The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (13 page)

After a few days I stepped out of Mr. Jelly Crisp into a bright morning feeling new, as if I had preserved my remorse inside the cooler for the rats to squabble over. With my Vocationals in mining I was able to get a seasonal job hauling sand. We trucked it from an unpopular beach to a popular one. The foreman said don't feel bad; the sand had passed back and forth twice already. I drove the front loader with a mounting sense of wrongdoing. Ghost crabs and coquinas, conchs and razor clams, they all went about their invertebrate business under the sand. What right did I have to disrupt their lives?

At night in my walk-in cooler, I lay on the shelf feeling its wire grid segment my back. I took a little fink and waited for the tar to rise about my sore feet, then waded in, up to my chest, my eyes, feeling around for Umma and Sylvia and Faron and Pop. I caught their oozy forms in the dark, but they had no density. They were lumps in a bread-crumb porridge and would dissolve too quickly in my mouth.

Daytone did me okay until the middle of October. It was breakfast time. I sat on a soy bucket picking weevils out of powdered milk, the door propped open to let in some light, when I heard voices in the dining area. Metal raked the kitchen tiles; a woman laughed. I grabbed a pair of fryer tongs for protection and closed the door. A reflexive fear stung the backs of my calves. Run, it said. Terry Nguyen was here. He had found me. I scanned the walls of the walk-in, only then realizing what a trap I had contrived for myself. The room was paneled in aluminum. A single vent on the ceiling was no bigger than my arm. I gripped the tongs and hoped Terry wouldn't look inside the cooler. But when had that man missed anything? I pictured my arrival at the Cuba Pens, the frog march down a long hall, Pop's face regarding me from the gloom of his cell: no recognition. I had left him behind.

It was not Terry Nguyen. It was two methy lesbians, come down from Jersey to winter on the Floriday sand. They wanted my accommodations. One lady was pretty and small and she waited outside while her companion rooted me out. Faron would have laughed to see how I cowered under that bully gal and her shovel. She had carried it all the way from Princeton with the express purpose of hitting somebody. It took only one blow, solid enough to knock a molar down my throat, to make me hand over my walk-in.

In Daytone I had made the mistake of sitting still. A fugitive should stay put no longer than it takes his blisters to heal.

For a week I sifted through my stool to find the tooth, but all I turned up was a missing button from my cutoffs. By then I was up the coast in Jackvill with enough cash for two nights at a lover motel. I got a funny look when I asked at the front desk for a needle, but when I showed the clerk my button, she offered to sew it on herself. I stood naked inside a broom closet till she was done. Whenever I need to remind myself of kindness, I touch that button. The clerk did her stitching well, and it has not fallen off since.

When my savings ran out I pushed inland till I reached the Ocala Forest. The Jackvill clerk had spoken of a place called Jupiter Springs. The way she talked, it sounded like a paradise. I found the water dried up and the area occupied by Seminole Indians. They lived outside Consolidated, outside Bosom, in their own Chiefdom of Fink. The Seminoles were traffickers and users both.

Their Chief went by the name Goldsmith. He started each morning grilling hoe cakes for his crew. Each day he ended with a tirade of abusive language. The Seminoles were a community bound by sporadic affection and mutual disdain. “Like Gunts,” said Goldsmith with visible pride. In the still of night we would be woken by the Chief's Rejection Dance, in which he went at the hull of a Consolidated chopper with a hockey stick. I found the routine exhilarating to watch.

Goldsmith modeled his gang after an actual tribe that had run the Ocala Forest many hundreds of years before the Gunts sailed across the sea. He wore buzzard feathers on his head and no pants. His men performed what he claimed to be authentic Seminole rites. In one an initiate would be buried up to his neck in Ocala clay. The surrounding earth would be spread with dry sticks and leaves, and Goldsmith would set a circle of fire around your head. You were supposed to spit out the flames before they reached your face, but I didn't bother. When they dug me out my beard was half burned and blisters ringed my throat. Chief Goldsmith declared me the most pointless man he had ever met and he made the other Seminoles feel inadequate by comparison.

One night I could take their fellowship no longer. As Goldsmith did his Rejection Dance I slipped out of the woods with a visible wad of fink taped inside my shorts.

Outside Valdosta I trapped a raccoon to be my friend. It died in my arms.

I caught malaria picking scrap copper on the Atlanta Fill.

On the Looval Hiway I hitched alongside a girl until a medical doctor in a Vanster said he'd take her but not me.

A vessel bound for the outer solar system loops around large bodies to gather speed for its journey. Dr. Ridley called it the Veega Trajectory. The Orion would circle Venus and Earth, gathering speed from their gravitational fields, before winging off toward Europa. It is a circuitous ride full of backslides and feints, eight years long. When I fled Cannibal, I thought I was running away. Now I see I was on my own Veega, only I didn't know where all those turns would lead me.

I had my mind set on a great hole in the ground called Mammoth Cave. The Seminoles told me of a river down there called The Sticks with waters that could cure you of fink sickness, malaria, or anything. It was meant as a joke though I didn't get the funny part, and it didn't matter. I never made it to The Sticks. At a bend in the road north of Halfway, I stopped to rest. Rain had fallen all afternoon, but now it hardened into sleet. I was wet, tired, frozen, and could walk no farther when I saw a sign on the shoulder:

SCENIC OVERLOOK

I had not seen anything worth looking over for some time, so I stopped.

Here is the picture they bothered to put up a sign for: in the valley below, a hamlet hung over a stream of rust. At one end stood a yellow Vanster dealership and a Fatty Meats Express. At the other, on a rocky promontory, a picture-book castle rose in the fog, the vanity of some bygone coal baron. On its bluestone battlements stood a ping-pong table and a rabbit hutch, the whole pile flocked with sleet like a dirty sno-cone. I hoped the place was abandoned, so I jumped the guardrail and skated downhill in my brogans.

At ground level the castle was more like a ranch home with ambitions. Fatty Meat takeout boxes sailed around the moat. Mud daubers' nests hung in the gate like oriental lanterns. A burned-wood sign on the sill read
CASTLE KINTEK
. I called out was anybody home and was surprised to see the drawbridge stutter down.

“Come in out the cold, stranger,” cried the lord of the manor, a peaceable fat man called Percy Muck. In the front hall he introduced me to his three sons, Mike, Ronnie, and Doot, a baby who giggled behind the chiffonade. Lord Muck called them his princes but to me they looked as ugly as meatballs in little wigs.

Had I known what Lord Muck wanted from me, I would not have stayed the night. He was an aspiring filmmaker who had everything he needed—a script, costumes, colored lights, three gifted child actors—everything, except a camera. Right off I was given the title of director, which meant holding a hand mixer up to my eye and shouting
action
.

That first night I studied his screenplay, a rambling narrative “of the chivalric age,” when people looked everywhere for an old cup and you would kill yourself for feeling too much love. It was called
The Petit Mort of Percy
and was dedicated on the title page to “the time when a man would do anything for his family, and vice versa.”

As I caught them from various angles, tracked them down the castle halls, and framed their clumsy swordplay, the four Mucks made oaths of fealty, kissed each other's rings, and rescued baby Doot from a three-headed gator. When I stopped finding them ridiculous, I grew to envy those Mucks. They were a family, and, unlike the Seminoles, it was not animosity that bound them together. It was make-believe.

I was so busy directing that weeks slipped by without my noticing. But one summer day the time came to move along. After me and Ronnie played a vigorous game of ping-pong I descended to the banquet hall for a soda. There I found Lord Muck ruminating alone on his gilded recliner. He patted one leg (Muck wore a fur-lined robe) until I sat on his knee (I was dressed in tights). Two claps and his princes hurried into the room. To general merriment he declared me an official Muck. Prince Rowan I was christened.

I looked at the three princes, dancing a circle, and saw for the first time how little family resemblance they bore to one another or to Lord Muck. He brushed my ear with his cracked lips.

Castle Kintek offered me more than shelter. Those broad battlements contained a home. Their unmade movie was a blueprint for kinship. “This old world needs to be taught the art of togetherness,” Lord Muck insisted. “Without stage direction and dialogue we are but lone animals out for carrion and sex.” He was not wrong, only weird, and I suppose he had been generous in letting me join his cast and crew and kin, but after what had happened to my own family, I could not be trusted with another.

The Mucks begged me not to go; little Doot wept and threw himself on the stone floor. Their masterpiece would be lost. A movie needs its director. I told them the camera was a hand mixer.

“Stay another day, my prince,” Lord Muck implored me. “Stay until dawn at least. Behold: the moon burns bronze, an ill-fortuned sign.”

A bit more than two years had come and gone since my escape from Cape Cannibal. In Astronomy, dates are immutable, daughter. Events in the heavens will happen when they must. I climbed down from his knee, kissed the backside of his hand, and hiked over the drawbridge, never stopping under a clear Kintek sky. As I walked I contemplated that lonely orphan Dr. Ridley called the asteroid, its tuberous heft, how it might tumble and loom as you cruised alongside. Twenty-five months into its voyage the Orion would pass the asteroid Gaspra, stealing a little more speed for the long ride ahead.

When he'd left his mother and sisters that last time, Pop hitched east from Texas to the Floriday orange groves and north to So Caroline, where he stole Umma from Coylan Howard's cut-and-sew. Throughout the year that followed I reversed Pop's trajectory, and in my mind every leg was an erasure, as if I could cover his tracks, undo myself and my family back to our beginning.

I expected distance to ease my fears, but the farther I traveled from Cape Cannibal, the more intensely I felt Terry's presence. In the lower reaches of Looseyanne I learned that a hurrycane was lashing the coast of Floriday; its outer band threw rain across the Gulf. I sheltered under a cloverleaf well aware of Smart Man Tolemy's notion, how weather bears feeling. I saw in that storm Terry Nguyen's anger blown across the land. I had stolen his rocket ship.

Even as I entered the Consolidated coast Nguyen haunted my movements. I bailed off a flash mantis farm by Leveetown when word got out that a Bosom defender had been seen idling beyond the buoys. It was night when I jumped from the pirogue. The mantis skirmished around me, flicking my ankles and popping their little flashbulbs so that a trail of light traced my path through the shallows. I was pulled out at the dock, legs bloodied and burned, sure that Terry had hooked me at last.

It was only the foreman. He told me I had two weeks left on my contract and had better return to work. Then he made me wade back through the paddy to the boat.

After my contract expired, I carried on around the Gulf. Careful not to enter Houston proper, I swung north of my pop's hometown to make some money in the Davy Crockett solvent works. Though this was a Consolidated outpost, it lay deep in Texas Bosom country. I knew better than to stay very long.

Hitching west on the Twenty Dollar Hiway, I reached Californdulia by early spring, just in time to pick fruit in the lower valleys. What Pop must have felt in the Floriday orange groves, I found in the avocado orchards outside Losang. Warmth of the sun and strong young men who camped out under the trees where rabbits were so plentiful all you needed was a brush trap and an appetite. I played cards and I swam. The harvest was not difficult. I made money and I shot fink with the boys.

By June I had earned about a million and decided to spend it all on a sightseeing hitch to Losang. Lord Muck had spoken glowingly of that golden city on the Pacific where movies have been made since the time of the Gunts. Though it was a Bosom town, the fresh air and cash had emboldened me. I felt strong and rich and reckless. Let Terry Nguyen take me in a state of contentment, I thought.

I never reached Losang. Near evening a trucker with a payload of Fanta soft drinks picked me up on the shoulder of a quiet desert route. Fanta is a charter division of Consolidated War & Jail, and I considered it safe to accept a ride from its transport crew. The cabs are always clean and warm. It is all the soda you can drink. Consolidated drivers are, by training, disinclined to ask or answer questions.

This one was different. He was going as far as San Bernadeen and filled the distance with conversation. He had been to Losang and could not recommend it. People there believe they have already arrived, he said, they've come through the desert to find the sea. They're smug and superior. Losang looks like your final destination, he explained, because you can't go any farther without getting wet.

“It is a city with no hope,” he said. His advice: “Don't bother.”

Boarding, as I had in flophouses and on grassy medians, I was often a target of Jesus Lovers. I could sense their soft approach well before the threefold question left their mouths. A pitying grin, the light touch, eyes that study you for the bruises made by appetite, malfeasance, or betrayal. I was plenty bruised. In the console light I could read the Fanta Trucker's intentions. He was a Jesus Lover, revving up to do me a Charity, to deliver the Gospel. I braced myself, thinking this would be my fare for a lift to Bernadeen. He removed one hand from the wheel to cup my shoulder.