The Family Fang: A Novel (30 page)

There would be redemption, the twins escaping the pit, disavowing their intended future, finding a new world to call their own. And, unfortunately, it would mean that nothing would change beyond them, that children would still be enslaved to fight each other in the pit, to smash their hands into tiny pieces of grit and then live with the repercussions for years after. But what could the two children do? Better to leave it behind than try to fix what was already broken. Had this not been what Annie had been trying to tell Buster for weeks now regarding their own parents? Was he agreeing with her only for the purposes of his novel, or was this a universal truth? He typed out the scene, reread it, and realized that it was the only possibility that made any sense. When he finally pushed away from his computer, it was one in the morning and he was not in the least bit tired. He knocked on Annie’s door and found her wide awake, simply staring at the wall. “My body won’t let me do anything but think about them,” she said. “It’s so fucking ridiculous.”

Buster grabbed a videotape, the first thing he could find, and the two of them, their hands trembling, watched a Buster Keaton movie where Keaton was slammed, flipped, and thrown through walls. And each time something disastrous happened, Annie and Buster watched with amazement as Keaton, his face impassive as stone, merely righted himself and kept moving along.

T
he next afternoon, still without sleep, Buster sat in the car with Annie in the passenger seat, engine silenced, windows rolled down, parked in front of a pay phone at a gas station in Nashville. Earlier in the day, Buster had called the club in St. Louis where The Vengeful Virgins would be performing and talked to the owner, informing him that he, Will Powell, was a reporter from
Spin
magazine with an interest in talking to Lucas and Linus. Buster made it clear that there was the distinct possibility of a cover story if the boys would offer him an exclusive interview. The owner said he would pass the information along to the boys when they arrived at the club, and now Buster and Annie waited in the car, Chick-O-Stick wrappers littering the floorboards, the interior reeking of peanut butter and coconut. Buster and Annie had driven to Nashville to help obscure their intentions to Lucas and Linus. If they were involved in his parents’ disappearance, he couldn’t very well leave his parents’ home number for them to call back. He didn’t even want the area code of Coalfield to appear in the phone number, so as not to arouse suspicion. Nashville was Music City USA. Even if the Virgins weren’t Grand Ole Opry material, it was where a freelance music journalist might reside. It was only after they had entered into this complicated ruse that they realized they could have purchased a prepaid cell phone and done all of this at home. To rearrange their plans, to change the pieces of the trap they had set, seemed like a bad idea, a worse idea than waiting for hours for the pay phone to ring, understanding that it might not happen. Buster realized that, regardless of his slight attempts at reconnaissance, he needed some degree of luck for any of this to work. And with each minute that passed, Buster remembered how unlucky he was, how he seemed a beacon for all manner of ridiculous misfortune.

Buster had wanted to put up a sign on the phone, which said
OUT OF ORDER
, but Annie nixed the idea. “No one uses pay phones anymore,” she said. “I can’t believe they still exist. There’s no point complicating things with fake signs.” On the drive to Nashville, she came up with a set of questions for the Virgins, open-ended questions that would allow the boys to make their own case for stardom. Buried at the bottom of the list, the ninth of ten questions, she finally asked the only question that mattered, the single question whose answer would be recorded for posterity.
How did you come to write “K.A.P.”?
The tenth question, if it became necessary to ask it, was
If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

And then the pay phone began to ring, once, twice, before Buster jumped out of the truck and snatched the receiver from its holder. “Hello?” he said. “Is this the guy from
Spin
magazine?” the voice replied. “It is,” Buster said, just as he felt someone tapping him on the shoulder. He turned to find Annie by his side, holding the questions for the interview. He took the notebook from her and she stood close to him, almost close enough to hear the conversation unfold.

“Is this Lucas or Linus?” Buster asked.

“Lucas. Linus plays the drums. He likes to stay quiet and make the sounds. I do the talking. Anything I say, he would agree with. Okay?”

“Okay. Perfect. So, the first question is, well, you have such an interesting sound, it seems wholly original, and yet I wonder if you have any influences.”

“Not really. We like speed metal, but we’re not good enough to play like that. We listen to some rap music, I guess, but that has nothing to do with us. Mostly we like movies and books for ideas. We like
Mad Max
and
Dr. Strangelove
and
Carnival of Souls
and Vincent Price movies. We read
Dragonlance
novels and comic books about zombies and we like books about the end of the world. We like anything about the end of the world. We really like this little book called
The Underground
. Have you read that book?”

Buster felt dizzy, wished he was in St. Louis so he could see Lucas’s expression as he asked this question. Had he already been discovered, so early in the ruse? “I have read that book,” he answered.

“Fucking great book. The first song on the album, I wrote that song after I read
The Underground
. Nobody else really knows about it.”

“What kind of guitar do you play?” Buster asked quickly, changing the subject. He resisted the urge to ask Lucas why, exactly, his novel was so amazing, knowing it would lead the interview further away from what he really needed to know.

“I don’t know. I got it from a catalog. We don’t care about instruments. The expensive ones make you feel bad for doing awful things to them. And they don’t make the same kind of sounds that the cheap ones make. We like the way cheap things sound.”

Buster went through the questions, Lucas giving shorter and shorter answers, his enthusiasm for being on the cover of
Spin
magazine overridden by his own attention deficit. Buster could hear him rubbing the tips of his fingers against the strings of his guitar, making a squeaking sound like animals trapped in a pen. Annie jabbed Buster in the ribs, keeping him focused, moving him toward the inevitable. Finally, with no way to avoid it, Buster summoned up the courage, in the face of constant disappointment, and tried once again to find his parents.

“How did you come to write ‘K.A.P.’?” he asked.

There was silence on the other end of the line. Buster could hear Lucas breathing, deep and steady. Buster expected the boy to hang up, but, slowly, in a measured voice, Lucas replied, “It just kind of came to me.”

“There wasn’t any event that made you write it?” Buster asked.

“I guess not,” Lucas said. “I just, you know, thought that people should kill their parents if they want to do anything good with their lives. This is a stupid question, I think. No offense.”

“You didn’t write that song, Lucas,” Buster said.

“Yes I did.”

“I know you didn’t write that song,” Buster said. “I’m going to write an entire article about it unless you tell me.”

“I’m going to hang up.”

“Who wrote that song, Lucas? It’s not even the best song on the album. I think there’s, like, eight other songs that are better, much better. The writing is sloppy and I think the sentiment is a little trite. It doesn’t have the depth of your other songs. That’s how I know you didn’t write it.”

“It’s going to be our hit,” Lucas replied.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t have other songs that are much, much better.”

“I . . . I didn’t write it,” Lucas said.

“I know that, Lucas,” Buster said. “It doesn’t sound like you.”

“Everybody loves that song and I didn’t even write it,” Lucas said, his voice cracking.

“Who wrote it?”

“Somebody else,” Lucas said, and Buster resisted the urge to smash the phone against the brick wall.

“Who wrote it?”

“My dad,” Lucas finally said.

“What?” Buster said, amazed at how unsteady the earth felt beneath his feet.

“My dad wrote it. He said we could use it; it was the first song that we ever played, and so we just thought we’d put it on the album because we knew it so well.”

“Your dad?”

Annie frowned at this statement, jabbed Buster again, but he shook his head and turned slightly away from her.

“Well, my stepdad. But I call him my dad. He’s been my dad for so long that I call him my real dad.”

Buster heard the sound of another voice on the phone, a woman’s voice.

“My mom just came in here,” Lucas said. “She wants to talk to you.”

Buster did not want to talk to this woman, not at all. “Wait,” Buster said to Lucas. “I have one more question.”

“Okay, but she really wants to talk to you.”

“Um, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”

Lucas, without hesitation, replied, “One that just got struck by lightning,” and then handed the phone to his mother.

“Who is this?” the woman said.

“Who is this?” Buster replied.

“What are you up to, sir?” the woman said.

“Do you know Caleb Fang?” Buster asked.

“You leave him alone,” the woman said. “I’m warning you, leave my husband alone.”

Buster, confused, his arm aching from holding the phone to his ear, replied, “Mom?”

“Oh, god, is this Buster?” the woman said. “No, Buster, I’m not your mother.”

“What’s going on?” Buster said, his anger now properly summoned at the embarrassment of mistaking a perfect stranger for his mother.

“Leave them alone, Buster. Just let them live their lives.”

“What the fuck is going on, lady?” Buster shouted, but the woman had hung up the phone.

Buster stayed on the line, unwilling to put the receiver back in its cradle. In a few seconds, he would turn to his sister and try to explain as best he could, then wait for her to decide how to proceed. For the moment, he simply listened to the dial tone, the way the unbroken sound seemed to be pulling him into the wiring of the phone. He wondered where his fangs were, those veneers from his childhood. He wished he had them on right now, teeth so sharp that they could tear through anything. He imagined the fangs digging into something soft and pulsing with life, leaving an imprint that would never, ever, go away.

Chapter Thirteen

A
s soon as they arrived in North Dakota, Annie understood that it was the exact place you wanted to live if the apocalypse ever arrived: the clear, stingingly pure air, the absence of color, the feeling that the place had never recovered from the Ice Age and would therefore be nearly unchanged when the world was stripped of what mattered most. It was wilderness, even the largest city in the state, and Annie felt trepidation upon walking out of the airport, the sense that her parents knew the terrain, had acclimated to this barren expanse of land, whereas Annie and her brother would be torn apart by wild animals.

Yet even as they drove down the single-lane highway, static and heavy metal on the radio, Annie prepared herself for the possibility that their parents would not be here. If the woman—Caleb’s other wife, if they were to believe this woman’s outrageous claim—had alerted the Fangs to their children’s sudden discovery, it was possible that they would keep running, move on to the next hiding spot. There was some grand reason that they had disappeared in the first place, and Annie now wondered if she and Buster were intended to play a part in it. She began to believe that her parents had created something that they would not allow to be compromised, even by their own children. Especially by their own children.

It was easy enough to find the twins’ house. A cursory look online provided the address for the only Baltz, Jim and Bonnie, in Wayland, North Dakota. “What will we do, if it’s really them?” Buster asked Annie, who struggled to answer with any confidence. The options were violence or forgiveness, which meant there was only one option. Unless her parents could explain this to them in such a way that there was a third option, begrudging acceptance. “We won’t do anything,” Annie said. “We’ll wait until it comes to us, how to proceed, and then we’ll do that.”

The house was nearly identical to the Fangs’ house in Tennessee, a one-story ranch, undecorated, left to weather the elements with little concern for upkeep. In the long gravel driveway, a semitruck was parked.
FLUXUS TRUCKING
, it said on the door.
IF IT EXISTS, WE SHIP IT
. “This is it,” Annie said, turning off the car, staring into the windows of the house for signs of movement, finding nothing. “They won’t be happy to see us,” Buster said, his face tight with the possibility of disappointment. “We won’t be happy to see them,” Annie said, and stepped out of the car, onto the porch, standing on a mat that bore no words of welcome. Buster took his place beside her on the porch, and, forgoing the doorbell, Annie rapped her knuckles on the doorframe, insistent, bone on wood, musical. There was silence inside the house, thirty seconds, a minute, and then Buster and Annie, together, knocked again on the door. They heard the sound of activity inside the house, footsteps on hardwood, and the knob twisted and the door opened and there, in front of them, no mistaking his presence, was their father, Caleb Fang.

“A and B,” he said, not a trace of emotion in his voice, a scientist classifying a familiar species. “We found you,” Annie said, muscle spasms softly twitching under her skin. Caleb nodded. “You did,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you. Bonnie called me after she talked to Buster, warned me that you might be coming. I’ve been waiting for you. If you hadn’t shown up, I think I might have been a little disappointed.”

“Where’s Mom?” Buster asked, remembering the woman, Bonnie, but not able to give it any more thought at the moment. Caleb shrugged. “Not here,” he said.

“What?” Annie said.

“She doesn’t live here,” Caleb said.

Annie pushed past her father, into the house, and Buster followed her. “We are in a position of power here, Caleb. Do you understand that?” she asked her father. Caleb nodded. “Whatever you’re doing, we can ruin it. I don’t think you want us to do that, all the work you’ve obviously put into it. But Buster and I, we want to ruin this very badly. We want it to blow up in your face. So you are going to tell us everything we want to know.”

“That’s fine, Annie,” Caleb said. “I can tell you the basics and I think you’ll be satisfied. I think you and Buster, of all people, will understand.”

“You’re going to tell us everything,” Annie said. “You and Camille are going to tell us everything, every detail, and we’ll decide whether we’re satisfied or not.”

“It would take a long time to explain everything,” Caleb replied.

“That’s fine,” Annie said.

“Annie?” Buster said, and Annie turned to see that Buster had wandered into the living room, was holding a framed picture. Annie walked over to her brother and stared at the photo: their father, younger; that woman who had once helped create a Fang event; and the twins, maybe seven or eight years old—a family portrait.

“What is this?” Annie said.

“That’s my family,” Caleb said.

“When was this taken?” Buster asked.

“Six years ago, something like that,” Caleb replied.

“Who is this?” Annie asked, pointing to the woman.

“My wife,” Caleb said.

“Dad?” Buster said.

“It’s complicated,” Caleb said.

“Stop talking,” Annie said, tossing the picture to the floor. “Don’t say another word until Camille is here, until all of us are together, and then we’ll talk.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

Caleb went to the telephone, dialed a number, and then whispered, “It’s me.”

“Is that Mom?” Buster said, but Caleb held his hand up to silence him.

“There’s a problem. We need to talk.” There was a long pause, Caleb listening intently, staring directly at Annie and Buster. “A and B,” Caleb finally said, and then he hung up the phone.

“Was that Mom?” Buster asked, and Caleb nodded.

“We need to drive to the meeting place,” Caleb said. “You two follow me; it’s about forty-five minutes away.”

“We’ll ride together,” Annie said.

“Fine,” Caleb said, taking a baseball cap from the coatrack, stepping outside, waiting for his children to follow him so he could lead them to the place they needed to go.

A
nnie drove, her father in the passenger seat, and Buster sat in the back, his body leaning forward into the space that separated his sister and his father. “We really started to think that you might be dead,” Buster said to his father. Caleb laughed softly, a hiccup of breath. “That was the idea,” he said. Annie placed The Vengeful Virgins album in the CD player and her father winced. “Can we not listen to this?” he said. “We like it,” Annie said, turning up the volume.

Their father directed them to a mall three towns over, only one level, the anchor stores long out of business. “This is it,” he said, “but when we talk, you need to call me Jim. None of this Caleb bullshit.”

“We’ll try to remember,” Annie said.

“What’s Mom’s name?” Buster asked.

“Patricia,” Caleb said.

“Jim and Patricia Fang,” Buster said.

The three of them walked into the mall, three distinct shapes fitting themselves into a new space.

They found their mother in the food court, sitting alone at a table near a restaurant that sold corn dogs and lemonade. When she saw Buster and Annie, she frowned, then quickly reconfigured the structure of her face into a grimace of sorts. She waved them over. “Hello, Buster,” Camille said. “Hello, Patricia,” Buster said, and Camille immediately looked over at Caleb. “How much do they know?” she asked her husband. “Not a fucking thing,” Annie interjected. “But that’s what you’re going to tell us.” Camille nodded, held up her hands, palms out, in supplication. “Fine, fine,” she said. “Just sit down.”

Camille looked around the table. “How do you want to do this?” she asked. “Should we just start talking, or do you want to ask us questions?” Caleb stated that it would be best if he spoke and then, once he was finished, they could ask questions. Annie shook her head. “We’ll ask questions right now,” she said. “Fine,” Caleb said, seeming to understand finally that his children had the upper hand.

“Why did you disappear?” Annie asked.

Caleb and Camille looked at each other and smiled. “Art,” they said in unison. “Caleb and Camille Fang, our defining work. You know this, don’t you? Why else would we disappear? This is all part of something larger, a statement, an event, on such a large scale that it’s impossible to deny.”

“How long have you been planning it?” Buster asked.

“Years,” Camille answered. “Many, many years.”

“We started this once the two of you made it clear that you wanted nothing more to do with our work,” Caleb continued. “Annie, you left us, and then Buster was gone a few years later. We had worked so hard to make you an integral part of these performances, to turn you into essential elements of our process, and then you left us. So we had to start from scratch, we had to start over.”

“You’re blaming this on us?” Annie said.

“We’re not blaming you, Annie,” Camille said emphatically, though Caleb’s face seemed to suggest otherwise, his eyebrows raised and eyes wide. “If it wasn’t for the two of you, forcing us to rethink how we made art, we never would have come up with this piece.”

“We started with the essential steps,” Caleb said. “We got new identities, social security numbers, passports, tax history, everything. Jim Baltz and Patricia Howlett.”

“When was this?” Buster asked.

“Soon after you left for college,” Camille responded. “Ten, eleven years ago.”

“You’ve had these identities for eleven years? And you only just disappeared last year?” Annie said.

“It was part of the process,” Caleb explained. “We had to create new characters for when Camille and Caleb died, identities we could easily slip into.”

“There was a woman, Bonnie; you might remember her, actually; she had been an ardent supporter of our work. So we reached out to her. We told her how we wanted to disappear, and she helped us. Her husband, who had no appreciation for art at all, had only recently left her and she had these twins, not even two years old yet, and so your father married her. Jim married her, perfectly legal.”

“I bought a truck and that was my cover, a long-distance trucker. I would spend most of the time with your mother in Tennessee, but every few months, I would drive back here and live with Bonnie and Lucas and Linus for a week or two, before I went back on the road. It worked well enough.”

“What about you?” Annie asked her mother.

“There was a small cabin on a few acres that had been in Bonnie’s family for years. I would stay there in the summers, getting to know people in the town, establishing my backstory, so that when I came here for good, people wouldn’t be suspicious of this stranger in their midst.”

“You did this for ten years?” Buster asked.

“It wasn’t so bad. I like it here. It’s quiet; the people are nice. I got used to it.”

“Little by little, we cashed out funds from our bank in Tennessee and then deposited it in the accounts here in North Dakota, building up enough money to live on. So the plan was in place, not quite fully formed but enough of an outline that we knew what would happen when we finally disappeared.”

“And then you two showed up, back in our lives,” Camille said, smiling.

“And we knew we had to take action,” Caleb continued, his voice growing more and more excited. “We hadn’t planned on you two coming back, but we realized it was a sign that we needed to put this thing into motion. If we disappeared, you two would be there to discover us missing. And then our disappearance would have even more meaning. And, if we had done things correctly, we thought you would look for us, and that would add depth to the piece, how our deaths would resonate beyond us.”

“What about all that blood?” Buster asked. “The police really thought you were dead.”

Camille rolled her eyes. “That was your father’s idea, at the last minute.”

“Bonnie had driven from North Dakota to meet us, and just as we were going to leave, I had the idea of violence, of some signs of struggle. So I took a knife and slashed myself with it. I didn’t realize how much blood there would be.”

“Oh god,” Camille said, smiling, remembering the event. “It was horrible. Your father looked like he was going to bleed to death. Bonnie had to stop at a drugstore and get a first-aid kit. We spread newspaper all over the backseat so he wouldn’t bleed all over the upholstery. It was awful.”

“It worked though, didn’t it?” he said to his wife.

She laughed. “You always had a weakness for the grand gesture.”

Annie and Buster watched their parents, obviously in love, appreciating the magnificence of their own handiwork, and felt their power slipping away.

“What about Mom’s paintings?” Annie asked. “What about that?”

Caleb’s face darkened and Camille looked away. “Yes, that was . . . that was well played on your part. After so many years of being the source of unrest, I guess I had forgotten what it felt like to be caught in the middle of the chaos. It was an altogether unpleasant experience. You two almost ruined us.”

“Good,” Annie said.

“Your mother first tried to tell me that it was a hoax, something the two of you had dreamed up. I wanted so badly to come to that opening, to see for myself, but I knew I had to stay focused. Instead, I went to her cabin when she was away and found more of those . . .” Caleb’s face had turned bone-white, flinching as if needles were being inserted under his fingernails, “more of those paintings.”