Around about Fort Worth, there is a county road whose name is shot up on a thin metal sign by several steaming holes. Bullet casings and wet gunpowder line the gravel surrounding it. “West Fire Tower” it must have read at some point, the remaining white letters now crosshatched by some hoodlum’s Swiss Army crucible. Down the road a bit is where the old fire tower, a rotten namesake, lays in ruins in the tall grass and the staggering pines. Its top busted off years ago and is mostly eaten away by rust and the acrid saliva of large birds of prey. Every once in a while the wind rushes through the stiff broken staircase and the old burnt away pilings so fast that a satisfying chorus of metallic ‘tings’ sounds from way back in the forest, as if the mosquitos had designed a method of communication slightly more advanced than the transfer of human blood. As if a blind and crusty man had lain there for most of the century, and had died chewing sharp-smelling tobacco, now eternally hocking a yellowy fluid spotted with strings of brown leaves into a crushed metal coffee can.
Cars pass by the fire tower sometimes; the drivers and their passengers pull to the side of the road, cram cigarettes and matches into their loose pockets, stuff their bare feet into some flaking leather boots (chiggers will find the holes, always), and step off the dirt, around the fallen remnants of rotted pillars towards a wide open circle, a clearing behind the trees, towards that broken down Econovan slumped like an invalid over the horizon, and though it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and the sun is all brass and noise, the sweat from the driver’s upper lip and the lit end of his Pall Mall are dull, as if both had been smeared flat across the baking day.
Deep within the spare tire is where he found me, curled into a perfect circle and sucking my thumb.
“ ‘Ey! For Christ’s sake, boy. Git outta there…”
He pulled me out of the middle of the tire, out of the back of the van, by the arms, gently. In the waning afternoon, we sat on the rusted remains of a bumper, and I still sucked my thumb. I could feel the pull of my mouth drawing out all the blood in my hand, and as Jim talked in a slow thorny drumbeat of a voice, I felt the sleepy lull of bloodlessness creep all the way up to my elbow. Just like every Sunday, we dangled our legs over a carburetor, some empty canisters of castor oil, and the great bleeding carcass of an old motorbike, picked apart by ravaging animals and thieves. And just like every Sunday, he plotted while I inhaled each of my fingers.
Jim told me on several occasions that the mystery of childhood was that you remember it always, as clear as the rain that collected between the rims of the tire that had been my bed for a very long time now. He seemed to forget that eventually, water rots everything, and mildew spreads faster when you sleep. If you’re not careful, even the fire tower’s rust, a half a mile away, can find its way to your blood.
~
Around about Texarkana, there is a country road that leads up to a whitewashed porch with a large glass pitcher of sweet tea sitting at the edge of the stairs, or at least, I assume it’s all still there. My mother’s hair – her red hair: I sat on her lap, pudgy and soft, and pulled and twisted the long threads of her red hair that fell around me in great ropes, and I imagined I was a sitting devil in a great curtain of fire. I sat on her lap, and she sang me country western songs until I fell asleep with my head between her breasts, and the long afternoon shadows that reached their tendrils up the stairs were defeated finally by the western sun, settling itself between the branches of two thick oak trees growing into one another on the edge of the property. The tea steamed in the heat, and I dropped to sleep with the faint taste of hot sugar drifting in the haze around us.
The next morning, I sat cross-legged on the countertop, sucking my thumb, and I watched Jim talking low and quiet to her.
The immortal Pall Mall stuck deep between his teeth, he breathed heavily so that I could smell every sulfuric leaf stuffed into the rolling paper like gunpowder, and he pointed emphatically at a piece of paper that I found unfamiliar, some blue lines running each and every way on thin pieces of parchment, forming a web, a second place for us to live, or to be found dead in. Once and only once that morning, he looked at me with jaundiced eyes, veins alive and writhing beneath the sun-pocked skin of his face.
To her, but without taking his eyes off of me, he said, “You think you oughta teach that boy not to suck on his thumb all the livelong day? ‘S liable to fall off…” I looked down at a small wet fingernail and puckered skin. I thought of the bowie knife and its faded shadow impressed upon the back pocket of his jeans where it had rested for many years. Jim had skinned bears with that knife and had their pelts stacked as high as I was in the bed of his truck; with it he had gouged out muskrat eyes as proof of his conquests, and now they hung like curtains along the eaves of his trailer. I quickly blew on my thumb in an attempt to dry the spit off and stuffed every inch of my hand deep within the folds of my legs, hidden from Jim’s shredded back pocket.
And the next month, he raised the bright shining beams and made a skeleton of our new house, a carbon copy taken from the pale blue veins I had seen on the parchment paper before. He fleshed it out, gave it shingles and siding and plaster, and made it proper for us to live in. And I sat on the plush new floor, sucking my thumb and pulling tufts of sticky red carpet from my hair.
The carpet had come in from the back door in rolls as thick as tree trunks. For a few weeks, they laid motionless in the corner, propped lazily against the wall as if they were yawning while someone tried to find a use for them. At first, a spongy foam blanket was laid out and stapled to the floor, and while Jim painted the outside of the house a pallid yellow, my mother and I bounced through each room, seeing how close we could come to touching the new crown molding on the ceilings. When the carpet was finally laid out, a fibrous permanence came into the house. The carpet was red, the red you would find on the edging of a rich woman’s red housecoat, and it was transferred everywhere by a mere touch. And it stuck. Soon, our white walls were covered in red lint; Jim’s smoker’s cough produced red; I began to find red in my comb every morning before school.
For a while, the smells were new. They were new as it was, as I was, but now they were foreign and man-made. They were cigarettes and rubber and sweat and leather and dirt, instead of my mother’s soft cotton shirt, faintly effervescent, dry even in the sun’s afternoon bloodbath.
The next day, we drove west of Dallas. It rained, and so the junebugs lay in sheets on the gravel roads we rode down and buzzed as our tires rolled over them. Next came the frogs, seeking comfort in the puddles on the roads. When the rain dried up, my mother stopped the truck and got out. She turned her head once, I saw, straining her ears to make sense of some tinkling in the trees, but like me, she guessed the rain had gone back to its work. Looking to the west, she saw something hidden in the brush, and then something behind that on the horizon, and she trudged through several old rows of dead grass as high as her hips to find out what was there.
I waited a very long time for her, and all the while I sat in the back seat and sucked my thumb and thought of the sun between the oak trees and tried to smell the sugar in the heat instead of cigarettes.
When she came back, she said nothing and drove me home.
~
That night, we stayed inside, though the squall line that had swept the Northeast part of Texas had come and gone, taking with it the lingering smell of mildew and wet cement. Jim had come over for dinner, and had smoked his cigarettes over the ribs she had cooked. She had taken the meat out of the freezer and sliced it between her fingers it as if it were made of plastic, stiff with sheen and smelling like nothing. When it had thawed, she had rubbed every part – shining white tendons, smacking red muscle, streams of translucent fat – with peppers and salts and smells. She had stuck it outside in a smoker, and I had watched great clouds of flat, gray smoke go up and over into the neighbor’s yards. He smoked over it; he flicked his ashes into the shredded innards of his meal. And he ate it. Chewing into the muscle, I saw little flecks of fat caked onto his teeth, so white and globular that the reflecting light from the overhead lamp blinded me as I sat across the table, watching him and slowly moving my empty fingers to my mouth.
“What’s the matter with you, boy?” he said through a crusty mouthful of beans. “You don’t like it here? Dont’cha wanna stay?”
I didn’t say anything; instead, I looked at my mother, my mother and her red hair. Everything in the kitchen was dark except the lamp that hung above our heads. It was a fluorescent bulb, Jim’s idea, because it was cheaper he said. And yet as I looked at my mother under that fake purplish light, all I could see was her red hair. It was adorned in a vibrant halo, a shaky haze that enveloped every strand. Underneath it all, her eyes sunk into their sockets and sagged under the heavy weight of oily mascara. Her mouth seemed like a dry pouch, with little flakes of skin of varying thicknesses, caked in pink lipstick, all falling about her lips. The worst of it were her wrinkles. The fluorescent lighting revealed to me finally how old my mother truly was – not cotton-soft and effervescent, but sallow and riddled with crevices brimming in dust.
She saw me looking at her. With one furtive, nervous glance in my direction, she found the disgust I was sure I had hidden like a perfect crime.
Suddenly, she got up from the table and walked to the bathroom. She was gone for a very long time, and I heard her rummaging in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror for something. She left Jim and I sitting across the table, that harsh, interrogating light overpowering the two of us. I saw the shadows lengthen under his eyes and nose, and sweat began to form across his upper lip.
The smell of something powdery and bitter reached my nose, and the nostrils and hairs stood on end, and as it mixed with the smoke coming from across the table, I suddenly felt sick.
A deafening thud from the bathroom, like a heavy head of cabbage falling into a wet garbage can, and the next morning I stood outside the property line and watched Jim bolt up the house he himself had built just a month ago. He walked past me without saying a word, but our eyes met – his yellowed and mine small – and the veins in his face pulsed a rhythm wholly unfamiliar to me.
He got to the edge of the road leading up to the house, and waited for me. I sucked my thumb, alone on the pavement, far from him. And then I turned around and followed.
~
I am kicked away. Jim has tried making up for it by talking to me about the direction of the wind or how many more bullets he’s got left in the rifle. All the news he has is foreboding. He offers me tobacco, but he knows I hate the smell, just like some people can’t stand a sweaty t-shirt or horse meat. He knows I’ll never forgive anyone for what I’ve been left to: this heat – this sucking heat, this sucking smoke from a silent follower, and the small dead animals sucking at the windshield behind us, stuck there perhaps by their own blood or sweat.
“Maybe we’ll go back,” I turned to Jim and said without conviction, feeling as if I was much older than I really was.
“Not a chance. Our luck’s run out. People have stopped caring; people don’t go back. Question it all you want, boy, but you know I’m right. Goddamnit, stick that thumb outta your mouth!”
Taking my thumb out of my mouth and putting it back into my pocket, I looked at him. Under a sky pregnant with the heat of a coming storm, I looked at him. His profile leaned against the wall of the van, and in the background, all I could see was the soft grass of summer, waving as a flag does on patriotic stamps, waving with a ferocity that shrinks you. Jim had fallen asleep with his forehead pressed against the inside of the Econovan, his face soon to be creased with dirt and rust. But the wind coming in from the storm, the wind that now filed into the open cavity of the van and filled it up with a swirling semblance of a tornado, would soon sweep free the debris. His mouth now laid open, ghastly open, as if I could play a ball-throwing game inside of it. What jarred me most was that it was a deep black, a flat black, as if his open mouth went only so far as his lips, as if it were solid, as if it could suck you under and trap you as the solid ice of oceans inevitably traps its own inhabitants.
Very carefully, I swallowed hard and sank my neck deep between my shoulders.
“Wouldn’tcha like to stay here forever, boy?” he mumbled in his sleep.
Xeroxes of blueprints strewn about the bare countertops in the kitchen.
They were the same words. The same since he found me hidden in a spare tire left over from the wreckage of a van some one hundred miles west of the house that he had built, the house he had built for my mother.
I put my thumb back into my mouth as he spoke. I sucked at it until it became wrinkled with moisture and all the blood had been pulled into the tip, leaving me yet again with the sensation that my mouth and my fingers were joined by the same tense nerve.
“You’d stay here forever if you had the chance to, wouldn’tcha?” His voice trailed off into a deeper sleep than could manifest speech.
Zeroing in on a lone blade of grass sticking up far enough from the ground for me to reach, I nudged it with my big toe, and it broke; it broke, and it fell apart and disappeared into a tangle of metal and green.
