Thumbsucker (5 page)

As Grandpa prepared our lunch on the small stove, I realized that the Horizoneer was growing on me. He whipped up our macaroni and cheese in no time, maneuvering in the miniature kitchen like an airline pilot in a
cockpit. We ate at a table with an inlaid checkerboard, and without getting up from his revolving stool, Grandpa was able to open the refrigerator and get us bottles of Coke. Compared to the compact, convenient motor home, the house I’d grown up in seemed huge and wasteful—an echoey shell that I frequently felt lost in.

“Coffee, Justin?” Grandpa asked.

“No thanks. Don’t drink it.”

“It’s good. It’s time to start.”

We drank the coffee out of plastic mugs whose bottoms were weighted so they wouldn’t spill. The first sip burned my tongue. The second soothed it. By the third sip, I wanted another cup. It was that way with everything I liked.

“It’s nice in here,” I said. “I like this life.”

“We’ll take you boys on a trip sometime,” said Grandpa.

“Fat chance,” Grandma said. “Our son would never let them. They’d see we were fun, not the creeps he makes us out to be.”

Grandpa refilled my cup. “Don’t listen to this. She’s not herself this week. There’s a sedative that she’s run out of and no one in Minnesota seems to carry it.”

“They carry it,” Grandma said, “but not in capsules. I only take capsules. My throat’s too tender for pills.”

She squeezed her neck and made a choking face. Then she reopened her murder magazine. “Everyone listen up: I have a quiz. Which are deadlier, pistols or
blunt instruments? It’s not what you’d think, so take a little time.”

Mike seemed to be hiding something at dinner that night. He was too considerate, too gentle. His cheeks were rosy from scrubbing off the buck scent and he grinned between bites of greasy venison loaf. The film of smoke on the kitchen’s picture window distorted the snowflakes that had started falling.

“Grandma gave us tips on crime,” Joel said.

Mike spread fried onions over his slab of meat. “I’m glad you spent time visiting together. Mom and Dad have their quirks, but they’re good people. I think that camper helps. Mom feels secure in it.”

“Can we sleep out in the motor home?” Joel asked.

“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” Mike said. “Give your parents some privacy tonight.”

“That might be nice,” said Audrey. “I think I’d like that.”

Mike’s smile broadened. “I got my doe tonight.”

Audrey’s mouth tensed.

“I aimed straight down at her. Easy shot. I bull’s-eyed. Strong, clean chest shot.”

“Where is it? Did you bring it home?” Joel said. My little brother loved dead animals. When Mike plucked ducks, Joel collected the chopped-off wings and ran down the driveway, flapping them and leaping.

“The deer’s still out there. It bolted. Then the sun set. I’ll find it tomorrow,” Mike said. “She left a blood trail.”

“You’ll find it tonight,” said Audrey. “Jesus Lord …” She stood up with her plate and scraped it into the garbage can.

“Fine,” Mike said. “I’ll get a sleeping bag and track the thing at first light.”

“The
thing
,” said Audrey.

“The animal, then.”

“Just stop it.”

“The precious Bambi.”

My grandparents were right: life was nicer in the Horizoneer.

With Grandpa drinking bourbon sours and Grandma woozy from a sleeping pill, it was like a party in the motor home. To make up for dinner, which I hadn’t touched, I shoveled down ice cream during our game of Scrabble. Grandma won by making nonsense words, including “plip”—a sound like
plop
, she claimed—and “clasque,” which she said she’d forgotten the meaning of. Outside, the snow had turned to slush and sleet, and I thought of Mike in the forest, tracking the doe. The sleet would erase the trail and soak his sleeping bag, but facing difficulties in the woods was Mike’s idea of fun.

After the game we popped popcorn in a popper whose
foil lid rose like a chef’s hat during heating. Grandpa gave Joel and me pillows and wool blankets and we lay down in the aisle head-to-toe. Scattered popcorn hulls pricked my legs and back, and I was convinced I hadn’t fallen asleep yet when suddenly I woke and noticed traffic lights in the small round window overhead.

The camper was moving, with Grandma at the wheel. Wearing only a flannel nightgown, a cigarette stuck in her mouth like a lit fuse, she stared at the fast-sweeping windshield wipers, eyes glazed. Grandpa was still on his stool at the table, his head down on the checkerboard, passed out.

I stumbled past him to the camper’s passenger seat. Through the sleet-blurred glass I saw a town: rows of unfamiliar stores, all closed.

“Where are we? Where are we going?” I asked Grandma.

“Sometimes those pills have the opposite effect. They jazz me up,” she said. “They make me restless.”

The town petered out and we drove along through cornfields on a muddy, potholed country road. The gusting dashboard vents blew Grandma’s hair back and pinked the tip of her nose. “We’re lost,” she said.

“This might be Wisconsin. Did you cross a bridge?”

“I might have. I wasn’t looking down,” she said.

She couldn’t tell me how long she’d been driving or in what direction she’d set out. The fields grew flatter and went from corn to soybeans, indicating that we were
headed west. We passed a few cars and another Horizoneer, which honked its horn in late-night solidarity.

Grandma eyed my reflection in the windshield. “We’ll go to New York. You’ll meet the other Cobbs. We’re quite a clan out there—we have position. No one says boo to us; we protect our own. Your father thinks it’s too dull, too sheltered there. Well, he can afford to—he’s a great big man. Women and children can’t risk that attitude.”

I turned on the motor home’s AM radio and listened for a clue to our location. Stations came in from everywhere: crop news from Omaha, polka from North Dakota, a Bible show all the way from Colorado. We were out on the plains, where all the signals cross.

“I think we need to turn around,” I said. I rooted around in the glove compartment, looking for a map, but all I found were empty asthma inhalers and a crime magazine whose cover showed a woman bound and gagged with black electrical tape.

Grandma’s head began to droop and sway; I braced myself to snatch the wheel from her. The only other vehicles on the road were pickups driven by hunters in orange caps. They steered with one finger, smoking and drinking coffee, and when the motor home drifted under forty, one of them honked at us and shook his fist.

All of a sudden, Grandma was fast asleep and I was pressed tight against her, steering us. I felt the Horizoneer’s bulk, its sluggish tonnage, and I called out
for Grandpa. Joel woke up instead. He cleared his throat, said, “Don’t,” and fell asleep again.

Keeping us straight required constant adjustments. There were crosswinds to fight and high spots in the highway. Our speed was a steady forty-three, governed by Grandma’s wedged-in throttle foot. In time I got the hang of things. My pride rose. I managed to get settled on the seat and nudge Grandma’s foot off the pedal with my own. I’d always suspected that I knew how to drive.

Moments later I heard Grandpa waking. I pumped the brakes and eased us toward the shoulder. He staggered forward, lost his footing, and ended up sideways in the passenger seat as I brought the vehicle to a stop. I waited for him to acknowledge my heroics but he was groggy and didn’t have his glasses on.

I had to explain the situation for him. All my finest moments went unwitnessed.

“The woman gets confused sometimes,” he said.

“She said she was driving to Buffalo.”

“She’s delicate.”

“Mike says she’s faking.”

“He knows better than that. Your grandmother’s nerves aren’t her fault. She struggles with them. The people who should have loved her weren’t always kind to her. Tough neighborhood. Tough family. Tough men. It wasn’t a tea party, Irish Buffalo.”

Grandpa took Grandma’s hand and tugged her upright. Waking up, she muttered a string of curses—not
the four-letter words that I was used to, but the ugly, peculiar ones you seldom hear.

“We know,” said Grandpa, smoothing her tangled hair back.

“Cunt hole,” said Grandma. “Prick.”

“It’s me. It’s Max.”

I excused myself, opened the door, and stepped outside. After so much venison and tension, the retching was a relief. It came in waves. And though I might have been able to swallow it back, I let it come up until it was all gone—not just the food but the desire for food, whatever that space was that the food had filled.

They were gone—to Florida, they told me, to join a convoy of other Horizoneers—when Mike returned with the gutted doe that morning. After I helped him unload it from the station wagon, he slit the tendons of the doe’s back legs and threaded baling twine between the bones and hung it from a rafter in the garage.

I watched with gritty, tired eyes, my mouth still raw and sour from stomach acid. I knew better than to tell Mike where I’d been all night and turn him against his parents even more. My adventures had never interested him anyway. With Mike, there was no way to get around the feeling that everyone’s in the middle of his own life and at the edge of everybody else’s.

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” he said. “She ran for almost two miles, I don’t know how. I only wish Mom
and Dad were here to see this.” He ran a hand along the doe’s stiff flank, leaving a trail of fluffed-up, muddy fur. In the sticky cavity where the organs had been I saw a white spider walk across a rib.

“Those two have their ups and downs,” Mike said. “I realize that. They sure do love you kids, though. That’s what matters.”

Blood dripped onto the orange plastic tarp spread out under the doe. It pooled and ran.

“They’re sort of cute together in that camper. And Dad, what a saint. The man just gives and gives.”

I looked at the ground. Mike was hard to listen to sometimes.

“Maybe you think hunting pleases me,” he said. “It doesn’t. Each season I think: ‘That’s it. Enough already.’ I look at my deer and all I feel is sadness. Those big brown eyes, those elegant long legs. Let someone else be the bad guy for a change.”

The spider crawled up the doe’s neck onto its tongue and started down its throat.

“But then, the next fall, another thought comes over me. I can’t control it. It pops into my skull. The next thing I know I’m out there with my bow again.”

“What thought?” I said.

“It’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Tell me,” I said. “I want to understand.”

Mike touched the doe’s forehead.

“Another year of meat.”

Mike let the deer age for a couple of days, then butchered
it himself. He tossed the slabs of flesh into a bucket while I stood by with his knives. I couldn’t watch him. In my shirt pocket was a postcard from Grandma describing her trip and ending with a P.S.: “Don’t let him make you eat anything you don’t want to. That’s how allergies develop, swallowing things you hate.” My chance to heed her advice came right away. When Mike finished hacking and scraping he held a steak out and asked if I’d like to taste it raw. I didn’t. He bit off a chunk and grimaced as he chewed, as if he were forcing down a dose of medicine. To
each his own
, I thought. Everyone in our family had his medicine, and the bug it was meant to drive off was one another.