Unpossible (24 page)

"God no. No children. I’m not exactly husband material," Pax said. "Or boyfriend material. Actually, I’m not sure I’m material."

His father grunted. Was that a laugh?

They watched the screen until another commercial break, and his father said, "Twice a week."

Pax looked over and said, "Dad!"

Harlan’s face had flushed. Liquid gleamed on the backs of his hands. "Twice a week she comes, sometimes three," he said. "But with you—with you here it’s different. You have to leave, Paxton. You’re just making it worse."

"That’s it, I’m calling the doctor. We can—"

Harlan grabbed Paxton’s bare arm. "Don’t." His father’s hand was damp with sweat. "Don’t have any sons. Even if she begs you. Don’t do it."

Pax scrambled off the couch. His skin tingled where his father had touched him.

Harlan’s robe lay open. The blisters had erupted again. They were everywhere on his skin, all sizes, weeping and glistening. His father reached for him again and Paxton stepped back. He remembered that electric rush of emotion that had struck him last night, left him lying stupid on the floor. Love, or something like it. Connection. The eggshell had cracked open and for a moment everything had run together; he’d forgotten who was Paxton and who was Harlan. The feeling had been exhilarating and suffocating at once. A child’s emotion: Love indistinguishable from total immersion.

Watch yourself, he thought.

His father’s eyes were wide, roaming the room. "Every good tree," he said. "Every good tree brings forth good fruit. And every corrupt tree ... "

Pax went into the kitchen and brought back a plastic garbage bag and a roll of paper towels. A blister near his father’s neck had already split, weeping liquid. Pax put the bag over his hand and crouched beside his father. He touched a corner of a paper towel to the spot, and the substance soaked into it. He held it away from himself like a lit match and dropped it to the floor.

But the serum kept flowing. Pax tore off more towels, pressed them into the blisters, made a pile of damp paper on the floor. He worked for fifteen, twenty minutes—an eternity—until finally the flow subsided. His father had fallen asleep, his breaths coming deep and easy now.

Pax stood up, dizzy and sweating. He retrieved another garbage bag, shoveled the crumpled and damp paper into it, then finished by pushing the first bag into it as well. He carried the sack outside to the back yard.

It was evening but not yet fully dark. He held the bag in his hand, letting it twist, and stared up at the tops of the pines, dark against the bruised sky. Despite the heat and the thick humidity, he felt an anticipatory chill, as if he were thirteen again steeling himself to jump off the high rocks into the ice cold water of the Little River.

He opened the bag and reached in.

3.

Vonda and her grandsons showed up three days later. They climbed out of a beat up Ford Explorer and walked across the yard, Vonda in front, Travis and another huge boy—had to be his brother, Clete, they looked so much alike—clumping behind her. Vonda was a small, bony woman, angular as a voodoo fetish, her tank top and frayed cutoff jeans hanging off her like laundry.

Paxton stepped back from the door’s tiny window. He knew they’d come, sooner or later. He’d been listening for the slam of car doors, waiting for the hard knock. She said, "I know you’re in there, Paxton. Open the damn door."

"I have a gun," Pax said. His father didn’t keep any firearms in the house, not even a .22 squirrel rifle. It was probably the only weaponless household in East Tennessee.

"Well good for you," Vonda said. "Now open the door so Travis can apologize. He told me he was kind of rude to you the other day."

He stepped back from the door and listened. His father still snored in the back bedroom. He spent a lot of his time sleeping these days. So did Paxton.

He opened the door halfway. Vonda stood on the step with her hands on her hips—bones on bones—brown skin baked and cracked by sixty years of sun and cigarettes. A heavy smoker who’d been heavily smoked.

"You don’t look so good," she said.

Pax gripped the edge of the door. "What do you want, Vonda?"

"Don’t be that way," she said. "I changed your diaper more than once. You used to run around my house naked."

Uncle Lem’s house, Pax thought.

Vonda said, "Say what you came for, Travis." The boy stared at Paxton with half-lidded eyes. She backhanded him across the bicep. "Travis!"

"I’m sorry," he said. "For scaring you." Clete snorted a laugh.

Jesus, Pax thought. He really did want to shoot both these kids. "I know what you’re here for," Pax said.

"Do you, now?" Vonda said.

He’d thrown away the needle and syringe, but now he wished he’d left them on the porch. A smoking gun. "That’s over," Pax said. "All of that. You won’t be touching him again."

Clete said, "Looks like you’ve been touching him yourself. How you liking the vintage, cuz?"

Vonda raised a hand to silence the boy. She said to Paxton, "So you’re staying, then? Years without a word, then you just move back in?"

"Pretty much." He’d missed work, hadn’t even called his manager. If he wasn’t fired by now he would be soon. He was playing it day be day.

Vonda said, "You don’t know what you’re getting into, Paxton. Your father has needs—special needs. Are you prepared to take care of him, every day, for the rest of his life?"

"I’ll get help. I’ll call his doctor."

Clete and Travis laughed, and even Vonda smiled. Clete said, "Listen, cuz, if you haven’t called yet, you ain’t never going to."

"I’ll call the cops, though," Pax said. "Just stick around."

"I’m here to help you," Vonda said. "And help Harlan. He used to be a self-righteous son of a bitch, and lord knows he can get mean. But he needs help. He’s hallucinating sometimes, isn’t he? Calling you names? And then there’s the weekly sweats—"

"Weekly? Try every night," Paxton said. "Eight-fifteen, like clockwork."

Travis and Clete exchanged a look. After a moment Vonda said, "So you know what we’re talking about. It’s even more important we help you out, Paxton. If you don’t get the vintage out of them they go a little crazy. It’s not pretty, but you have to do it."

The phone began to ring. Pax said, "Get the hell out of here." He started to close the door.

Vonda put out a hand to stop him. "I’ll give you another week, Paxton. You’ll see you’re in over your head, and then you’ll call me. And you know what? I’ll come back, with no hurt feelings. Because that’s what family’s for."

He closed the door, locked it. Then he hurried to the living room and picked it up on the sixth or seventh ring. He knew who it would be. The labored breathing on the other end of the line confirmed it.

"They’re coming for you," a voice said. A voice drowning in phlegm. "You and the vintage."

That word again. "They came and went, Uncle Lem," Pax said. Or rather, they were leaving now. He watched Vonda and the boys climb into the Ford.

"Already? No. I have to go, I have to—"

"Wait! They just pulled out this second. You’ve got time. Are you all right? Are they hurting you?"

"Past hurting," he said. "Your father, though—" He coughed wetly. "It’s the age. They’ll be after him."

"You have to tell me how to handle them, Uncle Lem. How to handle him. You have to tell me what to do."

"Do? You do your job." He coughed again. "Do what your father did for his father."

A loud clatter as Lem clumsily hung up the phone. From the back bedroom, his father shouted a question.

"Nobody, Harlan," Pax called back. "Go back to sleep."

The vintage rolled in and receded like a tide, the flow growing stronger each night. The longer Pax stayed, the longer they talked and sat together and ate together, the more Harlan produced. It usually came on in the evenings. His father would look down at himself, and say, "Ah," as if he’d spilled something on his clothes. Then Pax would run to get the extraction kit.

He’d gotten the supplies in Lambert, ten miles away, where nobody was likely to recognize him and nobody had. In a drug store he’d picked up antiseptic wipes, a box of vinyl gloves, skin lotion. Syringes and needles, though, weren’t on any of the shelves, and when he finally asked for them the clerk looked at him like he was a junkie. Did he have a prescription? He went to a couple hardware stores and kitchen stores, inspecting caulk guns, bicycle pumps, turkey basters, frosting sprayers, looking for anything he could rig. Then in the JC Penny’s housewares department he found a nickel-plated monster called a marinate infuser. Eight inches long, with loop handles, a plunger, and a 30-cc needle. The tool Dr. Frankenstein would reach for to inject a couple quarts of spinal fluid. Pax used it in reverse, drawing the fluid out of his father, pressing it into tiny rubber-capped containers he’d found on the Tupperware aisle, each one holding a few ounces. After attending to his father he’d stack them in the freezer. Then, later in the evening, he’d remove one. One or two.

Hours later he’d wake up, not sure if he was in bed, on the couch, inside or outside. His first sensation was of his own mass, the vast bulk of his body stretched out across the dark like an unsteerable barge. And at the same time, he felt the brittle angles of wrists and ankles, the knobs of his knees like two river stones, the blades of his hip bones, the shallow pit of stomach. He stared at the walls of his bedroom, and up at the trees that lined the yard. He breathed and heard himself breathing.

The split, when it came, left him not just alone, not just half of what he’d been, but some smaller fraction. A shard. Near dawn he’d fall into a more fitful sleep, and by ten or eleven a.m. the cycle would begin again. He fed his father, moved laundry through the washer and dryer, cleaning the rooms. Each day he picked out something to do outside—mowing the lawn, clearing brush, washing the cars—just to get him into the fresh air.

"You don’t have to prove anything," his father said. It was Thursday or Friday morning, and Pax was making his third attempt at scrubbing the kitchen floor. There seemed to be nothing he could do about the smell of the vintage. It was permanent now, baked into the walls and floorboards.

Pax had started the projects with a vague notion that he was preparing the house so that his father could get by alone, though Pax no longer had a clear idea of when he was leaving.

"You need to eat," his father said to him. He was standing up in the doorway, holding himself erect.

"I’m fine," Pax said.

"You’re not fine. I know what’s happening, Paxton. All this. It’s not the first time."

Paxton stood up. "Really. When were you going to tell me?"

"Not ’til you needed to. Maybe never."

"Shit, Harlan! What about when it happens to me? You’d be dead and I wouldn’t know what the hell was going on."

"Mostly it skips. There’s only one or two every generation—"

"Every generation? How long has this been going on?"

Harlan pulled out one of the metal chairs and sat down. After a while he said, "Your grandfather begged me to end it. End the line. I couldn’t do it. And later, your mom ... " He shook his head. "I was weak. I knew what she was doing—what she wasn’t doing." He looked up. "I shouldn’t tell you this, but your mom—"

"Don’t worry, I know I was a mistake." He walked to the back door and yanked it open. The room was hot, and it wasn’t even noon. He had to get a couple more air conditioners into this house or he’d never make it through the summer. "Vonda’s coming back, Harlan. I need to know what she’s doing with this stuff. Is she selling it?"

His father frowned. "To who?"

"I don’t know—anybody. You have to understand, this ... " He couldn’t say vintage; that was Vonda’s word. "This stuff is stronger than anything I’ve ever heard of."

"It’s no good outside the family, Paxton. There’s no one to sell it to."

"What?"

"Sons and grandsons, yes. Daughters too, I suppose. But it does nothing for outsiders."

"Maybe she’s selling it to cousins, then."

"She wouldn’t do that," Harlan said. He didn’t sound sure. "It doesn’t matter if she is. Let her do what she wants. Go back to Phoenix or Chicago or wherever it is you’re living now. I have my own plan."