Tuesday, January 31, 2012

You died sparking up a ghost-wolf in grandma's hamper

When granddad passed, that old shed up outta grey splintery panels inviting nosey little spies through cracks all summer but otherwise strongly forbid under thick knitted brows turned forgotten like a problem having solved itself. No lock so rusty would ever work a key to be of use but the mere hanging of it, the massive weight and desert red scabs rich around the bolts sent message enough there unlatched. Each day you spent staring it down was one closer to practising the kind of courage that pays big in later life and you would wriggle it free to know an old man for your whole life hidden behind family and a stinking brown pipe.

The sky came up murdered that morning as fires ripped through what at first appeared to be neighbouring bushland. Realistically it behaved at a much safer distance from the contentment of your grandmother's outdoor Christmas Eve lunch than the adults, mainly the men, had made assumptions of after many glasses and several bottles between them of sparkling wine. Your uncle Shawn and aunty Achla and the cousins were late as usual and there was mention of the hold ups and detours they might be facing and growing concern for cell phones going straight to messagebank.

You had messaged the cousins on Facey about raiding granddad's shed, and the suspicion you shared with Jared but kept from Winona was the possibility of pornographic magazines while Jared spoke the disappointing hypothetical (and he was full of those because let's face it he was pretty much always a total downer) that they'd probably be all photos of old ladies like grandma, but of course the intrigue of it outweighed any worry about that.

When it came to seven thirty and while there was still sun out you had a change of heart about waiting not only from thinning patience but also because it had only just dawned that you could in fact be a bit of an asshole about the whole thing if you snuck in early to catch a peek before they even arrived. And who's to say they were going to make it before bedtime anyway? It might've been the only opportunity you would have with all talks of the adults wanting to add a section to this and restructure that. Poor grandma just wanted things to be left as they were and when she was gone well they were free to have at it. The garage dolphin torch from when granddad still had an itch for clubbing toads would do nicely and with the ruse of a totem tennis paddle in hand you journeyed through the unkempt garden for the back fence.

Anxieties returned as you considered how one would maintain silence in prying the door. It came with unfounded relief while edging open by the handle you found no squeak in the hinges at all; the old man having kept them well greased in aid of his own clandestine purposes. Encouraged by this stroke of good fortune you ventured in, viewing an expected array of objects lining the walls beneath torch light: garden tools, carpentry tools, fishing rods, a stringless flamenco guitar. That dartboard you remembered from two summers ago, the surface curling inward from the edges, all segments approaching the same neutral tone. One side devoted to shelving and transparent drawers; jars of nails and screws and mixtures of things you could grab by the handful. You scanned the torch around the floor over the boxes and the inside of one plastic milk crate shone with the familiarity of a glossy magazine. Diving down to your knees to review its contents, disappointment came when you flicked through nothing more than a pile of car manuals, the most recent being grandma's '99 Festiva. Next to it, sitting dust covered out of view between one of those ancient bounding oblong refrigerators was a rectangular chest, the size of a cat coffin, and inside of that alongside a scattering of rifle bullets and chewing tobacco was a smaller box. A cigar box with the word 'Spookies' embossed over the lid in 1930s billboard cursive.

* * *

"My idiot husband--apologies Barbara--but my lovely idiot husband thinks he can entrust our lives in some GPS he bought at a garage sale whose previous owner probably used it to map out his methamphetamine delivery schedule!"

"What does that matter? Everyone running yard sales is a meth dealer now?"

"He drives us--this man who needs a robot to tell him how to get to his childhood home--"

"It's been seven years! They turned that interchange into a labyrinth's asshole."

"And so even with the help of his infallible robot, my husband, bless his little heart, albeit a heart that doesn't quite seem to beat hard enough to supply the brain with oxygen at times, drives us straight into a ghost town cordoned by the fucking curtains of hell! Barb, forgive me."

"And here we are!"

"And the kids?"

"Lounge okay ma? They got their sleeping bags from last Christmas."

"But of course my darling boy. Let them sleep where they like."

"Speaking of which, where's our little urchin?"

"Out whacking toads it looked like."

"He really shouldn't be doing that. Filthy creatures."

"The old man wouldn't have anything bad to say about it."

"Fuckin' hated them things."

"Who doesn't?"

* * *


In the box were eighteen cigars, each as thick as whiteboard markers, wrapped tightly in dried leaves and there was a deathly grey tone about them. Sitting dead-centre on top of these Spookies a silver lighter, textured in an array of shallow pyramids, with the side facing up bearing a logo carved in like a stamp. Inside the circle was the head of a bull or an oxen and some squiggly lines surrounding it, maybe letters and words of a foreign language. As you inspected the cigars more closely you found the same logo stamped on each one in a rich viscous ink.

The annals of peer pressure had not yet exposed you to such curiosities as smoking or alcohol, and you considered yourself lucky to have avoided the embarrassment of the losing of face tied to such scenarios. However it was at this point an idea chimed out from the black bile on the outer edges of those quivering guts, something intangible spiraling up through your airwaves. You recognised it as a rare opportunity of great power bestowed upon you. It came in the way of a brief narrative as you pondered who exactly these kids in school were with their substance connects, who held a tough glare when roaming in packs and if you met their eyes beyond a whimper expect nothing less than a homosexual slur directed fiercely at you like the ward of a junkyard dog. These kids before they stole weed off their older brother who would kick their ass regardless, or the one with the creepy step-dad who worked in the liquor store exchanging product for something no-one ever heard about, these kids were just you, exploiting an opportune moment all the same. They were moral degenerates no doubt; disrespectful assholes with childish limitations of the mind. And you would kill to walk a school term in their scuffy sole-flapping shoes (the one's their parents couldn't give a fuck about ever replacing.)

It was obvious that the first step on this riveting staircase manifested as the lump in your throat was to light one up and see. To know the bone-thick smoke unfurling through spongy green lungs like they were sea foam. Testing the lighter in your hand, feeling a notion of its antiquity and cash-worth not to mention secret information formed only by it being heavier than you imagined and a quick strike escapes the deeper mind asking what they might call it; the perceived value of a thing going up when it turns out to have weight to it than one'd thought just looking at it (and did this phenomenon rise exponentially or was it something which nature let no clues about?), your thumb taking the message hidden between cog's teeth having waited ought number of decades to imprint the pre-ephebic digit (the thumb) and it reciprocating with a gesture of force so quick to be learned, that keeping out of the wind the way you were a glowing end came about and in the moment you reasoned that any smell the parents caught would be argued nolo contendere by aid of the distant smoke doing some serious wool pulling over their time-worn olfactories.

What would bring significant cash-worth from these Spookies by way of antique dealer or privy tobacconist was that each cigar was unique, meaning not the sense of being hand rolled (though they were in fact hand-rolled, since who would have a machine capable of compounding such brittle elements which begged for nothing less than the hands of a most noble artisan) but in the sense that each was uniquely 'flavoured' by the remains of a wild animal and each animal meant the world to their respective killer, hunted as part of a ceremony which would literally blow your mind apart in your fate to obliterate all over the inside of grandma's hamper.

* * *

It was sometime the following weeks, around dismantling the old shed for resale intentions, that the story granddad journaled, the whole crazy history on some kind of fancy paper unyellowed by its age, emerged from the very bottom of the cat coffin. Your father was first to read it there on the floor where you had knelt, he sat like a kid reading about the biology of sex with his legs as crossed as he could make them. The first time since your horrific passing his soul bore a spark extinguishing the past three months driven by lifeless mechanics.

While never relayed by any suspicious mannerisms, your granddad held a unthinkable secret regarding each one of those cigars in that box plus the one made soggy between your pallid oversalivated lips. Each stood for a man of Chinese origins and each Chinaman one whose life granddad had been the one to put an end to. The cigars themselves weren't from China and neither was the script on the logo which was more likely (when they went to get the things valued) a scarcely-known early days variant of Nepali mixed with other untraceable proto-Devanagari proto-languages.

The men granddad had slain, as par his notes, were an expedition he crossed at base camp in the Andes during his travels after the war. He quickly befriended any of those speaking an inch of English and together they went, eighteen Chinamen and one Aussie completely out of his depth along a trek which would finish all but one of them. Those who could speak the best English, mostly Bingwen, and Liu in less tumultuous weather, explained the purpose of their collective journey to the white man only the night before setting foot via the perilous mountains. Each one of them had seen in a dream a vision of their animal. The dream animal was what they were linked through in fate, and so if they were ever to reach any kind of major-league enlightenment the men would have to hunt and kill their animal by the primitive methods of their ancestors, in order to experience the nature of true grief. Past standing face-to-face with loss, the men would seek redemption in a land within the mountains, moving only by foot, in the vain of their animal companions and onto a plateau only mythologically heard of where ground was familiar with life again. They would find none other than the animals they took from their earth and there would be forgiveness and comfort and by way of this very spirited location each man would delve volumes into their interior for the precise question of being, triggering the next inevitable stage which was to get down to the best possible solving of It.

On their fourth day the expedition took a bad turn as the map Bingwen and his companions had been following led them to a zone notorious for its shifting snow and in record winter heat your granddad's inexperience coupled with these trekker's blind faith would unwind into almost inevitable peril. A growing intimidation of his surrounds led granddad to plead with the expedition that they should take shelter until they could at least get their bearings of what lay ahead and w/r/t their destination they should rationally consider, your granddad said, whether or not the day would allow for it.

They took camp that night beneath the shallow cover of awning shaped batholith grouping their tents as cautiously as possible from the sheets of loose snow. Your granddad carried packets of polyvinyl-chloride playing cards which provided a novel distraction from the cold as many took part in a riotous multi-deck variant of Gnau. In an entry dated months after that fateful night, your granddad blamed himself for the events which followed, that it had been the card game--he was sure of it--which carried the mob to heavy drink and mischief.

The bottles were few but the spirits were strong, your granddad had written. This first entry chronicling the nine days of his survival out of the mountain range having lost all maps and most supplies, began with as best as he could retell them the events of the night before, the deathly algid rug snatching eighteen hardened mountaineers into the void hiding all traces of its work and any hope of recovery in the eight hours masking first light.

Once they had run out of beer and rum, those who had taken to the effects of heavy intoxication were now on the hunt for anything to continue the merriment, and it was from the knapsack of an unsuspecting Bingwen that one poor fool found himself rummaging through before bolting his fist to the sky and held in its clench a brown forty liquid ounce bottle. The gesture was greeted by what could only be described as a unified gasp--even the other drunks taking heed--across the camp and from your granddad's measure of the situation it seemed the bottle wrapped in its old label worn at its edges like a joke pirate-map--but there was little of amusement to be had (not even in the seeming hyperbole of their reaction)--the bottle now at the mercy of one man and from the vibe he was taking in granddad knew this to be a situation that should never be, that the naieve and absolutely self-destroying being in all his idiotic youth this young Zhang lost from his body so far that he does not for a moment even recognise the danger brought upon by what lies in his grasp Grab that fucking kid Bingwen yells to his men and the rotund little Dingxiang hardly sober but still a great deal sullied by the incident, charges for the young fool full pelt taking him around the waist and to his fatal detriment not seeing as none of the others had seen either, that Zhang had in his statuesque pose in those few moments managed to loosen the cork from the bottle by the sneaky wriggling of his thumb.

Next to Dingxiang the toppled fatty, your granddad was closest to the transpiring of events and it was in the instant his eyes crossed paths with Bingweng that he knew the necessity of containing whatever it was that was in that bottle and he wrote of the ache in his legs fatigued by the day's ascent now crossing the twenty-five feet or so towards Bingweng's tent and the leap that knew had twisted his ankle but the flooding of pain not coming until well after he had landed completing missing his target of snatching away this weaponised glass vesicle coming at Zhang around the shins and toppling the young lad along with the bottle until it was loose from his grip and the liquid now filling out the contours of trampled snow.

A horrid chemical smell bled out into the seconds after when your granddad was nursing his foot while pushing the defeated Zhang up and off of him. Granddad felt the ice sheet split, he knew that much, but as he rolled over it was up the slope and away (by only metres) from the catastrophe which consumed the entire expedition. Smoke rose up from the invisible mountainscape until a rolling of white slush stripping it back to its prehistoric surface and granddad lay there at the edge of the abyss, his words, and he did not hear so much as a single scream.

* * *

After he had almost slept himself into a deep freeze coma, your granddad came to, he had written of a nightmare involving Bingweng in his final moments reaching out to him. As he sat up in the snow your granddad realised that the only thing which had survived besides himself was Bingweng's tent and so he frantically crawled inside, momentarily forgetting the pain in his ankle. It was inside the tent that granddad went through the remains of Bingweng's knapsack, and it was here, wrapped carefully in layers of fine cotton that he found the sacred objects which to the present day had remained safe and perhaps long forgotten in a cat coffin in his garage. Each cigar had been stamped the same. It was an insignia which stood for their collective fellowship, which represented nothing more than the bond of lifelong friends. Your granddad claimed to have taken accompanying documents back home upon his return to have them translated, and it was then that he put together the pieces of the spiritual journey these men had embarked upon.

* * *

Your father sat on the story for some weeks before finally going to your grandma with questions he, despite the grief of your loss having stripped away so many of his inhibitions, he still felt some deal of embarrassment asking her about this journey completely unknown to him taken by his father overlapping his time when it was to your father's understanding, old granddad had spent basking in the glamour of being considered a war hero (whatever that even meant). It was with, in some regards--pleasant--relief that your father heard that there was no trip to the Andes, well not in any real-world sense and that what he had read, despite it being so perfectly back-dated (one of the perks of being retired being that one has the time to spend on such painstaking details), that this was nothing more than another one of his godawful, your grandma's words, attempts at breaking into some niche of adventure fiction writing, most of which took place after he won a ten-litre coolbox full of acid tabs in a local game of five-card draw. She also pointed out that he damn near killed himself after the oh, eighteen months of tripping his ass off, just from the downer of the whole thing of going clean and it was damn near impossible for a seventy-nine year old man with no connects to score acid up this far north. Well not totally impossible, but she had sabotaged any further attempts he made to obtain the drug since the whole thing was like looking after a fucking four year old and the way she saw it it was up to the nursing home to deal with that whole kettle of shit.

The cigars, your grandma recalled, also came out of some card table or another and despite being fascinated with the things, she said they damn well creeped him out too much to inhale. Might be a dead person wrapped up inside he would say, mostly after melting a couple of tabs on his tongue. The way she heard it, they came from a gun for hire who specialised in taking out Indian folk, out in Nebraska or somewhere, and he'd fled the states for money reasons, maybe he lost his fortune on cards and thought maybe there'd be a thicker spread of suckers down below the equator or who knows but the way your granddad cleaned him out, well he knew his limits and he took what he could before pushing the guy to his limits and it was after those Spookies came home that he didn't go back to that card table any more.

The way you went, specifically was self-immolation, but a handful of papers with nothing to lose ran it as spontaneous human combustion, just to spook it up a little and your father in particular couldn't put it out of his mind as a possibility. It wasn't that he believed either of his parent's versions to anything close to being true, but he did feel that you had imbibed something a little too strong for your spirit that night, but had he been presented with the same situation in his youth he couldn't say that he wouldn't have done similar.