Authors: Sarah Kernochan
“Go on, Dad, win me something!” For the second time that day, the boy grins, his teeth flashing white. “I dare you!”
Brett considers the Rope-A-Dope dubiously. Handing two tickets to the carny, he climbs up on the cushion, plants one foot on the ladder.
He is thinking about his vision of Jane at the picnic, when the ladder pivots and flings him onto the inflated bolster with a thump.
Under the yellow bill of his hat, Collin is laughing. “Go again, Dad! Bet you’ll win.”
Brett flushes with embarrassment. He fell because he was thinking of Jane, when he’d promised himself to think only of Collin. This time, he’ll concentrate on impressing his son.
Paying more tickets, he studies the contraption. He concludes that putting weight in the middle of the rungs activates the pivot. If he grabs the side ropes only, not the rungs, and keeps his weight evenly distributed as he climbs—by grasping with the left hand while stepping with the right, then grasping with the right while stepping with the left—he will be able to maintain his balance.
He tries out this technique on the first rung. The cords tremble, dying to flip, but Brett is balanced…moving up… hearing voices behind him as people congregate to watch.
Gathering speed, he reaches the top, where he triumphantly clangs the bell.
A cheer erupts below. He rolls off the ladder onto the air cushion, sliding easily to the ground. A couple of teenagers high-five him; the barker tells him to pick a prize.
Brett’s not listening. His head jerks from side to side, frantically looking around him.
His son is gone.
RUPA POONCHWALLA’S SIDES
ache from laughing. Harish looks so funny as a gunslinger, tripping over his spurs, with his stiff bowed chaps and ten-gallon hat tipped over his nose. Rupa declines the skimpy dancehall hostess outfit, then slips into the cowgirl costume the young photographer found her.
It’s Harish’s turn to convulse with laughter as his wife stumbles out of the dressing room, a gun in her holster, pointy Western boots on her tiny feet. “You are dangerous, woman!”
They pose before a white backdrop, while the photographer props a fiberboard cactus behind them. He is a wiry boy not much older than Seth, with oiled hair flopping over his brow. His sleeveless T-shirt shows off tattooed biceps as he adjusts the digital camera on the tripod.
Behind him a plump girl in a short babydoll sundress shows off her soft round thighs. The candy apple in her hand glistens with her saliva.
Rupa recognizes her: the daughter of the local whore.
“Look in the camera lens, please. Point your pistols at each other like it’s a shoot-out.”
Rupa lifts her gun to Harish’s chin. “Careful, husband, I will kill you!”
He aims his gun at her temple. “I will give you such a headache!”
The photographer snaps the picture, and goes over to a printer in the corner. The plump girl joins him, leaning so her breasts graze against him as they watch the photo slide out. He turns and hooks his arm around her neck, kissing her candy-stained lips. She giggles.
The daughter already turns into the mother.
Rupa looks away, unbuckling her holster.
Harish approaches the curtain of the dressing room, where Gita is taking forever to change into a mermaid costume. “Gita! It’s your turn!”
There is no answer from the girl.
“Gita!” Rupa opens the curtain to peek her head inside.
The dressing room is empty.
“COLLIN SAMPSON,”
a voice blares over the P.A., “please come to the Ferris wheel ticket booth where your father is waiting.”
Collin darts quickly through the crowd, keeping his face down.
“Anyone who sees a boy ten years old, in a dark green tee-shirt and a yellow duck hat, please bring him to the Ferris wheel.”
Ditching the yellow hat, he cuts between the Dog ‘N Patty and the Buttered Cob, then sprints for the exit. Gita is already waiting.
They dodge through backyards, avoiding main roads, and blending into the foliage in their camo makeup.
At the motel, they retrieve their bikes and weapons and begin pedaling toward Rowell Hill.
Pumping beside Gita, Collin is breathless, ecstatic. They are cosmic commandos. Their mission is underway; there’s no turning back.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE
M
arly is dying.
She can tell from the doctor’s aloof expression: she is as good as gone.
While she was out on the table, they scooped out her mole and the surrounding flesh; then did some kind of dye test that lit up the tumor’s progress.
It had branched out to the lymph nodes. The doctor removed those too.
She has to wait four days for the biopsy, but the doctor is 99.9% sure that it will confirm melanoma; it has probably spread too far to treat, and there’s only a 1 in 10 chance that radiation will work.
Sure, if I felt like going through agony and then dying anyway and leaving Pearl with a pile of hospital bills.
Dying.
She couldn’t say the D word to Pearl when she emerged from the doctor’s office. (She couldn’t say much of anything, with half her face still frozen from the anesthetic and her cheek taped up in bandages.) Pretending she was fine, she made a show of lying down for a nap once they got home. She sent Pearl off to the St. Paul’s Fair to have herself some fun.
Alone, Marly bursts into tears.
She shuffles to the kitchenette, opening a can of beer. She’ll have to take food through a straw for a while; barely more than a membrane remains of her outer cheek. She’s afraid to touch the spot with her tongue for fear it’ll break through.
The beer makes her have to pee. But if she goes to the bathroom, she will catch sight of herself in the mirror.
Someone put a curse on me.
It all started going bad that summer night—can it be only six weeks ago?—she swerved to avoid a girl in the road, and crushed her bumper on Hoyt Eddy’s pickup. Ever since then, it has been one woe after another, eroding her spirit; despair metastasizing like the cancer in her face.
Outside, Thom Sayre’s brakes screech; she hears the thud of the mail in her box, the lid squealing shut. He’s gone by the time she comes out on the stoop.
She surveys her pathetic slice of lawn, an overgrown mess of chickweed that’s also metastasizing. Pook’s food bowl lies near the corner of the picket fence; she never had the heart to throw it out.
Pook is gone. In a little time she’ll be gone too. Then who will take care of Pearl?
All because of a girl in a purple anorak who appeared out of the dark and walked into Marly’s headlights…
Whatever happened to hope?
She retrieves her mail, flipping through collection notices. Then she sees the envelope from the lab.
Here it is: one last hope.
She sits at the dinette table. Breathless, she tears open the envelope.
Skimming over all the confusing numbers and columns, she skips to the interpretative section.
The alleged father, Hoyt Eddy, is excluded as the biological father of the child named Pearl Walczak. Based on testing results obtained from analyses of 4 different DNA probes, the probability of paternity is 0.0%.
Stunned, Marly rereads the paragraph so many times the words blur. She pictures her younger self in the bar, in her apron and miniskirt, flirting with the blue-eyed boy named Hoyt, thinking of his trust fund as he fucked her, hopes flying like colored flags:
he’ll take me to Boston, introduce me to his family, lift me up into a life of riches
…
An idiot to her dying day.
She probably knew all along, deep down, that Pearl’s father was the fat man who stocked convenience machines along the Interstate, Marly’s once-a-month customer until he moved to Michigan.
She stares at the official envelope. Her last hope can’t be dead on arrival. There has to be another last hope.
HOYT FLINGS OPEN
the bedroom door. He already knows Jane won’t be there. There were too many signs when he got home: the kitchen door hanging open, her battery lantern gone. He picks up her purple anorak lying on the rug where she dropped it in her haste to leave.
He shouldn’t have left her alone.
Tossing the flier on his bed, he quickly changes into his hiking boots. He knows just where she’s gone. How much of a jump has she got on him: 30 minutes? 40?
He wonders what the words mean on the flier: “a mental development disorder.” Is she retarded? Crazy? Or just eccentric? It’s plenty bizarre to live alone in the woods and move stones for fun. No matter: she asked for his help, and he refused, and now she needs rescuing.
As he grabs a water bottle from the fridge, he hears a car careening to a stop outside.
Seconds later, someone knocks.
Marly stands there holding out his Magnum. “I’m returning this,” she mumbles, one side of her mouth constrained by the large bandage taped to her cheek.
“Thanks, I’d appreciate your not pointing it at me.” He takes the revolver, checks the safety, then chucks it on the sofa. When he turns back, she has stepped inside, blocking his exit.
“Marly, I’m on my way out.” He tries to get around her.
“I brought your gun back ‘cause I’m scared, Hoyt.” She looks up at him with the abject expression that always makes him want to clock her. Except it looks like some surgeon got there first. “I’m afraid I’ll use it on myself.”
“Look, can this wait? My niece is in trouble. It’s urgent.”
Her hand flashes out, gripping his wrist. “This is urgent. I’ve got skin cancer. In a month I’m gonna be dead.”
“Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry.” He fights off a wave of disgust. He has always been heartless when it comes to Marly; she pisses him off even more when she’s dying. He grits his teeth, faking sympathy, “God, that’s so tough. But why come to me?”
“I just want to talk.”
“Go talk to someone who gives a shit!” He shakes his arm from her grip. “You’ve got a daughter.”
She narrows her eyes. “So do you.”
“Not that again.”
“I have the proof! I got the test results.”
Her eyes skate away from his face; she’s lying. “Show me.”
“I left it at home.” More eye wobbling.
“Too bad, when you went to all the trouble to type it up. Probably lying about the cancer, too. Christ, now she’s going to cry. You’re such an asshole, Marly.”
She flings herself on his sofa, weeping. “You have to take care of Pearl when I’m gone! There’s nobody else! Can’t you care about anyone but yourself?”
“Least of all myself.” Hoyt snatches the bottle of gin off the bookshelf and sets it on the coffee table in front of her. “Boo hoo, have a drink. I’ll be back in an hour. Make sure you’re not here.”
THE TRAIL BEGINS
behind your house. At the end of it, continue straight uphill until a stonewall appears…
The trail Jane mentioned begins behind his dump. Fear driving him, Hoyt climbs Rowell Hill by leaps and bounds. He has already forgotten Marly; there is only Jane, struggling up the hill somewhere above him, weakened by a wound that he made.
Spotting the old rock wall, he stops to catch his breath, chest heaving.
He hears a crackle in the underbrush, then silence. “Jane!” he calls.
A flutter of wings answers, as a thrush bursts from cover, rocketing to a high branch up the hill. As if Jane is beckoning:
I’m up here. Come find me.
Hurrying alongside the wall, he realizes the miracle that is taking place. He cares about someone.
That he hurt Jane has awakened the Catholic in him, his mother’s legacy, and now he is in the heady thrall of atonement. A lifetime of buried tenderness gushes up like the Holy Virgin’s spring at Lourdes, rushing from his pores, a sacred river carrying him to Jane…
He arrives at the clearing. In his overexcited state, the shack seems to shine like the Grail. Except, as he creeps closer, it emits a powerfully noxious chemical smell.
Hoyt puts his ear to the door. There are movements inside: faint metallic clanks, glass dings, a cough.
He knocks lightly.
The sounds abruptly cease.
He pushes on the door, which opens a crack, then stops, latched from the inside. “Excuse me,” he calls through the crack, “I’m looking for a girl named Jane. Is she here?”
Whoever is inside remains silent, pretending there’s no one home.