John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

They were still laughing. He had had enough. Every day he’d been soaking in shame, until he was wishing for the world’s end. Not just over Silas. His mother; his sisters; strangers’ pity at those wretched funerals. His petty edits to the encyclopedia — garnish, not knowledge — and on a mountain, when someone had asked did he want to undress in the hot wind, he’d said, “No.” If the geneticists were rooting for the underdog, they’d tensed up while he talked to Mrs. Boyd, and now they would clench their teeth again to hear Carl say, with no motive beyond catharsis, “I killed a boy last year.”

Immediately he had the clones’ attention. “There was no one else for miles,” he said. “It was a warm summer day, and Silas took off his clothes, because he wanted to play a game.”

Listening, each boy exhibited his own tic — Luc’s slanted smile; Heath’s twitching eyelid — but they were genetic equals, whose reactions must mean the same thing: they were all struggling to admit to wrongs on par with Carl’s crime.

Of course, he thought. Look who they were copied from! They had the DNA of a man who’d confined his boy slaves to a nailery under threat of the lash. Ones who fought were sold into the Deep South. Children as young as ten, living on a mountain at the edge of wilderness, but in a cage, hammering out ten thousand nails per day. Tranquility was the apotheosis, Jefferson had written. Freedom from worry; freedom from pain. Ataraxia and aponia: the Epicurean ideal. Would you spend your life harping on freedom from worry if you were free?

No, thought Carl, as he described tricking Silas out of kicking back, the terrible hike home, the news, the funeral, the aftermath. “Maybe that’s why I’ve learned no other languages,” he said.

Heath was typing. Another boy murmured. Carl waited for text to appear.

“Sounds like you needed that off your chest,” said Luc.

Or was it Mason, or Talbot? Both were suppressing the same smirk, as if no one else had anything to get off his chest. No words had arrived on Carl’s screen. “Look at the depraved things Jefferson did,” he said — an accusation, like saying, Look at the depraved things you’ve done. Look at the freakish secrets plaguing you! They wouldn’t look. Like their progenitor, they’d been raised too properly to defy the convention against reticence. That much was apparent to Carl now that he’d confessed. Not confessing had been miserable. Physical violence led to emotional violence, as it had done for the founders, so corroded by the guilt of enslaving that they’d dreamt of epochal ruin.

“No, you’re the depraved one,” Heath said. “Except for being genius polymaths, the rest of us are normal.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe my mom tainted my DNA when she smoked crack.”

He was beginning to hear the twang in his accent. He muted the speakers, not in spite. He had quit wishing for bombs to obliterate his twins’ cities. Suddenly the illogic of absolving himself by means of more harm seemed as obvious as his origins. Their lives were gaming out a wager whose odds had been set before Carl was born. Clone X to exceed historical Jefferson’s capabilities. Clone Y to prove capable of same as original. Clone Z to fail. If Heath and the rest kept up their tepid investigation, they would decipher a scheme to use settings of disparate privilege to pursue a trite inquiry into nurture and nature. Unplugging his modem, Carl forsook that quest for lack of significance. There were more intriguing questions. His injuries to the Hemings family alone had had Jefferson stoking the Reign of Terror. Whether or not that aligned with the record, Carl’s own thoughts proved it. He had worthwhile knowledge that would rewrite history. His dread was going to change the past. Not long ago, when he was still devoting his considerable brainpower to cluster-bombing, the ones who’d bet against him must have believed they were sitting pretty.

IN NOVEMBER 1995, on the eve of the federal shutdown, the high-school mountain biking champion of California set off down the Central Valley to look for his father. A Fresno Superior Court judge was demanding both parents’ signatures before she would approve Hunter’s emancipation petition. Unless Hunter found Arthur Flynn at a Flagstaff address from years ago, his mother would have to testify at a public hearing. It was a glorious fall day, the hills crisply amber against a mackerel sky. His friend Cody had come along on the promise of a ride. Both boys raced as expert juniors; both were skipping school.

“Thank God your mom’s crazy and your dad vanished,” Cody said near Bakersfield, “or we’d be in chemistry.”

Hunter forced a laugh even as he cringed to hear his mother described that way. She was devout, not crazy. Since her car wreck she’d been paying sixty dollars an hour — from Hunter’s race winnings — to a Christian Science practitioner who prayed with her for the pain to end. Lately those injuries had segued into something more deep-seated. After she tithed the entire purse from Hunter’s win in Tahoe, Cody had convinced him to cut her off. “Do it before you get sponsored,” he’d said after Bike Magazine labeled Hunter “the likeliest Jordan of our incipient sport.” In the inaugural run of the Leadville 100, Hunter had placed in the top ten overall, including adults. His nickname since then was Death Wish. Kids broke bones on those steep, rocky trails where winners topped forty mph. Worried parents sidelined many a natural talent, but to Emily Flynn, asking her son to slow down was like telling God she didn’t believe in him. Velocity was a beguiling illusion meant to test their faith, which explained why Emily at the time of impact hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.

East of Mojave the valley gave way to brown desert lined with ranch trails that Hunter gazed at longingly from the wheel. Lately he’d been staring at singletrack and doubletrack the way other kids looked at porn; something welled up in him until he needed to touch it, feel it under him. “Look,” he said to Cody, who glanced up from examining the road atlas.

“We’ll be like fifty miles from the Grand Canyon,” Cody said.

“Let’s drive up and see it.”

“No, let’s ride to the bottom of it.”

“It’s a national park. They’d arrest us.”

“Which is fucking dumb.”

“The trails are kind of narrow,” said Hunter, picturing hikers leaping to their deaths as he and Cody raged down a precarious path.

“It’s probably a fifty-dollar fine.”

“It’s more if you kill someone.”

“Or if you get a yeast infection from rubbing your pussy on the seat.”

“What?” said Hunter.

“Medical bills and all.”

“I’m just saying it’s narrow trails.”

“Then let’s hit Moab and ride Slickrock.”

“Okay,” Hunter said, liking that plan better. He was still adjusting to his coming freedom. After the emancipation, he would drop out of high school and buy an RV that he and Cody would drive to race after race, detouring whenever they felt like it to Slickrock’s petrified dunes or any trail in America. He’d been telling Cody it sounded awesome, and it did, except when he imagined his mother living alone.

There was the practitioner, of course. Recently Joseph had offered to hold Emily’s hand as she walked away from Error back into Mind. God helped people ready to render themselves fools in the eyes of others, Joseph had said, and Emily need only look to her sister — Hunter’s aunt Amy, who’d died of the flu — to see what became of fear. Hunter couldn’t tell whether the man was a grifter. Maybe Joseph was in love with Emily, as she seemed to be with him. Hunter imagined his concern was only a conjurer’s trick, as Emily would say about the sky shimmering above Barstow.