Zombie (10 page)

“Mr. Rembrandt,” I say.

“The director,” she says.

“Mr. Barker,” Mr. Rembrandt says.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do next. I drop my hand from my nose and tuck the bloody tissues into my pocket and do the only thing I can think to do—I stand and raise my hand to my forehead, my fingers tight together and stiff, and salute him with a chop. Then as she rushes toward the stage with her back to me, I yell, “I LIKE YOU, AIMEE WHITE.”

Jeremy Barker is black and has that thing called swagger.

O
n the 55 home, I freak out about Aimee. I don’t freak out, like some kind of spaz and nerd all over the passengers. But I do replay the past two days in my head and try to guess what will happen next.

My bus stops at a community college near my house where the remnants of a small carnival are in the process of deconstruction. A Ferris wheel and Tilt-A-Whirl fold up and are loaded into tractor trailers. Wooden booths break down into a pile of planks. A canvas tent used to cover the food court is uprooted pole by pole.

Our driver opens the door and greets the students and teachers stepping inside.

The last time I went to a carnival like this my Dad taught me all about my penis. And told me he had killed people. And showed me how to shoot a gun. This was a very big day.

I remember it almost too well. We stood in line for hot dogs and funnel cakes.

I poked my penis. “Is this a bird?” I said, still poking. “People in my class call it a bird. Is it?” I asked. “A bird?” Poked some more.

“It’s not a bird,” he said. “It’s a penis.” He asked me what I wanted on my hot dog and I told him just pickle relish. He made a face. He only ever ordered his with spicy mustard. “Jeremy,” Dad said. “You know it’s not called a bird, right?”

A kid in my gym class, Jerome, had told me that my barn door was open earlier that week and that my bird was going to fly away if I didn’t close it. I didn’t want to tell Dad everything Jerome had said. I didn’t want him to yell at me for leaving my barn door open.

“So it’s not a bird?” I asked.

“Jesus. No. It’s not a bird,” he said. “Am I making sense? Your penis can’t fly. It doesn’t have wings. Because it’s not a bird. Your penis is just a normal penis like any other penis.”

“My penis is like your penis?” I asked.

“Smaller than mine,” he said. “But it’ll get bigger as you grow.” Dad warmed up to the subject as we stood in line. He said that only boys had them. He said that girls had less to work with and had something called
penis envy
. “They have vaginas,” he said. “They each have a vagina. But they wish they had what we have. The dong.”

“They each have a vagina,” I repeated. “What’s
the dong
?”

“It’s just another name for a penis. Dong. Pecker. Dick. Johnson. Snake. Penis.”

“But not a bird?” I asked.

“Not a bird,” he said.

We got our hot dogs and walked to a tent where a man encouraged people to shoot a rifle at alien-faced balloons.

“Baltonam is under attack,” a born-and-bred Baltimore man said with a hillbilly highway accent, in a backwards O’s hat. “Extraterrestrial warfare has begun in the streets of Baltonam. This is a call to arms, hon. Grab a gun and join the fight. Baltonam needs your help. Five bucks for five bullets. Pop three balloons, kill three aliens, and win one prize.” Gigantic panda bears dangled from hooks above the counter of rifles. “Be a hero, not a zero.” He held a microphone and wore an apron stuffed with cash. His face and forearms were sunburned red. He wiped sweat from under his eyes and unfolded a fat wad of green to make change for some people who stepped up to the counter. “Baltonam. The last stand. Be a hero, not a zero.”

I asked Dad what the man meant by Baltonam and Dad explained how it was a cross between the words
Baltimore
and
Vietnam
. Just another name for our city.

“You were in Vietnam,” I said, watching someone else load a gun at the counter of the tent. “Baltimore isn’t like Vietnam, is it Dad?”

Dad agreed with me. He said Vietnam was nothing like Baltimore. He said that the two couldn’t be more different. Then he said, “Vietnam was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

“Did you shoot anybody in Vietnam?” I asked.

An old lady with a walker stopped at the game, a little girl at her side. She sited down the rifle and popped three balloons in rapid succession. Panda time.

“I did shoot people,” he said. “I shot a lot of people. When our bullets killed someone we called them
killshots
.”

“Did they cry?” I asked. “The people you shot?”

“I did a lot of bad things over there, but they were things that needed to be done,” he said. “I did a lot of things that I am not proud of, Jeremy.”

“Were you sorry that you killed those people?” I asked.

“Not at the time,” he said.

“Does it make you sad now?”

“It makes me sad to tell you about it.”

I hugged his leg.

Dad got out his wallet and the man loaded our rifles. Dad instructed me on aiming for the killshot—how to control my breathing, how to inhale and exhale before squeezing the trigger.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

My shots hit everything except the wall as the kickback from the rifle jammed my shoulder. Dad, however, held the rifle like he’d never been without one. He raised it to his shoulder and stared down the barrel to aim, before popping five balloons in five pellets and winning a panda bear prize.

I wonder sometimes if I remember the details of this memory incorrectly, like maybe I learned some of the more disturbing details of Dad’s time in Vietnam years later and somehow combined them with this memory of us at the state fair as a way to deal with it. Then again, look at who I’m dealing with. Really, anything is possible.

A young man runs across the school parking lot and bangs on
the side of the bus as we start to pull away. He yells to the driver to stop and open the door, but the bus keeps on rolling. We ride down the street and through a light before pulling back over to the curb.

Zombies attack the bus on all sides, slapping bloody palms and flesh-eaten fingers across the windows. Fast fuckers with gray skin, pocked with peach-sized craters of missing muscles. Hundreds of them flood the street, filling in around us. They vomit up their insides, growl through jagged teeth, and snap their jaws. The bus rocks side to side and soon will be on its side. Then the feeding will begin. Dinnertime. And there’s no place else that I’d rather be.

D
ad orders dinner but doesn’t tell me when it arrives.

I can smell it up in my bedroom and my belly growls, so I go downstairs and find him in the living room already halfway through a container of moo shu pork and starting on egg drop soup. Dad loves Chinese food but hates Chinese people. He pinches a ball of rice in his fingers and drops it in his mouth. Dog pushes herself up from her bed in the corner and sniffs the floor, looking for dropped Chinese food. Dad plucks a bamboo shoot out of a container and feeds it to her. She loves him for it.

“Jeremy, cue up the movie when you come in, yeah?” He gulps from a bottle of beer, food still in his mouth. His attention and focus are on the black flat-screen TV with nothing on it, but if I were a fly on the wall and watched him I’d swear he saw something there.

“I didn’t know about dinner,” I say, sitting next to him on the couch. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I called you,” he says.

“No. You asked me to cue up the movie.”

“You were upstairs.” Dad puts down his plastic spoon and container of neon yellow liquid. He cups his hands over his mouth. “JEREMY. DINNER IS READY.” He picks up his spoon and container again.

“You never listen to me,” I say.

“And you lie.”

“Don’t change the topic, okay? I hate it when you do that.”

“You lie. You skip class and don’t say anything about it. I ask you
to cue up the movie and you say
yeah, yeah Dad
but don’t cue up the goddamn movie. Does this look cued up to you?” He points to the blank TV. “Cued … up,” he says, turning on the TV and DVD player with the remote control. “Jeremy, is the movie cued up?
Yes, why yes it is, Dad
. Good job, son.
Thanks, Dad
.” He fake smiles to no one sitting next to him. Then looks at me. “Lied. Liar. Lie. You.” Chewing like a cow, he says, “Are we going to watch this goddamn movie, Jeremy, or do you want to hold hands and continue talking about our emotions until our periods sync?”

“I am asking a simple thing,” I say.

“You think I don’t know?”

“I know you hear me,” I say.

“You really are your mother’s son.”

“How hard is it to come up and get me when dinner is ready?”

“Fine. I will. Okay? Are we done here? Can we get on with it?”

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too,” he says, holding out his fist for me to pound. “I’ll be better about it. Promise.”

“We both know you won’t,” I say. I make a fist, tiny in comparison, and tap it against his, but his tap feels more like a jab. I grab the DVD from the table and cue the fucker up.

“I said I promise and when I promise, I promise,” he says. He finishes a bottle of beer, but has another one ready to open. He drinks half before setting it down. “In the Marines,” Dad says as the FBI warning fades up on the screen, “they teach you a lot of everyday skills. They teach you important qualities that every man should own, like loyalty, honor, respect. The Marines,” he says, aiming his fork at me, instead of having to look at me. “The Marines taught me the value and importance of consequence. They taught me a lot of things. A lot,” he says, looking at me now. “I was the one they trusted and so they taught me how to extract the tongue from a prisoner’s mouth, surgically, as a consequence for not cooperating with our interrogator.” He takes a small bite of his mu shu pork and then another bigger bite. “They taught me to do this thing as a consequence. If a valuable prisoner refused to speak,
then the interrogator would say it was time to send in the doctor. That’s what they called me, the doctor. That poor bastard would see me walk in with a little black kit filled with the nastiest little blades and clamps, and immediately he’d sing the most beautiful song. Everything we needed to know, right there.” Dad scoops up more food, but doesn’t eat it. “And when he didn’t sing, I did what I had been trained to do. They took the kit away from me when I returned home. Said I had no civilian use for it.” He laughs. “So don’t ever lie to me.” He taps his temple. “I’ll know, or I’ll know how to get to the truth.”

Dad is known for his stories. He lectures and rants and keeps strong opinions that are mostly and largely not fit for radio or cable. But
this
story, this was different. This was new. This was about what he had done. Who he had been at one time. Extracting tongues.

“Once a long time ago,” he says, “way back at the beginning of everything, there was a man and he was alone with only one purpose—survival. He didn’t have a choice—he was a survivalist—and that one man learned the most valuable lesson of all. He learned that there are only two types of people in the world—the hunters and the hunters being hunted.”

I am goddamn thankful that
Planet Terror
, a true Zombie Apocalypse, a terrifically bad zombedy, begins.

The writer and director Robert Rodriguez has created one of my favorite heroines in zombie cinema: Cherry Darling—a go-go dancer, not a stripper as she argues throughout the movie. I love her mainly for clarifying this very issue of stripper v. go-go dancer throughout the movie. This zombedy has a phenomenal opening sequence wherein Cherry dances on a stage, shaking it out, until the very end where Rodriguez’s brilliance truly shines through, revealing Cherry in all of her emotional glory as she collapses into a puddle of furious and hysterical tears, crumpled in the corner, crying on stage as all of her deep-seated emotional pain comes crashing down all around her.

If you ask me, though, she is a stripper, not that I’ve ever really seen a stripper. Dad thinks she’s one too and I’m fairly sure he has
seen a stripper. In the 1970s a chick that danced and stripped on stage was a go-go dancer. In the 1980s, this same thing was called a stripper. Either way, the girl is usually showing tit, at least.

Planet Terror
is the kind of movie where it’s part zombie film, part schlock, part low-budget gore fest, part skin flick. It’s the complex, complicated layers that make it great and more than some dumbass zombie movie. Regardless, one thing remains true—zombies are dead inside without any stake in humanity. They generally have no emotion and carry only the need for destruction and cannibalism. The zombie movie is a morality tale. Catholics call these parables. Recently, Hollywood calls them box office blockbusters.

Dad and I’ve seen
Planet Terror
a trillion times. Shit, we’ve seen every zombie movie a trillion times, but everyone has his or her comforts.

T
here’s a chemical explosion in
Planet Terror
(isn’t there always?) that causes human skin to melt and liquefy into horrendous walking rotting corpses of goo. Dad calls these
Goo Babies
. They are the grossest kind of zombie you can encounter. Like melted gum on the bottom of your shoe.

“Dad, there are two things I want to say to you. I don’t like the fact that you disappear every night and I don’t think that Liza really exists.” I’ve broken two of the Zombie Survival Codes. I made eye contact with him and opened my damn mouth. I sit back and wait for him to respond—shout or explode, I’m not sure which yet.

“Let’s play
Zombie
. Okay? Situation—you’re alone in this house.”

“Is Liza here?” I ask.

“You’re in the basement. By yourself. It’s our basement.”