Hummingbird Salamander(95)

Hellmouth Jack considered me with a kind of regret. “We would’ve made a good team.”

“You mean we’re not a good team now?”

“When I find it. When we find it…” But he trailed off, and he looked lost, confused. Lost some vital thread.

If only his head had dipped lower. If only he had fallen into drunk sleep.

But instead he went into a rage and took my bottle of rum away and stormed out into the rain.

I heard him arguing with himself. I heard the voice of a man who had only the vestiges of a plan left. And that was fraying.

The way the world does that to you.





[98]


At the end of the third day, Jack sat down heavily on the gravel. We were both utterly exhausted. My leg and shoulder burned and ached, and in all ways I wanted the weight of my self lifted from me. The sky above, as I collapsed, had a blue-tinged gray that mocked with that hint of normal. Soon enough, the hail. Soon enough, snow and sleet. It stiffened you. It brought you to a stop. Hands abraded from scrabbling in rubble. Chasing ghosts.

Hellmouth Jack began to weep. Hunched over, knees drawn up, he wept. Uncontrollably. Like a child. Like a breakdown. Like nothing I’d ever seen or wanted to see since leaving home.

“Total fucking waste of time. All of it. Total fucking waste of time.”

“Maybe not. What if you just like to kill people?” Because it had worked so well last time. So he’d stop fucking crying. It got his attention.

“Fuck you.”

“What if you just like playing games? Like some kind of child.”

“Silvina played games, not me,” Hellmouth Jack said. “Silvina was twisted in so many ways.”

His tone had gone flat, his face emotionless. How quickly it happened should have frightened me.

“At least she had a reason,” I said.

“You mean a ‘greater good’?” Lip all twisted up with contempt. “I’m a greater good. I’m a greater good. Me.”

I began to laugh. Laughed like it was the happiest day of my life.

Maybe because Hellmouth Jack was pathetic. Maybe because it was over. I was free, in a way. I had lost everything. Bet it all on nothing. I had nothing. But that was okay.

He didn’t like my laugh. He beat me for it. He beat me hard and said not a word while doing it. But I kept laughing. I’d been through it all before with Shot. What did I care from beatings.

As he beat me senseless, at least one of us had begun to understand that history would wash over us indiscriminate, like the gray-green, the green-gray dawns and dusks. That so little would matter. That my laughter was, unknown to me, for the future.

In the early morning, I regained consciousness. Hellmouth Jack was gone from the mountainside, as if he had never existed. The rope on my wrists magically gone, too. As if I’d made him up to goad me forward.

Except he’d left me a pack of cigarettes. For which I was thankful, in the end. Sitting there waiting for the rain. Waiting for the next thing.

I never saw him again.





[99]


I wrote letters back to my mother for a few years. This was before I had the job as a security analyst. My college years were hit or miss academically. I drank a lot and thought it didn’t matter because I’d built up so much muscle mass. If I’m honest, I dropped out of bodybuilding competitions later because I wasn’t disciplined enough. As much as anything else.

The dread of those envelopes from her. How they smelled of her hand lotion. A soft, gentle lilac. While the contents were a kind of violence. I’d be in the dorm, on my bed, just staring at the latest one, while my roommate chattered on about how much she hated classes. But I’d always open the letter. Receive whatever lurked there. Whatever beast. Along with news of Ned.

Such detailed storytelling: that I was a cocaine addict in a specific neighborhood or a failure as a fisherman or had jumped off a cliff on an island she’d always wanted to visit. Kidnapped or murdered or worked as a custodian in a shopping mall. Lived at home, on the streets, in a halfway home, in the basement we didn’t have.

Most of the time, I was older in these scenarios. Sometimes as old as Mom. Sometimes I had the same symptoms she did and was ancient. It frayed my nerves. But I had to read them to find Ned again and to push back, to provide the antidote particular to her delusion. It helped me sleep.

When I replied, I made up my own stories. About how I had straight A’s. Or, for a while, about how I knew I wanted to become a doctor, because Mom thought doctors were highest in the hierarchy of life. Then I began to roam into the future. Sent her letters about my life as a doctor. The illnesses I cured. The day-to-day of the practice. Or maybe I wasn’t a doctor, but a lawyer. Sometimes I played the stock market. Professional gambler. Professional bodybuilder.

In one letter, I was old and gray and I had grandchildren. Many, many grandchildren. And I was writing to my mother after her death, to thank her for raising me right. For always supporting me. For having my back. For knowing what was good for me. For not inflicting harm.

I never sent that one. I wish I had. Don’t know if she got even one of my letters. Or if she’d have read them if she did.

As I fled the mountain, I thought about our wounded correspondence. Wondered what my mother might have thought of my letters. If she would have understood why she should be proud, no matter what was true. And I wished, in such a desperate way, that she was there to tell me what to do next.