The Family Fang: A Novel (2 page)

the sound and the fury, march 1985

artists: caleb and camille fang

B
uster was holding his drumsticks upside down but Mr. and Mrs. Fang thought this made it even better. The boy spastically pressed his foot on the pedal that operated the bass drum and flinched with each percussive note. Annie strummed her guitar, her fingers already aching not five minutes into the concert. For two people who had never learned to play their instruments, they were managing to perform even more poorly than expected. They shouted the lyrics of the song that Mr. Fang had written for them, their voices off-key and out of sync. Though they had only learned the song a few hours before their performance, they found it easy to remember the chorus, which they sang to the astonished onlookers. “It’s a sad world. It’s unforgiving,” they yelled at the top of their lungs. “Kill all parents, so you can keep living.”

In front of them, an open guitar case held some coins and a single dollar bill. Taped to the inside of the case was a handwritten note that read:
Our Dog Needs an Operation. Please Help Us Save Him
.

The night before, Buster had carefully written down each word as his father dictated it to him. “Misspell
operation,
” Mr. Fang said. Buster had nodded and wrote it as
operashun
. Mrs. Fang shook her head. “They’re supposed to be untalented, not illiterate,” she said. “Buster, do you know how to spell
operation
?” his mother asked him. He nodded. “Then we’ll go with the correct spelling,” his father said, handing him another piece of cardboard. When it was finished, he held up the sign for his parents to inspect. “Oh, good Lord,” said Mr. Fang. “This is almost too much.” Mrs. Fang laughed and then said, “Almost.” “Too much of what?” asked Buster, but his parents were laughing so hard they didn’t hear him.

“T
his is a new song we just wrote,” Annie said to the audience, which was, inexplicably, larger than when they had started. Annie and Buster had already played six songs, each one dark and unhappy and played so inexpertly that they seemed less like songs and more like the sound of children having a tantrum. “We appreciate any change that you can spare for our little dog, Mr. Cornelius. God bless.” With that, Buster began to tap his drumsticks against the hi-hat cymbal, tit-tat-tit-tat-tit, and Annie plucked a single string, producing a mournful groan that changed its tone as she moved her finger up and down the neck of the guitar but never lost its intent. “Don’t eat that bone,” she warbled and then Buster repeated the line, “Don’t eat that bone.” Annie looked into the crowd but she could not find her parents, only face after face of sympathetically cringing people too nice to walk away from these cherubic, earnest children. “It will make you ill,” Annie sang, and Buster again echoed her. “Don’t eat that bone,” Annie said, and then, before Buster could follow her, a voice, their father’s voice, yelled out, “You’re terrible!” There was an audible gasp from the crowd, so sharp that it sounded like someone had fainted, but Annie and Buster just kept playing. “We can’t afford the bill,” Annie said, her voice cracking with fake emotion.

“I mean, am I right, people?” their father said. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” A woman in the front of the crowd turned around and hissed, “Be quiet! Just be quiet.” At this moment, from the opposite direction, they heard their mother say, “He’s right. These kids are terrible. Boo! Learn to play your instruments. Boo!” Annie began to cry and Buster was frowning with such force that his entire face hurt. Though they had been expecting their parents to do this, it was the whole point of the performance, after all, it was not difficult for them to pretend to be hurt and embarrassed. “Would you shut the hell up?” someone yelled out, though it wasn’t clear if this was directed at the hecklers or the kids. “Keep playing, children,” someone else said. “Don’t quit your day jobs,” a voice called out, one that was not their parents’, and this caused another shout of encouragement from the audience. By the time Annie and Buster had finished the song, the crowd was almost equally split into two factions, those who wanted to save Mr. Cornelius and those who were complete and total assholes. Mr. and Mrs. Fang had warned the children that this would happen. “Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes,” their father told them. “Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.”

With the crowd still arguing and no more songs left to play on the set list, Annie and Buster simply began to scream as loudly as they could, attacking their instruments with such violence that two strings on Annie’s guitar snapped and Buster had toppled the cymbal and was now kicking it with his left foot. Money was being tossed in their direction, scattering at their feet, but it was unclear if this was from people who were being nice or people who hated them. Finally, their father shouted, “I hope your dog dies,” and Annie, without thinking, took her guitar by the neck and pounded it into the ground, shattering it, sending shrapnel into the crowd. Buster, realizing the improvisation going on, lifted his snare drum over his head and slammed it against the bass drum, over and over. Annie and Buster then left the disarray around them and sprinted across the lawn of the park, zigging and zagging to avoid anyone who might try to follow them. When they arrived at a statue of a clamshell, they climbed inside and waited for their parents to retrieve them. “We should have kept all that money,” Buster said. “We earned it,” Annie answered. Buster removed a sliver of the guitar from Annie’s hair and they sat in silence until their mother and father returned, their father sporting an angry black eye, the smashed glasses that held the camera hanging off his face. “That was amazing,” said their mother. “The camera broke,” said Mr. Fang, his eye nearly swollen shut, “so we don’t have any footage,” but his wife waved him off, too happy to care. “This is just for the four of us,” Mrs. Fang said. Annie and Buster slowly climbed out of the clam and followed their parents as they walked to the station wagon. “You two,” Mrs. Fang said to her children, “were so incredibly awful.” She stopped walking and knelt beside them, kissing Annie and Buster on their foreheads. Mr. Fang nodded and placed his hands softly on their heads. “You really were terrible,” he said, and the children, against their will, smiled. There would be no record of this except in their memories and of the few, stunned onlookers that day, and this seemed perfect to Annie and Buster. The entire family, walking into the sunset just past the horizon, held hands and sang, almost in tune, “Kill all parents, so you can keep living.”

Chapter Two

B
uster was standing in a field in Nebraska, the air so cold the beers he was drinking were freezing as he held them. He was surrounded by former soldiers, a year returned from Iraq, young and strangely jovial and scientifically proven to be invincible after serving multiple tours in the Middle East. There were cannon-like guns, comically large and hinting at all sorts of destruction, laid out on sheets of plastic. Buster watched as one of the men, Kenny, used a ramrod to force the ammunition down the length of the barrel of a gun that everyone referred to as
Nuke-U-Ler
. “Okay,” Kenny said, his speech slightly slurred, beer cans scattered around his feet, “now I just open the valve here on the propane tank and set the pressure regulator to sixty PSI.” Buster struggled to write this down in his notebook, his fingers frozen at the tips, and asked, “Now what does PSI stand for?” Kenny looked up at Buster and frowned. “I have no idea,” he said. Buster nodded and made a notation to look it up later.

“Open the gas valve,” Kenny continued, “wait a few seconds for it to regulate, then close the valve and open up the second valve here. That sends the propane into the combustion chamber.” Joseph, missing two fingers on his left hand, his face round and pink like a toddler’s, took another swig of beer and then giggled. “It’s about to get good,” he said. Kenny closed the valves and pointed the contraption into the air. “Squeeze the igniter button and—” Before he could finish, the air around the men vibrated and there was a sound like nothing Buster had ever heard before, a dense, punctuated explosion. A potato, a trail of vaporous fire trailing behind it, shot into the air and then disappeared, hundreds of yards, maybe a half mile across the field. Buster felt his heart stutter in his chest and wondered, without caring to discover the answer, why something so stupid, so unnecessary and ridiculous, made him so happy. Joseph put his arm around Buster and pulled him close. “It’s awesome, isn’t it?” he asked. Buster, feeling that he might cry at any moment, nodded and replied, “Yes it is. Hell yes it is.”

B
uster had come to Nebraska on assignment from a men’s magazine,
Potent,
to write about these four ex-soldiers who had been, for the past year, building and testing the most high-tech potato cannons ever seen. “It’s so goddamned manly,” said the editor, who was almost seven years younger than Buster, “we have to put it in the magazine.”

Buster had been in his one-room apartment in Florida, his Internet girlfriend not returning his e-mails, nearly out of money, not working on his overdue third novel, when the editor had called him to offer the job. Even with the terrible circumstances of his life at the moment, he was loath to accept the assignment.

After two years of writing about skydiving and bacon festivals and online virtual-reality societies that were too complicated for him to even play, Buster was on the verge of quitting his job. The experience of these unique events never lived up to his expectations and then Buster was forced to write articles that made these things seem not just amusing but also life-changing. Driving dune buggies through the desert was something that Buster desired without ever having considered it before the opportunity arose, but once his hands were on the steering wheel, he realized how technical and complicated it was to have the kind of fun that wasn’t readily available. As he struggled to handle the vehicle, his instructor patiently explaining how to accelerate and steer, he found himself wishing he were back home, reading a book about detectives that drive around in dune buggies and solve mysteries on the beach. Once he flipped the dune buggy and was kicked off the course, he went back to his hotel room and wrote the article in less than an hour and then smoked pot until he fell asleep.

He had assumed the same thing would happen with the potato gun story, a few hours of boring explanations of how the cannons were built and what principles they operated on before he watched them fire off a few rounds of potatoes. Then he’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter until he could get a flight back home. Even as he boarded the plane, holding a barbecue sandwich and a hastily purchased copy of
World Music Monthly,
which he had no desire to read, he knew he was making a mistake.

Once his plane touched down in Nebraska, the four subjects of his article were unexpectedly waiting for him at the baggage terminal. They were identically dressed in Nebraska Cornhuskers baseball caps, black wool coats, tin cloth pants, and Red Wing boots. They were tall and sturdy and handsome. One of them was, strangely, holding Buster’s suitcase in his hand. “This yours?” the man asked as Buster, his arms held up as if to show that he was unarmed, approached them. “Yeah,” said Buster, “but you guys didn’t need to meet me here. I was going to rent a car. You gave my editor the directions last week.” The man holding Buster’s suitcase turned and started walking toward the exit. “Wanted to be hospitable,” the man said over his shoulder.

In the car, surrounded on all sides by ex-soldiers, Buster resisted the idea that he was being kidnapped. He reached into his jacket, too thin for this weather, and produced a notepad and a pen. “What’s that for?” one of the men asked. “Notes,” said Buster. “For the article. I thought I’d get your names and maybe ask a few questions.” “They’re easy names to remember,” said the driver, “I doubt you’ll need to write it down.” Buster put his notepad back in his pocket.

“I’m Kenny,” said the driver and then gestured to the man in the passenger seat, “and that’s David,” and finally waved his hand over his head as if to indicate the backseat, “and on either side of you is Joseph and Arden.” Joseph held out his hand and Buster shook it. “So,” Joseph said, “you like guns?” Buster shook his head. “Oh, no, not really,” he said and he could feel the air in the van become heavier, “I mean I’ve never fired a gun before. I don’t really care much for violence.” Arden sighed and looked at the window. “I don’t know many people who care for it,” he said. “What about potato guns?” Joseph asked. “You ever make one when you were a kid, fill it with hairspray and shoot at the neighbor’s dog?” “Nope,” Buster said, “sorry.” He could feel the article slipping away from him, imagined going on the Internet and fabricating the entire thing. “And the war?” asked David. “I’m not a fan,” Buster replied. He looked down at his shoes, black leather sneakers with complicated stitching, his toes already slightly numb inside of them. He thought about reaching over Joseph, pushing open the door, and jumping out. “Well, you ever been to Nebraska before?” asked Arden. “I’ve flown over it a few times,” Buster said, “I would imagine.” For the rest of the ride to Buster’s hotel, there was the all-encompassing sound of five men not talking, the radio broken and filled with static, the car’s engine going just a little faster than it had before.

While the other three waited in the still-running car, Joseph helped Buster carry his suitcase to his room. “Don’t worry about them,” Joseph said. “They’re just a little nervous. We’re unemployed and we build spud guns and we just don’t want to look like a bunch of losers when you write the article. I keep telling them, it’s your job to make us look cool, isn’t that right?” Buster realized he was putting the key card into the lock upside down, but once he had rectified the problem, the door still would not open. “Isn’t that right?” Joseph asked again. “Yeah, of course,” said Buster. He imagined the three other men downstairs, restless and regretting their decision to allow some outsider to witness the bizarre thing that everyone would soon know existed.

After nearly a dozen tries to gain entry into his room using the key card, Buster finally pushed inside and went straight to the minibar. He retrieved a tiny bottle of gin and killed it in one swallow. He grabbed another bottle and downed its contents as well. Out of the corner of his eye, Buster saw Joseph unpacking his suitcase for him, placing his shirts and pants and underwear in various drawers of the dresser. “You didn’t pack enough warm clothes,” Joseph said. “There’s some long underwear in there, I think,” replied Buster, working hard to get drunk. “Jesus Christ, Buster,” Joseph said, almost shouting, “you’ll freeze your ass off.” Buster was about to suggest that he forgo the potato-gun demonstration. He would order a hamburger from room service and watch soft-core cable TV and empty the contents of the minibar. He would go back to Florida long enough to get kicked out of his apartment and then he would move in with his parents. And then he thought about a year with his mother and father, sitting at the dinner table while they devised more and more elaborate events that he could not understand if he was a part of or not, waiting for something to explode in the name of art. “Well, what should I do?” Buster asked, determined to seem like a capable person. “We’ll go shopping,” Joseph said, smiling.

While Kenny and Arden and David walked at a safe distance through the Fort Western Outpost, Joseph quickly rifled through racks of clothes and other cold-weather essentials, tossing them into Buster’s waiting arms. “So you write for a living?” he asked Buster, who nodded. “Yeah,” Buster said, “articles mostly, freelance stuff. And I’ve written two novels, but nobody reads those.”

“You know,” Joseph said, handing Buster two pairs of wool socks, “I’m thinking of becoming a writer myself.” Buster made a sound that he hoped suggested interest and encouragement, and Joseph continued. “I’ve been taking a night class on Tuesdays at the community college, Creative Writing 401. I’m not that good yet, but my teacher says I show promise.” Buster again nodded. He noticed that the other three men had stepped closer to the conversation. “He’s a damn good writer,” said David, and Kenny and Arden agreed. “You know what my favorite book is?” Joseph asked. When Buster shook his head, Joseph answered, a huge smile on his face, “
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens.” Buster had never read the book, but he knew that he should have, so he nodded and said, “Excellent book.” Joseph clapped his hands together loudly, as if he’d been waiting for this moment for months. “I love that first line:
My name is David Copperfield,
” he said. “It tells you everything you need to know. I start all my stories like that:
My name is Harlan Aden
or
I go by the name of Sam Francis
or
When he was born, his parents named him Johnny Rodgers
.”

Buster remembered the first line of
Moby-Dick
and mentioned it to Joseph. Joseph repeated the line:
Call me Ishmael
. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “that doesn’t work for me. That’s not as good as
My name is David Copperfield
.”

An older man pushing an empty shopping cart asked if he could pass by the crowd of men to reach some dress socks, but no one budged.

“See,” Kenny said, “that makes this Ishmael guy seem like he thinks he’s a big deal. He can’t just tell us his name? He’s got to go making demands that we address him as such?” Kenny made a face like he’d had to deal with guys like this all his life.

“And that might not even be his real name,” offered Arden. “He’s just telling us to call him that.” The men all agreed that
Moby-Dick
sounded like a book that they had no desire to read. “Sorry, Buster,” Joseph said. “
David Copperfield
is the winner and still champion of the world.” David walked off and came back with a packet of air-activated hand-warmers. “I like these when it gets cold,” he said, handing them to Buster.

Back in the car, Buster having nearly maxed out his credit card on a black wool coat, tin cloth pants, Red Wing boots, and a Nebraska Cornhuskers baseball cap, they drove toward their next-to-last stop, the liquor store. “What was your last article about?” David asked Buster, who replied, “I had to report on the world’s largest gang-bang.”

Kenny carefully flipped on his turn signal and slowly pulled onto the side of the road. He placed the car in park and then turned around in his seat. “What, now?” he asked.

“You guys ever heard of Hester Bangs?” Buster asked. All four of the men nodded emphatically. “I was there when she broke the record for the biggest gang-bang. She had sex with six hundred and fifty guys in one day.”

“You didn’t,” Joseph began, his face bright red from embarrassment, “I mean, you didn’t have sex with her, did you?”

“Oh, god, no,” Buster answered. Buster remembered the two-hour argument on the phone with his editor when he refused to take part in the actual orgy. “It’s called Gonzo Journalism,” said his editor, “I’m looking it up on the Internet right now.”

“So,” Kenny said, “you basically watched this woman fuck six hundred and fifty guys?”

“Yeah,” answered Buster.

“And you got paid to do that?” continued Kenny.

“Yeah,” Buster again answered.

“Well,” Arden said, “that sounds like just about the greatest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“It wasn’t that great, actually,” said Buster.

“What, now?” Kenny asked.

“I mean, yeah, it sounds great, I guess, but I pretty much sat around while a bunch of hairy, out-of-shape guys with their dicks hanging down waited in a line to fuck this woman who looked pretty bored about the whole thing. I interviewed some of the guys and several of them told me that they had told their wives that they were going golfing or to see a movie that day. One guy bragged about how his girlfriend had threatened to break up with him if he went through with it and, as he told me this, he got really sad and said, ‘And she was a pretty awesome girl.’ After every time a guy pulled out of Hester, she would look over at some guy who was sitting at a desk with three different clocks and tons of permission forms and an adding machine, and she would ask how many guys were left to fuck.”