Ceremony of Flies (11 page)

I blink and blink until my vision clears. Harvey and Baldy are across the courtyard. They are misshapen silhouettes, like a boy and his dog lawn ornaments made without a pattern, against the washed-out white of the sky.

I run to them. The charred air is heavy in my chest. “What the hell are you doing?” I yell as I run. It comes out sounding like some raspy old train station bitch yelling about the end of the world to passersby. “You scared the crap out of me,” I gasp as I grab Harvey and pull him to me.

He squirms to get free.

I let him go. Maybe I overreacted a little. My mom was always doing that. If I was ten minutes late getting home from school, she acted like I’d been taken hostage by a pedophile. I always hated that crap when I was a kid. I guess I got it from her.

Fuck.

I always said I was never going to do that if I ever had a kid.

I completely get it, though. This was how my mom felt, every time.

“Where’d you get water?” I ask Harvey, who’s floating an origami boat in a basin of grimy water.

“From the well.” He waves his arm. He laughs and the sound of it echoes in a hollow, creepy way.

Why is that funny?

Beyond the sheds that look like they might have held garden tools or bicycles or something, all I see is the irregular checkerboard of Joshua trees and tufts of desert grass spreading out to infinity. No well. I want, I
need
, water.

“Show me.” I take Harvey’s hand and pull him to his feet, not giving him time to protest.

Baldy growls and I could swear his eyes flash red. Must be the light hitting the inside of his eyes just right.

Don’t dog eyes glow green? Or maybe it’s red.

Harvey runs through the gap between a shed and one of the larger buildings, dragging me with him.

He drops my hand and rushes up to a little brick well that looks just like an illustration from a book of nursery rhymes. He jumps up on the edge and throws his leg over.

“No!”

I lunge for him and pull him off the ledge. I know I said I wouldn’t act like that anymore, but I can’t stop myself.

Do all kids jump like that? He seemed to bounce once and fly. It wasn’t so long ago that I was a kid. I could never do that, I don’t think.

Once he is safely on the ground, I notice the scales under my feet. They cover the ground like cherry blossom petals. Weird place for fish scales to be. A pail dangles at the end of a rope with a ladle hanging from it. Is that sanitary? My throat is so dry, I don’t care.

As I am drinking, Harvey takes off running.

Fuck.

Kids are kind of a pain in the ass.

Out in front of the semicircle of mission buildings, the priest leans under the hood of Rex’s car.

Bastard.

I hate that guy. He thinks he can just tell me what to do. Fucking priest thinks he’s going to be
my
moral compass, he’s got another thing coming. His neck looks too long as he’s leaning over the engine, like a lizard or something. I think about the logistics of slamming the hood on his head. Would that even kill a guy? Or would he just push it up and be seriously pissed about it. You never can tell about things like that. TV makes it look like one little bonk on the head and down they go. I’ve got the scar from where my broken rib poked through my skin to prove that’s not the case.

Harvey runs right up to Rex, which means he also runs right up to the priest.

Fucking kid.

Doesn’t he know that priest is the enemy? The priest is trying to take Harvey away. Harvey acts like he isn’t even scared. Maybe he’s got faith that I will protect him. I wish I had that kind of faith.

I hurry over to where they’re working. Not too fast though. I’m not going to let that son of a bitch know I’m worried.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey, Kitty. Listen to this.” Rex grins real big and cranks the engine. It roars and then settles down to a hum like the purr of a happy cat.

Rex jumps out of the driver’s seat. “Whoo! Whoo! On the road again. Mexico, here we come.”

“Yay!” I say without any sarcasm for the first time ever in my life.

I mean it.

Fucking yay!

I can’t wait to get out of this place.

The priest wipes his hands on a rag. He shakes his head like he’s especially sad as he grabs his cane. Where the hell did that come from? Damn priests and their conjuring abilities. His eyes settle on Harvey and stay there.

“The boy will be staying here with us, like we agreed.”

“No, no, we did not agree.” My voice warbles and sounds like I’m unsure of myself.

I’m not.

The father puts his hands on Harvey.

I spring. I clutch Harvey and pull him away.

The priest swings his cane. It connects with the bridge of my nose. A sharp white pain shoots through my skull. I can’t see through the milky-white opacity of agony.

I can hear though.

POP! POP! The sound expands like an earache. It’s followed by an ominous thud of a body hitting the ground.

An acrid, sulfurous smell envelopes me as my vision clears.

The father lies in the sand. There’s a gaping hole where his forehead should be.

Rex doesn’t look right. Sweat drips from his face. He’s holding the gun. His hand is shaking.

Even Baldy the dog looks shocked by Rex’s behavior.

I snatch Harvey up and cover his eyes. I run with him to the car.

“Go!”

Rex takes too long to react. He stares at the fallen priest. All of him is shaking like he’s having a seizure. Now is not the time for that.

A dark shadow crosses in front of the sun. Blocks the light like an eclipse. A
thwap, thwap, thwap
sound fills the air. Giant beating wings.

Harvey knocks my hand away from his eyes.

“Azrael flies,” he says in that deep too-old voice.

“Let’s go!” I shriek.

11

One August when I was a kid
,
our central air broke down. It was hot like I’d never experienced before. Me and my mom lay on the tile floor in the kitchen and stayed perfectly still. It didn’t help much. The window was open and I could hear the neighbor’s dog yapping and the zoom of cars passing by. The yellow gingham curtain didn’t move a bit. The wind chimes with the silver bird heads on tubes like whistles didn’t stir. It was take-your-breath-away hot.

My mom told me a story about a dog that was stolen from his home and sent in a crate to the Yukon to be a sled dog. She told me that story because it had a lot of snow in it and I guess she thought that would make the heat easier to bear. It was cool that she tried something creative like that.

That night my dad came home with a new air conditioner. All the stores around our house had sold out of air conditioners because of the heat wave and he was late because he went all over the place looking for one. That was a nice sentiment and all, but it didn’t matter. We’d already done the suffering, his good intentions didn’t take any of that away. I remember wanting to bite and scratch and kick him. My mom had to hold me back. I was a kid but I was pretty sure I could have done some damage if she’d let go of me.

I was overreacting back then. It wasn’t like the heat was life-threatening.

The heat is life-threatening now. Baldy the dog is panting harder than I’ve ever seen a dog pant. He keeps saying,
water
, over and over. It’s seriously creeping me out. I know dogs can’t talk. I know it. But I completely understand this one.

Harvey was crying earlier. He stopped when I yelled at him. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but fuck, I know it’s hot, you don’t have to keep saying it. He didn’t exactly stop the second I yelled. He, in fact, cried even harder, then climbed down on the floor where I can’t see him. He sobbed and heaved and probably lost tons of water from his body. Add that to the list of shit not to do to a kid. Seriously, how is it possible to fuck up so much in just one day? I’m feeling kind of like I might want to forgive my parents for some of the things they did because, damn. Kids seem like an unwinnable game. How are there even still people on earth? I wish Harvey was crying now because then I’d at least know…

Fuck.

I think we’re going to die. I can’t see an alternative.

Linda is barely moving. Whatever Rex and the priest fixed didn’t stay fixed for long. The hot tar, burning-plastic smell gags me. Linda is probably going to be the first of us to go.

I’m going to miss her. She feels like a friend.

The lump from the fly bite on Rex’s neck looks really bad. It’s swollen to the size of a slider from White Castle. The part where he was bitten is oozing and turning purple. The edges of the wound look like liver. There’s another bite on his cheek that’s starting to puff up too. The veins in his neck stand out too much from the skin. He’s not the right color. His face is a bluish shade of gray I’ve only seen on really old homeless guys on the coldest days of winter.

I’m driving because Rex needs to sleep.
Needs to sleep
might not be exactly the right way to say it. Sleeping isn’t really optional with Rex. I think he might be unconscious, but I don’t know how to tell for sure. His chest is rising and falling, so there’s that at least. He needs water, food, a doctor.

I’m thirstier than I can ever remember. And I don’t want to look, but I know my face is burned. It’s going to take a whole lot of lotion to cure sunburn that hurts as much as this one. Sunburn seems almost stupid to think about. But I do, but only a little.

The hum of flies is not quite as loud as the grind and ping of Linda’s engine. I swat them away but they crawl over Rex like he’s already dead. That’s the most horrible sight I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some horrible shit. All I have to do is swat them away. The flies aren’t attached to him. They aren’t part of him. But it seems like they are. It seems like they’re rising by spontaneous generation from his body. But that’s crazy. No one has believed in spontaneous generation since the seventeenth century when Louis Pasteur proved that tapeworms didn’t come from rotten meat. I can see why people believed that theory for so long though. If people look at rotten meat long enough, they’re bound to see something move.

“Harvey,” I call out as I twist my head around and look where he’s huddled on the floor behind Rex’s seat.

“It’s too hot, Kitty. This body must have water.”

Why this kid couldn’t say
I’m thirsty
like an ordinary kid is a mystery to me.

“I know, honey,” I say real sweet and patient because it wouldn’t kill me for once in my fucking life to be kind. I’m not the monster I thought I was, I guess. Monsters don’t feel this bad about other people. Fine fucking time to learn this little fact about myself. “I’m going to figure something out real soon.”

That’s a lie even though I said I’d never lie to my kid like my parents did. I get why they did it now. If the truth is horrible, telling it is the same as hitting the kid. It’s so very clear to me that I can’t imagine why I was so angry about my parents’ lies. They were shielding me from the blows.

I can’t decide if I should tell Harvey the story about the dog that gets captured and taken to the Yukon to become a sled dog. I try to remember if hearing a story about snow makes it feel cooler. I can almost feel the tile floor of my old kitchen on my cheek.

That story stuck with me long after my mother told it to me. The thing I remember most about that story was how mean the people were to the dog. How no matter where he went, the people were fucking horrible. The man with the red sweater beat him and another man who was trying to be good ended up starving the dog because he was stupid. The dog went wild. That was even the name of the book.

My mother was just trying to help me get through a heat wave. There was no way she could know how a story about a dog in the snow would get into my head. There was no way she could have known that I’d follow the wolf into the woods. I decided not to tell Harvey the story of
The Call of the Wild
. That’s not a fucking story for kids.

I hear a droning sound. It’s not the flies and it’s not Linda. It comes from behind a rise in the desert floor. Not even on a road, just coming out of the desert like they’re part of it, are four riders on motorcycles.

A girl who hadn’t followed the wolf into the wild might have been relieved to see them.

I wasn’t that girl. This couldn’t be good.

The panic wave laps at me.

Washes over me.

Crests.

Whatever is going to happen is going to happen.

It’ll be over soon.

12