Marvel and a Wonder (25 page)

After twenty minutes or so, with two or three other girls gracing the stage—their drawn faces caked in makeup—Gilby strode back down the corridor to the bathroom and found his older brother leaning over its only toilet. He looked like he had vomited. Gilby squatted above him, asking if he was okay.

“I’m okay, little brother. It’s everyone else I worry about. This world, this world . . .”

“I’m going to go unhook the trailer and drive around some. See about finding a motel maybe. Do you want to stay here and watch that guy?”

Edward shook his head, wiping some spittle from the corner of his lip. “No. Let’s go find a room somewhere. This place is too full of cooze. It makes me feel emasculated.”

Gilby helped his brother to his feet, and, holding him under the right armpit, marched him into the unforgiving spectacle of the midday sun.

They unhooked the trailer, lowering the support struts in place—Gilby peering through the metal slats at the animal, whispering vague sounds of kindness to the horse—then hopped back inside the truck. The two brothers circled around town, finally settling on a chain motel, Gilby helping his brother from the cab, across the sticky parking lot, over the threshold like a timid bride, arm in arm, and into one of the single beds. Gilby fetched him a glass of water and stood by the bed, unsure what to do.

“I’m going to go drive around some. Maybe go back to that place and keep an eye on that guy.”

“I trust you,” Edward whispered, as if somehow, even in his mental decay, he was able to detect his brother’s anxiety.

“Okay. I’ll be back.”

“Gilby?”

“Yep?”

“I keep seeing my future.” The older brother coughed. “I keep seeing all the pain I got left to cause, and it terrifies me. Truly.”

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

“Knock before you open that door. In case I turn into something that doesn’t recognize you.”

Gilby nodded and carefully closed the door behind him, hoping he would never have to see his brother again.

* * *

The grandfather went on with his story: “And so we looked in the back of the truck and saw the girls, and Stan told them to stay put, and told me to watch them, and then he hurried off after the fella who had been driving. We both figured the guy was going to try to make it back to the compound on foot. You could see the lights of the place from where we were on the road, but it was starting to get dark and here we were, about as close as you could get to the thirty-eighth, right alongside this rice paddy, and the thing of it was, the people up there were always kind of superstitious about that place. It always made me jumpy.

“Anyway, there we are in the woods, and there’s the mountains, some of which look like dust piles, they’d been bombed down to craters, and then there’s the line of wire you can’t hope to see through. All of it haunted. And Stan, he tells me to wait with the girls. He says to keep an eye on them, because even though they’re women, they know they’re in trouble, and they outnumbered me, and so I shouldn’t turn my back on them, and I told him,
No problem,
and held my rifle in front of me like I might shoot any one of them if they decide to try to run. So Stan heads off into the woods by himself; all he’s got is his carbine—his rifle—and his pistol. He doesn’t even bother to take a flashlight. Off he goes into the woods and he does this funny thing then—he looks over his shoulder like he was going to say something else, and then he turned back, and that was the last I seen of him. Standing, I mean. The next time I seen him, he had been shot. I heard the shots and decided to go see what happened, which was against an order from a commanding officer, but I went off into the woods myself because I figured it was the right thing to do, given the situation. As soon as I started on my way, I seen the whores take off running, but by then there wasn’t anything I could do.

“It was muddy and easy to spot where Stan had gone. I followed his bootprints for a while into the jungle, and after a couple minutes I found him lying there, gasping for air. He had been shot in the chest. He wasn’t dead yet but he had been shot right through the lung, I think, and it takes awhile sometimes to go like that. I think what happens is . . . what happens is your lung, it fills up with blood. So it was like he was drowning or something. So I sat with him there. I held his hand and watched him gasping there like a fish, trying to breathe, and I knew there wasn’t no one around who was going to be able to do anything, certainly not me. I didn’t have any medical training—I mean, I unbuttoned his shirt and all, tried to put pressure on the wound, but he knew and I knew it wasn’t going to do much good. So we just sat there for a bit, and I held his hand, and his eyes were wild and white and his mouth was flapping . . . he was trying to say something. I couldn’t figure out what it was he wanted to say. And so I put my ear up next to his mouth, and I could feel his breath there, and he kept whispering it, over and over again. But I still didn’t know what he was saying. And then I looked down at him and he had gone white as a ghost and he stopped trying to breathe, and I knew he was dead.”

“Then what happened?” the boy asked, eyes still on the road.

“Well, I leaned over and slid Stan’s eyes closed, and then I heard something behind me, but by the time I heard it I knew it was too late, and I felt a hand go over my mouth, and I could taste tree bark and mud on it, and something else too, something that had the funny smell of perfume, and then I felt the knife go in, right between my ribs, right in the back there, and then I was lying on my side, and everything felt kind of heavy and I was looking up at the trees, thinking how they looked the same as they did back home. And that thought made me feel okay, so I thought I might go to sleep and die. But I didn’t. I guess you already know that much.”

The boy nodded.

“Yeah. Well, that was it. Whoever had shot old Stan had crept up on me while I was tending to him. Only I seen him. I didn’t know that I did, but I did. While I was lying there. It was that roughneck Mooney. And that’s what old Stan was trying to tell me. He was saying that fella’s name again and again. Only I didn’t know it until I was lying there on the ground and I saw him standing over me. I can see his face even now. It was floating above me in the dark, only it wasn’t like no face at all. It was like the moon. Sometimes when I look up at the moon, that’s what I see. His face. It was the oddest thing.”

The old man went silent then, the memories continuing on behind his heavy-lidded eyes as the grandson held his hands steady against the wheel. They drove along for a few more minutes before the grandfather spoke again.

“So that’s how I got stabbed. It ain’t much of a story. I mean, it’s nothing to brag on, I guess. After that, I was out of commission for six weeks, in a hospital in Pusan. They gave me the choice to check out or stay on, and since I didn’t have anything waiting for me at home, I decided to stay on. They sent me right back up to Chuncheon, gave me a new partner, a kid a few years younger than me, somewhere close to your age, and the first night we drove around, I seen it was utter lawlessness. They all knew Stan was dead and nobody thought they had any reason to fear me, so they were drinking and whoring and sneaking in and out of the fence with all kinds of things they had stolen.”

The grandfather tugged at the collar of his flannel and asked the boy if he wouldn’t mind turning the heat on. “I get a chill in my feet,” he said. “Any time I talk about it. I get cold in my feet and see that fella’s face and it feels like I been stabbed all over again.” He peered out the passenger-side window. A sign for
Lexington, 68 miles
flashed by. “But that’s a thing they don’t ever tell you in Sunday school.”

“What’s that?”

The grandfather stared straight ahead. “That the Devil sometimes wins.”

* * *

Beneath a procession of stubby hills, mountains, trees, several narrow, unnamed streams that give way to a river; a few skyscrapers upon a lone, precipitous skyline; the sun like a dove reeling from a red-tailed hawk; the afternoon light—fading.

* * *

By five o’clock, Gilby had realized what a profound mistake he’d made. He was certain now that his brother had lost his mind somewhere out in California and was probably never going to be the same. Not soon anyway. All he could count on now was Belinda. He tried to call her two or three times to be sure she was on her way, but her mother answered both times and so there was no way to know if she was coming. He circled the bus stop once, then again, finding a parking spot in the back of the squat redbrick building. He watched six go past, then six fifteen, then six thirty, and finally, when the chrome bumper and oversized wheels of the bus arriving from Indianapolis rolled up, he hopped out of the cab of the truck, scanning the door for her soft, wide-eyed face. He was going to tell her that he had messed up again. That they had not gotten the money, and that, in his opinion, the two of them—he and Belinda—ought to take the pickup and drive as far away from Indiana and his brother as they could get. He had other ideas about what he wanted to say too, about how he was going to get a job somewhere and take care of her, how he was going to marry her but did not want to propose, officially, until he could afford the ring, but she could call him her fiancé if it pleased her, because something had happened to him over the last day or so, and he was a different person; he was done getting in trouble.

When a dark-eyed girl about Belinda’s height stepped down from the bus, he ran forward and then stopped himself, seeing that her jaw was too wide and her hair was the wrong length. He turned back toward the pickup, feeling something blunt-shaped shoved up hard against the back of his neck. He started to laugh, expecting Belinda to have snuck up on him somehow, but went sick when he saw the face hanging there instead: it looked like a Halloween mask—long, weathered, the white eyebrows bedraggled, the mouth as stern and straight as the horizon line. The nigger boy was with him too, standing behind, the old-timer shoving what had to be a Colt or some sort of .45 sharply into his spine. Before Gilby could get the words out, before he could begin to lament, before he could make the face before him understand that what had happened had not been his intention, the grandfather began to speak quietly.

“Were you the one who shot me?”

Gilby shook his head, croaking out a faint, “No.”

“Go on and tell me where that horse is.”

There were still folks coming off the bus, but none looking this way.

“Make a peep. Go on and see what happens, son. I got the law on my side. And I know you ain’t carrying. We watched you parked there for the last half hour. The only chance you got now is to tell me where to find that horse.”

Gilby glanced from the old man’s face to the bus door, which had swung closed.

“She ain’t coming,” the old man said.

“What?”

“That girl. She’s the one who told us where you’d be.”

Gilby stumbled back a little, his heart dropping to his knees. “Belinda? She was the one who told you?”

The old man leaned in closer, his breath a mixture of sleep and orange juice and coffee. The lips curled cruelly over white teeth, the blue eyes limitless now, as open as the sky above an unfurrowed field, the old man’s voice unhesitant, without fear, now whispering directly into Gilby’s ear: “It’s either me or the police. You think on that for a minute. Because it don’t seem all that hard to me.”

Gilby’s stomach began to ache, rumbling all the way up and down his spine. It felt like he was going to die. It really did.

“Now you tell me: which one’s it going to be?”

_________________

The horse, stamping in its silver prison, the trailer now resting alone at the side parking lot of the strip club, the sound of laughter, of motor vehicles arriving and departing, of industrial music echoing through the thin walls, of the tenor of the afternoon giving over to night, of four o’clock on a Friday, then five, then six, then seven, the hour interrupted by the sound of a fight between a man and woman, the man knocking the woman down, rifling through her purse, the man walking off, the woman—crying, on her side, her black nylons bunched up around her knees—crippled by love, looking up and realizing at once that she was staring at something unfamiliar, the horse whinnying a little, cramped in its quarters, rearing back but trapped, the woman thinking,
Is this a dream
? but knowing and then not knowing that what she was seeing was the unchangeable, irredeemable depiction of her own fate.

* * *

Between the grandfather and the grandson rode the dull-eyed kid from the pet store, sweating, eyes blinking out tears. Quentin was behind the wheel, minding the road, afraid to look the other young man in the eye. Only a mile or two from the bus stop, they pulled up in front of the chain motel, the grandfather slowly, with great effort, climbing out first, dragging the miscreant after him. The trailer was nowhere around. Immediately the old man got a premonition that the kid had been lying. He had the look of a liar. The old man paused for a moment and turned to his grandson, muttering a few particulars: “You wait here. Mind me, don’t you follow till I come after you.” Then he marched the greasy-faced kid up the concrete stairs to the wooden motel room door, a golden
209
hanging along its warped center.

“Open it,” the old man said in a low voice, the pistol tapping a sore spot into Gilby’s back.

Gilby found the key in his pocket, secretly hoping his brother would be gone. And if not gone, then something else—a wolf, a bat, something so terrifying that its gruesome shape would be enough to frighten the old man without either gunshot or bloodshed.

The lights were switched off, the TV turned on—a talk show where the guests were throwing chairs at one another—and both beds were empty.
Gone. He became something else and disappeared.
Then the toilet flushed, the bathroom door opened, the addled, rough-skinned face creeping out slowly, crossing into the blue light from the television set, it becoming clear now he was naked, the frayed-looking limbs and desiccated ribs, the blue-black tattoos and scars erupting from the frame that looked like it belonged to some unnamed predatory bird, the older brother too sick to notice the stranger standing there, until the grandfather moved past, shoving Gilby inside, taking aim on the skeleton before him, something out of an old horror film, some sort of spook, a ghost made flesh, caught in that limbo between night and day. It was bleeding, the ghost, from its hands, looking like it had punched the bathroom mirror with both of its fists.