Future Home of the Living God(79)

Grandma’s eyes slowly open after she’s finished her story, and she goes on talking in her cracked-bark voice. She tells me that she didn’t know when she made those six pies for the Fat Man’s Race that she was pregnant. The father of her baby was the blue man in her dream, and her son was born with strange marks. He came out with bruises on his back and bottom. So dark they looked indigo. Didn’t seem to hurt. The Devil must have kicked this one out, said the medicine lady. But I said, hugging my baby close to me, no. No. Angels must have beat him to find out how much he could endure.

Whatever else, Grandma’s story completely diverts me from the sudden reversals in my own narrative. It also feels like a warning. My father and mother, both loving and lying to me. And Phil, my angel of deception. I need a real angel. A good spirit. At night, again, as I am falling asleep I feel the presence approach again to sit at the end of my mattress. Whether or not it is an illusion, this visitor is so calming, so powerful, that I float easily into a dreamless pure sleep.

*

Eddy hides me in the truck and brings me to the tribal offices. His secretary takes my picture and laminates my new tribal ID. I look happy in my picture. My cheeks are round and full. I am wearing a pair of eyeglasses not my own. My hair is shiny and long. I am a mixture of Sweetie and Glen. That’s me. Mary Potts.

And what sort of being am I, really? First I find that I am my father’s actual child, descended of a line that goes back to Richard the Lion-Hearted. Then I find that my heritage is also bound up in a sinister blue man who impregnated my grandmother in a dream. And you, with Phil as your father, a man who did harm when he tried to do no harm, carry within you the patience of ancestors who worked with stone. Sometimes I think of the grab bag of labels and photos that I rescued from the recycling center, the fascinating collection of printed words and images. Without act or will on my part, I am creating a collage of DNA and dreams, all those words made flesh, and I am doing it even in my sleep.



November 19

A piece of plywood slides out of place behind the boiler, and if a raid starts I can crawl in there, I guess, and disappear. Sweetie has made the entrance undetectable. It is an actual room, newly finished inside. There are no windows, of course, but the walls are clean and freshly painted. Mom and I make peace long enough to agree that we’ll go inside when we’re ready. So that is where you will be born. Underground. Safe in a dug burrow. Or at least that’s what I expect. After you’re born we’ll probably still have to hide you. But things will change. They’ll leave me alone. Sweetie says I’ve got a girl. She overheard Sera and me arguing and heard me talking about parthenogenesis. She thinks it’s hilarious that we imagine we can make our own babies now.

“Immaculate Conception. According to Cedar! That’s the new thing,” she says, “but I still prefer Eddy.”

*

I shouldn’t have promised Eddy to keep this stupid rifle with me, but I can’t put it back in the trunk because he’s locked that. I tuck it down the side of my blow-up mattress, against the wall, loaded but with the safety on. Tired, so tired, I swoon into sleep as often as I can.



November 20

They make their way past the dogs, through the kitchen, the living room, to the bedroom where I am sleeping in piles of Mary’s dead clothes. Some tiny sound, a squeak or cough, wakes me. I hear their stealth. One of the dogs starts barking, but far away, in the field. Maybe they lured the dogs away. I pull more clothing over me and I reach down the wall for the Custer rifle. I draw it up next to me, removing the safety. I whisper to Little Mary, who shifts in her sleep but doesn’t wake. The door opens, light from the hallway spills in. Under the spaghetti of stockings, scarves, shirts, jackets, leggings, my eyes are shaded. I peer out from under the wreckage. She looks straight at me.

It is Mother. Her thick hair is fiercely sprayed, the bangs immobilized. Her dark eyes are sunken in her dough face. Her lipless mouth puckers in sympathetic consternation.

“Are you in there, dear?”

She is wearing a maroon quilted down coat that reaches past her knees. Brown mittens. Rabbit-fur earmuffs. Her eyes dart around the room and she whispers, “Can you believe this shit?”

With a thrill of pride in Mary, I realize that Mother can’t even see me beneath all of these wads of clothing. Now is the time to shoot, if I could shoot, but of course I can’t shoot. Anyway, Mother looks like she’s already been shot. As she takes in the overpowering chaos and layers of developed filth, her mouth opens and shuts. Her face crushes in, distorted, like a softened take-out box.

With an air of sacred awe, Mother backs out of the room. I feel soundless footsteps glide down the hall. I slide the rifle back down along the wall. I’m so disoriented that I immediately decide that I did not see what I did see. I can only think of nestling farther down into my sister’s pile of musty tights and limp dresses. Crawling underneath the chaos. Curling up in the endless yellow afghan. All I want is oblivion. Right after I hear the tiny click of the front door and the dog outside, barking good-bye, I thank my little sister and fall into a dead black sleep.



I am pulled down, down, sucked into this sleep. I wake with a hand clapped over my mouth, Phil’s hand. He drags me up, out of my mattress cave and bundled clothing, keeps his hand over my mouth as he picks up the go bag I always keep beside my bed. He whispers in my ear as he drags me outside—“They’re coming back.” As he puts me in a smoke-smelling car—“Don’t make a sound.” As he coasts down the driveway and starts the motor at the mailbox—“If they found you there, they’d take out everyone. We’re going to the gas station. It’s empty. We’ll sneak in and you can hole up. There’s a van going north this week.”