The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World (3 page)

“Not hardly,” says Scarlett.

“Wanna do something?” Teddy asks.

“Of course I do,” says Scarlett.

Blue Parson cracks open another, “Nothing better than free beer,” he says.

Rob Cooder nods agreement, sips at his own. “Wonder why everything’s down?”

The two sit in lawn chairs beneath the tree house, and Tim Bittles pulls up in his Ford. He gets down. “Got one for me?”

“Sure,” says Blue, and he fetches a bottle from the ice chest. “But you gotta show me some them cell phone titties for it.”

“Shit,” says Tim, “you got yourself a deal.”

Scarlett pulls Teddy’s hands to her throat, grinds up, down, back, and forth. She is giddy with sex pain. She is slick with their thrusting. Her eyes are closed tight, teeth clenched, mouth forming an agony. Teddy says, “You, you?” and Scarlett says, “Yes, yes.” And then they are both lowing moans and pressing as firm into the other as they can muster their muscles to press, their minds lost in that light and music and dizzy and space and breathing.

“My daddy would kill me if he knew I was about to do this,” Burt says, and he hands a pistol to Tyler.

Tyler smiles.

“You know how to use it, don’t ya?”

Tyler holds the pistol sideways, fires a bullet at a nutria rat, and the dirt near it coughs dust.

Old Burt shakes his head. He reaches out and turns Tyler’s wrist so the gun is properly held. “Just cause you’re a nigger,” says Old Burt, “don’t mean you gotta act like one.”

Tyler shakes his head. “Why come I don’t shoot you?” he asks.

Old Burt raises his shotgun and blasts the rat that Tyler couldn’t hit. “Prolly cause you’d miss,” he answers. “Now try again. And pretend you’re white.”

Tyler fires at a possum that thumps dead to the dirt.

“There you go,” says Burt. “How’d it feel?”

Tyler nods, smiles.

Then Manny: “I want a fucking gun too.”

Then they hear the screaming.

It can’t be natural. Light bulbs burst in their sockets and birds fall from the sky, shrieking. Old Burt winces in pain. Tessa watches as the glass windows of the storefront crack in threads like webs. Teddy thinks he’s fucking Scarlett better than he ever has. Mindy drops her quart of beer on the sidewalk where it explodes. She falls to her knees, plugs her ears with her fingers. Blue, Rob and Tim drop their beers too. Plug their ears too. Burt, Manny and Tyler drop their guns. Cover their heads. The rabbits and possums and armadillos and raccoons and mice and rats and frogs and deer and birds grow crazier, run in circles, blood leaks from their ears. The water at the edges of the bay and laguna begins to shake, bubble, effervesce. First bait fish float to the surface, crabs belly up. Later, small reds, whiting, flounder, mullet. In the sky, the clouds are dispersed concentric, so above Scrape, the moon can be seen full and pale yellow against a circle of black. Light bulbs continue to burst, raining splinters of glass, sparks of light, and with each one destroyed, the sky goes deeper dark, revealing twinkling stars arranged in myriad constellations. The neon signs of Scrape scream open, rain electric colors. In homes, liquor bottles are toppled from their pedestals, perfume bottles drop and rattle on countertops. Aquariums flood open, and tropical fish wriggle on carpets, their gills aching in search of breath, their tails clapping them about. The temperature rises. In the diner, the butter melts in its foil wrap on the tables, and the ice in Blue Parson’s cooler thins to water. Every leaf from every tree limb drops, and the helicopter seeds chop their single bladed flight haphazardly. Chicken eggs explode in refrigerators, yolks and whites scrambling with slivers of shell and mingling into muck heaps at random. Crayons go soft in children’s hands. In the fields, cows topple, dung beetles creep queerly from manure piles, roll on their backs, kick their legs at nothing. Dogs howl. Cats hiss. Snakes slither into holes, coil up so their heads are tucked beneath the braids of them. Above, the moon seems to be made alive, red and blue veins show on its surface as though it’s some clot of newborn flesh, pale from never seeing sunlight, though the light it’s reflecting is just that. The contents of the sandbox in the schoolyard is picked up and blown off in a magnificent wind that scrapes paint from the cars it crosses over. Soccer balls and bicycles and baby dolls are wriggled away from their resting places, redeposited at the phenomenon’s whims. Countertop fryers dance until they drop on linoleum, spilling their rancid grease in pools that ooze slowly with bits of caramelized flour shimmying in the thickness. Lipsticks melt, pools of maroon and crimson emerge at the base of their black containers. Pianos and guitars and violins and cellos and violas in the orchestra room of the high school emit all their notes in unison. The cooler doors of the convenience store spill open under the weight of the toppled beverages they contain, and Gatorades and Coca-Colas and Pepsis and chocolate milks and Budweisers fumble out into the aisles, the glass containers cracking and rivers of beer and soda flood across the tile floor, down the grout lines. Coins rattle in car ashtrays. Keys jingle where they sit. Books fall from shelves. Coats limp from their hangers in the closets. The pilot lights in all the ovens extinguish. Old ladies lose their wigs, contact lenses. Dentures drop from their mouths. Babies shit themselves. Then the words. Carried on the screams. Thick as cement. “Where are my children?”

There is a legend, and it varies in telling. Some say it’s 500 years old, others, less than 100. It centers on this: a woman is left by a man.

Is it Malinche, Cortez’s translator and concubine? Is it a peasant who fell in love over lies? Either way, there are children. Most say two, and most say this: The woman is deceived, destroyed, heartbroken.

The man desires the companionship and matrimony of one closer to his station, one of his own race, nationality.

Once content to confine his time with the mother of his children, the lowly status of her lineage grows troublesome to him, and their current proximity to poverty, while once poetic, romantic, intoxicating in its reality, becomes laborious, repulsive, complicated and terrifying.

Could it be catching, the squalor? If you mix yourself into that cocktail of ill-repute, can you come clean of its contents and rise to your rightful spot in society?

First, there is love.

Let’s say the couple occupies themselves in the sunshine of the world, clipping flowers that they dry by hanging upside down in front of open windows—the perfume of their drying, soporific and warm.

There is no music, but alas they are dancing.

Draped in quilts of lavender-dyed cotton, the man and woman read fairytales to their children—cautionary things that expound on the positive results of behaving with virtue, dust-flavored stories where witches drown and spoiled princes are punished.

But it’s terrifying to turn your back on your training, and in these moments the man is bungled by internal whispers that revoke his current joys and manifest self-doubt.

The man’s protocol, preached to him since birth, is this: Find a woman of strong history, pleasing form and well-postured behaviors, woo her, win her, and have her bear you children. Endow these children with your knowledge. Bless them with your name. Gift them with inheritances. And pray that your line endures strong for eternity.

To the woman chosen, this notion is lost. To her, you seek love. She can’t conceive the trepidation mounting in her husband’s heart every time her family appears dressed in tattered clothing, playing music on botched instruments with broken strings, drinking until they forget their own language.

She is prideful in the strength of her own charms. She believes the warmth of her affections are celestial-sent, predetermined by heavens. In her mind and soul, the matrimony she’s engaged in is somehow woven into the fabric of the galaxy and her husband’s eyes see beyond her flaws because love allows for every kind of forgiveness.

But, this is far from true.

When alone, wandering amongst his own kind, in the town he never invites his family to from fear of humiliation, he encounters myriad women who embody the stock he knew he was supposed to search for. Often, he curses himself for chancing upon his bride, in a world foreign to him, alive with mystery. It is this mystery he accuses, blaming the unfamiliar surroundings as the catalyst for his faulty feelings. The mother of his children is still pleasing to look at, to hold, but now that the magic of her strangeness has tapered, been undone and made homespun, a nausea at the eternity he’s promised her has mounted, made him miserable. 

It is not so much a plan he hatches as a notion. He leaves himself open to the suggestion that he might still find his way. After all, their wedding did not occur in his church, under his Lord’s eyes, but rather near a river at dusk, the faint wisps of orange sunlight leaking like streaks from the horizon.

“If I am approached,” he tells himself, “I will not thwart the advances.”

In this way he deceives himself into believing that any engagement that might grow out of his openness would be fatalistic, sent by God, and who would he be to intervene?

Maybe he is sharpening a sword, maybe he is cleaning a rifle, maybe he is checking the mailbox—it all depends on when the story occurred. There is nothing definite beyond this: the man finds a more suitable lover.

On a lark, he meets a woman with money from a respectable family, and, because they are more suited to each other, they fall madly in love, and the man sets his designs on stepping away from his former family and into this new lady’s life.

He barely explains this to his wife, says merely, “I’ll not be home again,” and the wife is heartbroken.

Here the legend becomes murkier, splits in two.

Some say the wife does it immediately, some say years transpire before it’s done.

This is a possibility: the man’s new woman cannot bear him children. They try, over and over, they try, but the results are always the same—nothing happens.

The man knows, for his life’s plan to be fulfilled, that he must have children to pass his name to. The new wife knows this as well, lays in blankets weeping and watching the sunset, lighting candles and speaking with Jesus.

It is a great internal debate that twists in the man’s soul. On the one hand, he already has two children, on the other, they must stay secret or it could be his undoing.