The Family Fang: A Novel (4 page)

The soldiers shouted and exchanged high fives and, when Buster returned, took turns roughly embracing him, as if they had just rescued him from a cave-in or pulled him out of a dark well. “If I was any happier,” Kenny said, “I would combust.” Buster pulled free of their arms and snatched the last unopened beer from the cooler. “Again,” he said and, without waiting for an answer, ran into the growing dark without fear, every single part of his body overwhelmed with the task of being alive.

W
hen Buster awoke from unconsciousness, he saw, with some degree of difficulty, Joseph’s face hovering over him. “Oh god,” Joseph wailed, “I thought for sure that you were dead.” Buster could not turn his head and his vision went in and out of focus. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I shot you, goddamn it,” Joseph yelled, “I shot you in the face, Buster.” He heard Kenny shout, “We’re driving you to the hospital, Buster, okay?”

“What?” Buster asked. He understood that people were shouting but he could hardly hear them. “It’s pretty bad,” Joseph said. “My face?” Buster asked, still confused. He moved to touch the right side of his face, which was numb and on fire at the same time, but Joseph grabbed his wrist to stop him. “You probably shouldn’t do that,” he said. “Is something wrong with it?” Buster asked. “It’s still there,” Joseph said, “but it’s not . . . correct.” Buster made the decision, which took some degree of concentration, to go back to sleep, but Joseph would not allow this. “You are definitely concussed,” he told Buster. “Just listen to my voice and try to stay awake.”

There was an awkward silence and then Joseph said, “I wrote this story last week for my class. It was about this guy who had just come back from Iraq, but it’s not supposed to be me. It’s an entirely different person. This guy lives in Mississippi. So, he’s back in his hometown after being away for almost ten years, and he’s having a drink at this bar. When he goes to play some pinball, an old friend from high school comes up to him and they start to talk.” Joseph paused and then squeezed Buster’s hand. “Are you still awake?” he asked. Buster tried to nod, but couldn’t and so he said, “I’m awake. I’m listening.”

“Good. Okay,” Joseph continued, “so they’re catching up and getting drunk and the bar’s starting to close. The main character tells this guy about how he’s trying to get a job and make some money so he can move out of his parents’ house and get his own place. Well, this guy tells the main character that he’ll give him five hundred bucks if he’ll do something for him. How does that sound so far?” Buster wondered if he was dying, if, when Joseph reached the end of his story, he would be dead. “It sounds pretty good,” he answered.

“The guy has this dog that he loves and now his ex-wife has the dog and won’t give it back to him. So he asks the main character to steal the dog and bring it to him and he’ll give him five hundred bucks. That’s the conflict. So the main character thinks about it and he goes back and forth and finally, two days later, he calls the guy and tells him he’ll do it.”

“Uh-oh,” Buster said.

“I know,” Joseph said, “bad idea. So he breaks into the ex-wife’s house one night and steals the dog but something goes wrong. The dog thinks he’s an intruder, which he is, and starts to attack him, takes a big chunk out of his arm. Well, he manages to get the dog outside and into the car, but when he gets home, he realizes that the dog is dead, that he crushed the dog’s windpipe or something, I wasn’t too specific. Anyways, the dog is dead.”

“We’re almost there,” Kenny shouted.

“So the main character takes a shovel and buries the dog in his parents’ backyard. When he’s done, he walks to the bus station, buys a ticket, and gets on a bus without knowing where it’s headed. So he’s on the bus, his arm is bleeding like hell but he’s trying not to let anyone notice, and he hopes that wherever he ends up next will be a good place. That’s the end.”

“I like it,” Buster said.

Joseph smiled. “I’m still working on it.”

“It’s really good, Joseph,” Buster said.

“I still can’t figure out if it’s a happy ending or a sad ending,” Joseph said.

“We’re here,” Kenny said, the car coming to an abrupt stop.

“It’s happy and sad,” Buster said, drifting off. “Most endings are happy and sad at the same time.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Joseph said.

“I am?” Buster asked.

“You’re indestructible,” Joseph said.

“I’m invincible,” Buster corrected.

“You’re impervious to pain,” Joseph continued.

“I’m immortal,” Buster said and then passed out, hoping that wherever he ended up next would be a good place.

a modest proposal, july 1988

artists: caleb and camille fang

I
t was time for a vacation, so they all got fake IDs. The Fangs had just recently received a prestigious grant, more than three hundred thousand dollars, and they were going to celebrate, the counterfeit IDs spread out on the table. Mr. and Mrs. Fang were Ronnie Payne and Grace Truman. The children were allowed to choose their own names. Annie was Clara Bow, and Buster was Nick Fury. In exchange for this staging of real life, their parents had promised Annie and Buster that there would be no art during the four days they would be at the beach, nothing but a normal family getting sunburned and buying trinkets made out of seashells and eating food that was either deep fried or dipped in chocolate or both.

Inside the airport, Mr. and Mrs. Fang read magazines about people who were supposedly famous but whom they had never heard of, forcing down banal information about miracle diets and movies they would never see—all in the interests of establishing their characters. Ronnie owned a string of Pizza Huts and had been married and divorced three times. Grace was a nurse who had met Ronnie in rehab and they had been living together for the past nine months. Were they in love? Probably. “Are you going to tell me what you’re going to say?” Mr. Fang asked his wife. “It’s a surprise,” Mrs. Fang said. “I think I know what you’ll say,” he said, and his wife smiled. “I bet you think you do,” she answered.

Annie sat alone in an empty aisle of chairs and sketched various people in the airport. She held a fistful of colored pencils like a bouquet of flowers and softly scratched an image into the sheet of paper in the notebook on her lap. Ten yards away, a man with a huge, hooked nose and a pair of oversize sunglasses slouched in his chair and took surreptitious pulls from a silver flask in his jacket pocket. Annie smiled as she emphasized the already outlandish features of this man, turning her drawing into something not quite caricature and not quite portraiture. As she studied him for more details, he suddenly looked in her direction and she felt her face grow hot. She winced and returned her gaze to the notebook, running a lightning bolt of pencil marks across the image she had just drawn until it was unrecognizable, no evidence of her interest. She returned the notebook and pencils to her book bag and rehearsed her story. Nearly penniless, her mother had left Clara with her grandmother and moved to Florida to find a job. After six months, Clara was finally going to live with her mother again. “It’s a brand-new start for us,” Annie would say to the flight attendant or neighboring passenger when asked. If she did it right, and she always did, someone would slip her a twenty-dollar bill and tell her to take care of herself. When they finally got to Florida, Annie imagined that she would take the twenty dollars and bet it on jai alai while she drank a Shirley Temple so large it took three straws to reach the bottom of the glass.

Buster had found that a plausible backstory took too long to establish and provided too many opportunities to be found out. So he had begun to create obviously false stories that, in turn, established a kind of backstory of its own, that of a bizarre child who should be avoided. As he sat in the airport bar and drank glass after glass of lemon-lime soda and ate handfuls of peanuts and pretzels, he had decided that, should someone ask, he was not a real child but a robot built and designed by a scientific genius. A childless couple had ordered him and he was now being delivered to them in Florida. Beep-bop-boop. Buster wasn’t even sure what the happening was going to be this time. His parents had only told him that he would have to pretend that they were not his real parents, to travel separately on the plane, and, when the event occurred, to react according to the general mood of the audience. “The less you know, the better,” his father said. “It’ll be a surprise,” his mother told him, “you like surprises don’t you?” Buster shook his head. He did not.

O
n the plane, Annie and Buster were each chaperoned by a different stewardess into aisle seats on either side of the first row so they were now just a few feet apart from each other and pretending they had never before met. The children watched their parents stroll down the aisle, hand in hand. Buster could not help but stare as they passed and Mr. Fang winked as they made their way to their seats in the middle of the plane. Buster asked a stewardess for peanuts and, when she brought him three packages, he asked for one more. The stewardess turned away from Buster to get another packet of peanuts and rolled her eyes. Annie saw this and felt her body go tense, one degree shy of anger. When the stewardess returned with her brother’s peanuts, Annie tugged on her sleeve and asked for five packets of peanuts, her eyes like slits, hoping for trouble that would overshadow whatever would happen later on the flight. The woman seemed unnerved by Annie’s nearly imperceptible quivering and hurried away to find more peanuts. As soon as she received her bounty, Annie turned to Buster and dumped them in his lap. “Thank you,” Buster said. “You’re welcome, kid,” Annie said.

Everyone settled in, the stewardess having explained what to do in case of an emergency landing, Annie and Buster hoped that whatever their parents had planned would not end with the two of them floating in the ocean, holding on to their seat cushions, waiting for help that may or may not arrive.

More than an hour into the flight, the children turned to watch Mr. Fang walk down the aisle and place his hand on the elbow of one of the stewardesses. Annie and Buster strained to listen to their father but they could not make out what he was saying. He held something out toward the stewardess and her eyes grew wide and she placed her hand over her mouth. She looked like she was going to cry. Mr. Fang gestured toward the front of the plane and the stewardess nodded, leading him toward the intercom system. Annie wondered how on earth they would avoid jail time if their parents tried to hijack the plane. When he passed by their seats, Buster resisted the urge to grab his father’s hand, to say, “Dad?” and ruin the entire event. Annie sketched a drawing of two people, a boy and a girl, jumping out of a plane, parachutes deployed, nothing below them but the emptiness of the blank paper.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the stewardess said, “we have a very important message and we need all of you to listen very carefully. This man here, Mr. Ronnie Payne, needs to say something.” There was the hum of silence over the intercom and then the children heard their father’s voice say, “I don’t want to take up much of your time, folks. I’m over there in Row 17, Seat C, and right next to that seat is my special lady, Miss Grace Truman. Wave to everybody, honey.” Everyone on the plane turned to watch their mother’s hand raised above the seats as she gave an uncertain wave to the rest of the passengers. “Well,” their father continued, “this little lady means a lot to me and I was going to do this when we got to Florida but I just can’t wait. Grace Truman, would you marry me?” Mr. Fang handed the microphone to the stewardess and walked back to Row 17. Annie and Buster wanted to run down the aisle to watch the proceedings, but they stayed in their seats, craning their necks to see what would come next. Their father knelt in the aisle beside Mrs. Fang, whom the children could not see, and everything was silent except for the sound of the engines keeping the plane aloft. Annie and Buster both whispered the same word under their breath, “Yes.”

Suddenly, Mr. Fang stood and shouted, “She says yes!” The entire airplane began to cheer and several men got out of their seats to shake their father’s hand while Mrs. Fang displayed the ring to an older woman in the seat next to her. The sound of corks popping echoed through the cabin and the stewardesses began to walk down the aisle with trays filled with glasses of champagne. The pilot’s deep, smooth voice came over the intercom and he said, “A toast to the happy couple.” Buster managed to swipe two flutes before anyone noticed and handed one of them to Annie. “Why, thank you, little boy,” Annie said. “Don’t mention it,” Buster replied. They clinked glasses and downed the contents in one swallow, happily ignoring the burn as it went down their throats.

T
hey spent the next four days dizzy from overexposure to the sun and still giddy from the success of the marriage proposal. They read pulp novels and comic books and would sleep at odd hours. On the beach, they took turns burying one another up to their necks in the sand and then chased each other with jellyfish hanging on the ends of sticks. They stood in the ocean as waves gently broke across their legs while they ate cotton candy that held the slight tang of salt water. If told this kind of happiness was something that could be attained by everyone, the Fangs would not have believed it.

O
n the plane ride back home, everyone again separated and under assumed names, their father once again nudged the stewardess, showed her the ring he had purchased for his girlfriend, and asked for the use of the intercom. Once again, the stewardess was nearly moved to tears by the romantic nature of the request and led him to the front of the plane. Buster tore open his eighth bag of peanuts and arranged the nuts so as to form the word
YES
on his folded-down tray.

“I’m over there in Row 14, Seat A, and my girlfriend, Grace Truman, is in the next seat over. Grace, honey, could you come up here for a second, please?” Mrs. Fang shook her head, embarrassed, but Mr. Fang continued to call for her until she finally stood up and walked over to her husband. When she arrived, Mr. Fang dropped to a knee, opened the tiny box in his hand, and displayed the ring, her own wedding ring. Their four days in the sun had caused the tan line on her finger to disappear. “Grace Truman,” their father said, “would you make me the happiest man in the world and marry me?” Annie was sketching a picture of onlookers throwing handfuls of peanuts into the air as a married couple walked down the aisle of a plane while she waited for her mother to answer. “Oh, Ronnie,” Mrs. Fang said, looking like she might cry, “I told you not to do this.” Their father looked uncomfortable to be kneeling for so long but he would not stand. “C’mon, honey, just say yes.” Mrs. Fang looked away but her husband raised the microphone to her face. “Just say yes into this microphone and make my dreams come true.” Annie and Buster had no idea what was going on but they both had the same sick feeling that things were about to get worse. “No, Ronnie,” Mrs. Fang said. “I will not marry you.” There were gasps from some passengers in the cabin and their mother walked back to her seat, leaving their father on his knees, still holding the ring. After a few seconds, he stuttered into the microphone, “Well, folks, I’m sorry to take up so much of your time. I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.” He then stood and walked back to his seat beside their mother and sat down, neither one of them looking at the other.

The rest of the flight was so tense and uncomfortable in the cabin that a plane crash would have been welcomed to avoid the embarrassment of what had happened.

In the car, driving home from the airport, the Fangs did not speak a single word. It had all been fake, a choreographed event, but they could not escape the dread that rattled inside their chests. It was a testament to their proficiency and talent as artists. They had affected themselves with the authenticity of the moment.

Annie and Buster imagined a world where their parents had not married, had separated and never returned to each other, a world in which, to their horror, they did not exist. Buster rested his head in Annie’s lap as she stroked his hair. As they pulled into the long, winding driveway of their home in the woods, Mr. Fang finally pulled his wife close to him and whispered, “I love you, Grace Truman.” Their mother kissed him on the cheek and responded, “I love you, Ronnie Payne.” Annie leaned over her brother’s open face and kissed him softly on the forehead. “I love you, Nick Fury,” she said. He smiled and said, “I love you, Clara Bow.” Even after the car was parked and the ignition turned off, the Fangs sat, their seat belts still fastened, and allowed the world to turn without any help from the four of them.