The Devil's Alphabet (6 page)

“I’m still in Chicago.” Did the old man not even know where he lived? “I’ve got to leave this afternoon. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Good.”

Paxton felt his face flush in anger. That tone. He’d forgotten how fast, how effortlessly, his father could piss him off.

His father leaned away from him, turned his head to eye him. “Look at what happened when you showed up. Before yesterday it hardly ever came. You’re only making things worse.”

Pax pushed down the top of his father’s head and the old man obediently faced forward and bent his head.

Pax said, “Deke told me about—about how the chub boys suck that stuff out of you.”

“They came again last night,” his father said. Pax could hear the accusation in his voice. “Big day, they said. A double-header.”

“I was with Deke yesterday. I was, well, recovering.” His father didn’t say anything. The hair along the sides of his head had dried and tangled. Pax tugged and cut, tugged and cut.

Several minutes passed. “I remember Jo Lynn when she was small,” his father said. “I remember both of you …”

Pax’s hand was resting against his father’s head, holding it steady; he felt his big body tremble. “I’m not feeling so good,” his father said. He exhaled heavily. “Help me get back to the living room.”

“Just a second, I’m almost done,” Pax said.

His father pushed up against the tabletop, tried to rise, and fell back.

“Hold on, hold on,” Pax said. He put down the comb and scissors and stepped in front of him. His father was just so
damn big. Pulling him upright, Pax realized, would be an engineering problem—an exercise in mechanics and leverage.

He straddled one of his father’s legs and got a hand under each arm. “Ready?” he said.

He braced his feet on the linoleum floor and leaned back. His father held on to him, then with a lurch rose from the chair. For a moment they held each others’ arms like dance partners: London Bridge Is Falling Down.

His father was much shorter than he remembered. It wasn’t just that Pax had grown. Maybe the weight had compressed Harlan’s spine. Maybe charlies gradually became perfect spheres. This old man came rolling home.

His father looked up at him and laughed. “He arose!” Like that his mood had lightened. He moved slowly toward the living room, planting each huge foot a few inches in front of the other.

His father’s shape had been embossed onto the couch. The big man turned, put one arm on the back of the couch, and dropped into the same spot.

Pax parted the drapes. The chub’s car was still out there. “Do you know what they’re doing with the stuff, Dad?” he said. “After they take it from you?”

“Oh, you can ask Rhonda about that.
Somebody
ought to ask her.” He pointed at the TV. “Turn that on.”

Pax turned on the set, handed his father the remote, and then went back into the kitchen to make a sandwich from the deli meat he’d bought. By the time he returned with the plate his father was asleep.

Pax opened the kitchen windows, turned on lights. The kitchen was filthy, but ten years in the restaurant business,
working every position from dishwasher to line cook, had inured him to vile substances that bred in the dark. He’d just clean up a little, and then when his father woke up he’d say his good-byes and get the hell out of there.

He swept up the hair clippings, and when he couldn’t find a garbage bag, tossed them into the grocery sack. There was Palmolive dish soap under the sink—his mother’s brand. He washed the dishes and rinsed them in bleach water. Then on to the refrigerator. The racks held nothing but condiments and Tupperware and foil-wrapped bowls. After inspecting a few of the containers and finding their contents far gone, he began to toss everything. His father’s snoring drowned out the sound of the TV.

He could have come back here and started cleaning last night after supper at Deke’s. Instead he’d driven up to the Lambert Motel 6. Deke and Donna had tried to get him to stay with them, but the vintage was still in his system and the oversized bed in the giant house was a little too Alice in Wonderland. He felt like he was overdosing on strangeness.

That night he sat on the polyester bedspread in his underwear, eating CiCi’s pizza and flipping through channels. For dessert he smoked a joint while he watched a
South Park
rerun. Around ten he called in to work and told the night manager he couldn’t make it back to the restaurant by Monday. The manager started to be a dick about it, as usual, but quickly backed off when Pax told him his father was sick. Pax must have sounded genuinely upset.

He said he didn’t know how long it would take to get someone to take care of his father. Which was true, as far as it went.

Nobody at work knew he was from Switchcreek. None of his friends either. They knew he was from down south, but so
far he’d never felt the need to open up a conversation—or shut one down—with
Hey, you know that biological catastrophe thirteen years ago? That was my hometown!

It helped that nobody he knew in Chicago talked about the Changes, or had even seen a Switchcreeker in person. All the years Pax lived in Chicago the only Changed he’d seen was an argo boy on a talk show. He’d heard there was a beta in L.A. who ran some kind of fetish website, but he’d never looked it up. His people stayed home, or they became professional freaks. Only the unchanged, like Pax, had the option of passing in the outside world. Pax could slip back to his life in the city any time he wanted to. Any time.

He heard a faint thump from outside—the chub’s car door shutting? He hurried into the living room, and stopped short before reaching the door.

His father’s body had swelled. His stomach had pushed open the robe, and his face and neck had ballooned. His snoring had stopped, but his eyes were still closed and his breathing was coming heavy.

“Dad?” He went to his side, touched his shoulder. “Dad!”

His father’s eyes slowly opened. His pupils were dilated. “Lorraine. Lorraine was here.”

“Mom’s not here, Dad. You were dreaming.”

His eyes seemed to focus on Pax’s face, then his head fell back in surprise. “Paxton? Is that really you?” He smiled. “The prodigal returns.”

Shit
, Pax thought.

“You mother was just here,” he said. “Or maybe that was yesterday.”

The blisters had erupted again. They were everywhere on
his skin, all sizes, weeping and shiny. His father reached for him and Paxton stepped back. He remembered that electric rush of emotion that had struck him, left him lying stupid in the grass.

He heard voices and went to the door. Through the diamond-shaped window he saw another car in the driveway—one of those new Cadillacs with a snout like a bulldog—and Aunt Rhonda waddling toward the house in her blazing pink pantsuit. Close behind came three chub boys: Clete, who was carrying a Styrofoam cooler; the one with the diamond earring and a head like a bowling ball who seemed to be Aunt Rhonda’s personal bodyguard; and another muscled boy he didn’t recognize who swung a duffel bag in his hand.

Paxton locked the door and stepped to the side, out of the view of the window. Even though he was expecting it, the knock made him flinch.

“Reverend Martin?” Rhonda called. “Paxton?”

He backed away from the door—he didn’t want his voice to sound too close—and called back, “This isn’t a good time, Aunt Rhonda.”

“Don’t let her in!” his father bellowed.

One of the men laughed, but was quickly cut off. Rhonda said, “Paxton, honey, I’m here to help. Boys, go back to the cars and sit awhile. Paxton and I need to talk.”

Pax risked a glance out the window; the chub boys were walking back to the driveway, talking among themselves.

In a lower voice Rhonda said, “Paxton, open the door and let me explain what all’s going on.”

Pax glanced at his father. He was staring at his knees, shaking his head back and forth. Pax unlocked the door and slowly opened it. “I think we should talk outside,” he said, and pulled
the door closed behind him. The chubs glanced back but kept walking.

“How’s the reverend doing?” Rhonda said. She looked like the Man in the Moon in drag: tiny blue-shadowed eyes and tiny red lips in the middle of a huge round face.

“Not too good,” Pax said.

“Is he bloated?” she asked. “Talking to himself, hallucinating?”

“Something like that. Well, all of that, actually.” She pursed her lips understandingly, and he said, “I know that you’ve been, uh, siphoning him.”

She nodded, waiting.

“He says you’re milking him like a cow.”

She smiled wryly. “That sounds like your daddy.” She nodded toward the window. “Has he told you why we’re doing it? Or is he too far gone to say?”

“He said I should ask you.”

“Well, that’s good advice, at least. Here’s what’s happening right now—he’s got a drugstore-worth of chemicals running through his system. If we don’t drain the vintage out of him he’s going to be high as a kite, and who knows when he’ll come down. Let my boys extract it now, Paxton. You can watch if you want. But then you and I need to have that talk you promised me. Now that your father’s producing, you need to understand what your responsibilities are.”

“Get off my property!” his father yelled.

“Is it painful?” Pax said. “The process, I mean.”

She patted his arm. “Maybe to watch, honey. But it don’t hurt them none.” She gestured to the chubs, and they started walking back. “It’ll be good for you to be here, though,” she said. “Your dad can be kinda feisty.”

———

Rhonda stood well back from the old man and issued instructions to the boys. Everett, the serious boy with the shaved head and earring, sat on one side of Harlan, then hooked a foot around his ankle to hold down his legs and grabbed an arm. Clete took the other side. The third chub, a younger kid named Travis who had thick black hair and Elvis sideburns, worked the needle. Pax crouched near his father’s knees, talking in a low voice through the paper breathing mask Rhonda had given him. His father could not be soothed. He struggled and shouted, but Rhonda’s boys couldn’t be budged, and in a few minutes his father was exhausted.

“Like trying to shave a cat,” Clete said, and Travis laughed.

“Shave a cat,” Travis said.

Aunt Rhonda excused herself. “Best not for me to get too close,” she said, and went outside.

The boys started with the insides of his father’s forearms. Travis would swipe the surface of a sac with iodine, then slide in the needle. Pax winced every time, his stomach turning. But his father didn’t seem to feel the needle; they might as well have been poking at Ziploc bags. After his arms they opened his robe and lifted his T-shirt to siphon the larger sacs on his belly and chest. They ignored the smaller blisters and pimples.

When the syringe filled, Travis placed it in the Styrofoam cooler, then picked up a new needle and syringe from a box on the floor.

The siphoning seemed to go on and on, but when Pax checked his watch only fifteen minutes had passed. A sour odor filled his nostrils. He felt queasy, and sweat painted his neck.

At some point his father passed out or simply fell asleep; his head lolled to the side and he began to breathe deeply. The robe had fallen open, and Pax was alarmed to see that an erection tented his boxer shorts.

Pax pushed the robe over it and Clete laughed. “Happens every time,” he said. “This stuff’s better than Viagra.”

“Cut it out,” Everett said sternly. It was the first time Pax had heard him speak. Now that Everett didn’t need to restrain Harlan, he could help siphon. He started using a second needle, and the extraction proceeded faster. A few minutes later they had only his father’s back to do. They tilted Harlan forward and sideways, then pushed up his robe to his shoulders. Pax held his father’s head against him, patting with his gloved hand the black-and-gray hair he’d been cutting two hours ago. He could not get used to the size of his father, his helplessness, the zoological strangeness of his body.

The boys began to pack up their supplies. Pax pushed his father back into a sitting position and straightened his robe. Then he followed the boys outside.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Rhonda asked him.

Pax stared at her.

She laughed heartily. “You held it together better than I thought you would. Most skips couldn’t do it—certainly not a man. It’s women who change the diapers and take care of the old people in this world. Most men don’t have the stomach for it.” She held open a plastic garbage bag and he tossed in his mask and gloves. “Do this every day and you’ll get used to it.”

Pax exhaled heavily. “Every day this has to happen?”

“If you want to keep him healthy.” She gave him an appraising look. “Now I didn’t come out here just for your father’s
treatment, though I was glad I could help. I came to show you someplace where there’s a different way of doing this.”

“I don’t know,” Pax said, glancing back at the house. Everett stepped out carrying the cooler.

“Don’t you worry,” Rhonda said. “We’ll have you back in no time. Your daddy’s going to be sleeping for a while.”

T
HE INSIDE OF
the Cadillac smelled like a tub full of lilac petals—Rhonda distilled.

Pax rode in the back alone, while Rhonda sat up front in the passenger seat next to Everett. “My next project is to build our own high school,” Rhonda said. Only the top of her hair-sprayed head was visible. “You know they wouldn’t let Everett play on the football team at the county school? Can’t pass the physical, they said, because he’s morbidly obese. Obese! Not for a charlie, I said. Not for one of our people. They won’t let the argo boys play either, especially not basketball. Lord, they’re deathly afraid of argos playing basketball. Not that they’re any good at it—they got hands like concrete. And nobody wants to even shower with the beta boys. Tell me that’s not discrimination.”

“That’s discrimination,” Pax said.

“You bet it is. We’re going to sue their hind ends off, then use it to pay for the stadium. Everett here can be our coach.” Pax could see the side of his face. The man shook his head, smiling shyly. It was the first time Pax had seen him break his frown.