Made to Break (9 page)

“I'm not going anywhere.”

Another fit had settled over Dinky, the coughing again, the same spewing again of blood and phlegm. I smoothed his blanket and dabbed his mouth. Hickory told me to kill my smoke, so I got up and took about fourteen slugs of bourbon. Then I went into the storm, hollering out for some wild old man, with his wasted monkey and bed of dolls and dog standing quietly by.
An emptiness had opened up inside me. The night was wet and black and empty and cold, and I was scared, more so than I'd ever been. Maybe this is
it
, I thought, maybe this is where I'll see the face no one but the dead have ever seen. But maybe I won't be dead, just almost-dead, just passed out kind of in a forest of mud, curled up like some little bald worm in the mud.

THERE ARE TIMES YOU SEE THE ROT YOU'VE always been. My days were a trail of liquor-store bumblings and sunrise guilt, and every penny I'd earned these years had come to rest in a dirty glass. I'd ceased caring for others, and definitely for myself. The only things that mattered were booze and books. Scrubbing toilets—the very ones I'd puked into so many times—that was what I knew. The hurly burly of solitude that took me come each day's midnight had stripped any cool I might still have owned a long time back. Night after night, in the chill of an empty school, my ambitions fell away like leaves from boughs in autumn. And wandering those halls, moving from bin to toilet to bin, the few kind trophies of memory that did remain floated by as evil nymphs—evil because angelic, angelic because there in the corridors of my past those trophies were safe from deeper ruin. And like angels they were accessible in only the cruelest of ways. What was the good in having something you could never hold?

Dozing behind the desks in that collegiate gloom, the times of my youth would tiptoe up with a sort of wary glee, now days of drowsing in my grandfather's swing, now lightning in a field. Grape juice popsicles melted in my hand, beneath the shade of a swaying oak. My young mother would come to play
in the wading pool. And rustling leaves, and tinkling ice, and the buzzing of bees, and pie…

And now? Now I was a shrunken head…

In the cabin some jazzy swing had commenced. Any other day it would've been a finger-snapping bop for Lucky Strikes and gimlets and velvet gowns on creamy skin, spiffed up wingtips and watches on fobs, dipping your darling with her mouth full of giggles and hot white teeth—Bobby Darin crooning for the sharks and the billowing blood. But that was not the case tonight. Tonight was a heckler in the dark.

I remembered in the midst of my shouting the light I'd seen through the trees when after the wreck Super brought us home. Dinky had said he had no neighbors, but if that were true, what was behind the light? A couple hundred yards down the road, I met another that spliced away, made just of dirt albeit. At first I couldn't see zilch, much less a would-be light. The wind roaring as it was, the water coming down as it was, not from the sky at the moment, but from the trees, with needles and leaves and dirt, and the groaning of the trees and rush off the mountain of water still in sheets, it was all I could do to keep from turning back. It seemed to me the notion of a boob to walk up that road alone—surely I'd deserve whatever I got. Who knew what I'd find, if not Super or a neighbor then may chance a pissed off lion, as scared as I was scared and hungry as hell besides. And what if I did find a man, but that man was no neighbor or even a neighborly man, but the kind Basil had always feared, the freak in the plastic suit, with six fingers and toes and a penis on his chin, wielding a flamethrower and Sawzall both? Not good, not good, any way you sliced it, not a bit of it was good. On the other hand, who the frick cared what I found? If I did nothing, chances we all croaked up here on the mountain wouldn't be so slim. Certainly Dinky wasn't going to mend. The
guy needed a doctor, pronto. Not to mention if I ran off now, down the line I'd have to live with myself, a prospect at its best unspeakably vile. Getting killed was preferable to such a fate, honestly. I hoofed it up the road therefore on a bit less than faith, my adrenalin pumping as I stumbled along. And then I saw it, like before, a single light shining faintly through the trees. So it was actually there. So I had not been totally tripping. And lights meant power, and power, human beings. My eyes swelled bigger, then, I was ready for the worst, though just what I'd do when the worst came down, the best could never say. The road wound toward the light, but dwindled soon to a shabby trail leading higher up the mountain than the light had had me guess. Oh well. I'd gone this far, and now I had to see it through. The trail wended on, this way and that, until abruptly it debouched onto a tiny glade crepuscular with the light of a bulb on a wire through trees about twenty feet up. In the middle of the glade was a grimy tent, that was all, shaking in the wind. I cast about, struggling to discern a figure or shape, something squirming hogtied in a bag near the edge of the glade, I didn't care, I only wanted the what-was-what, even if that what was drastic. But I saw nothing but the rickety tent—not a clothesline, not a fire pit, not a chair or box or ice chest or stove, just a rickety, grimy tent. It simply didn't make sense, this scene. What was the source of this odd light's power? And who needed light to sleep in a tent, since pretty plainly nothing else was happening here? And why even a tent, in this of all wicked places? The last thing I wanted was to look inside, but knew I couldn't do other. That no doubt would be the test. The tent could even have been booby trapped, I thought. The freak with his bear-hide cowl and dick-chin and bones could be lurking anywhere, really, patiently waiting me out, itsy bitsy fly that I'd then be. And that was all it would take, my stepping into the creepy glade, whereon the fiend could drill an
arrow through my neck or maybe just wait snaggletoothed and grinning till I stepped in the jaws of the trap he'd camo'd at the front of the tent, then rush up to hack out the pieces of me he'd forthwith set to slobbering on while writhing in eldritch pain and eldritch horror I lay by watching, pathetic. A few minutes of this whimsy later, having been struck that I could stand there forever conjuring the scene of my demise, I set toward the tent, listening through the wrack for some atypical sound, however teensy, however bright, anything to presage if only by an instant my impending harm, pressing on through the aura the hammer of my heart had generated round me, turned by now half-puke/half-stone, my legs prehistoric sarcophagi. My vision had contracted into the space of the tent itself, buffered all around by a band of quivering mist. And the closer I drew, the farther away the tent seemed to get, until in the space of a step the distance vanished, and there I stood before the tent. It seemed almost a being itself, the tent, its canvas in the wind like the skin of a creature from the sea or the north, a leviathan, suddenly, hunkered in the mud, I could easily have believed. Somehow I'd taken the zipper in hand, itself already half undone, and slid it till the entrance material had crumpled at my feet. And yet when I leaned into the tent, expecting who knows what to materialize before me—a stack of corpses, a cache of grub, magazines of ammo, maybe, tent-top high—what should I find but… nothing. The tent was as empty as a dead man's mind, not a scrap to be found, nothing so much as a wayward battery or dented cup, nor candy bar wrapper nor length of string nor nubbins of some candle. And it was then I saw the nature of terror, because it was then the nature of my predicament, like a toxic cloud, swallowed me utterly up. Terror, I realized, had nothing to do with time and space but with the absence of them, and with the incomprehensibility of that absence. There before that rotting
little tent empty in the night in the glade in the forest in the heart of a pulsing storm, the emptiness of my life, and of my aloneness in it, usurped my thoughts with cruelty I couldn't fathom. A cipher just the moment before, the tent was now clothed in the powers of a totem, implausibly vicious, and I was numb head to toe, not a single atom free. I turned away in my deadness and broke through the night, blind, numb, thoughtless, empty, dead, Frodo in his fog of malice having donned that hideous Ring. I don't know how long I ran, but only that I ran till the earth resolved to steal my feet. My face had hit the mud at the base of the trail. I'd tripped on a branch, and lay in the mud, now, gasping for breath as once again the rain came down. When finally I rolled over and planted my hand, instead of the sense of slimy mud, the crinkle of cellophane brought me to. And what should that cellophane be part of, I saw, but an empty pack of smokes, Pall Malls, no doubt, goddamn. I dropped the thing and ran up the road shouting once more for Super. I shouted and cried, but come the fork at the road to the cabin, I'd seen nothing, Super most of all. What was the use. There was no use. Nothing mattered. Uselessness ruled. The numbness had left me.
I
had returned, my body in woe, the wet and the cold and the bitterness of my presence in their midst. I put my hands in my pockets and chin on my chest and stumbled toward the cabin.

It wasn't long before, unbelievably, he reappeared, that weird old man, hobbling up from a path to the lake, Fortinbras at his heel. My heart at first leapt with fright—after all I'd been through, my expectations lapsed, I no more thought I'd see him again than a witch. But there he came, lurching along with his earwig mouth, and I knew it would help little to speak of the tent and certainly of where he'd been. Super hadn't been merely
out there
, but
out there and everywhere else
. He
liked
it out there.
Out there
was where the bastard
lived
.

“We hadn't planned on leaving you down and friendless, young Horatio,” he said, “if that's what brings you through this rage.”

“Dinky needs help, right now,” I said, shivering, “but the phone's still dead.”

“You know like we know that the closest you are to another phone is a generous league. You seen the distance between here and the next abode.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. Like his hands, it felt hard as ivory, and cold. Even out here I could smell him—cigarettes, marijuana, blood. “But what about your place?” I said, desperate, knowing as I spoke the vanity of my words. “Don't you live somewhere here nearby? Don't you have a phone?”

“Your phone, boy, was fixed and fixed. If it don't work, nobody's does.” He may as well have handed me a rock. “Where's Laertes?” he said. “We'll be needing his size for the expedition we have in mind.”

“He's a little scared of you,” I said.

“And yet what with our wheels knee high in mud, we require a beast of his mass.”

Super's company back to the cabin was welcomer to me than his presence was to Basil at it.

“Is he kidding?” he said when I told him Super wanted his help.

The old man stood just outside, smoking and sucking his teeth. “Come with us, now, Laertes,” he said, and leaned in and pointed at Dinky. “Any little fuzznuts can see what our good cousin's worth. And as for young Horatio here, even if he does have a furious heart, well, he's just a bit too scrawny.”

“If you think for even two seconds I'm going out there,” Basil said, “into
that
, with
you
no less, you're one hell of a lot crazier than I thought.”

Hickory squared herself to Basil. She whispered. “Dinky is sick, Basil. Do you understand?”

“I know it.”

“So then pull on your boots and all that and help the man get help.”

“How do I know he's not going to slice my throat once he's got me hunched over out there in Shitholeville?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“If he was going to mess you up,” I said, “he'd have already done it.”

“That's a joke,” Lucille said.

“Andrew's right,” Hickory said. “Why else would he be here?”

“Oh Laeeeeee-er-teeeees,” Super said, sounding like Bugs-Freaking-Bunny taunting Elmer Fudd. Basil said nothing and glared. Super waved his pipe. “We've got a little something for the road, if you catch our drift.”

He'd poked my friend where he was soft. Basil knew about Super's drugs. That's a thing he'd never forget.

“And this is no ordinary bud we're talking about,” I said. “You get some of what he's got and you'll be riding a freaking dragon.”

Basil looked at me and Super and then at Super's pipe. Then he pulled his porkpie down and said, “What's a little more rain?”

DINKY'S HEAD ALONE DIDN'T WEIGH TWO-FORTY. And he wasn't fat, either, just thick as a Nordic killer. And something else that confounded the world, myself included, was his skin, tan all year and, like a doll's, seamless. It was his skin, I figured, that kept folks from seeing what a speed buster he'd been those years at Hastings, when the professor would call him out to say, for instance, whether a man who'd signed a contract with another man and then stabbed that man with a pencil could be held liable, given he'd met his contractual obligation—
Mr Wainwright, will you please explain?
—and Dinky, insomniacal, garbed rain or shine in rugby shirt and Bermuda shorts, would totter from his seat to hold forth like a limey MP. But just as the class thought itself with a kook, Dinky would somehow manage to conjure the magic words. “And finally, sir,” he said that time I accompanied him, “since the injury in question has nothing to do with said contract, it should rightly be considered a circumstance actionable in tort. Thus, by virtue of precedent, that being Tabucchi vs. Collins, 1976, the answer to your question must be indisputably affirmative.” And that was him. He'd huff and he'd puff like some crook on the lamb, but unless he wanted you to see it, what you saw was a man turned gold from days on a lounge in the sun, impeccable coif and skin.