Hunting Mr. Old Sack Bones Read online

  Hunting Mr. Old Sack Bones

  A.D. Bloom

  Old Sack Bones piles his insides up and makes himself tall, and he looks like a pot-bellied bearskin rug with a fringe of stolen teeth. It's clear which fur-patch came from what meal, like on a stitch-skin coat. Besides the teeth, everything else is inside.

  Inside is small bones and muscles. Not one set of bones there long enough to let him stand tall. So they pile up on each other. Sheep on top of rabbit, on top of squirrel, on top of dog, on top of Mrs. Chao's cat, and three turtles until he can stand tall.

  Tall as he can be, he falls like a shadow: fast and absolute. Where he falls, they find the grasses all dead, the mosses turned to ash, and the trees all blighted. But they never find what he ate because it's all inside Old Sack Bones, and now he can get taller. Fall further. Eat something bigger. As soon as he's big enough, he comes.

  I saw him coming three hundred miles away.

  Ask me how to see that far, and I'd tell you to take a walk. Walk blocks and forever til your path spells out your name and your footfalls become a drum beat. Walk with nothing but the drum until you forget it's there. And then, if you're lucky, you'll be left with Nothing. Don't look him in the eye and don't give him your name, but from wherever he is, you can see Everything.

  I follow Old Sack Bones' trail with fingertips on bus schedules and maps. I follow it up the coast and use my thumb to catch rides up 101, down river, with the current. At first, I ride trucks. The driver's side is called the See Side, but to follow Old Sack bones you gotta sit on the other side, the Blind Side. I ride a Mack, then a Peterbilt, with a Jake Brake hammer-growling down the sides of mountains. Then I ride cars, markin' which ones are going my way as I see 'em. Buick to Barracuda to Ford to a wood-sided pick-up. On the way I tell one driver how long his dying father will live. I tell another driver a story about herself as a rabbit. I'm a bottle with messages, and I ride their joss on the currents to the end of the line: Covelo, California.

  Covelo is hippies and guns. Love hippies. They carry me downstream and leave me at a bar near the Indian casino, and it's where the other side of Covelo is. Guns instead of hippies. Inside the bar is Cowboys and Indians. It doesn't take more than five minutes for one of 'em to poke me with a stick. “What kinda psycho-weirdo are you, man?” Maybe they don't like my dress.

  I tell 'em I'm hunting Mr. Old Sack Bones. I tell 'em about how he stands tall and casts shade and how every psycho-weirdo like me has to face him, has to learn to spell and wake, or die sleeping in his belly. I tell them the truth. I always do.

  They like the spook of it and they laugh. One of the meth-hopped Indians says I'm crazy. Then he says it's okay, long as I remember I'm in Indian Country. One of 'em isn't laughing. He isn't lookin' at me like I'm crazy, neither. He's seen it. The smell of Old Sack Bones is all over him. “That thing you was talkin' about. Shit like that don't exist, man.” Rico's an Indian. A Yuki Indian. Gotta a loaded gun rack on his F-350.

  Outside, we're smoking, and I can see the twist on his face. He's twisted cause he's seen it. Something inexplicable yet undeniable can do that to you. He figures he's crazy, maybe. Lots of folk do. Maybe he won't trust himself enough to wake up. But he's seen it, and no matter what he chooses to believe, it'll end one way or the other, probably tonight. It's dark, and Old Sack Bones is already out for the hunt.

  Rico won't admit he's seen it right the fuck in front of him. He lies and tells me, “That thing was in my nightmare, man. It hugged the ground like a hole and slid and clawed its way along with teeth around the edges. I saw him stand up tall like you said.”

  “Did he fall? I mean his shadow.”

  “I ran when I saw him. To get a shotgun. He was gone when I got back.”

  “He'll be back tonight.”

  “You came here to hunt that thing?”

  “That's what I said,” but it's only a half-truth, and I want to tell Rico the whole truth. “Old Sack Bones only shows up when someone calls him up. What called him up from Underneath is why I came.”

  “You're fulla shit,” he says. Must seem like it. Only a couple of choices for Rico right now: A) I'm fulla shit, or B) The world is Weirder than Rico thought, and he's going to have to make some major adjustments. Rico goes from A to B faster than I thought he would. He asks, “So what called him?”

  “Something that doesn't know it's own nature.” Just in case I'm wrong, I look again. I squint with my whole self. Like squinting with yer eyes 'till you can't see nothing unless it's as bright as the sun. But I do it with my whole self. I squint myself up to the point where I can't see any of the sleepers, just the gleam of any waking around me. They can't hide when I squint. Not from a mind's-eye with one foot in the dim. There's not a hint of shine here; it's all quiet.

  Nothing but sleepers here. No offense meant. Really. Nothing's prettier than seeing a sleeper wake and throw blind-bright beginner's luck through everyone's lids.

  “Let's get wasted and shoot it,” he says.

  Hours later we're drinking on Rico's farm, and when I squint up and turn my eye to the dim, I can see it through the mountain. Shuffling like an inchworm and creeping like a vine, Old Sack Bones is coming.

  We're out by the fire when Rico's mules hear him. They bray, but I tell Rico to leave 'em there. They hear Sack Bones' growling stomach. He's all stomach.

  Rico smokes, and there's no reason not to.

  Sack Bones crawls out of the woods on the trail, a carpet of fur with stolen teeth and claws. The mules go calm when they see him, and Rico freezes. He's bigger than I remember, and from the rumble of his stomach, he's hungry.

  Old Sack bones piles himself up inside and makes himself tall. All the bone and muscle inside his fur sack stands him up while his top fringe of teeth all reach for the sky and glint in the moonlight tarnish. I'm glad for the fire's glow, because when Old Sack Bones falls, his shadow falls faster than I can run. We huddle over the oil drum's fire and the cone of orange glow, so we have something to breathe – a bubble of air in the dim.

  Everything outside the bubble gets shaded. Strangled. The bark peels, and the grasses go ashy, and the little animals in their burrows nearby snuff it quietly underground. The jerklines' mouths open to bray again, but Sack Bones' shadow eats their cry. Standing tall, he's a monolith of fur and teeth, and the hungry shade he throws eats everything it can. Mosquitoes fall from the air.

  Rico shoots, and I told him it wouldn't do anything, but I don't blame him for trying. I could stop all this, make Sack Bones go back Underneath, but far as I can tell, I didn't come here to do that.

  As the mules pale before his eyes and fall, Rico's face is underlit by the dying flames. When he sees Old Sack Bones' shadow eating the fire's glow and how the bubble of breathable light is shrinking, Rico looks more scared than I am. He looks like he's already dead. Then the fire snuffs, the bubble is gone, and we're both underwater, drowning in Old Sack Bones' shade.

  I don't know where the surface is. It's everywhere, only inches away, but you'll never find it. Once the heaving is over, once the drowning dance is done, we've almost found ourselves. We're dying slow in the whale-belly dark, and it's quiet as quiet can be.

  I lead with my voice. “Walk with me,” I tell him in the Dark. “Up.” We walk up, blind. Then a right turn that curves back on itself into the Up line we walked before it shoots a diagonal down and left. “The path is a letter,” I tell him. “And it leads to a name. Follow it with me.” I'm a dancing bee, drawing the letters on his head so that he knows them, too. Up again. Then the curving up, left, and down, left, the circle that doesn't close. When we reach the last letter, Rico's voice leads and makes the full circle, all the way around. He says, “Rico. That's my name. That's My nam
e.”

  We surface. We're back from the beast's belly and on the ground at the foot of Old Sack Bones, still standing tall over us, still falling. Rico's wake-shine cuts through Sack Bones' hungry shade and burns his fur until wisps of smoke rise and curl in the shadow-stilled air. Rico laughs and lets out a victory cry as he watches Old Sack Bones run away, run back Underneath.

  It's beautiful. There's nothing like watching someone wake. It's Awareness and Ignorance in equal parts, flexing muscle everywhere. It's Beginners Luck. It's ass-backwards perfection.

  Rico whoops one more time and pumps his useless rifle in the air. Then he grins at me and picks the bottle up off the ground. When he takes a swig, his face screws up in disgust. “It's water. Nothin' but water, now. That fucker.” He laughs before his eyes roll back in his head. Then he passes out and pisses himself, and I leave him there for the sun to find. Leave him there to wake with all his new toys and to puzzle the rest of it himself for a while.

  And I leave him a note that tells him when and where he can find the rest of us.

  Only Suckers Call It Luck

  A.D. Bloom

  I was twelve when the sun erupted. After a solid month of searing, microwaved days and shimmering, sky-fire nights, the aliens showed up. Her name was Casper. For some she was a man, for others he was a woman. She was different to everyone she visited so I can only tell you what she was to me.

  She manifested herself in my room and stood over me where I lay sleepless. It was winter in Massachusetts and winter nights were still cold then, but all she wore was an open, yellow windbreaker. I stared up at her breasts and into her wooly black mound and down at all the fine hair on her never-shaven legs.

  Casper only said one thing: “You've got fifteen years. Then comes the mother of all coronal mass ejections. In fifteen years, baby, if you don't get off this rock, then you're going to die.”

  Everybody on Earth got a visit from Casper that night, and everybody took the news differently. Some ignored her and pretended it never happened. Some cried. Some pleaded and bargained and prayed. The man next door shot her and claimed he thought she was a home invader.

  *****

  Over the next decade, the vulgar, flaring sun cooked us night and day. During those years, I only saw Casper a few times.

  She watched from the other side of the street in a coonskin hat and a one-piece bathing suit while I made it with Sarah Clausewitz in my Nissan during junior prom.

  Five years later, a truck ran a light and t-boned that car, and between the moment I saw the grill of the truck looming large in the passenger window and the moment when it smashed into me, I swear I saw Casper sitting in the passenger seat, feet on the dash, wearing a wedding dress hiked up around her waist, knuckle-deep in the bramble of her unshaven sex.

  A day later, she manifested herself in my hospital room wearing half a pantomime horse and asked me if I wanted to go skydiving. She told me I should move to Vegas, and I did.

  Vegas is perfect for her.

  Casper likes a good time. She likes gambling. She likes nightclubs and sex and liquor and coke and anything else that'll mess you up. And death. She loves death. The cabbies here say they won't pick her up because it's even odds whether or not she's going to OD in the back. One guy I met said she did it to him three times in one night, and all he could do was keep stuffing her bodies in the trunk.

  She said on TV that dying is the perfect way to cap off an evening of being alive. I think she said that to make us earthlings feel better about the fact that the sky is on fire and that when our insane, murderous sun finally hurls a big enough piece of itself right at us, anyone still here is going to die extra crispy.

  *****

  Casper once said her flesh is a shadow cast from another dimension. Standing at a roulette table in the Horseshoe, I felt the chill of that shadow fall over me before she pressed herself against my back. “Only suckers call it luck,” she said in my ear.

  I kept my eyes on the croupier raking up my chips while the man to my right scowled and left muttering about how Casper is always Bad Luck. She took his place, and I pushed another chip forward for an outside bet on Red.

  She wore thick, arctic-weight goose-down pants, suspenders, and an amber necklace where frozen insects hung suspended between her breasts. When I finally looked up at her eyes, she smiled at me, reached into her pocket, and came out with three hundred-dollar chips. She put them down in a neat stack for a straight-up bet: twenty-six.

  As we watched the ball clatter and bounce, her fingernails played over the back of my hand and drew lines in the burn I got for going out before sundown. “Twenty-six,” the croupier announced, “Black.” Her next bet went on fifteen, and she won that, too. On the third spin, I was smart enough to bet on whatever Casper did, and I finally won.

  “It's only luck if it happens by accident,” she whispered in my ear. She asked me if I wanted to drink. I shook my head no; I don't know why. She slid her hand down the front of my jeans and squeezed and said, “C'mon... We haven't had any quality time in forever, and time's running out.”

  The burning night sky waved as I drove us back to my motel. “You cheated, didn't you,” I said while she sniffed white-powder off a tiny spoon.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Back in the casino. After you won, you said, 'It's only luck if it happens by accident.' If it wasn't an accident, then you must have cheated.”

  “Was that cheating?” she asked. Casper flipped the visor down, looked in the vanity mirror, and said, “I cheat.” Then she blew herself a kiss and laughed. “If you liked that trick,” she said, “then you're going to love this:” She opened the door of my Caddy and stepped out. We were doing eighty when she hit the asphalt, and I didn't hear a single complaint from any of the cars behind me.

  *****

  After I showered at the motel and put myself to sleep, she was there. I woke up with her on top of me, all slick with sweat. As she moved, drops of it flew off her. Inside, Casper is a furnace.

  “You want to know how to do my tricks?” she asked. “You want to do what I do? You want to cheat, baby?” She put emphasis on the word 'cheat' and ground herself down so hard she bruised me. “You want to cheat and get off this dying rock?” I tried not to answer, but the words leaped from my mouth.

  “I don't want to die.”

  While the night sky lit us lurid, she balanced herself on the waist-high railing of the balcony and glanced down at the ten story drop to the parking lot. Then she smiled wide and pulled me to her. “You want to know how I do it?” she asked, wrapping her legs around my waist. I nodded and felt a drop of sweat clinging to the end of my nose. She pulled me in and held me there and squeezed. “You want to know how to cheat, baby?” she asked again. “Like this:” She reached her hands towards the sky and leaned back and hung off the balcony, out over the open air of the parking lot, half upside down. All that kept her from falling were her legs wrapped tight around my waist and her heels in my back. I held her hips and tried to hold her, tried to keep her from falling, but she began to pull me over the railing. She saw the fear in my eyes and laughed and dug her heels in and bucked hard.

  I panicked. I twisted and pulled and tried to get away before we both fell. I let go of her hips and arched my back to keep from going over. Then I reached behind me and unlocked her ankles.

  I saw Casper tumble backwards for a quarter-second before I fell back on the concrete balcony and shivered. I never heard any impact or any car alarms, and I never got up the courage to look over the edge.

  *****

  When the sun set enough to go out without blistering, I went to look for Casper at the Horseshoe. I saw her hanging around the high stakes tables in a red ski-vest and cowboy boots, flirting with the whales. Fear spun me on my heels, but out front when the valet brought my Caddy, she was already in the car.

  On the freeway, she told me to pull over and park in the breakdown lane. The hazard lights ticked and the car shuddered and rocked
every few seconds from the traffic speeding by. “Are you going to chicken out this time?” she asked. I shook my head, and she stared at me like she didn't believe me until she shrugged and said it didn't matter either way.

  Casper found the seat controls and reclined mine back as far as it would go until there was room for her to sit on top of me and face forward while she gripped the wheel and gyrated.

  Even with the engine running and the AC going full blast, Casper fogged the windows. It made the freeway lights and the electric plasma sky into one big blur on the windshield. I told the back of Casper's head, “I'm ready.”

  “What do you think the chances are that you could run across the freeway?” she asked.

  “And not get hit by a car? Just about none.”

  “Just about none,” she said. “But not none. Not zero. Why not?”

  “Because it's possible. Technically. But I'd have to be pretty damn lucky.”

  “Sucker.” She laughed at me.

  “Maybe I should cheat,” I said, “like you do.” That made her turn and grin.

  “Let's go, baby; I'm bored with this planet.” She lifted herself off me and got out the passenger side door. Through the fog on the windows I saw her walk around the front of the car, and when I wiped the windshield clear with my hand, she was in the headlights and the blinking hazards, looking back at me. The insides of her thighs were smeared shiny and she gave me the finger.

  I got out of the car to watch. A second later, she stepped into four lanes of fast and thick freeway traffic and crossed them all in a single, impossible step.

  From the median, she beckoned for me to follow. I waved to her, but I couldn't move.

  I don't want to die.

  If I was like Casper, if death didn't mean a thing to me, then maybe I'd have been able to take that first step into traffic and follow her. Maybe I'd fail and die like roadkill on the freeway but hell, I'm going to die anyway. In five years we'll probably all burn like Casper said.

  She watched me to see if I'd take that first step, and I flushed with shame because I knew I wouldn't. Not now, probably not ever. I know she could tell because she blew me a kiss. A goodbye kiss. Then she came back across the freeway, squeezed my balls and said, “You're going to die here with the rest of the suckers.”