Youngins

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The bouquet wilted on the table, swimming in slime, weeks since initially filled. Next to it coffee rings, permanent, long since through the varnish and taken ahold of the grain itself. The table had been acquired secondhand, so they said, but realistically they must’ve been the eighth, maybe ninth family in whose home it had found its way; a table picked to suggest a prosperity, a change in fortune. A twenty-day delusion.

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The handroll fumed dangling from Bill’s lip and the felines cried for food. His finger roamed the stains, and he wondered if it was them or the last ones who’d left them there. He didn’t go for that morning mud anymore. No bean water for me, though a brown liquid as the sun just showed was still needed. The babies woke them these days; long since past the point of personal procreation, this provided equal parts elation and enervation: a pound cake of pain. 

 

His teeth still swam in their glass, and his shirt was a tatter, and it had begun to get cold, and he knew they and everyone else were going to need wood—but he was as stiff as the trees, and he knew sleep didn’t come easy, but damn, he sure wished it did.

 

The first one they might’ve been happy to take—he didn’t know anymore—but the second may as well have been left in a basket on the stoop, placed there by some terrifying bird, a burden from a power unknown; at least then they could imagine God having some plan. But Doris came in screeching, and he could see how she was and where she’d been, and when he and Marge had looked down at the bundle she’d said something about Jesus, but he didn’t want to hear it—'cause they both knew sin had played a part.

 

The world made the wishes on the dandelions, shedding all their fluff. A blemishless sky above, sun like a child had drawn it, and he—handsome in his own way, a way that she got angry when others didn’t see—sat on the bed of his truck as she frolicked, thinking about how this was like something out of a story, or maybe a movie: one of those ones where someone like Hilary Duff or Miley Cyrus became a farm girl and met the love of her life. He was younger, but he was so beyond his years. 

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His father had seen that in him when he was little: a seriousness about the eye. It might’ve been there the day he was born, but it was definitely there the first time he’d gone into a stadium, the popcorn pebbling the floor and the roars of the free on a day they should’ve been at work filling their every pore. He didn’t get overwhelmed. As a baby he barely cried. The doctors weren’t sure if he was even alive. But he saw recognition, he saw animation. That was his gift: seeing things. He spotted things miles away with those good eyes, eyes his mother said only came because she asked for them, being the granddaughter of a blind. Enemies in ruins, waiting for them to walk out into the open; black smoke rising far off in the distance. The smell of skin and gun powder and shit everywhere. It didn’t compute that it ever smelled like anything else.

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She pulled the blanket over them right there in the bed, and thinking of it later, was sure that’s where it’d been made. He was happy at first, telling Doris that this was always something he’d wanted—but even then, he knew it wasn’t something he wanted like this. She watched him retreat into himself. He’d always hankered for a boost, but the pick-ups became biweekly instead of monthly, and from there even more. And what? Was she going to be denied the excitement just because she was with a passenger? That didn’t feel fair. And he cried about the risks, but she told him if risk was something he really cared about, then maybe he’d start jacketing up more whenever he wanted in some little tart. 

 

She watched her daughter crumple onto the floor. That was two daughters now. She’d had hopes for Doris, telling everyone how bright she was and how eager she was to pull them out of the hole which life had dug. Kayleigh had already shown a propensity for disturbance, loud in volume as a child and loud in action as a teen. She detested her mother. She was indifferent to her father. She hated her school, and she hated the county, and finding Ryan in all that noise she still believed to be a godsend. They were twelve when they met and they were twenty-three when they split, but those eleven years still made her feel more alive than anything that came after. 

 

Her father had called when Doris came with the bundle of joy, and called again when Doris had disappeared in the night. He asked if she’d reached out to her and she thought, “What kind of

stupid question is that?” but said, “No pops, we don’t really talk.”

 

She’d always hated that her mother had seen Doris as some sort of golden child. Doris was an idiot. Doris would shake her cooze at a lamppost if she thought it wanted her. And that’s what they thought of her, because they’d found her and Ryan with hands in waistbands when they were thirteen. She was a one-man gal (now two) and if they couldn’t see the dedication with which she went at things, then they didn’t deserve to reap the benefits of her work. 

 

They’d hardly spoken to her leading up to the move. Ryan had disappeared a year prior, and after a few of them being apart, she couldn’t stand to look at the world they’d traversed together—so she’d decided to make her way into the heartland to find somewhere flat and pliable to call her own. She’d met Dennis on the internet and he’d flown out a few times, and though she didn’t feel what she’d felt before, she knew that this something different could only be good. She decided to let everyone know on Christmas Day. Every other thing on Christmas was a spoonful of sugar. This medicine would barely register.

 

Mother had exploded. Mascara dribbled down her face, and she began on a tirade whose main point was ingratitude.

 

“Calm down Marge!” father had roared, but there wasn’t any stopping her.

 

Doris hadn’t shown that morning, then called around lunch, letting everyone know that she was actually going to spend lunch with whatever the beau du jour’s name was. She didn’t remember. That had placed mother in the wrong headspace, and she’d already mentioned news, so after grace had been said there was no escaping dropping Fat Man too.

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She’d retreated the scene into the serenity of the cold afternoon air and found Benny, the youngest, sitting on the swing alone, herb in pipe, already checked out from the festivities. 

 

No one had noticed him stepping away. No one noticed much of anything he did. It had been true growing up, and it was doubly true now that there were two new youngins. He’d been outside when Doris left. An orange pick-up had pulled in and some greasy haired poser, some city slicker playing at poor stepped out and asked him if he knew where Doris was. Lots of them took him for stupid—spoke slowly and overenunciated just to make sure he could follow—so he played the part and looked at him blankly without so much as a word in return. His gaze didn’t move and so he burned his fingers when the cigarette ran down to the filter and he dropped it with a yelp, only adding to the assumption. Doris didn’t look at him when she left. He wondered if that was ‘cause it’d make her feel guiltier than she probably already did, or if she just didn’t care.

 

The children were like roosters, and he wasn’t able to sleep past sunup anymore these days. He’d emerge bleary-eyed and irritable into a Xeroxed morning—the same morning practically—somehow become ’93 Murray through no fault of his own, or at least that’s how he liked to see it. It wasn’t like the days at home were very different (sans youngins) back in Forsyth, but for all its faults it was still civilization. There were restaurants that didn’t just serve barbecue and there were bookstores and GameStops and movie theaters and big box retailers and even if they were bored, they were bored doing things. He didn’t understand boredom before the mountains. 

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In the mountains there were two fast food chains, a lot of gas stations, places to buy farming equipment, and a handful of stores whose employees had always been there—as if the space was erected around them—and who were never going to give up their places in them. He’d done his best to make inroads in a few of these places, cozied up with owners and managers—but by the third of fourth times in, the normally benign specters had morphed into revenants, out for his blood, adamant that he never return and never try to oust them from what was theirs ever again. And so, he’d return home, back to crying (old and young), back to money troubles, back to spotty WiFi, back to Cup of Noodles and Spam and Wonder Bread, and he’d wait for Kenji to return.

 

The gravel would sound when he’d reach the top of the street, charitably called a road. The meetings

had become infrequent because of distance, but they still happened, which was all that really mattered. His ears would be ready for the sound, straining past the mews and the barks and the hollers and the clanking to catch the rumble of rubber on rock. Already packed and showered he’d bid farewell faster than they could realize he was going, and they’d get on the highway within minutes: a relief to him, not so much for Kenji.

 

This was what he’d wait for: an escape from the last bits of natural world left in this godforsaken land and into the miasma of world developed. Exhaust and rancid oils filled the sinuses and concrete and steel filled the gaze. Light pollution snuffed the stars, and the trees were scrawny and decorative.

 

Kenji’s work overlooked one of the big malls and he spoke of the herds of vehicles, the migrations of the shoppers, like Ham must’ve described the pilgrimage to the Ark. The wonder of the thing never left. 

 

His apartment was fine and the complex was cookie cutter, but to Benny the place was the only refuge from a life gone wrong. In this oasis he quenched his thirst and found a peace that monks spent decades attempting to reach. The thirty-six to forty-eight hours he would spend there would have to last him several flips of a calendar. But what a thirty-six to forty-eight they were.

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Industrial and commercial architecture, repetitions of the same, passing by en route to eateries so varied—choices that, when presented, overwhelmed him before a place was chosen by Kenji and the others. In the eatery, a view of death, Dia de la, white and red boned figures engaging in merriment, while tequila and mezcal drinks floated from table to table. Ancho aroma. Avocado mountains. They imbibed and gorged, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten so well. The spice tickled his tongue and then coated his throat and the south of the border cerveza slithered down and provided a momentary relief before the pork and beans and rice and tomatoes entered to be broken up once more.

 

Smoke in the parking lot. The car filled up. Then, onto the next.

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The movie house a vision, built before American involvement, before that fateful day in Hawaii. Shining carpet and a wall of flicks he’d either seen or never heard of. The flicker of lights. The churn of an actual reel. They paid premiums for this. A black and white Parisian street and a hoodlum, shot, running like a cartoon, before succumbing to the wound. A beautiful girl looking down on him. Death.

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Return. Late night munching acquired prior to arrival. Caviar and sparkling wine and chicken wings. Continued glutton. No regret. A table set. A map of resources. Rolls and yells and behind them, covering all sixty-five inches, views of worlds they’d never see, described by Attenborough. Hands washed and dirtied again filling the pipe. They stepped into the haze together.

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Sleep. The sun would be back soon. Their stomachs pushing against non-elastic pants leaving them in a discomfort that only morning defecation would fully soothe. Back pats and hugs and promise of starting it back up in just a few hours. They left him in the dark.

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A dream of what he’d left behind. Peepaw was alive and they were at the original house and there were no youngins in sight, but everyone fretted over them. Princess, his first dog, chased the chickens and he felt cold, but the sun shone and the leaves were green as Ireland. Doris and Kayleigh sat quietly, and he could smell mother frying up bacon. He walked through the graveyard of cars, his father’s to-do list, and found the one waiting for him—a Chevy Impala, 1967—and sat in the driver’s seat and caressed the wheel. He would take this car and leave it all behind, he thought. He would see the canyons and the lakes, and he wouldn’t chop wood and he wouldn’t move furniture. He was going to find peace in a place unknown, the way Kayleigh said she had—but he knew she wouldn’t ever find peace, not the way he intended to. He was going to escape them all—even Kenji, his best friend, his only salvation—because that salvation lived alongside resentment, and he didn’t want to carry that guilt of resentment anymore. He was going to be his own man, in his own town, living a life none of them would ever know about.

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His eyes cracked open and the sun peeked over early morning overcast. The apartment was only just visible. He listened for a sound, but he was the only one awake. Even without the noise, he couldn’t sleep.