GATEWAY TO THE OZARKS
BEFORE THE FIRST GENETIC clone of Thomas Jefferson turned thirteen, he would puzzle out the steps that had led to his conception, beginning with his mother Marissa’s debt. To creditors the bipolar and unmedicated Marissa Barton owed fifty thousand dollars; to the drug dealers of Southwest Missouri, a smaller, more pressing sum. At Shoney’s she had been earning two-fifteen an hour plus tips. When she signed up for the crack-cocaine study, it was for the cash, and after blowing through that easy money Marissa didn’t balk at having her bills paid in return for submitting to a new kind of hysterectomy. Her daughters had moved out, her son was sixteen. If she wound up conceiving, said the researchers, she must carry to term or forfeit the payout. It made no sense, but Marissa was too strung out for questions and anyway, Bob, her boyfriend then, had had a vasectomy.
From an early age, Marissa’s youngest child didn’t mind spending time alone while his mother partied. Carl Barton’s indoor pastimes — editing Wikipedia and drawing blueprints — were solitary ones. Compared to the mood elsewhere in his home, Carl enjoyed his bedroom and the quiet of his thoughts. He’d have explored the Ozark hills alone, too, but Silas Boyd Jr., the lisping boy across the road, trailed along chattering about Warcraft. It brought Silas no awe to discover an Osage arrowhead. If he mentioned school, it wasn’t to wonder about a science lesson but to prattle on about the polyester pants their science teacher wore. Carl didn’t care about pants. He edited encyclopedias. Lying beside Silas on the grassy hilltops, he would try to model the behavior of inquisitiveness, asking questions like, “Did you know these aren’t mountains, but an eroded plateau?”
“You’re an eroded plateau.”
“Have you been to the Rockies?”
“Do what?”
“You take vacations?”
“My mom’s a manager.”
“Mine’s a scientist.”
“She’s a crackhead.”
“She studies stars.”
“Want to get naked?”
“No,” Carl said. The wind on his naked skin might feel magnificent, but what he sought climbing Thistle Mountain was serenity. Gazing into a wild but consistent landscape dotted with fiery blooms, he lay still.
“Maybe next time.”
“Maybe,” Carl said, and indeed next week Silas asked again. Again Carl said no. The third time, Silas proposed a game: they would drop their pants and kick each other in the balls, and whoever took the most kicks would win.
“I played it with my cousin and I beat him.”
“Which means you lost.”
“You’re a dipshit,” said Silas, which was outrageous.
“Fine, I’ll do it, but with my clothes.”
“Well, I’m taking mine off.”
Silas let his pants fall. Proudly he stood there in briefs as Carl readied his leg and kicked, hard. The blow landed on target. Gripping himself, Silas lurched and leaned into the pain, trying not to wail.
It felt good to hurt someone as embarrassing as Silas. After a few moans, though, Silas stood upright again and grinned, which was when Carl fell forward into a fetal crouch of his own.
“You win,” he howled in mock pain, upside down while Silas’s pan-faced head moved closer. He shut his eyes. Was he okay? “I don’t know,” he whispered, wanting Silas to worry.
After a minute Carl opened his eyes to see Silas’s crotch bulging out through his briefs. His balls appeared twice their former size.
“Did that happen when you played with your cousin?” Carl said, pointing.
Silas reached down to feel. “I might should put some ice on it.”
They walked downhill. “Maybe a doctor, too,” said Silas on the trail.
“One word to your folks, and I’ll tell everyone.”
“It doesn’t hurt, it just chafes.”
“Your balls grow as you get older,” Carl said, more to reassure himself than to comfort Silas. “You’re probably just growing up.”
Back home, trying to edit, he kept losing himself in the same sentence on mountain formation. What was distracting him — his mother’s snores? She slept through plenty of afternoons. The bills? His brother Frank was paying those. The pain he’d caused? Thinking about that, he pulsed with dread. He felt like a sick pervert. Out the window he noticed that the Boyds’ car was gone. Where? The hospital. Why? His breath went shallow; he gulped down puke. Either Silas had told, or he’d succumbed before naming Carl. If the latter, the exam would show a bruise or there would be no exam. If the latter again, no one had seen the kick or someone had, everyone had, and so on until Carl heard on the TV news that, in a freak accident, a local boy had suffered testicular trauma, gone into shock, and passed away on a gurney in the ER.
For days Carl waited for the cops to come for him and find his mother’s drugs and arrest her too. He could warn Marissa to lie low, hide the pipes, but how to justify his concern? Better her in prison than him coming clean. On the fourth day he attended the funeral, so awful that he retained few memories of it later on Thistle Mountain’s survey stone, eating wild berries until the knife-blade of dread chased him from his crime scene. A mother who paid attention might have connected Carl’s behavior to Silas’s death. One naïve question and Carl might have burst into blubbery tears, told all — it would have brought such relief — but the closest Marissa came was the day he found her on the couch, the curtains wide so any passerby could see her smoking.
“I’m studying Alberta,” she said, when he went to shut them.
“What’s Mrs. Boyd doing?”
“Gardening. Was Silas your best friend?”
“We knew each other.”
“You were always climbing hills.”
“I still climb hills.”
“It’s like, here I am, and Alberta’s got energy for flowers? I never taught you about death. I’ve had friends die, but I wasn’t young, I took you to that funeral and I. .”
She trailed off. If she’d been clean, she might have felt in Carl’s vacant shoulder-pat how anxious he had become.
“I know what death is,” he said.
“Maybe sort of, but not really.”
“Spot and Rex died.”
“You remember Spot?”
“Mom, treat me like an adult?”
“Okay,” Marissa said. Had Carl obeyed the moment’s instinct, he’d have followed her gaze out to watch the Boyds’ house like a film with her. Instead he returned to his room and drew plans for a four-story shopping mall. Sketching its soaring atrium, he was able to breathe easily. As he laid out a zoned city around the mall, a belief crept in that he’d intended to kill Silas, so he threw himself into a more ambitious project, a megalopolis made up solely of limited-access highways. In 2000:1 scale the cloverleaves metastasized onto page after new page, crowding out thoughts. Evolution, taunted Carl’s mind in the distance, had paired Silas’s instinct for being hurt with his for hurting. He only drew. Like editing, the work was endless. If he heard a car at the Boyds’, he focused harder, and so on until August, when the principal began the welcome-back assembly with a moment of silence for their classmate who had tragically, et al.
Weighing the rhyming sounds of silence and Silas, Carl went hollow. Each school day would begin with a similar call for “a moment of silence for meditation or personal belief,” and each day plainclothes cops would observe to see which kid froze up in guilt. Blueprints wouldn’t help. Nothing would but some all-out war. Fort Leonard Wood was up the road. If China nuked that base, killing everyone, one boy’s demise would come to seem a tiny thing. Their ballistic missiles had the range. Atomic holocaust, chanted Carl’s wanting mind as other kids coaxed meaning from their friend’s demise. “It’s when you touch yourself too much.” “It’s AIDS.” They seemed as excited as they were troubled. Nodding to agree that such a death could claim no honest victim, Carl wiped out his school with hydrogen bombs, conveying to God what he wanted now that he’d given up on his mother.