Day later and Tyrone’s son from Kabul had come home to Burnside with a prosthetic foot and a spook for an eye and only just one. The other had been pirated out its socket by a dry-wall-screw bomb hid by a ten-year old in a Pepsi machine and was now all eye-patched in padded black nylon for life.
Tyrone sighed in the truck cab and said offhand, “He’s haunted.”
He is hurt,” I agreed.
“Alien ghosts are haunting my son.”
“You’re saying Afghanis, sir?”
“No. No,” he corrected, “aliens.”
We were returning up the dirt road to the brick sweat lodge field; the other Bounders were scrunched behind us out back in the truck bed, choking on copper motes. Before we’d picked the rest up from their host families, Tyrone had requested special I drive with him and his pooch in the front. “It’s the aliens,” he said then. “The ghosts of the alien gods.”
Well, okay, why the hell not was the thought. Might as well go along for the ride. And why shouldn’t alien ghosts and their gods be the ones responsible? Diagnosis seemed good as any other shot in the dark. “Well what do your people do?” I said. “Sir, in scenarios like your son’s?”
“Squaw dance,” Tyrone said, “mock battles. That whole Enemy Way ceremony I mentioned to you earlier, doodle. That’s what we’ve been prepping to do. For three days he will visualize the Alien God Slayer. He will identify with the Alien God Slayer. For three days he will channel the slayer’s power. We will cleanse him and celebrate him and welcome my son home with washed spirits.”
Once, months back, Shelley had posted an image of a severed hand sewn at the wrist into the plate between a woman’s breasts, and when she did, I could look at that beastly image without a wince, investigate it scientific even. The hand was stuck there as though the fingers gestured a sorta come-hither what’s up; how’s it going I dared back with my eyes.
Once I’d blogged film stills from a sexploitation in which a satanic empress super-slides in virgins’ still-hot blood; it was fun to watch during homework for pre-calc. Once the initials of a boy I’d carved into my stretchmarked hip with the blade of Mom’s cork-screw key. I’d ripped salvia from a water pipe shaped like the helmet of Marvin the Martian, felt the hit butterknife-slice through my rear brain, and all when I was meant to be in after-school jujitsu; and I didn’t go, I ditched, and that boy, I didn’t even like him, only the letters in his name.
I was sixteen, and I knew a sick joke when I saw one, prided myself on being the one who cracked them, even if my own life was the cracker.
Yeah, Pop stuffed Mom’s earthly possessions into the moonroof and with her mall-bought thongs doused in sure-fire charcoal briquettes, with one strategically aimed bottle rocket, yeah, dad fireworked the Jetta to Pomona and back; but even then, as they carted him off, I could still look him straight, stare even.
Only the spook eye of Tyrone’s son and that stiff, plastic foot of his had ever shamed my head down like a cop ushering you into the plexiglass theater of his backseat.
