John McManus - Born on a Train - 13 Stories

Then show me how, said Hiram. I’ll do it myself.

I won’t show you.

I paid for this fucking thing myself.

I’ll break it.

I’ll beat your ass.

I’ll run away, said Eammon. They’ll take me with them.

I doubt they’d want you, Hiram said.

I can tell it in her eyes.

You can’t tell shit in her eyes.

She loves me.

Her eyes love you about like her mama’s do me.

I’ll go to Florida with her.

Hell, said Hiram. They’ll probly just stay here in town somewhere.

She’ll want to be as far from you as she can get, said Eammon. So do I.

Told me she might just settle down, said Hiram. Tired of traveling.

You don’t know.

There’s houses all over the place these days.

Get out of my room, said Eammon. I don’t want you here.

I own this room, said Hiram.

Fuck you and your room. He turned the computer off and stomped out.

Hiram felt behind the monitor for a switch but didn’t find it. When he turned to look at me I closed my eyes and listened as he quietly left the room. By that time my arm felt the same as the rest of my body, and it wasn’t long until the sun began to rise. The cries of birds made complicated flowers with their calls. When I fell asleep again, they were having a war. Many of the species had developed explosives. The brown birds were neutral — finches, waxwings, owls — and therefore silent like the bombs that woke me up, killing everything, even the terrain, so there was nothing left to dream.

Libby, Mother yelled, the bacon’s ready.

I timed the food from bed as it got cold. When my legs had tired of the mattress’s relentless waves they stiffened up. Chirps and bleats crept upstairs from the Saturday morning cartoons. I still could smell leftover breakfast fumes when Mother began to cook lunch. I could tell her then or wait until we ate. I wondered if she’d get so embarrassed she’d run away on foot, leave the car behind so I could drive it to my own towns, find the shittiest city in America and get that one over with right now. She cooked for an hour and a half, using every stove eye and the broiler and the Cuisinart, then turned them off and frowned at each dish one by one with a curled, unhappy nose and twisted shoulders and carried them to where we’d be together, set them down. The duck stared up at us as we converged.

You must be hungry, Mother said to me. You haven’t eaten since yesterday.

Is that a question? I said.

Mother smiled at me. Who wants to say grace? she said, but no one answered, and she looked around. Hiram? Don’t you folks usually say grace?

Hiram shrugged.

Well, it’s not like I’m one to say it, Mother said.

Eammon sat down, and then Jackson and Leroy did, too.

I guess we won’t say it then.

However you want to do it, Hiram said.

Mother poured tea for everyone. We piled our plates high with hot, steaming lumps of food until the serving bowls were empty. I wished there were a way never to need to eat, never to sit in a wooden chair in a room of wooden chairs with ugly people trapped like wingless birds who try to eat and breathe and chew their food and talk to one another, all at the same time.

How’s the duck? Hiram said to me.

It’s better than the pork chops.

Of course it is, he said. It’s a duck.

I see the same resplendence in its eyes that I once had.

Hiram kept on looking at his plate as Eammon set down his fork and stared across the table at me. Mother got up to fetch the pepper shaker from the kitchen. Eammon fingered the cross on his necklace and frowned and pulled it up so he could see its crusty coat of dried-up grunge. The silver band was tight against his neck. What’s all this shit on my cross? he said, glaring at me again.

It’s been there all along, I said.

This is gross, he said.

That’s from when Jesus was on it, I said.

What?

It’s from His smegma.

Mother’s cheeks got bright. She slapped my cheekbone instead of my cheek, so it didn’t make the sound she wanted, and she didn’t seem to understand why she’d done it. Hiram stared at her with his fingers curled around his bugle.

Our Lord was circumcised, she said. He didn’t have any smegma.

Maybe it came from somebody else’s smegma, I said.

Like yours, she said.

I reached as if to slap her back, the right way, but I didn’t.

You’re the smackinest damn family I ever saw, said Hiram, and he licked a greasy film of mashed potatoes from his teeth. They weren’t as crooked as Eammon’s, although he’d never had braces either, it appeared. Mother sniffled as her nose swelled up like mine does when I cry, reddening long before the tears appear. Hiram put his bugle to his lips and played reveille right there at the table. He wasn’t good enough to play upbeat. That’s the kind of man who likes Mother. He didn’t seem to care much about her anymore though.

For future reference, he said, don’t mash the potatoes up like this, till they’re goddamn diarrhea.

He sputtered a low note like a fart on his bugle, and Eammon giggled.

You went and beat the hell out of em, Hiram said. I take it with some lumps.

Mother nodded like she was almost smiling. Hiram adjusted his hearing aid, smearing gravy on his earlobe.

Just for future, though, he added. I reckon it’s all right for just this once. Two brown cardinals landed on the kitchen windowsill, and Hiram blew the bugle until they flew away to other people’s houses. Note the bird’s behavior: is it alone or in a flock? What’s the nature of its call? The loggerhead shrike has no talons, so it impales its mice and rodents on a thorn or barbed-wire fence, hence its nickname, butcher bird. It waits to tear the prey apart until a later time. Don’t read at the table, Hiram told me, and I laid the book facedown upon the tablecloth.

Daddy? said Jackson.

What.

Do deaf people know it when they fart?

I’m sure they do, he said.

How do they tell the loud ones from the ones you can’t hear?

Hiram shook his head. Mother tried to hook her eyes to mine, but I looked down, refusing to acknowledge her silent cries. Some species can be lured into view by an imitation of the sound of a bird in distress. Hiram drank his coffee from a tin cup with a pinch of salt and blew his bugle once again and laid his fork down suddenly and closed his eyes to say grace after all. He cleared his throat and thanked his mother, Jesus, God, the duck, the mother of his children, solemn-spoken names I didn’t recognize, all the people who had died to make our lives so beautiful.

You know, I can do it too, I said to Mother.

Libby, sweetie, I don’t know what you mean.

It doesn’t take much. Say what state and give me three days’ notice. I can keep up with you.

Hiram said, You better watch your mouth, little honey.

Why don’t you let Big Honey be the one to tell me that, I said.

He shrugged and said to Eammon, Hurry up. I want to get an early start.

Where are you going? I said.

Why don’t you ask Big Honey, Hiram said.

They’re driving down to Bristol for the NASCAR race, said Mother.

That sounds like fun, I said. Eammon ate eagerly and quickly and didn’t look at me anymore, only at Mother. He and Hiram left their dishes at the table and disappeared upstairs to change their clothes and then came back down and shouted bye and let the screen door slam, and then we were alone with only Hiram’s dog and all the dirty plates. Leroy and Jackson played Nintendo in the living room. Mother dragged her chair to the wall and stood upon its seat and stretched to reach the pink wallpaper border. A house is a home where love dwells. She found a crack in it and tried to pull the banner off the wall, but just two feet came loose, and she crumpled up the strip and growled and laughed and cried and coughed. The o in love was a bubbly heart.