The next time the father went to get the mail he found the whole box fat with caterpillars. They spilled out as he pulled the lid down. They were curled and brightly hued, some in a webbing. Some had hair as long as half a foot and fat as someone’s finger. Some wore yellow and some wore orange, some wore gold or green and black or silver, messed in spindles, mounds. Some were a color the father could not think of the name of, though somehow it reminded him of a stretch of land for sale somewhere in Nebraska. The father had never been to Nebraska. The critters fell and wiggled on the concrete. There were hundreds of them stuffed inside the mailbox. There was no room for the mail.
The father went to the garage and got a cup and bucket and went back and used the cup to scoop the caterpillars out. He didn’t want to touch them with his fingers—he didn’t like that. Crawling. He didn’t want to kill them either. The father had heard stories of men becoming things in other lives—how when you are reborn you could come as any other. You could come back as a wall. The father imagined his father there in the mailbox now, spackled, wet with wriggling, and his father’s father, and father’s father’s father, on from there. The father imagined all the prior men in his dead family there in the mailbox waiting for him, destined. This was some kind of delivery.
In careful scoops the father took the caterpillars from the mailbox and when he’d filled the bucket up he carried them away. He went off behind the house and through the forest following a wire until he got to some small exact place, in the mud. He dumped the bucket in a pile of colored moss or mold that’d grown up in this location, groggy bloom. The caterpillars (fathers) squirmed and squirted. Many slunk or screamed along the ground. Some submerged headfirst down into the dirt, building tunnels, which the father had never seen a caterpillar do, down and down into the earth. Then silence.
The father went back to the mailbox and filled the bucket up again. He hadn’t thought there’d be enough caterpillars to fill the bucket twice. But the caterpillars filled the second bucket and a third and fourth and once again. He carried each load to the same place, the ground there darkening with every dump, rising up, a structure. By the time the father had carried twelve loads he was very tired and soaked with wetting and not so much interested in preserving the caterpillars anymore. He could hardly blink or breathe. He stopped and stood for some long second staring straight up into the long column of air carried above him, into the barely yellow sky, on pause—his spine inside him, hiding—his head’s blood inside out and upside down.
If the father ever played a Hammond organ, he would find he was naturally a master. Elevator music. Careful evenings. Tone wheels in his heart and in his hands.
Moving again from the mailbox, the father went and uncoiled the garden hose from its spindle set upon the house, its source mouth fed by pipes buried underneath the dirt. The father dragged the hose around the house. With the far end of the tangle he sprayed out the inside of the mailbox, flooding pressure, until it was clean and clear enough to kiss. On the ground below the mailbox the crap from all the gashing caterpillars pillowed and piled over. Their minor bodies gave off what looked like human blood, a little lake and many rivers. The warm ground seemed to sauté the runoff.
Several thousand gallons later—in which a whole day passed, bringing the father full-scale back to the exact second of the day as the second in the day before when he’d stopped realizing where he was—the father stood there for some time in waning sunlight and admired what he’d done. His hands had a slow itch. He craved chili. He scratched his hands together, knuckles in friction, and then he went inside and got online. On a credit card he’d never used before, christening, he ordered ten new magazines that would be delivered to his gorgeous, sparkling, brilliant, bending mailbox once a month.
The magazines were:
1. Penthouse
2. Enormous Women
3. Better Homes & Gardens
4. The Father Life: The Men’s Magazine for Dads
5. [THIS MAGAZINE DOES NOT HAVE A NAME]
6. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly
7. Animal Husbandry Enthusiast
8. Teen People
9. TV Guide
10. Guide to TV Guide