Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

He tells me. He tells the big stupid boy all about it, and it’s quite a good joke at that. Everyone was in on it except the big boy. Oral, of course, isn’t making complete sense, Oral isn’t telling the joke in an absolutely clear way. He mixes up the sequence a bit. But even a big stupid boy can figure it out, even I can put it together. The way I put it together, my father fathered two of us, so to speak. Maybe even the same night, for all I can tell from Oral’s gibberish. Maybe the same night seventeen years ago he conceived a child with Alice, the way I put it together. At any rate he left the bed of his wife not having had nearly enough of a woman, and lit out for the Indian huts where he left his seed in Gayla as well; both women became pregnant. Both women carried their child in them within a mile of each other. For a while my father must have thought the joke was on him. Over and over he tried to send the Indian away, over and over she returned to the huts. Alice regarded Gayla’s pregnancy as a sort of dreadful coincidence, maybe she thought the joke was on her. She held steadfast against acknowledging the truth of the matter even as anyone else could and did. Oral’s struggling now to explain it, he’s squirming in the balance of my wrath and curiosity. The way I put it together, both women gave birth within a mile and six hours of each other, with an orderly and almost precise clockwork that might have been the orderly and precise Nineteenth Century having one last good joke on the Twentieth. Alice’s labor was tortured, her child dead. “Come on now Oral,” I’m saying, “come on. I just know this is where it gets good.” Oral spits and slobbers. Alice lies unconscious struggling for life. My father hits on the masterstroke by which he solves the problem of his bastard quarter-Indian child who’s been born on this very same day and doing it in a fashion practically befitting a white man. And it’s damn shrewd of my father at that. For such an unstable man, I mean. For such an unstable man he somehow figured that the Indian woman who kept coming back every time he sent her away would let him take the child and never say a word. He somehow figured that if the wife he cheated lived long enough she would accept the child in awful silent suspicion never voicing the slightest question that wanted no answer. I don’t know how he figured it, to be honest. So my father rides to the Indian huts and takes Gayla’s son, and returns with the baby to the ranch and places it in the crib where another child has died only hours before. “Who would have figured it, Oral?” I say to him there in the dark of the hut with the sound of my mother sobbing at my side. “But you’re absolutely right, it’s a fine joke.” He crumples to the floor like Henry did, though life still moans from him.

The Indian woman has stopped sobbing but still holds her face in her hands. Part of me still wants to hit her, I want to make her tell me why she let him take me from her. The idea I hate most is that she might have actually thought it was better for me, to live in a white and blue, sound and certain house, in a room with nine windows. She might have thought it. I take the blanket from the bed and put it around her. “I’ll be back,” I tell her.

T.O.T.B.C.—4

I TELL IT TO her but maybe she doesn’t hear me. I’m already halfway out the door, crossing the outskirts of the ranch with the moon white and huge above the blue hills. I’m driving the bigness of me across the stables toward the house in big strides, I’m not thinking at all. I’m not calculating anything, I’m just doing. They’re sleeping in the house, they don’t have any idea what’s coming for them.

A big surprise, that’s what.

I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn’t an act of fury, fury isn’t part of it anymore. It’s more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation. I come into the kitchen and Minnie comes running in from the room off to the side where she sleeps. Even in the dark she takes one look at me and knows. The terror comes from her like a blast from a furnace. Even in the dim light of the moon I can see the whiteness of terror’s blast.

“It’s Minnie,” I laugh, “it’s Minnie from Old Virginie.”

She dashes back into the house. I let her go, I can’t be bothered with her. She’s starting to yell through the silence of the house but it doesn’t matter. It’s only fair actually, it gives them a chance.

Alice is no longer in the living room chair wrapped in a comforter. By now she’s retired upstairs. That’s where I’m headed. At the top is my father, stumbling out of his bedroom. He’s in the hall when I get to the top of the stairs. His tyranny doesn’t allow him really to understand what’s happening at this moment. He thinks it’s something he can take care of with a rifle, or with a beating in the barn with the horses. “What the hell is this, in the middle of the night?” he says to me.

“Hello father,” I say to him. I’m all the way up to him before he has the sense to step backward. I catch him as he momentarily loses his footing. It takes only part of my strength to lift him from his place and throw him against the wall. It’s a fucking nuisance that he doesn’t wise up, I have to keep throwing him against walls. It’s just absolutely necessary that he understands this, I can’t feel good about it otherwise. Making him angry is useless to me and I have to keep throwing him against walls until the anger goes away. When the anger goes away he’ll finally start to fear for something and when he finally starts to fear for something then he’ll finally start to fear for everything, and then I can feel good about it. Alice is screaming in the bedroom doorway.

My father and I are in my bedroom doorway and I toss him into the middle of the room. I’m even working up a sweat at this point. “I got the joke,” I say to him. It’s useless. I don’t think I’m going to make him fear for everything no matter how long or hard I try. Annoyed, I throw him one more time through the first of the nine windows, throw him out into the night and all the way to 1917. I have to be satisfied with the sound of his body hitting part of the roof below my window, the sound of its bounce as he tumbles onto the ground. It’s hard to make out in the dark if he’s alive. I have to settle for the odds that his back is broken, maybe in many places.

Alice is still screaming in her bedroom doorway which is between my father’s bedroom and my own. Downstairs Minnie sounds hysterical. I go into the hall and now it’s Alice I pick up and throw. She hits the wall pretty hard, her tight little purple curls all undone now. “I got the joke now,” I tell her. “I got the joke, and isn’t this the way I was supposed to act sooner or later? Sooner or later I was going to be too big to be anything but monstrous.” Her whimper at the base of the wall is irritating, and her face is all snot and blood. “When you took me and named me, was it meant to be your blow, against all of us? Did you think you were letting yourself in on the joke with a love that wasn’t love and a trust that wasn’t trust? Here’s your monster.” I pick her up gently this time, she screams at the touch. I set her on her bed. “Oral and Henry took me to fuck my own mother tonight,” I say to her, “but the ones who wound up fucked were them. I killed Henry, mother.” I’m still used to calling her that. She screams again when I tell her this and then starts wailing uncontrollably because she knows I’m not lying about it. “I killed him,” I tell her, “and I’m sorry he’s not alive so I can kill him again.” Now I pick her up and put her over my shoulder and take her down the stairs; she’s almost in shock now. Minnie’s back in the kitchen wringing her hands; when she sees me with Alice on my back she flings herself out the back door and I can see her running through the moonlight. I drop Alice on the ground outside not far from where my father writhes on his back. I go back in the house and it takes me ten minutes to break up some furniture and build a good pile in the middle of the living room. I hunt up some heating oil from the side room where Minnie sleeps and some of the gasoline my father uses in his motorcar. I pour it all around the house until there’s nothing left to pour.