Fuckness (17 page)

I desperately wanted Uncle Skad. He was the reason I came here. He was the only thing, in my mind, keeping me from bottoming out. These people, they were people who had had the nets removed. The reason they ended up here was because there was absolutely no one to help them. I had wondered before how terrifying it would be to look around you and find no one and, if it weren’t for the idea of Uncle Skad, I would know. This was where I belonged. In the Tar District. In the land of people who didn’t have anybody. They weren’t just without a home, they were without anything. Every comfort a home brings with it was denied these poor souls. And that’s really all they were. Souls. Maybe they had beautiful thoughts that helped them get through. Maybe their thoughts were genius. Maybe they had firmly planted their existence in their minds. But they didn’t exist in the physical world. Not the physical world that anybody sees, anyway. They had been cast out.

I stood there crying. I was stupid for doing everything I’d done. I shouldn’t have run away. I shouldn’t have killed the parents. I shouldn’t have set fire to the parents’ house. I shouldn’t have stood up to Bucky Swarth. But I did. I did all of those things and I stood there rotting in my decisions, wondering if they were
my
decisions. Maybe that was why I stood there feeling like I belonged in the Tar District, but not feeling like one of them. I doubted their decisions put them here. Did they
deserve
it? Did they feel like they deserved it? That’s exactly what I felt like.

What if I
was
what everybody said I was: a molester, a rapist, ugly, a demon, a half-wit, a murderer? If so, then this was certainly where I belonged. But I stood apart because something told me they wouldn’t accept me either. Prison would have been a luxury. This was punishment of another kind.

I didn’t have any idea what to do. I just wanted to see Uncle Skad but I didn’t remember what he looked like or if he still lived here or not. I stood there and it felt like a billion different things were trying to pull me in all those directions and I couldn’t do anything but stand there and cry like a huge baby. A weak demon. The boy with horns.

That’s truly what I had become. Everyone I’d been around had found me to be repellent. They could remove my personality if they didn’t interact with me. By telling me to shut up, by silencing me every day, they had removed a little bit more of that personality. And the more personality they removed, the more room they created for something more malevolent to fill. Oh sure, sometimes I would find someone else to inflict it upon, but it was never very long before they wised up too. And that was all I was as I stood there in the rain. I wasn’t a name or a personality, I was the boy with horns, like the hunchback of Notre Dame, some twisted freak of nature people could no longer even bear to look upon.

I was an embarrassment to the human race. I became a raw soul, unable to exist in the physical world.

No
.

The thunder clapped and I took off running toward the Saints thinking maybe I should throw myself in, but that wouldn’t happen either. No, I would run until I died. If I died it was going to be in a cathedral or a mansion, any place spectacular, not the Tar District, not where people died every day. Not where death was common. I would die someplace fantastic even if I was only robbing it.

I ran until I got so close to the river I could smell it, my raw lungs sucking that odor in. The Saints’ presence was all over me and I collapsed into the mud and the muck, spiraling uncontrollably into some form of exhausted sleep and thinking for some odd reason the strong scent of the mud was what a fish’s spine would smell like.

Chapter Sixteen

Dreaming of Hell

It’s always the shortest sleeps that breed the longest, most vivid dreams.

The dream I had that night, after passing out under the rain, gave me a desire to go on. I can’t explain why. I think it showed me that things had to change. That eventually, something had to give. The fuckness
had
to recede.

When the dream started, it was very dark and I was wrapped up in all these things that felt like spiderwebs. They were very thin and fine but there was also something sort of metallic about them. Slowly, all those cobwebs dropped away and it got a little bit lighter all around me. It’s amazing in dreams the amount you can
feel
. I think that’s what really makes them so lifelike—the fact you can feel, emotionally as well as physically, everything you can in real life. That weightless feeling I’d had earlier, a feeling I would try never to forget, entered into me and it felt like I was flying, up close to the sun, the air around me thin and blue. I felt the coolness of the clouds on my face, so close I could taste them. They tasted like the purest, coldest water I had ever tasted. Nothing like the orange muck that came from the pipes at home.

And then I saw Bobby DeHaven. He was standing on a cloud further in front of me and I could tell by the way his mouth moved that he was singing but I couldn’t make out any words. The wind up there, wherever
there
was, blew his beautiful blond hair off his face. Those feathered sides looked like wings. He wore pants that had the same pattern as the American flag—stars on his crotch and ass and stripes down his legs—and then I was going past him, slowly past him.

I was coming down.

Everything felt so blue and weightless. It ran over my skin, through my veins, like a gentle electric current. I felt like I was in a bubble where no one could hurt me.

And then the bubble broke, the weightlessness sucked away. I found myself in a park. I never saw myself in this dream. I felt everything as though I were inside myself, looking out through my eyes. The parents were there. Off in the distance. They were throwing a bright red Frisbee back and forth. They were my parents but not really. Right away I noticed Racecar had legs. But as I got closer to them, I started noticing other differences. Racecar’s legs were prosthetic. He wore a pair of very short running shorts. The shiny plastic of the legs gleamed in the sunlight. They had to have been like twice as long as his real legs had been. He moved deftly around on them, running this way and that to catch the Frisbee and then launching it back at the mother.

The mother looked better, too. She had on a new wig, an auburn one, and it looked like she’d taken the time to put it on straight. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth, comically huge, bellowing a truly abnormal amount of smoke. She still wore a nightgown but it also looked new, bright nearly-fluorescent flowers standing out on a pink background.

Racecar was smoking too. Combined, they looked like a cigarette ad. The smoke from their cigarettes swirled up into the air, darkening it. I realized I could still hear some of the music from Bobby DeHaven’s guitar playing except it, like the air around me, also became darker and heavier.

Suddenly, everything became foreboding.

I looked around the park. It was up on a hill. The only thing blotting the surface of its green grass was an orange swing set. The park was surrounded by a huge factory, as though the park itself were little more than a courtyard. Something inside me desperately wanted to be on the swing set, but there was another part of me that knew I had to run, to get the hell out of the park.

The sound of the mother coughing drew my attention back to the parents. She was doubled over, having one of her fits. Racecar wound up with the Frisbee and let it fly. It hit the mother right on the head, knocking her wig askew. She coughed again before retching, unleashing a torrent of bright red onto the grass. The sounds of the factory gained volume, becoming both rhythmic and abrasive, nearly musical, drowning out all the other sounds.

I tried to run, but it felt incredibly hard, like the grass was growing up around my feet. The air felt thicker, also. Not only was it hard to run, it was nearly impossible to breathe. I half-ran until I got to the wall of that factory. I looked back over my shoulder and noticed the parents were following me.

“
Come on, Wally,” Racecar called. “Come and play Frisbee with us.”

I ignored him and pressed on into the factory. Even though there weren’t any discernible doors or entrances, I got inside anyway.

“
Come on, Wally,” Racecar’s voice matched the rhythm of the factory sounds.

In front of me, there was nothing but blackness and hell orange. To my sides were walls of dead, charred bodies. Once I realized what they were, the smell nearly made me vomit.

“
You come back here, Wallace,” the mother strumbled, framed against the comparative brightness of the entrance. “You little fucker. Little shit.”

And she let fly with the Frisbee. It approached me in slow motion. I melted down to the floor, pains running all over my body, nearly paralyzing. While the Frisbee came floating toward me, I had the idea that, somehow, Uncle Skad was supposed to save me from all of this.

“
Uncle Skad,” I called.

Futility, a sinking dread, closed in around me along with the blackness and not the hell orange, but its hot essence.

“
Uncle Skad!” I yelled. “Uncle Skad! Uncle Skad!”

I opened my eyes and he was there.

Chapter Seventeen

Uncle Skad

The first thing I saw were his huge, crystal blue eyes surrounded by bloodshot. Those eyes were full of concern. Something in the area around his eyes, in the folds and wrinkles, said he’d done a lot of worrying in his life. Blackish dirt, the dirt of the homeless I’d seen before my collapse, caked his face. A huge steel-gray beard surrounded that face, the same color as his long, dirty gray hair. That strange electric feeling I remembered from my dream was still there, in the room all around me. I realized the energy was coming from Uncle Skad.

“
How is it that you know my name?” he asked.

I must have mumbled his name in my sleep. It was a simple question but it caught me completely off guard. There was electricity there, in the air, but it couldn’t eclipse that grinding bonefeel. It was back and hurting even worse than it had that morning, after the multiple beatings.

“
I’m... I’m...” I stammered.

Skad backed away from me. He was older and a little bit plump, but he moved with amazing fluidity.

“
A boy, a peculiar boy, with horns atop his head, staggers and falls. This boy, this stranger, this alien is brought to me, slung across the arms of a stranger. But I’m enjoying a fine sleep. A holy helluva sleep. The door is kicked several times and I lie there, on my soft mat, my makeshift bed, hoping that the kicker, the disturbance, will go away. I lie there, drool trickling down my beard, listening to the kicking and the soft drip drop of rain on the rusted tin roof. I go to the door, look through my viewing slot and see one of my fellow Tar Mates. I open the door and the kicker, the knocker, comes inside with this woesome man-child slung over his arms. He plops him down on the floor and says, ‘He was asking for you.’ ‘Me?’ I ask. ‘You,’ he says.”

Skad moved around his dark little space, his arms gesturing in a dramatic fashion.

“
And I ask this child, this being that calls for me as he nightmares away a rainy night, I ask him how he knows my name and he stammers, ‘I... I...’”

Skad looked at me as though to terrify me and I did feel a great welling of fear from within, those eyes piercing through me. Then he smiled, chuckled, a whole different look, a friendlier one, covering his face. I struggled to sit up.

“
Re
lax
,” he placed a hand on my chest.

Uncle Skad was the only thing I could focus on. Everything else was completely shrouded in black.

“
I’m Wallace Black. Sadie and Carl’s kid,” I wheezed out. Skad’s little place was uncomfortably warm, leaning more toward hot, but whenever I breathed in, it felt more like I was breathing in the icy, rainy air of outside.

“
I guess that
would
make me your uncle. I thought we shared some familial resemblance. I knew it was you anyway. I could tell by the freckles and the mouth. Remember? The family reunion about ten years ago. Just you and me stayed out there by the swing set. My arm nearly fell off from pushing you so damn much but I would have done just about anything to stay away from those potato salad-sucking fakes that call themselves family. Say, how are your parents anyway?”

I started to answer, to make up something I was supposed to say like, “Oh, they’re doing fine,” but he put a finger over my lips.

“
Wait. You know what? And this is no offense to you, but I don’t give a good goddamn how your parents are doing. They stopped believing in me a long time ago. Besides, you know, I didn’t really push you on that swing just to stay away from the family, you were pretty interesting. Until you told me about those cloud factories, I didn’t have any idea how those things got up there in the sky. If you haven’t learned yet, Wally, you might figure out that the truth isn’t always what you want to believe. You’ve grown horns since the last time I saw you. Looks like you’ve got something stuck on one of those things.”