Engine Zero-Zero: Chapter 27

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27

“Your mother talked in her sleep. I don’t mean she would mumble something and roll over, I mean I used to have entire conversations with her while she was asleep. We would talk about the pets we had growing up, fights our brothers or father’s were in. They were nice talks and I would think we were finally getting somewhere but then in the morning she would be the same evil bitch she always was. She wouldn’t remember anything—none of what we’d talked about. She seemed to know things while she was asleep that she didn’t while she was awake, like one time when she rattled off all fifty states and their capitals like she was reading right out of a textbook. Next day, I asked her to do it again, and she just looks at me, and she spits on me, right in my face. I guess she thought maybe I was making fun of her or something. She didn’t like being teased. She was a real bitch and if you ever said anything just a little bit mean to her, even if you was joking, then she would fly off the handle.

“It got to be like she was two different people—sweet and smart while she was asleep, mean and dumb while she was awake. Got to be confusing. So one night what I did was I found an old video camera, what they used to make movies on, and I filmed one of our talks together while she was asleep. We talked about how our mothers had both died. She told me how her brother’d taught her how to tell what type of bomb was being dropped based on what note it whistled as it fell. I asked her if she loved me, if she still had any feeling for me, and she said, ‘Of course I do Tommy, of course I love you, why would you even ask that?’ And I told her, ‘Well it’s just because you’re so mean all the time—I never know what to think.’ And she said, ‘I’m not mean, I’m just shy. I’m just shy is all.’

“Well in the morning I showed your mother what I’d recorded on the camera. I don’t know what I was expecting, if I thought it might make her more like she was while she was asleep. But when I showed her the night before I just watched her face get redder and redder, and her get mdder and madder. When the video gets to where she tells me she loves me, she takes the camera and she throws it against the wall, and she comes at me with a screwdriver—puts a hole right in my hand. See that there? That’s where she got me. I could hold my hand up to the sky and see light coming through the hole. After that was when we split. I told her, ‘It’s not you putting a hole in my hand, it’s that there’s two of you. I didn’t sign up for two of you.’ Few months later she comes back with you in her arms, says, ‘Here this is yours,’ and takes off again. I tried asking her how she was sleeping but she ignored me.”

Miller finished his story and drank from his canteen. He watched the boy for any reaction, then when couldn’t find any, asked him, “What’d you think of that?”

Junior shook his head. His goggles and his parasol had been taken away on the train and he held his hands up against the sun. “Don’t think anything,” he said.

“I think maybe you need a mother. That’s what I think. Maybe the next town we come to I’ll ask around. Then again I don’t know what I have to offer without the train.”

“Is it coming back? Is the train coming back?” It was the most Junior’d said in awhile.

“Would it be so bad if it didn’t?”

The boy didn’t answer.

They walked along the track the direction in which the train had gone, nothing to protect them from the sun and the heat. Miller aggravated the boy in rationing out only a little bit of water at a time. He aggravated him in eating a cicada off the ground and trying to make him do the same.

“Everything I do is for you, pard. You may think I’m being mean or trying to hurt you, but really I’m doing it for you.”

The boy nodded. He covered his eyes and searched the sky in every direction and when Miller asked him what for he said, “Kite.”

“We’ll get you one. Soon as we get somewhere, we can get you one, or you can show me how to make one.”

That seemed to finally make the boy happy, gave him something to fixate on.

After walking for who knows how long the track brushed up against the mountains again and Miller pointed out the opening to a cave up in the rocks.

“Why don’t we go up there and rest a while?” he said. “Get out of heat?”

The boy nodded and they climbed up shouting and clapping their hands to drive out any coyotes or anything else that might be living in the cave. Miller still had his flashlight and his knife on him from the night before and lead the way inside.

There was no room to stand in the cave but it was still enough to sit or lay down in and it was cool and relatively clean. A snake skin withered on the floor and Miller hurried and stuffed it out of the way before giving Junior the go ahead to enter.

The boy blinked and rubbed his eyes. He sighed happily.

They sat, leaned back, closed their eyes. Outside the desert buzzed and seared and there was a narcotic effect to it so that they no longer feared the snakes, coyotes, drying out, or starving to death. They drifted in and out of sleep and every time Miller said they ought to get moving they only put it off again, until it got to be dark and the choice, he said, was out of their hands. He stood his flashlight on end and taught the boy how to make shadow puppets on the walls. He told him he would guard him while he slept, and that he needn’t be afraid because fear was just a choice he made.