All the Beautiful Sinners (10 page)

“I want everything for you,” he said.

“I have it,” John13 said.

“You don’t know,” his father said back. “I wish you didn’t ever have to grow up.”

“Dad.”

“I wish it didn’t have to be like this.”

His sweat was acrid, his jaw rough, nonregulation.

John13 tried to pull away, couldn’t.

Son, Scout, Soldier. James.

He tried to pull away again then, and his father held him closer, closer, his thick body racked with sobs, the can at John13’s lower back crunched, the beer slipping down the seat of his pants, and he saw his father for a moment the way he wanted to see him, on his drills, every motion efficient and sure—pure—his hands steady and right, because the world depended on them.

But he wasn’t that person. Just on the radio.

“Dad . . .” John13 said, and his father held him out at arm’s length, appraising him, looking for himself in his son, the muscles on one side of the back of his neck twitching, so that his head kept jerking that way.

“. . . son,” he said, then kept one arm on John13’s shoulder, used the hand of the other to tip the cooler up to the edge of the boat, his eyes apologizing already at a furious pace.

John13 took one step back, away, and for one crystal moment the cooler—the
Mosley
—was perched on the aluminum lip of the boat, and John13 was making deals at a furious pace: that if it would just
float
in there, he would never hurt any living thing again, and he wouldn’t think wrong thoughts, about anybody, and more, and more. But then it started leaning over into the water, turning all his promises the other way, inside out, until they were threats. He moved towards it without even meaning to, never saw the back of his father’s military hand approaching.

It unhinged him, slapped him back into the other side of the boat, and the Mosley slipped into the lake.

Neither of them looked at it, just at each other. John13’s left nostril leaking blood.

“You’re growing up, now,” his father said. “Can you feel it?”

John13 smiled, looked over at the shore. Some of the high-schoolers had a bonfire going, the sparks trailing up into the sky.

“Yeah,” he said, toeing a lifejacket.

His father smiled, then, extended a hand—something you do for a
man
—and John13 smiled back, but it was a different smile altogether.

“Do quickly what you have to do,” he said.

His voice was different, even. He could feel it, hear it, and then he was diving into the water after his radio, making no splash at all.

It was hanging eight feet under the boat, strung out from receiver to headphones, the headphones tangled in the hinge of the cooler, the cooler bobbing just under the surface.

John13 held the receiver hard to his chest, screaming bubbles, and then the fireworks exploded over the water, and it was all color, no sound. Beautiful with no oxygen, the surface of the lake on fire. Independence Day. He screamed, kicking for the boat, his eyes burning, but the slack he made in the headphone cord loosened the headphones from the hinge of the cooler. It corked back up, disappeared—his father, lifting it out, thinking it was him, John13. That he would be attached.

He wasn’t. He was sinking, unable to let go.

Seventy-five feet. John13 reeled the headphones down to him, shoulders jerking when his eardrums burst, but he was going to die anyway, it didn’t matter. The last thing he did was cup the headphones over his ears, to staunch the blood, to
hear
, and then before he could say stop, it was days later.

The head of his bed was against the window, and it wasn’t his window, wasn’t his bed. The hospital, his mother talking to him. She sounded like her mouth was full of tinfoil. She was stroking his hair.

He was alive, the Mosley polished on the top shelf of the closet. Unmossy.

“Dad?” he said, when he could, and his mother explained how John13’s father was living on base now, with one of his friends. That he might be there for a while. That it wasn’t his fault, John13’s.

John13 nodded.

He was alive.

Every time he opened his mouth, his jaw, his ear popped, the drum in there stretched too tight now, but trying to heal.

“It still smells like gunpowder,” one of the nurses said.

Like fireworks.

John13 stood at the window watching the base kids shoot off what they had left over, and flinched with each explosion. They were too far away to hear, but there was something.

It was behind the base, looming: a thunderstorm.

The barometer was dropping, and he could feel it now. In his inner ear.

“Gonna rain,” he said aloud, to nobody.

That night he stayed awake to watch the lightning play on the white walls, and then he was still awake when the storm broke.

It was two months until September.

The clouds were beautiful.

He was alive.

Amos was carrying a dead girl across the pasture. Her mouth kept falling open, but he could usually nudge it shut with his chin before she said anything.

It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Whenever he got to a flat enough place to see his shadow, the wind was making his hair look like a woodcutting he had seen once, where the sun had been behind the hero’s head, with just a narrow ridge showing where the head stopped, the light started. Only that ridge was gone now, had been sliced away.

He felt expansive, large, like he was flying, just very close to the ground. It was always like this before a storm.

Already the rain was coming down in pellets, in tablets, in capsules.

Now he was cutting baking soda and Vitamin C and trucker speed into what was left of the Dilantin.

It was the absolute perfect balance.

Amos smiled so big he almost tipped forward, spilled the girl.

When he pulled her close she tried to bite onto his neck but he angled his jaw up and away, shook his head no to her.

The dead don’t understand.

It’s one of the first things you learn.

But they don’t understand when they’re living, either.

Amos laughed to himself.

At the edge of town, he had to set her up on the cinderblock fence then follow her up, over.

When he padded down on the other side, his legs absorbing the extra weight of her, a giant dog exploded from the porch, frothy lines of saliva arcing around its head like the whiskers of a Chinese dragon.

Amos was entranced, could have watched the dog approach for days, but there was the girl to think about.

He turned around so the dog wouldn’t bite the girl, and the dog hit him in the back, all its slow-motion catching up to it at once. It threw all three of them against the fence, scraping the girl’s face against the rough cinderblock. After Amos had gone to such great pains to keep her pretty for her mom and dad. Now you could see her teeth through her cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to her, his eyebrows up in what felt like an upside down V of concern, then, with the dog pulling at his left elbow, already spinning him around to go for the throat or the belly, he whispered for the girl to wait, rose to meet the personal test this animal was trying to be, for him. Rose to thank it in kind.

Because the teeth were what you had to watch, Amos sacrificed his bandaged right palm to catch the top jaw, a tendon rubberbanding up the backside of his forearm, then got his left fingers around the other jaw and brought the dog down on its side until he could work his feet up into the mouth he was holding open. After that, it was easy: he just wrenched the mouth open wide with his leg muscles, until the skin tore, then the muscle, then the skull, the dog’s new smile gaping and permanent.

It still wasn’t dead, but it was close enough. When the skull had tried to close back in place on each side, it had probably pinched some brain in there, severed it from whatever the dog was trying to think.

Amos squatted, watched the dog pedals its paws into the lawn. He lifted the dog’s thick head and the lower jaw stayed on the ground.

Amos giggled.

He lifted it again, again, loved that goofy expression.

The
storm
, the girl said though, bringing him back, and Amos stood, collected her.

She was right. They didn’t have long here.

Amos’s first thought was to leave her on the lawn furniture couch, to keep the cushions from blowing away—they’d be good for forts, later—or maybe arrange her on the stone bulge of the cellar, so it would look like an alter, but then he saw the treehouse.
Her
treehouse.

Yes.

It was old but it was good.

He set her up there, followed to make sure it would work.

It was perfect, had been a fort a few years ago.

Amos propped her up on the outer halfwall, so she could see into the living room, then he looked into the house with her, and then the sky took a deep breath, held it.

Amos and the girl peered up, waiting.

First one hailstone hit the ground, then ten thousand, like they’d been in a canvas tarp up there, and somebody had finally pulled the string on it.

And then it was over. Car alarms all over town screaming. Speckled eggs shattered in their nests. Amos remembered being young-young, thinking ducks and birds were filled with eggs, that they had to be so careful about ever bumping into anything. That they would bleed yolk if they did.

Now
now
now
, though, Amos told himself, tapping his temples on both sides. Stay in the now only. No falling backwards anymore. It was too easy.

It was the Dilantin, he knew. It pulled down the walls keeping yesterday back. Looking backwards was no help, though.

But he had discipline. Had had it surgically implanted.

He made himself look into the living room with the girl, be only in this one place instead of trying to straddle decades like a walking suicide.

The living room, that living room.

It
was
Indian, right?

This was the girl’s treehouse, so this was the right address. You don’t take treehouses with you when you move. But still. The living room was a Mr. Rogers living room, clean and neat, no oil paintings of chiefs, no sweetgrass braids on the speakers. And there were no cars in the backyard. And also there
was
a yard.

But there were train tracks right on the other side of the fence that would be thunder at night, shake the windows in their frames, roll baseballs out from behind the refrigerator.

And the dog had been bigger than any dog should have been. And meaner.

It’s
all
right
, the girl told him, and Amos sat back, pinkied some more Dilantin up from his pocket, inhaled it.

It’s all right.

Amos grabbed onto the top of the treehouse’s halfwall, no discipline at all, and fell the hell back through time. But it wasn’t his fault. He’d heard that before was the thing. What she’d said, he’d heard it before, just like that.

It was the year before Father had found him. A day with bleachers. The wind blowing but not like this, just gentle, to wick the sweat from your face.

Baseball. A diamond made of chalk.

A kid in the outfield all of the sudden screaming.

Amos was just eleven, was waiting for Coach to wave him home, but now Coach was looking to the outfield.

Everybody was.

One of the high school boys vaulted over the fence, never spilling his coke, and trotted out ahead of everybody, then stepped back himself, his coke sloshing over the edge now.

There was something on the ground. In the grass. Trying to move, trying to struggle through.

Amos looked down to it and a shrieking filled his head.

It was a turtle, just with no shell.

Not a turtle that had been cracked open on the road by a car tire and had the bad luck to live, but one that had been born naked, just like this. Wrinkled and green and leathery, too skinny, its neck the wrong kind of long, but not a baby anymore either. It had been like this for years already. And now it was turning itself in.

“It’s all right,” Coach had said, and stepped forward with his cleats, put the turtle out of its misery in a way that made Amos straighten his own back.

He hadn’t been able to finish the game after that, couldn’t stop crying, had to sit in the dugout all through the next inning until he got in trouble for drinking all the water.

“
No
!” Amos told the girl, it
wasn’t
all right, and, to keep her standing there while he went back for her brother, he founds the tools all the way on their shelf in the shed with the flappy door and nailed her hands to the top of the halfwall. She didn’t even bleed. That’s how he knew she’d wanted him to do it.

On the way out of the yard, he stopped to inspect the dog again.

Its one eye was watching him. Its tail whapped against the ground.

Amos petted it, joked with it, pulling its tongue out so it could lick its own eye, and then lightning hit a pole across the pasture to remind him what was coming, what kind of day it was here in the neighborhood.

He melted over the fence, inhaled some more Dilantin for the strength he would need to cross the elevated railbed again, and collected the boy from the maroon Monte Carlo’s trunk. It was an Indian car, already a feather on the mirror and everything.

On the way back, the boy kept crying—something was coming out of his eyes anyway—so Amos finally broke down and gave in and caved, zero discipline, told the boy about his first ever concert, how perfect it had been. Def Leppard, and Amos made his voice like a chant, rising and falling, to lull the boy into the coliseum.

Def Leppard was big, then, he said. The biggest. Hello America. Rise up, gather ’round, Amos knew all of them. They were all he had in his basement. And the crowd, God. Throngs of people you could unzip from neck to crotch, to let the sheep they were in secret slump out steaming at your feet, their blank stares thankful.

This was going to be Amos’s first time, solo.

In line to get through the doors Amos had stood by Father and shifted from foot to foot, trying to hold his lips in no particular manner. Because this could be another lesson. They might leave the concert halfway through, drive to a woman gagged and bound in a storage unit on the other side of town. Meaning
she
would be his first.

But Father had promised. This was exactly why he’d taken Amos from his first home, he said. He could see this in him, that he could do this, that he someday would, all alone, out in the real world.

They’d parked the van nine blocks away, legally, because a ticket under the wipers could be the one thing that gives you away, Berkowitz. Walking away from it they looked back, to map out all the angles, to fix the van in their minds, so that if it looked any different three hours later, they could just keep walking.

But Def Leppard. It looked like it was really going to happen.

Father put on his black wraparound shades, placed his hand on Amos’s shoulder. There was loose fabric there, enough to grab onto. And the jacket, it was a trick to unzip, hard to shrug out of.

He would find you, though, if you ran. Amos knew better by now, didn’t even try anymore. Didn’t want to. Would never go back even if he could.

The assignment part of the concert, the learning part, was that Amos was supposed to make it look like an accident. Nobody was ever supposed to know. That was the best trick, the best way not to ever get caught: blame it on something normal.

It was how Father had been able to keep going for so long.

But first, the actual and real concert, standing arms-up with thousands of other people. And the songs you already know. It’s like the shapes of the words are in your head already, waiting for the band to fill them with sound. And then the girl stands up from the audience, twice as tall as the rest—on a guy’s shoulders—and peels her shirt up over her pale breasts, the spotlights holding on her, and you realize you’re alone, untethered, no leash, no hand on your shoulder, Father melted back into the mass of people. You step forward. It’s not that you haven’t seen flesh before like this, had to take it apart in the long, narrow basement of the house then dispose of it in various ways, it’s that you’ve never seen it so
willing
. And so you step forward, and you step forward, entranced, and then the head between the girl’s legs resolves into a face, and he’s looking at you look at her, and you know
who
, now, just like Father said you would.

He was right again. Like always. It is a love story every time.

In your pocket is the bar of soap he’s told you to use. It’s the
only
thing you can use.

Because you have to be ingenuitive. Have to be able to think, to use everything he’s been teaching you all these years.

You lower your head, slip between the warm bodies to the wide, concrete hall, and from there to the bathroom that says it’s being cleaned even though it’s not.

It’s empty, just leftover pot smoke up near the lights. Perfect.

Fourteen minutes later, after a stream of other people who don’t care about the yellow sign either, the guy who was holding the girl up into the light walks in, has been looking everywhere for your brown ass, he says, like the looking’s made him even madder. He also says that it figures you’d be playing with yourself in here alone.

You stand at the urinal not peeing, not playing with yourself, your belt open but your pants buttoned, and you wait, don’t want to rush this. Because you only get one first time.

He’s behind you, leaned against the sinks, arms crossed, staring.

“Like what you saw?” he says.

You turn, look at him.

His hair is long too, but dry and brittle. Because his father doesn’t wash it for him every other day in the sink, then sit him in the kitchen, inspect for split ends, take them off with a pair of professional scissors. Because his father doesn’t love him.

“So you like white women?” the guy is saying now, talking himself up to wherever he plans to take you.

You reach up to flush then step closer to him, closer, like you just want the sink here. He’s taller than you, so isn’t afraid. He should never have kept his arms crossed, though. It’ll take too long to untangle them.

“She’s a whore,” you tell him—the girl—and just as he smiles, not really disagreeing, you do it: whip around behind him, wrapping his arms up, his hair in there too, so he can’t come back with his head.

You drag him into the handicapped stall, kick the door out hard, so that when it swings back, it’ll wedge itself into the frame. Because you don’t have time or hands to mess with the lock.

Four feet away, at the row of urinals, someone starts peeing, a steady, confident stream.

Father.

He doesn’t flush, doesn’t leave, just listens. Is probably even the one who told the guy where you were.

The guy in your arms kicks the toilet paper dispenser, the metal wall, the toilet itself. Pushes you back into the wall over and over, until you both fall into the sludge.