He walked past the silent huddled trailers that were crowded together like sardine cans on a grocery shelf. He didn't understand how people could live like this. Car engines and baby-doll parts were strewn through the bare red yards. Clotheslines sagged from the weight of ragged blankets and underwear with big holes in the crotch. Even the scavenger birds avoided this place, as if instinctively knowing that not a crust of bread would escape these sorry tables.
The Ford pickup wasn't parked in front of the Mull trailer. Neither was Junior's dad's truck. Reggie crept around a rusty oil barrel toward the trailer, feeling a shiver of excitement ripple up his spine. He tried to picture Peggy at the window, her hand on her pale cheek, waiting for him to drop by, a maiden longing for her prince.
As he passed the end of the trailer, he heard voices coming from inside. He stooped and ducked under the trailer through a ragged gap in the white aluminum underpinning. He put his ear to the floor. Peggy was saying something, and the mattress was squeaking. Reggie could hear the bed's bare iron legs lifting and settling, lifting and settling, on the groaning floor.
He looked at the tar-papered tool shed twenty feet away. He could get up on top of it and see through the window. That old apple tree would hide him, that tree with the split trunk and gnarled nest of elbows. A few snowballs of white blossoms protruded from its upper branches as if the tree hadn't yet realized it was dying.
He glanced around the trailer park. Somewhere a kid was squalling like she had a razor blade under her fingernail, and a dog barked weakly from the end of its chain. Traffic flared past on the distant highway, but the rest of the park was hushed, as if smothered by poverty.
Reggie slipped behind the shed and scrabbled up its boarded side, pushing his feet against the knots in the apple tree. He wriggled onto the roof, hoping the shed wouldn't collapse. The tips of the tree branches skittered on the tin sheeting around him like wet chalk on a blackboard. He held his breath and looked through the trailer window, still slightly buzzed from his lunchtime smoke break.
A man was standing in the room, someone Reggie didn't know. He was nodding his big head and scratching at his gun blue stubble. His shirt was off, and his plump red shoulders hunched into a pale, hairy chest. Then Reggie craned his neck and saw the rest of the room. Peggy was in bed with a man who had a Rebel flag tattooed on one side of his back.
How many other guys do I have to compete with?
Then he saw her face. Her cheeks were wet with tears, her nice yellow hair spilling on the pillow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She was smiling, but it was a frozen smile, the kind you got when you were in church and the preacher told you somebody had died for your sins. Sort of like "Isn't that nice?" but you wouldn't mind being somewhere else.
Peggy never wore that expression when Reggie was making love to her. She would giggle and nip at his earlobe, her breath fresh on his neck like a morning wind. And she always caressed his back and wrapped around him like one of those eight-armed Buddha babes. But right now her arms were spread out at her sides, palms turned up and fingers slightly curled, as if surrendering to something.
Whatever that redneck was doing to her, she wasn't fighting it. But she also wasn't enjoying it. Maybe she really did love Reggie, the way she said. And he hoped that she was saving her special stuff for him. Reggie couldn't complain about other guys getting their turn. After all, she was married. But he knew she would stay true to him in her heart.
And now her redneck lover was getting up and pulling away from her. The other man got into bed with her. He was still nodding, but Peggy didn't even blink, just winced a little as he entered her. Her head rocked back and forth as he went to work, but her eyes never left the ceiling.
Reggie felt a hot firmness in his pants where the fabric pressed against the sun-baked tin. Maybe he could wait until they left, then he could have Princess Peggy to himself, to tell her that he was in love with her and would she mind letting him show how much?
But he was afraid Little Mack would come home any minute, and then word might get back to Junior. Damn the world, always getting in the way like that. Love ought not be so fucking complicated.
He slid backward off the roof and hooked his sneakers on a fat branch. Then he looped down to the ground and peered around the corner of the shed, ready to sneak back through the woods. But somebody was coming.
A wrinkled, leather-faced old man with an eye patch stepped out of the silver trailer next door. He staggered slightly, as if his knee bones were realigning themselves with every step. The man walked to Peggy's door and knocked lightly, then put his bat-winged ear to the door. He was grinning like a mud turtle as he pulled the latch and went into the trailer.
That old bastard looks eighty, if he is a day. If he can get it up, then sweet Peggy is a miracle worker. But I don't want to stay around to see if that particular wonder comes to pass.
Reggie shuddered at the image of the one-eyed old-timer’s stained khakis dropping down around those varicose legs and knobby knees. He was sick now, disgusted at himself for sharing his soul with something that opened up for anything that moved. He was about to jog off, blind with tears, when a hand fell on his shoulder. He turned and found himself in the arms of a new kind of lover, one that made him forget all about Peggy Mull’s lies.
Sylvester had traveled many miles. But distance no longer mattered to him. Or to the parent.
Distance was only time, and shu-shaaa had forever. Forever to return to the bright hot center of everything where the universe began. Forever to cross space and rejoin its kind in a white collection of energy.
Forever to gather its seeds together, the seeds that had been scattered by that cataclysmic explosion at the dawn of chaos. Forever to retrace the explosion that had spread the stars and matter and atoms and galaxies across the black mist of nothingness.
Sylvester dripped with the glory of the parent, stewed in cleansing juices of perfection, and wallowed in the brilliant healing rays of the sun. Its warmth washed his flesh and the sweet breath of the far trees sang in his ears as his budding fingers found memory of the door latch. His mind screamed words, but words had no place upon those flowery lips. He dimly recognized the trailer park and the white metal box that had once had meaning, that drew him forward on some buried instinct.
He was still much too human, human enough to know the parent was beyond names. Human enough to remember Sylvester Mull and the existence of pain. Human enough to know that hunger came in many forms. And the parent’s hunger drove Sylvester to harvest.
He grabbed the boy by the shoulder, watched the human eyes widen as Sylvester bestowed the parent’s flawless blessings. They communed, mouth to mouth, and Sylvester tasted speerhorn stooge stoner prince, all crazy images, as their juices swapped genetic mutations. Then he let the boy fall, left him to answer his own calling, and continued toward the white metal box that had once been home.
He wished he could say words. He wished that the parent would lift its green veil so that he might speak his human heart. But wishes were fruitless. His tongue had gone to seed.
No matter. This was his door and doors were made for going through.
The parent was hungry.
And he was home.
“ Shu-shaaa.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Emerland negotiated the narrow, twisting road, cursing the stupid hick loggers who hadn't bothered to remove all the stumps. The branches that hung low on both sides of the road swatted at the candy-apple red paint on the flanks of his Mercedes. He winced at the grating of wooden fingernails.