David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Oh, OK, you’re the Antichrist’s sister,” said Clint Wood, sizing Lenore up. “Can’t do enough for the Antichrist, no problem. Thanks again, guys.” He left.

“Hi Bob.”

“Oomph. ”

“This is a deadly one. There’ve been like twenty ‘Hi Bobs’ in this one.”

“What’s the leg got there?”

“Looks to be three j-birds. Poorly rolled.”

“None of you guys have classes?” Lenore asked. Ed McMahon came on the television.

“I have classes,” LaVache said. “I know I do, because it says on my schedule I do.” He cleaned under his fingernail with the corner of his clipboard clasp.

“He’s going to go to a class this semester, he told me,” Heat said to Lenore, doing a handstand in the middle of the floor, so that his shirt fell over his face. “He’s determined to go to at least one class.”

“Well I’m disabled,” LaVache said. “They can’t expect a disabled person to hobble to every faraway, top-of-the-hill class of the semester.”

Lenore looked at LaVache. “You don’t work, here, do you?”

LaVache smiled at her. “That was just work, what I did. I do lots of work.”

“He literally does the work of like forty or fifty guys, and even more girls,” said Heat. “He does all our work, the big lug.”

“What about your own work?” Lenore said to LaVache.

“What can I tell you? I’ve got a leg to support, after all.”

“Dad thinks you work.”

“Surely you of all people didn’t come all the way out here after seeing me only a few weeks ago to tell me what Dad thinks. Or to find out what I think and do and then scuttle back to Dad.”

“Not exactly,” Lenore said, shifting because her suitcase handle was digging into her bottom. “There’s stuff we need to talk about, that’s sort of come up.” She looked around at Cat, Heat, and the Breather.

“Well goody. Stuff.” LaVache looked back at the television. “We have a game of Hi Bob to finish, and then there’s an episode of ‘The Munsters’ on Channel 22 I particularly want to see, and then we can go conversationally wild.”

“He’ll be asleep by then, though, I predict,” the Breather whispered into Lenore’s ear as his elbow brushed her chest.

“Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, the character Howard Borden, on the screen.

“Death, big time,” said LaVache, looking at Cat and the nearly full bottle of vodka on the floor in front of him. “See you tomorrow, Cat.”

“A l‘enfer, ” Cat muttered. He began sucking on the bottle. He had to stop almost immediately.

“You’ve got five minutes to finish that,” LaVache said to Cat.

“He’s going to be really sick,” said Lenore.

“We don’t get sick here anymore,” said LaVache. “This Amherst guy, this legendary guy a few years back started this tradition where, instead of getting sick, we pound our heads against the wall.”

“You pound your heads?”

“Really hard.”

“I see.”

The phone rang. “Breather, you want to get the lymph node?” LaVache said, returning to writing on his clipboard. The Breather stepped over Cat, who was crawling on the gray carpet, and got the phone. The Antichrist was writing something.

“Antichrist, it’s Snadgener,” the Breather said after a bit, putting his hand over the phone. “Evolution as Cultural Phenomenon Paper Number One. Were Darwin’s critics right about the theory of natural selection being deeply dangerous to Christianity.”

“Tell Snadge the leg is wondering what he has for it,” said LaVache.

“Mushrooms, he says.”

“Professor?”

“Summerville.”

“Tell Snadge the interesting answer for Summerville is yes,” LaVache said. The Breather whispered into the phone. LaVache continued, “After the Origin, the Bible has to retreat, he thinks. The Bible ceases to be a historical record of actual events and instead becomes a piece of moral fiction, useful only as a guide for making decisions about how to live. No longer purporting to tell what was and is, but only what ought to be.” LaVache opened his eyes. “Summerville’ll lap it up.”

The Breather talked into the phone. Cat had a third of the bottle to go and was green and moist. Heat sat cross-legged with the joint on the sofa.

“Snadge says it sounds kick-ass,” the Breather said. “Snadge says thanks, Antichrist.”

“Tell Snadge the leg and I look forward to seeing him and his fungal fee sometime tonight,” said LaVache.

Lenore leaned as far as she could over toward LaVache. “ Anti christ?” she said.

“What can I tell you?” said the Antichrist. “We can’t deny I look satanic. Heat, you want to clear a space on the wall for Cat?”

Heat got up slowly and began to move posters.

“Mother,” moaned Cat.

“The really sadistic aspect of this game,” the Breather whispered to Lenore, leaning over her so she had to lean way back and almost fell off her suitcase, “is that if someone else on the show says ‘Hi Bob’ before Cat has discharged his vodka-responsibility, Cat has to drink a whole ’nother bottle in another five minutes.”

“Does Cat know that?” Lenore asked, looking at Cat. Cat sat slumped on the floor, the back of his head resting and intermittently pounding weakly on the wall behind him, the bottle of vodka in his lap and a thin rope of spittle joining his lip and the lip of the bottle.

“I think at this point Cat knows what’s up in a sort of ganglial sense,” the Antichrist said, “although he’d have a hard time actually articulating the rule if you asked him to.”

“Mommy,” Cat squeaked faintly.

“You can do it, you great big enormous guy,” the Breather said, massaging Cat’s shoulders.

Ed McMahon came on the television screen. “Sell it, Ed!” yelled the Antichrist.

Heat put aside the corpse of the joint and sipped thoughtfully at a beer. He turned dense red eyes and looked at Lenore for so long that Lenore felt uncomfortable. Heat then looked at LaVache, who ignored him. Then back at Lenore. “Hey Antichrist,” he said. “You care if I ask your sister a question?”

“Be my guest,” the Antichrist said, alternately watching the screen and Cat’s attempts to finish the bottle, attempts that were at this point pretty pathetic, because there was just a little bit of vodka left, and Cat kept trying to get it in his mouth, but it kept somehow bouncing off, or at any rate not staying in, and sliding back inside the bottle and down the outside and onto the rug and his shirt.

Heat looked at Lenore as the Breather massaged his shoulders, now, from behind. “Lenore, how did the Antichrist lose his leg?”

“Well, now, hey, that’s not fair, because it’s not a question, because I’ve already answered it,” the Antichrist said. Lenore looked at him. His head rested on his shoulder. “I’ve already told you it was a dancing accident. I had such an unreasonably happy childhood that I simply danced, all the time, for joy, and one day the dancing just got to be too much, and I had an accident. Quod est demon stratum.”

Lenore laughed.

“Is that true?” Heat said to Lenore. “Are you going to back him up?”

“By all means,” Lenore said, not looking at LaVache, who was not looking at her.

LaVache turned to Heat. “And don’t you know disability etiquette? You don’t discuss a disability in the presence of a disabled person unless the disabled person brings up the disability. For all you know I could be reeling, from hurt, on the inside. How’d you like to do your own Calculus homework for a while?”

“Antichrist,” Heat said with an easy grin, “I hereby tender a sincere apology for my gaucheness, and also take the opportunity to point out that another joint seems to have expired, here.”