The Crooked God Machine (11 page)

“You left,” I said, “I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“Say hello, Boxy. Charles, did you know Boxy’s an exotic dancer?”

“No, I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

I glanced back at Leda. She stared at her hands, palms full of veined debris. Her fingers twitched as if they were slipping into gloves of broken glass. “Those Apocalypse Brigadiers got all riled up after we electrocuted that girl in town square,” Ezekiel said, “rioting, blowing up the street, demanding her corpse so they can desecrate it. It’s great. Come down here.”

He tipped the deadhead’s neck back so far I thought her vertebrate might reach out to brush her ankles. He kissed her and she screamed in the back of her throat like night thrush and swamp music.

“I can’t,” I said, “I’m sort of busy.”

He let go of the deadhead with a flourish, and she splayed out onto the gravel in front of him, wide-eyed, like a choked doll.

“You know I know you better than that. Sort of busy? Long as I’ve known you, you do nothing but draw those little pictures of yours and meander around considering the lilies. And why, dare I ask, have you yet to find a job?”

“Theresa’s sick.”

“She’s a deadhead,” Ezekiel said, “there isn’t any other kind but sick.”

I grasped the window casement above my head to steady myself. After a moment’s pause, Ezekiel sighed loud enough to make sure I heard.

“Right, of course, I forgot. You’ve got one of those savior complexes,” he said, “well, good luck with that.”

He threw the deadhead woman over his shoulder and left.

“You should stay here if the Apocalypse Brigade is out,” I said to Leda once Ezekiel was gone, “Sleep on my bed. I’ll sleep in Theresa’s room. She never sleeps.”

I walked toward the door to go out into the hallway.

“Sleep with me,” Leda said.

I paused.

“What did you say?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard her.

She got up with slow, heavy motions and crossed the room, and then lay face down in my bed. The bed sunk underneath her. The headboard and the posts and the frame groaned with her unfamiliar weight. Leda’s treacherous limbs stiffened, as if they would fall apart if she didn’t hold on tight enough.

“Sleep with me,” she whispered.

I crossed the room and stopped at the foot of the bed. For a long while she stood there. I watched her frail body shake with her breathing.

“Charles,” she whispered.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I’m so tired,” she said, “It’s been so long.”

I crawled into bed beside her. I touched her shoulder and my muscles tensed. My head did not belong to me. My limbs did not belong to me. I seemed to be not inside the bed, but floating above it. I watched myself as if from a cloud, a television screen, as I wrapped my limbs around her body and pulled her close toward me. Her breath melted into my breath. I lay there with my eyes open, my mouth and chin buried in her short hair. But the pain lashing my back wasn’t what kept me awake.

When her breathing slowed I crept out of bed and out into the hallway. My blood followed me like a second skin. It seeped through the bandages and mottled my back. It dripped down into the shape of a face and dried there, crusty and beaded, empty eyes, hole of a mouth. It trickled down my legs and pressed red imprints of my feet down into the floor.

I got to the end of the hallway and went into Momma’s room. The window was open, blowing leaves and dust across the floor. It’d been years since Momma could even walk up the stairs. Everything was arranged as it once was. The bed, the dresser, my baby brother’s crib. I knelt beside the crib and pressed my forehead to the cool plastic railing.

“Charles?”

Without turning around, I knew Leda watched me from the entryway.

“I’m over here,” I said, my mouth dry.

“You’re bleeding.”

I could still see the dried spot of blood on the wall where years ago my baby brother spit out his thumb.

“I know,” I said.

“What was his name?” she asked.

I said nothing. She touched my shoulder.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

I didn’t notice until she mentioned it. I thought it had been the room tilting sideways, the bed and the baby crib and the dresser clenching their teeth, growing thin with anemia. But it wasn’t the room, it was me.

“You’re making me remember things I don’t want to,” I said.

She pressed her sharp face down into my shoulder. Her arms encircled me. I couldn’t remember the last time someone held me.

My nerves bit down. They chewed and chewed until I thought they might spit my skin out. I wanted to cry out and scream, to jump up and down, put my fists through a window elbow up. Anything to break away from that alien sensation.

“Charles,” Leda said.

“What?”

For a while I thought she wasn’t going to speak. My name hung in the air.

“I think we’re just two very lonely people,” she said.

My nerves relinquished their grip. The room snapped back into place and the bed and dresser stopped looking like sick dogs. I tilted my head back and reached up and slipped my fingers into her hair. I kissed her.

When we got back to the room and curled up against each other I fell asleep almost instantly. Leda jolted me awake by grabbing my shoulder when the screaming in the swamp started.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, “that’s just Jolene.”

I went back to sleep.

I wanted to dream of her, warm on my lips. I wanted to dream of slipping off her dress and pressing my mouth between her legs.

Instead I dreamed of Mad Maddy’s gritty, black glass feet dragging across my bedroom floor.

Chapter Three

After that night we started to meet each other in the woods. They were the only quiet times I could remember. We lay together on a blanket for hours, even on the nights when the monsters were slavering awake with the heat and the Apocalypse Brigade marched the streets rallying for God. I sketched everything I could think of but her, she wouldn’t let me sketch her, and while I did so she taught me the name of every flower and tree. She spoke their names like the names of abusive husbands.

We kissed like children, with all our clothes on, backs craned and legs spaced apart. Despite those vicious eyes Leda went shy when I tugged on the hem of her dress, or tried to slip my hands underneath to touch her bare skin. She touched her face and hugged her chest and rolled away from me. I withdrew my hands to my sides.

“I’ve never kissed without having sex first,” I told her.

She laughed with her face pressed into the grass. I didn’t want to tell her I wasn’t joking.

We started to see each other once every fortnight. Then each week. Then a few times each week. Soon we were going out every night, sloughing through poison ivy and breaking abandoned monster holes with our shoes to get to each other. When we saw each other across the clearing we walked with hesitant, lamb steps searching for monsters that might be coming out our limbs. When we reached the center of the clearing we felt the back of each other’s heads for the heat of the wire spider.

“You’re still here,” I whispered, when I felt nothing but her cool scalp.

“Still here,” she said.

In the clearing she taught me how to dance. She pressed my hands against her waist and showed me how to lead, stepping over animal skulls and crumbling moss, as she hummed a song she’d heard once. We’d lost music a long time ago, after Sissy broke our last record player. Except for the timpani music that used to blare out of the speakers of the courthouse and the skinned drums of the Apocalypse Brigade, Leda’s was the only song I could ever remember.

In the middle of our dance I swept her against a tree. I tried to hoist her up into the branches and rest her legs against my shoulders, but over the years I’d gotten too weak. My muscles ached with the weight of her. She slipped down and I leaned into her, my face cooked with sweat. I grasped at the bark her hair, panting.

“You’re getting better at this,” she said, “the dancing, I mean.”

She hummed a few more seconds of the song.

“Where did you learn that?” I asked her.

“The ocean gave it to me,” Leda said, and she smiled.

She leaned her head back, tilted her chin upward. The tree above us quivered with sleeping birds. An owl with the face of a bear opened its eyes and they gleamed fierce. They were Leda’s eyes.

“Let me draw you,” I said to Leda.

“Later,” she said.

We lay down on our blanket together and I waited for later. The months unraveled themselves. We danced until it became muscle memory, until I could take a wolf or a lizard by the waist and waltz across the glade. Leda’s cut hair grew long and thick until it covered her eyes and I could lose the ends of my fingers in it.

We continued like that for a while, humming snippets of song, kissing like we were chaste, eating the forest because the government never gave us enough rations. Comfort motions. Each day I hooked Momma up to the IV and filled her bag full of cold nutrients and peeled Sissy off the locked knife drawer or the medicine cabinet or the upstairs closet full of Daddy’s stuffed animals. Then I’d fix myself breakfast, if there was any left in the refrigerator, and drink weak coffee while God read out the list of plagues for the month, and the various transgressions for which we were being punished. Sometimes the noise became too much and I’d walk around the perimeter of the house and watch the weeds that grew up to the second story windows, wondering where last I’d put those clippers seven years ago. Most of the time I’d just sit upstairs at my desk and draw. And wait. No motion had any color to it, everything I was doing had already been done for an eternity. Every monster that emerged out of the murky swamp was a monster I’d already seen before.

But when night came and Leda got off from the flower shop that she worked at, I’d run into the woods shedding the numb parts of me. My skin seemed to be newly sewn, the older skin left to sink down into the furniture of our house. The moments before I saw Leda I transformed into trembling mucus and raw muscle. I was wet with my brain slipping down my nose, all of my limbs threaded with gold.

Soon we both stopped talking, and for a while I didn't mind. I lay in the nest of her hair. I learned how to handle her softly so that she wouldn’t kick away from me. She walked backwards through the clearing with a blindfold on. I tried to draw shadows, but they turned into people.

One night I opened the front door, ready to run off into the woods, and I found two members of the Apocalypse Brigade standing out on my porch.

I took a step back and my heel touched the threshold. I groped behind me with one hand, as if searching for the old skin I'd ripped off before opening the door.

The two Apocalypse Brigadiers turned to face me. One was a short, chubby girl wearing a cape and a snarling wolf mask. The other was a lean man holding a knobby cane and carrying his rickets skeleton body behind his head like a traveling case. He leaned against my porch banister and closed his eyes, slowly, pus leaking out of the corners.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“We're taking a survey,” the girl said, “your name is Charles, isn't it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How old are you, Charles?”

The girl spoke with a lilt, tilted her head to one side every time she spoke. Sideways, the snarling wolf seemed to smile. Even with the wolf mask on, the girl seemed decidedly familiar. I squinted for a few moments, trying to place her.

“Missy Freeling?” I asked, “from sixth grade science class?”

The girl clenched her fists as if she was going to throw a punch at me, and the lean man lifted his atrophied hand and placed it on the girl's shoulders. The wolf snarled.

“Her name is not important,” he said, “only the questions.”

The girl relaxed her fists, but the muscles in her neck bulged.

“Continue, darling,” the old man said, “it’s all right.”

“Over the course of the last three years,” the girl said, a small quaver in the undercurrent of her voice, “how many Apocalypse Brigade meetings have you attended?”

I hesitated.

“Answer the question, sir,” the man said. Coughed.

“None,” I said.

“How many times have you attended a public execution?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said, “about one every month or so.”

“Interesting,” the girl said.

“Did you want to write any of this down?” I asked, “you did say it was a survey.”

“No, that won't be necessary,” the man said, “Missy, continue.”

“Over the course of the last three years, how many times have you blasphemed against God, the creator of the universe and your immortal, all powerful savior?”

“None,” I said.

The man coughed again, but it almost sounded like a hacking laugh.

“That's impossible, sir,” the girl said, “everyone blasphemes against God. We are dirty sinners, after all.”

“Are you sure that's quantifiable then?” I asked.

“This is not a joke, sir,” the man said.

For a moment I couldn't speak. They'd caught me in the middle of my ecdysis, in the in between place between daylight and night. I felt as if I stood before them naked, busted at the seams.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Who is that?” Momma called from inside the house, “tell him to come inside for tea.”

“Give me a minute, Momma!” I called back.

“Who is that?” the girl asked.

“We were told nobody else lived in this house,” the man said.

The man and the girl crowded together on the porch. Though the man wore no mask, he looked more and more like a wolf every time I glanced in his direction.

“My mother and my sister,” I said, “they're deadheads.”

“But other than that, it's just you?” the girl asked. Her voice changed direction once more. Her quaver solidified, and she now spoke like a block of ice.

“Yes,” I said, “there's only me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why wouldn't I be?” I asked.

They’d trapped me, and they knew it. It was as if I could feel the tips of the needles in my back. Daddy once told me it was better to kill yourself than let a monster get you. They ate you while you were still alive, you see, pinned your head into the ground with one paw and chewed and chewed.