“What’s it about?”
“Evil pigmen.”
“Piggies aren’t evil,” Sinsemilla corrected. “Piggies are sweet, gentle creatures.”
“Well, these aren’t pigs as we know them. These are from another dimension.”
“People are evil, not piggies.”
“Not all people are evil,” Leilani countered in defense of her species, finally looking up from the book. “Mother Teresa wasn’t evil.”
“Evil,” Sinsemilla insisted.
“Haley Joel Osment isn’t evil. He’s cute.”
“The actor kid? Evil. All of us are evil, baby. We’re a cancer on the planet,” Sinsemilla said with a smile that was probably like the one that she had worn when the doctors shot enough megawatts of electricity through her brain to fry bacon on her forehead.
“Anyway, these are pigmen. Not just pigs.”
“Baby, Lani, trust me. If you combined a piggy and a man, the natural goodness of the piggy would overcome the evil of the man. Pigmen would never be evil. They’d be good.”
“Well, these pigmen are total bastards,” Leilani said, wondering if anyone, anywhere, in the history of the world, had ever engaged in philosophical discussions like those that her mother inspired. As far as she was aware, Plato and Socrates hadn’t conducted a dialogue on the morality and the motives of pigmen from other dimensions. “These particular pigmen,” she said, tapping the book, “would gut you with their tusks as soon as look at you.”
“Tusks? They sound more like boars than piggies.”
“They’re pigs,” Leilani assured her. “Pigmen. Evil, nasty, rude, obnoxious, filthy pigmen.”
“Boarmen,” Sinsemilla said with a serious expression that most people reserved for news of untimely deaths, “would never be evil, either. Piggymen and boarmen would both be good. So would monkeymen, chickenmen, dogmen, or any type of animal-man crossbreed.”
Leilani wished that she could fetch her journal and record this conversation in her invented form of shorthand without making her mother suspicious as to the true nature of the diary. “There aren’t any chickenmen in this story, Mother. This is literature.”
“Smart as you are, you should be reading something enlightening, not piggymen books. Maybe you’re old enough to read Brautigan.”
“I’ve already read him.”
Sinsemilla looked surprised. “You have? When?”
“Before birth. You were reading him even back then, over and over again, and I just absorbed it all through the placenta.”
Sinsemilla took this declaration seriously and was delighted. Her expression brightened. “Cool. That’s so cool.” Then a sly look found fox features in her face and brought them to the fore as if she were undergoing a moon-driven transformation. She leaned across the table and whispered, “You want to know a secret?”
This question alarmed Leilani. The impending revelation surely involved whatever the mother and the pseudofather had been murmuring and whispering about all the way from Santa Ana to San Bernardino, to sun-baked Barstow, to Baker and beyond. Anything that tickled them could not be good news for Leilani.
“I’m making a little piggy right now,” Sinsemilla whispered.
On some level, perhaps Leilani knew immediately what her mother meant but simply couldn’t bear to contemplate it.
Reading her daughter’s blank expression, Sinsemilla gave up the whisper and spoke slowly, as though Leilani were thickheaded. “I’m making … a little piggy… right now.”
Leilani couldn’t keep the revulsion out of her voice. “Oh, God.” ‘ “This time, I’m going to do it right,” Sinsemilla assured her.
“You’re pregnant.”
“I used a home-pregnancy test two days ago. That’s why I bought thingy, my little snaky fella.” She indicated her left hand, where the bite was now covered by a large Band-Aid. “He was my gift to me for being preggers.”
Leilani knew that she was dead already, still breathing but as good as dead, not on her birthday next February, but much sooner. She didn’t know why this should be true, why her mother’s pregnancy meant that she herself was facing an earlier execution date, but she had no doubt that her instinct could be trusted.
“When you were such a baby about poor thingy,” Sinsemilla said, “I thought you brought bad luck. Killing thingy, maybe you jinxed me, and maybe I wasn’t knocked up anymore. But I gave myself another test yesterday and”—she patted her belly—“piggy’s still in the pen.”
Nausea brought a sudden flood of saliva to Leilani’s mouth, and she swallowed hard.
“Your daddy, Preston, he’s wanted this for a long time, but I wasn’t ready till now.”
Leilani looked toward the driver’s seat, toward Preston Maddoc.
“See, baby, I needed time to figure out why you and Luki never developed psychic powers even though I gave you, like, a magic bus full of truly fine psychedelics from my blood to yours while you were in the mommy oven.”
The back of the pull-down sun visor featured a makeup mirror. Even at a distance of sixteen or eighteen feet, Leilani was able to discern Maddoc’s eyes repeatedly shifting focus from the highway to the mirror in which he could see her and Sinsemilla.
“And then it just hit me — I have to stay natural! Sure, I was doing peyote, you know, cactus buttons, and I was doing psilocybin, from mushrooms. But I also did some DMT and plenty of LSD, and that shit is synthetic, Lani baby, it’s man-made.”
Pain throbbed in Leilani’s deformed hand. She realized that with both hands she was twisting the paperback that she’d been reading.
“Psychic power comes from Gaea, see, from Earth herself, she’s alive, and if you resonate with her, baby, she gives you a gift.”
Without realizing what she’d been doing, Leilani had broken the spine of the book, crumpled the cover, and wadded some of the pages. She put the book aside and held her aching left hand in her right.
“But, baby, how can you resonate when you’re being strummed with both the good natural hallucinogens like peyote but also hammered by chemlab crap like LSD? That’s where I went wrong.”
Maddoc wanted to make a baby with Sinsemilla, knowing full well that throughout pregnancy she’d be heavily consuming hallucinogens, resulting in a high likelihood of yet another infant with severe birth defects.
“Yeah, went way wrong with the synthetic crap. I’m enlightened now. This time, I’m going to use nothing but pot, peyote, psilocybin — all natural, wholesome. And this time, I’m going to get myself a miracle child.”
Dr. Doom wasn’t also Mr. Sentimentality. He didn’t get weepy on anniversaries or while watching sad movies. You couldn’t imagine him playing with children, reading fairy tales to children, relating to children. The desire to have a child with anyone, let alone with this woman under these circumstances, was out of character for him. His motives were as mysterious as his furtive eyes glimpsed in the mirror on the sun visor.
Sinsemilla drew the damaged paperback across the table and began to smooth the rumpled pages as she talked. “So if Gaea smiles on us, we’ll have more than one miracle baby. Two, three, maybe a litter.” She grinned mischievously and winked. “Maybe I’ll just curl up on a blanket in the corner, like a true bitch, with all my little puppies squirming against me, so many tiny hungry mouths competing for just two tits.”
All of her life, Leilani had lived in the cold tides of this deep strange sea called Sinsemilla, struggling against its drowning currents, riding out daily squalls and storms, as though she were a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a floating length of shattered deck plank, grimly aware of dark and murderous shapes circling hungrily in the
fathoms under her. During these nine years, as far back as she could remember, she had coped with every surprise and every writhing horror this sea threw at her. Although she hadn’t lost respect for the deadly power of the elemental force called Sinsemilla, although she remained wary and always prepared for hurricanes, her ability to cope had gradually freed her from most of the fear that had plagued her as a younger child. When strangeness is the fundamental substance of your existence, it loses its power to terrorize, and when you tread weirdness like water for nine years, you gain the confidence to face the unexpected, and even the unknown, with equanimity.