Dusk Country Blues: Part V

Chapters X & XI

X

Off past the buildings, where the machines ones moaned, I found Elsa bathing in puddles. She didn’t see me, and I felt like a pervert though she was fully clothed. She wore a loose flannel shirt, its sleeves rolled up, and tight jean shorts. It was intimate in the way fucking my brother didn’t seem to be.

She sang quietly to herself. It was a song I recognized because my mother once sang it to me and Abe. A sweet nothing kind of song about a flying cow.

A song deep inside my ears and lungs, still spilling out of me with every exhale.

The puddles were so shallow. She scooped up the water in her hands and rubbed her face, her arms, her legs, and feet. The sun clung to the horizon, but the air was hot and sweaty, thick, mosquitos surrounding me but never landing, never biting. The fireflies hovered round her antlers as they bobbed along to the songs she sang.

She washed her hair slowly, carefully. Like the water she used was clean. Not some runoff from the buildings or stagnant breeding water for mosquitos. Her singing changed. Thickened. And I knew she was crying.

Crying like all of us. all of us wanting, hoping that someone would save us. Make this halflit world bright, make the machines howl back to life, make this shitty life worth living.

“You okay?”

She gasped, her entire body jolting away from me. Her eyes were big and round and rimmed with tears. “What the fuck. Were you watching me?”

“No. Yes. Not on purpose.”

“You accidentally spied on me?”

I wanted to defend myself. Shame rose in me and embarrassment cowed me. But I was sick of myself. Sick of who I had always been. The shadow of my brother’s shine. “Those songs you sang—my mother used to sing them to me. To us. Abe and me.”

She just stared back at me. Her eyes still full of tears, but hard. Digging into me, flaying every layer of skin and muscle and bone. “You look like shit.”

“I was crying too.”

She snorted but not with derision. Measuring me. Breaking me to pieces and inspecting the bits that made me up. But nothing made me up. I was what was left over from making Abe. “Why are you so afraid?”

I laughed. I didn’t try to, but it burst from me. “I’m afraid that I’m wrong.”

Elsa raised an eyebrow. Thin and arched so delicately I imagined breaking it and laughed again.

“All this,” I waved my hand around us. “I’m terrified that this is all there is.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I’m going to run away. Going to find what’s past the dusk country.”

She began washing her hair again. “I can tell you what’s out there.”

I swallowed. Afraid to ask but willing to beg. Willing to do anything. Willing to humiliate myself again, if only she’d tell me. If only she’d touch me. My voice came like a whisper, “What.” My heart hammering in my chest. My sweaty shirt sticking to me.

“Just more people like you. Millions of them.”

“Why do you do that?”

She didn’t even turn to me. “Do what?”

“Hurt me.”

She laughed then, and I wilted. Cowed by her. When she turned to me, I flinched from the anger, the pain I saw on her face. “You’re pathetic.”

I struggled not to run, to flee from her. “Why? Why do you—what have I done to you?”

Her smile was like a knife in my spine, “You’re a drain on Abe. You leech from his life. All of his joy turns to mud in your mouth and you can’t help but vomit it back on him. You shower him with your self-loathing. You came here, spied on me, and hoped to find a kindred spirit in pain.” She laughed bitterly. “My pain doesn’t want your company, Locke. My pain wants nothing but release. So go run from this dusk country you’ve made in your head. Go run to the real world. You will find nothing but people like you who find only deserts when the sun shines.”

Choking back sobs, I turned around and left her there. Alone.

XI

The day mother disappeared was the last day I spent in the dusk country.

I opened her door to feed her, but she was gone. Even the scent of her was gone.

The weeks had dragged on. My brother fucking girls and boys all over town while I wandered the dried-up husks of abandoned industry. Every dream I had was of Elsa. Her body. Her touch. Her eyes. Her tongue coiling round me, pulling me inside. Swarms of fireflies forming into wings and she flew through the blackened empty skies, hunting me. Haunting me.

He tongue reaching into me, ripping out my lungs and heart, and consuming everything.

And then mother was gone.

Rapping on the front door pulled me away. I closed the door for the last time.

Chantelle and Lyla were standing there.

“Hi.”

Chantelle’s eyebrows were low. “Where’s Abe?”

I looked behind me. “He’s sleeping, I think.” Even as I said it, the moans started.

Chantelle shook her head and Lyla pushed past me. She opened the door to Abe thrusting into Monique while Bucky licked his asshole. The three didn’t even stop fucking.

Chantelle said, “Girl, don’t let him come inside you.”

“Hey girl,” Monique spoke through grunts and gasps. “What’s up?”

I couldn’t see Abe’s face, but I imagined he was trying not to laugh.

Lyla said, “That fucker got us pregnant.”

Abe said, “Shit. For real?” The tempo of the fucking slowed.

Bucky pulled his face away from Abe’s asshole.

Monique pushed herself back into him harder and said between moans, “Fill me up, boy. Get me pregnant too.” Then she turned to us and said, “Close the door.”

Abe only laughed, said, “Sure.”

Chantelle closed the door and they both stepped outside. I followed. Monique’s voice came through the walls, “Come inside me and fill this pussy up.”

Chantelle started laughing, “Crazy cunt.”

“You guys really pregnant.”

Lyla sighed, “Fuck.”

“So are Angie, Laura, Corine, and Val.” Chantelle’s voice was even.

“What about Elsa?” I said.

“That horned bitch?” Chantelle’s lips were tight.

“Antlers.” I said.

Lyla said, “Who gives a fuck.”

Chantelle said, “People say he don’t come inside her.”

My face flushed. “What you gonna do?”

Lyla put her hands on her stomach, “I guess I’m gonna have a fucking baby. When’s the last time someone had a baby here?”

Chantelle laughed. “Good question. Years probably. Since I was little, I think.”

I said, “Rodney’s only fourteen and he’s the youngest in town.”

“There you go.”

“Yall aren’t mad?” I said.

Lyla shrugged with her eyes. “It’s not like we didn’t know he wasn’t off fucking everyone and their brother or that he was coming inside us. It just feels weird.”

“Yeah.” Chantelle nodded. She pulled out a cigarette and I laughed.

“Haven’t seen one of those in a long time.”

Chantelle shrugged. “Found them.”

We sat there passing the cigarette back and forth between each of us, not really talking. The smoke felt like shards of glass in my lungs, piercing through me. My lungs filling with blood, making each inhale shallower, harder.

Monique brushed past us and said, “Can still feel his babies dribbling down my leg.”

Lyla laughed. “Won’t be funny when you have a baby squirming out your pussy.”

Monique shrugged. “Don’t know. Might be nice.”

I said, “How?”

She shrugged again. “Having something to love. Some reason to love.” She shrugged once more. “Feels like what’s missing.” She moved her hands to her stomach and held it. “Hope it’s true.”

Lyla and Chantelle held their own stomachs.

The three of them left together, talking about names.

A few minutes later Abe was moaning while Bucky grunted from deep in his throat. It was a while later that Bucky left. Abe came out shirtless and damp with sweat. He sat next to me and plucked some weeds from the concrete steps and tossed them aside.

“Mother’s gone.”

He inhaled audibly, held it in a moment, and let it go.

“You really like it here?”

He smiled bashfully. “Don’t know why I’d want to leave. Got everything I ever needed right here.”

“I don’t trust her.”

He dropped his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Elsa,” I said.

“I know it. I don’t get why you don’t get on with her. She only has nice things to say about you.”

My heart beat in sweltering blastbeats. “Why doesn’t she care?”

He raised an eye to me. “About fucking other people?”

I looked away.

He took my hand in his and laced his fingers with mine. “No one cares. We don’t belong to one another or anything. We’re just living, and the best part of living is fucking.”

“Don’t you want more?”

He laughed, a high lilting song. “Like what mom and dad had? Falling in love and rotting and disappearing? You always going on about how there’s nothing here. We got nothing but the rot and decay around us. Can barely find enough food to fill a day with. Fucking’s about the only thing that makes time go by. Otherwise it’s just darkness.”

I turned back to him and studied his perfect face. “We could leave. Just us.” I squeezed his hand, trying to make his heartbeat follow mine for once.

“Nah.”

“She’ll eat you alive.”

A wan smile opened across his face. “She’s about the only thing that makes me feel like life’s worth living.”

“She scares me.” I squeezed his hand again.

He let go of my hand and put it on the back of my neck, pulled me close. I leaned my head into his. The smell of Monique’s pussy and Chucky’s asshole were still on his fingers.

We stayed like that till the sun peered over the horizon and Elsa walked up to us.

She said, “What’s up, bitches?”

Laughter bubbled up inside me unbidden. She was so goddamn beautiful, her hair cascading behind her like a cape fluttering in the wind. Her antlers holding up the orange fingers of twilight. Fireflies stretching wide around her.

She kissed me on the cheek and uncoiled her tongue for Abe to suck on. The smell of her got me hard. Something wild. Alive. Like growth and a new world.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

Abe waved me off and led Elsa inside, but Elsa watched me over her shoulder. Her eyes burrowing into me.

The broken roads were filling with teenagers trying to catch what little light they could. I asked what they were doing, and they said going to the highway. I went with.

As we walked, they started clapping their hands together and pounding on their chests, stomping their feet. They started shouting in a kind of nonsense language. Random undulating vowels broken by sharp consonants. I joined in, fell right into that rhythm. Even started shouting with them. Shouting sounds without meaning. Sounds just to fill the empty sky. Sounds to prove we were there, even while the ground we walked on crumbled to the dust drifting through the air. Shouting and slapping till my voice was hoarse, till my feet callused and my hands were raw. Shouted and screamed and tore at the coming night till it was alive with the fireflies that swarmed the highway leading who knows where. It was as if we called them all into the night, as if we wrangled them from wherever they lived.

They gathered fireflies in jars. Hundreds of them. I even caught some in my hands and swallowed them just to have some light inside me. Maybe it could fill me up and make this dark and dying world bright and new.

They brought out their beetles and a dozen matches happened at once. An accidental tournament and I used my voice to announce each one, calling the shots, the moves, and they cheered with me, with the beetles.

And then we were running back to town, shouting differently. Not in any rhythm or to fill up the night, but just out of joy. Running as fast as I could, screaming and leaping, following the procession of jarred fireflies. I felt no pain. I thought of nothing. I was blissfully clear and empty like the life I had lived. A long life of nothing. Of waking in darkness and sleeping in darkness with only a few brief hours of slanted light. My body slipped through my hands and I stopped being me and just started being. My body caught in the motions, in the simple pleasure of living loudly in a world of silent decay.

I found myself in front of the dilapidated house I’d called home for so long panting and sweating. Elsa’s moans came through the walls.

I went inside not even trying to be quiet. Elsa’s eyes were on me right away. Abe was sucking on her antlers while fucking her. She just stared at me, mouthing Fuck and Shit but never my name. I walked into the room still panting.

Abe raised an eyebrow to me and slowed, leaning away from her. “Want her?”

My voice came clear and deep, like I spoke from the depths of those silos. It reverberated through the room lit by fireflies. “Why not me?”

Elsa just stared at me, the fireflies gathered round her antlers. I withered beneath that impassive gaze, her mouth slightly open.

She sat back and stared at me and Abe said, “What’s wrong?” Still naked, sweating, he stroked himself with one hand and her antlers with the other.

“It’s not fair,” I said. Shame struck me like a punch but I didn’t care. Couldn’t stop myself. “You get everything and now mother’s gone and daddy’s always been gone and and and…”

Elsa only stared at me.

Abe turned to the window behind him like answers could be found there. He cleared his throat and said, “We only got what we make of life. You got a lot here if you just slow down and look around.”

“He cannot love himself and so he believes none can love him.”

“Shut the fuck up!” I punched the wall, leaving a crack.

Elsa started laughing. Her eyes on me, digging into me. “He hates himself and wants everyone else as filled with hate. He seeks death.”

Abe frowned. “We’re brothers. I need you.”

But I saw only Elsa’s laughing face. Her husky voice tying itself to that voice that coursed through my whole life, and fury took me. I threw myself at her, raised a foot to kick in her skull, but Abe tackled me. He held me and said, “Brother, it’s all right. You’re okay. I love you. I need you.”

I pushed him off and away, kicked at him as I thrashed. When I got to my feet and saw his bleeding mouth, I felt bile rising in my chest.

I ran.

I just ran.

I didn’t think about where or what I would do. I just ran from her, from my brother’s blood. I vomited in the street and felt fireflies hounding me, hunting me, seeking to consume me. My body shaking, my thoughts scrambled. Dread. My insides coiled, and my lungs burned from running. In the distance, I thought I saw trees. Tears poured out of me and I sobbed. Snot dripping into my mouth as I tried to breath, openmouthed. Still running. Trying to get away. Hoping for somewhere with more light.

But her eyes were all I could see until I woke up far away from home, bathed in darkness burning my skin.