We’d gotten as far as the door when that sound came again, more solid this time, mallet into thicker bone, and when I looked toward the fire and what was going on there I couldn’t make out which was Cheyenne and which Axl, but it didn’t matter, they were taking turns, both silhouettes hopping from foot to foot in their glee, and naturally Nihil loved it, ate it up like ambrosia.
With the boy in my arms I rushed out of the slaughterhouse and through the woods, breath in plumes, the hiss of fresh snow whispering through the trees. In that stillness I was the bull, the violator, shoes mashing layers of dead leaves while I plotted a course to the nearest hospital, Central DuPage probably, I could hand him over at the emergency entrance and fade before anyone could get my license plate, I didn’t even know this boy, how could they connect us?
The lights of the houses grew brighter ahead, and the boy, so weightless before, became heavier with each step. I stopped to adjust and set him down a moment, braced against one bent knee, but in the twilight his face began to streak, blood from both nostrils, and his limbs trembled, weak as a rabbit’s heartbeat, and that was it, he had no more of anything. I watched it leave.
We lay in the leaves and sticks and frost, dusted with snow, then I looked back at the slaughterhouse, where smoke rose from the gabled tower, and I wondered if I shouldn’t see the rest of it through. I’d already amazed myself, taking an actual moral stand on something, so I left the boy on the path for now and went back, back to the killing floor.
Their sledge now still, Cheyenne and Axl were crouched before the fire, wiping their faces clean, while I stood before Nihil. I could cut him into pieces, burn him, stop it here before his dream spread any further. He was as revivified as I’d yet seen, Andre’s skull especially resonant maybe, and his eyes were open, looking, comprehending. They fixed on me with an unblinking struggle to contract his focus to one tiny mite before him.
“I,” he whispered, slow and laborious, “know … you…”
I shriveled. You cannot look upon such a thing, or hear its voice, and feel sure of anything, especially conquering it, except for one: Nothing is as you believed, and is probably worse.
His eyes never left me, two dark malignant stars.
“Ohhhh,” his withered lungs creaked, “negative…”
I’d heard all I wanted, drifting over to sit beside the fire, warming my hands because there was nothing else to do until rush hour traffic thinned. Cheyenne and Axl watched with expectation now that Andre had gone the way of the weak, seeming to expect me to bring them their hamburgers now. Later, when I left, I almost told them to go home until I remembered they were, and the last I saw of them they were tugging on the chains to hoist Nihil and the springs up, up, higher, into the gabled tower and gathering smoke, where he might better see and hear and smell all.
O, he’d said, negative, in recognition, and now I knew what it meant, but could never recall having told Jamey my blood type.
On the path I retrieved the boy, because he deserved better, and carried him to my car, no suburban dweller stopping us because I looked like I knew what I was doing, every wet mile of the way, southeast, into a buffering industrial zone before Chicago peters out into farmland.
No one lived near, and it was too late for blue collars and too cold for gangbangers. We had the wastescape to ourselves, a jagged field of refuse like the worst of Belfast or Beirut, or an elephant graveyard, only for a city, iron bones and entrails everywhere you looked. On clearer days you could look north and see the skyscrapers of downtown.
I could never have left the boy at the slaughterhouse, had no reason to believe he had much of any family who would do right by him and his pock-burned arm, so I carried him into the scrapyard for the most fitting mausoleum I knew: the big boiler that Mae and Jamey and I had turned into a giant drum one Sunday last summer.
This time it was empty, although Mae had never known any different, and it was out of the wind and elements, just a cut-out heart that had long ago ceased thumping. In there I laid him, with his soggy head, wrapped in an olive coat big enough for a shroud, and I wished I’d had a flower or two to leave, but it was the wrong season, and always would be for him.
*
We’d chanced across the boiler while exploring, Jamey always on the lookout for new sound sources, and to him this place was a playground, if one where anyplace you fell you’d contract tetanus. I remember him running both hands over the boiler’s plated hull, asking, “Who could throw away something with this much potential?”
“The world is full of stupid people,” Mae said. “Why not just give up and try to blend?”
At Jamey’s instigation we took bars of scrap metal and began hammering away to see what the thing sounded like, a deep hollow gonging of incredible density. Soon we found our rhythm to work around, something of our individual selves given over to a group mind. It happened naturally, bypassing thought, the reverberations taking us over as we swung and sweated and felt our arms thrumming with each impact, down to the pits of our stomachs, until it felt as though the boiler were playing us instead. We served it, dancing to its massive peal, until we felt we might raise such shockwaves we could collapse the city into piles of rubble, if only we had the stamina to play that long.
And when our arms gave out and echoes rang, Jamey wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “I’ve got to bring my remote DAT down and record this sometime,” then he ran to a port where some intake pipe might’ve once connected, crawling halfway through to listen to the last dying echo.
We asked him what it was like, if he heard God, and moments later he backed out, with a subdued and thoughtful frown. He dug for car keys and handed them to Mae, asking if she’d do him an enormous favor and check his trunk, he might’ve left a tape deck in there after all.
Mae said, “I’m nobody’s coolie, you know,” but went anyway.
“You lied, didn’t you?” I said, because he had, and when Mae was halfway to the car Jamey motioned me to follow his lead and we crawled into the boiler like a giant womb.
We stared at the withering vagrant curled in his rags and filth, features sunken, one desiccated hand atop an empty bottle, and Jamey wondered aloud how long he’d been there, and I said long enough to turn halfway into a mummy, baked inside here.
“Why didn’t you want Mae to know?” I asked.
“I just didn’t,” he said, and shrugged. Then: “She’s seen enough for being nineteen. Her mother quit eating, some reason, disappointed in Mae, like that. Shriveled up and died. She didn’t say much. I thought this guy might…”
No need to finish.
“I didn’t know any of that,” I said.
“Now you do.”
Why I made the connection I don’t know, but under the crud and whiskers and haggard years this vagrant could’ve been fifty, and I said, “For all I know? That could be my father.”
Jamey nodded, understanding everything. “For all I know, a year from now, it could be me.” Then he nudged my arm. “Joke.”
We left the boiler, nothing more to see or say. Back at the car Mae told him thanks for nothing, sending her on a false alarm, but she was quick to forgive. Jamey eased into a big smile, just the most heartening thing, as this time it carried up to his eyes, and it meant different things to each of us, I’m sure, but to both of us he seemed to be saying that everything was going to be okay … and for the rest of that day, at least, it really was.