God Is Dead (19 page)

The boy stared at him silently, then turned on his stool and yelled through a doorway. “Carlene!”

A pear-shaped woman in a sunflower T-shirt emerged from the stockroom. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead and smiled at Arnold. “What's going on, Ty?”

“This man doesn't want to pay for his food.”

“I'm not trying to cause trouble,” Arnold said. “I was telling your son—”

“Oh, Ty's not my son,” the woman said, still smiling. “He's my nephew, near as I can remember. I'm pretty sure I had a sister, and Ty was her boy. But who can be certain about these things?” She laughed cheerily and rubbed brisk circles on Ty's back with the palm of her hand. “We've all forgotten so much, it seems.”

“Well, I was telling your nephew that I've just come from the fighting in Mexico, and I don't have any money.”

“There was a fight? You do look like you've been worked over pretty good.”

“The war, miss,” Arnold said. “I was with the PoMo Marines in Mexico for eight years.”

“And on top of that, you're delirious. Did you take a hit on the head?” The woman came around the counter, still smiling, and put a hand on Arnold's arm. “You should go upstairs and lie down on our sofa for a while. Ty, take him up to the apartment.”

Arnold wanted to protest—he was anxious to keep moving toward home—but the idea of napping on something softer than packed dirt was too appealing to pass up.

Ty stood up from the stool. “Come on,” he said, disappearing through the doorway. Arnold followed him up a narrow set of stairs to an attic apartment full of hundreds of shipping boxes bearing labels such as
INVISIBLE TUMMY TRIMMER
and
PEE-B-GONE COMPLETE URINE CLEANUP KIT.
The boxes were stacked three and four deep, from floor to ceiling, leaving only a narrow walkway through the apartment.

“Carlene keeps saying she'll get rid of these,” Ty told him. “But she won't. She's worried she'll need to return something and won't have a box to send it in. Here's the living room.”

With all the boxes, Arnold had to squeeze past Ty to get to the sofa. He took off his boots and lay down.

“Thanks, Ty,” Arnold said, his eyes closed. “Tell Carlene I said thank you. I'll just sleep a few hours and be on my way.”

“She won't care how long you stay. She's cracked, like everyone else,” Ty said. He pretended to study the label on a box, then asked, “You were in the Marines?”

Arnold opened his eyes and looked at him. “You remember the war?”

“I remember everything,” Ty said. “When the men came I held the pills under my tongue. When they left, I spit them out.” He scoffed at the simplicity of it, though clearly he was proud of his cunning.

“Does anyone else remember?”

“Not around here,” Ty said. “Nobody I know.”

Arnold considered. “Ty, I'm going to take a nap, and then you and I need to talk,” he said. “About something bad. Something scary. You think you can do that?”

Ty scrunched up his face. “Whatever,” he said. “I'm not afraid.”

“Good,” Arnold said. He lifted his hand to the boy. “My name's Arnold, by the way.”

Ty shook his hand, once, then let it drop. “That's a geeky name,” he said.

Arnold hid his amusement at this. “Better than Ty,” he said. “Now let me sleep.”

When Arnold woke the room was still bright with sunlight. For a moment he was disoriented—he felt like he'd been out longer than an hour—until he realized it was the next morning.

On the television a man was asking, “What if creating beautiful designer nails was as easy as writing your name?”

Arnold did not know the answer to this. Fortunately the man on the television did.

“Well, now it is!” he said. “With new Nail Dazzle Duo-Pen!”

Carlene squeezed her plump body through the boxes on either side of the doorway. “You're awake,” she said. “For a while we thought you'd never wake up.”

Arnold felt something tight on his leg where the shrapnel was lodged. He looked down and saw his thigh had been wrapped in gauze and white medical tape.

“Yeah, sorry,” Carlene said. “You were bleeding on the sofa. That must have been some fight you were in! Obviously I didn't want to take your
pants
off”—here she tittered and covered her mouth with her hand—“so I just bandaged you as best I could.”

“No, it's okay,” Arnold said. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Thank you.”

Carlene quickly changed the subject. “I've got some huevos rancheros going,” she said. “It'll be just a few minutes. The remote's there on that box if you want to watch TV.”

She disappeared into the kitchen again. Arnold flipped through the channels, trying to find the news, but there was nothing on except infomercials.

A man named Chef Henry told him about “a knife so sharp you can cut a pineapple in midair.”

A woman asked if he was sick of feeling uncomfortable in his own body, and if he was ready to get serious about rock-hard abs.

Another woman informed him that the average person carried five to ten pounds of toxic matter in their intestines—but now there was a way for him to scrub his insides clean.

“Breakfast is ready!” Carlene called from the kitchen.

Arnold found a place set for him at the table. Ty sat flanked by columns of boxes, quietly forking eggs and salsa into his mouth. While Arnold and Ty ate, Carlene hovered at the gas range, fiddling aimlessly with pans and spice containers.

“How is it?” she asked when he was nearly finished.

“Very good,” Arnold said.

“It used to take me an hour to make the salsa,” she said. “But I got this Magic Bullet chopper-dicer thing, and now I'm done in five minutes. It's great.”

“Sounds like a lifesaver,” he said.

Carlene took off her apron. “I've got to get downstairs and open the store. I asked Ty here to take you to the doctor when you're ready.”

“Terrific,” Arnold said, though he had no intention of going. “Thanks so much, Carlene.”

“You boys stay out of trouble.” She winked at them and went down the stairs.

“So, Ty,” Arnold said, wiping his mouth and pushing his plate away. “That thing I wanted to talk about.”

“Yeah.”

“I don't have time to sugarcoat it. Are you sure you're ready to hear this?”

“I'm not a kid,” Ty said. “I take care of myself, basically.”

Arnold studied the boy's face. “Okay,” he said. “Here it is: We have to leave this place. Today. Or we're going to die.”

“The war,” Ty said.

“Yes, the war. We lost. They're coming to kill us. It's that simple.”

“Carlene won't go.”

“Why not?”

“None of them will,” Ty said. “They won't listen. I told you, they're cracked. They don't remember anything. They'll say we're the crazy ones.”

“Carlene must remember something, Ty. She knows she's your aunt, after all.”

“She's not my aunt,” Ty said. “She's my mother.”

Arnold, who believed that eight years of combat had removed him permanently to a place beyond shock, was stunned.

“What about your father?” he asked.

“Dead. He was with the Marines, went to some place called Guam, and never came back,” Ty said.

“She doesn't remember him at all?”

Ty plowed rows in the leftover salsa with his fork. “Sometimes she gets upset for no reason. I find her in the bedroom, looking out the window and crying. But not really crying. She's still smiling, but there are tears on her face. I ask her what's wrong. She says she doesn't know, don't worry, she just gets sad sometimes. Whatever.”

“Ty,” Arnold said, “we need to convince your mother to come with us.”

“You can try, but it won't work.”

“I think you care more than you're letting on,” Arnold said. “And if you don't, you should.”

Ty stared at him. “She'd rather forget my father than remember me,” he said. “So, whatever.”

The kid had a point. “All right,” Arnold said. “I'll talk to Carlene. But I still need you to do something for me. Do you guys have a car?”

“Didn't you see the truck outside?”

“A truck, okay, that's good. I want you to go downstairs and tell Carlene to come up here. Tell her you'll watch the store.”

“Okay.”

“I need you to pull the truck around front to the pumps—you can drive, right?—and fill it up. Then pack it with food and water from the store.”

“I can drive.”

“Good,” Arnold said. “Go ahead. We'll be down soon.”

Ty went downstairs. While he waited, Arnold thought he heard the radio-static sound of a jet flying high overhead. He threw open the kitchen window, leaned out and looked up, and though the sky was high and clear he could see no vapor trail.

If he hadn't known better, he would have chalked it up to imagination.

Carlene entered the kitchen, beaming her sweet, half-vacant smile. “Ty said you wanted to see me?”

“Yeah,” Arnold said. “Let's have a seat. I want to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind.”

They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table.

“Do you remember your husband, Carlene?” Arnold asked.

Her smile widened. “I've never been married.”

“Sure you have. Your husband was killed in the war.”

“Poor thing,” she said. “You really aren't well. We have to get you to the doctor.”

“Carlene,” Arnold said, “I think there's still a part of you that knows what I'm saying is true.”

Carlene stood up from the table. Still smiling, she said, “I think I'll go into the living room and watch some TV.”

Arnold followed her at a distance, waiting as she squeezed herself between the boxes, reclined on the sofa, and pointed the remote control at the television set. Over the voice of a woman outlining the virtues of the RoboMower, Arnold heard again the sound of jet engines above, louder and unmistakable this time.

“Look at me, Carlene,” he said. “You know you had a husband. You know Ty is your son.”

Though her smile remained, Carlene's eyes began to shimmer. “I could really use one of these,” she said, pointing at the television. “Those weeds out back just grow and grow, and I never have time to trim them down.”

“Carlene, please, listen to me,” Arnold said. “Men are coming to kill us. We have to leave now.”

“No, I think I'll stay,” Carlene said. “You boys go ahead and have fun.”

Arnold reached out and grasped her wrist. “We don't have time to argue,” he said.

Carlene leaned up, and for a moment Arnold thought she would come along quietly, neither yielding nor resisting. But then she bit him, hard enough to tear the flesh away from his knuckles. He pulled back, and she lay down again, her smile stained now with a streak of red.

The sound of distant explosions rattled the building. The television went dead, cutting off a man in the middle of his explanation of the many uses for Odor Assassin.

“Oh, a thunderstorm,” Carlene said. “We haven't had a thunderstorm in a long time. It hardly ever rains here, but it's so nice when it does.”

Clutching his hand to his chest, Arnold watched Carlene curl slowly into a ball with her fists tucked under her bloody chin. She was still smiling, still staring at the blank and silent television, and Arnold felt a sudden, abiding sadness—not for her, but for Ty, and not for the fact that Ty would soon lose his mother, but for the way in which he already had.

Another series of explosions shook the floor beneath Arnold's feet, and he turned away from Carlene, running through the kitchen and down the stairs. Outside he found the truck idling near the pumps. Ty sat in the passenger seat, watching calmly through the windshield as columns of black smoke rose from a dozen fires all over town.

Arnold got in on the driver's side.

“I told you,” Ty said, still watching the sky.

“I know,” Arnold said. He put the truck in gear and pointed it west rather than north, driving through the bombs and the fire and the people in the streets who didn't seem to notice their world was being destroyed, and even when Boca Buitre had dropped below the horizon and Ty began to cry like an old man, quietly, his body still, neither of them said another word.

Normally I find words to be more than equal to the task at hand. As a means of thanking the people who contributed to the writing of this book, however, words are woefully inadequate. But since my cooking skills have eroded and I can't legally offer free medical services, it seems words will have to do:

Big thanks to the undisputed heavyweight champion of literary agents, Simon Lipskar, a tireless advocate who daily, or at least biweekly, pulls off the improbable feat of making me feel like his only client. Also to Nikki Furrer, Dan Lazar, and everyone at Writers House for putting up with me/covering my butt.

Big thanks to my editor, Molly Stern, who was kind enough to lead me by the hand to a better book when she probably wanted to whack me with a cattle prod to expedite the process. Also to Alessandra Lusardi, Laura Tisdel, and the other behind-the-scenes folks at Viking. You won't see their names on the dust jacket, but they can rightly claim the bigger slice of credit for any success I enjoy.

Thanks to all my talented and supportive compadres at the Zoetrope Workshop, where I cut my teeth as a writer and where the major part of this book was born.

Extra big thanks, finally, to all my family and friends, for never voicing their doubts when I hadn't accomplished anything, and for not being too impressed now that I have. In particular I need to thank my parents, Ron and Barbara, who put up with more than was reasonable for longer than was reasonable, and deserve much greater credit than ink on paper can provide.