Hystopia: A Novel Page 18

  He turned to Hank in the dark and spoke in a low voice, as if sharing a secret.

  You’d know about earning trust, wouldn’t you, Hank?

  Hank stared at the faint outline of trees and brush in the moonless dark.

  I’d know about what it’s like to make damn sure I look like I give a shit, he said. If that’s what you’re saying.

  I feel like killing something, Rake said. He got up and crossed the yard to the shed, the coal of his cigar an orange point, and when he came back he had the ax.

  You feel like killing something?

  Sure, I feel like killing, Hank said, resisting the urge to wrest the ax from Rake’s hand and put it into his head, to unfold and feel the old primeval rage retroactively. To kill and then locate the impulse to kill in the act itself.

  You’re thinking this is some kind of test, Rake said.

  No. I don’t think you’re the type to test, Hank said, rubbing his sweaty palms on his pants. I think you’re the type to go ahead and make a move. He stood up in front of Rake and waited. He knew that one wrong move and Rake would be upstairs in the house, raising the ax over Meg.

  I think you’re the kind of man who strikes first and takes a look at the ramifications later. And I’m the same kind of man, Rake. So if what you’re saying is you think I’m a different man, or that I betrayed you somehow with Meg, out there on my run, then we might as well kill each other right here, he said. Then Rake had his arm on his shoulder and they were hugging, saying fuck fuck, and Rake was still saying, I want to kill something. He took the ax and went back to the shed, with Hank following beside him, and killed the new dog with one swift chop, a jangle of chain and a single, soft yelp, and then he stepped away and Hank, who felt sorrow akin to a tree sorrow, followed him back to the chair and had another drink. In the false camaraderie, Hank imagined winning an acting award, hoisting the trophy into the air as he thanked his beloved Meg for being with him when he needed it, and MomMom for all her demented wisdom, and the stars in the sky and then, finally, above all, the trees for being such good role models over the years, strong and stable and outside of the human realm, and when he laughed he did it from his belly and Rake joined in.

  RUMORS AFLOAT

  Summer had begun to push north through tense days. The days seemed long, with the sun coming up early and setting late, but they weren’t that deep into the summer. What was it? Late June? Early July? Nights were still cool, but in the middle of the day, in the seething tension and silence, the sun baked the grass in the yard and curled the leaves in the trees. A stench of decay wafted in from the shore, because things were dying in the sun, rotting all around the state. On the beach blackflies were rising into the sky in swarms from the crags along the shore, spinning outward and coming back together like migrating birds. There was the smell of the dog, too.

  He was watching her bury a dog again, out by the shed. He leaned down and looked at the hole. It was deep and wide—deep enough for the dog. He needed more time so he told her to keep going. When she took another break he looked into the hole again and spoke softly. Look, Rake’s wound up more than usual, and his suspicions are high. I think we can take advantage of his state, channel it back at him somehow.

  He gave her a soft swat on her back and watched as she put her heel on the shovel and tried hard not to look at the remains of the dog, sagging but not part of the earth yet, just like the other dog but sadder this time. The smell was fantastic, burning into the nose and staying there.

  I’m getting scared of you, she said. Nothing moved on her face and he saw that she was completely serious. Her shoulders were pink from the sun and he longed—more than anything in the world—to touch them, to run his fingers along her back, to pull her up against his chest and feel her looking up at him in a sweet release from fear. He gazed around the yard and saw Haze in the trees, standing as straight and still as a Buckingham Palace guard. His eyes and face were in shadow, but he was watching carefully. Suffering seemed to slip into him and stay there forever; he knew how to hold himself when it came to military-style actions. He had gained back some of the weight he had lost on his last run. On the other side of the yard, MomMom was again taking laundry down and putting it in a basket, wooden pins in her mouth, and then taking the same sheets she’d folded and putting them back up again, pinning them in a long line—standing back and walking along amid them, weaving through them as they sailed in the wind—and then taking them down and repeating the process.

  It wasn’t true, but he thought he saw this in her eyes, as she looked at him without blinking, anger and fear and something terrible, some judgment: Why don’t you do something, or let me do something. To bide time in a strategic manner is foolish beyond a certain point, and if you could remember your war experience you’d know that for a fact. And he wanted to say (but he couldn’t, with Haze in the woods, watching) that he was sure that what he was waiting for would come. He was trusting his instincts: a sense, deep, deep inside—tied most likely to his love of trees—that told him that when things got to a terrible climax they would somehow resolve in a plan of action. He lost his train of thought and pushed her away and ordered her to dig deeper, because Rake had shouted something from the upstairs window, not a word, at least not anything discernible, but a barking sound, or a howl.

  * * *

  I’m watching you, he said, to Haze, cornering him in the yard that evening, trying to bore into the kid’s eyes, to put the fear in him and make sure he knew where he was situated in the structure of things, but the kid just returned his look and said, Well, I’m watching you watch me, and he got up and stood shirtless, his chest concave and hairless. He was jittery in a way that suggested he was going to try something soon. Inevitability was implicit in his distance, his hanging back on the margins of the yard, hidden in the brush, or in the shed doorway, back far enough to be hidden in shadow.

  I see what you’re doing, Haze said. I know you and that girl are up to something.

  Hank threw an uppercut—he felt good doing this and imagined (but wasn’t sure) that he had a memory of boxing somewhere, a club back in Detroit, the swat of leather against a bag, the echoey glove-on-glove slap of men sparring—that struck the kid in the jaw. Then he followed with a jab and watched him as he flopped to the ground and looked up with a smile smeary with pink.

  That was a sucker punch, he said. That second one. The first one I saw coming.

  You’re lucky I didn’t hit you in your good eye, and you’re lucky I don’t kill you right now, Hank said.

  Who says I can see out of the eye? Haze said. Who says it’s my good eye?

  I says, Hank said. And I’m telling you to be careful what you see.

  If it sees, it’s gonna see what it wants to see.

  That’s what I’m saying. Everything that eye needs to see has been seen, he said, and then for good measure he aimed a kick into the kid’s chest and left him squirming in the yard to consider his place in the pecking order and how easily it could shift—the same as the wind blowing up the sheets—with a sudden movement of flesh. Exhausted, he walked into the trees so the kid couldn’t see how he was sweating. Instilling fear wasn’t his way. Old Hank would’ve felt a surge of joy, he speculated. His ears were buzzing. Through the trees he could sense the lake, beyond, throwing itself urgently into the sky. Out there his old memories rested, waiting to be reclaimed.

  * * *

  They could feel it, a tightening sense of doom in the long afternoons. Rake sorted on the kitchen table, picking the pills up one by one, holding them to the light for inspection, placing them in bags, and then he sat in the yard drinking, expounding on his need for speed and the rumors he’d been picking up (or so he claimed) on his drives in the morning to connect (so he claimed) with Black Flag members. One of the rumors concerned a duel up on Isle Royale, a formal confrontation between two grunts who had fought in the same unit and had betrayed each other during a reenactment, the same way they had betrayed each other when they were deploye
d. They’d shot each other dead, and their seconds, the guys who helped coordinate the duel, got into it and offed each other, too, but the cops or some investigative agents from the Corps had found the setup, the handkerchief that one of the seconds used to start the duel and the rope that was the line between them, and there’d been witnesses, too, he explained, his eyes bright with excitement. Rumors of the double-enfold, double-dose of Tripizoid that Black Flag members used as they reenacted battles so intense they went insane and had to fight them over and over again. Rumors that Canada was trying to establish a new kind of Corps, something to counter Kennedy’s vision, a group that would reenact with a different, better drug, something that didn’t leave even a trace, a fuzzball. The rumors went in and out of mouths until they somehow reached Rake, who went out—random times, random modes, random ways—and came back to fill the air with talk, his voice gleeful as he described Oswald’s twin, who was making a final salute and taking aim, following the president as he toured the Midwest again. Don’t fuck it up this time, Rake shouted. We’re counting on you to do what the rumor fucking says you’re gonna do.

  Whenever she arose out of the stupor of the drugs, it came to her that she had been in love with the guy in her vision when she was seventeen or eighteen. She remembered that sadness of knowing he would be gone and lost forever, one way or another.

  From the vision she’d had underwater, she connected to another memory she had, a boy on the beach, in the dunes on Lake Michigan, his body young and lean in the sun, his eyes liquid blue and squinting, the sweet smile with which he’d closed in for a kiss, a breeze blowing over them and shifting the razor grass, the salty taste of his kisses, and she knew—in bed, alone, trying to extract meaning from the voice she’d heard—that he was, in the memory, heading soon to Vietnam. His number had been called, and this was one of the last days they’d spend together.

  Billy-T, Hank said, when she mentioned his name. That rings a bell. I feel like I know that name for sure although I have to admit I don’t know it the way I should know it except I do somehow—and I’ll admit that maybe I’m just imagining that there’s a connection, Meg, maybe I’m just taking a hopeful spark that doesn’t exist and turning it into a lament that has something to do with something I’ve lost. It’s a name stuck in whatever I enfolded when I treated myself. That’s what I like to think.

  Hank, she said softly. You’re long-winded. Did you know that?

  I do know that, he said.

  They were on the porch. He had her hands tied and they knew that Rake would appear at any moment. He went out and came back at random intervals, but there was still a rhythm to his movement, and his car had a bad muffler and, if the wind was right, was audible from a half mile away.

  It bothers me that I think I know the name, he added. But if I know it, it’s likely that Rake knows it, too. There must be a connection. It tempts me to try to unfold a little bit of myself, to get in there and poke around.

  He comes at night to my room and when he’s touching me I want to scream because I’m sure he wants to kill me. He talks to me and he talks to me and I can tell he’s wondering if something in me unfolded, and he wants to know what it is and he’s fishing around for it. We have to do something.

  We’ll take action soon.

  He led her down the trail toward the water. The afternoon air was sweet and soft. They stopped for a moment and listened for footsteps behind them. At the fork he took her to the right, a path that ran through forest to a clearing—he left her hands tied just in case. In the clearing a small brook bubbled up to the surface. He scanned around again and then hunched down to scoop some water, washing his face, and he loosened her ropes, let them hang, and told her to take a drink. She drank and splashed her face and when she came back up she was smiling. He nodded and retied her hands and they continued along the trail for about half a mile, cutting down to the soft, sandy soil, along the low-growing shrubs and razor grass and then along rockier ground until they got to a cut in the headland, a path in the embankment, a natural way to the shore. He stopped her and smelled the air, listening to the sigh of the surf, and then took her by the hand—gently, softly twisting his fingers against hers, holding her so their arms were touching—down to the beach, where he loosened the ropes and then pulled them away. The stones on the beach were dried white, coated with powder, except where breakers had come in, forming black tongues, and when they walked they kicked them over and blackflies swirled. There was a strong fishy odor drifting from the west—he took a deep breath—where alewives had died en masse, washed up in clots, a stench, when it drifted in, so persuasive it seemed to be saying something.

  There might be something in the rumor about men having duels, she said, swiping the flies off her arm, shaking them out of her hair. He’s mentioned it a few times, so he’s thinking a lot about it.

  Hank looked out at the water, his voice low and weary. Well, a duel is an arrangement, a formality, an unnatural structure around death. It’s a way to solve disputes. It’s a way to make sure two men shoot at each other no matter what. It doesn’t make sense that men up there, trying to reclaim their glory days, would resort to duels. It seems too orderly. Too pat. But then maybe that’s why it’s a rumor and not necessarily true. Maybe it’s something hoped for, deep down. Not by Rake but by whoever’s out there dreaming. Someone thought about duels and then they imagined a story behind it, or they were delusional and believed what they imagined, something like that.

  He knew what he was feeling—a chill went through him and he shivered. He was resisting the urge to unfold himself, to reverse the treatment he had given himself, to go back to the water, to put his feet in the lake, to dive all the way in and hold himself under. He sat next to her and looked at the sky, at the pearly whites and heavy grays and deeper silvers out to the horizon, gripping the water as it reached up—close in color, not too different—and the sky reached down to form a slice of deeper dark where the two met, and the heavy waves, closer in, lumbering slowly with large gaps between as if avoiding each other, and he could hear—in the sound of the waves, in the lift of the wind—the way it spoke to the trees behind them, and the trees were speaking back, with a deep sigh, carrying the far-off scent of wide, boreal forests in the high reaches of the Canadian Shield, where an answer to the eternal question was forming.

  RETURN

  It takes two to fight and five to riot, Singleton thought, struggling to keep his attention on the road as they drove to her father’s house. Kids were throwing rocks, darting out of yards with their arms raised, aiming at whatever was moving. The trick was to keep to a moderate speed, not too fast to kill someone if they ran out, but fast enough to scare, and it was important to stay on the side streets—empty, sad-looking, arched over with trees.

  “Didn’t your old man have some kind of escape plan?”

  Wendy stared ahead and said, “He said he’d stick it out. We’ll have to drag him out. It’s going to take force.”

  “Good old force,” Singleton said, abstractly.

  The horizon was a rubber gasket of dark clouds. Looters were gathering.

  “He’s incredibly stubborn. He’s been through a lot. He’ll see this as one more thing to go through.”

  She spun the radio dial through static and signals of the Emergency Broadcast System. Finally she found Iggy All the Time, another spin of Fun House, the beat quicker than usual because the turntable was fast. Iggy’s voice had a fresh manic edge. Two blocks from Wendy’s house, they passed kids lugging cans of gasoline. A block later, they passed the kid in the yard, the one who had been striking the charge pose, and he turned with his middle finger raised.

  “L.A. Blues” ended but the needle stayed skipping and popping into the runout groove.

  Her father’s house sat serenely amid the unusually green trees. The Zomboid sat in his wheelchair with a rifle on his lap, the wind ruffling his long blond hair. As they pulled to the curb he raised one hand, slowly, and made a victory sign. Wendy put her hands
over her face and sighed, sliding down.

  “Peace,” he shouted. “It’s good to see the Cav arrive to save the day. Never too late, never on time.” He wheeled himself forward, pressing his foot supports against the chain link.

  “Guess he got the use of his hands back,” Singleton said. They watched him back up and shove against the fence again.

  “He’s always had the use of his hands. Believe me, he knew how to use his hands.” Her voice was low and sad. “I should go and say how sorry I am that we can’t take him along with us. I should reconcile with him somehow. But I can’t do it.”

  “Man, the sound of a skipping needle,” Singleton said. “You go in and talk with your father. Tell him we’re heading north and we need him with us for support, armed support. Make sure he understands we’re heading on a mission. Throw him a bone. Make him feel he’ll be part of something big.”

  She got out of the car walked up the path. He dragged his duffel into the front seat, unzipped it, and took the gun out from beneath a pair of pants. He snapped open the chamber, checked it, snapped it shut, and sighed because his hand felt a kinship with the crosshatch, no-slip surface of the grip, the heft. He thought of Rake’s face in the file, the face in the dream. He tucked the gun into his pants and pulled his shirt down and got out of the car and stood in the evening light. There was a faint tannic smell in the air. In the yard the Zomboid, his hands lax on his gun, called out, “Wait, man, wait. Come over here, man, and help a fellow out.”

  At the fence he saw that the Zomboid’s eyes were slightly off in some kind of high.