The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [64]
Having organized the particulars of their own lives, Annie and Buster began working on their environment, cleaning the house, which was no small task. Annie carried bag after bag, rattling with empty bottles of booze, to the garage. Buster removed the dozens and dozens of gauze and bandages from his night table, crusted with blood, still wet with ointment, which he’d never bothered to throw away, had simply put aside to grow into some strange, living sculpture of his recovery. They helped each other make their beds, vacuumed the floors, and organized their meager belongings. They met in their shared bathroom and made it sparkle. It wasn’t even noon and they had accomplished more than they had in the previous year.
The living room, the largest room in the house by far, was filled with old Fang projects, notes, and outlines, stacked from top to bottom with ephemera. She had no idea where anything went, how to even begin devising a filing system, and so she focused on the scattered LPs on the floor, a collection of sound that, to this day, baffled her.
Caleb and Camille liked two kinds of music—esoteric, impenetrable things like John Cage and the apocalyptic folk of Current 93, and then the dumbest, loudest music possible, punk rock. When they were little children, their parents had sung Black Flag’s “Six Pack” to them before bed as if it were a lullaby. “I was born with a bottle in my mouth,” their mother would sing, and then their father would chime in, “Six Pack!” At the end, before kissing Annie and Buster on their foreheads, Caleb and Camille would whisper, “Six Pack! Six Pack! Six Pack!” and then turn off the light.
While she organized the albums in the cabinet beneath the hi-fi, she placed the James Chance and the Contortions album Buy on the phonograph and cued up the fifth song, which she remembered her parents often playing before they would all head out into the world to create some new form of chaos. It was not an unpleasant memory, which surprised her, the excitement of not knowing what would happen, watching her parents get more and more worked up about the thing they were making, knowing it wouldn’t work without her and Buster. The strange, jangly music made its way out of the speakers and it wasn’t long before Buster emerged from the hallway, tapping his foot. Annie waved him over and they stood in front of the speaker, nodding their heads, singing along, “Contort yourself, contort yourself.” If Annie could not drink, if Buster could not overmedicate, then dancing to abrasive, atonal jazz-punk would have to do. The music screeched and spilled over the edges of normal rhythm, but Buster and Annie did not miss a step, dancing the only way they’d ever known, poorly, but with great enthusiasm. If there was a name for this dance, it would be The Fang.
The phone rang three times before either of them even heard it, was able to tease the sound out of the tangle of noise that surrounded them. Annie reached the phone in the kitchen just as the answering machine was saying, “The Fangs are dead,” and Annie said, out of breath, “We’re not dead! Sorry, we’re here. Sorry.” There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, and Annie figured the caller had been scared off, until she heard a man’s composed, patient voice answer, “Mrs. Fang?”
“Yes,” Annie said.
The voice became slightly more interested. “Camille Fang?” he said.
“Oh! No, I’m sorry,” Annie said. “I’m Annie. I’m Mrs. Fang’s daughter. I’m Camille’s daughter.” Was she drunk? She thought for a second. No, she definitely wasn’t drunk. She tried to get it together.
“My mother is not here,” she continued.
“You’re her daughter?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, this is Officer Dunham,” he said, and Annie was already prepared for what would follow. Arrests had been made. Her parents were in trouble, just enough to be a nuisance. Bail would be arranged. She felt, for a brief second, a slight admiration for her parents that, after the incident