John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

He woke up gasping. Maybe you could dread just one thing at a time, he thought, walking to the kitchen to find Willy and his mother listening to Led Zeppelin.

“Past your whatchamacallit,” said Marissa.

“Bedtime,” said Willy.

“That’s the ticket. We might go to the beach.”

“Mom, did you ever want to be a scientist?” Carl asked, wondering whom she meant by we , and what beach. The Gulf was hundreds of miles away.

“I wanted to be a nurse.”

“Cleaning up shit and vomit?” Willy said.

“Better than doing nothing all day,” said Marissa, her first statement in a while that made Carl feel like they had something in common.

“Tell me about Bob,” he said, naming his supposed father.

“Bob liked all those guys in the Highwaymen. Waylon and them. Born and raised in Texarkana and he drove an El Camino.”

“Was he smart?”

“Same as anyone.”

“Did he like science?”

“This is date night,” said Willy, shifting Carl’s mood. Frying fish sticks, he imagined again the fusion bombs falling, this time killing Marissa and Willy along with everybody else. He wished Marissa would clean up, climb mountains with him, enjoy the views, but it wasn’t meant to be, and he’d learned to be okay with that; if she wound up in prison, he wouldn’t go blubbering over it like he’d have done last year.

Carl dined in his bedroom with his blueprints laid out around him in a satisfying grid. Peering out at Willy’s trailing headlights, he saw a shooting star, and read up on meteor showers. Already a fellow editor had written about the unusually dazzling outburst of 9 October. Tonight.

The Boyds’ house loomed in shadow as he ventured into the chilly night. He lay down on the picnic table. Right away two meteors came dying across the sky. A boy who hadn’t killed his neighbor might have relaxed into pondering the dynamical evolution of meteoroid streams, but Carl zeroed in on something else, the wishes you made on stars. I wish never to be caught, he decided as another one flared. These burning rocks weren’t the bombs he’d asked for, but chances to remain free. I’m not a violent person, he whispered, as if that too was a wish. Don’t send me to jail.

After a dozen selfish wishes he thought of wishing for Marissa to go clean, but she was under the sky; she could make wishes of her own.

Amid frog croaks like low-pitched roosters he heard his name spoken, and sat upright to face Silas’s mom, Alberta Boyd, standing there in her Target shirt.

“It’s the Draconids,” he said, startled.

“You know, you look a lot like someone on TV.”

Even in the dark Carl could see that Mrs. Boyd, with her sharp cheekbones high on a narrow face, appeared years younger than his haggard mother, yet he knew from Silas that this woman was the older one. “You’ve known me all my life.”

“Not what I mean.”

“My mom’s away at the observatory.”

“Have you made a wish?”

“I don’t believe in that stuff,” he said, coming around to what Mrs. Boyd might mean: she’d seen him on America’s Most Wanted .

“Come talk to me sometime; I know your mom isn’t as available as you’d like,” she said, before walking away again.

More seething than afraid, Carl lay still in the dark. As a shooting star streaked toward a puny hill, he wondered if his father, too, had fallen politely quiet to mask rage. If he’d wished for nations’ ruin merely to calm himself at insults to his mother.

The phone rang inside. It was his brother Frank. “Making a run down to Topeka.”

“Mrs. Boyd was telling me I look like someone.”

“Like me and the rest of us,” Frank said, although they both knew Carl resembled none of the other Bartons. His chin was sharper, his eyes deeper, his voice reedier.

“Kansas is north.”

“I know where Kansas is.”

“You go up to it, not down.”

“Does Mom want her usual?”

“Did Bob have more kids?”

“Weird thing about Bob, he’d had a vasectomy.”

“So it can come undone?” Carl asked, feeling like he was learning that his whole life had been a dream.

“Mom was being evicted, is why I did my first deal. Except she had more cards than I could cover.”

Frank paused. Carl heard clicks of interference. Not just a dream, he thought, but some nightmare, where the terrible truth lurked invisibly around the bend.

“I found this place called Consumer Credit Counseling. Drove back home with the brochure, and Mom told me, I’ve paid my debts. Then nine months later. Anyway, her usual?”

Was Frank punking him? Was he strung out? A vasectomy reversal, the encyclopedia said, cost thousands of dollars. Marissa fretted over sums as small as twenty dollars. Maybe she’d blackmailed a rich guy. Carl went to her bedroom and pulled out a box from under her bed. It held disability applications, credit card statements listing hundred-dollar cash advances, and a crayon drawing of mother and son on a raft in the Ninth Ward, storm clouds swirling above. He tore it down the middle. Burn the box and the house too, he was thinking when he came upon a letter from a man named Jim Smith, at a place in Virginia called JCP, dated 2000.

Congratulations on your acceptance , it read. Peruse the guidelines, sign the confirmation and liability form, and return them before April 1. Upon receipt, our office will contact you about travel. If you have questions, call us at (703) 921-2258 .

There were no guidelines, no letterhead, only this page whose number gave a busy-circuits signal when Carl called. He’d been born ten months after 1 April 2000. Pinching his arm, he tried to quell a sense that something demonic had occurred. A thin orange line glowed in the east. Civil twilight , he read, begins when the geometric center of the sun is six degrees below. .

The phone rang. I’ve solved it, he thought, they’re calling to congratulate me.

“Ms. Barton?” said a woman.

“I’m Mr. Barton,” Carl said.

“Is Marissa Barton your wife?”

“Marissa is my mother.”

“Then give me your dad.”

“I’m searching for my dad.”

“Well, go find him,” said the voice, at which point it became clear this was the police, letting Carl know — as he intuited before he heard another word — that he wouldn’t be asking Marissa about the letter, now that she and Willy and two of their friends had driven off a cliff en route home from date night.

There were so many kinds of bombs. Fission and fusion weapons, split into subcategories that ran to thousands of words each. Delivery systems, trajectory phases, navigational equations; still, some missiles lacked pages of their own. Across the wall from his grieving sisters Carl opened the Article Wizard to channel knowledge from schematic to encyclopedia. Hour by hour the templates grew. Propellant, warhead, blast yield, launch platform. There wasn’t some high heaven where Silas floated over to Marissa to whisper why he’d died; the dead quit knowing you, so he launched a new attack, not some vague bomb batch anymore but Dong Feng 31s and Julang-2s carrying payloads of ninety-kiloton MIRVs. From Jin-class submarines they flew toward America. The impact was cataclysmic. Instantaneously there was no crime scene, no Ozarks, no Bartons, only a lurching sensation like what he’d felt before the car wreck, a cold shiver, an extraneous coincidence, rather than the souls of the newly dead passing through him toward their starting place.

The bungalow Carl’s brother Frank shared with his wife and their young sons sat on a four-lane bypass by a check-cashing store. There was a billboard tower in the front yard, and no internet except at the library in a nearby flat town. Once a week Carl could use his sister Sheila’s computer to look up Jim Smiths who led to various dead ends, but he couldn’t live with his sisters because of their jealous boyfriends. At his new school the top student, Wade Jones, had recently died in a wreck of his own. Since Carl was smart, the other kids pegged him as Wade’s replacement, conflating Wade’s and Marissa’s wrecks the way Carl conflated Wade and Silas. Every mention of Wade returned Carl to a familiar sick place. He began to worry also about the bad education he was receiving. In the work of some of his Wikipedia colleagues, he could perceive the gap between autodidacts and the classically educated. While his mind recalled numbers and diagrams well, and he saw beauty in symmetries both natural and syntactic, he knew next to nothing about the arts. He spoke one language. Rich kids on the coasts were vaulting hopelessly ahead while he lived on some highway. One Friday he sneaked out of school and biked across town to the Montessori academy to tell the director, “I’m Carl Barton. I want to enroll.”