard friends are sitting at a table smoking cigars and playing poker. Every
time Frankie loses, which is every game because Frankie plays shitty poker, the two young guys get to do whatever they want to Nader McMillan.

Outside it rains frogs. Big, bouncy frogs that hit the thatched roof with such speed and force I am sure the hut will topple in another hour if the rain doesn’t slow down. I am sure we will be up to our pits in frogs.

“Lucky,” Nader whispers.

I ignore him.

“Lucky,” he whispers again, this time sobbing after he says it.

I look at him. He mouths, “Help me.” I look away.

I am crazy with hatred for him. I know this. I am okay with it.

I point to the scab on my cheek. Before I had that scab, there was no scar from the banana incident. The only scar was on my brain. Now I have something I can point to. I have something that can be photographed. Teams of psychologists can line up the pictures and say, “Lucky Linderman’s gone insane after receiving a blow to the cheek in the shape of Ohio/West Virginia/Michigan/Iowa.” I point to the scab, but really Nader knows what I’m pointing at. The scar that will never heal. The scar shaped like Florida or California. My banana-shaped scar.

I mouth back, “Fuck you.”

The ants march single file to his face and spell it out right on his greasy forehead:
FUCK. YOU
.

Granddad is on his mat, meditating.

He says, “You have to live in the present, Lucky.”

“But it’s impossible to forget.”

“I didn’t say you had to forget it. Never forget it. But stop living there. Live here, in the present. Think forward to your future.”

“My future is three more years of Nader McMillan.”

“Yes, but from now on you’re the one in control.”

When Frankie loses the hand and it’s time to torture one of the prisoners, the young guards point to Granddad. Frankie points to Nader. “Young!” he says. “Brave!”

But they want Granddad.

I look away. Granddad doesn’t even make a noise. He is happy to eat the banana after the ordeal is over.

Nader McMillan screams. The hut is awash in frogs. The door is forced open, and they rush in and begin to drown us.

Granddad and I flow quickly through the window and land on frog rapids, riding them with no boat. A minute later Granddad and I are on the muddy shore, his legs a mess of fractured bone, clots, yellow fatty stuff and other colorful sinew. Mine are inexplicably perfect—not even a scratch.

“How have you lived this long?” I ask.

“My time’s not up, I guess.”

“No, I mean, how do you survive this?”

“I just do,” he says. “When they torture me, they show they’re weak. When I survive, I show them I’m stronger.”

“My life is mine,” I say. “Not the man’s.”

“Exactly,” he says while rearranging his tibia to line up with the rest of his leg. “You’re stronger.” He bends his knee a few times to make sure he’s all fixed up. “Can I ask
you
a question?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you keep coming here?”

I can’t understand why he’s asking me this. It makes me angry that he has to.

“You know,” I say.

“Tell me anyway.”

I sigh. “I’m here to rescue you. To bring you back.”

“Why?”

“Jesus! Because you shouldn’t be here! You shouldn’t be here!” I say. “And Granny Janice told me to. Because we need you.”

“So you were sent here. That’s why you’re here?”

“Yeah.”

“So what if I tell you to go away? Don’t come back?”

“I wouldn’t do it,” I answer. “I have as much reason to be here as you do.”

“Son? Do you really believe you can drag me out of this place through your dreams?”

I don’t say anything. He pats me on the shoulder and hands me a stick of chewing gum that he pulls from his ear, as a magician would with a quarter. He produces a piece of gum from his other ear and unwraps it and pops it into his mouth.

“Think about it for me, will you?” he says.

•   •   •

When I wake up, I’m still smiling that goofy smile Ginny said was cute. And I’m holding a stick of chewing gum, and I think about it like he asked me to, but I don’t really know what to think. Is he asking me to give up my life’s mission? Or is he telling me that this
isn’t
my life’s mission?

Mom
, Jodi and I have been in the car for a half hour. Jodi drives too slowly and gets freaked out if anyone behind her gets too close.

“Get off my ass!” she says. “Oh! You want to play? Because I can go slower!”

Mom is watching the desert crawl by out the passenger’s-side window and is probably dreaming of the laps she’ll do when we get home. I’m lying across the backseat in case any of the people behind us decide to shoot Aunt Jodi for driving like a crazy person. You never know.

We pull into the dirt parking lot of an old gold-mining town—now a tourist attraction—and Jodi says, “Here we are!”

The three of us spend the next hour wandering the place,
even though it’s more than a hundred degrees outside. Jodi gets a picture of me (sweating) behind the bars of the small-town jail. We sit and talk for a while with the sheriff, who totally notices that my scab is the shape of Iowa. Behind him, costumed floozies play poker. We have a root beer in the saloon and wait for the hourly gunfight to start. Though it’s totally touristy and lame in ways, it does make me think about what this place must have been like back in 1890.

“Imagine that,” Mom says.

“Yeah,” I answer. “Crazy to think that’s the way things were.” Of course, things are still kinda the same. I mean, there are probably more shoot-outs now than there were then.

After the gunfight is over, we put a few bucks in the donation hat and walk up to the brothel. Jodi, Mom and I stand outside while the faux hookers invite us in. We go to the blacksmith next door instead. When we get to the top of the town, Jodi goes into the little white chapel while Mom and I sit down and share a bottle of water.

“You okay, Mom?”

“Sure.”

“No. I mean,
are you okay?
To go back?” I ask.

She nods. “Can’t wait to see your dad. I miss him.”

“That’s good,” I say. I can’t figure out what there is to miss, but that’s between them.

“I hope you know I had to do this for myself. It wasn’t really anything to do with you,” she says. “I mean, it
does
have to do with you, but it’s not your fault.”

“I know.” I say. I watch as the ants act out a gunfight with tiny pistols in the dirt at our feet. I envy how much fun they have sometimes.

“All those years…” She starts to cry a little. “I wanted to call the principal or the superintendent. Once, that time when you had the bruised nipples from the twisty-nipple things—”

“Titty twisters.”

“Yeah.” She shakes her head and bites on her bottom lip. “That time. I wanted to call the police, I was so mad.”

“I heard that fight,” I say.

“It’s not that he wants you to suffer. He just doesn’t know what to do about it, so he thinks there is nothing to do about it.”

I nod.

“I mean, we tried! Remember that time we got him suspended?”

“The pencil,” I say. Nader stabbed me in the arm with a pencil in fourth grade. After he came back from suspension, he punched me in the ear so hard I couldn’t hear right for a week. His father threatened the school district. Said if Nader got “unfairly suspended” again, he’d sue.

“And then your father thought up
the plan
. Thought he was a genius.”

The sun is baking us into human raisins. If Aunt Jodi doesn’t hurry up, we will be two piles of dust.

“Reverse psychology, he told me.
Maybe if we don’t say anything, they’ll just leave him alone
. And I fell for it because I was sick of arguing.” She looks at me, the direct sun making her
face look older. “But look at everything you lost because I was sick of fighting with a stupid man over his stupid idea.”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

“It’s not okay. I’m your mother.”

“Yeah, but I stopped telling you guys stuff a long time ago. I stopped telling anybody,” I say. “Anyway, we’re here now.”

She looks at her watch and over toward the chapel. “We’re here, all right. Why, I don’t know. This was probably the worst place to bring you!”

“Not really. I feel better.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Dave taught me a bunch of stuff. And just meeting Jodi kinda showed me how normal my life is. I mean, even with Dad storming out a lot and wishing we were ham hocks.”

We watch Jodi waddle from the door of the chapel, and I add, “I kinda like her, you know? She has redeeming qualities or something.”

Mom chuckles and says, “Yeah. She has something. Not sure what.”

Here is where I would tell her about Dave cheating if I had more time, but I don’t. I don’t want to ruin her relationship with her only sibling, or mess up anything more than it already is.

When Jodi returns, she says, “You two ready to pan for gold?” and we walk down to the panning shack and the three of us buy a pan of dirt to sift through. The woman gives us vials for our gold and some tweezers. Mom finds more gold than all of us. Jodi says she’s only after garnets this time because
she’s come here enough that gold is boring to her. Unsurprisingly, I end up with a vial full of iron pyrite—fool’s gold. Last week this would have made me feel stupid. Today it makes me laugh. And it reminds me of what Granddad said last night. Maybe I’m looking at things all wrong. Fact is, iron pyrite looks a lot like gold, and I wouldn’t be the first person in the history of the world to have confused the two.

When we get home, it’s three o’clock. I watch Mom swim laps. She says she can’t stand the short pool much longer. “Makes me feel like a condor in a birdcage,” she says. I tell her that I’m taking a walk, which is insane because it’s a hundred and ten million degrees outside, but I see Ginny walking with some girls through the common area behind Jodi’s house.

I cut through the backyard, and by the time I catch up with her, she’s talking with three normal-looking girls (long, straight hair done just right and ironed preppy clothes) on the sidewalk. When she sees me, she excuses herself and walks over.

“You’re still smiling,” she says.

“Can’t help it.”

“You coming tomorrow?”

“I think so,” I say. “Are you still gonna…?” I point to my hair and raise my eyebrows to indicate the rest of my sentence:
shave your head?

Just as she’s about to answer, there’s a loud whistle. She turns toward her house. When she does, her hair swings like a wide skirt. I will miss it.