Shepard points a bone-like finger to his watch, his face shrunken into a scowl.
David runs back into the room, strips to his underwear, douses himself in deodorant and cologne (the smell of which makes him yearn for home and Lizzy, as she’s the one that picked it out for him) before dressing in a casual outfit and leaving with Shepard by his side.
There’s a cab waiting for them outside the hotel and it takes them a block shy of the bookstore. There’s traffic blocking the way and Shepard hastily pulls David out, choosing to dash between the crowd of people for the remaining block. There’s no line outside because there’s another, larger chain bookstore almost cattycorner which saps a lot of the business.
Shepard disappears to the head of the store while David looks for the back – this is his third time doing a signing in this store and it’s his favorite of all the New York book signing locations. The next one, scheduled for later that day, will be in the larger chain bookstore cattycorner from the one he’s in now, and they always treat him almost like an undesirable since he takes a section away from the store, even though a small crowd tends to form and he brings them revenue. This one, which is only a bit smaller, often delegates an employee to stand by his side, along with Shepard, to bring him anything he requests.
There’s an enlarged poster of his face on a stand – the picture’s over three years old, an extra snapshot taken during the shoot for the back cover of his second book. In an odd moment of displaced anger, David hates the photo. A young store assistant catches sight of David and walks from behind the table they had setup for the signing – with him a cup and a vague, ethereal-sounding greeting, “Hot chocolate and coffee, like last time…though it’s not as cold out, but I remembered that you—”
“Where did you find this stupid picture of me?” David snaps, his voice louder not from the loss of hearing but strictly in anger.
The young assistant – a man whose name David’s long forgotten – stops horrified at the barbed remark. He turns, his eyes rolling over the same picture they had been using the past three years, then reluctantly returns to David, saying something low.
“I can’t hear,” David says loud, rudely gesturing to his ears. There’s a person nearby flipping a copy of Captain Rivet & The Fantastic Ambruister over in her hands but the strident, pronounced words coming from David cause her to look over, concerned. A feeling of loss washes over David as realizes just how inappropriate he’s being. The anger, which arrived with such force, fled in much the same way, leaving him with a hollow mound in the pit of his stomach.
He forces a fake laugh, patting the shoulder of the store employee.
“I’m uh…just messing with you,” David lies. “But I really can’t hear well, just a little out of the right ear. Burst ear drums.”
The store assistant cautiously smiles, handing over the styrofoam cup.
“Thanks,” David says with sincerity, taking the coffee.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Ridley,” the assistant responds, his guard dropping.
Before taking a seat and readying his pen, David asks himself:
What was that about?
NOT-HOME BUT HOME NONETHELESS
“Why aren’t we gonna see yer mom?” Lizzy asks as they drive.
“She wasn’t uh,” Chris takes his eyes off the road to look over at Lizzy, “nice. She wasn’t ‘specially nice.” His eyes return to the main road, where the land is flat and, every quarter-mile a red-clay dirt road branches off into what appears to be an unending thicket of forest on either side.
They pass a small river.
More forest.
Another small river.
“Why wasn’t she nice?” Lizzy finally asks.
“’Cause she was mean instead.”
And that seems to end it.
“So wait…then where are we going in Mississippi?”
Chris had a plan – seven stops between six states – but he had never fully elaborated it to Lizzy. He had asked her to join him and she agreed so vehemently that to further explain each of the stops after Mississippi hadn’t seemed necessary.
Also, the best aspect of this “vacation” could be the mystery of each destination.
He thought that was cool.
“Well, this is the second stop and, technically, it’s Mississippi but – and I totally should’ve prolly told you this before now, I know – but we’re on more of a…” and Chris turns on his turn signal, “…more of a sight-seein’ trip. Yeah. Not so much visitin’ people.” And Chris turns the car onto one of the dirt back roads, following along an embankment until he reaches a sign that says Road Closed.
He parks the car.
“Guess they closed the road, we’re gonna—”
“Where are we?” Lizzy asks, startled at the realization that she might have to walk through desolate back country somewhere around the border of Mississippi and Alabama.
“This is our second stop. Though it’s kinda a ways up. We’ll spray ‘erselves with bug spray.”
Before Lizzy can ask anything further, Chris is out of the car and around back, to the trunk. Lizzy’s eyes go wide as she begrudgingly exits the car. There’s a mist of lingering bug spray and the scent of pine as she rounds the trunk. Chris finishes and signals for Lizzy to close her eyes and mouth before releasing a torrent of spray on her.
“’Squitos are awful this time’a year,” he says.
Finally presented with the opportunity to protest, Lizzy opens her eyes to find the bag with the tent being pulled out of the trunk. Chris slings it onto his back. Then, with a slight hint of reverie, he gently wraps his fingers around the shiny silver handle sticking from out a long, leather sheath: lifting it into the air, he carefully removes the sheath to reveal a glistening machete. He sticks the blade back in the leather sheath and tucks it through his belt, secure against his body.
“Wha—are we camping? Uncle Sandwich said he’d pay for hotels and stuff—no no-no-no-no way, you didn’t say there would be camping,” she begins fast and picks up speed, “it’s way too dirty out here, and creepy, and there’s like a trillion bugs. Disgusting. And snakes. Disgusting snakes and bugs.”
“We have to,” Chris says definitively, stuffing a pair of binoculars, an old, rusty lantern, and a rolled-up newspaper into a duffle bag that already contains two sleeping bags and several pillows. Lizzy stares, flabbergasted at the prospect of “having to” camp. Before she can form the words to protest, Chris tosses the clothes knapsack at her.
“Please carry that.”
Then, after swinging the duffle bag onto his back and tucking two tiny, folded-up beach chairs under his right arm, Chris yanks the cooler out, spins it around, and grabs the handle with his left hand.
“An’ this will be fun, I promise.”
His lips curl in a tight smile, his eyes give a tiny wink, and then he’s off leading the way down a thin, red-dirt path heading further into the forest.
Lizzy stays behind the car, thinking. As Chris shows no signs of slowing on the long, seemingly unending path, she hurries off and joins behind the cooler, the knapsack full of clothes hugged against her chest with both arms.
The neighborhood is rather desolate. The closed “road” they’re on has long been overgrown with weeds; even the narrow path, one that seems to have been well-trodden at some point, now appears neglected, discarded. Down a short embankment on the right, through more forest, there’s an occasional house or remnants of a rusted, forgotten car. The left is nothing but flat land covered in a dense pine forest and impassable thickets of pricker brushes, poison ivy, and man-sized shrubs. They travel about half an hour through terrain that seems to repeat, twenty-five of those minutes with Lizzy complaining:
“These bugs are NOT going away.”
“It’s hot. I’m,” whine, “sweating.”
“Is this whole trip gonna be like this?”
“Why are we here?”
“Bugs suck—ahh!”
“Can we rest?”
; “Why is it so hot?”
“Why are we here?”
“Did you bring the bug spray?”
And on and on.
Chris is so infatuated with something in the distance that he ignores Lizzy completely, and she raises her voice to be sure he hears her. “Why are we here?” becomes her most frequently asked question and it’s the one to break through Chris’ concentration on the forest to the north-east.
“I’m, uh…I was lookin’ for somethin’,” is his dazed answer, then the elaboration, “but, uh, I found it…A friend of mine used to live near here a long—very, very long time ago. Up ahead is where we used to camp. One of my old favorite places.”
Chris stops and stands aside to reveal a sturdy post a little taller than Lizzy. Vertical along the aged, square plank of wood are hunks of dirty fluff and weather-faded fabric, pinned by jagged, rusted nails. The post stands with more than a dozen nails on each side and, past it, the path forks in two directions: to the right continues a landscape mirroring everything they had already passed.
“So, we’re gonna camp not far from here, up through there,” and Chris points to the other path, one leading deep into the forest on the left, where there’s a wall of brush. But his head never turns, nor do his eyes. He’s tilted down, smiling. On the side of the post, a purple stuffed-animal had been nailed to the old wood plank facing the forest and recent enough that the color had yet to fade.
“It’s not home but…a sorta home nonetheless.”
Chris pulls out his machete.
AN ODD REQUEST
The owner of the store makes a brief appearance shortly before the signing has commenced. He says something, leaning close to David’s left ear. Shepard stops him, about to tell him that David’s deaf, when David motions for the owner to speak into his right ear. Shepard smiles as if it’s a joke but, when the owner thanks David for choosing his store for the signing (something David didn’t choose) and David responds in a calm, rehearsed tone, “No problem. I like this place best of all the New York signings,” Shepard’s face drops as if the whole thing had been a sham.
As David lowers his head into the first copy of a book that’s been brought to him, scribbling his name on the inside page, he answers Shepard’s questioning gaze:
“My right is coming back a bit. Started this morning.”
If Shepard responds, David doesn’t hear it; even if he did, the pace by which people arrive to have a copy of Captain Rivet & The Fantastic Ambruister signed by the author grows steadily over the first hour until a line extends almost to the front door. He keeps his head down most of the time unless the person makes a request or asks a question, at which point he’ll look up with a smile and acknowledge them. For the people that don’t say anything, he keeps his head down as they hand over the book, only glancing up with a smile after he’s signed it. In the brief twenty-four seconds people have with David, they tend to make modest requests:
“Sign it to Adelaide, that’s my daughter.”
“Can you make it out to James? That’s—I’m James.”
“My sister is sick, could you add something about her getting well?”
And on, none of which is odd or unexpected, and David obliges everyone.
Some people ask a question, the most frequent of which is:
“What’s this book about?”
David’s answer is quick and routine:
“It’s about five hundred and sixty-eight pages.”
He’s surprised that, more often than not, people just accept this answer; he’s long since stopped answering people that were unfamiliar with the particular work he was signing, as the inside jacket could answer that question better than he could offhand.
And then, just at the tail-end of his commitment to the bookstore, there is an odd request…a person hands over a copy of the book. David accepts the copy and opens the cover to find a crisp hundred dollar bill. He looks up, confused. Staring back at him is an Asian man with a scar from his right ear, along his cheek bone, to just under his right eye; he also has a blonde eyebrow, mismatched by the dark black of his other eyebrow and mop of hair on top of his head. His face is clean shaven and it makes him look young, maybe in his early twenties.
“I have a request,” he says in perfect English, his voice exquisitely tender, “It’s kind of specific. For friend.”
David hears out the request and, against Shepard’s protest, obliges.
SKYLINDS
The humidity is enough that Lizzy can taste it on her parched tongue, a point she makes clear several times during the hour or so Chris spends hacking into the thicket of vines and unrelenting brush. They make it through, finally, to a half-acre clearing. The space is absent trees but abundant on all sides (except the roundish portal Chris hacked with his machete) in twisting vines, thorny bushes, and long, flat patches of some odd, carpet-like green plant. The red dirt is visible only in the lifted patches of anthills.
“Careful…of the fire ants,” Chris warns, leaning against a tree while he catches his breath. He didn’t take a break once, his excitement to find the old camping spot beating back the exhaustion. “Them ants…they’er awful this time of year.”
Now with enough room to maneuver from behind Chris, Lizzy lets out a short, angry grunt with each stomp away from the large anthills. She drops the knapsack of clothes so it lands with a thud and takes a seat – with what sounds like great effort – to glare viciously at the ground, her head low. Time passes and she remains silent except for an occasional frustrated grumble.
Chris disappears for a short period, returning with the cooler, the duffle bag, and the beach chairs.
“Bugs’er startin’ to hide. It’s prolly gonna rain in a bit, should feel damn good,” Chris tells her, clearing out an area for a fire pit. This causes another stress to Lizzy and she huffs again, letting her shoulders fall as if the Earth were going to dissolve in rain and she had to watch and suffer. “Gonna go gather up some wood. If’n it rains, we’er gonna need it dry for later. Stay put unless yer gonna come an’ help…”
Lizzy doesn’t make a sound and avoids looking up at her uncle. He shrugs, pleasant as always, and heads back through the newly cleared portal with the machete in hand. Minutes pass in silence and she lets out a bored groan, now miserable that she’s alone and no longer occupied with the bugs (as they’ve now abandoned her, too) or the heat (as it had begun to subside with the caress of a soft breeze). Her mind wanders and her eyes search the forest for signs of her uncle. Slowly, her gaze lifts. Just from that half-acre patch, she can see an overwhelming sky occupied by one dark, furious cloud overhead and nothing surrounding.
“The ocean’s a brilliant, beautiful creature,” Uncle Sandwich had once told her in a rare fit of passion, “and it’s so powerful and great that there will never be anything we can create like it. It combines, it-it—all water leads to all water. Every ocean, every river valley, everything blends. Everything finds its way around to almost every corner and then finds its way back together again.”
“Like God?” she had asked.
“Um…sure,” he had answered, and she knew he didn’t like to talk about God; neither did Uncle Chris.
After a moment’s pause from Uncle Sandwich’s answer, her father (who had been listening nearby) found a bit of his own passion in the subject and answered a bit more:
“You know what, sweetie – you’re absolutely right. It’s exactly like God. Powerful as an ocean and subtle as a creek. And it’s everywhere, for everyone.”
She felt a bit of excitement for the sky like her uncle had for the ocean.
When Chris returns with a pile of wood, Lizzy is staring up and smiling.
“You look better-off, pickle. Whatcha thinkin’ about?”
He drops the pile of sticks and broken trunks next to the half-finished fire pit, his tee-shirt covered in thick dirt.
“Sky,” Lizzy answers, still looking up. “It reminds me of the ocean. Like the clouds are islands and everything down here is upsi
de-down.”
Chris unrolls the tarp that had been around the tent, laying it over a flat spot some ten feet from the fire-pit. He sets the rumpled, worn, dark blue tent on the brighter blue tarp while he nails the ends into the ground; even crumbled, it’s apparent the tent must be a decades-old family heirloom. While Chris goes about setting up the tent, he tells Lizzy a story now that she’s overcome her irritation:
THE KUDZU CRUISADES
You really wanna hear somethin’ backwards and upside-down. There’s this plant here called kudzu. I think it’s from Japan. [points to a three-leaved brush growing up the base of trees and rocks]
It’s like’a fungus.
Japan brought it to some convention in the 1800s and the good ole’ U.S. brought it in to kill…something in the soil ‘er somethin’, I don’t rightly know. But this stuff –this kudzu plant – it killed everything.
Backwards, right?
Why didn’t they just get rid of it when they saw that it was bad?
‘Cause I think it was too late by then. Anyway, another weird thing about this plant ain’t…it ain’t a detail about the plant so much but how I always remembert it, or how I learnt it.
Uncle Chris?
Yeah?
You realize your accent returns more and more since we left?
That I do, pickle. I can’t help it. Sometimes it comes an’ goes dependin’ on who I’m with.
Anyway, so there’s this plant. This kudzu weed, grows in fields. It’s like’a virus and it can get vines and it’s nasty, annoyin’ thin’. And when I learnt about this plant, I was in school – in history class, ac’ually – and we were learnin’ ‘bout the Crusades. This teacher barely mentioned the plant. Old man we called Gnarly cause his last name was Narlson or somethin’ – one thin’ he taught—prolly the only thin’ that evil prick taught me—was ‘bout when he mentioned Kudzu when he was talkin’ the Children’s Crusades. It was completely off topic but it stuck with me.
What was the children’s crusade?
It was these kids a long, long, long time ago that…they thought they could’a done a better job passin’ religion than the older people. They thought that…others had suckt spreadin’ the word of Christ and they’d succeed ‘cause they’er young.