Ceremony of Flies (7 page)

Fuck!

“You know I had to do it, right?”

The dog is making a snorting noise like he’s laughing. He stops slurping to do it. I gave that fucking dog ice cream. What is so goddamned funny?

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You know what you done was wrong. You’ve got the voice in your head telling you right from wrong just like everybody else.”

“I guess.” I feel the wave of fear and panic rising up around me. It picked now to come out of hiding. I do not have a voice in my head. I could really use one of those. I could use someone on my side.

“Hey, Rex, I’m sorry, okay.”

Linda makes a whining sound and Rex strokes the dashboard with a gentle, barely there touch. I wonder if loving a car like he does makes you a bigger target too.

“I really truly am sorry. I never wanted to get you mixed up in this sh— I never did want you to have to suffer for what I did. I am sorry.”

I feel tears well up in my eyes like I’m some little crybaby girl. I don’t want to cry now, not at this late date. What if I never stop?

I didn’t cry when Frank the bunny died. I didn’t cry when I left school or about what happened to Joey and what he did about it—any of the shit that happened. I didn’t even cry when Joey…I don’t cry.

Rex holds his arm out like he wants to give me a hug.

I slide across the seat and he lowers his arm and wraps it around me.

“Sometimes the Lord gives you more chances than you deserve.” Rex squeezes me a little. It gives me more comfort than anything I can ever remember. “Yep. I’ve had more than my share of chances. Maybe you will too.”

“You’ve messed up before and gotten another chance?”

“I’ve messed up big, Kitty. There’s something I should probably tell you about what happened in Truman, Missouri…” He says the name of the state in that peculiar way Southern people do. His voice trails off like maybe he’s not so sure he wants to tell me.

“You didn’t really meet that actor guy?” I ask. “When you were playing pool.”

“Nope, that part’s the God’s honest truth.” He just stops talking like that is the end of it.

“Then what?”

“That gun you used back there at the Crossroads bar, it’s not mine.”

Yeah right, dude, and everyone in jail
is
innocent.

“I took it off a guy.”

“Seriously? It’s stolen?” I feel him bobbing his head up and down.

“Well, technically, I guess it is. It was in the glove box when I drove off with Linda.”

“No fucking way. You stole this car?” I lift my head up and look at him. His face is stiff, stoic. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road.

“Fellow that had her wasn’t treating her right.”

“So you just stole the car. That is… I don’t have the words.”

“The point of me telling you that was to let you know that the Lord gave me another chance. I’m here with you today and not in some jail. Maybe he’s going to give you one more chance too.”

I hope what he says is true. I hope more than anything that is true because the darkness doesn’t seem so terrifying as I lay my head on Rex’s chest and listen to the
thump thump
of his heart. He smells familiar like home would smell if I had one, but also like oil and metal and sweat. He doesn’t seem to mind if I stay next to him, so I do. I can hear the boy in the back snoring softly.

I hope Rex is right and this chance we got works out. I hope somewhere inside of me is a person who won’t fuck it up. I stare at the road as it threads endlessly through the desert. Each of my eyes see the road a little bit differently. The double images separate and rejoin in a disjointed dance.

“I’m ashamed to call you my daughter.”

I blink away the double vision. I don’t move. I’m paralyzed. On the hood sits a woman who looks a lot like Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Labor, except she’s wearing a getup that’s so traditional no Chinese woman would ever actually wear it. I wonder why the wind whipping past doesn’t blow off her Chairman Mao rice paddy hat and pull the chopsticks out of her hair.

“I’m not your daughter,” I say.

I think I say.

“I’m not anyone’s daughter. You didn’t care enough to bring me up yourself.”

“You are no good.” The woman on the hood of the car scowls. “You helped your sissy boyfriend kill that boy. And then you ran away from your punishment.”

You don’t even know how much that son-of-a-bitch deserved it. He deserved more. After all the shit he did to me. Where were you? Isn’t a mother supposed to stop bad stuff from happening? I’m not your daughter.

Thunder rolls across the desert. Lightning illuminates the sky behind my mother, my imaginary Chinese mother. For an instant she looks like she is sitting in front of a paper screen painted like a stormy sky. “You think only of yourself,” she says.

I think about the boy…and Rex too. I care about them.

A strange truth occurs to me. For the first time since Joey died, I care about someone. I did not think that would ever happen again.

“I’m going to take care of them like nobody ever took care of me.”

“You are a killer now, that’s how you take care of people.” The woman’s scowl deepens. “You destroy them. You are no daughter of mine.”

She turns away. And keeps turning—and turning until she is spinning like a fairy-tale character. She spins until she swirls away into the desert. A mother tornado. I feel the vacuum of her in my insides.

“Would you look at that?” Rex says.

“What?” I ask. My voice sounds thick with sleep even though I’m pretty sure I’ve been awake the whole time.

“You see that twister?”

“I do.”

“The world is a mysterious place,” Rex says.

Thunder rumbles across the desert. Lightning flashes in the sky. It looks like a paper screen painted with a stormy scene. My Chinese mother is gone.

The lightning flash decays to nothing.

When will this darkness end?

I am scared of the dark.

I am.

The Mayan Calendar

The Maya were a Mesoamerican civilization
prominent from 2000 BCE to CE 900. The ancient Maya were the only people to master written language in the pre-Columbian Americas. They also developed mathematical and astronomical systems.

In the twenty-first century, the Mayan civilization is no longer a political entity, although the Mayan people are minority populations in southern Mexico and the countries of northern Central America.

The Maya are perhaps most famous for their calendars. The Sacred Round or Tzolkin measures a 260-day year with 20 periods of 13 days. Once a cycle completes, it begins again. The Tzolkin is a handy way to keep track of birthdays, anniversaries and holidays.

The Long Count calendar uses astronomy to track the universal cycle. Each cycle is 2,880,000 days or approximately 7,800 years. The Mayans believed that the universe ends and begins again at the start of each universal cycle. The latest cycle began on the fourth of Ahaw in the eighth of Kumku. It ended December 21, 2012, give or take a year or two.

7

I open my eyes and I can feel the sun burning through the fabric of my jeans and toasting my thigh. I sit up with a start. Rex pulls his arm back and chuckles. “Good morning.” His laugh sounds kind of like he’s forcing it. Not much to laugh about, I remember, as I fully wake up.

Thunder rumbles in the distance, rolling over the desert like a bowling ball flung down an alley. I wait for the crash and the fall of pins.

It doesn’t come.

There’s a damp spot on Rex’s chest where I drooled on him. He doesn’t say anything about it.

“What time is it?” I look at the dash.

“Don’t know.” He looks up at the sky. “One o’clock or so I’d say.”

“One o’clock in the afternoon!” I feel woozy like I’ve been drinking. But I haven’t. I’m sure I haven’t.

There are clouds gathering overhead but they don’t block the sun. It doesn’t rain in the desert as far as I know. Why bother with clouds?

“Did you know the Mayans had a calendar that was hundreds of times more sophisticated than ours,” Rex asks with a look on his face like he’s ready to tell me all about it.

“I
did
know that. I saw a documentary, maybe two. I’m a regular scholar on the topic.”

I should have tried harder like my white parents said. I could have probably gone to college. I was good enough in music to get a scholarship to somewhere interesting. Not that I needed one. My parents would have paid. I get a melancholy feeling at the thought even though I hated school when I was there. I could have probably made some different choices. Made something more of myself.

Rex’s eyes look kind of weary. He reaches under the dashboard and wiggles a wire or something when the car makes a strange noise. “Did your documentaries tell you that they predicted the end of the world?”

“Yeah, they mentioned it.”

I just woke up, dude. Give me a fucking break with the news updates.

I twist around and look in the backseat. The boy is stretched out with his head lying on the photo of the old lady. His mouth hangs open and a fly buzzes around his lips. It’s joined by a second that skitters out of his mouth.

“Close your mouth, Harvey,” I say. “Or the flies will get in.”

Or out as the case may be. Kids are gross.

He doesn’t move.

The dog is curled up beside him. It’s completely hairless except for a tuft of white hair on the crown of its head. It is a seriously ugly beast. The boy looks sweaty and the sun’s hitting him right in the face.

“We’ve got to put the top up,” I say.

I feel sick like I slept through Christmas. When I was a kid, I didn’t think the sun would come up if I wasn’t awake to make it happen. I’ve never been much of a sleeper. And now when the darkness is worse than it’s ever been, I’ve missed hours and hours of light.

“Top’s not working,” Rex says.

I am not taking very good care of the boy already. I look at his little back moving up and down under his dirty white T-shirt. He’s breathing. At least he’s not dead yet. I want to shake him a little to see him move. But I don’t.

“I’ve got to feed him,” I say.

Rex doesn’t respond.

“Do we have water?”

I could use some myself and a shower and maybe a coffee from Starbucks.

Rex shakes his head and jiggles whatever he’s jiggling under the dashboard. I notice some steam coming up where the windshield meets the hood. It could be a mirage, though. The desert is supposed to be rife with those. The car seems to be moving slower than it was before and now it’s making a hissing sound.

Who the fuck drives through the desert without water? I remember it’s my fault. I still can’t quite shake the feeling of being pissed off at Rex.

I’m so thirsty it feels like the dreams I used to have when I drank. I’d drink glass after glass of water but it was never enough.

Could I walk back to civilization if I had to?

Without shoes?

The desert spreads out to the horizon. Not even a telephone pole breaks the wildness of it. The vista is more than immense. Walking from one end to the other isn’t a difficult distance to travel. The journey is more than an obstacle to be overcome with determination and willpower, it’s an impossible feat. Truly impossible, like flying bird-style or becoming invisible. The fact that I am already too far in to make it back under my own power is no joke.

This isn’t like the time I accidentally ended up in Florida and had to hitchhike back. That was hard. This is impossible. No amount of putting one step in front of the other will get me out of this alive. Plus a kid and a dog—and Rex.

Like the executioner’s ax, the big picture slams down on my head. I’m a helpless little meat bag wandering in a vast wilderness with no water, no food, no shelter and I’ve got a kid to keep alive. I will shrivel and die. Getting busted for multiple murders might have been the better option.

Rex pushes on the gas pedal and the car shimmies and shudders.

“What’s wrong with the car?” I hear the panic seeping into my voice.

Rex leans close to the steering wheel. Linda groans and cries out in pain as he pushes her down the road, such as it is. “There’s something up ahead.”

I look but I don’t see anything. He’s probably got heat stroke. A headache is throbbing behind my eyes.

I squint and I can just make out some weird shapes. Like a Stonehenge monument, a circle of tiny buildings looms off in the distance about ten city blocks away. The buildings are the exact color of the desert as if they were built from the sand. If they really are buildings and not just some trick of the light.