“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Probably he even sometimes rides up alongside you in the forklift.”
“Sorry?” he said.
I looked at the clock on the wall. It didn’t seem to have any hands. It was just a moving pattern of yellow and white.
“Do you know what time it is?” I said.
The guy looked up at the clock.
“Six,” he said.
14
Out on the street I found a pay phone and called Renee.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry about that pitcher.”
“Yeah, well,” she said in her non-fancy voice. “You’re gonna buy me a new one.”
I could hear she was trying to make up.
“No,” I said. “I won’t be doing that.”
“Where are you, Mikey?” she said.
“Nowhere,” I said.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“Home,” I said, and hung up.
15
Coming up Gleason, I had that feeling. My hands and feet didn’t know exactly what they wanted, but they were trending toward: push past whatever/whoever blocks you, get inside, start wrecking shit by throwing it around, shout out whatever’s in your mind, see what happens.
I was on a like, shame slide. You know what I mean? Once, back in high school, this guy paid me to clean some gunk out of his pond. You snagged the gunk with a rake, then rake-hurled it. At one point, the top of my rake flew into the gunk pile. When I went to retrieve it, there were like a million tadpoles, dead and dying, at whatever age they are when they’ve got those swollen bellies like little pregnant ladies. What the dead and dying had in common was: their tender white underbellies had been torn open by the gunk suddenly crashing down on them from on high. The difference was: the dying were the ones doing the mad fear gesticulating.
I tried to save a few, but they were so tender all I did by handling them was torture them worse.
Maybe someone could’ve said to the guy who’d hired me, “Uh, I have to stop now, I feel bad for killing so many tadpoles.” But I couldn’t. So I kept on rake-hurling.
With each rake hurl I thought, I’m making more bloody bellies.
The fact that I kept rake-hurling started making me mad at the frogs.
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
Years later, at Al-Raz, it was a familiar feeling.
Here was the house.
Here was the house where they cooked, laughed, fucked. Here was the house that, in the future, when my name came up, would get all hushed, and Joy would be like, “Although Evan is no, not your real daddy, me and Daddy Evan feel you don’t need to be around Daddy Mike all that much, because what me and Daddy Evan really care about is you two growing up strong and healthy, and sometimes mommies and daddies need to make a special atmosphere in which that can happen.”
I looked for the three cars in the driveway. Three cars meant: all home. Did I want all home? I did. I wanted all, even the babies, to see and participate and be sorry for what had happened to me.
But instead of three cars in the driveway there were five.
Evan was on the porch, as expected. Also on the porch were: Joy, plus two strollers. Plus Ma.
Plus Harris.
Plus Ryan.
Renee was trotting all awkward up the driveway, trailed by Ryan’s mom, pressing a handkerchief to her forehead, and Ryan’s dad, bringing up the rear due to a limp I hadn’t noticed before.
You? I thought. You jokers? You nutty fuckers are all God sent to stop me? That is a riot. That is so fucking funny. What are you going to stop me with? Your girth? Your good intentions? Your Target jeans? Your years of living off the fat of the land? Your belief that anything and everything can be fixed with talk, talk, endless yapping, hopeful talk?
The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.
My face got hot and I thought, Go, go, go.
Ma tried and failed to rise from the porch swing. Ryan helped her up by the elbow all courtly.
Then suddenly something softened in me, maybe at the sight of Ma so weak, and I dropped my head and waded all docile into that crowd of know-nothings, thinking: Okay, okay, you sent me, now bring me back. Find some way to bring me back, you fuckers, or you are the sorriest bunch of bastards the world has ever known.
SHHHH by NoViolet Bulawayo
Father comes home after many years of forgetting us, of not sending us money, of not loving us, not visiting us, not anything us, and parks in the shack, unable to move, unable to talk properly, unable to anything, vomiting and vomiting, Jesus, just vomiting and defecating on himself, and it smelling like something dead in there, dead and rotting, his body a black, terrible stick; I come in from playing Find bin Laden and he is there.
Just there. Parked. In the corner. On Mother’s bed. So thin, like he eats pins and wire, so thin at first I don’t even see him under the blankets. I am getting on the bed to get the skipping rope for playing Andy-over when F — when he lifts his head and I see him for the first time. He is just length and bones. He is rough skin. He is crocodile teeth and egg-white eyes, lying there, drowning on the bed.
I don’t even know it’s Father at the time so I run outside, screaming and screaming. Mother meets me with a slap and says, Shhhh, and points me back to the shack. I go, one hand covering my pain, the other folded in a fist in my mouth. By the time we are at the door I know without Mother saying anything. I know it’s Father. Back. Back after all those years of forgetting us.
His voice sounds like something burned and seared his throat. My son. My boy, he says. Listening to him is painful; I want to put my hands on my ears. He is like a monster up close and I think of running again but Mother is standing there in a red dress looking dangerous. My boy, he keeps saying, but I don’t tell him that I’m a girl, I don’t tell him to leave me alone.
Then he lifts his bones and pushes a claw toward me and I don’t want to touch it but Mother is there looking. Looking like Jesus looks at you from Mother of Bones’s calendar so you don’t sin. I remain standing until Mother pushes me by the back of my neck, then I stagger forward and almost fall onto the terrible bones. The claw is hard and sweaty in my hand and I withdraw it fast. Like I’ve touched fire. Later, I don’t want to touch myself with that hand, I don’t want to eat with it or do nothing with it, I even wish I could throw the hand away and get another.
My boy, he says again. I do not turn to look at him because I don’t even want to look at him. He keeps saying, My boy, my boy, until I finally say, I’m not a boy, are you crazy? Go back, get away from our bed and go back to where you come from with your ugly bones, go back and leave us alone, but I’m saying it all inside my head. Before I have finished saying all I’m trying to say he has shat himself and it feels like we’re inside a toilet.
—
Mother had not wanted Father to leave for South Africa to begin with, but it was at that time when everybody was going to South Africa and other countries, some near, some far, some very, very far. They were leaving, just leaving in droves, and Father wanted to leave with everybody and he was going to leave and nothing would stop him.
Look at how things are falling apart, Felistus, he said one day, untying his shoes. We were sitting outside the shack and Mother was cooking. Father was coming from somewhere, I don’t know where, and he was angry. He was always angry those days; it was like the kind and funny man with the unending laugh and the many stories, the man who had been my father all those years, had gone and left an angry stranger behind. And little by little I was getting afraid of him, the angry stranger who was supposed to be my father.