I showed up at the funeral, most of the family and friends strangers to me, and that night, instead of getting in a fight, I walked out into land I didn’t know and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes down to the butts. Just staring at the sky. Interrogating it, I guess.
I’d never smoked—you need your lungs if you dance—but after that night, I kind of understood why Mom always had. It makes you feel like you have some control. You know it’s bad for you, but you’re doing it on purpose, too. You’re breathing that in of your own volition, because you want to.
When you don’t have control of anything else, when a car can just go cartwheeling off into the horizon, then to even have just a little bit of control, it can feel good. Especially if you hold that smoke in for a long time, only let it out bit by bit.
But eventually I stood from that first pack, and made my way back to my camper, back to the circuit.
Until I got to thinking about what happened when I was twelve.
Which is why I pulled my truck into Dino’s parking lot this morning.
Because I’m family, I can check him out with a signature and proof of ID.
He remembers me, too. After his third grade, nothing really changed for him. Just, it’s the rest of us who kept changing. But he still sees me as the twelve-year-old I was, I think. The one who fought the monster for him. For all of us.
On the drive out, I tell him about my son. How, if he’d been able to make it through that wreck, how he was going to have taken over the world, Indian-style. Maybe he’d have been a male model, maybe he’d have played basketball, or maybe he’d have been an architect.
Just—that was all gone now.
Unless, right?
When we pull up to the old rent-house, there’s nothing there, of course. Instead of dogs in the neighbor’s long yard, there’s goats behind the chainlink now. They stare at us, never stop chewing.
The house burned down years ago—again, not from cigarettes—but what’s still standing, what I wasn’t expecting even a little bit, it’s the tetherball pole.
There’s no ball, no string. But even that it’s just still there, it means this can work.
Once, years ago, in the old-time Indian days, a father died, but then he came back. He was different when he came back, he was hungry, he was selfish, but that’s just because he already had all that inside him when he died, I know. It’s because he carried it with him into the lake that night.
My son—I won’t say his name out loud yet—all he would have taken with him, it’s his smile, and everything he could have been.
So what we do, it’s wait until dark, and walk into the burned pad where the house used to be. The cinderblock pylons are still there, holding up my memory of the floor plan.
I settle us down under what was Mom’s bedroom.
Something happened here once, see.
A cat or a possum or a rabbit, it crawled into this darkness to die. But because it was hurt, that gave something else access to it.
Under the tarp in the bed of my truck is all the roadkill I could scrape up, to be turned into body mass, and in raccoon traps at the front of the bed are four hissing cats.
They’re not hurt, yet.
There’s four because four’s the Indian number.
But that’s all later.
Right now, I’m just sitting across from Dino. Waiting for him to remember. Is there the least amount of blood seeping down from behind his ear, from where a razorblade might have traced a delicate X?
There is.
He turned his head to the side for me to do it, like he knew this part already, and I almost couldn’t press that metal into his skin.
Almost.
Before him in the dead grass I’ve set four action figures.
One of them—one of them, I know its life cycle. That morning after, it showed back up on Dino’s dresser in his bedroom. Because Mom had found it floating in the dishwater.
It was the only artifact from then. Except for Dino himself.
And now, if he picks that one up instead of the other three, now they’ll be together again, and it can all start all over.
Except—like I say, I know the life cycle, here.
What’s going to happen, I know, is that Dino’s going to pick up the superhero, not any of the other action figures, and then, because this is part of it, I’ll force the left leg into his mouth as gently as I can, as gently as any big brother’s ever done a thing like this, and then I’ll come up under his chin with the heel of my hand once, fast, so he can bite that foot off.
Maybe he’ll swallow it on his own, maybe he’ll need help, I don’t know.
We’ve got all night, I mean. He can sit there trying to figure this out and I can dance softly around him in my regalia for as long as it takes, chanting the numbers up to twelve, to prime him, to remind him, the balls of my moccasin feet padding into the dirt over and over in the old way, to wake anything sleeping down there. Anything that can help us get through this ceremony.
And, for my son—Collin, Collin Collin Collin—for him to get as solid as he needs to go out into the world like he was supposed to, he’s going to need the same thing Dad needed, the same thing Dad got with the neighbor’s corpse, the same thing seeping down the side of Dino’s neck already.
When will the facility miss him?
It doesn’t matter.
They’ll never find us way out here, at an address that doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s kind of like we never even left, really.
I can see the old walls rising around us. I can see the shadow of the roof, the way it was.
When I was twelve years old, I mapped the interior of our home.
Now, sitting across from my little brother, I’m sketching out a map of the human heart, I guess.
There’s more dark hallways than I knew.
Rooms I thought I’d never have to enter.
But I will.
For him, for Collin, I’ll walk in and pull the door shut behind me, never come back out.
The Dinosaur Tourist
Caitlín R. Kiernan
The South Dakota summer sky is a broken china teacup, and I have the distinct impression that when I finally stop the car and step outside and dare to let go of the handle on the door, I will fall straight up into that broken china sky. And I will not stop falling until the world below me is so small that I can make a circle of my thumb and forefinger and catch it all inside. And hanging there, I will freeze like a rose dripped in liquid nitrogen or my blood will boil, but I’ll have captured the world’s disc in one hand. There’s country music on the radio, George Jones and Tammy Wynette singing “Golden Ring,” and I turn the volume up just a little louder, to help take my mind off the smell. On either side of this seemingly eternal highway, there’s shortgrass prairie and patches of bare earth pressed flat beneath that brutal, hungry blue broken cup, and I rush past a comical sort of billboard, an old prospector and his cartoon mule, and the mule is luxuriating in a horse trough, and the billboard promises Refreshing! Free Ice Water! at the Wall Drug Store if I just keep going straight ahead twenty more miles. The kid in the passenger seat is still sleeping. I picked him up last night just outside Sioux Falls, just after I’d traded 1-29 North for I-90 West and the kid said he’d blow me for a ride to Rapid City. And I said shit get it and I have an empty seat don’t I? You don’t have to blow me, if you don’t mind that I smoke, and if you don’t mind the music. The kid said he’d blow me, anyway, because he didn’t like taking anything for free. Yeah, okay, I said, and so we found a truck stop, and he did it in the stall, and I tangled my fingers in his blond hair while he sucked my cock and fondled my balls and, for no extra charge, slipped a pinkie finger up my asshole. I bought him a burger and fries and told him don’t worry, it wasn’t for free, he could blow me again later on, so we’d be even. But I had to feed the kid. He looked like a stray dog hadn’t been fed in a month. And then I drove, and for a while the kid talked about his boyfriend in Rapid City, and I played the radio, and he finally fell asleep. In his sleep, he looked more like a girl than a boy. I pulled over near Murdo, just before four a.m., and I slept a little myself. I dreamed of the White Sundays. “You ever been to Rapid City?” I ask him, and he says no. I ask how it is his boyfriend is in Rapid City when he’s never been there himself, and he tells me they met on the internet. “You’ve never met him face to face?” I ask, and the kid wants to know what difference that makes. “Does he know you’re coming?” I ask him, and the kid just shrugs. “That means he doesn’t, right?” I ask. “He’ll be glad to see me,” says the kid, and I let it go at that. “What kind of drugs?” he asks me, and I’ve already forgotten the lie. It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. “What kind of drugs got you fired from the college?” he prompts, and now he stops watching the prairie and stares at me, instead. “Heroin,” I tell him. “Heroin and pills. And a little coke, just to sweeten the deal.” And he says, “So you’re a junkie. I gave a junkie professor a blow job. What if you gave me AIDS back there? I didn’t know you were a junkie.” I tell him I don’t have AIDS, and he frowns and sighs and wants to know if he’s just supposed to take my word for that? Don’t I have some sort of papers to prove that I’m clean, and when I say no, I don’t have any fucking papers saying I don’t have AIDS, he turns off the radio and goes back to staring out the window. “Your car smells like road kill,” he says, and I say yeah, I hit a dead skunk back at the state line, just as I was leaving Nebraska. “I pulled over at a truck stop and washed off the tires and underneath the car with one of those high-pressure jet nozzles, but I guess I didn’t get it all. “It doesn’t smell like skunk,” he says. “It just smells like road kill. It just smells like rot.” So I ask him if he wants me to pull over and let him walk, and he doesn’t answer. I turn the radio back on. Hank Williams is crooning “You’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” “You catch shit from your parents?” I ask him, and he says, “I caught shit from everyone, okay? I caught shit from the whole fucking town,” and I say fair enough and that I wasn’t trying to pry. “It would be just my luck you gave me AIDS back there,” he mutters. “People back home would say I got what I deserve.” I ask him if he’s got any open sores inside his mouth or any bad teeth or anything like that, and he says no (and looks sort of offended at the suggestion), and I tell him fine, then he can stop worrying about catching AIDS from giving someone a blow job. We pass a rusting red Ford pickup truck stranded in the black-eyed Susans at the side of the highway. The front windshield is busted in and all four tires are flat. “Lucas has a red pickup truck,” says the kid, and when I ask if Lucas is his boyfriend in Rapid City, the kid nods and reaches for his pack on the floorboard between his feet. I told him he could toss it in the backseat, but he said no, he’d rather keep it with him. He’d rather keep it close. I didn’t argue. The kid lifts it onto his lap, black polyester bulging at the seams with whatever the kid holds sacred enough that he’s brought it along on his sojourn west. He unzips the pack, digs about for a moment, then takes out a little snub-nosed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. The sun through the windshield glints dully off stainless steel. My heart does a little dance in my chest, a surprise tarantella, and my mouth goes dry. “That thing loaded?” I ask, trying to sound cool, trying to keep my voice steady, like it’s nothing to me if the kid’s carrying] a gun. I tell myself, shit, if I were hitching in this day and in this age, I’d be carrying a gun, too. “Wouldn’t be much point in my having it if it weren’t loaded, now would there?” And I say no, no I guess there wouldn’t be much point in that at all. He opens up the cylinder to show me there’s a round in all five chambers, and then he snaps it shut again. He aims the pistol out his open window. “You any good with it?” I ask, and the kid shrugs. “I’m good enough,” he replies. “My brother, he was in the Army, over in Iraq or someplace like that. He came back and taught me how to shoot. And then he killed himself.” I glance at myself in the rearview mirror, and then I glance at the kid again, and then I keep my eyes on the road. “Sorry to hear that,” I say, and the kid says, “No, you’re not. You don’t have to pretend you are. I’m sick to death of people pretending shit they don’t really feel.” We pass another billboard for Wall Drug Store, and the kid pantomimes taking a shot at it. Bang, bang, bang, like he’s seven years old, playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, with the neighborhood brats. “Baghdad,” says the kid. “That’s in Iraq, ain’t it?” I nod, and I tell him, yeah, that Baghdad is the capital of Iraq. “Then Iraq is where they sent my brother,” the kid tells me. “He saw a buddy of his get blown up by a landmine. He saw another buddy of his kill a woman because just maybe she was carrying a bomb. Something like that. He said everyone was afraid all the time, no matter how many guns they carried, and he came back still scared. He had to take pills to sleep. I guess he just eventually got tired of being fucking scared all the time. I know I would. He couldn’t get into college, so he got into the Army, instead.” I repress that reflexive urge to say I’m sorry again. Instead, I say, “We’re gonna be stopping just a couple of miles up ahead, so you better put that thing away until we’re back on the road again. You never know when there’s gonna be a state trooper or something.” The kid fires off another imaginary shot or three, and then he says, “Dude, South Dakota’s open carry. What the fuck is it to me whether there’s police around.” And I say fine, whatever, suit yourself, kid. He asks, “Does it make you nervous?” And I admit that it does. “Just a little,” I say. “I’ve never much cared for guns. I didn’t grow up around them, that’s all.” And now I’m thinking about three nights ago at a motel outside Lincoln, sitting on the hood of the car in a motel parking lot, and I’m thinking about the oddly comforting smell of cooling asphalt and about staring up at an ivory-white moon only one night past full. I crane my neck and look up through the dirty, bug-specked windshield and wish there were a few clouds this morning to break the tyranny of that broken china blue sky pressing down on me. Or if not to break it—because that would be asking an awful lot of a few clouds—at least to pose a challenge, at least to stand as a counterpoint. The kid opens his backpack again, and he puts the .38 away. I allow myself to relax a little, quietly sighing the proverbial sigh of relief. “This is the farthest west I’ve ever been,” says the kid, and then he asks, “What’s in Wall?” and he sets the backpack down on the floor between his feet. “Not much at all,” I reply. “Less than a thousand people. There’s a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control facility, just outside town.