Engine Zero-Zero: Chapter 12

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12

“Chief says you’ll take us on a test drive tomorrow, through the desert and back.” The rider smoked his cigarette and worked the stove, juggling a heap of potatoes in a greasy skillet. The sound of children playing in the dark came through the open window.

            “I suppose so.” Miller sat on the edge of the bed, sharing a picture book with Junior.

            “Didn’t think it would be ready so soon,” said the rider.

            “Not much to it.” Of course what Miller worried, and what they would not talk about, was what would happen after, when he was no longer any use to them.   

            “How’s this one?” The dark-eyed rider’d put aside polishing his stones to get in Miller’s trunk and try on his clothes. They would have to dress this way, he said, for going into the settlements, if they were going to try and sell the cargo. He turned himself left and right in a mirror, Miller’s shirt and pants draped oversize around his frame.

            “Like the green one better,” said the rider at the stove.

            Meanwhile the rider with the missing ear was growing increasingly frustrated with Dendri’s Bible. He sat huddled over it on the floor with his head in his hands, mouthing the words and furrowing his brow. “Listen to this—” Every other minute there was some new confounding. “ ‘The Parable of the Ten Virgins’—”

He read slowly and poorly, and when he was finished slammed the book shut.

“What the hell’s any of that mean?!” he exclaimed. “What the hell’s the point of it?!”

“It means be prepared,” said the one in Miller’s clothes.  

“I know what it means but why don’t it just say that? Why’s it not just say be prepared instead of all this other junk?”

“Story gets the point across,” said the rider at the stove. “You can tell someone be prepared but even better is tell a story about why they should be prepared. Read it over again, I want to hear the one part again.”

The rider with the missing ear read through story again until the rider at the stove told him to stop.

“That part there—” The rider pointed emphatically with his cigarette. “ ‘While the bridegroom tarried.’ How’s it the virgins’ fault the bridegroom tarried? How’s it their fault he don’t show up until midnight? They supposed to carry around extra lamp oil everywhere they go for somebody who can’t be bothered to show up on time? What if he don’t show up until four, five in the morning? Then it’s everybody’s lamp oil’s wasted. Then it’s ten foolish virgins instead of five.”

“What’s even a bridegroom?”

“It’s a man’s about to be married.”

“Should just say that too. Would be easier to read without all this shit stuck between the pages.” The rider with the missing ear held the Bible by the back cover and shook out a flurry of Dendri’s notations.

“Careful with that!” Miller leapt up to try and save the Bible and the rider flung it aside to level his spear. Miller stopped just short of running himself through and raised his hands.

“Give me a reason!” said the rider with the missing ear. “Go ahead and give me a reason!”

The rider in Miller’s clothes sprang forward to intervene. “Watch what you’re doing—he needs his guts to teach us the train.”

The riders bickered back and forth and then the one diffused the spear from the other, and then they got to laughing and roughhousing, poking and slapping escalating to out and out grappling and crashing through the furniture. Junior started crying and the riders picked up their heads from their tangle on the floor, grinning and red-faced.

“What’s the matter with him?” said the rider with the missing ear.

“Scared is all,” said Miller, and tried to calm the boy down.

            “Scared?” The rider stood, panting, and came before Junior. “We scare you?”

            Junior squealed and shrunk against his father.

            “There’s a trick for that,” said the rider. “There’s a trick always works for me.”

            The rider left the train then returned a moment later carrying a brown leather satchel. “Come here, boy.” He went and opened his satchel by the mirror. “It’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you. It’s paint, see?” He opened dirty jars of red, black, and white paint from the satchel and stirred them with a butter knife. “Come get your war paint.”

            “He don’t like stuff on him,” said Miller. “Don’t like to be touched.”

“He’s fine.” The rider with the missing ear whistled at the boy like he was a dog. “Come here, boy. Not going to hurt you.”

Miller didn’t like the mean, manic look of the rider but told Junior to go ahead, to go to him. The boy hesitated, then obeyed.

“Let’s get your shirt off.” Junior trembled as the rider with the missing ear lifted his arms and pulled off his shirt, turned him left and right. “Make a muscle—make a muscle, let’s see how strong you are.” The rider showed the boy how then when he wouldn’t bent his arm and squeezed his bicep. “You’re a string bean, kid. What’s your dad feed you?”

Junior whined and hummed and trembled but the rider pretended not to notice.

“You’re alright.” Miller told the boy. “You’re alright.”

“Hold still.” The rider scooped out globs of white paint with his fingers and smeared it all over the Junior’s back and chest. “This is how to get ready for a fight. Can’t be scared in a fight. Can’t be scared you’re gonna die, can’t be scared your friends are gonna die. Hold still now, hold still!” He gripped the boy tight and smeared the paint all over the his face, in his hair. The rider at the stove tried to reel him in but he ignored him. “People can’t help but be afraid. Person’s got a body, a face in the mirror. He talks.”

The boy’s eyes stood out from the white paint like pieces of dark coal. Every pallid, bovine contour of his face was eroded to a salt flat.

The boy blinked at himself in the mirror while the rider readied the black and red paint, and in a moment his whining and trembling stopped and his whole body relaxed. It was like watching an exorcism, the slow leak of an angry spirit.

“You don’t be none of that,” the rider continued. “That’s how you don’t be afraid as you don’t be none of that, none of what a person is. You turn to blood and darkness. Death and blood and darkness. Ghosts and goblins.”

He crowned the boy’s forehead in red, collared his neck in black. He painted tiger stripes across his torso and snake diamonds  on his limbs. When he was finished he stood behind the boy and gripped his shoulders, wearing him as a shield in the mirror.

“How’s that feel? You feel tough?”

The boy spit paint from his mouth. He shivered.

“You feel strong?”

The boy fidgeted and grabbed onto his crotch. He nodded.

“You like to be free don’t you, boy? You don’t want to be the living dead.”

“I look crazy.” The boy started cackling and pointing at himself in the mirror. “I look crazy,” he repeated. “I look crazy!” He turned to his father, face a mess of white, black, red. “Look at me,” he said, pointing in the mirror. “Don’t I look crazy?”

Miller felt sick. There was something unnatural about the boy in his new skin, like a thing that casts no shadow. “Sure do,” he said. “Look crazy.”

The boy cackled and wheeled about the sleeper car, jumping on the furniture, swinging from the ceiling, cheered on by the riders, until finally he collapsed on the floor in a laughing heap. Outside in the dark the children all matched his tenor, carried on for the him after he’d exhausted himself.

“Why don’t you go wash up?” Miller told the boy. Then to the riders, “Let him clean that off.”

            The rider with the missing ear nodded and told the boy to go ahead. The riders let Miller help the boy with the shower.

            When Junior was clean and dry the rider at the stove commanded him to the table and set down a plate of potatoes in front of him. “What’s the matter?” he said when the boy wouldn’t eat. “What’s the matter with the food?”

            Junior scrunched up his face and groaned on repeat at the lopsided, overdone potatoes.

Miller smiled.

Chapter 13