Farewell Navigator (12 page)

Consulting the script Morrigan had written out for him, Kasko bellowed, There are those in our midst who seek the bond of handfasting. Let them be named and brought forward.

Morrigan and Egg Boy each took a tiny step, but there was not much room to go before they hit Kasko.

Are you Gwyll? said Kasko.

I am, said Egg Boy. (Morrigan had told him he needed a name more appropriate to the ceremony.)

What is your desire?

Egg Boy looked down at his arm, where he had written out his part. To be made one with Morrigan in the eyes of the gods and the Wicca.

Kasko said to Morrigan, Are you Morrigan?

I am.

And what is your desire?

To be made one with Gwyll in the eyes of the gods and the Wicca.

After taking one more glance at her tits, Kasko reached behind him for the plastic sword that had been borrowed from Davey’s uncle, who did seasonal work at the Delaware Historical Society acting out the Revolutionary War. He raised up the sword then handed it to Morrigan and Egg Boy, who grasped it between them.

Here before you, boomed Kasko, stand two of your folk. Witness, now, that which they have to declare.

In my version for the stranger, I don’t mention looking at their butts. I don’t tell about seeing Kasko, after the whiskey toasts, put a finger on my sister’s nose and softly say, What about a handfasting for
us?
Sarah laughed and shook her head so his finger slipped off. Not for us, she said.

Let’s get in the car, Giles, says the stranger. This heat’s not fit for man or beast. We climb in and he turns the key; the air conditioning comes blasting. His eyes are wet but they still aren’t dripping. I wait for him to say something. What he says finally is, I’m John. We haven’t been properly introduced.

Can I smoke in this car?

You may. The ceremony you describe is a Wiccan marriage rite. I’ve come across it in my research.

What’s the research for, if you’re not writing anything?

The bride, he goes on, happens to be someone quite, that is to say extremely, dear to me. Her name is Abby.

From his shirt pocket he takes a postcard, creased and soft. It is a picture of the Wolvercote courthouse in the fall, with leaves piled red on the square. On the back there is only one sentence:
Everything in this town reminds me of falling down
.

How do you know she wrote it? I ask.

It’s in her hand. She has a very accomplished, a very graceful hand.

The letters are spidery, slanted, curled—the writing of a person who wants people to think she is mysterious.

He gets something else out of his pocket. It’s a photograph of a girl standing on a lawn in a light green thin-strapped dress with yellow flowers stamped all over it. She seems embarrassed and is not smiling. This girl looks like your average girl, maybe a little prettier than your average girl. Her hair is dark blonde. Her lipstick is pink. If this is Morrigan, she’s deep undercover.

That’s her? She looks all normal and shit.

This is her—
before
, says John. I ask before what, and he says before she got the idea in her head that college and hamburgers and having sex in the missionary position were going to extinguish her soul. And this was her sunsuit, he says, that I bought for her two summers ago. She called it a dress, but it was more of a sunsuit.

She definitely wasn’t wearing
that
when she came to Wolvercote.

I imagine not. She burned it shortly before she left me. I got home from class one night and she had this little bonfire going in the kitchen sink. The sunsuit was in flames; so was
the phone bill, a letter from her mother, and our marriage certificate.

That sucks, I say.

Her witch phase had been going on for a few months by that time. The books and herbs and amulets—but mostly the new wardrobe. She jacked hell out of our credit card. Started doing a kind of Halloween-on-the-banks-of-the-Nile makeup routine. Made a witchy friend at the New Age bookstore. She thought about joining a coven, but the nearest one was a ninety-minute drive.

She needed a change, I conclude.

John taps a pen against his lips and says, What confuses me is why your fellow members of the rural underground are so secretive about her having been here. Is it from boredom? The need to build drama where there is actually rather little?

Kasko is his best friend, I explain. He won’t let him be disgraced any further. He says Morrigan was a fatal gash in the vein of Egg Boy’s manhood.

The vein of his manhood?

The chick made a fool of him. It amounts to a castration.

So says Kasko?

I shrug. I don’t like talking about Kasko. His name brings up pictures of Sarah without any clothes on, eyes shut, writhing on a gritty sheet and making noises like the girls on the videos Davey keeps in a cooler in his parents’ garage. But I want John to understand his terribleness. Did you know he tortures squirrels? I say. He rigs traps where they strangle slowly until he lets them go. They make horrible little coughing sounds, after. And he shot a dog once in the foot and bragged about it. And his name sounds like a gas station.

That’s awful, says John, but he isn’t paying attention. Will you take me to see him?

Who?

Humpty Dumpty. He of the manly vein.

He’s not really into visitors, I mumble. But okay.

After the witch agreed to cast a spell for me, I looked hard for evidence of success. If my sister slept at home for two nights running, I thought Morrigan had triumphed. If I detected a grain of irritation in Sarah’s throat when she said Kasko’s name, I silently congratulated the Dark Side. But nothing, really, when it came down to it, was changing. I still caught them kissing behind the counter when I stopped at the Morning Star after school. I still heard him whisper, in public earshot, about sticking it in her.

I went by the apartment above the packie. I wanted to ask her why the spell wasn’t working. She might need different herbs, or a frog to grind up. (I would offer to catch one.) In the stairwell I heard screaming.

What’re you talking about? What the fucking
fuck
are you talking about?

HOW CAN YOU BE SO MORONIC YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT?

I waited on the landing until the screaming stopped. It stopped and I kept waiting and then Morrigan came gunning out the door, black dress afloat. Oh, she said, it’s you! but did not stop. I followed her down two flights into the bright wash of beer light.

Can you please do that spell again? I said. It’s not working that great.

What?
Fuck, I have no cigarettes.

Here. I held out my pack. The antilove spell, remember? For my sister and the asshole.

She filled her chest with smoke and said, Look.

With that one word, I understood.

I’m sorry, she said. I’m just not a very good witch.

You’re a
fake
witch, I corrected.

Morrigan glared back at me, then turned to squint up the block. There was nothing to see. Will you get your parents’ car, she said, and take me to the nearest train?

On the highway, John drives slowly and keeps readjusting the rearview mirror. Davey is going to be mad that I abandoned his truck at the Red Roof. But I’m not afraid of Davey. He’s too little to break anyone’s bones.

She was a waitress, says John, as if answering a question, at the diner down the street from my apartment. I had breakfast there twice weekly before my sociology class. I was very shy. You’ve seen her, so you understand my reasons for shyness. She noticed my books on the table. She was in college too, a psych major. She had never heard Brazilian music. I took her to hear it.

This is before she got all dark and shit?

He nods. This is when her favorite meal was cole slaw and hamburgers. When she enjoyed her sitcoms.

And when you were fucking her, I add, relishing the chance to say this word without lowering my voice.

John snaps, I would really appreciate your not talking like that about my wife.

But you said—

Stop it! His upper lip is twitching. Red spots jump in his cheeks. Have some goddamn respect.

Sorry, I say, and I am. He is doing pretty poorly, this John. He does not seem well. His face has the same quivery, fish-skinned look my mother’s gets right before she refills her prescription.

He parks in front of the neon beer signs. Two floors up, we
stop at a door hung with a huge poster for a band Kasko has been trying to book for years but who are too good to come here. The ones who come have no place better to play. John looks disapprovingly at the screaming corpse on the door, its bony hands raised in pleading.

Egg Boy opens at our knock. He is shirtless, in black sweatpants, and obviously hasn’t bothered to shave his head in several days. Soft shoots of gold are growing in. His chest, which I’ve always envied for its hardness, does not look so hard. The belly swells out from under the ribs.

Giles, he nods.

Can we come in for a second?

Egg Boy shrugs, stands back. The room, painted a dark streaky red, with black plastic sheets tacked over the windows, smells like toe lint. The only places to sit are bed and floor; we all stand.

How you been keeping? asks Egg Boy.

Fine, I say, and look at John, because I can’t think of a way to introduce the topic. The smell in the room is making me breathe through my mouth.

John, says John and reaches to shake Egg Boy’s hand. I’d like, if I may, to ask you about Morrigan.

Egg Boy sticks out his chin. I remember how he clocked a boy once in the grocery store parking lot, a clean quick smash, and the boy didn’t get up for half an hour. That little cunt? What about her?

John coughs. She’s my wife.

She’s
my
wife. My cunty wife.

I think of my bike leaned up against a bench on the square, under the maples, where I left it this morning. I want to be on it, riding. I want not to see the skin under Egg Boy’s eyes sagging weirdly.

Are you the college motherfucker she used to live with? She told me about you. I pictured you with little granny glasses.

John reaches to dab sweat off the sides of his nose. She didn’t tell you we were married?

Uh,
no
.

Ah, says John. He sounds very tired. She left me in February, and I’ve been looking for her. I just want to know what happened. I want to tell her she can always come back.

The coming-back part changes Egg Boy’s face. A shudder unclenches his jaw. You would take her? he says. After she dicked you so royally?

I can’t hate her. I’ve tried. I can’t.

It’s easy, says Egg Boy. Just think of how she put her head on your stomach at night and said
This is so much better than anything
and how she talked about the kids you’d have, how you would dress those kids in tiny black boots and the kids would have your sexy blue eyes. Think of how she said
We’ll go to Scotland where they have castles
. Think of how pretty she was.

She was pretty, agrees John.

Egg Boy sits down on the bed. John kneels to the floor, leans back against the minifridge. I feel stupid standing. I’m gonna take off, I say.

You mind running by the Star to get us some sandwiches? says Egg Boy. Tell your sister to put them on my tab. Turkey club, no lettuce.

Ham and swiss, please, says John. I notice he has quit sweating.

The lunch rush is over and Sarah is reading the newspaper. The line cook sits smoking. Davey isn’t around.

Can you make me a couple of sandwiches?

You going on a picnic? she asks.

It’s for me and the guy doing witch research.

I thought he left town.

Nope, he remains. Turkey club, no lettuce, and a ham and swiss.

She gives the order to the line cook, who nods but stays where he is, smoking.

You be home for supper tonight? I ask. They’re showing vampire-bite survival stories on the sci-fi channel.

I don’t think so, she says. I have to meet up—

—With him after his shift. I know. What, are you guys
engaged
or something? He tortures squirrels.

He does not.

Oh yes he damn does. I saw him. And he shot that dog in the leg.

Which was an accident. Look, baby bear, we’ll watch a movie tomorrow night. We can rent if there’s nothing good on. And I’m not engaged. Most definitely
not
engaged.

But I see them on the sheets, his huge body pressing the air out of her small one, sauce and dirt from under his fingernails smeared across her stomach. I hear him making fast high grunts like the gigantically hung actors on Davey’s videos. Lunging, stabbing, shoveling, so rough she starts to cry. She is crying and then it’s not Kasko on her, it’s John, skinnier and frecklier, but he holds her wrists against the wall so she can’t leave.
Let me go
, my sister whispers.
I am late for supper
.

She asks do I want any chips. I shake my head and Sarah goes back to reading the paper. It’s a long time before the line cook gets up to make the sandwiches. In the wait, I try to clean the pictures out. I want my head empty of bodies on beds, of stabbing bodies, of Kasko’s voice telling my sister he’s going to lick his fingers and slide them up her gash until she begs.

Back at Egg Boy’s, the husbands are drinking from plastic cups illustrated with the planet Jupiter and their faces have gotten redder. A record is playing of a guy singing sadly in French. I lay the wrapped sandwiches in the middle of the floor.

Think of how, says John, she dumped her nonpareils into her popcorn at the movies, because chocolate and corn are delicious together.

We never went to the movies, says Egg Boy, but think of how she threw you up against the sink in the BK men’s room and took off your belt and wrapped it around your neck and put the buckle in her mouth before she—

Think of how ticklish she was at the backs of her knees.

How sweet she looked in crotchless panties.

John helps himself from the bottle of brown liquor on the floor. No, how sweet she looked in her
sunsuit
, standing in our backyard. It was my job to mow the grass.