Lullaby

  Helen says, “I don’t do fun.” With her other hand, Helen jingles her car keys at me.

  Then it happens. Oyster has his arm locked around Helen’s head from behind. That fast, he knocks her off her feet and as she throws her arms out for balance, he grabs the burning poem. The culling song.

  Helen drops to her knees, drops out of his grip, she cries just one little scream when her knees hit the concrete sidewalk, and she tumbles into the gutter. Her keys still in her fist.

  Oyster beats the burning page against his thigh. He holds it in both hands, his eyes twitching back and forth, reading down the page as the fire rolls up from the bottom.

  Both his hands are on fire before he lets go, yelling, “No!” and sticks his fingers into his mouth.

  Mona steps back, her hands pressed over her ears. Her eyes squeezed shut.

  Helen on her hands and knees in the gutter, next to the burning families, she looks up at Oyster. Oyster as good as dead. Helen’s hairdo is broken open and pink hair hangs in her eyes. Her nylons are torn. Her knees, bloody.

  “Don’t kill him!” Mona yells. “Don’t kill him, please! Don’t kill him!”

  Oyster drops to his knees and grabs at the burned paper on the sidewalk.

  And slow, slow as the hour hand on a clock, Helen rises to her feet. Her face is red. It’s not the red of a Burmese ruby. It’s more the red of the blood running down from her knees.

  With Oyster kneeling. With Helen standing over him. With Mona holding both hands over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut. Oyster’s sifting through his ashes. Helen’s bleeding. Me, I’m still watching from the phone booth, and a flock of starlings flies up from the roof of the library.

  Oyster, the evil, resentful, violent son Helen might have, if she still had a son.

  Just the same old power grab.

  “Go ahead,” Oyster says, and he lifts his head to meet Helen’s eyes. He smiles with just half his mouth and says, “You killed your real son. You can kill me.”

  And then it happens. Helen slaps him hard across the face, dragging her fistful of keys through each cheek. A moment later, more blood.

  Another scarred parasite. Another mutilated cockroach armoire.

  And Helen’s eyes snap up from Oyster bleeding to the starlings circling above us, and bird by bird, they drop. Their black feathers flashing an oily blue. Their dead eyes just staring black beads. Oyster holds his face, both his hands full of blood. Helen glaring up into the sky, the shining black bodies hiss down and bounce, bird by bird, around us on the concrete.

  Constructive destruction.

  Chapter 31

  Amile outside of town, Helen pulls over to the side of the highway. She puts on the car’s emergency flashers. Looking at nothing but her hands, her skintight calfskin driving gloves on the steering wheel, she says, “Get out.”

  On the windshield, there are little contact lenses of water. It’s starting to rain.

  “Fine,” Oyster says, and jerks his car door open. He says, “Isn’t this what people do with dogs they can’t house-train?”

  His face and hands are smeared red with blood. The devil’s face. His shattered blond hair sticks up from his forehead, stiff and red as devil’s horns. His red goatee. In all this red, his eyes are white. It’s not the white of white flags, surrender. It’s the white of hard-boiled eggs, crippled chickens in battery cages, factory farm misery and suffering and death.

  “Just like Adam and Eve getting evicted from the Garden of Eden,” he says. Oyster stands on the gravel shoulder of the highway and leans down to look at Mona still in the backseat, and he says, “You coming, Eve?”

  It’s not about love, it’s about control.

  Behind Oyster, the sun’s going down. Behind him is Russian thistle and Scotch broom and kudzu. Behind him, the whole world’s a mess.

  And Mona with the ruins of Western civilization braided into her hair, the bits of dream catcher and I Ching, she looks at her black fingernails in her lap and says, “Oyster, what you did is wrong.”

  Oyster puts his hand into the car, reaching across the seat to her, his hand red and clotted, and he says, “Mulberry, despite all your herbal good intentions, this trip is not going to work.” He says, “Come with me.”

  Mona sets her teeth together and snaps her face to look at him, saying, “You threw away my Indian crafts book.” She says, “That book was very important to me.”

  Some people still think knowledge is power.

  “Mulberry, honey,” Oyster says, and strokes her hair, the hair sticking to his bloody hand. He tucks a skein of hair behind her ear and says, “That book was fucked.”

  “Fine,” says Mona, and she pulls away and folds her arms.

  And Oyster says, “Fine.” And he slams the car door, his hand leaving a bloody print on the window.

  His red hands raised at his sides, Oyster steps back from the car. Shaking his head, he says, “Forget about me. I’m just another one of God’s alligators you can flush down the toilet.”

  Helen shifts the car into drive. She touches some switch, and Oyster’s door locks.

  And from outside the locked car, muffled and fuzzy, Oyster yells, “You can flush me, but I’ll just keep eating shit.” He shouts, “And I’ll just keep growing.”

  Helen puts on her turn signal and starts out into traffic.

  “You can forget me,” Oyster yells. With his red yelling devil face, his teeth big and white, he yells, “But that doesn’t mean I don’t still exist.”

  For whatever reason, the first gypsy moth that flew out a window in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1860 comes to mind.

  And driving, Helen touches her eye with one finger, and when she puts her hand back on the steering wheel, the glove finger is a darker brown. Wet. And for better or for worse. For richer or poorer. This is her life.

  Mona puts her face in both hands and starts to sob.

  And counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 . . ., I turn on the radio.

  Chapter 32

  The town’s name is Stone River on the map. Stone River, Nebraska. But when the Sarge and I get there, the sign at the city limits is painted over with the name “Shivapuram.”

  Nebraska.

  Population 17,000.

  In the middle of the street, straddling the center line dashes is a brown and white cow we have to swerve around. Chewing its cud, the cow doesn’t flinch.

  The downtown is two blocks of red-brick buildings. A yellow signal light blinks above the main intersection. A black cow is scratching its side against the metal pole of a stop sign. A white cow eats zinnias out of a window box in front of the post office. Another cow lies, blocking the sidewalk in front of the police station.

  You smell curry and patchouli. The deputy sheriff’s wearing sandals. The deputy, the mailman, the waitress in the café, the bartender in the tavern, they’re all wearing a black dot pasted between their eyes. A bindi.

  “Crimony” the Sarge says. “The whole town’s gone Hindu.”

  According to this week’s Psychic Wonders Bulletin, this is all because of the talking Judas Cow.

  In any slaughterhouse operation, the trick is to fool cows into climbing the chute that leads to the killing floor Cows trucked in from farms, they’re confused, scared. After hours or days squeezed into trucks, dehydrated and awake the whole trip, the cows are thrown in with other cows in the feedlot outside the slaughterhouse.

  How you get them to climb the chute is you send in the Judas Cow. This is really what this cow is called. It’s a cow that lives at the slaughterhouse. It mingles with the doomed cows, then leads them up the chute to the killing floor. The scared, spooked cows would never go except for the Judas Cow leading the way.

  The last step before the ax or the knife or the steel bolt through the skull, at that last moment, the Judas Cow steps aside. It survives to lead another herd to their death. It does this for its entire life.

  Until, according to the Psychic Wonders Bulletin, the Judas Cow at the Stone River Meatpacki
ng Plant, one day it stopped.

  The Judas Cow stood blocking the doorway to the killing floor. It refused to step aside and let the herd behind it die. With the whole slaughterhouse crew watching, the Judas Cow sat on its hind legs, the way a dog sits, the cow sat there in the doorway and looked at everyone with its brown cow eyes and talked.

  The Judas Cow talked.

  It said, “Reject your meat-eating ways.”

  The cow’s voice was the voice of a young woman. The cows in line behind it, they shifted their weight from foot to foot, waiting

  The slaughterhouse crew, their mouths fell open so fast their cigarettes dropped out on the bloody floor One man swallowed his chewing tobacco. A woman screamed through her fingers.

  The Judas Cow, sitting there, it raised one front leg to point its hoof at the crew and said, “The path to moksha is not through the pain and suffering of other creatures.”

  “Moksha” says the Psychic Wonders Bulletin, is a Sanskrit word for “redemption,” the end of the karmic cycle of reincarnation.

  The Judas Cow talked all afternoon. It said human beings had destroyed the natural world. It said mankind must stop exterminating other species. Man must limit his numbers, create a quota system which allows only a small percentage of the planet’s beings to be human. Humans could live any way they liked so long as they were not the majority

  It taught them a Hindi song. The cow made the whole crew sing along while it swung its hoof back and forth to the beat of the song.

  The cow answered all their questions about the nature of life and death.

  The Judas Cow just droned on and on and on.

  Now, here and now, the Sarge and I, we’re here after the fact. Witch-hunting We’re looking at all the cows released from the meatpacking plant that day. The plant is empty and quiet on the far edge of town. Someone’s painting the concrete building pink. Making it into an ashram. They’ve planted vegetables in the feedlot.

  The Judas Cow hasn’t said a word since. It eats the grass in people’s front yards. It drinks from birdbaths. People hang daisy chains around its neck.

  “They’re using the occupation spell,” the Sarge says. We’re stopped in the street, waiting for a huge slow hog to cross in front of our car. Other pigs and chickens stand in the shade under the hardware store awning.

  An occupation spell lets you project your consciousness into the physical body of another being

  I look at him, too long, and ask if he isn’t the pot calling the kettle black.

  “Animals, people,” the Sarge says, “you can put yourself into pretty much any living body.”

  And I say, yeah, tell me about it.

  We drive past the man painting the pink ashram, and the Sarge says, “If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate.”

  And I say, yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s already told me that one.

  The Sarge reaches across the front seat to put his wrinkled spotted hand over mine. The back of his hand is carpeted with gray hairs. His fingers are cold from handling his pistol. The Sarge squeezes my hand and says, “Do you still love me?”

  And I ask if I have a choice.

  Chapter 33

  The crowds of people shoulder around us, the women in halter tops and men in cowboy hats. People are eating caramel apples on sticks and shaved ice in paper cones. Dust is everywhere. Somebody steps on Helen’s foot and she pulls it back, saying, “I find that no matter how many people I kill, it’s never enough.”

  I say, let’s not talk shop.

  The ground is crisscrossed with thick black cables. In the darkness beyond the lights, engines burn diesel to make electricity. You can smell diesel and deep-fried food and vomit and powdered sugar.

  These days, this is what passes for fun.

  A scream sails past us. And a glimpse of Mona. It’s a carnival ride with a bright neon sign that says: The Octopus. Black metal arms, like twisted spokes, turn around a hub. At the same time, they dip up and down. At the end of each arm is a seat, and each seat spins on its own hub. The scream sails by again, and a banner of red and black hair. Her silver chains and charms are flung straight out from the side of Mona’s neck. Both her hands are clamped on the guard bar fastened across her lap.

  The ruins of Western civilization, the turrets and towers and chimneys, fly out of Mona’s hair. An I Ching coin bullets past us.

  Helen watches her, saying, “I guess Mona got her flying spell.”

  My pager goes off again. It’s the same number as the police detective. A new savior is already hot on my tail.

  The more people die, the more things stay the same.

  I turn the pager off.

  And watching Mona scream by, Helen says, “Bad news?”

  I say, nothing important.

  In her pink high heels, Helen picks through the mud and sawdust, stepping over the black power cables.

  Holding out my hand, I say, “Here.”

  And she takes it. And I don’t let go. And she doesn’t seem to mind. And we’re walking hand in hand. And it’s nice.

  She’s only got a few big rings left so it doesn’t hurt as much as you’d think.

  The carnival rides thrash the air around us, diamond-white, emerald-green, ruby-red lights, turquoise and sapphire-blue lights, the yellow of citrons, the orange of honey amber. Rock music blares out of speakers mounted on poles everywhere.

  These rock-oholics. These quiet-ophobics.

  I ask Helen, when was the last time she rode a Ferris wheel?

  Everywhere, there are men and women, hand in hand, kissing. They’re feeding each other shreds of pink cotton candy. They walk side by side, each with one hand stuck in the butt pocket of the other’s tight jeans.

  Watching the crowd, Helen says, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but when was your last time?”

  My last time for what?

  “You know.”

  I’m not sure if my last time counts, but it must be about eighteen years ago.

  And Helen smiles and says, “It’s no wonder you walk funny.” She says, “I have twenty years and counting since John.”

  On the ground, with the sawdust and cables, there’s a crumbled newspaper page. A three-column advertisement says:

  Attention Patrons of the Helen Boyle Real Estate Agency

  The ad says, “Have you been sold a haunted house? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.”

  Then Oyster’s cell phone number. Then I say, please, Helen, why did you tell him that stuff?

  Helen looks down at the newspaper ad. With her pink shoe, she grinds it into the mud, saying, “For the same reason I didn’t kill him. He could be very lovable at times.”

  Next to the ad, covered in mud is the photo of another dead fashion model.

  Looking up at the Ferris wheel, a ring of red and white fluorescent tubes holding seats that sway full of people, Helen says, “That looks doable.”

  A man stops the wheel and all the carts swing in place while Helen and I sit on the red plastic cushion and the man snaps a guard bar shut across our laps. He steps back and pulls a lever, and the big diesel engine catches. The Ferris wheel jerks as if it’s rolling backward, and Helen and I rise into the darkness.

  Halfway up into the night, the wheel jerks to a stop. Our seat swings, and Helen makes a fast grab for the guard bar. A diamond solitaire slips off one finger and flashes straight through the struts and lights, through the colors and faces, down into the gears of the machine.

  Helen looks after it, saying, “Well, that was roughly thirty-five thousand dollars.”

  I say, maybe it’s okay. It’s a diamond.

  And Helen says that’s the problem. Gemstones are the hardest things on earth, but they still break. They can take constant stress and pressure, but a sudden, sharp impact can shatter them into dust.

  Across the midway floor, Mona comes running over the sawdust to stand below us, waving both hands. She jumps in place and yells, “Whooooo! Go, Hele
n!”

  The wheel jerks, starting again. The seat tilts, and Helen’s purse starts to fall but she grabs it. The gray rock’s still inside it. The gift from Oyster’s coven. Instead of her purse, her planner book slides off the seat, flapping open in the air, tumbling down to land in the sawdust, and Mona runs over and picks it up.

  Mona slaps the book on her thigh to knock off the sawdust, then shakes it in the air to show it’s okay.

  Helen says, “Thank God for Mona.”

  I say, Mona said you planned to kill me.

  And Helen says, “She told me that you wanted to kill me.”

  We both look at each other.

  I say, thank God for Mona.

  And Helen says, “Buy me some caramel corn?”

  On the ground, farther and farther away, Mona’s looking through the pages of the planner. Every day, the name of Helen’s political target.

  Looking up, out of the colored lights and into the night sky, we’re getting closer to the stars. Mona once said that stars are the best part of being alive. On the other side, where people go after they die, they can’t see the stars.

  Think of deep outer space, the incredible cold and quiet. The heaven where silence is reward enough.

  I tell Helen that I need to go home and clean something up. It has to be pretty soon, before things get worse.

  The dead fashion models. Nash. The police detectives. All of it. How he got the culling spell, I don’t know.

  We rise higher, farther away from the smells, away from the diesel engine noise. We rise up into the quiet and cold. Mona, reading the planner book, gets smaller. All the crowds of people, their money and elbows and cowboy boots, get smaller. The food booths and the portable toilets get smaller. The screams and rock music, smaller.

  At the top, we jerk to a stop. Our seat sways less and less until we’re sitting still. This high up, the breeze teases, rats, backcombs Helen’s pink bubble of hair. The neon and grease and mud, from this far away it all looks perfect. Perfect, safe, and happy. The music’s just a dull thud, thud, thud.

  This is how we must look to God.