Western Empire

By Richard Greenhorn

Western Empire charts the decay of the small town and the American family through the eyes of two cousins. Peter Barnstock has just returned home from the east coast to tend for his ailing mother, while Dwayne Barnstock must deal with collapsing drug business and nasty rumors circulating about him throughout his decaying prairie hometown. The cousins' meeting forces both men to confront the ghosts of their past and the barrenness of their futures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781387175727

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

There was no seam between the sky and the land, and there was no moon. The only visible stars shone below the plane: the firmament of tiny towns scattered across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, waiting for some inspired Greek to constellate them.

Minneapolis and St. Paul passed below the plane like a dingy, white nebula—the pilots had fallen asleep somewhere over central Wisconsin and had missed the airport completely. As the plane traveled onwards, towns became sparser and their lights more feeble as the great black sea of the plains suffocated the last remnants of human society which had stalked it out of Eastern Standard Time, flickering alongside on the journey west. Soon the blackness outside the plane was complete—the ground as dark as the infinitely empty sky above.

With a solid harrumph one pilot woke from his sleep, and with an elbow to the side of his navigator the two of them succeeded in turning the plane around. They had been horribly late out of Philadelphia, and neither man had slept a wink in the twenty-eight hours prior. In the back of the plane, the stewardesses were all in trances, and the passengers were in similar states, lying motionless in their seats. On the ground, if even one person was minding the plane’s course, he was keeping mum on it. And thus, the pilots and one man, Peter Barnstock, were the only people who realized that the plane had made it all the way to South Dakota’s eastern border, right at the kink in the Minnesota River, before turning back to MSP.

As was the case in almost every airplane cabin he’d ever occupied, Peter Barnstock was the only passenger who, for the entire flight, never took his eyes from the window. Even the immaculate blackness of the dead of the night transfixed him, as if in lieu of a corporeal reality transcribed on maps, the continent now yielded itself up for his imagination to etch upon.

He was a handsome man whose once-longish brown hair was now trimmed in corporate subservience; though he was only twenty-eight, any youthful curiosity had long been washed out of his eyelashes by the grim monotony of commerce. He had dull blue eyes and cynical, nagging lips, the kind that seem forever curled, on the verge of asking a snide rhetorical question. His girlfriend, Emmy, was asleep to his left. Sweat was welling in his pores. Waiting for him in Minnesota was his family.

He would have done almost anything to get out of the encounters that awaited him below. He moved uncomfortably in his seat and reassured himself that with Emmy there, he could handle it all with ease. The gentle, sweet thing, she would make every interaction bearable. Those boring stories his uncle told which scaled his brain like a fish: she would make them interesting with her burbling laughs; she could do the same to his mother’s probing inquiries. The kisses his Aunt Shar leveled at him as if they were punishment—she would make it all bearable with her charm. Peter had never come home with a girlfriend before, and the thought of having her at his side made him believe everything could be okay.

But when the plane flew past the Twin Cities on its errant western course, and Peter watched calmly as the skylines of Minneapolis and St. Paul smoldered in the distance, great relief flooded his heart. Maybe they were going to the Rockies instead. Escaping! Neglecting to stop in Minnesota or anywhere near it. The thought excited him: Rebellion. A break for freedom. Maybe they would crash into a mountain peak and they would all die—an outcome not that much worse than his Aunt Shar’s scabrous perfume. The thick bubbles of his sweat popped and evaporated in a joyous haze.

The blackness of the prairie was perfect.

His mind roamed. He started thinking about (for the first time in years) his father. Specifically, his father’s gift to him for his seventh birthday, an airplane ride out of the Mankato Municipal airport. His old man had arranged it with some occasional pilot friend of his. Peter had never seen the pilot before. He was a man with skin that looked like corrugated cardboard and a missing eyetooth that emitted sewer-smells, a man Peter might have recognized later in life as a meth addict. But in his seventh year he was a man who owned a little four-person Volkswagon of a plane (four foam seats and cupholders—cupholders!) and was willing to spend his afternoon chaperoning a little kid up into the sky.

Up until that day, Peter had never flown before, so the trip was easily the most exciting thing he’d done in his life up to that point. The week leading up to it had been spent in rapt anticipation, dreaming of the majesty of being so high above ground. But by the time they were in the air, Peter was shaking so hard the tubes in his ears were rattling, and his father had to scream over his shoulder, Don’t be afraid! Don’t act a coward on me now.

So Peter, steeling himself, Leroy-like, crept up from his seat to look out the window…

It was October, and the corn that would have dominated the landscape weeks earlier had been sown. What remained was a desolate landscape, the endless gray dirt broken up only by brown chaff scattered here and there. As the plane rose higher the chaff disappeared, and Peter dared himself to rise higher in his seat to better see Nemancie, which was now directly below. He saw it all: The two intersecting highways, the Catholic Church, Main Street, the grain elevator, the watertower, the contiguous high, middle, and elementary schools—his home town. He wondered if he had the courage to peer long enough and count each of the 2,500 people living in it.

His father turned to him, smirking approvingly, proud that his boy had been able to overcome his fears. Someday you’re gonna go places, you know, his father had said.

That had been his last time flying until he was eighteen, when he boarded a jet to New York for college.

He felt the tilt of the jet turning. His dreams of death had been too hasty. Peter was being returned to his family. There was no escaping it now.

Damn it…

He turned to Emmy, unable to stand his thoughts anymore, and shook her arm.

The pilots flew past the Cities, he whispered. We completely missed the airport.

Emmy had been asleep, and the idea of the plane straying from its proscribed route was not something that registered for her at the moment. Peter could have told her they were flying over Barbados, Barcelona, or Venus and she wouldn’t have been shocked. That’s nice, she drawled.

He started on the topic that was really concerning him: I was just thinking about when we touch down. I was thinking about what we were talking about earlier. When we’re at Aunt Shar’s house I do think I should sleep on the floor. They’re Catholics. I don’t think anyone on my mom’s side would look upon it too favorably to see us sleeping together. It should be all right at Jo’s house.

The floor. How romantic, said Emmy, more awake now, but with her eyes still closed like a newborn rabbit’s. I’ll make sure not to step on your face when I get up to pee in the night.

He had used the phrase his mom’s side redundantly; for all practical purposes he had no paternal family.

(But on another note: Why did she have to talk about peeing while he was feeling contemplative?)

He decided to forget the topic, and tried to draw a smile from Emmy: We’ll still have lots and lots of sex, you know. In my cousin’s house. In my aunt’s house. Even in my mother’s house.

You’re goofy.

He leaned over and kissed her cheek, her ear, and her cheek again until she was at the point he liked, the point where she couldn’t stop smiling.

Stop! she cried playfully, pushing him away gently by the face. The flight attendant will see us. This girl needs to get some shut-eye, I tell you. I wish the pilots would do a loop around the Rock of Gibraltar to give me some extra minutes, contorting her face back into a frown the way a spoiled child will when she suddenly remembers that she is supposed to be unhappy.

Ask me how cold it will be when we touch down, he said, again jostling her forearm.

How cold will it be when we touch down? she asked, not turning her head.

Think of the most scalding hot temperature you can imagine, where your skin hurts just from sitting in the sun. And salt comes out of your pores because all the liquid’s gone. And you don’t even think you can move, because your muscles are so worn. Can you imagine that?

Yes.

Well, replace that heat with cold, and that’s how cold Minnesota is.

Oh Jesus. I’m gonna throw up from the cold, aren’t I? she said. Then she reconsidered: I know how to use the weather channel website. And I don’t have balls, so you don’t need to tell me what it’s like to have them frozen off. It’s not like you’re telling me anything new.

Peter decided he would shut up; his girlfriend was over-tired and he was being a heel in trying to prop her awake. She was wearing a red sweater which added a hue of crimson to her chestnut hair, a strand of which fell over her face as she sank into her seat. Her face was lovely to him, with gently freckled cheeks and soft brown eyes. Her lower lip quivered slightly now, as if whispering to a bug, a phrase Peter would sometimes tell her, when they were in bed, and she was dozing off…

But he couldn’t help it:

I was thinking about my dad.

The one who wore sweaters and endorsed Jello, or the one who sat in that chair and cursed all the people with brown skin?

The real one. The one who committed suicide.

Suicide…

A rose by any other name.

You don’t know that, Emmy replied nonchalantly. She barely opened her eyes, but through her eyelashes she realized this response was inadequate; she reached over and hugged her boyfriend. He was laconic and unresponsive, but she did it anyway. If the affection wasn’t exactly appreciated now, she knew he would gripe about a lack of it later were she to quit. She and Peter had been together for eleven months, well long enough to know this. My austere little baby, she said soothingly.

I’m not trying to be a baby, he whined like a baby. I’ve just had these weird thoughts.

Emmy waited for him to continue, but realized she was going to have to draw it out. She rushed her hand quickly through his hair and looked at him calmly: What about?

A couple memories I have of him. He took me on a plane, once. His friend owed him—I don’t know what. It was my first time up in the air.

Ooo.

When we were up there, he yelled at me so stridently. I didn’t want to look out the window. And the guy he had piloting the plane was cretinous. He looked like a used dishrag.

You’re thinking too much into it, Emmy assured him, falling back towards the cozy part of her seat. Your dad wouldn’t let you go up in the air with a soused-up pilot. Whose dad would let him go up with a soused-up pilot?

You could have collected the skin on the back of his neck in a potpourri jar. And I remember thinking, This cretin must have gray blood, for how his face looks. I’d call him a meth addict today. He must spend his nights in a cardboard box.

You were probably just displacing your fear of heights, dear. If he had a pilot’s license I’m sure he was an upstanding citizen, and a more-than-adequate pilot, that’s for damn sure.

Peter’s thoughts scurried to a long-ago family reunion—his mother’s side, of course. Picnic, at a park, green grass, tall deciduous trees surrounding the picnic area, and his dad was bending over to pick him up, all five years and fifty pounds of him, and he stuttered—he almost seemed to trip over some invisible object—he stuttered again—then he fell right on top of Peter, his father’s weight descending on him like an imploding building. Peter’s mother came rushing, quietly scolding one of them—had it been his father, or Peter for having overpowered him? He couldn’t remember precisely. He wasn’t hurt at all by his father’s weight. The one impression that remained was the terror of having toppled his old man.

Probably, Peter replied.

I know it, said Emmy, emptily. Your family seems pretty top-notch, from what you’ve told me.

That’s my mom’s side. I know about nothing of my dad’s side. My mom’s side’s all very close. Used to have dinners at our house, all our family together. My grandma and grandfather would sit at the ends of the table and talk Czech. My grandfather died a while ago. It’s been different since then.

Honey, I need to try to sleep.

Peter stopped. He countenanced a little hurt.

There was a little back-and-forth: You don’t have to be so curt. I wasn’t being curt. I thought you were being curt. You might think that… It was the kind of conversation that is embarrassing to listen to, and similarly embarrassing to recount.

After his five years at Columbia finishing with the MBA, and five more in Hartford analyzing margins, coming home only for funerals and Christmases (though missing the last one to be with Emmy’s kin in Rhode Island), even the Twin Cities seemed dismal to Peter, a dead end. The Midwest was nothing to him—it was superfluous to the wonderment and pleasures he derived from the East. Eastern girls were sluttier; eastern men were more refined. There was more to do, more to see, more to buy, more to experience—more life there waiting to be lived. Even the places in the Midwest that made the grandest impressions on him—Minneapolis, Chicago—were paltry imitations of New York, Hartford, Boston. The Midwest was nothing to Peter. For him it was an empire of bullies, of bigots, of morons, of religious zealots and awkward adolescent sex; it was a penal colony from which he had escaped. He had never wanted anything more, from childhood onwards, than to get away.

Someday you’re gonna go places.

But for all his disdain there was still never any doubt that this was his home. His family—both his mother and father’s sides had been in Minnesota for generations. His mother’s side was from the south-central portion of the state, one of the few Czech towns in the region. And his father had grown up in the way-northwest, in the dismal swamplands, the kind of place that made death seem no more remote than the shallowly hills hiding the missile silos in the distance. His father had used to tell him about the old farmhouse he’d grown up in, where it was never warm enough—in the winter, as a child, there was never a time when your toes didn’t feel like cold pebbles, or your bones didn’t ache from the feeling they had frost crystals on them, just as the ice did itself. The summers were humid and stultifying. Town was always too far to go to, and in the summer you could listen to the distant thunder of jets murdering the skies in the night.

Peter could still remember his father telling him these things. He had been a good dad—a good dad while he was there. He would comb back Peter’s long hair and whisper things the child couldn’t possibly have understood into his ears.

Why had his father left them? The question never even entered his mind as a child, for to be an adult was to be inscrutable. They always behaved in a way Peter couldn’t understand. And there’s just a certain way you just have to feel about your dad. His father had always been kind enough to him. That time in the little plane was the only time his dad’d ever yelled at him, and made him look out the window on threat of an ear-smacking, because if he didn’t he was wasting the experience. Something like: No son of his was going to have over a hundred bucks dropped on him and not appreciate what it bought.

And out the window? what was there to see? Highway-19, flat and endless, leading nowhere, surrounded by acres and acres of gray dirt.

The Twin Cities again came into view. The quavering lake of suburban light grew larger.

Emmy, wake up, he bothered her again, harassing her forearm.

What?

It’s Minneapolis. And I love you.

You think you’re cute, she said.

Well, he said coyly. I have to prep you a little more for when we get down. My cousin Jo: She’s crazy. Not exactly a Type-A personality, but if she gets on a point and you disagree with her, she’ll drag you down. I lived with her for nine years. She made my life hell as a kid.

She’s probably a big sweetheart, Peter, she replied. You’re just in one of your funks. Pimples seem like tumors.

They’re not rich people, my family. They come from a different era, almost. My mother’s house isn’t like your parents’. It’s not big and impressive.

Funny that they’re even bothering to foreclose on the woman.

Little Acerbic Emmy. At other times Peter might have laughed at the joke, but now he scowled and turned away from her.

Oh come on. I thought we were joking with each other again. Don’t put on that silent treatment. I don’t need that from you right now.

Emmy and Peter seemed to be the only passengers not to receive their luggage at Claims. With Emmy standing behind him, hectoring him for not checking if the tags were correct back in Hartford, Peter arranged to have their bags, if and when they arrived, sent to his Cousin Jo’s house later in the day.

And for all Emmy’s bluster, she wasn’t able to stand more than five minutes in the cold, waiting just outside the terminal for Jo, who had promised she’d be keeping track of their plane on the airline’s website.

It feels like Jack Frost is reaching his arm down my throat. Emmy groaned, shivering as they went back into the terminal.

Should we get a cab? Emmy asked, warming her red cheeks with her palms.

I don’t know where Jo’s house is.

Then why don’t we get a hotel?

I don’t want to leave Jo waiting, Peter replied.

In other times Emmy would have criticized Peter for this kind of self-immolating Minnesotan guilt—or was it Catholic guilt? or was it Minnesotan Catholic guilt? But she found something else to keep her attention. There was one other family at the terminal at that hour, waiting for their car to arrive, a man and a woman and a baby who was rotating between burbling, crying, and sleeping in his mother’s arms. Emmy adored children and, putting aside her frustration, led Peter by the hand towards their company. The women immediately bonded over things maternal. The man needed no pretext to talk about economics.

Name’s Pierre Ching, he said, strangling Peter’s hand. He had a thickly-gelled pompadour of black hair, and his right eye was a glass one, and blinked involuntarily. The glass eye was horrid as a piece of modern art; its general layout was no different from any human eye, but the white of the eye was whiter than an opal, and its iris was split into a thousand different lens, like an insect’s eye. Name’s Pierre, but my friends and clients call me Pig’s Eye. On account, (wink wink), of the Pig’s Eye, as we call him, pointing to himself with his thumb.

Peter Barnstock.

What you delving into the tundra for? Must be a masochist. Or a sadist, if ya wear your wife like a coat.

Noooo, no. I’m heading back with my girlfriend for some family affairs.

Girlfriend, eh? Not fiancé?

No.

Lemme say to you Peter, employing my particular kind of expertise: If you think you can stick it out two years, the financial benefit of being married will well outweigh the costs of the divorce. Granted you have a prenup, and you’re smart about it, (wink wink), no joke. But that’s just a friendly aside: We’re—my wife and son and I—we’re moving to this ice cream pole for good. Good business, I mean. What do you do?

Peter was an analyst and margins specialist for Hartford Bank and Savings. Boring to even recite!

Ah, good man, good man. (wink) Smart man, I proffer. He’s a damn fool, the man who hasn’t changed his middle name to FDIC.

Heh heh.

"Ha ha is right. As you well know, sir, the only business nowadays is speculation. (wink) I’m sure you’ve had real estate hosers gnaw your ear: Buy land cuz God ain’t makin any more of it? Well, hencetoforth, God ain’t makin more of anything. And the guy who’s gettin a taste of what He did on that Third Day is the guy who’s makin his own water into wine. Only way to do it. Back in Raleigh I was scooping up the land like a mole. I did alright, partner. (wink) But that’s all through now. Everything in this country moves west until it drops into the ocean, and I’m making my bet now that this Minnesota’s the next stop."

Why do you say that?

Pierre leaned back sagaciously, looking as luxurious as possible to look in the hard plastic terminal seats.

Regime change. Obama’s coming in, and every palate of land that son-of-uh smiles upon is gonna spring grass. This country’s salad. And the smart guys are gonna get in fast. So many fools of our ilk, mister, try to malign the government when they should be breaking their kneecaps in front of her throne. (wink) Government’s the only reason anyone has two dimes anymore. Stimulus, baby, stimulus. You’ll hear people trying to put Uncle Sam down, but believe me, if it weren’t for the Congress no one would work in this country. This country doesn’t breed workers anymore. Take away the Federal money, the cities would collapse. You think blacks know how to work? Hell no! And the work ethic’s dying all over this country. And all white men will be black soon enough. No, you take away that Federal money and the people would eat their tails in revolt. That’s no good.

That’s no good, Peter agreed.

Just the facts, baby. The fact of life is that while a congressman’s makin laws up, it’s a businessman’s job to employ them. Employ them in a way that profits his family. You don’t wanna have to explain to your family why you’ve got no income. I’ve got a son. I don’t want to be one of those people who can’t look his son in the pig’s eye, (wink) when they get home at night.

Can’t be one of those people.

No, you can’t. You can’t be a real man if you ain’t making some real money.

No.

Mrs. Ching had given the little Ching to Emmy, and a mutual smile rose between them like a baby’s gas rising in its gut.

So tell Pig’s Eye. What’re you doin with your family? Ya miss Christmas?

Kind of. My mother’s getting foreclosed upon tomorrow and we’re going to help her move.

Ooohh, said Pig’s Eye; his head twitched in pain as if someone had just ripped duct tape off an extremity. That can’t be fun. But remember, God ain’t making any more mothers either. Is your father still—?

No.

Even more so. You only get so many inheritances. God, she’s a lovely girl, isn’t she? Ching asked, looking towards the women.

Emmy?

No. My wife. I had to promise her a house before she said she’d marry me. I had to promise her the entire state to get her to move to this climate.

Hopefully you can at least wrangle her up a county.

"There’s money hidden everywhere you look. Hope too."

The Chings’ car arrived, and the couple wished Emmy and Peter farewell, leaving the terminal.

CHAPTER TWO

Emmy and Peter spent the night in the hard plastic seats at the airport. When he was in fact able to drift off, Peter failed to dream in the typical sense; rather, there was but one image in his head throughout the night, tattooed on the insides of his eyelids: His father’s face.

It was like pale chewed gum, peaking just high enough above the sides of the casket for him to see, plain and gaunt. The smell of the dirt from the flowers crowded the air, and offhand gossip hung like wisps of hair just above his ears: Jim Beam, ya know. Just the way it goes. En if it weren’t for the tread uh his shoes, he’duh slid right inta Lake Ripley. Ya don’t know how lucky ya are just to have a corpse tuh send off.

Jo made it to the airport around nine o’clock in the morning, hugging and apologizing to her neglected wards. She’d fallen asleep right on her keyboard. So sorry. But don’t worry, she told them, breakfast and bed were waiting for them at her house.

She drove them to Rosemount, a suburb about twenty minutes from the airport. The town’s interior attested that it once had been a farming community, but Jo and her boyfriend Chad had a house in a new development towards the eastern border of the town. The houses here were sterile, white, and large as country barns, and as they rounded the snarling suburban streets, one couldn’t help but notice the absence of light in the windows and cars in the driveways, most of which had not been shoveled after the last snow. Still hungover from the darkness of the night, Peter imagined someone was giving him a tour of a Potemkin Village, trying to convince him of being in a real locality, when in fact he was still gazing upon a bad dream. Mailboxes hung agape at the ends of driveways, empty as singing skulls. He honestly wasn’t quite sure of his positioning until they were at Jo’s.

"Yeah, the owner, he was askin somethin crazy for rent, like, twenty-one hundred bucks a month which (I grant ya) would’ve been a friggin bargain at height uh the market. But now, said Cousin Jo, making a sweeping motion with her cigarette over the kitchen table, it’s a buyer’s paradise, buddy—I’m not lettin you take advantage of me like that. He’s fightin his best just not to lose the things—keepin afloat—and the whole rest uh the neighborhood looks like the Fifth Ward, or synagogues in the Gaza Strip—somethin outta a horror movie. And none of these houses have got two good decades in em if ya ask me. So yeah, rent is very reasonable. I gotta say, though, the desolation—Shit! I got ashes on my eggs, and she flicked them off with her chrome-painted nail. I never hafta smoke at breakfast, usually, babies. But leaving you there like that at the airport makes me so stressed."

Jo jammed a hearty, raspy cough into her fist and killed the cigarette in a tray. The four of them, Jo, Chad, Emmy, and Peter, were circled around the table eating breakfast: eggs, toast, and stale doughnuts Chad had bought the day before. White sunshine invaded the room from a window over the sink, and ached like dry ice in Peter’s temples.

I like what you’ve done to the place, said Emmy, giving a cursory glance around the kitchen and an insincere smile.

Most def, droned Jo. We were debating whether or not we wanted to go to the suburbs, but the quiet’s nice after four years in Bloomington. No drugs, no crime, so to speak (some arson, when these were first goin up, ya know). It’s kind of a relief. Though like I said, I wouldn’t want to get tied down here. Place just isn’t built to last.

Shoddy workmanship, Chad interjected.

The kitchen was ludicrously big. The cupboards were cavernous given its owners’ scanty glassware, and the counter expanded like an airport runway between a cutlery block and the gargling coffee maker sitting by the lip of the sink. Just as the massive living room contained only a television, a couch, and an ocean of white shag carpeting, all of Jo and Chad’s possessions seemed paltry, like a skinny man in a fat man’s clothes.

Must cost a fortune to heat, said Peter.

Not as much as you might think, said Jo.

How’s it feel to be back in the good ol Minnesota cold? asked Chad, turning to Peter, smacking into his toast with an explosion of crumbs.

Jarring, ya know, said Peter, struggling to find adequate response to such a banality. But homey.

I did some business with an electronics firm in New Hampshire last February. We were havin one uh those minus-twenty degree stretches out here and out there—man. Man—I gotta say, it wasn’t all that cold like temperature-wise cold, but it was nasty cold. Like you’d step outside and have a twenty-five degree wet tongue slapped across yer body, up en down yer legs. That kinda cold.

It’s from being next to the ocean, said Emmy, the wet cold.

Real unpleasant if you ask me, mumbled Chad, lips gummed up by a paste of starch and spit. "I call what we have in Minnesota honest cold, if ya know what I mean. Good’n dry cold. It’s one’uh the reasons people out there are so dang unhappy. They’re too close to each other, fer one, and their cold’s not honest, fer two."

Hmm, said Peter.

Chad was fat and crew-cut, with an inoffensive and ingratiating quality to him which Peter associated with premature middle age, the complaisance you learn from talking to clients, potential clients, former clients, clients’ wives, and the castrated friendliness that develops when a majority of the day’s interactions are with suburbanites from whom you’re hustling cash.

Jo continued: "Our old house, Pete. My mother’s—we basically tore that place tuh hell with a toolkit when we was kids, and it’s still strong as it ever was. That was a Real House. Built in the forties. Men made livings back then when they made something. The things they made were built to last.

Did Peter tell you about our house? she asked, dropping her didactic tone for a conversational one, turning to Emmy. "We lived together from when I was nine until Peter went to New Yahwk, squawking the last word like a crow. He was exactly like a little brother to me, and our moms were more like best friends than sisters. Why would you wanna live with parents when you can live with best friends? I dunno. Peter and I used to have quite a party. I used to look out for him at school. True, Peter?"

Yes it is, he said.

Jo got up and took everyone’s dirty plates, circling the table, strolling in a lithe way which belied her heavyset frame and leaden breasts—she was genuinely big-boned, as Aunt Shar used to say. Since Peter had last seen her, her weak chin had slouched into a pure double. Rings had formed around her neck and she’d put a purple streak in her dirty blond hair, highlighting how unexceptional the follicles were in the first place. Her thickness and gregariousness hinted at something maternal inside her, but her sardonic eyes and mordant humor told of someone too worldly and independent to ever go off the pill. From talking to Chad, he seemed like a groveler, a man who is nothing if not offering himself to someone, the kind that (Peter believed) usually didn’t last their early-thirties without a son. Wonder how long they’ll stay together, Peter thought rather too glibly.

Peter was our precocious little guy. I’ll have you know: You’re dating the smartest goddamn kid in his class, Miss Emmy Newlton. Let’s see, lighting up another cigarette, using the ember as guide down Memory Lane. There was time, I dunno, maybe Peter was eleven, he started talking in a British accent to all the teachers at school. He was goin on about how he’d never watch a sitcom again, and how short pants and bluejeans were oh so undignified. Aww, it was horrible, it was hilarious, you pretentious little jerk—slapping him on the shoulder. "And around Christmas, like 1994—you remember that?—you started playing with that dreidel you got from the Polanskis. Oh jeez, you shoulda seen the look on our gramma’s face. She use’tuh want Peter to join the priesthood, ya remember that, Father Barnstock?"

"There’s one holy mandate I couldn’t put up with," said Chad, stupidly.

You want some more coffee—caffeine—honey? asked Jo to Emmy. We’ve got a day ahead of us and it’d be better to have ya dead on yer feet than dead on the ground.

No thank you, said Emmy.

You sure? Cuz I’m five doors down from human without at least two cups in the morning.

Knock knock. Who’s there? said Chad, stupidly.

Not me, Jo said, sitting again. Pete-Pete, how can you downplay your holy side? You were a regular Pope Pious the Fourth for a while when we were kids. You should’ve seen it, Emmy. He’d go around blessin these toys of his, that little bear, what was it called?

Maurice.

Maurice the Bear. What a character he was! An astounding citizen, was ever there a baptized bear. When you played Mass, what was he? He was like an altarbear.

Yeah yeah, something like that. Sometimes the Vice-Priest, sometimes the priest’s vice, Peter replied. He’d try to diminish the name of Christ in a holy place pretty much all the time. Me and the Rector Dog would have to teach him the error of his ways.

Dog could fly with his ears, Emmy. Supernatural powers. You shoulda seen your boyfriend. He’d take all my Barbies and all his toys and set them on those Scrabble holders as pews and then lead them in the rosary or the Gospel reading, collection plates. All the fun of bein in goddamned church, brought home to ya in yer front den. You tattled on me for kissing Ben Bryant behind the garage, cuz you’d just learned the word ‘celibacy’. And you’d say, ‘Follow thus out of the darkness and thus. And you will see’ en shit. You remember that time we played exorcism with GI Joe?

I think you might have just been ripping the heads off my toys that day.

Oh, I think it was an exorcism, Jo insisted. He was such a devout little kid. He made this whole stained glass window out of Starburst wrappers, and he’d give the neighbors communion with Eggo Minis.

It was pretty sacrilegious now that I think about it… reflected Peter, smiling to Emmy. Her sweet-as-sweet-butter face was empty, tired, blank—nothing on it but a sardonic smirk.

The neighbor kids just loved you. You were the sage little dude who knew just about everything. They’d pick on him in school, sure, Emmy, sometimes, but when kids are outside of their structural bounds, they know who to flock to when the going gets real.

Bunch of morons, all of them, said Peter dismissively, tired of listening to Jo’s rambling. I was just thinking about the Eberts on the plane last night. Morons. Maybe I’ll get to see some of them, riding around Nemancie. Huh!

Luckily there was no longer any room for griping. Chad looked up at the wall clock, said, Should probably be on our way…

So they all put on their jackets and went straight from the house to the garage. Chad had a Ford FG-960 and Peter