Unpossible (22 page)

Something glinted in the grass beside the porch. He crouched to pick it up: a syringe and needle, the tube empty. What the hell? He set the syringe on the porch where he could find it later.

He walked around the corner of the house, stepping carefully through the high grass, wary of sharps. The side window of his father’s bedroom was filled by a silent air-conditioner; the glazed bathroom window next to it was closed and dark. Behind the house, the backyard had shrunk from the advancement of the brush line. The rusting frame of his old swing set leaned out of the shrubs. Further back, the low, cinderblock well house—made obsolete by the sewer and water lines added in the ’70s—sat almost buried in the undergrowth like a Civil War fortification.

The door to the back porch was unlocked. Pax went through it, to the kitchen door. He knocked once and turned the knob. The door swung open with a squeak.

"Hello!" he called. "It’s me." The air smelled sickly sweet and fungal, a jungle smell. "It’s Paxton," he added stupidly. From somewhere near the front of the house came the low murmur of television voices.

The kitchen was as he remembered it, though dirtier than his mother would have ever allowed. Dirtier even than they’d kept it after she died. In those years they’d lived like tenants without a landlord, a teenager and an old man who had become a parent much too late to have the energy to do it alone. But even then they’d never let things slide this far. The garbage can overflowed with paper and plastic containers. Dishes sat in the sink. In the center of the breakfast table was a white ceramic casserole dish, the aluminum foil peeled back.

Pax made his way through the dining room, dusty and preserved as an unvisited exhibit, to the living room, where he found his father.

The Reverend Harlan Martin had a firm idea of what a pastor should look like, and it began with the hair. Each morning after his shower, he’d carefully comb back the wet strands from his forehead and spray everything down with his wife’s Alberto VO-5, clouding the bathroom. Sunday required extra coats, enough hairspray to preserve his appearance through a fire and brimstone sermon, a potluck dinner, a visitation or two, and an evening service. His Sunday hair was as shiny and durable as a Greek helmet.

As a child, Pax loved when the hair was down, as when his father slept late and came to the breakfast table unshowered, pushing the long bangs out of his face like a disheveled Elvis. Like now.

His father sat sprawled on the couch, head back and mouth open, eyes closed. His dark hair, longer than Pax had ever seen it, hung along the sides of his wide face to his jaw. His body was huge. His father’s side of his family were all big, but this was beyond anything Pax had seen. He seemed to have put on a hundred pounds or so since Pax had left.

"Harlan?" Pax said. The atmosphere in the room was hot and unbearably humid, despite the ceiling fan turning above, the air heavy with that strange odor like rotting fruit. He took a step forward. "Harlan?"

His bulk spread across parts of three cushions. He wore a blue terrycloth bathrobe half closed over a white T-shirt, and black socks stretched over broad feet. His face was deeply cratered, the skin flaking and loose.

His father’s chest moved. A whistling wheeze escaped his mouth.

Okay, Pax thought. Still alive. Until that moment he hadn’t realized how he’d been braced to find a corpse.

The coffee table and chairs had been pushed to the walls, leaving a wide space with clear view of the television’s flickering screen. The television abruptly became louder—an ad—and Pax flicked off the set.

His father suddenly lifted his head, turned to glare at Pax. His eyes were glassy, the lids crusted with sleep matter.

"Out," his father said, his voice garbled by phlegm. He coughed, and raised a wide hand to his mouth. The arm was as pockmarked as his face. He pointed past Paxton’s shoulder. "Out of my house!" He still had it: the Preacher Voice.

"It’s me, Paxton." He crouched down next to his father, and winced at the smell of him. He couldn’t tell if he was delirious or simply confused by sleep. "It’s your son."

The huge man blinked at him. "Paxton?" he said warily. Then: "It’s you."

Pax gripped his father’s hand. "How you doing?"

"My prodigal son," his father said.

"The only kind you’ve got." Pax tried to let go, but his father squeezed harder.

"Who called you? Vonda?"

"Close," Pax said. He extricated his hand and stood. He was surprised to feel something oily on his palm, and rubbed his hand dry on the back of his pants. "I need to open some windows."

"She wants me. Wants to milk me like a cow. You can’t be here."

Pax pulled open the big front drapes, and fought down a wave of dizziness. The air in the room was too close, too fetid. The sickly sweet odor had blossomed, become suffocating. He’d been told Harlan was in trouble, but nothing had prepared him for this.

"You’ve got to leave," his father said, his tone no longer firm. His body, huge as it was, looked like a bag to hold an even larger man. The skin hung loose at his neck and cheeks, and now beads of sweat appeared along his brow. How long it had been since his father last ate? Could he even move?

Harlan’s face shone with sweat, as if breaking a fever. A water blister had appeared on his cheek, as large as a walnut, the skin so tight it was almost translucent. Pax stared at it in horror.

"Oh," his father said softly. "Oh, Lord."

"Harlan, what’s going on?" He tried to keep the panic out of his voice.

"You took me by surprise," he said. He looked up, smiled faintly. His eyes were wet. Two more blisters had appeared at his neck. They seemed to expand as Pax watched. "You better leave now."

Pax turned toward the front door, lost his balance, and caught himself. He turned the lock and yanked the door open. The air was too heavy to offer much relief. Keeping a hand against the wall to steady himself, he made his way back to the couch. The telephone wasn’t at its old spot on the end table. He’d called the house a dozen times over the past few days, but it had rung and rung.

"Where’s the phone, Harlan?" Stains the color of pink lemonade had appeared on his father’s T-shirt.

His father looked up at him with half-closed eyes. "Paxton Abel Martin." He said the name with a slow drawl, almost singing it, in a voice Pax hadn’t heard in a long time. He had a sudden memory of being carried up the church stairs in the dark—he must have been four or five—held close in his father’s arms.

Pax kneeled in front of his father. The rich, fruity smell enveloped him. Pax gently pushed the robe further open, and began to lift the T-shirt. Blisters had erupted over the skin of his belly: tiny pimples; white-capped pebbles; glossy, egg-sized sacs. The largest pouches wept pink-tinged serum.

"Oh Jesus." Pax bunched the edge of the T-shirt and tried to cover one of the open sores, but the oily liquid soaked through and slicked his fingers. "Listen, we’ve got to get you to—get ... "

His fingers burned, but not painfully. He looked at his hand, rubbed the substance between his fingers. Slowly his gaze turned to his father, and their eyes locked.

There you are, Pax thought. There, waiting beneath the sagging flesh, the mounds of pitted and pocked skin: The man who carried him up the stairs. Relief flooded through him. What if they’d been lost forever? Pax and his bloated father were here, in this stinking room, and they were also Harlan Martin and his four-year-old son, climbing out of the church basement after a long Sunday night service. He felt himself being carried, and at the same time felt the weight of the boy in his arms.

And then Pax was on his back, staring at the ceiling. He raised a hand—I see that hand, his father used to call from the pulpit, I see that hand—but his limbs were so heavy, and his arm fell to the floor with a distant thump.

He listened to the sound reverberate through the bones of skull. And then the world slipped sideways and pitched him into the dark.

2.

A young man lay sprawled across the braided rug. Skinny, head shaved like a criminal, a tattoo on his left arm. Still, unmistakable. He nudged the boy with his foot—and felt the poke under his ribs. That confused him. He tried to turn, to see who might be behind him, but now his arms and legs refused to respond. The boy on the floor made a noise, opened his eyes—

—and the room spun, then just as suddenly shuddered to a stop like a jammed gear. Paxton blinked hard, awake now.

His father loomed over him, a huge shadow limned in daylight. "I thought I’d made you up," Harlan said.

Pax slowly sat up. His arms and neck trembled to keep him upright.

His father said, "I’ll make you breakfast," and turned toward the kitchen. He moved like a man in a heavy diving suit, plodding across the ocean floor.

Pax got to his feet. He felt light-headed, then waited until it passed. Morning light burned through the windows. Jesus, he thought. Passed out all night? He shuffled to the kitchen doorway and leaned against the frame.

"I’m not going to a hospital," Harlan said. He stood in front of the open refrigerator. The blisters seemed to have receded, but his face, which had been slack and baggy last night, had filled like a balloon. Harlan peeled back the lid of a Cool Whip container, sniffed, then tossed the bowl onto the top of the pile of garbage.

"Tell me," Pax said, and then coughed. "What the hell’s going on, Harlan?" His father hated it when he called him Harlan.

"I’m fine," his father said. He opened another plastic bowl and put it back in the fridge. It was the kind of thing you did for someone you loved. "The women from the church drop this stuff off, leave it on the porch. It goes bad fast." He bent and reached deeper into a shelf. "If you’re here for money I don’t have any."

"What? No." How fast the man could piss him off. Pax had never asked him for a thing since he left home. "I’m here because Uncle Lem told me to be here."

Harlan shifted his bulk, stared at him. "Lem talked to you?"

Lemuel Martin was Paxton’s great uncle, on his father’s side, another man who’d never left Switchcreek. The last time Pax had seen him, when he was nine or ten, his uncle had to be over seventy years old, morbidly obese and rarely talking.

"I could hardly recognize him, but yeah. Five days ago." Lem gargled like a man drowning from the inside.

"How did he find you?"

"Jesus, does it matter?"

"You move around like a hobo. Arizona, New Jersey, Chicago."

"I’ve been in Chicago for the past five years, Harlan. It’s not too hard to look up a phone number." His father had called him exactly twice in twelve years. "Christ, all you have to do is call Aunt Jen, I always keep her—"

"Stop talking like that—Christ this, Jesus that."

"Tell me what’s happening to you, Harlan." His father scowled, and Pax said, "Look, I know there’s something that runs in the family, something on your side, that you guys never talked about. I wasn’t completely oblivious as a kid." Harlan grunted, a sound that could have meant anything. Pax said, "I thought it was just the size thing, like Uncle Lem, or, I don’t know, depression. God knows that makes sense. But last night you were hallucinating, and there was that, that stuff."

His father turned back to the fridge. "What did Lem tell you?"

"Nothing that made sense. He was rambling, talking senile. He said you were sick—terribly sick. He sounded like a scared child."

"That’s it?" Harlan asked.

Don’t forget mortal danger, Pax thought, but stifled that. "Before he hung up he made me promise not to tell anyone he called, especially not Vonda." Lem’s daughter. She was a little younger than Harlan, so had to be in her sixties by now. She’d lived with her father her entire life, even as a couple husbands moved in and moved out. Pax said, "You were talking about her last night, too."

His father slammed the refrigerator door. He went to the counter and fished through a pile of mail. "Here," he said, and tossed Paxton an envelope. "Cash this and get me some groceries."

"You’ll have to tell me what’s going on sooner or later, Harlan. And you have to see a doctor."

"You’re staying?"

Pax shook his head. "I’ve got to be back at work by tomorrow morning."