The Crooked God Machine (2 page)

“Hey Daddy,” I said.

“Hey Charlie,” Daddy said, “want to hand me that jar of pickle juice over there?”

I picked up the jar of formaldehyde and handed it to him.

“Thanks, Charlie.” he said.

I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. I came back into the living room and stood a few feet away from Daddy, watching him work.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Daddy stopped for a moment, his knives dripping, and tilted his head to one side.

“I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. What was that?”

“Why are you cutting up those animals?”

Silence.

I walked across the living room floor and was about to go upstairs when Daddy spoke.

“Hey Charlie?”

I stopped. “Yeah?”

“Before God made us the universe was a lifeless place. When we're gone the universe will go on as if we'd never even been here,” Daddy said. “Life is a rather strange and dangerous thing.”

Then he returned to working on his dead deer, sick under the lamplight, with the shadow of his back twisting on the wall like an angry bear.

The next time Momma cooked dinner Daddy sat down at the kitchen table and insisted Momma save a spot for his stuffed deer. While we ate, the stuffed deer watched us from one corner of the table with its plastic red eyes.

“Why did you have to give it red eyes?” Momma asked, the first thing she’d said to Daddy in weeks, “why not a nice amber?”

“You don't even like my animals,” Daddy said, “what the hell do you care what color its eyes are?”

“I just think amber would have been nicer,” Momma said.

She looked down and picked at her food with her fork. My baby brother upstairs began to wail. Nobody moved.

“I like its eyes,” Sissy said.

“There you go, Theresa,” Daddy said. “See? Your daughter thinks its eyes are just fine.”

Silence.

“I have an announcement to make,” Daddy said. He set down his knife and fork and pushed his plate away. Daddy's voice made my stomach greasy and cold. I stopped eating. For a moment he looked at all of us, without speaking, his scarred black hands laying palm up on top of the table. His wrist appeared to squirm on the table like a worm caught above ground.

“I'm leaving you all,” he said.

Then Daddy stood up, threw on his leather jacket, and grabbed the stuffed deer with red eyes from the corner of the kitchen.

“Why?” was all Momma could say.

“Because God told me to.”

Daddy grabbed a fried chicken leg from the table and stuck it between his teeth like a cigar. I glanced over at Momma and Sissy. They both looked bloodshot, their mouths and eyes heavy and white, their skin cracked stiff. Daddy looked at them and laughed.

“I'm only joking,” he said, “I'm just sick of you all.”

Daddy left the house with the stuffed deer under one arm. I jumped up from the table, knocking my chair over.

“Charles, don’t you go after him,” Momma said, but I did anyways.

I ran into the living room. Daddy left the front door open, and the wind that blew through the door scraped against the walls and whistled past my body. I ran out onto the porch and the night crept in on me. The night screamed through me. I called out for Daddy. I called out and the angry monsters in the night answered in response. A chill came and snuck into my lungs, making it hard to breathe. I couldn't see him anywhere because the night swallowed him whole. The world grew impossibly large, spun off its axis, sent me down into a sickening vertigo.

Sissy and Momma found me outside in the woods crying and dragged me back to the house. They told me Daddy wasn't coming back and I couldn't stop crying. They told me the hell shuttles would pick him up, that God would punish him, and I couldn't stop crying.

Chapter Two

After Daddy left my baby brother started to chew on his fingers and face. No matter what Momma did, rock him, pacify him, feed him at all hours of the night, she couldn’t keep him from eating his knuckles. His toes. He bit off his thumb in the middle of the night and spit it out against the wall. Momma and Sissy kept me from seeing the severed thumb, but I saw where it hit, a dusty wallpaper flower licking a spot of blood above my baby brother’s head. Momma slapped me when she saw me standing in front of the crib with my sketchpad and piece of charcoal drawing that blood drinking flower.

Too much jump jumping of nerves in the brain. My baby brother couldn’t control the impulse to spit out his thumbs and gnaw off his tongue. My baby brother died upstairs with his face torn apart and his eyes squeezed between his fists.

Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, the doctor said. A rare genetic disorder, it couldn’t be helped. Missing a vital enzyme that had a name too long to pronounce. One little enzyme was all that separated us from gnawing our faces off in the long hours.

Instead of taking my dead baby brother to be buried in a cemetery Momma placed his body in a sweltering trash bag. I watched from my bedroom window as Sissy and Momma carried the trash bag between them, out the door and down the porch-steps and to the edge of the lawn toward the swamp. Then they lowered the trash bag down onto the grass and walked back to the house.

I stood at the window for a long time after Momma and Sissy went inside, watching the sun seep onto the bag. I imagined my brother’s fingerless, toe-less limbs curled with the heat, his small bones washed up like detritus on a distant shore. I got out my sketchpad and my charcoal to try to capture that last image of my brother, but my hands shook too badly to draw.

Later the woman that lived in the swamp crept out from behind the tree line. She dragged her body behind her like a chained shadow. Her red hair was a nest of moss and thorns and bone. She bent down over my baby brother, grabbed the trash bag, and carried him off into the trees.

“Her name’s Jolene,” Sissy told me later when I asked, “She’s lived in that swamp as long as anyone can remember.”

“Why did she take our brother?”

“He was a gift,” Sissy said, and that was all she would tell me.

But after Jolene took my dead baby brother away she decided she wanted to take me too. As I tried to sleep she called out to me in the dark to come join her down in the green waters. She scratched at my bedroom window while I hid trembling underneath the bed covers.

“Your mother’s a cunt,” Jolene whispered with her mouth pressed against the windowpane, “and your sister’s a whore.”

I called out for Daddy, but Daddy disappeared long ago.

“If only this window was your throat,” Jolene told me, and she scratched and scratched.

I jumped out of bed and ran down the hallway into Momma's room. I found Momma asleep wearing her sleep mask with the painted bug eyes that looked like they were popping right out of her head. Everything in that gray room rose up to attack me; the nightstand, the bed rails, the dead buttons of flowers on the wallpaper, Momma's ghost hair. Her svelte, sticky ribcage rose up like a wasteland against my knees and rolled past my body.

In the corner of the room rested my dead baby brother's crib and inside the crib his old blood bloomed into a snake. I called Momma’s name but she wouldn't wake. I shook her shoulders but she wouldn't wake. I sat on top of her like in a bad dream and leaned down into her face and screamed.

“Bubba, what are you screaming for?”

Sissy stood in Momma’s doorway in her white nightgown, her hair upbraided in a snake coil, rubbing her eyes.

“Jolene’s trying to kill me,” I said, “and Momma's dead.”

Everything in the room returned to its normal place. The looming furniture shrank. Momma’s ribcage turned from sand back into bone. The snake of blood had been nothing but a tired spot on an unused mattress. Sissy went to the bed stand and picked up a nearly empty pill bottle. Shook it.

“Momma’s not dead. She just took too many sleeping pills.”

Jolene screamed to shake the entire house. She spit my name out like a curse word and the hallway light busted. The house tumbled into darkness.

I cried out for Daddy.

“Charles,” Sissy said, “he’s not here.”

Sissy pressed her mouth to my forehead and whispered a “shh” that hummed on my skin.

Jolene rattled my bedroom window.

“I'm going to fuck your sister with the branches of this tree,” she called to me. Her voice tumbled through the room like broken glass.

Sissy reached out her hand for me to take and then lifted me off the bed. We went down into the hallway past my open bedroom door. Jolene’s silhouette plastered itself onto my window. Her nails scratched against the window, and they were color of a sick dog, translucent and green.

Sissy hid the both of us in the hallway closet and we sat on top of the boxes full of Daddy's leather jackets. I tried to speak, to tell Sissy to make Daddy come back and save us all, but I could barely breathe. Sissy touched the back of my neck with the tips of her fingers and stroked my hair. Her hands were the only real thing that kept me from falling straight through the floor as I rattled with Jolene’s screams.

When morning came Jolene was gone and Sissy and I were still alive, so we left the closet and went downstairs to find Momma raised from her sleeping dead stupor and making coffee. Sissy and I sat down at the kitchen table with red eyes and animal seizure nerves. Sissy scratched her nails into the table. I chewed my thumbs into the shapes of meat hooks.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Momma said.

She didn’t meet our eyes. She only poured substitute sugar into her coffee and looked out the window where Sissy’s garden lay abandoned in the gloom outside.

“I thought the wisteria would’ve come in by now,” she said.

She sighed, and her body heaved with soporific weight. Momma took her coffee upstairs and left us alone.

“Do you want some breakfast, Charles?” Sissy asked. When she looked across the table at me her face was a lead weight, and for a moment I saw Momma creeping into her eyes.

“What is that thing?” I asked.

Sissy said nothing.

“If she gets me will she come after you next?”

Sissy leaned forward and her back made a noise like a button snapping off of a coat.

“You know,” was all she said.

That night after Sissy and Momma went to sleep I put on one of Daddy's leather jackets, took a kitchen knife out of one of the kitchen drawers, and went down into the swamp. Daddy was gone and I knew I was the only one to protect Momma and Sissy from the bad things. I walked with the kitchen knife held straight out in front of me. The roots of corpse trees dug down into the mud and pried open a path. The fog sucked at my feet and a chill settled down on my skin.

Jolene called my name and her voice shivered through the metal of my kitchen knife. I looked behind me and the house bottomed out and disappeared. I kept walking. The air became thicker. I became shrouded in a miasma of dust and the atmosphere shrank. The swamp closed above my head.

Jolene rose up above me out of the green water, her limbs shining like insect wings. She bent her spine so that it arched against her skin like fish fangs. She reached out toward me and clasped my knife between her palms. The knife scratched her but she did not bleed.

She smiled and her wet, dirty hair fell in a halo against my forehead. Her crown of tree branch teeth pressed into my cheeks. The crooked tip of the kitchen knife gleamed sharp in the center of her eyes, those dripping, fist-sized eyes that could cut into bone. I shivered and shrunk in her grip. When she spoke her voice abraded my head.

“Give me the knife,” she said, and she pressed her forehead to my mouth and whispered, “shhh,” just like Sissy did.

She shoved my nose into the folds of her rotting dress. She breathed swamp into my hair and her body twitched.

“Give me the knife,” she said again.

I let go of the knife. It slipped through her palms and dropped down into the water below. She grabbed my hair and shoved my head down.

“Look,” she said, “look down into the water.”

She forced me down to my knees into the swamp and silt. My mouth and nose touched the surface of the water. Her nails dug into my scalp.

“Look or you drown,” Jolene hissed.

I looked down and saw straight to the bottom.

There were bones in the water. The skull and finger and hip bones of children. The bones of all the children lost to bullet wounds and SIDS and cracked heads. The bones of all the children put into black trash bags and left on porch steps so that the monster with her hands now tugging at my hair could drag them down here in the swamp to build her sleeping nest.

The bones were cracked open and gnawed and left to corrode in the mud. Bones that were cool blue and misery heated red, bones that never learned adult fear. Bones of girls with mouths frozen into rictus and bones of boys with empty skulls and skinny legs chewed apart. Bones of my dead baby brother. Bones that held out their hands to touch me. Bones that went down into the darkness forever.

Jolene released my hair and I stumbled backwards and fell. She laughed.

“Run home now,” she said, “you’ll be with me soon enough.”

I ran, leaving my dead baby brother and the kitchen knife and my bones in those dark waters behind.

Chapter Three

God appeared on the television in a black horned mask and warned that Judgment Day was approaching. He’d been doing this for as long as I could remember. After my baby brother died and Daddy left Momma threw all of Daddy’s stuffed animals into closets and cupboards. Then she sat down in front of the television and turned the television volume up a little more each day until God's voice broke through the walls and busted down the ceiling and rattled my bed so I couldn't sleep. 

Momma put on her angry face every time God came onto the television. Her angry face made her look about a century older, her mouth small and hard and her eyes big and buggy. Her body knotted against the couch like a dead tree. She grew twisted claws in the perfect shape for gripping curtains and the edges of chairs.

Yet no matter how long God on the television in his black mask screamed and cursed, no matter how much Momma's body knotted and strained and her angry face threatened to eat out her head, no matter how many times the television speakers boomed so loud that I thought the furniture would blow across the room and Momma would have to hold tight onto the seat curtains to keep from flying out the window, she never turned off that television.