The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (6 page)

While Nguyen took the liberty of boiling tea water, Umma rolled off the air mattress with a deflated sound. She crawled on all fours to Pop's amp and rested her head there a while before crossing the room to lean against the breakfast bar.

“The van,” Nguyen told her, “is waiting downstairs. And has been for close to an hour.” Perhaps, he suggested without malice, we had forgotten to set our alarm.

Because no one else stirred, I felt it incumbent on me to come to Umma's aid. This took some doing. When I sat up the hangover expanded in my skull like a pine cone. Having arranged the kettle, our unwelcome guest strolled about the unit, inspecting every inch. Houseflies browsed inside the goose carcass. Pop snored on, the Roland slung around his heaving chest. Nguyen fingered the one-hitter, carried our empty jugs to the sink, and made a demonstration out of tidying up.

I studied his face for a judgment. Would he frown? Wince? Chastise us? Rescind his most generous offer to blast us bodily at the solid sky? Nguyen's face remained as impassive as ever, a picture of itself. My brother was offered the first cup of tea, a gesture, I suppose, meant to smooth over the previous day's friction. Legs sprawled, one bent knee pressed against the wall, Faron pretended to sleep. But his teeth were set and the lashes twitched. “Drink up,” said Nguyen, setting the warm mug on Faron's leg. My brother opened one eye. “We have a long ride ahead of us.”

I looked for the golf cart in the parking lot, but Terry had engaged a far more splashy ride for this momentous day. His white Darling Vanster featured three rows of seats, front and rear bumpers, and a handsome pebbled-vinyl dash. On the road to Cape Cannibal we made little in the way of conversation. We each contemplated our separate miseries and aired our individual gases. Nguyen rolled down every window but his own. His delicate movements, I realized, were on account of that hairpiece. For a man who reveals nothing, the loss of a wig must be intolerable.

The freeway tumbled by under intense sun, past Hiya City, where I slunk low in my seat. Up the coast the world grew more peopled and its commerce less practical. We passed discount flooring shops and private nightclubs with names like the Duck Inn and the Boiler Room, a shooting range called Head Woundz. A guy dressed as scissors waved at us from the parking lot of a haircuttery. Pop waved back. I tried to imagine the lavish lives of midstate Floridayans, their busy social calendars, the firearms and paid-for hairstyles, the colorful tiled floors.

Nguyen turned off where the sign read
CRUISE SHIP TERMINAL
. Indian River, deep carved and sheltered from the sea, is a traditional port of call for these magnificent vessels. I remember a white liner standing tall over the cranes, sleek and poetic. Pop wondered aloud at the cost of such a ship, at the wealth of its passengers. Nguyen made no comment, only pushed on past the terminals to the interior of the cape.

Here the blacktop fell to pieces. Bubbled, sank, pimpled up, and boiled forth sand. Palmettos had pushed through the asphalt, requiring some deft steering, which Nguyen handled with minimal fuss. We came upon a crowd of turkey vultures picking at a flat whitetail. He blew the horn and they fluttered into the air, in no special hurry, only to settle back down to lunch after we'd passed. The road turned to concrete slab, an improvement and indication that the route had once borne heavy payloads. On the right appeared a clutch of rotted buildings. The sign read
VISITORS CENTER
. Dented missiles lay around in a pile like cigarette butts. Grackles stood on the nose cones, lords of all that busted potential.

From a distance the security gate looked bully enough, but when we drew close I saw that it was nothing more than a plywood cabana borrowed from a private beach. The guard rested her squirrel popper on a sawhorse. At the sight of Terry Nguyen she dragged the barricade onto the shoulder, taking her time. Under her reflective vest I saw that she wore a spine brace.

“That your muscle?” Pop asked Terry. He was getting his spark back, which concerned me.

Nguyen told him this headland used to be a walled city, a fortress. The Astronomers named it after a Gunt warrior priest called Jack Kennedy. This man had declared war on all Commies. They'd had a spat about who adored the Moon more, Terry explained, so Jack and the Reds settled it with a gentleman's wager: whoever reached it first would be most beloved by heaven. To protect his facility from the Commies, Kennedy's Space Center was gated off, like Hiya City. Had its own power supply, water, and police. They hid all the secret stuff inside a gator-infested swamp.

Terry pointed out three good-sized bulls in the culvert. “Now,” he said, “the whole place belongs to those monsters.” When they were clearing land for the cruise-ship terminal, every foreman was required to carry a shotgun, “and we still lost three men.”

The world goes wild so fast, I thought. The flattop dipped in and out of black water, and the Vanster struggled. Pine trunks stood blanched and headless in the wake of a hurrycane. The only sign of habitation was a single edifice that rose among the scrub palms like an ocean liner run aground. A factory and warehouse, Nguyen explained, the grandest in the Gunt world, for storing their holy missiles.

At a small gravel road he turned off into the woods. We crossed the culvert on a makeshift bridge of tractor tires and scrap lumber. In a clearing the white warehouse loomed overhead. You could still make out a faded Gunt flag and the cultish blue emblem of the Astronomers writ huge on its facade. But when Terry edged around back, we saw how low this cathedral had sunk.

The rear of the building had been shredded by storms and melted by fire. You could see inside from the floor clear up to the ruined roof. Nguyen told us it was the largest one-story building ever made. Neat mounds of rubble had been bulldozed out to the perimeter, but the rubbish crew was now gone and their earth movers rusted under blue tarps.

Attached to the warehouse was a four-story structure that appeared largely intact. “Launch Control.” Nguyen idled in front of the lobby. “This is where the Astronomers made their sacrifices to the Moon, where they sent tributes to the Wanderers,” only to watch their bright missiles crash against the Night Glass.

He spun the van about and carried on past a stand of bleachers and low black buildings. These were for “the lower Astronomers, Gunt functionaries, come to admire the sacrifices.” The road we were on paralleled a second, broader thoroughfare that was paved down two sides with unbroken bands of concrete. The median had been filled in with crushed bluestone. Pop asked if it was a runway.

“We think it was a road,” said Nguyen. “For a colossal truck they called the Crawler. It was how they carried the missiles from the warehouse to the launchpad.”

Umma grew more agitated the farther we traveled. Her hands wanted a job to do. They dug into the upholstery like she was prospecting for loose change.

The Crawler Road veered off to our left. I saw where it ended at a flattop mound penetrated by a great concrete trough. Faron pointed to a structure on top, an openwork scaffold or antenna.

“Launchpad 39B,” said Nguyen. “Take a good look. This is the last acre of Earth your feet are going to stand on.”

Umma spoke for the first time, her voice small enough to get Terry's attention.

“Are we a sacrifice?” she said.

He pushed on through a bog of scrub palms and onto a dirt road. “Miss Van Zandt,” Terry said. “Bear in mind that everything I tell you is a fairy tale. Or perhaps it isn't.”

“Did they ever make it through, though?” By which she meant through the Night Glass.

Nguyen braked in a clearing between two elegant motor homes. “Here we are!” He honked to disperse the turkey vultures and got out to show us around our new lodgings.

Someone had dressed up the door with a wreath of Spanish moss. Our surname was stenciled in red on the polyvinyl. Nguyen turned a key and tried the knob with his diminished hand but it wouldn't budge. By the van Umma made a circle like a mutt trying to settle in, then sat in the grass. Pop strode up and checked the door with his shoulder. I heard the old weather stripping rip free.

“My wife is not feeling well,” he said.

I shut my eyes and smelled my way inside the motor home. The interior reeked of wet canvas, a smell I particularly loved, for it reminded me of tent living in the peach orchards. Terry Nguyen found the light switch, and Pop whistled appreciatively, for Umma's benefit. She followed us in.

“See here, doll. I told you Bosom would put us up in style.”

He was right. This was utter luxury. The dine-in kitchen had about fifteen styles of veneer, each one a studied facsimile of some natural surface. The double sink looked new. It was offset by a marbled backsplash with hooks for scrub brushes and oven mitts. There was no oven—who would bake bread in this heat?—but the full range had a built-in timer and a center eye exclusively for pancakes.

Pop slipped out of his boots and moaned. The carpet was resolutely shag, in the corporate colors of Bosom Industries, yellow and brighter yellow. Through a beaded curtain Terry revealed the master bedroom. I had never seen a Californdulia king outside a catalog and could not resist giving it the old bounce test. “Come on, Faron,” I said. He joined in, but only to give Umma a laugh. On either side of the bed, matching lamps stood on built-in nightstands. They had been artfully formed in resin to represent some species of mythical sea beast.

“Manatees,” Nguyen said. “The original Floridayans killed them for sport, with motorboats.”

A shelf atop the headboard groaned with paper books. Terry Nguyen told me they had been found in a bunker beneath Launch Control. These volumes, he said, represented the private library of an ancient Astronomer called Bob Sprell. “He must have been a vastly wealthy man.”

From the stacks he offered me a paperback. “You look like a reader.” His selection had not been arbitrary.
The First Men in the Moon
was its title, and Mr. H. G. Wells the man who wrote it. The story took the fanaticism of the Astronomers into the realm of madness. There used to be Jesus Lovers in the Gables. They would enter their trances right there in the lobby and embarrass everyone. They shouted and sang to the Fanta machine in a homemade language, did so with narrowed eyes and lolling gray tongues—with such crisp articulation that you almost believed they saw something you didn't. H. G. Wells must have been one of them, and his book a seizure of belief.

“Hey, look at that! You like a good reading book, too, hon,” Pop said.

I could take no more of his attempts to coax Umma out of her gloom, so I climbed into the padded loft above the master bedroom with Mr. Wells and his moon bugs. Better company. A skylight showed the cool blue of late morning. A gull shot past, giving the loft the sensation of flight. Below I heard Nguyen say good-bye. Faron joined me in the loft, and pretty soon the snoring was general across our pretty new home.

Noon came and the great Peeping Tom of the sun crawled into view. While the rest of my family slept, I lost myself in the old plastic dome of the skylight, in its network of tiny fractures brightened by the sun. As a boy, I looked everywhere for patterns. Patterns held the world together or did the opposite.

Our siesta was interrupted too soon by Terry Nguyen's three-finger knock. Lunchtime. Under a sickly black oak he showed us a picnic table laid with cold cuts, cheese singles, sacks of snowy white bread, a tub of macaroni salad, and iced tea in pitchers. Beers floated in a styrofoam cooler. If we were human sacrifices, Terry intended to fatten us up like calves.

We weren't the only livestock invited to lunch. Butt to butt on the opposite bench sat a family that looked almost as shitted-out as the Van Zandts.

Terry started the introductions with Mae Reade. She was my own mother's age, but where Umma's hardness radiated heat, Mae appeared to be frozen solid. She smiled with greater conviction on one side of her face than the other. Her chin showed a bruise, but so did her knuckles. She lavished mayo on a disk of boiled ham, not rising to shake Pop's extended hand.

Bill Reade was her husband. He wore sunglasses and a straw hat and sat upright like the decorated soldier he had once been. There was no kindly feature on his face. He seemed like a man who delivered bad news for a living, went door-to-door with no other intention than to crush your dreams. I disliked him on sight.

The girl who sat between them, on the other hand, was someone I could look at forever. Not that she was overly pretty. One of her ears was tattooed green, which is how I learned that the Reades hailed from Canaday. Her hair had been buzzed close to her scalp some days before and had grown back in oddly spaced whorls like there was no consensus about the way forward. I wanted to gather those knots between my fingers and comb that mangled head with my hand.

I do not know what the girl thought about me. She folded a slice of bread and bit a hole in the middle. Then she unfolded it and glared at us through the hole. Faron stared back at her, and I felt for the first time the pinch of fraternal envy. I know it might be hard to believe, but I rarely envied my brother. I was content to take cover behind him for the rest of my life.

“What's her name?” he asked.

“Who?” said Nguyen. He was dishing out macaroni salad.

“That one there.”

“How insensitive of me,” said Terry. “Meet the Reades' daughter, Sylvia.”

At Pop's urging I tried to make conversation. I cannot recall the first thing I ever said to Sylvia Reade. I only know that it took me a long time to say it. When I was finished she looked at me and said, “Are you going to talk like that the whole time?”

She winged the slice of bread into the bushes and stalked back inside her trailer. To my father Bill Reade said something unkind about the temperament of daughters. He winked at me. Umma stared into the cooler.

It was just as well Sylvia had left the picnic. I was feeling the initial stages of the shits. Even as I sat down to those rich boiled meats, my tubes went knotty. I mean no offense to the food. We had not seen such a spread in our whole lives. My discomfort was on account of the contrast. Everything last night's simple family dinner had been, this fancy outdoor luncheon was not: no laughter, no song, no solidarity. Only the flap of the palm fronds and the sound of compulsory chewing. I excused myself to pass the rest of the afternoon in our private toilet.