Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

That was before we all grew up.

What finally killed Mom, it wasn’t her lungs. It was just being sixty-three years old, and nearly a whole state away from all the girls she was in first and second grade with. If she’d had someone to talk with about the old days, I think she’d have maybe made it a few more years.

If she’s sixty-three, that would mean I’m thirty-nine now, yeah. Except she died two years ago already. I’m in my forties, Dino his late thirties.

Mom’s not why Dad coming back matters now, though. Why I’m feeling through it all again.

Why it matters—well.

It’s hard to know where to start, exactly. Each thing has one thing before it, so I can go all the way back to when I was twelve again, easy.

So, after that night, we just kept growing up. High school was high school. The reservation wasn’t the only place with parking lots to fight in. Mom got a desk job, Dino got checked into the first of his facilities and institutions on the tribe’s dime. At some point in there, a girlfriend took me to her uncle’s house while he was enlisted overseas. He had all the regalia, and when he didn’t come back, she smuggled it out to me.

It’s backwards, I know—you’re supposed to start dancing, then accumulate your gear item by item, piece by ceremonial piece—but this is how I did it. The first time I looked at myself in a full-length hotel mirror, I felt lake water was rising in my throat.

You can dance that away, though.

You can lower your head, raise your knees, close your eyes, and the world just goes away.

I’m not a champion, can’t make a living off what I win, but I get around enough, and there’s always odd jobs.

News of Mom passing caught up with me two weeks after the funeral. Evidently, Dino had been taken there. He’d fidgeted in the front row, I imagine, not sure what was going on.

In movies, after you beat the bad guy, the monster, then all the injuries it inflicted, they heal right up.

That’s not how it works in the real world.

Here’s one way it can work in the real world: the son you accidentally father at a pow-wow in South Dakota grows into the spitting image of a man you remember sitting in the shallows of a lake that goes forever. Like to remind me what I did, what I’d had to do.

You don’t see him constant, this son, this reminder, but you see him a few times every year. At least until word finds you—this time, the day after—of a car rolling out into the tall yellow grass. Rolling faster and faster, slopping burger bags and beer cans up into the sky. My son was dead by the time they all landed.

I showed up at the funeral, most of the family and friends strangers to me, and that night, instead of getting in a fight, I walked out into land I didn’t know and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes down to the butts. Just staring at the sky. Interrogating it, I guess.

I’d never smoked—you need your lungs if you dance—but after that night, I kind of understood why Mom always had. It makes you feel like you have some control. You know it’s bad for you, but you’re doing it on purpose, too. You’re breathing that in of your own volition, because you want to.

When you don’t have control of anything else, when a car can just go cartwheeling off into the horizon, then to even have just a little bit of control, it can feel good. Especially if you hold that smoke in for a long time, only let it out bit by bit.

But eventually I stood from that first pack, and made my way back to my camper, back to the circuit.

Until I got to thinking about what happened when I was twelve.

Which is why I pulled my truck into Dino’s parking lot this morning.

Because I’m family, I can check him out with a signature and proof of ID.

He remembers me, too. After his third grade, nothing really changed for him. Just, it’s the rest of us who kept changing. But he still sees me as the twelve-year-old I was, I think. The one who fought the monster for him. For all of us.

On the drive out, I tell him about my son. How, if he’d been able to make it through that wreck, how he was going to have taken over the world, Indian-style. Maybe he’d have been a male model, maybe he’d have played basketball, or maybe he’d have been an architect.

Just—that was all gone now.

Unless, right?

When we pull up to the old rent-house, there’s nothing there, of course. Instead of dogs in the neighbor’s long yard, there’s goats behind the chainlink now. They stare at us, never stop chewing.

The house burned down years ago—again, not from cigarettes—but what’s still standing, what I wasn’t expecting even a little bit, it’s the tetherball pole.

There’s no ball, no string. But even that it’s just still there, it means this can work.

Once, years ago, in the old-time Indian days, a father died, but then he came back. He was different when he came back, he was hungry, he was selfish, but that’s just because he already had all that inside him when he died, I know. It’s because he carried it with him into the lake that night.

My son—I won’t say his name out loud yet—all he would have taken with him, it’s his smile, and everything he could have been.

So what we do, it’s wait until dark, and walk into the burned pad where the house used to be. The cinderblock pylons are still there, holding up my memory of the floor plan.

I settle us down under what was Mom’s bedroom.

Something happened here once, see.

A cat or a possum or a rabbit, it crawled into this darkness to die. But because it was hurt, that gave something else access to it.

Under the tarp in the bed of my truck is all the roadkill I could scrape up, to be turned into body mass, and in raccoon traps at the front of the bed are four hissing cats.

They’re not hurt, yet.

There’s four because four’s the Indian number.

But that’s all later.

Right now, I’m just sitting across from Dino. Waiting for him to remember. Is there the least amount of blood seeping down from behind his ear, from where a razorblade might have traced a delicate X?

There is.

He turned his head to the side for me to do it, like he knew this part already, and I almost couldn’t press that metal into his skin.

Almost.

Before him in the dead grass I’ve set four action figures.

One of them—one of them, I know its life cycle. That morning after, it showed back up on Dino’s dresser in his bedroom. Because Mom had found it floating in the dishwater.

It was the only artifact from then. Except for Dino himself.

And now, if he picks that one up instead of the other three, now they’ll be together again, and it can all start all over.

Except—like I say, I know the life cycle, here.

What’s going to happen, I know, is that Dino’s going to pick up the superhero, not any of the other action figures, and then, because this is part of it, I’ll force the left leg into his mouth as gently as I can, as gently as any big brother’s ever done a thing like this, and then I’ll come up under his chin with the heel of my hand once, fast, so he can bite that foot off.

Maybe he’ll swallow it on his own, maybe he’ll need help, I don’t know.

We’ve got all night, I mean. He can sit there trying to figure this out and I can dance softly around him in my regalia for as long as it takes, chanting the numbers up to twelve, to prime him, to remind him, the balls of my moccasin feet padding into the dirt over and over in the old way, to wake anything sleeping down there. Anything that can help us get through this ceremony.

And, for my son— Collin, Collin Collin Collin—for him to get as solid as he needs to go out into the world like he was supposed to, he’s going to need the same thing Dad needed, the same thing Dad got with the neighbor’s corpse, the same thing seeping down the side of Dino’s neck already.