The Sun My Destiny Page 9

  Nothing so cold as that hand. I’ve slept under black night-clouds without a blanket or anything and that couldn’t match the chill that went through me at the touch of that dead hand.

  Before I dragged her by the legs back to The Memory Palace, I cut my unborn brother from her stomach with my bowie knife and flung his red-glistened body by the toe into the nearest garbage mountain, the nearest Hades. Then I buried him within the trash heap where no one would ever find him and no one would ever know he existed. Because that’s what Momma would have wanted. And that’s the way it was supposed to be.

  19

  “These are my calendars,” I tell Joyce, picking up the large stack and rearranging them into a nice pile on the coffee table. “Have a seat.”

  Joyce takes the red chair and kicks her big old mean boots up onto the coffee table.

  “No! Not that seat!” I tell her. She should have sat in Papa’s chair (the yellow one), or mine (the blue one), but she took Momma’s (the red one).

  “What?” she asks, smirking. “What’s wrong with this chair? Is it gonna bite me?”

  I look at her. I look down at my calendars. I look back to her. “Nothing,” I say. “It’s OK.” I open my kitty calendar and scratch out the last several days.

  “What day is it?” Joyce asks, her hands crossed over her belly.

  “It’s August twelfth,” I tell her, closing the kitty calendar and putting it back in its place.

  “August twelfth, huh?” she says, sighing. “Well, I guess I had a birthday last week. I don’t keep track of time anymore, really. Doesn’t really seem necessary, does it?”

  “A birthday?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Goddamn.”

  “What?”

  “I guess I’m thirty now. I never thought I’d grow to be this old.”

  “You don’t look thirty,” I tell her, running my hand over the photo album’s cover. A light breeze brushes by and the refuse in the giant mounds surrounding us blushes.

  “That’s sweet, kid, but, with all due respect, how the fuck would you know?”

  “I…. Wait here,” I say and run over to the tent placed atop Momma’s final resting place. When I come back, I hold out a penny to her. “Here,” I say.

  “What’s this?” she asks, puzzled, gently taking the penny from me.

  “A birthday present,” I tell her, suddenly feeling a twinge of embarrassment.

  “A birthday present?” she asks, turning the coin over, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, then inspecting it. “Hmm… 2049, huh? That’s a good year.”

  I laugh but don’t tell her why.

  Her eyes get a little wet. “Thanks, kid.”

  “Let me tell you something,” I say, grabbing the photo album. I motion for her to get her feet off the coffee table and then take a seat on her knee. She lets me and I know she’s humoring me, but that’s fine, so long as King Clyde gets what he wants, it doesn’t really matter.

  “What are you going to tell me?” she asks as I flip through the photo album. “Who are all these people?”

  “These people?” I say, pointing at the glossy rectangular photos. “These are pictures of me, Momma, and Papa.”

  “But it’s all different people, kid.”

  “Look. Look at this one. Here we are in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Papa just got that cowboy hat and he was real proud of it. Thought it made him look rugged. We’re at something called a ghost town where cowboys used to live but now just their ghosts do. We spent the weekend there talking to cowboy ghosts and buying cowboy boots and hats. One cowboy ghost told us he was Momma’s great great grandad. We asked him where great great grandma was and he said she was taken away by something called Injuns. Injuns, apparently, were a lot like you guys—Out-of-Towners, even though they were there first. It’s complicated. Anyway, my great great great grandad died because he went after the Injuns and he raped and killed most of them, but the last one in the camp managed a good sneak attack and sliced his head clean off.” I flip the page. “Anyway, that’s when we met my great great great grandad.”

  “That’s a… nice story, kid. Why don’t we head back now?” she says, a hand on my back, trying to usher me from her knee.

  “No! Wait. This one,” I tell her, pointing to a photo on the next page. “This one is us—you and me—and—”

  “That’s not me.”

  “you knew me a long time ago. See?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll remember once I tell you the story. See, here you are in this picture holding me when I was a baby. Originally we thought that was Momma, but now that you’re here and she’s not, I know that that’s you, Joyce. And when I was a baby you were my babysitter. Babysitters way back when had very important jobs. When moms and dads had better things to do with their time than hang out with their dumb babies they’d hand the babies over to babysitters and babysitters would sit on the babies until the moms and dads were tired from having fun and ready to go back to their babies. I know this because Papa told me it was like that. So, Joyce, you used to sit on me when I was a baby, and that’s why we’re already very good friends. Like we are now. We were friends back then so that’s why we are now. We’ve always been friends. As I recall now, I liked when you sat on me when I was a baby. I have very fond memories of it, Joyce.”

  “Clyde, first off—never mind. Is your story done? Can we go back now?”

  “Do you remember?” I ask, reaching out and pushing the hair from her forehead.

  “Do I remember what?” She brushes my hand away.

  “Of course you don’t. Because I haven’t finished the story yet. See, this is a very interesting picture because while you’re just holding me in it, you’re still my babysitter. And this one night that this picture was taken, you called your boyfriend over, as you and all babysitters pretty much did. You wanted him to come over and stick his pecker in you while I played in a nearby crib. However, when your boyfriend came over I was being so cute and baby-like that you didn’t give him enough attention and he started getting mad and told you he was going to go take a bath and you just kept playing with me and ignored him because I was a very cute baby with a button nose and you were doing your job as a babysitter even though you weren’t sitting on me at that moment. Anyway, you hear your boyfriend drawing a bath and think that maybe he’s really filthy and needs to wash his pecker before he sticks it in your woo-hoo. Next thing you know, he’s storming into the living room, yanking me from the crib, and running to the bathroom where he immediately dunks me into the tub full of water. He’s screaming how he hates me so much and how you never pay attention to him when I’m around. So, you tried very hard to get him to let me up out of the water but he was much bigger than you because he was captain of the lacrosse team or something. So, you couldn’t do anything, or so it seemed. What happened was you ran out of the bathroom, grabbed a hammer from the hall closet, and proceeded to beat his fucking brains in. I mean, you brained your old boyfriend real good. Like, his brains were actually squirting out of his ears and falling out the back of his skull. Once he was properly brained you got me out of the water and performed CPR on my little baby lungs and got all the water out of me and made me alive again. You were hailed a hero in the papers and my folks gave you a raise and made you my Godmother, which means you have power over whether I go to Heaven or Hell. That’s why we’re so close now and that’s why it doesn’t matter that you were mean to me even though I’m King Clyde and you should never be mean to a king.”

  I wait a moment but Joyce just stares at me, wordless, not even blinking. The grey breeze tickles my earlobes and pushes Joyce’s scraggly hair back across her forehead.

  “Do you remember now?” I finally ask, feeling almost out of breath in the moment. Like, remembering that near-death drowning really knocked the wind out of me.

  “No, Clyde.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, I don’t. Because you’re just making up a story—”

  “You don’t remember
? How can you not remember? I just told you the story! There’s a picture and I just told you the story!”

  “These pictures are all of people long dead and gone, kid. You’re just making up a story on the spot—”

  “No! You have to remember! I told you the story! It’s our story! You have to remember! Momma would remember!” I shout right into her dust-caked face.

  Joyce tries to pry me from her knee but when I don’t budge she shoves me and I fall backward, clacking my head on the coffee table, the photo album flinging from my hands up into the overcast sky.

  “Oh, shit. Goddammit! Clyde, are you OK?” Joyce asks. I sit up, rub the back of my head and stare at her through watery eyes. She kneels down and I roll away from her, putting the coffee table between us.

  “You can’t remember because you’re a nobody!” I yell at her. “You’re nobody! You don’t deserve a story! You don’t count! You don’t deserve to live in my Kingdom! You’re nobody!”

  “Come on, kid. Just calm down. I’m sorry about you hitting your head,” she says, a hand out to me, trying to calm me like I was some crazed animal.

  A bunch of pictures escaped the photo album in the tumble and I’m crawling around on hands and knees, collecting them.

  “Just get out of here!” I scream at her, though I’m looking directly into the grey earth. “You’re not my Momma! Get out! You’re not my Momma! You don’t even exist!”

  “Fine, kid. Fine. When you’ve calmed down, come on back to the camp. I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  “Get out of here! Get out of here, you assless cunt!” I scream, managing to hold tears back this time, but a string of spit still drops from my lips to the dirt. With all the photos and the album gathered, I sprint into my tent and close the flap. “Momma, she’s being mean to me again!” I say. “Momma, tell her to go the fuck away! Momma!”

  Eventually Momma does order her to leave. She really gives Joyce some lip. Scrap metal clatters angrily as Joyce clambers over garbage mountains. Then I lie down, stroke Momma’s hair between my fingers, and Momma reaches up through the grave to wipe my tears away.

  When I come back to the camp in Monster Island the next day, the sack over my shoulder’s twitching and agitated. Joyce sits against her satchel reading a book from The Library, Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. She didn’t ask permission but I’m in no mood to bring it up with her. I just hope Rosa and Petunia remembered to tell her when it’s due back! Sam’s doing what he always does when he doesn’t have Joyce telling him what to do, which is to stare off into space, jaw unhinged, almost drooling. He’s surveilling me move among them now, however.

  “Well, well, well,” Terrance says, digging a knife blade under his fingernails. “Welcome back, stranger. What ya got in the bag?”

  I drop the sack to the ground, walk over to the nearest trash mountain, and kick aside some debris: flattened plastic bottles, dented tin cans, plastic bags of rot, a busted radio alarm clock. I finally find what I’m looking for: a flat piece of wood that probably belonged to a chair. I take that and drop it next to the convulsing sack. Terrance walks over, spits, waits to see what I do next. Joyce ignores me behind her book.

  From the sack I retrieve some nails and a hammer. Then I withdraw the scrawny jackrabbit spasmodically kicking its crooked legs. With my hand around its throat, I hold it against the wood.

  “What are you doin’ with that rabbit, kid?” Terrance asks.

  “You taught me to hunt, didn’t you?” I say, just as the first nail pierces the rabbit’s sternum. It squeals and squirms and Terrance says, “Jesus Christ, kid,” and as I’m nailing the rabbit’s legs down, Joyce finally looks up from her book. I get the second leg nailed down just as Joyce stands.

  Before I can nail down the forepaws, Sam’s storming over to me, an earthquake with each footfall. With one enormous hand he pushes me away, a deep, garbled whine escaping his lips. With his other hand he quickly twists the rabbit’s neck, ceasing its struggle against the crucifixion.

  All three stand over me with concerned faces, blanketing me in shadow. Even Terrance, whose amusement waned.

  “Clyde,” Joyce says, with finality.

  “What?” I ask, getting up off the dirt. I brush my hands together then make an elaborate effort to remove months of dust from my life vest, my pants, my big rubber boots. “Jesus, I was just bringing us some dinner,” I say after too many silent seconds. Then I push through them. On my way out of the camp, I stoop and pick up Tender Buttons and head to The Library.

  20

  The last few weeks have gone OK. These Out-of-Towners have begun to respect my presence as King Clyde and I’ve been feeling healthier with all this meat I’ve been eating. We ate that rabbit a while back and rat meat isn’t as scant as I had once thought. Sure, we still have to munch on Protein Beans some nights and throughout the day to keep our energy levels up, but the rich decadence of meat has begun to fill out my sinewy muscles with bulk. I’ve felt my chest widen and my pecker lengthen. I’m not joking, either—it’s getting really big! And while I don’t appreciate the insolence of outsiders, my time in The Kingdom since their arrival has become fuller, like my muscles. My brain is functioning at full capacity as well since Joyce has read me some of that nonsense poetry (I gave her permission to check out Tender Buttons again after I returned it). She tricked me into believing I understood it. Which is half the battle and half of what makes people smart—faking it! I’ve learned that well and now I’m an even better-functioning King! In any case, I’ve enjoyed listening to Joyce read me that gibberish. Her voice is strong and fluid, not flighty and wavy like Momma’s these days. Plus, when she reads to me, we sit up against her satchel and she lets me place my head on her shoulder. From time to time she has allowed my head upon her breast where I could listen to her breath and heartbeat. It’s a really great sound, and her heart is so much louder than Momma’s ever was, especially the way it had been sounding for a while before I found her with the bag over her head.

  Right now, Terrance, Sam, and me are sitting around a crooked card table, playing with the nudey cards that they stole from me. It just turned to twilight and Joyce is over near the well, building something she calls a “shanty” for herself. I guess she couldn’t find a tent, so she’s using canvas, blankets, boxes, and wood to make a kind of fort. She said she wanted her privacy, but also implied that they weren’t going anywhere so she “might as well set up shop,” as she put it. Not quite as elegant as Momma, but Joyce also has a way with words.

  “Go Fish,” Sam says in his slow, deep voice.

  Terrance slaps his cards down on the table. “Dammit, Sam, I told you we’re playing poker. Poker, you dumb shit!” He reaches across the table and lightly smacks the base of his palm against Sam’s massive forehead.

  Sam chuckles, rubs his forehead. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Hey, you leave Sam alone,” Joyce says, draping fabric material as a roof over her slipshod structure.

  “Hey, kid,” Terrance says, sneering. He lays a card on the table, face down, so that the nudey is showing. The woman on the card has wild, dark curly hair and a brightly painted face. She’s sitting up in a bed dressed in golden sheets and pillows, her large round tits just as shiny. Her legs are spread and between them is another mass of wild, dark curly hair. Her fingers are in that tangle, spreading a moist, meaty, pink parcel of flesh.

  Terrance snorts, laughs lecherously. Sticking his pinky finger between his dry lips, he sucks the fingertip, then places it between the lady’s legs and ejects another wicked giggle as he rubs the picture in slow circles, leaving a wet mark. He snickers. Sam chuckles. So I giggle, too.

  Terrance’s gaze drifts from the playing card, to us, and over to Joyce, bending over her construction, lifting heavy wood into place. My eyes drift over there, too, and I feel my underpants tighten. Joyce glistens in the twilight, her lean body bending, twisting, flexing, tensing. She bends over and her breasts dangle inside her shirt, a drop of sweat from her neck drips down
between them.

  When Terrance sees that I’m watching, too, he smacks the back of my head and says, “Hey!” Embarrassed, I put my hand between my legs and adjust my dick, mentally ordering the little soldier to stand down. I feel the warmth in my face and I wonder why I feel so silly. I mean, why should I, of all people, feel embarrassed?

  “Go Fish,” Sam says again and chuckles, laying down all his cards.

  “Alright, alright,” Terrance says, gathering up the cards and shuffling them. “Go Fish, it is.”

  After we’re done with a few hands of Go Fish, Joyce has already “gone to bed,” hidden in her shanty. Terrance places the cards back in their pack and tosses them to me, saying, “Here, knock yourself out, mutt.” Once he and Sam are fast asleep, I’ll sneak off to The Memory Palace with these cards where I can find some privacy of my own within my old tent.

  “So you’re staying?” I ask, sitting on an upturned orange bucket outside Joyce’s shanty.

  “For now. For a while. It looks like it,” she says, sitting in a chair just to the side of her shanty’s entrance. She’s gnawing on a long stalk of the weed she uses to make our tea. None of it grows within my Kingdom for some reason but is easily found, she said, just outside the wall. It’s a quick trip, so she’s willing to risk it.