The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (11 page)

The big clock in Launch Command had ticked down to 23:08:35:00. Time sat on us. Time compressed us inside a drum and hammered tight the lid. Waiting made us wild, some with eagerness and others with fear.

*   *   *

But before we could go anywhere we had to bury Umma.

Pop had entered an unprecedented phase, neither kind nor cruel. He stood in our kitchenette trying out shapes with his mouth, but no expression fit a man who had sworn off grief so long ago. After his father was killed and his mother set him loose, Pop said he had forgotten how to cry. He had been left on the occasion of his sweetheart's suicide with an austere sorrow, the worst kind.

Pop would snap out of it soon enough, though, and not with a smile on his face.

I mourned in my own cowardly style. That first night back at Cape Cannibal even Sylvia could not draw me out of the trailer. After bedtime she stood under the bathroom window waiting for me to make my nightly toilet. Faron was brushing his teeth when she scratched at the glass with a palm frond. “Come out, come out,” she sang. “Whoever you are.” She wanted me—I was sure—but I told Faron to go in my place. I would only make Sylvia miserable. He agreed.

A few hours later I woke to my brother's heel pounding my spleen. Faron had returned and fallen into a rageful sleep. I tried to hold him down, but my brother was a twist of tendons. He yelled. He thrashed. He threw a fist that nearly knocked out the loft window. I felt him taut all over, grown large with feeling. I knew the imagined enemy on the other end of that blow, but I couldn't guess how Terry Nguyen would pay for his sins.

Not wanting a fat lip, I climbed down from the loft and slipped out of the trailer to take a walk. When I reached the moony flats of the launch area, I saw that a second, wider hole had appeared beside the first. It was shallow, only about four feet deep. The bottom was a broad white platform, the roof of the great elevator that had raised Orion to the surface.

I walked to the original opening, where we had entered the excavation for the first time so many months earlier. Below I saw the steel floor gleam in the moonlight. I eased my legs over the edge and found the top rungs of the ladder, cringing and crawling from one landing to the next until I reached the bottom. A cascade of sand followed me down, and I marveled at how quickly these secrets could be lost again. How easily I might be buried with them. How it might feel to vanish into a fairy tale with the Astronomers, a new chapter in
The Lonesome Wanderer
.

I grabbed a hard hat and stepped into the wide hallway, where the GMC truck shone warmly in my headlamp. There in the back lay the space helmet Sylvia had worn the day we met the Reades. I shivered to think of her wearing one for real.

“Faron?” The voice came from inside the pickup, dampened by the weird acoustics but clear enough.

“No,” I said. “It's me. Rowan. What are you doing down here?”

Sylvia sat up as if startled and I saw a beach towel stretched over her body. “Too hot to sleep in the trailer,” she said. True enough; the pit must have been ten degrees cooler.

“Your daddy know you're down here?” I don't know why I asked. At that moment I hated Bill Reade nearly as much as I did Terry. She plucked at the handle with a bare foot and the passenger door swung open. She was down to underpants, no brassiere, but it wasn't like Indian River. This was not a provocation. She wrapped the towel around her chest. I sat and she settled her calves across my legs.

She wanted to know about Umma. Where she'd come from. Who she'd been. I told her the story of Coylan Howard and the textile mill, how Pop smelled of orange zest and nearly pinked a man in half with his shears. How Umma carried me and Faron out of So Caroline to be born in a dog kennel for itinerant farmhands. She laughed at the funny parts and did not laugh at the rest, which is how I knew she understood me, as if she'd heard all my sad ridiculous stories before.

I slumped against her, pressed myself into the rough terry of her beach towel, feeling warm flesh underneath. She draped an arm over my back. I drew it to me and gave her elbow a peck. And that is how we two slept the precious last hour of night before my mother's funeral.

Morning light flooded the cab. My kidney on one side ached and both feet were pins and needles. I kissed Sylvia's sleeping face and dislodged myself from her arms. The sun streamed in through the shaft of the huge elevator, glowing in the Tyvek tunnel that led to the clean room where the Orion had slept for hundreds of years. The bay was now empty except for the blue pipes of scaffolding scattered about like picked bones. I climbed back to the surface, leaving Sylvia to the long silence of the pit. She is not your mother, Little Sylvia; she is better; Sylvia Reade is the mother of an idea; the idea is you.

Back at our trailer I was greeted by Faron's severely combed head. Raked, you might say. The tines left red streaks where he had punished his scalp. His cheeks were scrubbed bright. Even his jumpsuit looked fresh as a restaurant napkin. Instead of flipper-flops he wore the new black brogans. A second pair stood on the draining board. My feet still ache to recall them. Gifts from Nguyen, said my brother, then spit on a toe as if to polish it.

Pop, he said, had gone to fetch the body from the cooling tank.

“Umma,” he clarified, as if I had not understood.

I said I thought the funeral was not until noon.

He shrugged. “Change of plans.”

I had always believed Faron's strength to be inexhaustible. His strength was total and could not give, so he broke. He embraced me, pressed his face into my neck, where I could feel his mouth convulse. My brother was making words, only one of which I could identify.

“Sorry,” he said. I was certain that he meant to apologize for Zoo Miamy, but there was no need. It was true; we would not be here, and Umma would not be there, had we gone to Vocationals that morning instead of stealing a tour bus. I told him to hush. It was not his fault; I had gone along willingly. There would be plenty more blame to go around when we were done.

He told me I didn't understand. “I know how much you love her,” he said. He pushed me off him and patted down his hair.

I said of course; we both loved Umma very much.

He took the second pair of brogans from the counter and shoved them hard into my gut.

“Put your Jesus shoes on, little brother.”

I was lacing up when the knock came, thin-fisted. Terry's knocks had come to feel like jabs, dull needles drawing blood. He wore his Bosom Industries yellows, a walky-talk strapped to the hip. Nguyen said he would not come in; there was no time. “Something has come up,” he said, and he didn't have to explain what.

*   *   *

The first place we looked for Pop was the cooling facility. We felt through the fog to confirm the absence of Umma's body. Next we tried the Indian River pier, but came up empty again. Faron said he's running. He's getting her out of here. “He doesn't want her final resting hole to be under that rocket.”

There were two roads off the cape: south past the guard station or north along the beach to the 401 and west over Indian River. The 401 made more sense, Terry said. He urged the Vanster across a culvert and onto a dirt road. Through a screen of high grass we landed on four lanes of blacktop. He stopped and looked at us. To our left the causeway squatted over the marsh grass on cement pilings.

“You'll have to take care of this,” he said. “Your father would like to murder me.” Nguyen was actually frightened and showed it.

Several yards ahead we spotted Pop carrying Umma's body like it weighed nothing. She was frozen in the tight ball—legs tucked, head down—that she'd made in the water drum. Only her blue feet protruded from the striped bedsheet Mae had wrapped her in. My father's feet were bare, too, blackened by the warm asphalt. Pop's Fire Mane, the tassel of hair of which he'd been so heartbreakingly proud, was chopped short. At closer range I saw that Umma's hair had come loose from its bindings. It dripped filthy icicles. Faron caught Pop by the netting of his jersey. I heard a dynamo whimper as Terry's Vanster backed away.

The tide had run out, and on either side of the road the mudflats gasped and gurgled. Crabs swayed their pincers at their doorsteps. The smell of fish rot and reed blew across the road. Everything stank of death, everything but Umma.

“Pop,” I said. “You can't just take her. Terry said he won't allow it.” I looked to Faron for backup. We had to pull together.

My father did not respond. Faron did. “You talk like Umma sometimes,” he told me. “The old man can do as he likes.”

An oak had broken through the surface of the causeway, spreading shade over the blacktop. Pop leaned the body against the tree and looked past us to the launch tower. Faron shoved me hard and I tripped over a root. “If it wasn't for you,” he said, “Umma would have never signed those papers.”

I asked what he meant, and I regret to say he told me. “She knew you were soft. You never were bully enough for the Gables, let alone any Cuba Pens. She only signed to save you from prison, and now look.”

I did. A puddle was forming around the corpse. Umma steamed in the rising heat. The shroud softened to reveal her features, a delicate shoulder, a deerlike calf, an ear. “I didn't kill nobody,” I screamed, but my voice sounded like it had in the pit, stifled and stuck inside my own head.

Pop studied his arms, blue from the inert burden he had carried across the cape. He flexed them carefully. I wanted to tell Faron he was the one to blame. He was the one hijacked a tour bus. Pop was guilty, too. Who kills a man over a jug of rum?

It was not my softness that had brought our family down; it was ill temper.

We soft ones only absorb the blows. After some fool flies into the Night Glass, we are the ones who stick around to suffer their absence. For men like Pop and Faron, the pain of life is profound but brief. Mine is like that Melville Island sunset, sorrowful and so long.

But I didn't say any of that. I was hurt, so that's what I told him. Hadn't Faron just apologized, wept on my neck? “But you just said you were sorry.”

He looked at me as if I was stupid. “For Sylvia, idiot.”

I didn't understand. He clarified: “Me and Sylvia,” Faron said. “It's me and Sylvia, not you. Not you and anybody.”

While we were fighting, Pop picked up the body again and left the shade of the tree to jump the retaining wall. He stepped into the marsh and started walking. I said we should go get him, but Faron told me Pop could take Umma wherever he wanted, walk out to sea if he wanted. Drown with her if he wanted. “A man and a woman are meant to stay together. Pop won't be nothing without Umma.”

I did not see it that way, and if I stayed on the road with Faron I might have hit him, which would have ended poorly for me. I followed Pop into the marsh, but it was hard going in dress shoes. The mud wanted my brogans, so I left them behind to collect later. Barefoot was no good either. Under the pluff lay a minefield of oyster shells. I stepped carefully over the debris of a wrecked car. A bumper, hubcaps, a booster seat with a bloated dolly inside, they made a floating bridge.

Pop had already gone far ahead, showing no hesitation whatever. Even shin-deep in the muck and carrying Umma, he appeared to pick up speed. I turned back when a beer can cut my toe. Pop sat down in the water and started digging with his hands.

Faron removed his shoes and hurled them across the marsh. Pop picked up a brogan and examined it, like he had never before held such a marvelous and wretched object. Then he stuck Faron's shoe in the hole and looked back at his sons.

“I only want to sit with her a while,” he shouted. “I only need—” But he didn't finish saying what it was he needed.

I said we should give Pop some privacy, although that was a joke, as crowded as he was by mosquitoes and fiddler crabs. He would come back, I said, when he was done. Faron only wished he had more shoes to throw at him. We watched Pop peel back the bedsheet and press his head to my mother's cold face, and then I dragged Faron back down the causeway.

*   *   *

Pop stayed out on the marsh until late afternoon. When he returned to lay the body across the picnic table, he looked worse than Umma. His legs were white with dry mud. Welts covered his face and arms. They must have been a miserable torment, but Pop refused to scratch, like he was doing a penance.

Terry located the keys to the front loader, but after a promising start it sputtered out well short of the creek where we intended to dig her grave. We couldn't leave Umma out to be torn up by turkey vultures. A mother requires proper disposal. So Mae arranged a stack of busted pallets in the Launch Control parking lot, and Bill set the pyre ablaze with a Bic and a can of lavatory disinfectant. While Umma's body snapped and dissolved in smoke, we passed around the Haven Dark and listened to Bill rattle off clichés.

When no one seemed to appreciate his eulogizing, he tried to make a joke. “Little hot for a bonfire,” he said.

The effect was to remind me of the fires along the Dixie Hiway, how Umma reeked of wood smoke when she returned from the clinic to our Gables apartment. Her body, ablaze on the pallets, gave off a different sort of heat than any bonfire, like a radiant form of anger that made my skin crisp up into a shell. I understood what it felt like to be Pop, to hate so thoroughly and know the hatred would not pass until someone paid.

One flesh cooks like any other and smells much the same. Mother or rabbit. Loved one or dinner. I pressed a rag to my nose and begged the wind to shift. Mercifully it did, and then the breeze stiffened till sparks danced into the woods. We heard the first drops of rain sizzle on the hot asphalt. The fire flared up, then dimmed, as a storm raked across the cape, almost cold after the day's heat. Umma smoldered, steamed. Blue smoke spread low and thick to erase the mourners from sight.

I shouted to Pop. What do we do now? We can't just leave Umma here, half done. It wouldn't be right. Bill was quick to answer: we needed to get the body in the ground. The gators would come for her overnight, the rats. Pop stepped into the hissing coals and lifted her up. Together we followed him past the trailers to the creek in a soggy processional.