Pilgrims Upon the Earth Read online

  LIGHT RAIN in the night, then morning cold.

  The gas tank was empty. He stepped out, kicked at loose rock in the driveway, stood and looked at the car, tossed the key ring over the cracked window to the driver’s seat. For a moment he thought of punching the glass or the door panel, and it took all of him to steady his hands already curled to fists and trembling. He rapped knuckles against the back end, at the flap covering the fuel spout, put hands then to his hips and paced. School was five miles.

  He walked in the tall broom grass at one highway shoulder, wet at his shins, gone dead some at the tips. Yellow headlamps broke the hill a quarter mile in front, then dropped, sped the incline and turned road wet gone past him, damped his forehead with rain and brake dust. Other cars hissed at his left shoulder, early blue light smoked on the hoods. He was tired, eyes strung sleep. He drifted a foot in the road. Fast air kicked hard at his shoulders, brimming like an industrial fan, and fell him backward. A red and white box pickup keeled to the other lane and the old man driving blew the horn.

  The high grass bobbed above him. He stayed on his back and kept his legs long in the damp, crossed them at the calves, and after what felt a long while but was not things righted in his head, and he thought to stay some more, but he stood instead and brushed his shoulders and arms, wet spots at the elbows like patches on a dress coat one of the teachers wore.

  Three miles before the front gate the school traffic was quiet and the road bare and dry. He saw a dented spot in the shoulder grass and stopped and leaned over.

  He worked one hand beneath the bird, and then he raised it up and cupped it with both. Splinter grass clung to its back and chest, and it was small, warm, brown and white mottled, a finch, a sparrow, he couldn’t tell. It didn’t look dead; eyes open and wet black, but its head doll limp, small yellow feet gripped an old branch. Maybe, he thought, it was just sleeping; it could wake later and need water, seed before flying. He unzipped his knapsack, moved a notebook over some, put the bird careful on the bottom, and then he sealed the bag and draped it to his right shoulder.

  At lunch a teacher paced rows in the cafeteria, checked to see they ate paper carton milk, meat, block green jelly, and left soon as they finished. Most of the hour they spent in the yard. The school was built in a hollow circle, around a courtyard. At the west end there was an amphitheater, maroon painted steps in cracked jagged lines, grass and daffodil and rank clover pushed through. Three basketball goals lipped the east end, near the gymnasium, chain net rusted beneath the high red rims.

  Terry hunched with the rest of them on the fence near the amphitheater and kept the bag closed and propped at his shins. John Michael Johnson stood beside him. He was fourteen until November, neared six feet, wore eyeglasses handed down from his older brother that made him look a scientist, the lenses square, thick as bottle glass, arm on the left temple fastened by white suture tape. He tore up his first razor before he turned twelve. He grew block sideburns to his jaw. Terry leaned over the knapsack again and checked the zipper. Then he stood up. John Michael kept the newspaper wide and looked over at him and then down at the bag.

  You got something in there? he said.

  Nope.

  Come on.

  Alice Washington and some others on trash detail paced the far end of the steps and carried plastic bags. They bent for soda cans, scrap paper. The principal walked a line above them. Terry shook his head slow.

  I don’t have anything, he said.

  Fine, John Michael said. You just walk up here, like you’ve got a damn pimp cane and a top hat.

  What?

  Nothing. You just go on then. There’s current events I need to know about. I think some old coot saw that lizard thing.

  What?

  The monster that lives in the swamp. Half man, half lizard. Or most lizard and a little man. I can’t remember.

  Like the swamp thing?

  No, not like that. It’s much worse.

  Iguana?

  That’s stupid.

  John Michael went back to the paper and held it up. He was at the front page. He stayed on a picture of Basil Frick, and then he read funeral plans and the names of relatives aloud to a few of them, and then he went on and told the whole thing. Terry thought of a painting, a man clamped wrists and neck at a wooden stock, over him the town crier wearing a curly wig with powder in it, tall red socks, a long red coat and a pirate hat. He’d seen it the year before in the history book. It was from when the British were coming and before they shot the fireworks.

  The afternoon prior Basil sat back straight at a tree in his front yard, held the butt of a single-shot twenty-two with his knees and opened his mouth. The bullet bounced around some inside his head, and it didn’t come out. His father watched television in the back bedroom. He bled for two hours, from nose and eyes and ears, and then he died.

  John Michael held the picture up where they could see; Basil Frick in a suit, hair slicked, mouth turned on a grin.

  One of them said, He looks like the damn devil.

  Another went, Hello, mister lucifer.

  Terry got a cigarette and watched the trash squad some more. Alice Washington worked nearby He saw her help Basil jump the fence, but he wanted to ask her what misstep put her there on detention, anyway He thought to use the word vagrancy in his question. He snapped the filter close to her ankles when he finished. Alice Washington kept at the plastic bag and the ground. He kicked a soda can. It scraped at the asphalt, bounced, and she watched it spin and then rest. She turned up, eyes wet gray. Terry waved. She put a hand up quick and dropped it back. She stooped at the can, foot dented, put it to the bag, bent down to another.

  John Michael folded the paper and held it pressed between arm and ribs. He spoke loud and waved his hands.

  That jackass told me I couldn’t sing in music class. I was in the choir. I sang in church. Old ladies got faint. What’s he singing? Nothing. That’s what I thought.

  It’s a dumb story is what it is, one kid said.

  He was named Richard Jenkins. They caught him jerking it at the town pool the summer before. He had a buzz cut, a large mole on his earlobe shaped like the state of Georgia.

  John Michael turned at him quick, tilted his face and closed one eye when he spoke.

  What? he said.

  I said it’s dumb and you heard me say it, Richard Jenkins said.

  John Michael raised his voice and stuck his finger out.

  You just go on before I fix you up.

  He swung his free arm to one side, pointed across the yard at some kids huddled far off.

  I said go on.

  Richard Jenkins stayed, crossed his arms at his chest, and flared his nostrils wide. John Michael shook his head slow.

  That’s twice I told you go on, he said.

  Richard Jenkins kept his eyes straight and did not turn, even then.

  You won’t be helped will you? John Michael said.

  He held the newspaper to Terry

  Take this, he said.

  Terry folded the bundle under his arm the same as John Michael, like a headlock. John Michael spit to one side and took off his glasses, folded the arms and set them at his chest pocket; without them, his face looked a barbell; he stepped close to Richard Jenkins, chin level to his forehead. The yard was quiet, air heavy, like before thunder.

  AT THE house he got two sheets of newspaper from the bin and wrapped the bird and laid it back into the knapsack. He pulled the zipper, patted the lump through the canvas. He tried to think of a name but couldn’t; something, maybe, about how fast birds fly, how blue their wings, how red their throats. The rooms were empty and still. Most days his father’s job held him past dark. The two of them lived in a small wood frame near the baseball field and close to the brown and yellow painted water tower shaped a thimble. There was a red brick fireplace at the fore room, and a short couch and a chair, and a small kitchen with an electric stove, linoleum and tack board cabinets, a window above the sink. The drive was a tire worn dirt
circle out front. The neighbor planted three rows of firs in the east side lot to sell at Christmas.

  Before the firs, the lot was scrub and dwarf pine, trunks blacked soot, and charcoal. Terry put his hands against them, stained his fingers ash; sometimes then he drew swipes around his eyes and at his forehead. He looked himself in the mirror, made faces, angry and monstrous as he could figure, and sometimes too he made a low growl like he thought a wolf did. The art teacher liked the homework drawings he made with hunks from the trees turned charcoal; house, dog, horse. He thought of his father standing at the kitchen window near first light and looking out, fingers gripped hard over the sink lip, face night black, then lit yellow from a small car burned cinder in the tree lot. The ones inside were from the high school, older than Terry by seven years, two boys, the paper said later, dead already, by shotgun, before the car melted, because they messed too long with some dealers from another county and got sticky hands.

  Beside the big window in the last house his father rented he saw a dead redbird turned upside down, feet stuck long and old yellow. There wasn’t furniture yet. His father pushed the door and led him to the living room, the knee high windowsill, four pane glass taller than his father. They stood there looking out to the yard. Next to his foot some light came through hard and heated the carpet and at first he thought to go and lie down in it but then he saw the bird there and the dust come up around it in the light beam. He pointed it, his father bent down and gathered it up, held it in one hand, but lightly, careful, like he held thin paper. He got the shovel from the washroom, and he told Terry maybe it was bad luck, a dead bird in the house, but he was not sure. Terry asked him how it got there, how it died, and he said he didn’t know. Probably it came through the chimney or a cracked door, made for the window, thinking it not a window, but the sky, broke its neck sudden and in such a way to drop it mid thought, there on the green velvet carpet. Outside, Terry smoothed the dirt over the bird once his father dug the hole and placed it there, and let the shovel drop handle long in the yard. His father said maybe they should say a prayer or something.

  You know any? he said.

  Just one for food, Terry said.

  The ring finger on John Michael’s left hand was jammed straight to the top knuckle. He curled the other ones down and winced. They sat on his front stoop and watched some cars pass on the street.

  That hurt? Terry said.

  I’m just making a face. I hit him wrong is all. Cheekbones break hands is what. I was going for his nose.

  You dropped him.

  John Michael turned a red plastic butane lighter upside down and tilted it to heat the metal. He had three fresh burns at his forearm, down near the wrist.

  Turn it all the way that lighter blows up, John Michael said.

  He knew this caution from his brother, fifteen years elder, a seller of vacuums that used water to get at the dirt.

  The fumes don’t have anywhere to go.

  He tilted the flame close.

  Pow.

  He let it down and put the lighter on the step.

  I’m telling you it’s gone hurt, John Michael said.

  I can stand it, Terry said.

  He wasn’t sure if he could or not, but he wanted to see. Terry put the lighter on his forearm and held it.

  I wonder if Basil had a dog, John Michael said.

  Terry kept the lighter pressed down, mashed his teeth and pinched his eyes hard at the burn. His open hand shook.

  He probably had a fucking cat, John Michael said. Probably bunches of them.

  Terry opened his mouth wide and yelled, felt an animal, threw the lighter down against the steps.

  Pissing all over things and rubbing their asses on your car. If one ever does, dammit, put an orange on the hood. It doesn’t matter where. A cat’s scared of an orange. Waiting until nobody’s around to see, fucking knocking over vases and shit. A one eared tabby named John Stone hit this Hawaiian statue thing my mom has on the mantel, broke it on the goddamn floor. And I got blamed. Me? That fucking cat. I hope he goes off in the woods and can’t fend himself. He’ll see then. I ever tell you when I saw him sleeping under that bridge?

  John Stone the cat?

  Basil.

  Nah.

  The railroad bridge? It’s high. A hundred feet if it’s anything.

  You never told me.

  I should have.

  THE BURN welled a pink face and throbbed. They stood back from the ticket booth and the front doors at the movie theater. Terry clenched a fist, yanked his sleeve down from the elbow. John Michael paced the curb, and took quick drags from a long cigarette. Neither one had money. They waited for a big enough group to get in with.

  Terry passed the town’s one theater often walking the town, sometimes wanted bad to go inside and watch, but he did not. Last fall he got two books of pale green grocery store stamps from his father to cash in for a ticket, but the clerk shook his head and passed them back under the window; he spoke to a long necked microphone, told him the Magic Hat Cinema of Issaqueena, South Carolina, as a strict rule, did not accept grocery stamps as legal movie tender.

  He saw Alice Washington in the floodlight, close to the front of the line, by herself. She took off a pair of black plastic eyeglasses and fogged breath on the lenses and wiped them with the bottom of her shirt. She counted change and put it down to the cashier tray John Michael went on telling him about the movie.

  They build a time machine. Out of a car. A fucking DeLorean.

  What’s a DeLorean?

  The fastest car in the world. It has doors that open up over the ceiling, like wings.

  Terry picked up two torn stubs on the ground near the trash and gave one to him. A few minutes they got back of four old people, kept their faces down and went inside. He thought one usher might be wise to them. They stopped, though, for a moment at the glass counter with the candy The machine on wheels, what looked a wheelbarrow to him, gurgled popcorn like a burst water main. Terry pulled John Michael at the jacket sleeve.

  Come on, he said.

  The candy here is amazing, John Michael said. They have all of it here. All of it. Fucking Sno-Caps.

  She was two rows from the front. They sat a few back from her and put their feet on the chairs. John Michael got two soda cans from his jacket. Terry yanked the pull tab and tilted it. He drank half, and then he looked at Alice Washington. He looked at her some more, the back of her head, bare neck when she twisted her hair a cord, pulled it to one side and stuffed it past the neckline on her sweater. He spoke but didn’t turn.

  You know her? he said.

  Who?

  That girl two rows ahead.

  John Michael crunched his eyes and poked his neck forward some, got a look at her and then settled back to the seat.

  She’s retarded, I think, he said.

  Like the ones in the gym.

  Not like those. But retarded, yes.

  That’s not right.

  It is.

  I don’t believe you.

  She ate like a hundred bobby pins once too. They had to pump her stomach. One Easter her class made these rabbits from construction paper, like baskets, I guess, and they put cotton balls on the outside, like the rabbit fur, you know, and that green plastic grass inside of it, and then all this candy, jellybeans, eggs, those puffy colored baby chickens, and by the end of the movie they watch she’s got cotton and glue on her face, like some of that grass hanging out of her mouth. She ate all the candy, then the cotton, then the grass, then the construction paper. They had to pump her stomach that time as well, but that was before the bobby pins.

  The lights dimmed. The red side curtains began to part. Terry took short pecks from the can, sipped it as he would a hot drink; white burns on the dark screen, crackle of film run through the hobbling projector.

  He got up and went down beside her and held out the can. She looked at him and squinted her eyes. She shook her head, turned to the screen, and the curtain went on its high move and the dim l
ights. He wished to put his hand beneath her sweater and touch her bare shoulder, and then he wanted to touch her bottom lip, and then her earlobe. He did not understand these things. He leaned down and put the soda near her feet and left it.

  A scientist knocked over a large sealed metal tub, and it broke open, steamed, green fluid run on the floor. The tub was top secret, controlled by a group of industrialists, and headed for the military Terry waited for the DeLorean. One zombie with padlocks for earrings crawled from the tub and went at chewing the scientist’s brain, and the scientist screamed, bewildered, and another zombie with a purple mohawk ate off his face.

  Goddammit John Michael.

  This isn’t the one. There’s been a mix-up.

  Terry got his feet off the chair and leaned up, forearms at his knees.

  What he thought was, where is that fucking DeLorean? The movie felt an awful, sad vision, a ridiculous thing, and worthless; the world felt less somehow, with a thing such as this movie floating around inside.

  What is this shit, man?

  It’s just a different movie. I read the paper wrong.

  An old man screamed and a group of zombies went eating on him.

  I shouldn’t be here, Terry said.

  His body jumped.

  Gross, John Michael said.

  I have to leave. I can’t watch this.

  He looked at the back of her head two rows up.

  Hang on, John Michael said.

  Nah.

  It was fluid.