A warm, dry California night. I was dragging a rug filled with my mother’s dead boyfriend down a concrete culvert, trying to find a patch of brush, a ditch, any place where I could hide what I had been forced to do just an hour before. I looked up and stopped blubbering long enough to see a tall, skinny kid rise up at the opposite end of the culvert. Bare-chested, he was wearing cutoffs, carrying a long stick, and smoking a pipe. The bowl of the pipe lit up his face when he puffed.
“Hey there,” he said.
“Hey,” I said, and wet my pants. Why I hadn’t done that earlier I didn’t know.
“Who’s that?” he asked, pointing the pipe at the rug.
“My mom’s boyfriend,” I said.
“Dead?”
“What do you think?”
“What’d he do?”
“Tried to kill us.”
“For real?”
I was crying so hard I could not answer.
“Okay,” said the shirtless boy with the pipe, and ran off into the dark. I thought he was going to tell the cops and so I resumed dragging the body in earnest farther down the culvert. Then the shirtless boy returned minus pipe and with a camping shovel. He unfolded the shovel and pointed into the eucalyptus woods. “I’m Joe,” he said.
“Hey,” I said.
“There’s fill dirt about twenty yards north. Soft digging. What’s his name?”
“Harry.”
“Anybody going to miss him?”
I said I did not know. Maybe not.
Joe took one corner of the rug. “How did it happen?” he asked as we dragged the body between the trees, over the dry leaves.
“He broke down the door to my mom’s room.”
“What’d she do?”
“She didn’t wake up. She’s stoned.”
“And?”
“When he saw me, he swung a big hunting knife. He said he was going to gut my mom, then me. I had one of his pistols.”
“Just as a precaution?” Joe asked.
“I guess. He’d beaten her before. He taught me to shoot.” That seemed unnecessary, but it was true.
“Then?”
“I threw a glass at him, to get him out of her bedroom. He followed me down the hall and I shot him three times.”
“Shit! Suicide by kid. Anybody hear the shots?”
“I don’t think so. He fell on an old rug. I rolled him up and dragged him here.”
“Convenient.”
No more questions, for the time being. We dragged the body together and in an hour or so had dug a not-so-shallow grave and rolled him into it, down beyond the reach of coyotes.
Then we filled it in and spread a layer of topsoil and dry brown eucalyptus leaves over the patch.
“I’m Joe,” he said again.
“I remember. I’m Michael,” I said, and we shook hands. “No one’s going to know about this, right?”
“Right,” Joe said. “Our secret.”
I was thirteen. Joe was fourteen. Hell of a way to meet up. But Joe had judged me and I had judged him. In the next few months, he blocked my downhill run to drugs and crime. He even talked to my mom and got her into a program, for a while. He seemed to know a lot about human beings. But for all that, he wasn’t any sort of angel. He always managed to get us into new and improved trouble—upgrades, he called them, like that time on the railroad bridge, or in Chihuahua when we found the mummy and brought it home.
Matter-of-factly, over the next year, Joe assured me that he and I were a team. By being associated with him, with his crazy self-assurance, even his tendency to vanish for weeks, then pop up with plans for another outlandish adventure, I began to feel I was special, too—a capable survivor. As we crisscrossed Southern California and Mexico, hitchhiking or getting our older friends to drive, we kept nearly getting killed, but more than once he saved me from other sorts of grisly death—and together, we helped each other grow up.
The police never did find my mom’s crazy boyfriend. He might still be out there in those woods. And my mother never asked about him, never mentioned him again. She was probably just as glad he wasn’t around to beat on her. Good riddance to one miserably screwed-up bastard.
Most of that shit isn’t worth going back to. My whole life has been a parade of crazy hopes. Hardly any rest. Joe was part of it from that time on. And now we’re stuck here, waiting to be canned. Sardines waiting to be packed in oil.
Then why am I still thinking, still trying to solve problems? Thinking. Sinking. I really am sinking. Before I go to sleep, in my head, all by myself, I spout maxims and rules of thumb like a drunk DI at his fucking retirement party. I’m an old man in a young man’s body. That’s what Joe told me years back when we stood in line to recruit. “You’re an old soul,” he said. “And that ain’t necessarily a good thing.”
It’s even more true now. That’s what battle does to you. That’s what …
Shit. I’m forgetting the best stuff. Really clever stuff. It was all so clear just a moment ago.
Someone grabs my helm and shoves another helm in close. Through the visors I see Jacobi. She looks angry. Her lips form words: “I don’t think they like us!”
No shit. So sleepy. I can’t hear much. All comm has been jammed or cut and the suits are too insulated, too heavy. Jacobi’s hands let me go. She’s checking other helms. Poking, looking, poking again—taking a count. Then she half-walks, half-swims through the silty fluid and returns to me. Again she’s trying to say something, but she points emphatically at the wall. Hey! There’s an Antag peering in, checking to see if we’re still alive. Fucking ugly bird with useless wings, except they seem to be able to swim. Or maybe they’re weightless and that’s the only place those useless wings work—in zero g.
Jacobi slams her helm hard against mine, twists my head left, and I see what’s beside the Antag. It’s a big, shadowy mass, slowly morphing or rotating, can’t tell which, but it has long, sinuous arms. For a moment, it looks like a catamaran viewed head-on—two bodies linked by a thick bridge. Each body sports two very large eyes. Arms emerge from the tips of the bodies, below the eyes—slow, lazy arms.
I have no trouble reading Jacobi’s lips through her visor. I’m thinking the same thing: What the fuck is that?
That’s not all that’s new. I see smaller forms that superficially resemble Antags, crawling by the tank on their knees or feet, wings folded, like bats. Never saw either the squid or the little bats on Mars.
Then the silhouettes move off and the tank goes dark. Hours pass, maybe days. How much in the way of sips and gasps do our heavy suits carry? We finally get organized enough to sit up and form a long oval in the murk at the bottom. We could be in a twelve-step program. At Jacobi’s prodding, some of us stand and try to walk, but there’s nowhere to go.
I get lost all over again in trying to remember Camp Pendleton, Hawthorne, Socotra off the coast of Yemen, Skybase Lewis-McChord. Madigan. Why can’t an instauration come along, one of those preprogrammed moments that make me think I’m somewhere else? Compared to this, that would be a vacation. But there’s no such relief.
I can almost imagine those far-off places are still around, and might return to my life—that I’m here but they’re still out there, still real, and some of the memories carry so such detail—
But the damned suit keeps pinching, cutting, insinuating, and that blocks me from losing myself in any memory, any setting, any world I want so badly to re-create. Worse, it keeps diverting me to the pain of my first year as a teenager. Listening to my mom get beat up. Sitting with Harry, her boyfriend, on the couch as he drank beer and smoked and made me watch grisly YouTube videos with him. Accidents, corpses, history shit. Kept him from beating on Mom, but I hated those videos. Made life seem frail and nasty. Poor fucked-up Harry. Maybe he never had a chance.
I don’t want to remember any more about Harry.