Crystal Eaters (12 page)

His first shot is a fourteen-foot jumper with no arc that arrows through the no-net. He runs to the ball that bounces off the padded wall. Sneakers squeak with each sharp but careful turn. Pants, on the baseline, drives in for a lay-up while a guard with a head like a hamburger looks in from a window above. He takes more shots, lost in thoughts of childhood because his only future thought has been breaking out and seeing his family again and he can’t think about it anymore, when it will happen or not. He’s been putting together his childhood memory by memory. One shot comes close, bounces high off the back of the rim and nearly hits one of many spinning fans. The guard looking in shakes his head and blows on his lips.

When Pants McDonovan was a child he didn’t use toilet paper.
He’d pull his underpants up, and using three fingers, wiggle them into the fabric, into his ass, and once there, curl-pick his fingers until assumed clean. In his bedroom, he’d take the underwear off and roll the soiled pair into a tube he hid in a dresser drawer. This continued until Mom noticed his lack of underwear in the laundry. She walked into his bedroom late one night with an armful of clean laundry and opened the bottom dresser drawer and found fourteen perfectly aligned rolls of dirty underwear. When she picked one roll up she noticed another beneath. The smell was so strong she thought Pants would wake, so she hurried from the room and into the bathroom where she unfolded the underwear revealing a wide splotch of dried shit in the shape of a hammered butterfly. She turned the sink on, let them soak in hot water, and tried not to feel that she had done something irreversibly wrong as a mother. She would confront him in the morning. She wouldn’t sleep that night.

He said he didn’t know why he did what he did, but boy it felt good, toilet paper was rough and sometimes didn’t flush because the water pressure was so weak in their house. Their plumbing is city plumbing a hundred years ago. This is something the city knows and makes fun of. Men in city bars like to talk about how dirty the villagers are. It’s another reason why the city should continue building. Just look at them, men in city bars say. They don’t shower. They lie in rocks and mud and make babies in the mud. They don’t worship a god. Mom said none of that mattered because what he did was wrong and it had to stop.

Dad couldn’t look him in the eyes. He let Mom deal out the punishment. Grounded for a week. No play time in the mine with Remy. Also, forced to wash all his underwear to an insane brand new clean. The task taught him how to do laundry better than all, something he was strangely proud of but didn’t tell anyone else about until the prison. But the punishment didn’t work because Pants continued the habit and found new places to hide his dirty underwear: between his mattress and bedspring,
between the window and screen with the blinds drawn, in a shoebox kept in the closet, behind the YCL generator in the basement, and finally, and best, behind his dresser.

He skipped school once a week to make the trip – a somewhat long walk from one side of the village to the other – to get the same kind of underwear his Mom bought with a matching design consisting of a red elastic band and bubble-words written across the crotch and backside that said WINNER. CHAMPION. VICTORY. They were different because they came from the city, traded for crystals curious city-folk displayed in their homes or taken from Mob of Mary’s who always had a steady supply. He used these pairs not to wear, but to throw into the dirty laundry after he purposefully dropped them on the ground, dragging them through dirt and weeds.

But the room took on the bottom-drawer smell. The bright yellow paint above the dresser turned to the shade of straw. At first Mom blamed the moon, an unusual lighting effect caused the paint to look that way, but the smell couldn’t be ignored and her denial wasn’t strong enough. She wanted to believe that her words, her punishment, had been received and she was not only a good mother but an effective one who was developing her son to be a greater person than her and Dad. Again, she went into his room, this time when he was at school. She opened each drawer before pulling the dresser from the wall where a heap of underwear spilled to the sides, the paint behind the dresser peeled off in curling sheets, half a dozen brittle hooks fingering the air.

“I mean, how
ridiculous
. No more spending time with those boys. I’m telling your father. I don’t know what to do with you.”

What was said between parents: slightly worse than a spanking. Something to be remembered. He sensed the beating coming from Dad’s truck heading home from the mine. He had never seen Mom so angry and had overhead the word
belt
. Even her cough was angry. He feared bruises. What he did to protect
himself was take the rolled up dirty underwear on the floor and stuff it down the inside of his pants, covering his legs front and back. He put the underwear under his shirt and fattened his belly. He positioned underwear on his shoulders and became a little anxious monster waiting for Dad’s anger to liquefy out and onto his body.

He lay on the bed with his chest rising and falling in the silence of the bedroom.

Mom greeted Dad in the driveway. Pants startled when Dad slammed the truck’s door. Then he heard their voices through the window before they decided to go for a walk. Pants got up, kind of penguin-shuffled with the shit-underwear covering him and watched from the window until they came back up the road. He thought maybe nothing would happen. He thought maybe a big body wouldn’t hurt his small body. A walk meant things were okay. Walks relaxed. You talked and felt better after a walk.

Again, they stood in the gravel driveway talking closely, the wind sweeping dirt from the road into brown wings against the sky above them. When Mom looked up at his window he fell backward and onto the bed and began hyperventilating. He couldn’t control his air. The bed squeaked and he tried to calm himself down by saying it would be okay. Would it be okay?

Remy woke from her nap and shouted
Wake me up!

His body felt miniature because the bed felt like it was the size of the room.

His breathing hurt.

Mom lifted Remy from the crib and she stopped crying.

Footsteps in the hallway.

A drawer being opened then closed.

Someone in the bathroom.

A body near the door.

Footsteps.

Then no footsteps.

When the door opened a hole opened in his heart.

Dad lunged in. The belt extended from his fist and hung against his thigh. His work shirt was stained with long drips of YCL and he smelled like mold. Pants sat up in bed, swung his legs over the edge, fell to his knees on the carpet scattered with underwater, and apologized. Mom said from the doorway maybe he would learn something this way because she had tried everything else. Her father had done the same to her, and so did Dad’s, and it worked, look at them, adjusted people. She didn’t necessarily believe what she thought, but her family history was stronger than her head. The important thing was a punishment that he would remember.

Going in for a lay-up that won’t go in because Pants is directly under the rim, he understands Dad was so mad that day because of Mom. The fights, the silence at dinner, all things he saw but couldn’t process, building up inside Dad, exploding against his boy’s body. What was said during the walk was what upset Dad, and because he couldn’t vocalize then, to her, what he felt, it came out against him. Why Mom allowed it he wasn’t sure. It was so unlike her. He’s not sure who is more at fault. He’s not sure what it’s like to be a parent, how difficult it is, all the mistakes made even though a parent is constantly trying not to make mistakes. But maybe that’s the problem.

He can’t make a single shot because his mind is in the bedroom.

He was lashed across the back of his legs and down his arms. Rolls of dirty underwear falling from his shirt in a strange and terrible magician
ta-da!
kind of way. One pair, from his left leg, wrapped around his ankle and stayed there for the remainder.

“I’m sorry,” he babbled.

Dad flung him into the ceiling when he tried to hide in the space between wall and bed.

“I’m saying I’m sorry why aren’t you stopping please why aren’t you stopping?”

Dad grabbed his hand and dragged him to the center of the
room, the belt a blur, difficult for Pants to predict where the next hit would strike. The buckle landed in his palm and produced a rectangular welt.

“Enough,” said Mom.

Dad kept going. The belt discovered new skin to plant bruises. But Pants wasn’t trying to run away anymore. He was holding on to his father because he thought being close enough would make him stop. It appeared that he was trying to hug him, to get so close that the beating would
have
to stop and the only option would be an embrace. But it didn’t work because Dad couldn’t stop himself, everything emotional pouring through his swinging arm, his limbs buzzing with blood, everything coming out and onto his screaming son crumpled around his thighs, arms loosening with each strike down.

After Dad drove off in the truck Mom told her son to take off his shirt. She inspected his body. She was too shy to tell him to take his underwear off, but she never would have made it. His back was divided thirteen times in thirteen places. Stomach puffy and red, and in one area, split and bubbling crystal puss. All doors were shut now. Smelled like dead dogs, but mostly shit because his sweat had warmed the underwear that didn’t fall out. Mom just stared at his heaving and bloodied back, the back that had once unfolded out of her. She sat on the couch. She couldn’t stop thinking about his birth, the exact moment of it, and she connected it to this moment. He walked over and pulled her hands from her face.

“How many did I lose?”

She always told him a bedtime story about the sun leaving the sky because it had to visit the other side of the world and that night she told it to him in extended form, detailing villagers who ate light, rode crystal-armored horses, fought city workers in misty green mountains, until he fell asleep and she walked from the room, leaving him to the images, his recovery dreams. Mom stopped herself from feelings when Dad came home.
They didn’t talk. She lay in bed pretending to be asleep and hoping he wouldn’t smell the underwear in the garbage.

The next morning his body was swollen. When he stood, his left hip slipped from the socket before finding its new place a quarter inch left. Both ankles were loose. It hurt to put clothes on. He was scared to breath, and when he did, deciding on a big inhale to see just how bad it could be, the air flowed over something sharp.

Days later in the mine he found black crystals during a strong rainstorm and odd day of extreme heat, and desperate to heal, willing to try anything, he accepted a double-dog-dare from Bob T. and ate three chunks. He brainstormed ideas on count when his brain unfolded and folded and unfolded again, the feeling of black crystal in his body a new machine to revisit. He had no anger toward Dad, only fear, and thought of giving him, not Mom, a black crystal as a gift, an apology for being the type of kid who embarrassed his parents, who deserved to be punished for the way he was, what he did.

The pain from the punishment has stayed. He moves in ways so he doesn’t feel it. For example, he knows not to lean too hard on his left hip. He forgets at moments, like playing basketball, when he drives the baseline and tries for a lay-up he’s too far under to make. He takes a step under, to the far side of the rim, and his hip makes a loud
pop
, turning the guard’s hamburger-head in the window. He launches three-pointers that force him to land hard on the heels of his feet. His foot throbs numbers.

He can’t hit a shot. Everything bricks. When the ball gets trapped between rim and backboard the guard with the hamburger-head who has a belly like a bag of trash comes in and knocks it free by jumping with his club, his keys jangling and pants sagging. He grabs the ball and continues shooting, trying to hit the simplest of shots and misses each one.

With every missed shot his body hurts and he can smell his shit coming in through the vents in waves, crashing into the
fans above who spin the shit and flatten-out the shit. Guards crowding by the window crawl over each other and laugh as he misses. He stands two feet from the hoop and raises the ball with one hand.
Push
. And miss. A muffled yell from a guard against bulletproof glass says, “Gotta be kidding me!”

It’s my fault for hiding my underwear and it’s my fault she’s sick
.

The steel white doors unlock and open, meaning the hour is up. He has one shot left.
Flick the wrist
. Swish.

Pants says, “I’m a winner,” with his arms raised, ponytail a dog’s tail, the ball rolling to a stop at the colored, padded wall. He thinks of Mom and the previous health meeting when he discussed the rape in the mine and how it dug up sadness, frustration, odd attraction, things no boy should witness or have to process. How he felt guilty for doing nothing. But now he has another chance. He will escape. He will see her again. He will find a way to add and make things better. He stops jumping, a sharp pain connecting his foot to his lower back.