Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (22 page)

“Good thing you’re not Jewish, huh?”

“Yeah. Good thing.”

Johnny looks at his watch. “Well, it’s just about quittin’ time. Listen, if I were you, I’d walk straight home. Don’t let nobody get too close to you ‘til you gargle with some Listerine. Otherwise they’ll smell the beer on your breath. And while I’m handin’ out advice, you should stop worryin’ about your dick so much. Just do whatever comes natural–but no more’n five or six times a day.” Smiling, he stows away the cooler with their empty beer bottles and heads down the stairs. Gordon follows. “And hey–” Johnny says to him, “next time you see Lilith in your sleep, throw a good one inta her for me. I ain’t seen her since I was in the Marines. I kinda miss the old slut.”

“You’ve seen her?” Gordon bleats. He misses a step and has to grab the railing to avoid falling over.

“Jesus Christ, I’m just pullin’ your leg!” Johnny says, patting him on the back. “I guess you got a little drunk.”

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A warm spring rain accompanies Gordon on his walk home from the lumberyard. Fat, widely spaced droplets spatter the sidewalk like the blood that dribbled from his finger in the nail shed. His nose is tickled by the smell of wet dirt rising from the asphalt. Still reveling in the happy, numb glow of his beer buzz, Gordon thinks the raindrops feel like the hand of God, petting him. An e.e. cummings poem is probably responsible for that notion. The line he’s thinking of goes:

“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”

It’s been a dry year and the lawns in front of the low, stucco-sided ranch houses Gordon passes are the color of toasted Wonder Bread. His father drew the architectural plans for nearly half the homes in this neighborhood.
Swannson Lumber, Inc.
probably supplied ninety percent of the building materials. Gordon wonders what Kingsburg would be like if–like a modern-day George Bailey in “It’s A Wonderful Life”–his father were angel-hustled around an alternative universe in which he’d never existed. Would things be better there, or worse?

Of course, in that alternative universe Gordon wouldn’t exist.
No big loss
, he thinks. Most of the time he wishes he’d never been born, anyway.

But not today. Today he’s discovered the magical effects of beer drinking. He has a new reason to live, something more to look forward to than just getting laid. He ponders how one goes about becoming an alcoholic. Next week, he’ll check out Malcolm Lowry’s
Under the Volcano
from the town library.

Why is it, Gordon wonders, that ecstasy and evil are so closely linked when it comes to pleasures of the flesh? Why is it that whenever he does something that feels good, someone comes along to insist that it’s bad for him? Even in Gordon’s own mind, desire and disgust are never far apart. Almost every time he has an orgasm, a bitter old church lady inside his head peers through her cat’s-eye glasses at the resultant blobs of jism–clinging like marrow to the shower walls, pooling in his palm like an oyster’s drool, staining a tissue like some spattered albino insect–and she purses her withered lips and says,
“Your body is a temple. Don’t defile it.”

But what if he doesn’t defile it? What if he refuses his body every pleasure it hungers for, like some flesh-denying monk living by the Zen mantra,
Want Nothing
,
Accept Everything,
or some timid Christian so wary of sin that he fears God will damn him to hell just for eating Oreo cookies? What then? Gordon imagines the interior of such a body as the equivalent of the formal living room in his parent’s house, which has always been off-limits to him. It’s a place of gold shag carpet that shows footprints unless it’s brushed a certain way, white silk couches that become permanently stained from the slightest bit of dirt off a rambunctious boy’s jeans, and tall orange throne-like chairs so top-heavy that they’re always in danger of tipping over and smashing a swag lamp or busting up a fake Grecian urn. Gordon hates that room. It’s always seemed pretentious and useless to him, a huge waste of space. His parents rarely use it for entertaining because they’re afraid of making a mess. What Gordon would like to do is set Samantha loose in there with a belly full of beer and watch her careen around like a floppy-eared pinball, peeing on everything. It would be a triumph for animal instinct.

The world is a vicious, jealous place where any sense of fun is frowned upon–or so it seems to Gordon today. He can’t even make a joke anymore without someone wanting to spit in his face. Those crummy, self-appointed judges of what’s acceptable–those self-righteous critics and snotty put-down artists–they suck the spirit out of everything. But at least Johnny Hoss was able to make him feel less alone and weird. Maybe, if he finds the right friends, everything will turn out okay. In the meantime, he’ll try to pay more attention to the simple, good things in life and enjoy what he can.

The cracked and hairy pineapple hide of an old palm tree growing next to the sidewalk captures Gordon’s attention. He looks up, marveling at its longevity. His grandfather probably passed by that very tree fifty years ago. In its bird-spattered crown, Gordon hears a mourning dove’s sorrowful burble blending with the dwindling patter of rain on this otherwise churchyard still day.
Where are all the people?
Kingsburg is having one of those small town moments when everything seems deserted and bathed in a dusky melancholy.

Late one summer evening last year during just such a moment, Gordon was walking under the long double row of maples forming a canopy over 16th Avenue when he came upon a Junior League brass band practicing on the stage of the band shell in
Olafson Park
. Draping willow trees and huge, blooming rhododendrons mellowed the usual shrillness of the marching tune as it carried across the park’s vast, darkling green spaces. John Philip Sousa had never sounded sweeter.

A lawnmower starts up somewhere, distant and muffled as a hornet’s nest at the bottom of a dry well. Who would be out mowing their lawn in this weather? But then Gordon realizes it’s not a lawnmower, it’s the drone of a single-engine plane. He looks above the horizon and sees a red-and-white Cessna cruising low in the ash gray sky, just above the roofs and trees. It’s his father’s plane, he’s almost sure of it. When he thinks of his father up there with Mike, showing him a good time, Gordon feels a slight pang of… what?
Envy? Guilt? Rage? Humiliation?
He’ll probably never come up with exactly the right word for it. Whatever it is, it sucks.

Then, remembering his conversation with Johnny, a flood of forgiveness rivers through Gordon. He feels his ribcage loosen as his lungs fill up with silvery air. He can empathize with his father now; he can understand some of his frustrations. There are so many things Gordon wants to tell him. It could be their first man-to-man talk, the start of a new, and deeper, relationship. Gordon feels an almost mystical connection between the two of them. He’s brimming over with a soulful, slobbery sort of garrulousness that he will later recognize as a telltale sign of having drunk too much.

A pinprick of sobriety at the back of Gordon’s brain reminds him that he and his father rarely talk about
anything
, much less Mal’s secret hurts and fears. So the kind of rapport he’s longing for is probably out of the question. But at least Gordon can show his father that all has been forgiven. Raising his hands high above his head, he runs toward the plane, waving.

Something’s wrong. The Cessna is flying
too
low, even for his daredevil father. It’s heading straight toward him over the roof of the Bigani’s pink stucco duplex. Its wings are banked at a crazy, almost 90-degree angle as the plane dives down in an arc. As it passes above Gordon, he reaches up and jumps, thinking he can almost touch the lowest wingtip. He even contemplates, for a drunken instant, the spectacle he would make if he grabbed onto the wing and held on.

And then the wing falls off.

Actually, it’s ripped off, torn from the rest of the plane as the power lines across the street catch it and snap with a resounding
Ping! Ping! Ping!
The sound reverberates like a violin struck by a handsaw’s taut steel blade. An instant later there’s the sound of aluminum tearing–a car crash in slow motion–and then the wing seems to just hang between the power poles, suspended in space. Time slows to a crawl. Gordon can see pink aviation fuel gushing from the top of the severed wing and running in rivulets down its gleaming white paint. Then the whole wing lands, with a thud, in the Hovnanian’s front lawn on the corner, next door to Gordon’s house. It stands on edge for a moment, then flops down on its side in their gypsum-strewn cactus garden.

The plane flips over like a gunshot bird and the other wing glances off the peaked
faux-
Swedish roof of the Hovnanian’s house. That second wing is also ripped away and goes clattering down the slope of the Hovnanian’s shingled roof to land in their backyard swimming pool. The plane is now just a shrieking fuselage. Gordon gets a glimpse of two figures through the tinted cockpit windows (
His father? Mike?
). It looks like they’re fighting. The fuselage drops low and the sputtering prop crunches into the cinderblock wall at the far end of the Hovnanian’s backyard, decimating it. The noise is louder than anything Gordon has ever experienced, a teeth-grinding screech, a slow explosion, as the plane’s belly erupts into aluminum confetti. Still, the battered fuselage somehow remains intact. It hurtles across the alley, flashes past the bottlebrush tree at the side of Gordon’s house, and then, spectacularly, makes a jagged hole in the wall where the living room is and disappears inside.

Gordon goes running. There’s no smoke, no flames. Almost all of the aviation fuel was left back in the tanks of the detached wings. When he gets to the alley just in front of the hole, he sees odd pink chunks–about the size of campfire marshmallows–clinging to the curb. (His mind, at the time, doesn’t register the chunks as human flesh, but it will later.) Also on the curb–in the middle, as if deliberately placed there–is something even stranger. Shiny pink, with teeth, it looks like the lower half of an old man’s dentures. Gordon picks the thing up without thinking too much and puts it in his back pocket. Someone might need it.

He walks over to the hole, picking his way across sharp, wavy strips of metal and broken bits of Plexiglas, being careful not to step on any pink marshmallows. It’s dark in there–his eyes are adjusted to outdoor light–and Gordon has the sensation of entering a cave where man-eating beasts might lurk. He steps over the broken slats of cedar and chalky hunks of drywall where the wall once stood. There’s a smell of motor oil on hot metal, the same smell Gordon always noted in the Cessna’s hangar as it was being put away after a flight on the weekend. It’s a strange smell for his parents’ formal living room.

“Is anybody in here?” Gordon asks. He really hopes this isn’t his father’s plane in pieces all around him.

It’s hard to pick out any one thing from the wreckage, but as his eyes adjust to the dimness what Gordon notices first is one of the white silk couches against the wall to the right of him. An enormous streak of red has been smeared across the gold-flecked wall directly behind it, like some abstract expressionist’s tantrum, and where the smear ends, Mike Shriver begins–or what’s left of him.

Mike’s broken body, still in his blue jumpsuit, is slumped across the back of the couch, but the jumpsuit looks too big on him now–and too lumpy–as if half of him is somehow missing. In fact, an arm and a leg are gone–and also Mike’s head. The bloody stump of his neck rises just above the jumpsuit’s collar, still pumping dark spurts of blood into the white silk cushions, which are now mostly red. Even more gruesome, the jumpsuit has been sliced open down the front and the flesh laid bare. Mike’s torso has been butterflied, the slick pink and purple of his entrails exposed. As Gordon watches, stunned beyond moving, a length of intestine swims loose–like a fat, wet worm–and goes spooling to the gold shag carpet.

Gordon is torn between running away to call the police and staying there to search for his father. Paternal devotion (and morbid curiosity) wins out. He starts to lift up torn and twisted pieces from the wreckage with shaking hands–a red-and-white door, part of the oxblood vinyl backseat. He’s stumbling around in shock now. At the same time, deep within Gordon’s brain, a dense tangle of neurons called the amygdala is releasing a torrent of hormones that will sear everything he sees into memories–memories that will later be used to torment him with nightmares, panic attacks, and fits of narcolepsy. The unbearable made unforgettable. His own personal horror show.

Turning over a section of tail rudder propped up in the far corner, Gordon finds Mike’s decapitated head. It seems to have smashed into an air conditioning vent like a cannonball. Now it’s stuck against the dented metal grate–eyes closed, bloody. It looks too heavy, off by itself like that. Then again, Mike’s head always looked too big for the rest of his body.

I wonder where his Benjamin Moore Paint cap went?
thinks Gordon.

Still no sign of his father. Maybe Mike was flying solo. That would explain a lot. But no, Gordon sees it now…. Skid marks in the foyer, and across that space, in the den, the pilot’s chair sits intact on the green carpet like an ejector seat with its back to him. Walking over to it, Gordon feels his whole body shuddering–motor control failing, heartbeat stuttering in anticipation.

Mal is still strapped to the chair. His arms and legs are gone. His shoulder sockets and what’s left of his thighs are oozing a pinkish-red jelly. But his head is still there, eyes wide open, staring straight up at Gordon, as if pleading with him. (Years later, when he sees that
Star Wars
episode in which Darth Vader is unmasked, Gordon will think,
That’s the same look my dad had on his face.
Like Darth Vader, running out of oxygen, finally beaten.) “Oh, dad, I’m so sorry…” Gordon says. But Mal’s not hearing any of it.

He looks thirsty. Maybe that’s because the lower half of his jaw has disappeared. His upper gums are weirdly exposed and his tongue is just hanging there like a flower stamen. Gordon gets the dentures out of his back pocket, suddenly sensing a need for them. He passes out when he sees they’re not dentures at all, but his father’s real teeth.