They Had Goat Heads (5 page)

FATHERS & SONS

“Dad’s dead,” said my father. “I better put him in the freezer.”
   Grandpa lay on the kitchen floor, tightened into a fetal curl. He looked like a crumpled sheet of sandpaper. Dad picked him up and slung him over his shoulder and went downstairs.
   I waited.
   He came back later. “Dad’s in the freezer. I had to fold him up to get him in there. But he’s in there.”
   I didn’t know what to say. “That’s good news,” I said.
   He made himself a ham sandwich with American cheese. No condiments. I asked if he would make me a boloney sandwich. No cheese. He made me a peanut butter and banana sandwich. As he sliced the banana into long, precise rectangles, he explained how fruit had not always been as readily available at the supermarket as it was nowadays.
   The sandwich tasted good.
   “Oh.”
   I stopped chewing. “Did you hear that?”
   Dad shook his head. “No.”
   “Somebody said ‘Oh’.”
   “Ohh.”
   “There it is again.”
   “There’s what again?”
   “That ‘Oh’ sound. It’s coming from the basement.”
   “The basement,” Dad echoed, and clucked his tongue.
   I put my sandwich down. My father finished his sandwich and poured a tall glass of milk. He drank it and wiped the milk mustache from his overlip with a shirtsleeve. He licked his overlip and wiped it again. Licked it again. He scrubbed it with a dishtowel. “It won’t come off!”
   I squinted at him. “I don’t see anything.”
   “Ohhh.”
   “I better go check on that.” He put the towel down and put some Chap-Stick on and took a bite of my sandwich and said “Mmm” and went downstairs.
   I waited. Much longer than last time. I looked at the clock and tried to figure out how long my father was gone. The hands of the clock taunted me, dared me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out what they meant.
   He came back later, covered in dirt and sweat. His T-shirt was ripped in places. He hurried over to me and finished my sandwich in two great bites. “That tasted so nice,” he said.
   “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
   “I’ll make you another one. I promise.”
   “I believe you.”
   “I’ve just been thinking about that peanut butter and banana sandwich for awhile, is all. Since I made it for you.”
   “It’s not a problem.”
   “I know.” He smiled for a long time. His neck looked stiff. I felt awkward. Then his head sort of slumped off-kilter and the smile became a slot.
   “Your grandpa’s dead,” said the slot.
   “What happened?”
   “He’s dead. People die. It just takes time, sometimes.”
   “Ok.”
   He looked at the clock, then at me. “You need to learn to tell time.”
   “I can tell time.”
   “What time is it?”
   I studied the clock. “3 a.m.,” I said in a casual, uncaring voice.
   “Not quite,” said Dad. “It’s 12:30. In the p.m.”
   “Hm.”
   “It’s light out, for Chrissakes.” He pointed at the window.
   I looked out the window. “I know.”
   “You’re a big boy, goddamn it. Learn to tell the damn time.”
   “Ok.”
   “How old are you? You’re pretty old to not know how to tell time. You’re like in your thirties or something.”
   “I’m not that old.”
   “You’re old enough.”
   “Ok.”
   “Ok, ok. It’s settled.” He shrugged. He shrugged again, holding the shrug at its summit. He let his shoulders fall and shrugged once more. “By the way,” he said, “Dad got out of the freezer. He looked hurt. We wrestled around on the dirt floor. He told me I was a bad son. ‘Don’t ever tell your son he’s bad,’ I told him. He apologized and said he didn’t mean it. I said not to worry about it and we wrestled some more. Then I bashed his head in for awhile with a two-by-four until he stopped moving and squirming around. He lay there like the empty husk of a goddamned Junebug. I dug a hole with a garden hoe and nudged Dad into the hole with my foot and then I filled the hole back in. We need to get a gravestone. Write that down. They sell them at Wal-Mart for, like, really cheap. We also need to get the basement carpeted. Dirt floors are bullshit.”
   I stared at the crumbs on my plate.
   “Don’t be sore,” said my father. “He would’ve died eventually. I think he was dead. I think it was just a reflex or something.”
   “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
   “Jesus Christ! What the fuck is this? A fuckin’ fairy tale?” Dad looked at me expectantly.
   “What’s a fairy tale?” I said.
   “Jesus.” He took off his T-shirt, looked down at his belly and studied it. Grey, bristled patches of hair marked the flabby mass. “Jesus I’m getting fat. Jesus H Christ.”
   “Ohhh.”
   I said, “I think Grandpa’s alive again.”
   “I’ll be right back.” He poured two shots of tequila and we toasted to Good Times and slammed them. Then he went downstairs . . .
   Five days might have passed. Maybe five hours. Or five minutes.
   At some point I noticed Dad skulking through the kitchen. He had retrieved Grandpa and was carrying him in a Baby Björn. Grandpa’s thin, pale, liver-spotted limbs dangled lifelessly from the apparatus. He looked very clean, though: Dad must have washed him in the basement sink.
   They went to the back yard. I went to the window and cranked it open. The fresh, summer air smelled good.
   Dad took Grandpa out of the Björn and told him to go play. Grandpa didn’t respond; he lay on the grass as if poured there, eyes half open, ribcage slowly rising and falling. One moment Dad scolded him; the next he encouraged him. Then he put a leash on Grandpa and started dragging him around the yard. Now and then Grandpa tried to keep up, but he was too weak, and for the most part he could only let himself be dragged. His face and scalp turned purple.
   One of the neighbors came over. I didn’t know his name. He wore red longjohns and construction boots. He had just killed a deer and wanted to show my father. He brought the carcass over in a wheelbarrow. He explained how he had “destroyed” the deer with his bare hands. He kept repeating the word “destroyed.” At first he and the deer merely wrestled in a playful manner, but things got dirty. The deer tried to run away but tripped over a fallen pine tree. The neighbor jumped on it and punched it in the head until it died. “Luckily it was a doe and there weren’t no antlers on it,” he said. “Otherwise I mighta cut my fists when I destroyed that crazy fucker.”
   Dad said it was a nice-looking deer, despite its mauled, almost unrecognizable head. The neighbor thanked him.
   Grandpa gasped for air. He convulsed for lack of oxygen.
   The neighbor wheeled the carcass back into his yard and began to skin it with a hunting knife. One strip of deerhide after another he tossed over his shoulders. The musculature of the deer was bright red. Fluorescent. It looked fake.
   Dad pulled Grandpa around the yard a few more times, falling into a soft trot. Then he came back inside and lay Grandpa on the kitchen counter. His neck was inflamed, bruised and bleeding. I checked his pulse. He was alive. We stared down at him.
   “I’m thirsty,” said Grandpa.
   Dad made a frog face. “Thirst is part of life. People get thirsty. That’s life.”
   “Respect your elders,” said Grandpa.
   “Fear your offspring,” said my father, eyeballing me.
   I offered Grandpa a shot of Tequila. He wanted water. I got him a glass of soda and carefully poured it into the gash of his mouth as if filling up a lawn mower with gasoline. He choked on the soda but managed to get some of it down. “That wasn’t water,” he remarked, then rolled onto his side and tightened into a fetal curl.

FUNAMBULISM

I insisted they replace the tightrope with a two-foot wide plank before walking across it. I also wanted the plank bolstered from the underside by a series of pillars and support beams. In addition, I wanted three nets set up—one near the ground, one halfway between the ground and me, one just a few feet beneath me, all made of spidersteel and reinforced with a Tungsten nanocomposite—and a strongman waiting to catch me beneath the third and lowest net in case I fell through them all. “Secure my path with handrailings, too,” I added, and then I realized there was no reason to walk across the plank when I could glide across it. I ordered them to construct an airport walkalator instead of a plank. “Make it four—no, five feet wide,” I said, putting on a sumo suit in case I fell down. I put on another sumo suit for good measure. And I decided that, instead of pillars and support beams, they should fill the circus tent with sand, fill it all the way up here to the tightrope platform, and then we can simply lay the walkalator on top, but since we’re on the subject, why use sand when we can use concrete? I barked, “Fill the tent with concrete!” and began to gesticulate as if my hair had caught fire. I quickly checked myself, however, and demanded that they not only fill the tent with concrete, but the whole city. Frenzied, they assembled a mountain of gravel bags and water barrels and loaded up a battalion of cement trucks. As they leapt into the trucks and revved the engines, I reneged. “Forget about the concrete. Forget about the sand. Just make sure that walkalator is stabilized. Please wrap it in cellophane as well. I don’t want to get any germs on my feet.” I took off the second sumo suit. I took off the first one. I thought twice and put them both back on. I added a third. I took all three suits off and put all three back on again as they erected pillars and set up nets and hired a strongman and designed and assembled a walkalator, which they summarily laid atop the pillars from one platform to the other, sealing it in place with miniature blowtorches, and they even ran a series of copper wires from the walkalator’s handrailings to the ceiling, ensuring that it wouldn’t budge. “A brontosaurus could fall on this walkalator from the roof of a tall building,” the foreman said, “and it still wouldn’t budge.” I thanked him. He climbed down the ladder and left me alone. The spotlights came on. The crowd grew quiet and stared up at me. Beneath the nets, the strongman flexed his pectoral muscles and exclaimed, “Don’t worry! I’ll catch you if you fall!” I waved at him. I waved at the crowd. I took a series of deep breaths, waved at the crowd again, smoothed out my eyebrows, cleared my throat, scratched one of my earlobes . . . Finally I stepped onto the walkalator. It ushered me from one platform to the other without incident. Halfway across I did a masterful cartwheel. The crowd cheered.

BALLOON

It wouldn’t deflate. In fact, it had grown larger and more buoyant. I purchased it over three months ago and it continued to float there, adamant, proud, its string tied to an armrest and taut as a guitar’s. The balloon was daring me. I decided to stick it with a knife. It absorbed the blow, as if expecting it, and the balloon dimpled and wrinkled as it sunk to the floor. My daughter thought it was dead. She insisted that we bury the carcass in the back yard, near the garden. We invited guests, my daughter and I. There was a long ceremony followed by a catered lunch. Everybody talked about the balloon, remembering the good times. Nobody talked about how I had gotten away with murder.

THE HUIS CLOS HOTEL

Marionette puppet in the corner. Long strings rose into an obscure grill in the ceiling and I couldn’t see who was manipulating them. I heard heavy breathing up there. Sometimes sharp curses.
   The puppet stood eight feet tall with long shoulders and piercing features. It wore a gray suit and held a paperthin paddle in a wooden hand. Imprinted on the paddle was a photographic headshot of itself, or rather the man who had served as a blueprint for the puppet. At random intervals, the puppet raised the paddle to its face and repeated the same mantra in an electric monotone: “No strings attached.”
   I opened an umbrella as more and more guests strode through the lobby. A bellhop sneered at me. He conferred with another bellhop who conferred with a doorman. The doorman pointed at a check-in clerk and gestured at me. The check-in clerk blew a whistle and a concierge appeared at my side, chin upturned.
   “Today I met the man who will take out my gall bladder,” I said, tilting the umbrella to one side. “He seems like a good man.”
   The concierge didn’t say anything. I noticed a small, inconspicuous fishhook protruding from the close-shaven flesh of his chin. Its line rose into an obscure grill in the ceiling.
   “They say that the Huis Clos Hotel is where everything happens,” uttered the concierge through tight lips. “I regret to inform you that an important part of everything is death.”
   I closed the umbrella and eyeballed the puppet. Its puppeteer yanked on the strings attached to its shoulders, producing a vulgar shrug.
   I looked at the concierge. His head jerked up and down and he turned toward an elevator, toes dragging across the carpet.
   Reaching for a chandelier and striking an aggrieved pose, I faded out of the narrative like a
nosferatu
at dawn . . .
    . . . All of the elevators in the hotel dinged at the same time and the doors slid open and a troop of boy scouts in hunter green knee socks and hunter green shorts and khaki shortsleeve shirts with red neckerchiefs exited and got into formation and marched through the lobby citing their Law in unison: “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” They repeated the Law until the last scout had exited one of eight revolving doors, the hotel’s only entranceways. Staff and guests alike acknowledged the procession with three-fingered salutes.
   A woodpecker flew into the lobby through an open skylight. It landed on the puppet’s nose and began to jackhammer its forehead. It pecked a quick hole and ruptured a pipeline; glowing antifreeze exploded from the wound. The puppet staggered backwards into the wall, shooing away the bird with pinwheel swats, trying to plug the wound with its fingers, but the antifreeze kept coming, spurting across the lobby. Guests slipped and fell. Staff members tried to help them up and they slipped and fell, too, waving their arms in awkward circles even after they had hit the floor, stranded on the paisley carpet.
   Commotion in the ceiling. Like a stampede of tap shoes and cowboy boots moving across an old, rickety stage. It shifted all over the lobby, erratically, with no apparent direction or purpose. The puppet followed the commotion, wigwagging and hemorrhaging, as if being jabbed with broom handles from multiple angles. He trampled the concierge. He trampled a family of four. Outcries, accusations. Everybody threw up their arms in feigned slow motion. All the while the puppet continued to put the paddle to its face and articulate its mantra . . .
   The puppet collapsed in a revolving door, jamming all eight of them—the entranceways functioned as a hive mind—and its marionette strings snapped. The puppeteer blew a hole in the ceiling with a shotgun, dropped a thick rope through the hole, and rappelled down it. On his head he wore a small cardboard box with rectangular eye-slits. Seven or eight men wearing the same boxes followed him down the rope. All of them wore gray suits. As more and more people struggled to get inside the hotel, congealing on the sidewalk into an elastic riot, they piled onto the eight-foot obstruction and scrambled to set it free.
   A fire started.
   Arson. The guilty party slipped onto a fire escape and bolted the door behind him. Nobody could get out. Everybody caught fire.
   Final images: . . . The burning face of a man with long shoulders and piercing features turned to ashes. The roof caved in. Suns and moons timelapsed across the sky . . . The ashes blew away, revealing a large, herbaceous pinecone with scales that twitched and glistened in the ruins.