There Is No Year - Blake Butler [7]
The father did not know what had made him talk like that.
The father could not laugh.
HOW THE SON GOT SICK
For years the son believed the father when the father said he owned a live man’s head—though years later, in the telling, the father swore he’d said nothing of the kind. The father told the son he kept the head locked in the attic in a safe in their old house. He said he’d bought the head from a woman on the street—a woman with wrinkled, thumbless hands and a mustache. The father claimed the head particular in its eating. The head liked ranch dressing on fruit salad. The head liked mayo by itself. The father told the son not to try to see the head because the head would bite the son. The father said the head had mentioned the son in particular as a thing he meant to eat.
The son went on for years and years with the head inside his head. He began to learn other things about it. He and the head had long talks and walked in sunsets. The head told him things about money and pornography and chess and investing and wilderness survival. The son was three years old at the beginning, and the head was there still when he was nine. All through those years the son tried to guess the safe’s combination with no luck, though his dry mouth spoke the numbers in the night.
The son’s tenth birthday morning bore one condition: go. And so he’d gone. The son had gotten out of bed, sweated sopping wet with eyes not open, and walked downstairs and left the house. He walked straight on into the forest. He was thinking anything at all. He came to a small, hardwood gazebo. The gazebo was black and had words emblazoned, long words, names on names. A beehive hung from a cord in the gazebo’s ceiling’s center. In the son’s hands he found a stick. With the stick he beat the hive down with wide swinging, expecting to be stung—stung and stung and swollen up all over, growing several times himself—the son had thoughts inside his head. Instead, the hive hit the ground in silence, the bees all stunned in seasoned sleep—a queen among them, held a god.
The son felt cheated. The son winged rocks. He shouted sick words into the hive’s holes. He heaved the hive into the air over and over and watched it hit the ground. No matter what it was the son did the son could not get the bees to buzz up, to surround him, though on his tenth toss, the hive fell open. Inside the hive was chock with mazy tunnel. Something oozing, some white brine, a sound.
Cut in the wax there, runned with honey, the son saw the combination.
KEYS
In the morning, crushed with a warm air, the mother could not think of where to hide. She’d been left alone in the house again, like every other day—the father working, son at school. Usually the mother liked to be alone, swum in the peace. Sometimes she took her clothes off and went out into the backyard and stood and sang and walked around, performing common household habits like any other except with her boobs and ass hung in the sun, as she had when she was teenaged on strange beaches on vacation from her childhood house. The mother felt young out in the wrecked light naked. The mother could spend years inside those days.
Today the mother’s spit was brown like coffee. She ground her teeth, felt them diminish. She could not shake the sense of someone there behind her. She kept feeling something brush against her back. In all the rooms the curtains seemed to rustle even when the a/c had been turned off. She’d been finding keys all around the house. She’d found a key in the baking powder. She’d found a key taped to the window. A key inside a certain book on a certain shelf. A key tied into her hair. All the keys unlocked the house, though some had no teeth. The mother hid the keys in certain places. Still she kept hearing the front door open. She heard something moving on the roof.
She tried to hide in the hallway closet but something kept rustling in the towels. She tried to hide in the washing machine but it kept turning itself on. Even when she stood and watched the room in a long mirror she knew things happened