Lost Signals (24 page)

The box had pushed into the tender flesh just below his ribs, deep. He dug his nails between the puckered, reddened skin of his stomach and the edge of the box, but it stuck fast, and his attempts were met with shooting pains. Finally, he drew a bath for himself, stood in the water so as not to submerge the box, running a soaped-up cloth over his skinny body. He worked the suds in around the box and tried to pry it out, but still it stuck fast. Finally, he dried himself and then dressed in the clothes in which he’d slept. He went outside. Pa was gone. The bottle lay empty by the smoldering fire pit.

He lifted his shirt to inspect the box. It had taken on the contours of his side now, had darkened in color. It pulsed slightly, a counterpoint to the boy’s breathing. He touched the tip of his index finger to it. It was warm, somewhat damp, certainly more pliable than before. He pulled his finger back, letting the shirt fall back in place, and inspected his fingertip. A liquid sat in the whorls, a muted pink, like blood diluted with saliva. He rubbed it on his pant leg.

From under his shirt, a chorus rose, female voices, some humming low, others soaring. It was glorious, the sound of angels, of tenderness itself. The sound gathered in front of him like smoke. He moved toward it and it moved away, fading just slightly. One more step forward. Two. A third and a fourth and it was as loud as you please. Then the sound began to fade. He made a noise of frustration, something between a whine and a growl. He cocked his head. He side-stepped to his left, and the voices rose just a touch in volume. Another step, even louder. The voices led the boy as surely as a leash or a harness. They went toward town, warping the air. The boy followed. His lips moved soundlessly. The word he mouthed repeatedly but did not dare speak aloud was
 
: “Mother. Mother. Mother.”

***

When Pa pulled the boy from schooling, he’d laid down some simple rules. Explore the woods. Collect sticks. Don’t talk to people. Don’t go to town. Now the boy found himself passing the white church with its modest dormer, the priest’s voice rising and falling like storm winds within its walls, an odd, halting cadence. The cemetery, where men lamented with heads bowed over silent monuments. The general store, where old men rocked in chairs on the broad porch, solemnly engaged in discussing other people’s personal business. The tavern, wherein younger men roared, bellowing over one another, women shrieking, raucous laughter, clanking and stomping. All drowned out by a chorus of angels as the boy walked, head tilted and hands grasping, along the forbidden territory of Main Row.

As he passed the cobbler’s, a wave of exhaustion surged through his body, and he staggered, putting out a hand to the wall. Pains jolted his temples, zig-zagged behind his eyes, ran along the line of his jaw and under his tongue. His side throbbed where the box had burrowed. Then nausea caressed his innards and he retched, but produced nothing but rank and viscous saliva. He grabbed at it with his fingers, pulled it up from his throat, flung it to the ground. He rubbed his fingers together. He felt hot, in the grip of a powerful ague. His shirt had dampened where the box had worked its way in.

Then Pa was before him like a hallucination, tall and starkly removed from the context of home. He had stumbled from Crackerbarrel Alley, looking down, fastening his belt. Behind him in the darkness a twig-thin woman adjusted her skirts. Pa looked up, and his mouth fell open. The boy’s mouth moved soundlessly. Pa’s ruddy hand grabbed him by the throat, and the box started to chant, a chorus of voices, speaking in tongues like folks did at the church, overlapping, rhythmic. Pa swatted the air around him. His pupils dilated.

“No,” said the boy. “Don’t you dare kill my pa.”

Shhhhhh
, said the box.

Pa jammed his fingers into his ears. He pushed hard, the muscles in his forearm bulging, until his fingers broke through and pushed in deep, right to the knuckles. His eyes went dead and his jaw dropped. A long, rattling exhalation, a failed attempt to bring in air, and he was gone. He stayed standing, though, feet pointed inward, elbows crooked. Something drummed in his chest and a dark stain blossomed at the crotch of his pants. The woman screeched and retreated into the darkness of the alley.

The boy stepped around Pa’s propped remains, staring ahead, for now the singing had a source. Great translucent snakes swam over his head, overlapping, intertwining, taking on the color of the sky here, the clouds there, the treetops over there. He jumped up to grab one, and it shot right down like a lightning bolt, was slurped into one of the holes in the box, joining the chorus of voices that sang within. The boy giggled. He left Pa, following the snakes from town, toward the forest.

A rider on a dappled horse gave him a wide berth, this mad boy, walking, leaping into the air, grabbing at nothing, twitching and chortling. The snakes took many shapes as the boy followed. A dog with a profusion of bulging, dangling breasts. A broad-chested man with a cane and an exaggerated swagger. A billy-goat on hind legs, with horns curled toward the treetops. A sleek, long-limbed panther. Into the thick of the woods they went, the ever-changing squadron of snakes and the boy just behind. It seemed for a time that others walked beside him in the wood, long-legged, tall, with massive, sagging heads, all grinning mouths, teeth and wild eyes, but he saw them only sidelong
 
; when he turned, all he saw was saplings and ferns, reeds and vines.

The snakes led him farther into the wood than he’d ever gone before. Up great hills and down deadfall-strewn valleys, through gurgling brooks and over fallen branches. The trees were thicker out here, thick as houses. It was cold here, too, and the boy’s clattering teeth served as percussion, backing the breathless chorus. Up ahead, the deepest part of the forest loomed dark as coal, darker than under the wool blanket in his windowless, candle-snuffed room. This, the boy surmised, was the place that nighttime fled to when the sun tried to set it on fire.

The trees began to lean away from the boy, opening a v-shaped swath in the woods. He looked down and he was clad in the bejeweled clothing of a prince, a broad lace collar like a flattened flower, a patterned doublet in purples and reds. Breeches bunched at the knee, pristine white stockings, gemstone-spangled shoes whose bright buckles gleamed. Drums thumped in their thousands. Trumpets sounded a triumphant blare. On either side of him, great tapestries unrolled from the rafters formed by the high branches, depicting scenes of great revelries, long tables spilling over with food, lined by men in black hoods and sheep-headed men
 
; a hunt wherein devils on the backs of muscular black mares drew arrows back in massive bows, shooting angels, mouths agape, from their perches in the cottony clouds
 
; expansive beds upon which dozens of plump young maidens cavorted, wanton mouths agape, with six blank-faced elderly men sporting comically large, pink-tipped erections.

It all fell away in an instant, the trees snapping back, the tapestries lifting, as the forest opened up upon a grassy clearing, a hazy grey at the edge of the night’s hiding place, where six men, tall, gaunt-faced, stood in a broad circle. The men were dressed formally, as Pa would dress when he used to go to church
 
: cockel hats, coats and capes. Their skin was as pale as a tree stripped clean of bark. The snakes took the form of a great bird, flew to the center of the circle, and disappeared. The boy followed until he stood in the center of the circle. The men’s features were indistinct, blurred, secreted in shadow. The boy couldn’t make them into faces no matter how hard he looked. The box whispered something, and the boy nodded.

And began to spin. His feet dancing a mad kuchipudi in the muddy earth, he spun and spun, the men whirling around him. A face began to take form as he spun, a face that formed from the six faces that surrounded him, a face that hovered over a rotating array of decrepit bodies. It was a leering face, a triumphant face, a face of a man—or something a shade different than a man—who had more than a passing familiarity with cruelty. The boy felt his side pucker and pull, and then a gaping absence as the box broke free. Cold rushed into his body through the ragged hole. The box, purple and swollen and gelatinous, fluttered through the air, a winged leech, and the man’s tongue surged from his mouth and grabbed it, pulled it in. The man chewed, his eyes locked on the boy’s eyes. Blood sprayed from the man’s elongated mouth, trickled down from the corners.

The man’s many hands took the boy around the neck and under the chin and under the armpits. They lifted him from the earth, his feet still dancing below him, like the feet of a man being hanged. The man inspected him carefully. The song of the snakes, of warped trumpet blare and thundering drums, stormed the woods, bouncing from leaf to leaf, leaping among the high limbs, rising into the sky, surrounding the man and the boy, and it devolved into whimpers and shrieks and forlorn lamentations as the man began the work of taking the boy apart in order to make from him something altogether new.

She was late
bringing Andrew back, again. It was always the same with Sheila. Operating on her own schedule, never minding the interruption of anyone else’s routine. “Self-absorbed,” was the phrase Matt’s attorney had used during the custody hearing—a perfectly applicable description, and with her legal history, enough to make the judge believe she was unfit.

He waited in the car, the air conditioner pouring mildly cool air over his sweating hands. Fifteen minutes turned into thirty, and his anger melted into fear. She’d threatened more than once to take his son from him. Could she have meant that literally, using the two-week summer visitation as cover for flying him across the country
 
? Was he in a plane already, his blonde hair dyed brown, rolling whatever new name she’d given him around on his lips
 
? Testing it out, happy for the chance to start over somewhere, without—

Four short horn beeps brought him back to the parking lot of McDonald’s, as her blue Mustang pulled up next to him. She motioned for him to put his window down. She wore rhinestone sunglasses and a satisfied smirk ringed with scarlet lipstick. Matt hadn’t wanted to smack someone so badly in years.

“Sorry we’re late. Traffic was just
dreadful,
” she said through the open window in that adopted Hollywood starlet accent he’d always hated. Andrew waved from the passenger seat. He looked brown and lean, maybe even taller.

“Most people would have called,” he told her. She shrugged and got out of her car. Andrew hopped out and went around to the trunk.

“Wait ’til you see what Mom gave me
 
!” he exclaimed. He lifted the trunk lid and, with some difficulty, pulled out a large cardboard box. “It’s heavy
 
!”

Matt took the box from him, tucking it under one arm while he grabbed his son’s suitcase with the other hand. The boy was taller. A trick of the light
 
? He looked Andrew up and down, studying him, measuring him. The high top sneakers and skinny jeans he wore gave an ever bigger illusion of height. New clothes, presented by Mommy Dearest—clothes he wouldn’t be able to wear at his new school, which Sheila would know if she ever bothered to check in with the father of her son. She never bothered to ask about Andrew’s grades, or his friends, or his problems.

“We’ve been listening to people in Russia and China and all over the place,” Andrew said. “Maybe even people in outer space
 
!”

Matt put the box in his trunk as his son and ex-wife hugged their goodbyes. He heard them whispering conspiratorially, but his relief at having his son within arm’s reach kept him from interfering. She was, no doubt, promising something outrageous, something only Mommy could deliver. Sheila couldn’t seem to mail a simple support check every month, but could show up with expensive gifts when it suited her interests.

It wasn’t until the blue Mustang was a small dot in his rear-view mirror that Matt finally relaxed and began to focus on the excited ramblings of his son. He reached into the back seat and squeezed the boy’s knee. “I missed you, kiddo.”

“Missed you too, Dad. And then we walked on the beach and I almost stepped on a jellyfish because they were all over the place and they look like plastic wrap when they’re dead and we made biscuits and listened to the radio some more and then I fell asleep in the hammock. Can I keep the radio in my room, please Dad, please
 
?” The earnest and nervous look on his son’s face required an immediate response.

Matt replied quickly, without thinking. “Of course. You can keep it . . . wherever you can find room in the mess.” He smiled and settled back in his seat, relaxed and happy once again, as he prepared to share the next three hours participating in his ten-year-old’s dramatic recreation of “how I spent my summer vacation.” It was good to be a dad.

***

“You cleaned it,” Andrew whined. He turned and peered at Matt over the tops of his glasses—one of Sheila’s signature gestures of disapproval, and one Matt hoped the boy wouldn’t have learned this quickly.