The Brink (13 page)

“Hang on just one a moment, son,” Leland said. “What do you drink?”

Kyle sat bolt upright in the lawn chair, as though he might be graded. The interior of the gazebo was a green cave—lights strung up along the lattice made him feel like they'd crawled
inside the private heart of the plant. Barr had hacked their way inside, tearing at the vine, wrestling with something prior and clearly still present. Kyle hesitated before he followed. The guy was half off his face, marinating in alcohol, and curious about all the wrong things. Did serial killers like plants?

“And just what is a ‘kraken'?” Leland Barr asked. “And why do you want it released?”

“The kraken is a monster,” Kyle said. “It's supposed to be funny.”

Kyle sipped his drink tentatively—Barr had made them both bourbon and coke with “two jiggers” of liquor—and checked the time on his phone. He felt trapped, though Barr was harmless.

“Well, I'm not a monster,” Barr said. “Whatever your friends say.”

“They're not my friends,” Kyle said.

“And the hospital? Are they taking care of him?” Barr drained his drink.

“I don't know. His mother doesn't want me there.”

Squirrel's mother had, in fact, hated him instantly. She lashed at him, as though he were to blame, and yet he was—by anyone's measure—the furthest from it. “Stay away from my son,” she'd said in the hospital parking lot where he'd gone to greet her, and then promptly barred him from the room where Squirrel lay prone and silent. None of the Mountain Justice League had sided with him, the gay boyfriend, the outlier. Instead, they drew a perimeter of care around Squirrel that didn't include him, didn't include
that
kind of justice. When
she turned away, he saw the patch for a horse farm emblazoned across the back of her denim jacket. It was definitively, and Squirrel would have appreciated this, off-message.

So Kyle had decided he would not let them exploit the accident for their gain. He'd taken Squirrel's keys, visited the Justice League offices that morning, and absconded with the briefcase.

“He's from Pikeville,” Kyle said.

“Ah, the rural East,” Barr said. “You'll have to be patient with her.”

“She doesn't know who he is.”

Kyle looked over at Barr. His rumpled dress shirt and red mesh sports shorts made him seem half undressed already. Judging by the topography, Kyle was pretty sure he was free-balling. Barr had the ferocious calves of a shot-putter—a coachlike solidity that Kyle would never admit stirred him. Barr had shaved his head down to a fringe of black hair, and his face had a serene, almost baked quality from years of comfortable executive living or a long drip of hard alcohol. But a loneliness pervaded the house, a single man in a mansion.

Barr stared back and Kyle detected a not-unfamiliar searching, undefended quality. Since Kyle had moved to Kentucky—the only person he knew to
move
there and not grow up there, like some hothouse flower—he'd come to know that a goodly portion of the gay men in Kentucky were, in fact, married to women. It was a Southern fact. He'd met them at bars
with their rings on
. The contradiction was part of their appeal, maybe all of it—Lord knows, the pleated pants were
not. He even had gay friends back in Philly who advertised online as straight and married because it worked. Men wanted a challenge, a conquest, terrain where they could plant a flag.

“So you're not an activist?” Barr asked. “What's your line of work then?”

Kyle had several answers to this, but the honest one was staring at the ceiling, trying to will a professional life into being. His relationship with Squirrel had introduced him to penniless activists who were not impressed by full-bleed layouts. They'd rather xerox a xerox, samizdats for a cool war, and look at him with pity. At least in Philly he'd designed album covers, websites for nonprofits, and if he wasn't paid well or wasn't paid at all, at least they'd been grateful. The looming truth was that he'd have to reboot: move back to Philly and be broke there.

“I'm between jobs,” Kyle answered. “And let's put jobs in quotes.”

Barr said then that he wanted to propose something, and that if Kyle didn't like what he heard, he could get up and go and there would be no consequences. This was the opening Kyle could see coming miles away. It didn't shock him. Not anymore. Not living in the northernmost Southern state, where gentlemen preferred their piece on the side to be preppy, discreet. He drained his glass and smiled to himself in the dark.

“I have a job for you,” Barr said. “And Kyle, listen, you could be a real game-changer.”

The arrangement was this: the boy would return on Saturday afternoon to mow the back lawn, some demonstrable work for the pay. But it was after that Leland waited for, when he would make them a drink, they would sit in the mottled light of the gazebo, and the young man would report back on the meetings of the Mountain Justice League.

At first, Kyle was cagey and hesitant. He wasn't sure what Leland wanted to know, or why, and the details he offered were digressive, more color than anything. Like the injured boy's progress—he remained in the rehab unit of the hospital, struggling to regain his speech. Or the various fund-raising farragoes: an upcoming occupation of a city park, or the decision to raise money for a single mother in a godforsaken hollow who had run afoul of the banks. Leland didn't care about good works. He wanted to understand the bull's-eye—who drew it, where it would be. The leading edge of their campaigns. Kyle left with cash, two hundred dollars a visit. After the first time, Leland wasn't sure the boy would return. But then, there he was the following Saturday at four, in a baseball cap, headphones in his ears. And again the next Saturday, when he asked for two hundred and fifty, and Leland did not balk.

“You realize they're just kids,” Kyle said, folding the money into the breast-pocket of his shirt. “I could tell you about the lentil-loaf recipes and twinkle hands for consensus. But I'm pretty sure you don't give a shit.”

Leland did not. But he had, without knowing it, come to
anticipate this time. The utter improbability: a young stranger, feet up on a rattan ottoman like he owned the place, sharing a drink with him in the shade. Leland's world had become a strict dial of interactions—his secretary's chilly regard, an unseen lawyer faxing him divorce paperwork, and site managers reporting in—none of which provoked him in any discernable direction. His physician had told him to smile if no other reason than it softened the ventricles of the heart. So Leland smiled.

Leland said, “I've come to see you as a friend.” Was that true? It was. The young man was his only regular company.

“Do you pay all your friends?” Kyle asked.

“I think we pay each other in different ways.”

Kyle stretched his back with his hands planted at the top of his ass. A sort of bowing, throwing his midriff forward, pulling his shirt up at his waist, revealing the smooth, carved joint at the top of his thigh. It was a move that heterosexual men did not, could not, do. A strange stirring alit inside Leland. It had been months since he had been touched, his body a map he skipped over: the ridgeline of hair on his shoulder that Merrill had once asked him to shave, his belly that bulged like a dumpling . . . What did the boy see? He tried and the image was blank.

“Restroom?” Kyle asked.

Leland pointed at the back door.

“Or can I pee outside like a wild animal?” His eyes were unwavering, drawing something from Leland.

“Feel free,” Leland said. The boy grinned and slipped his feet back his shoes. A performance was beginning, and Leland
discovered he was a willing audience. Kyle opened the screen door and paused.

“Hey, so, what is the Dominion Project?” Kyle said. “They mentioned it at the meeting. Something Origin was trying to do. Buy up a whole bunch of mountains. That King was just the first.”

Leland circled the ice in his glass. An insect drowned at the bottom. How had it made its way in? The gazebo was screened.

“It's better if you know less,” Leland said.

How much he, too, would rather know less. Origin Resources intended to dragline a significant portion of Lawrence County's choicest seams; he would like to unknow that. The spoil rock they sent into streams was not harmless, incidental. The numbers were not good numbers. As a boy, Leland once imagined he would become a veterinarian, a savior to the animals—the kind of thing you imagined yourself
as
but never being, master of the vital operations and desperate rescues of what we actually love. Instead, he knew extraction.

Kyle looked out at the lawn and seemed to resign himself to his answer. Leland adjusted his seat cushion. The screen door slammed into its frame as Kyle walked across the lawn to the house and never returned.

The basket of soaps, the “Bless This House” wooden carving on the wall of the bathroom: a woman had been here, Kyle
thought, but a woman had also bolted and left the geegaws. The toilet roll had run out. The medicine cabinet seemed raided. It was as though Barr, too, was subtracting himself from the place. Maybe this is what made him diffuse, or desperate to have someone to drink with. It surprised Kyle that Barr had not already busted a move, given the private nature of a screened-in sex gazebo. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the wandering hand, for the lurching kiss, no doubt with snake tongue. Maybe Kyle'd be wrong, and the pretext of back channel about the Mountain Justice people was, in fact, just the text. Maybe Barr had no ulterior motive. Or maybe Kyle was supposed to make the first overture. Some prostitutes got paid just to hang out, didn't they? Was that what he was, an almost-sex worker? The feeling was exotic and, he had to admit, credentializing.

He finished pissing and wandered the ground floor of the house. The dining room was missing the table and chairs, so a chandelier hung over a rug. A leather armchair ruled the center of a sunroom, a scattering of papers around the base. He saw the legions of bottles, an empty, plaid dog bed, so much empty. In the kitchen, on the marble island, was Barr's laptop, playing the endless pipe screen saver.

Then Kyle stopped. On the counter was Squirrel's blue bandana, folded into a square, with coins on top. What the fuck was this doing here? How had Barr not seen fit to give it to him, the only person to whom it would matter? Kyle took it and held it up to his face. Squirrel's scent was gone, the cotton laundered. A memory came: Squirrel's terrified face on
the ground, one bloodshot eye, not understanding how irrevocable the day had become. He would never be the same, a venturesome boy on the edge of a dozer blade.

Kyle looked back out to the gazebo, where Barr awaited, and felt the grip of a new loyalty take hold.

It was early morning on the mountain, the sky gray and billowy. They'd have rain and the site would turn into a swamp. In the office, sitting across from Leland in a creaky wheeled chair, the site manager took off his sunglasses and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “Leland, just tell me if I'll have a job in three months.” Leland had no answer.

He left him and fled, down the ridge, boots crunching through the shale.

Two mornings back, the paper had started publishing everything—the extraction numbers, the data on the looming nitrogen levels in the creek beds, the next run of mountains. All taken from his laptop, gone missing, after that afternoon with the boy. Origin stock had already started its slide, and the television would run their first report that evening. The board figured a leak inside the company, and secretaries had been let go. But it was only a matter of time before it got traced back to Leland. He was convinced now that the encounter had been plotted. What could he say, to anyone? That he hired a spy. Even Merrill had called him, concerned about the news
stories, but he stopped answering. He was alone now, at the bottom of a hole with his mistake.

Leland came to the clearing where the oak tree remained on its side, the leaves brown and the root-ball dry. He noticed names carved in its bark, initials and other lettering that ringed the trunk. People had been here once and left their mark. The tracks of the dozer remained in the dirt, the place where the boy fell. The grasses in the cemetery were beginning to explode without the canopy to starve them. And nearby was an older woman with a shovel and bundled tarp on the ground who watched him with suspicion. Her long gray hair had been pulled into a ponytail and she wore a T-shirt printed with what looked like the photo of a cat.

“I know who you are,” she said. “Go get away now.”

But Leland moved toward her. The siren blared back at the site. The two-minute hazard warning. A long orange chain of fuses, like a braid of Christmas lights, were set into drill holes sixty feet deep. Fly rock would shower. The tremor could shatter an ankle.

“Didn't you hear me?” she said.

The grave markers were mostly broken, mossy remnants. Her small stone was one of the newest, a piece of granite with “DOLLOP” chiseled crudely into the rock. A green collar lay on the stone. It was a pet cemetery. A shaft inside him collapsed in: she was going to dig up her animal. You could never know what mattered to someone else, or how much. The thing was: to matter at all.

“Is this your cat?” Leland asked. “Let me help.”

She grimaced. “You have no idea what you done.”

It was then he saw, underneath the tarp, the branches. The roots bundled in muslin and twine. It was a sapling behind her, laid sidelong. She was going to set the tree in the earth, give the grave some shade.

But then the blast cap fired and his feet felt the rumble first. The bang echoed, like a gunshot, into the valley. A dank smell, the spent fuses, materialized in the air around them. The mountain, finally, was open.

Nobody wants to know where monsters come from. But I know. Because I am one. They come from a soundproof room, beige and white, with a door that seals for positive oxygen flow. Monsters come from all around to be born there, in the pure oxygen. Still, the place smells like Vaseline and burnt toast.

Outside the room are six beds, hidden by curtains. There, the nurses put cadaver skin on you because it has nutrients your monster skin needs. An Asian nurse lady, the one who wasn't afraid, laid gray pieces of dead guy on my face. When her fingers patted the gauze, I heard a scream. It came from me, a gust from inside, but I couldn't find where.

She gave me drugs to forget my life before, as a person. But the drugs stopped words from having beginnings and endings, so I got what was in between: giant vowels, jets of breath. My mother brought me magazines and my music. I could only put the earphones in one ear, the ear that remained, but music saved me. Movie soundtracks saved me. “Randy, I need to tell you something,” my mother said. “He's here. He's in the building.” The boy that made me a monster was on another floor,
getting saved. I asked the nurse to push as much forgetting into me as she could.

“You're going to feel an itch soon,” the nurse lady said. She was a hundred years old and every one of those years she'd taken the bus. But her fingers were soft, the only fingers that I allowed. “When you feel it, you should think far away,” she said. “Think of your favorite place.” I thought of my last night as a person, in the mall parking lot, and Melissa Carmichael's lap, Melissa whom I barely knew, who never came to see me. Good-bye, Melissa.

After a week, a baby monster came. She had crawled into a heating vent and got stuck, pressed against hot metal. It's dangerous to give babies the drugs, but she shrieked so much the doctors gave them anyway. Then she got quiet and I heard, through the curtain, the clicks and the wheeze of a bike pump going all night. At some point, the pump stopped and her mother gasped and wept. Maybe she should've fixed the vent. All of a sudden, I was crying too, except it felt like my face was tearing apart, like a paper bag I was done with. That was when my itch came, hot and unrelenting. Next day, the nurses had to tie down my hands.

One day, my mother brought me the newspaper. She put her hand on my arm and said, “He's dead, Randy. It's right here.” His high school portrait, right above the funeral notice. They'd tried lots of things but his heart gave. My mother let the smallest smile happen. I saw every muscle doing its work.

Right after, I told the nurses to stop the drugs. It was time to go home, to remember my life. Except now, like every mon
ster, I've got two arrows in my head: one going forward to what I want, and the other going back to what made me. These arrows move at the same speed, in different directions, and trying to hold them both in your head will make anybody crazy.

Is a horror story a horror story if the monster tells it?

A row of store-bought superheroes, cowgirls, and witches line up at the entrance of the Rutland Firehouse, waiting to be scared. In the parking lot, adults in parent costumes lean against cars and blow air into their fists. Tonight is Halloween. I have my hair back in a ponytail. My costume is a sign around my neck that says “Go Ahead and Stare.”

On a branch at the edge of the car lot, a yellowed medical skeleton dangles, and a punk comes and snaps the last nob of coccyx. The air is a freezer door open to my face, and the cold makes the itch. Heat, sweat, cold, tears, smiling: they all make the itch. When that happens, I have to busy my hands. I press them onto the warm hood of my car, but I'm nervous and my hands won't heat.

Jess isn't here yet. Jess will warm things.

“Look at this,” Solvang says. “This one will rock you.”

He flips a playing card onto the hood. For the past three months, over cheese and onion sandwiches at lunch, Solvang has been giving me dispatches about this newest project, a deck of cards he designed. He works at the printing office next to Kramer Photo and Retouch, where I'm at, and he has access to the machines. After hours, he prints up these cards, each with a disturbing image, gore from the Internet that no
one should see: crime scenes, blade accidents, amputees doing stuff. Solvang spent his childhood in the northern territories, in a one-room cabin with his parents, backwoods Swedes who taught him that life is about having something to trade. The latest: a girl tucked in the fetal position, lying in pink soup.

“Guess,” he says.

“A kid in a big purse,” I say.

“Not even close.”

“I don't want to know,” says Callie, Solvang's wife. “Those cards are evil.” With one hand, she forks her fingers into her hair, and with the other, she rains glitter. During the day, when she's not taking care of their baby son, Callie housecleans for a B&B up on the ski mountain. Tonight, she's a fairy godmother, in a busty silver gown and tiara. She was Wiccan for a while, so she knows how to accessorize. Her magic wand is a curtain rod with a tinfoil ball at the end, but I'm getting more of a scepter feel.

“That is a python,” Solvang says, “with a girl inside it.”

I pinch Callie's foil into star points. “I thought that was the other one.”

“That one was an orca,” he says, “with a dude inside it.” He flips to the next: a Siamese cat crammed inside a bottle, face against the glass. Somebody trimmed its whiskers and it looks so not psyched. “Check it,” he says. “The bonsai kitten. The cat lives in the bottle its whole life. They blow pot in its face to runt it.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Callie interrupts. “Something normal?”

A boy in a hospital gown approaches us, trailing his dad. The kid has a bleeding scar on his forehead, piecrust and red coloring dye. It looks carefully worked over.

“Excuse me but your face looks amazing,” he says to me. “How did you do it?”

His father takes his hand. “He loves horror movies, sorry.” I lean down to the kid, my cardboard sign dangling. I want him to be able to see up close, no flinching. “It's not a costume,” I say.

The kid blinks, confused. His father forces a laugh and then jerks his son toward the line, like what I've got might be able to be given.

“So how much longer do we have to wait?” Callie says. “The posters said eight o'clock. It's been eight o'clock for a year.”

Tonight is Eddie Cosimano's show—his name was all over the poster. “Horror effects by FX wizard Eddie Cosimano (
Rumplestiltskin II
,
The Witching of Amanda Jane
).” I know Eddie from high school, when we worked in the audio-visual room, shuttling the TV carts. During study periods, we watched horror movies over and over. The classics, the remakes and reboots, the Japanese ones that start as romantic comedies then turn to vivisection. All of them. Right after graduation, Eddie went out to California to work in film, but you have to freeze-frame to catch his name in the credits. He'd come back to Rutland to “regroup.” One guy. He gets to regroup.

“I'm cold,” Callie says. “Somebody warm me up.” Solvang rubs her shoulders, then nestles in for a kiss. He purses his lips like he's drinking from a faucet, like she's a necessary element,
and Callie moans a little. I still don't know what that feels like. I so want to know.

Just then, a van with tinted windows pulls into the lot, brights in our faces. The line of kids kinks around it, chattering at the arrival. When the driver-side door opens, mist billows out to the ground. My heart seizes a bit to know just how far Eddie has taken this. A black boot descends, buckled to the knee, and Eddie steps from the driver's chair, in an overcoat and a cap that says “
R II
.” His beard has crop circles. He takes a scan of the crowd and then hits the unlock. Here's where things get interesting, where things get different. The back doors open and a posse of vampire girls stretch their legs and follow. Last to emerge is Jess, the stake in my heart, the answer for everything. Her face is powdered to alabaster. Her eyes and lips, coal black. A charcoal cape doesn't quite cover her blouse. She wears a plaid, pleated skirt and ripped white leggings. She's all Catholic School except for two gray fangs. She stumbles a bit, unsure where to go until Eddie whisks her inside.

The itch says, Careful. My right hand dives in my shirt pocket to make sure the pills haven't moved. All there, safe and unsound, a handful of white roofies for the partner of my choosing. No more waiting. Tonight, I'm Jack with the magic beans. Here comes the stalk. Here comes the climb up into the clouds.

Jess stood at the door of Kramer Photo in her remember-me best: a tight blue V-neck sweater, brown hair curtaining around
her face, and J.C. on the cross nestled between her Temple Mounts. It was the same outfit she had had on before, in her first round of pictures.

“I'm here for my retakes?” she said.

“You're an hour late,” I said from the door, giving her my good side. She ran J.C. up and down on his chain.

“Sorry,” Jess said, and shrugged. “Student Council.”

For six weeks in the fall, portraits from all over the county flood into Kramer Photo. October is yearbook season. I work in the back and out of view, retouching—clearing complexions, subtracting acne from the record. You wouldn't guess, considering, that I am good at this particular fix. But I had the job before the accident, and Kramer kept me on after. “Nobody else looks as close as you do,” he said. And he's right. I see all the way to the pore. The measly flare, the third-eye keloid. Our skin is where we're judged, first and last.

I brought Jess upstairs to the studio. The door locked behind her.

Kramer and the others had already left, so it was just us in the studio. I had spent time prepping and figuring how to shade the space. She'd stay under the brights and flashes, and I'd stay behind the lens until she blacked out. The shades were drawn, but the studio felt cool and outdoorsy—that was the “Forest Glade” on the wall, a twelve-foot scrim of birch and fallen leaves. For portrait backgrounds, Kramer offers “Star Field,” “42nd Street,” and “Forest Glade.”

“I made you some coffee,” I said. I pointed to the cup, right there on the light table. Extra strong, to mask the dose.

“No thanks,” she said.

“Soda? No soda?” I offered. “Or something harder?”

I'd already had two shots myself before her arrival, to quiet my nerves. But she shook her head. At some point, girls learn they don't have to answer every question. And like that, my plan, the careful order of things, guttered out.

Jess spun on the stool while I adjusted the lights. Kramer specializes in large format, big prints, everything adjustable. Through the viewfinder, her face was a dish of cream. Her two front teeth had a slot between them for the perfect dime. No blemishes—somehow she'd made it that far without scars. I would barely need to retouch.

“I feel like I'm in a diorama with this forest thing behind me,” she said. “I should have a papoose and a spear.”

“Didn't your form say Forest Glade?” I said.

“I had nothing to do with the form,” she said. “My mother was all about the form.”

I felt a strange possessive surge. I didn't want her known or noticed, possessed by a family. When you come this far, this close, the aperture closes around what you see, and you want to be the only one looking. I tested the flash. The recharging whine rose to the top of the sound register. She asked if we lost other yearbook photos along with hers.

“I bet a lot of kids want to take theirs again,” she said.

“Sure, but you don't want to peak when you're seventeen,” I said. “You don't want to be fifty and look at the Rutland High School yearbook like those were the good days.”

“If I'm looking at my yearbook when I'm fifty,” she said,
“claw my eyes out.” Then she thought for a moment and took J.C. off her neck and laid him on the light table.

“Got plans for Halloween?” I asked.

She told me about Eddie's invitation, duly noted. My plan floated back from oblivion. I'd find her then.

“So what is his deal? Is he gay?” she asked. “Because he asked me to be a vampire and supposedly he's amazing with makeup.”

“He's not gay, he's just really into base,” I said. She laughed then and it was like she released herself to me.

“Ready?” I said.

The smile is always the hard part, because it has nothing to do with the mouth. It's all in the eyes. A grin lifted into her face, but it was only in the bottom half, what happens when you live with something.

“Thanks,” she said on the way out, taking the stairs two at a time. “Make me look beautiful, okay?”

Inside the Halloween firehouse, the light drops. I make out a long hallway of black-lit paintings and one cheap, low-hanging bat that won't last the night. Then the hallway opens out onto the kitchen where a kid lies under a sheet on a table. On cue, a chainsaw cranks and Dewey Church—the guy who trims everybody's trees—steps out from behind the door. The sound is deafening, and Solvang covers Callie's ears. Dewey plows through the belly of the screaming kid, sending an outrageous spray and guts into the air. Solvang casually picks a piece off his flack jacket. Baked ziti. The chainsaw quiets and the
disemboweled kid dips his hands into the gash to eat some. Dewey knocks the side of his head.

“Don't play with your guts, you idiot.”

“But it's freaky,” the kid says.

“It's confusing,” Dewey says. “Your dying moments, and you're going to taste yourself?”

The next room is a nonstarter. A pack of twelve-year-olds dolled up like zombies—Eddie really went for the coolie labor here—wander around and bump into each other. A preteen ghoul clings to us, almost like he's angling for change. Callie shoves him away, but I corral the kid before he can slink off.