Farewell Navigator (11 page)

I ask, So where do you find all your various socks? and he answers, Mother sends.

I say, Oh.

I believe there are many ways to choke.

I don’t think a blocked trachea is the worst of them.

I mean, yes, you’ll die if your flesh-clogged windpipe is not poked clear, but is that actually worse than years of nothing to say?

I slither my fingers down at night, like they are his fingers.

I am a stealer.

I take snapshots of other people’s heads.

I take their fingers and put them in my crotch.

I need to get him out of here.

I’m afraid he will turn into one long non sequitur if I don’t.

I can borrow disguises from my sister’s human-puppet college.

I’ll drive so fast they can’t catch us.

I am a good driver.

I’ll give him my bed and take the couch. Unless he says, Hey, come here.

I drop a pan of lasagna from picturing it so hard.

I don’t even mind when the lash-batter says, Oh my god,
loser!
because soon I will never see her again.

I will give him sugar cake for breakfast. Grapefruit so young it hurts your eyes.

I will take him for walks around my neighborhood, which has feral cats and a lightning-struck tree.

I will read aloud from a book of his choice.

I won’t worry any more about my breath stopping in the night, because if it does, he will start it.

He nods while her mouth moves, but really, what is she saying?

He is smiling because she is.

He is thinking, What about the misery shows? (The other humans often need him on hand to explain plot and character while they suck themselves into sucrose trances.)

He likes the red best. But there is never enough.

He likes the green under Penelope’s lashes.

He hates how worried she looks, so he keeps nodding.

He thinks, If any god has marked me out again for ship-wreck, my tough heart can undergo it. What hardship have I not long since endured at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.

He says, All right, lamb, see you then.

He adds, I shrive thee of all blame for Tuesday’s fungus-riddled cod.

I run it:
lamb lamb lamb lamb lamb.

I know he’d never say it to the eyelash-batter. He doesn’t even look at her, usually.

I repeat the word until my tongue hurts.

I am still holding the barrister wig, even though no one will be needing it.

I blink at the pink light growing on the floor.

I was clear, wasn’t I, in naming midnight as our appointed time?

I diagnose myself with dawnophobia: the fear of dawn.

I bet he fell asleep by mistake.

I wonder if his roommate caught him on his way out. Informed the nurses’ station.

I don’t think the roommate would rat; he is not a fan of people in charge.

I hope he’ll whisper apologies in the breakfast line. Raincheck on our rendezvous, lamb?

I won’t be able to stand it if—instead—he looks at me in that I-am-not-actually-here way and mentions a sea creature.

I will, though.

I will stand it.

I dry my eyes with a dry napkin.

I go through a whole stack—ten times ten—of suggestion cards in their plastic bin, writing the same thing on every card:
Please cancel your contract with the improv comedians
.

HANDFASTING

When the stranger walks into the restaurant, I am still listening to Kasko talk dirty to my sister. I’ve been listening all morning and hating Kasko and hating my sister for putting up with it. She does more than put up. She leans across the marbled counter, between poached-egg orders, bends close to his big thick face and keeps her lips apart. The spit glitters in her mouth.

Sarah isn’t spending many nights at home. She sleeps at Kasko’s trashed apartment between his crusty sheets. My parents allow this because my sister is out of high school and earns her own money. I am thinking, when the stranger walks in, about drawing up a list of Kasko’s crimes. My parents might be interested in seeing it.

Hello there, says the stranger to Sarah, and leans primly against a stool. His white shirt is stained blue from the fountain pens sticking out of its pocket. He orders hot water and dry toast and explains he is looking for witches. Yes, he says, it’s a strange thing to look for, but we must understand, he is writing a dissertation about them.

Aren’t any here, says Kasko. Town’s full up on
bitches
however.

I’m not talking about the broomstick kind, says the stranger.
Witches are not just a matter of the seventeenth century. They are alive among us.

But not here, repeats Kasko. Look around you—there’s
nothing
here.

There is a bank, a courthouse, a pharmacy. A green square where two streets meet. Around the corner is the Vietnamese café where Kasko rinses sauce off dishes and uses the long distance for booking bands that come to play at the VFW for the kids of Wolvercote, old kids, little kids, our hands full of beer.

My sister in her pink uniform with a tiny black star at either breast sets down the toast and hot water. The stranger dips one of the unbuttered triangles into the cup. Softens it, he murmurs.

She nods and asks, So what kind
are
they?

Modern-day witchcraft, he says, assumes many guises. You have your run-of-the-mill goth girl. Your senile herb-dicer. Your lesbian bookshop owner. Your California blood-guzzler. Your sober alcoholic in search of a new spirituality. And then there are—the renegades. They don’t fit into a category because they’re either insurgent or incompetent.

Kasko tells him he is barking up a blind alley. Sarah nods. Davey and the line cook nod.

I don’t move my head.

You sure you got the right Wolvercote? says Kasko.

This is it, replies the stranger. There are no other Wolvercotes of interest to me.

How did the stranger know where to look? The witch wasn’t here long. She passed through, is gone. Kasko says that whoever mentions her name gets a beating. He is full of big talk. But he can, if he wants to, break my bones. He tortures squirrels; he once shot a dog without remorse.

This stranger owns a very nice selection of pens, sleek and heavy, with slanting tips and drippy ink. He asks questions and writes down what the others say. I am the youngest and stay quiet. There aren’t any grown-ups around except the mailman, reading his paper in the corner, and he is deaf. Sarah pours coffee and refills our waters and tongs crullers out of the glass case.

What does the word
Wicca
mean to you? asks the stranger.

My friend Flicka! shouts Davey from down the counter, where he and the line cook are playing two-handed spades.

The stranger persists. Have you heard this term before? Has anyone around here used the term?

We’re very uneducated, sniffs Kasko. We don’t use terms.

Sarah offers the stranger a cruller, but he says he can’t handle sugar. I get bloated and lethargic, he explains. He touches very lightly the back of her hand that holds the green flowered plate. Kasko, noticing, says this interview needs to wrap up and what else does he want to know for God’s sake?

So far you’ve told me
nothing
I want to know. You have described some customary social practices that include—he looks at his notes—the listening to of extremely marginal music, and the pushing over of cows as they stand in fields. You have intimated that nobody over the age of twelve in this town is a virgin.

He said virgin, yells Davey from the cards.

When the lunch rush starts, the stranger says he’s off to the Red Roof Inn on the highway to write up his notes. We watch him go. Kasko announces his theory: the guy is on a hunt for tender meat. He has a thing for girls who wear black and use period blood in their potions. A fetish, he explains. This research is a front.

Sarah isn’t persuaded. He doesn’t look dirty, she says, just kind of pathetic.

Sex criminals, says Kasko, never look like sex criminals.

He was wearing a wedding ring, my sister points out. I didn’t notice this; neither did Kasko. It’s the sort of thing girls notice.

The witch’s eyes were painted purple and black. Back in April, I looked straight into them and asked for a spell. Cut those two apart, was my request. She followed my pointing finger to Kasko and Sarah, entwined. I’ll see what I can do, she said.

The stranger comes back the next morning. We are waiting. We would be waiting anyhow, because it’s July, the heat is wet and terrible, and the Morning Star has central air. My parents’ house does not have central air. The movie theater, two towns over, does not open until the afternoon.

He starts asking the same questions as the day before, and Kasko, Sarah, and Davey give the same answers. Nothing. Nope. Never noticed. The stranger is getting frustrated. Keeps asking the same things. Have we seen any girls collecting rainwater in bowls? Wearing milky stones on chains around their necks? Carrying a double-edged blade with runes carved into the handle?

Don’t blame us for the no-witches situation, says Kasko. He’s got a satisfied look I can’t stand.

I say loudly, Why don’t you talk to Egg Boy?

Shut up, Giles, they all go at once.

Who is Egg Boy?

A retarded person who lives under the town bridge, declares Kasko. Next question?

The stranger looks at me, hard. Giles, who is Egg Boy?

From across the table, Kasko is staring too. He shakes his head just the tiniest bit, and tucks his lips behind his teeth.

He lives under the bridge and steals eggs from neighboring farms, I answer reluctantly. But the stranger is writing it down. He seems excited. He finishes the coffee in his cup and slurps up what spilled into the green saucer. I look over his shoulder at the notebook and read
LOCATE EGG BOY
in big bleeding blue letters.

Egg Boy, whose heart was torn to pieces and left in the road, now keeps to himself in his apartment above the package store. His bad moods are feared and his grief is respected. People only discuss his plight in whispers, and never with grown-ups, much less strange ones. I’m actually not sure if this stranger is a grown-up or not. He dresses old—corduroy pants and white button-downs and thick brown shoes—but his face is soft and pimply. He doesn’t seem much older than Kasko or the other boys who are already done with high school.

I leave the Morning Star while the stranger is still sitting there, before Kasko can hit or lecture me. I take my bike away from town into the meadows, the pine woods, hiding in the heat until supper.

Do your spells really work? I asked the witch. A bunch of us were having beers at the VFW, where the manager doesn’t believe in underage drinking laws. If you’re old enough to stop a bullet for the U.S. government, you’re old enough to get blinkered, he says. I am not old enough to stop a bullet for the U.S. government, but I drink there anyway.

They work, she said vaguely. Destruction of love bond—it’s a common rite. But it might take some time.

I wanted her to hurry, before my sister did something stupid like marry him.

On the third morning, the stranger doesn’t come. We sit in the cool air stirring packets of sugar into burnt coffee. When
Kasko gets bored of telling my sister how hard he’ll get up in her snatch, he informs me I’m a brainless baby bitch and if I don’t learn to keep my mouth shut he will shut it permanently. Kasko never can come up with his own phrases. He just repeats what people say on cable. I wait for Sarah to defend me. After he calls me bitch a second time, she goes, Shut up, Kask, but in a dozy voice, not fierce at all. I sit there hating them both.

At noon Kasko leaves for his shift at the Vietnamese café. The Morning Star begins to crowd with grown-ups on lunch break from the bank, the pharmacy, the courthouse. I think of the stranger folding blue-stained shirts into a suitcase at the Red Roof, digesting his unsatisfying continental breakfast, driving his rental back to the airport. He will not find Egg Boy. The grown-ups of Wolvercote don’t know any Egg Boy; they think his name is Earl.

Davey, I say, lemme borrow your truck for a minute.

How long is a minute?

Short. And I’m a good driver.

You are a good driver, he has to admit. Next year, when I take the learner’s permit test, I will surely get a perfect score.

I find the stranger in the Red Roof parking lot, trash bag in hand, picking coffee cups and candy wrappers off his car seats. He is sweating like a hog.

I was worried you’d’ve checked out already.

Checked out? Hardly, he says. There is more to investigate. For instance, there’s not a single bridge within a fifteen-mile radius of Wolvercote—hence, Egg Boy cannot live under one.

But he could still be retarded, I remind him.

Is he?

I look at the stranger’s finger, the one with the ring. He’s actually smart as hell, I say. He was in Sarah’s class at school.
She said he wrote English papers that made you want to cry they were so beautiful.

And he, in his intelligence, might be familiar with witchcraft?

Well, maybe not so much the craft as the witch, I say.

The stranger flinches. Now we’re getting somewhere.

She showed up last spring, I tell him, at the VFW with a band Kasko had booked at the last minute. They seemed to be big fans of death. Strips of white cotton wrapped tight around their bodies made them moving mummies. Plastic half-knives were Velcro’ed onto their chests and stomachs, trickling red thread. Their songs, which came out of a computer, sounded like people getting hit with violins and hammers. The girl sat at a table overseeing their tapes and stickers while they stood on stage pressing the buttons. Nobody bought any merchandise, but Egg Boy went over and made conversation. She was pissed-looking and pretty in her Egyptian makeup, her see-through net dress, her boots that climbed all the way up her thighs. Egg Boy was pissed-looking too.

The band left and she stayed. For a week the two of them holed up in his apartment above the packie. When they came down again, he told Kasko, his best friend since seventh grade, that he was going to marry her.

What name did she go by? asks the stranger. He seems like he might be about to throw up. His eyes are blinking very fast.

Are you really writing a paper on this?

What was her goddamn
name?

Morrigan, I say.

The stranger nods, rubs his neck, stares down at the mottled Styrofoam in his hand.

So you’re
not
writing a paper. Are you even in graduate school?

I am admiring the guy’s ability not to cry when his eyes are so full of tears.

This Egg Boy, he says slowly, she was fucking him.

Well, they got married. What do you think.

He says nothing.

The majority of couples, I inform him, keep having sex regularly for at least the first three years of marriage.

Who told you that?

My sister. She read it in a magazine.

Did an actual ceremony occur? Was anyone
official
presiding? As in someone over the age of twenty-one?

No, but it was a real wedding. And they took their clothes off.

Lovely, he says, all cold.

The wedding was held at midnight in the back room of the Vietnamese café. Morrigan brought in a bunch of black lace and told me and Sarah to tack it up over all the windows. We didn’t have any tacks so we used electrical tape. From the stereo came groaning organ music; from the rented dry-ice machine, fog that smelled like strawberries.

The kids gathered. Some of the older ones, Kasko’s age, were about to turn into grown-ups; they had jobs and goatees and sometimes, by accident, babies. We stood around the room in our fanciest outfits. I wore my father’s tuxedo pants and a sleeveless white T-shirt and a long black tie. My hair, stiff with Ivory, shot straight into the air. Sarah was in a vinyl dress that crammed her breasts up, and I tried not to look at them.

Kasko was the priest. He waited under the exit sign, which Morrigan had hidden with a wreath of plastic orchids, in the
three-piece suit he wore to his mother’s funeral last year. I was thinking he should have worn a cape instead, something not so Christian-looking, but Sarah explained that the suit brought him closer to the Dark Side, where his mother was, and thereby invested him with the powers necessary to preside over the ritual.

Morrigan and Egg Boy came out of the kitchen in bathrobes. Morrigan’s midnight-blue hair was tied into clumps with little rubber snakes, and her eyes were painted in the shape of Cleopatra’s. Egg Boy looked like he normally did—bald, angry—except for the bathrobe. They stood in front of Kasko and everybody got quiet.

Why are they wearing bathrobes? I whispered to Sarah.

Because they’re doing the ceremony skyclad, she answered.

The robes dropped, making terrycloth pools at the feet of the bride and groom. I blinked at the sudden flesh. Morrigan had pointy shoulders and pimples on her back but her butt was plenty—I mean it was beautiful—round, soft, tilted up. I stared at its surging, the high curving slice, the two dents at the bottom of her spine. Her little pale legs were shaking. I pictured my hands on her waist, lightly clamped. I kept my eyes away from Egg Boy, afraid of seeing what a handsome guy’s butt looked like. I was sure it would not resemble mine.

I could not see their fronts but Kasko’s stupid lizard eyes crawled down, looking at what he shouldn’t. He saw it on my sister—wasn’t that enough? He stared until Egg Boy kicked his suited leg.