The Very Best of F & SF v1 (55 page)

Nobody knew
which one was the original, and that’s the way it should be. Otherwise it would
ruin the Closure for everybody else. I can tell you ours wasn’t, though. It was
just a feeling I had. That’s why we just shot him and got it over with. I just
couldn’t get real excited about killing something that seemed barely alive,
even though it supposedly had all his feelings and memories. But some people
got into it and attended several executions. They had a kind of network.

Let me see your
list. These two are the ones I would definitely talk to: 112 and 43. And maybe
13.

Is that what
they call us, 112? So I’m just a number again. I thought I was through with
that in the army. I figured we had the real one, the real McCoy, because he was
so hard to kill. We cut him up with a chain saw, a little Homelite. No sir, I
didn’t mind the mess and yes, he hated every minute of it. All twenty some odd
which is how long it took. I would have fed him to my dogs if we hadn’t had to
turn the body in. End of fucking story.

Oh, yeah. Double
the pleasure, double the fun. Triple it, really. The only one I was against was
this one, 61. The crucifixion. I think that sent the wrong message, but the
neighbors loved it.

Drown in the
toilet was big. Poison, fire, hanging, you name it. People got these old books
from the library but that medieval stuff took special equipment. One guy had a
rack built but the neighbors objected to the screaming. I guess there are some
limits, even to Victims’ Rights. Ditto the stake stuff.

I’m sure our mac
wasn’t the real McCoy. You want to know why? He was so quiet and sad. He just
closed his eyes and died. I’m sure the real one would have been harder to kill.
My mac wasn’t innocent, but he wasn’t guilty either. Even though he looked like
a thirty-year-old man he was only eighteen months old, and that sort of showed.

I killed him
just to even things out. Not revenge, just Closure. After spending all the
money on the court case and the settlement, not to mention the cloning and all,
the deliveries, it would have been wasteful not to do it, don’t you think?

I’ve heard that
surviving thing but it’s just a rumor. Like Elvis. There were lots of rumors.
They say one family tried to pardon their mac and send him to Canada or
somewhere. I don’t think so!

You might try
this one, 43. They used to brag that they had the real one. I don’t mind
telling you I resented that and still do, since we were supposed to all share
equally in the Closure. But some people have to be number one. It’s over now
anyway. What law firm did you say you worked for?

I could tell he
was the original by the mean look in his eye. He wasn’t quite so mean after a
week in that rat box.

Some people will
always protest and write letters and such. But what about something that was
born to be put to death? How can you protest that?

Closure, that’s
what it was all about. I went on to live my life. I’ve been married again and
divorced already. What college did you say you were from?

The real McCoy?
I think he just kept his mouth shut and died like the rest of them. What’s he
goin’ to say, here I am, and make it worse? And as far as that rumor of him
surviving, you can file it under Elvis.

There was also a
story that somebody switched bodies after a car wreck and sent their mac to
Canada. I wouldn’t put too much stock in that one, either. Folks around here
don’t even think about Canada. Forgiveness either.

We used that
state kit, the Kevorkian thing. I heard about twenty families did. We just sat
him down and May pushed the plunger. Like flushing a toilet. May and myself—she’s
gone now, God bless her—we were interested in Closure, not revenge.

This one, 13,
told me one time he thought he had the real McCoy, but it was wishful thinking,
if you ask me. I don’t think you could tell the real one. I don’t think you
should want to even if you could.

I’m afraid you
can’t ask him about it, because they were all killed in a fire, the whole
family. It was just a day before the ceremony they had planned, which was some
sort of slow thing with wires. There was a gas leak or something. They were all
killed and their mac was destroyed in the explosion. Fire and explosion. What
insurance company did you say you worked for?

It was—have you
got a map? oooh, that’s a nice one—right here. On the corner of Oak and
Increase, only a half a mile from the site of the original explosion,
ironically. The house is gone now.

See that new
strip mall? That Dollar Store’s where the house stood. The family that lived in
it was one of the ones that lost a loved one in the Oklahoma City bombing. They
got one of the macs as part of the Victims’ Rights Closure Settlement, but
unfortunately tragedy struck them again before they got to get Closure. Funny
how the Lord works in mysterious ways.

No, none of them
are left. There was a homeless guy who used to hang around but the police ran
him off. Beard like yours. Might have been a friend of the family, some crazy
cousin, who knows. So much tragedy they had. Now he lives in the back of the
mall in a dumpster.

There. That
yellow thing. It never gets emptied. I don’t know why the city doesn’t remove
it but it’s been there for almost five years just like that.

I wouldn’t go
over there. People don’t fool with him. He doesn’t bother anybody, but, you
know.

Suit yourself.
If you knock on it he’ll come out, figuring you’ve got some food for him or
something. Kids do it for meanness sometimes. But stand back, there is a smell.

“Daddy?”

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Jeff Ford says he does most of his
writing late at night, when everyone is asleep. “Those dark, quiet hours,” he
says, “are a beautiful time of the day. When I get too tired to stay awake, I
hear voices in my ears, and very often they speak pieces of stories to me.
Sometimes I remember them and write them down. When I write, I have the feeling
that the stories and novels already exist somewhere in my head, or out there
somewhere in another dimension, and the process of writing them is the process
of merely discovering them.” This writing process helps explain why so many of
Jeff Ford’s stories have the texture and potency of a vivid dream.

I
learned about
creation from Mrs. Grimm, in the
basement of her house around the corner from ours. The room was dimly lit by a
stained-glass lamp positioned above the pool table. There was also a bar in the
corner, behind which hung an electric sign that read
Rheingold
and held a can
that endlessly poured golden beer into a pilsner glass that never seemed to
overflow. That brew was liquid light, bright bubbles never ceasing to rise.

“Who made you?”
she would ask, consulting that little book with the pastel-colored depictions
of agony in hell and the angel-strewn clouds of heaven. She had the nose of a
witch, one continuous eyebrow, and teacup-shiny skin—even the wrinkles seemed
capable of cracking. Her smile was merely the absence of a frown, but she made
candy apples for us at Halloween and marshmallow bricks in the shapes of wise
men at Christmas. I often wondered how she had come to know so much about God,
and pictured saints with halos and cassocks playing pool and drinking beer in
her basement at night.

We kids would
page through our own copies of the catechism book to find the appropriate
response, but before anyone else could answer, Amy Lash would already be
saying, “God made me.”

Then Richard
Antonelli would get up and jump around, making fart noises through his mouth,
and Mrs. Grimm would shake her head and tell him God was watching. I never
jumped around, never spoke out of turn, for two reasons, neither of which had
to do with God. One was what my father called his size ten, referring to his
shoe, and the other was that I was too busy watching that sign over the bar,
waiting to see the beer finally spill.

The only time I
was ever distracted from my vigilance was when she told us about the creation
of Adam and Eve. After God had made the world, he made them too, because he had
so much love and not enough places to put it. He made Adam out of clay and blew
life into him, and once he came to life, God made him sleep and then stole a
rib and made the woman. After the illustration of a naked couple consumed in
flame, being bitten by black snakes and poked by the fork of a pink demon with horns
and bat wings, the picture for the story of the creation of Adam was my
favorite. A bearded God in flowing robes leaned over a clay man, breathing
blue-gray life into him.

That breath of
life was like a great autumn wind blowing through my imagination, carrying with
it all sorts of questions like pastel leaves that momentarily obscured my view
of the beautiful flow of beer: Was dirt the first thing Adam tasted? Was God’s
beard brushing against his chin the first thing he felt? When he slept, did he
dream of God stealing his rib and did it crack when it came away from him? What
did he make of Eve and the fact that she was the only woman for him to marry?
Was he thankful it wasn’t Amy Lash?

Later on, I
asked my father what he thought about the creation of Adam, and he gave me his
usual response to any questions concerning religion. “Look,” he said, “it’s a
nice story, but when you die you’re food for the worms.” One time my mother
made him take me to church when she was sick, and he sat in the front row, directly
in front of the priest. While everyone else was genuflecting and standing and
singing, he just sat there staring, his arms folded and one leg crossed over
the other. When they rang the little bell and everyone beat their chest, he
laughed out loud.

No matter what I
had learned in catechism about God and hell and the ten commandments, my father
was hard to ignore. He worked two jobs, his muscles were huge, and once, when
the neighbors’ Doberman, big as a pony, went crazy and attacked a girl walking her
poodle down our street, I saw him run outside with a baseball bat, grab the
girl in one arm and then beat the dog to death as it tried to go for his
throat. Throughout all of this he never lost the cigarette in the corner of his
mouth and only put it out in order to hug the girl and quiet her crying.

“Food for the
worms,” I thought and took that thought along with a brown paper bag of
equipment through the hole in the chain link fence into the woods that lay
behind the school yard. Those woods were deep, and you could travel through
them for miles and miles, never coming out from under the trees or seeing a
backyard. Richard Antonelli hunted squirrels with a BB gun in them, and Bobby
Lenon and his gang went there at night, lit a little fire and drank beer. Once,
while exploring, I discovered a rain-sogged
Playboy,
once, a dead fox. Kids said there was
gold in the creek that wound among the trees and that there was a far-flung
acre that sank down into a deep valley where the deer went to die. For many years
it was rumored that a monkey, escaped from a traveling carnival over in
Brightwaters, lived in the treetops.

It was
mid-summer and the dragonflies buzzed, the squirrels leaped from branch to
branch, frightened sparrows darted away. The sun beamed in through gaps in the
green above, leaving, here and there, shifting puddles of light on the
pine-needle floor. Within one of those patches of light, I practiced creation.
There was no clay, so I used an old log for the body. The arms were long, five-fingered
branches that I positioned jutting out from the torso. The legs were two large
birch saplings with plenty of spring for running and jumping. These I laid
angled to the base of the log.

A large hunk of
bark that had peeled off an oak was the head. On this I laid red mushroom eyes,
curved barnacles of fungus for ears, a dried seed pod for a nose. The mouth was
merely a hole I punched through the bark with my pen knife. Before affixing the
fern hair to the top of the head, I slid beneath the curve of the sheet of bark
those things I thought might help to confer life—a dandelion gone to ghostly
seed, a cardinal’s wing feather, a see-through quartz pebble, a
twenty-five-cent compass. The ferns made a striking hairdo, the weeds, with
their burr-like ends, formed a venerable beard. I gave him a weapon to hunt
with: a long pointed stick that was my exact height.

When I was
finished putting my man together, I stood and looked down upon him. He looked
good. He looked ready to come to life. I went to the brown paper bag and took
out my catechism book. Then kneeling near his right ear, I whispered to him all
of the questions Mrs. Grimm would ever ask. When I got to the one, “What is
Hell?” his left eye rolled off his face, and I had to put it back. I followed
up the last answer with a quick promise never to steal a rib.

Putting the book
back into the bag, I then retrieved a capped, cleaned-out baby-food jar. It had
once held vanilla pudding, my little sister’s favorite, but now it was filled
with breath. I had asked my father to blow into it. Without asking any
questions, he never looked away from the racing form, but took a drag from his
cigarette and blew a long, blue-gray stream of air into it. I capped it quickly
and thanked him. “Don’t say I never gave you anything,” he mumbled as I ran to
my room to look at it beneath a bare light bulb. The spirit swirled within and
then slowly became invisible.

I held the jar
down to the mouth of my man, and when I couldn’t get it any closer, I unscrewed
the lid and carefully poured out every atom of breath. There was nothing to
see, so I held it there a long time and let him drink it in. As I pulled the
jar away, I heard a breeze blowing through the leaves; felt it on the back of
my neck. I stood up quickly and turned around with a keen sense that someone
was watching me. I got scared. When the breeze came again, it chilled me, for
wrapped in it was the quietest whisper ever. I dropped the jar and ran all the
way home.

That night as I
lay in bed, the lights out, my mother sitting next to me, stroking my crewcut
and softly singing, “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” I remembered that I had
left my catechism book in the brown bag next to the body of the man. I
immediately made believe I was asleep so that my mother would leave. Had she stayed,
she would have eventually felt my guilt through the top of my head. When the
door was closed over, I began to toss and turn, thinking of my man lying out
there in the dark woods by himself. I promised God that I would go out there in
the morning, get my book, and take my creation apart. With the first bird song
in the dark of the new day, I fell asleep and dreamed I was in Mrs. Grimm’s
basement with the saints. A beautiful woman saint with a big rose bush thorn
sticking right in the middle of her forehead told me, “Your man’s name is
Cavanaugh.”

“Hey, that’s the
name of the guy who owns the deli in town,” I told her.

“Great head
cheese at that place,” said a saint with a baby lamb under his arm.

Another big
bearded saint used the end of a pool cue to cock back his halo. He leaned over
me and asked, “Why did God make you?”

I reached for my
book but realized I had left it in the woods.

“Come on,” he
said, “that’s one of the easiest ones.”

I looked away at
the bar, stalling for time while I tried to remember the answer, and just then
the glass on the sign overflowed and spilled onto the floor.

The next day, my
man, Cavanaugh, was gone. Not a scrap of him left behind. No sign of the red
feather or the clear pebble. This wasn’t a case of someone having come along
and maliciously scattered him. I searched the entire area. It was a certainty
that he had risen up, taken his spear and the brown paper bag containing my
religious instruction book, and walked off into the heart of the woods.

Standing in the
spot where I had given him life, my mind spiraled with visions of him loping
along on his birch legs, branch fingers pushing aside sticker bushes and low
hanging leaves, his fern hair slicked back by the wind. Through those red
mushroom eyes, he was seeing his first day. I wondered if he was as frightened
to be alive as I was to have made him, or had the breath of my father imbued
him with a grim food-for-the-worms courage? Either way, there was no
dismantling him now—Thou shalt not kill. I felt a grave responsibility and went
in search of him.

I followed the
creek, thinking he would do the same, and traveled deeper and deeper into the
woods. What was I going to say to him, I wondered, when I finally found him and
his simple hole of a mouth formed a question? It wasn’t clear to me why I had
made him, but it had something to do with my father’s idea of death—a slow
rotting underground; a cold dreamless sleep longer than the universe. I passed
the place where I had discovered the dead fox and there picked up Cavanaugh’s
trail—holes poked in the damp ground by the stride of his birch legs. Stopping,
I looked all around through the jumbled stickers and bushes, past the trees,
and detected no movement but for a single leaf silently falling.

I journeyed
beyond the Antonelli brothers’ lean-to temple where they hung their squirrel
skins to dry and brewed sassafras tea. I even circled the pond, passed the tree
whose bark had been stripped in a spiral by lightning, and entered territory I
had never seen before. Cavanaugh seemed to stay always just ahead of me, out of
sight. His snake-hole footprints, bent and broken branches, and that barely
audible and constant whisper on the breeze that trailed in his wake drew me on
into the late afternoon until the woods began to slowly fill with night. Then I
had a thought of home: my mother cooking dinner and my sister playing on a
blanket on the kitchen floor; the Victrola turning out The Ink Spots. I ran
back along my path, and somewhere in my flight I heard a loud cry, not bird nor
animal nor human, but like a thick limb splintering free from an ancient oak.

I ignored the
woods as best I could for the rest of the summer. There was basketball, and
games of guns with all of the children in the neighborhood ranging across
everyone’s backyard, trips to the candy store for comic books, late night
horror movies on Chiller Theatre. I caught a demon jab of hell for having lost
my religious instruction book, and all of my allowance for four weeks went
toward another. Mrs. Grimm told me God knew I had lost it and that it would be
a few weeks before she could get me a replacement. I imagined her addressing an
envelope to heaven. In the meantime, I had to look on with Amy Lash. She’d lean
close to me, pointing out every word that was read aloud, and when Mrs. Grimm
asked me a question, catching me concentrating on the infinite beer, Amy would
whisper the answers without moving her lips and save me. Still, no matter what
happened, I could not completely forget about Cavanaugh. I thought my feeling
of responsibility would wither as the days swept by; instead it grew like a
weed.

On a hot
afternoon at the end of July, I was sitting in my secret hideout, a bower
formed by forsythia bushes in the corner of my backyard, reading the latest
installment of
Nick Fury.
I only closed my eyes to rest them for a moment, but there was
Cavanaugh’s rough-barked face. Now that he was alive, leaves had sprouted all
over his trunk and limbs. He wore a strand of wild blueberries around where his
neck should have been, and his hair ferns had grown and deepened their shade of
green. It wasn’t just a daydream, I tell you. I knew that I was seeing him,
what he was doing, where he was, at that very minute. He held his spear as a
walking stick, and it came to me then that he was, of course, a vegetarian. His
long thin legs bowed slightly, his log of a body shifted, as he cocked back his
curled, wooden parchment of a head and stared with mushroom eyes into a beam of
sunlight slipping through the branches above. Motes of pollen swirled in the
light, chipmunks, squirrels, deer silently gathered, sparrows landed for a
brief moment to nibble at his hair and then were gone. All around him, the
woods looked on in awe as one of its own reckoned the beauty of the sun. What
lungs, what vocal chords, gave birth to it, I’m not sure, but he groaned; a
sound I had witnessed one other time while watching my father asleep, wrapped
in a nightmare.