In the violent remnants of what was once the United States of America, two boys are offered shelter from the storm, in exchange for their souls.
HOUSE OF CRYSTAL
by Joseph Hirsch
The house trailers were staggered in a herringbone formation, bordered on one side by a malarial creek, and on the other side by a basketball court that pointed cattycorner out to the dirt road, which ran alongside of the Elmwood Trailer Park.
The court was mostly empty, host only to an early morning pickup game of one-on-one, a HORSE scrimmage between two old friends who didn’t need words to communicate. A missed basket, nothing but backboard, gave Michael Lawson the rebound, and he dribbled deep into three-point territory, almost to the other end of the half-court.
Robby Huppert, his best friend, moved to the sidelines, and into a merciful patch of shade. “Shoot it already!” he shouted, prompting Michael to dribble for a few more beats, in defiance.
“Cocksucker,” Robby said in return. Then he shot his friend the bird, stripped off his white tee shirt, and used it to improvise a sunshade turban. Michael lined up his shot between pigeon-toed crosshairs, gently finger-rolling the half-inflated ball into a perfect swish.
“Yes!” he whispered, smiling widely, basking in Robby’s contempt.
“Shit,” Robby muttered, head down, hands on the cavernous hollows at the sides of his torso, in the curving spaces where a well-fed teen would have sported love handles. He swallowed a bellyful of pride and crossed the court to shake Michael’s hand.
“Good game, Mike.”
“You too, man,” Michael said. A smile flitted across his lips, and then disappeared just as quickly.
His mother’s shadow passed across the lone window in the double-wide that he called home, her silhouette bleeding through the American Flag which served as an improvised curtain, the tattered Stars & Stripes draped over the shameful domestic nightmare always waiting for him when he came home. As a consequence, Michael Lawson had become a very good basketball player.
Robby caught his roving eye and tried to distract him. He stripped Michael of the ball and dribbled across the bleary asphalt, down into free-throw territory.
“Check,” Robby said, weaving a bowlegged cross between the arches of his legs. Michael solved the flamboyant riddle of his friend’s dribbling by stripping him of the ball and dropkicking it, treating the two busted mercury vapor lamps as goalposts, sailing the basketball high over the rusted vinyl encampment.
The basketball continued floating on until it went crashing through a long-dead bug zapper, shattering both the chicken wire and the fluorescent tubing it housed.
“Nice job, douchebag.” Rob adopted his customary slap-boxing stance, the praying mantis pugilist, both of his hands gone limp. “Come on, man.”
And then he dropped his guard just as suddenly, stunned by the tears streaming down Michael’s face. “Mike, man…” If he couldn’t get Michael to stop, Robby knew that he would be joining him soon. “You can’t do this.”
“I’m sorry, man.” Michael’s voice cracked, and he caught a stray tear with a brush of knuckles. “She spends all day banging the ceiling with a broom. She thinks someone’s on the roof. And there’s nothing I can do to make her stop.”
He sagged down to a low center of balance, his head tucked between his knees, his rump only inches from the concrete. Rob joined him close to the ground. “It’s alright, man,” he said in a soothing, even tone. “My mom is fucked, too.” And his eye now strayed toward his own home, and then over each of the trailers. “This whole place is fucked.”
That, he decided as he stood and brought his friend to his feet, was the most accurate summary of this hellhole to ever be uttered. With his arm over his friend’s shoulder, Rob led Michael to a cluster of trees buckling under a light wind.
A gust of hot summer air, infused with traveling sand borne from the furthest reaches of the dustbowl, carried through the rustling grass, and soothed the two as they sat there, lulling them almost to the point that they didn’t hear the low murmur of an engine, a real gas engine growling in the distance, picking up in carbureted increments until the telltale sound had drawn every fiend (including both of their mothers) from the house trailers, out onto the porches, and into the middle of the dirt road.
Michael and Rob stood up. Rob said, “They told them not to do that.”
The statement might have sounded cryptic to the ear of an outsider, but Michael exactly knew what he was talking about. Tunk and Spider, those two cretins too putrid for hell, had warned all of the tweaking heads in Elmwood to stay off of the road, and to meet up on the basketball court. The heads were promised that they would get their tubes in due time. But the two dealers had found it difficult to convince the people in Elmwood of anything; it was hard to reason with people who brandished brooms, laboring under the conviction that demons lived on their roofs.
The sirens on top of the old police cruiser were still serviceable, and the duo put them to good use, sounding the red and blue wailers, punctuating the screams with some CB foreplay. “Hello, my fine little dope fiend friends. You didn’t think your Uncle Tunk had forgotten about you, did you?” He shared a robust laugh with his partner, and then resumed on the squawker. Spider edged the sedan through the phalanx of needy addicts, crawling at 5mph through their ranks.
“I’m surprised that asshole can work the radio with his one good hand,” Michael said. His voice was now an atonal flat-line, siphoned bereft of emotion. If he let himself feel anything, he would kill both of these motherfuckers at once. After all, they were killing his mother, weren’t they? And Rob’s? He looked over at his friend and saw his face stony, his jaw set, and he knew that together they carried a blood bond of absolute hatred.
“That’s it,” Tunk said, smiling gleefully, displaying rows of uneven, jagged teeth, with many empty spaces between the bucks and molars. His mouth was something like an antebellum cemetery, his grimy bicuspids like headstones.
Both boys watched in disgust as the cruiser drifted past them, rolling from the grass onto the basketball court, where the population of the small town now gathered around the cop car, like peasants around a robber baron’s Rolls-Royce. Rob and Michael remained at the edge of the spectacle.
The car doors fanned open, and the two mutants emerged. Spider was as thin, tall, and seemingly as flimsy as a stalk of genetically engineered corn. His nose was halberd-sharp, his mind much less so. The purple bags beneath his eyes, which covered a good portion of his face, spoke more of reanimation than insomnia, as if he were not tired, but rather had died and then come back to life.
Tunk had one arm, his right. The left sleeve of his weathered leather bomber was pinned to his shoulder. There was probably a story behind the amputation, but he was such a perverse entity that his tale was probably best left unearthed. For some reason, Michael hated (and feared) him more of the two.
Even though he was short one appendage, he always seemed to be the more active member of the pair. He had been the one working the radio, and he was now the one heading to the rear of the car, opening the trunk.
“I can already smell it,” Rob said, pinching his nostrils closed.
“Me, too.” Michael grimaced.
The odor of phosphorus and ephedrine coming from the mixed batch was anathema to them, and aphrodisiac to the rest of their friends and family, some fifteen to twenty people, a few of whom were younger than either of the adolescent boys.
They fought their way to the rear of the police cruiser, and would have overwhelmed Tunk, if Mr. Spider hadn’t suddenly brought a long-nosed .38 Taurus from its hiding place within the depths of his diamond-quilted field jacket. The jacket was reversible, and he never wore another. Sometimes he sported the reflective roadwork orange side, while on other days he chose the woodland green pattern. The .38 remained the only constant.
“Ease back, gentle brothers and sisters.” He fanned the piece, and it had the desired effect. It was a crucifix, and they were the vampires. The distance the gun had placed between pusher and customer was now a wide enough gulf for Spider to notice the detached twosome, and for him to remark on it to his own friend.
“Hey, Tunk,” he said, somehow keeping one eye on the crowd (along with the gun), and the other eye on the boys.
“Speak to me, brother.” Tunk was having less luck with his one arm. He had managed to handle the town’s allotted five tubes, but was forced to resort to using his chin to close the trunk of his car.
“Tweaksville’s got a couple of holdouts.” Spider smiled at the two boys, his eyes twinkling counterparts to the twin dimples at his cheekbones, a startling contrast to his anything but boyish ways.
Before he could ponder the mystery of the two abstainers, Tunk had stolen the show, his voice loud enough to co-opt all the rapt attention on the court. He didn’t need the CB anymore.
“Alright,” he said. “If you got money, we don’t need it. Money’s useless.”
The cylindrical containers that were filled with the white chips of meth proved his point. Else, if banks still mattered, why would they store and transport dope in the same tubes that had once been used for banking transactions at drive-thru windows? At this point, banks meant about as much as the police.
“One at a time,” Spider and his .38 advised, while Tunk continued with his soliloquy.
“Trade isn’t really an option at this point. Maybe when you were younger, sweetheart.” He gave a wink to Mrs. Huppert, and Michael saw her son flinch as he did so. Michael held Robby back. It had happened before. Both men had had their way with almost all of the women of this town.
But the poison they brought with them every week had worn the complexions of the women down to sandpaper, the sultry voices having morphed into the scratchy hisses of whispers oscillated through tracheotomy rings, the jeweled eyes filming to the cloudy milk of dilated addiction.
“I wouldn’t fuck you,” Tunk said to Mrs. Lawson, “with his gun.” He pointed to Spider, and his thirty-eight, and it was now time for Robby to return Mike’s favor.
What neither of the invading men knew, and what the town was intent on keeping secret, was that there were two girls in Elmwood, Lily Tidwell and Jennifer Ashton, who had reached the bloom of womanhood while managing to stay clear of crystal. They were now hidden, sequestered in a meadow far from the dirt road. And the signal would not be given for them to return until long after both of the men had departed.
In the meantime—
“And you’ve already given up all your jewelry, your batteries, your TVs…” Tunk had distributed four of the five tubes, but he had possessed the forethought to hold out on at least one, lest he should imperil his hold over his audience, leaving no one to enjoy his grandstanding save Spider, who was so taken that he began to lower his .38.
Michael thought of dashing forward to steal the tube from Tunk, but he found himself preempted.
“Take him!” Michael heard his mother’s voice, the same strained croak that constantly asserted that there were in fact demons crawling around on the roof of the trailer.
And he heard his own shouts. Not now, but the memory of his voice, pleading with her to please shut up so that he could sleep, to please stop scratching at the scabs that she was making worse with her incessant tweaked clawing, the holes she shredded in her skin that only made it that much easier for the airborne malaria to find purchase on her body.
He regretted his anger toward her, and bore his mother no ill will, even as Spider approached him, led by the dowsing of the praecox woman’s finger. He pulled Michael away from Robert, who stepped forward to join his friend.
“Not you,” Spider said, his threat backed by the revolver. Rob remained standing firm, despite the ventriloquist murmurs coming from the crack in Mike’s set jaw. “What the fuck are you doing?”
His friend’s response leaked out in grinding syllables. “Coming with you.”
Spider, impressed by the unnamed boy’s resolve in the face of the barrel, lowered the Taurus and pivoted toward Tunk. “What do you think, man? Looks like a twofer.”
Tunk, after a moment’s faltering, shrugged and relinquished the last plastic tube to the strawberry blond skeleton that had once been Michael’s mother. He didn’t give her so much as backwards glance as Tunk joined his scarecrow brother, surveying the gawky teens as if they were slaves on an auction block. The irony of the appraisal was not lost on him, and he separated Mike’s lips, observing the inside of his mouth as if he was a prize filly, and the quality of the thoroughbred’s diet could be gleaned from the gums.
“You boys don’t like meth, huh?”
They let the rhetorical question pass, and it was just as well. Choice was no longer a luxury afforded by fate. Spider, enthusiastic about the live bartering, opened both of the back doors. Tunk, with his one massive arm, ushered the two boys into the back of the cruiser, minding them to “watch their heads,” as if they had been arrested, and not stolen.
“Back when I was a rug rat,” Spider began, as he pulled out, “they used to have something called ‘Child Protective Services.’” A half-laugh leaked at the remembrance. “If they was still around, you boys would’ve been scooped up a long time ago.”
The police cruiser reversed off of the basketball court, up the grass ramp, and onto the dirt road. Through the kicked up clouds of swirling dust and monoxide, Michael could barely discern the townsfolk, his mother among them, as they scattered back to their trailers to smoke, spike, or sniff the contents of the plastic bank tubes. Robby kept his eyes forward, his hands looped through the grating of the cage that separated the front seat from the back.
Spider and Tunk blotted out the view through the front windshield, leaving the character of the road to be revealed in blurring glimpses as it flew past their windows, and then faded through the rear windshield.
On Michael’s side, a water tower had collapsed on its stilts, toppling into furrows of razed crops like a flying saucer that had crashed on impact.
On Robby’s side, the yellowing fallow acres were littered with dead cattle, the bloated contents of their spotted bellies exposed. In some cases, the udders had been ripped entirely free of the bovine corpses, and at least one cow had been decapitated.
Tunk wasn’t claiming credit for the tower, but Spider had a few choice words for the cows. “Yeah, me and Tunk was bored a few hours back…” He winked at the boys in the rearview. “Had ourselves a little bit of target practice, didn’t we, brother?”
His partner gave a noncommittal grunt, and then Spider said, “Too bad we didn’t find a farmer.”
For the first time since they had been abducted, Michael and Rob exchanged a look. Their eyes searched in groping panic for some kind of answer. Neither of them wanted to provoke the men who were now their guardians, fathers more sinister than the ones who had abandoned them and their mothers in the first place.
After some silent deliberation, where the sound of the Crown Vic was the only one to be heard, Rob finally took the bullet. “Where are you taking us?”
“The compound,” Tunk said.
Rob looked to Michael and shrugged. It was now his turn. Michael leaned forward. “You going to teach us to cook?” He wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to know the answer.
Spider tilted the rearview, leered at him, and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, little doggie! Slow your roll!” He switched lanes, easing the cop cruiser into what would have been oncoming traffic, if there had been any other cars on the highway. They had transitioned from dirt to hardball a half-mile back.
“That’s privileged information,” Tunk said. “We don’t just teach you to cook. You have to work your way up. Earn that trust.”
The driver’s side window creaked open and Spider jettisoned a thin line of spit from the gap between his two front teeth. “You cook without getting The Man’s okay, you’re in a world of hurt. In fact…” He looked over to Tunk. “We got us a little detour to take, don’t we, boss?”
“Yes, we do,” Tunk concurred, snapping open the glove compartment in front of him. He rifled through papers and empty spring-load magazines, as Michael and Rob looked on, waiting to see what he would produce. When he had found what he was looking for, Tunk slammed his fist against the crosshatched wire separating the front seat from the back, startling the boys until they jolted to the rear of the car. He laughed and kept his hand against the wire.
After overcoming their flinching reflexes, Michael and Rob leaned forward, a little more calmly this time. And now that they were calm, they could see what Tunk held, and they could see for themselves that it was a grenade.
“Holy shit,” Rob mouthed breathlessly. Tunk, appreciative of the compliment, held the grenade out for a few moments longer. Rob stuck a tentative finger through the wire, rubbing an index over the ribbed body of the ordinance, which was about one-third of the size of a pineapple.
“Who wants to throw her?” Spider said, as if it were not an inanimate object, but a maiden awaiting christening. Rob had already informally volunteered. But his shit-eating grin, which spread from ear to ear, and surprised even Michael, made it official.
Tunk withdrew the grenade and replaced it in the glove box. The boys shifted in their seats, the foam upholstery crinkling beneath them as they moved about in the cabin. They stared out of their windows, while Spider and Tunk watched the road in front of them, as the cruiser ripped through space.
Michael and Rob had sat in cars before, but never cars that moved. Driving without tires, moored on four cinderblocks, always seemed to prove a very difficult proposition.
Outside, the sun had faded, bullied to the edge of the sky by heavy gray clouds, which hung above the car, and followed them all the way into what had once been a city. As they pushed through downtown, Tunk explained that the building covered with glass skin was a “skyscraper.”
Another brick building was a “schoolhouse.” According to Tunk, the fact that he’d had to explain that to them was proof of how “fucking stupid” Rob and Michael truly were.
