John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

For months he showed up only in the back of the Alfssons’ station wagon as Mrs. Alfsson drove out of the garage. Out his window Victor would watch roly-poly Albert bouncing alone on a pogo stick, thousands of times in a row.

“Is Micah dead yet?” he asked his mother one day, thinking that in her grief she might rename him after her late friend.

“I’m sick of your crap, Victor,” she replied, upsetting him so much that he quit breathing. His skin tingled, his sight blackened, and he passed out cold. He awoke to find Mary pressing a cold cloth to his forehead.

“Thank God,” she said, as if she’d solved the problem and not caused it.

Lying there under her pressed washcloth, Victor said, “Where am I?” He wanted to freak her out, because he was hurt by the betrayal of her words. It was more than their sentiment — it was that crap , ugly in both sound and meaning, smack at the end of a blame. A voiceless bilabial stop, as vexing as the voiceless velar plosive at the end of his father’s favorite word. Although he couldn’t analyze consonants that way yet, he knew what he didn’t like. He breathed more quickly, aware of sucking in air, of being a breathing body. When his lungs filled up, would he remember to quit? Could he turn things around? Maybe not. His skin tingled, his sight vanished. Again he was gone.

After a dozen more such spells Ralph suggested specialists, like a pediatric cardiologist, whereas Mary suggested that Victor buck up. “He needs to act like a grown-up,” she said to Ralph, who went behind Mary’s back to find a shrink named Dolf Pappadopolous.

“I doubt your son will ever feel a normal range of emotions,” said Dr. Pappadopolous to Ralph as Victor sat between them. “This will worsen at puberty. His grasp of metaphor will be impeded, if it develops at all.”

“What kind of name is your name?” said Victor, phrasing the query so as not to utter any of its horrid mishmash.

“Greek and German. You probably have not heard of a Dolf, but go to West Germany, you will meet more.” Dr. Pappadopolous might as well have said, “Dunk your head in the toilet, you will eat a turd.” Victor’s head grew light again, his vision clouded. He put a hand out to steady himself.

“He does it again, you see? Makes himself faint? You or I could decide not to, but that is the nature of the dilemma.”

If he was fainting on purpose, Victor thought, he should faint again now. If some illness was causing his problem, he should remain awake. Which action would prove this odious man wrong? He breathed sharply in and out, considering the question. Before he could choose, his lungs ballooned so full of air that he panicked again and it was too late already. He awakened on the table as Ralph pleaded, “Son?”

Victor didn’t mean to reply with silence. He just didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t the names themselves so much as how no one, not even Ralph, perceived why Victor responded negatively. The answer wasn’t as simple as a need for aesthetic bliss. In his dungeon dream the sole color was the dull gray of concrete, of cinder blocks, of skin gone sallow in lantern light. There wasn’t electricity. It wasn’t the 1980s above that cellar maze, but a timeless realm without paved roads or child safety laws. The master of a lush, unspoiled land had banished each ugly thing underground, where Victor sat chained to a ball. How could he explain to his anxious father that he didn’t miss the sun? In an airy meadow overhead, wisps danced in the light, while Victor basked in the well-being he drew from knowing that all was neatly fenced off by the planet’s curve: grandeur above, everything else below.

As time passed, the quarrels over Victor’s bouts grew bigger. Ralph moved out, out of Yazoo City entirely, into an apartment in Hattiesburg. After that the house stayed messier. Alone with his mother, Victor learned to steady himself through fussy tidying. For an hour each evening he wiped down surfaces, straightened things just so. Out in the world, he and Mary would take the old highway past pawn shops, auto garages, the ball fields where several strata of asphalt merged in a chaotic pimple of broken tarmac. Victor suspected that none of the Little Leaguers hyperventilated, as he did, at the sight of Queen Anne’s lace sprouting through those pavement cracks. He alone hung a wrecking ball from space to demolish every derelict building as they passed. By shutting his left eye, he crushed whatever needed it on that side, likewise with his other eye on the right. He was uncompromising. Whole cities he flattened while imagining them from a bird’s-eye view, like the hideously named Hattiesburg, and then he seeded the scars with tulip bulbs, and that was how it was for years, until the day in ninth grade when he spotted Sievert Alfsson mowing the Alfssons’ lawn, a breeze rippling his open shirt and blond curls.

Transfixed, Victor knelt at the window. He’d never seen such a compelling boy before, or a richer contrast between someone’s ruddy skin and the green grass. For half an hour Sievert mowed. When he was done, he leaned on the lawnmower handle and gazed toward Victor’s house until Victor raised a hand.

Sievert did the same, in a gesture that could only mean he was beckoning Victor to come say hello.

Heart fluttering, Victor ventured outside on his left foot. He crossed into the Alfssons’ yard and ended in front of his neighbor on his right foot.

“Hey, Victor,” said Sievert in a voice whose deep pitch stirred Victor and rendered him briefly mute.

“I’m Micah,” he finally managed to reply.

“I thought you’re Victor.”

“That’s my middle name.”

“My dad says you’re disturbed.”

“My mom says you’re a Seventh-Day Adventist.”

“Sievert’s one, but I worship the devil.”

Victor’s impulse was to correct this boy: “Sievert’s you,” he nearly said, but in fact he was speaking to ugly old Albert.

He looked the alleged Albert up and down, judging whether this newly slim kid could own such a hideous name. “You’re skinny,” he said, his lungs seizing a little.

“So?” said Albert, as if it had been ever thus.

“How do you worship the devil?”

“You drink,” Albert said, pulling out a flask.

Albert sipped, then passed the flask to Victor, who took it, stealing a glance across the road. He’d done nothing like this before. Albert was home-schooled, ignorant of Victor’s reputation as a good kid.

I’m Micah, he thought, tilting the flask to his lips to pour what tasted like medicine into his mouth. Immediately he could feel stamina spreading through him, coating his insides as he choked on the burn.

“Too hot for a shirt,” said Albert, pulling his own off to toss it at his feet.

It was only about sixty degrees out, with cool gusts of wind. “Yeah,” Victor said.

“Been in the woods?”

“Those?” said Victor, gesturing behind the Alfssons’.

“Know some others?” retorted Albert, so that Victor heard how moronic he’d just sounded. Did he always sound that way? He fell out of the moment and stood thinking of Albert’s name, his grandpa Albert, wizened old men, until a tingling moved up his arms. Once again he would faint unless he did something. Albert was now squeezing under a barbed-wire fence toward a stand of pines. In alarm Victor drank. Right away, something flowed through him again and halted his decline. A layer of dry needles softened the pine-cone crunch under his feet as Victor hurried into the dark of the woods.

“My dad works for the radio,” Albert said when Victor had caught up, “so there’s free trips to Gulf Shores. What’s yours do?”

“He moved out of town.”

“Where’d he move?”

“East of here.” Victor didn’t want to say Hattiesburg .