Wichita (9781609458904) Page 11

“In the sense of its subjective qualities,” Seth said, “its meaning, yes.”

  “What about, I don’t know,” Lewis asked, “gravity? You made gravity?”

  “What gravity means to me, yes,” Seth insisted. He held up a hand, squinting into a band of sunlight that had suddenly appeared in the west. “See, what else matters besides what it means?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know,” Lewis said lightly, braced now for a resurgence of the true Seth: prophet, guru, monster.

  To his relief, Seth shrugged. “Me neither, really,” he said. “It’s just sort of a theory.”

  Lewis remembered that if they kept going to the end of Bleeker they would come to the Bowery and CBGB’s, a punk landmark that would thrill Seth. He waited until they were within sight of it then turned Seth by the shoulders and pointed to it and watched his face light up. When they arrived in front of the humped awning, a bespectacled man was addressing a small group of what looked to Lewis like Euro tourists.

  “Founded by Hilly Kristal in 1973,” the tour guide was saying, “C-B-G-B—does anyone know what these letters stand for?”

  “Country, Blue Grass and Blues,” someone said in maybe a Dutch accent.

  “You are correct!” said the guide. “OMFUG anyone?” That was what it said on the bottom half of the awning: OMFUG. If Seth were ever to know trivia, this was it. But Seth had stalked off down the street.

  “What’s up?” Lewis asked when he caught up to him. He was walking fast with his head down, as if in flight from a crime. “Seth, what’s up?”

  “I don’t know,” he said finally, glancing back up the Bowery. “The guy, the whole—” he waved his hand and strode on.

  Lewis grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Talk to me.”

  “I just need to eat,” Seth muttered, pulling away. Lewis led him into a narrow falafel joint and they ordered standing at the glass counter, Lewis watching Seth in the mirror behind the counter. Taking a bite of his sandwich when it was served up in a plastic basket, he seemed to recover himself. He sipped from a plastic cup of water, blinked, looked over at Lewis as if seeing him clearly again. How was school going, he asked. Lewis mentioned the midterms.

  “Are you ready?” It was more than he’d ever asked Lewis about college.

  “Not really,” Lewis admitted.

  Seth frowned. “So wait—shouldn’t you be at the library or whatever?”

  Lewis considered telling a white lie but then said, “Proba­bly.” If he left for the subway now he might be able to cram enough, staying up most of the night, to do okay.

  Behind them, a man got up from a table and, going past, bumped hard into Seth. Lewis glared after the man and Seth touched his mouth and looked at his fingers as if checking for blood then followed the man out, holding the falafel in one hand like a stone. “Hey!” he called.

  “Seth!” Lewis said quietly, catching up to him on the street. Bent forward in a leather jacket, the man walked quickly away. He either didn’t hear or thought better of stopping. Seth trotted up the avenue after him, reared back as if to hurl the sandwich then turned and flung it into a wire mesh trashcan.

  Lewis stood next to him. What happened to Seth’s radical responsibility, not blaming the world? Or was throwing the sandwich into the trash the extent of it? The wind snatched at the wax wrapping paper and Seth, staring at it and shaking his head in a continuous, palsied way, finally plucked it out and let the wind blow it away down the street.

  A month later he was in San Francisco with Candy.

  So maybe it is too late for Seth. He’ll never go to college, of any kind or caliber. Maybe it’s always been too late. Is that so tragic? The main thing is he’s alive, safe at home with his weed and his stoner disciple. For the moment, all is basically well. That’s a lot. That’s maybe everything.

  Passing through matchstick blinds, sunlight prints lozenges of wavering striated gold on the floor. It’s been holding Lewis’s attention for a catatonically long beat. He seems to have gotten high just sitting here breathing the air, no big surprise there.

  Now Donald goes by holding a cellphone to one ear and in a loud voice says, “Representative!”

  Seth and Cody look at each other with expressions of painfully suppressed hilarity. Donald, down the hall now, can be heard saying, “Member!” which sends them over the edge. Watching them flop around on the couch, Lewis finds it contemptible rather than cause for relief and gratitude. They’ll live at home; they’ll never leave Wichita.

  He goes to the kitchen and makes a cup of Earl Grey tea. Assuming Seth doesn’t, in fact, explode or implode or whatever it is Stacy and Cody fear, Lewis will just have to get through a certain number of days like this one. He needs to snap out of his blues about V. and do something, get a job, study German. It eats at him that he was never able to read it comfortably. There’s an essentials grammar in his book bag. He should go back to his room and open that to page one, begin again.

  Abby comes in, shoulders her purse, searching around the kitchen and breakfast nook for her keys until she finds them in the purse. “I’m going out for groceries. Any requests?”

  “More beer, I guess,” he says. “And a bottle of Dewar’s?” He’d like to have the option of going on a bender if in fact he can’t snap out of the post-V. blues.

  “Okay,” Abby says blithely, jotting it on a Post-It. He could ask her to pick up an eight ball of cocaine and, assuming she had a source for it and the money, she probably wouldn’t blink. People should be able to pursue whatever it is they want to explore.

  “Oh, I just got off the phone with Astrid,” she says. “You remember Astrid.”

  He does: yoga instructor, plain verging on homely but with a memorable, lithe body.

  “When I told her you were back in town, she asked whether you would mind coming along to the Celebration we’re having tonight—did I tell you about that?”

  He searches his brain carefully lest he appear absent-minded and shakes his head.

  “It came together rather quickly, which is what I love: how these things just move into being.”

  “Aren’t they women-only?” he asks. “What’s my role?”

  “Well, they are, technically. Astrid’s just having a little ex-boyfriend trouble.”

  Ex-Boyfriend Trouble: sounds like a band. “Meaning what?” he asks.

  “It’s just Astrid’s feeling a little worried he’ll show up and make a scene. He won’t, of course. Really. You would just sit nearby, or at the bar, for her sake. Dinner on us. It’s the best place in town.”

  “So I’d be, like, security?”

  “I can ask Donald if you’re uncomfortable with it.”

  “Right,” he says, scoffing lightly, though he’s not sure why: Donald’s big enough for the gig. Assuming he’s well-rested enough to be vigilant, given the sleep-eating. Does Abby know about that? He doesn’t feel like getting into it.

  “Fine,” he says. “Sure.” And feels a surge of sexual anticipation: Astrid in his chivalric debt.

  Abby thanks him warmly and heads out to go shopping.

  Lewis drinks his tea looking out at the backyard. He forgot to ask about her position on the weeds. At how many houses is that necessary? But they look for the moment, swaying in the wind, right and good.

  15

  On his way to his room and the green German grammar, Lewis looks in on Seth and Cody. Seth is fast-forwarding through the opening credits of a TIVO’d National Geographic Channel documentary about tornados. Beckoning to Lewis, he presses “play” at the appearance of an enormous soot-gray twister turning in slow-motion, chunks of black debris wheeling past in the foreground, then images of corn and wheat fields shot from above. “June 23rd, 1998,” intones the fateful voice of the narrator. “The heart of the American Heartland.”

  “God’s talking about us!” Seth calls, elbowing Cody along the couch. “Sit! Check this out!”

  Lewis hesitates then sits down between them on the couch. Reenactment shots of a man in plaid shirt going about
his rural chores.

  “7:02 in the evening,” says the narrator. “Farmer Arlen Wilke notices a dark cloud taking shape a few miles south of his farm.”

  Seth leans forward. “Yo, hurry the fuck up, Farmer Willie!” Lewis gets the impression they’ve watched this more than a few times.

  “This guy’s dead,” Cody says, rubbing his hands together.

  The farmer’s voice says, “The sky didn’t look right.”

  Cody and Seth cackle. “It didn’t look right because there was a fucking tornado about to touch down!”

  Wilke says, “And then we watched the tail come down and a tornado start. Someone suggested we grab a video camera.”

  “Uh, that would be Satan,” Seth says and again the footage of the enormous soot-gray funnel cloud turning, two telephone poles and a small white house in the foreground.

  “Growing in size and charging across nearby fields,” the narrator says in his sonorous voice, “it seems to be heading for Wilke’s home. He’s lived in the area all his life and knows the dangers of Tornado Alley well. ‘Please don’t hit my place!’”

  Snickering Cody and Seth, lean forward intently. Shot of Wilke beside cornfield. “You could really start to hear it roar. And it really got to be spinnin’ faster and it really, really built in size. It just got huge.”

  “Some kind of size queen, this guy,” Seth remarks and Cody titters, shifting around on the couch with embarrassment. Seth pats his inner thigh. “Yo, I got your huge tornado right down here, Farmer Willie.”

  Seth fast-forwards as if looking for something specific and there flashes a stuttering sequence of witnesses and survivors shot from the waist up then funnel clouds, whirling debris, aftermaths of ruin and destruction, over and over, like a kind of insanity.

  “We ARE in Kansas anymore!” Seth says, switching off the TV, which goes black with a static-electric sigh. “This IS fucking Kansas.”

  He looks from Cody to Lewis. “Are you with me?”

  “No,” Lewis replies.

  “God is right out there,” Seth says, waving vaguely at the front door, the roof of the house. He stands up. “On your feet!”

  Lewis stays pointedly put but Cody follows Seth through the living room. Then, rather than actually begin reviewing German, Lewis brings up the rear, curious to see what Seth will get up to.

  The air outside is humid and close. Seth is standing in the front yard, which is shielded from the street by scraggly evergreen hedges, looking up, arms spread in a V. The sky overhead is clear but there are darkish clouds approaching from the southwest.

  Backing out of his driveway, Oren brakes to stare frowningly, going on when Seth waves him over eagerly.

  He then draws Lewis and Cody into a football huddle. “Close your eyes.” He squeezes Lewis’s neck with his arm. “Do it!” Lewis closes his eyes.

  “I want you to feel a twister.” He’s silent for a beat. “Feel cyclonic.” He squeezes Lewis’s neck. “There’s a doubter in our midst. Do you know who I mean, Cody?”

  “It ain’t me,” Cody says.

  Seth holds them in the huddle. The stench from Cody’s mouth-breathing and blown-out Nike high-tops is only partly diffused by a breeze. Seth releases them, spreading his arms wide again.

  “Now look up!” Overhead, blue sky. Seth watches for a moment then shrugs, undeterred. “I’ll do a twister dance.”

  He begins whirling in place on one foot with his arms out then begins striding in widening circles bent at the waist, a mosh-pit step. “I have Indian blood!”

  Cody looks for confirmation at Lewis, who shakes his head.

  “Course I do,” Seth says, beginning to sweat. He pauses to hawk up phlegm, which he spits into the hedges then resumes mosh dancing. “I have Indian blood. I do, you do, Cody does. I mean, please: we are all Indians, tribal, big dicks, war paint.”

  “Sounds good,” Lewis says blandly.

  “You just forgot,” Seth says, flashing that volatile street-fighting light. “Forgot who you are. Forgot who your shaman leader is.” Nodding, he jabs a thumb at his own chest.

  “You, Lewis, left the tribe!” He points into distance. “Went out there and believed what the sick white cousins said about self and world. ‘Is that so bad, really? That’s just an education, isn’t it?’ Well, let’s look at the evidence: you came back weak and thin and white as a cave salamander and your bitch—well, I’m not even going there.”

  He pauses as if to give Lewis a chance to react and Lewis reacts by showing no reaction and Seth resumes the mosh-pit dance. “Killing in the name of!” he sings. Rage Against the Machine. Their juvenile anthem. Cody plays the three hard licks on air guitar: DOOH-dooh-dooh!

  “Now you do what they told you!” Seth wags his finger at Lewis as he goes around and seems more like a harmless prankster again. Cody plays the licks: DOOH-dooh-dooh! “Now you do what they told you!”

  Seth points out storm clouds beginning to reach fingers across the sky over head. “Have to go down to the basement in a minute!” Seth predicts in a sing-song told-ya-so voice.

  They all sit on the stoop to watch the sky. Cody points to something on Seth’s right hand. “What’s that?” he asks as if both miffed and remiss for not knowing every mole and mark on Seth’s body. He bends down and reads. “D - D - P.”

  “Dominicans Don’t Play,” Seth says, looking at it. “My homeboys gave me that. When we got popped they thought I was headed to Riker’s too. I was sort of in their gang.”

  “Dude, did you get jumped in?” Cody asks with big eyes.

  Seth pauses as if contemplating concocting a story for Cody’s entertainment then says simply, “Nah, one of them just gave me the tat. Big Biz.”

  Cody squints at him. “Weren’t you afraid of getting ass-raped in there?”

  Seth makes a nonchalant moue. “Nah.”

  “Damn, I woulda been!”

  “Ass-raped?” Seth says, looking with concern at Cody. “Repeatedly?”

  “No, afraid!”

  “Butt-raped until you screamed with ecstasy?”

  “Fuck you, Seth!” Cody says, raising his fist. Seth rolls his eyes at this and Cody settles back as if he’s defended his honor adequately. “Seriously, dude.”

  “What about your new tat?” Lewis says and Seth looks at Cody, who shakes his head emphatically: I didn’t tell him anything!

  “It’s not ready to be revealed yet,” Seth says.

  “Sounds momentous,” Lewis says.

  “Tornado Ally,” Seth says, snapping his fingers. “That’s what Mom should call the company.”

  “Won’t people just think it’s a typo for ‘alley’?” Lewis says.

  “Just fag-ass English majors.”

  “Castañeda!” Cody says approvingly, catching the allusion. They high-five each other.

  “You know, don’t you,” Lewis tells Cody, “Castañeda made all that stuff up, right?”

  “Bullshit!” Cody cries but looks at Seth, who hesitates then nods and shrugs as if to say, Yes, but so what?

  “It’s fiction,” Lewis says.

  Cody sits frowningly digesting this information while Seth shakes his head disappointedly at Lewis for, in effect, ruining Christmas for Cody

  “Well, it don’t really matter,” Cody concludes finally. “It’s still some rad shit you can apply. Like the stalking technique? That’s punk as fuck!”

  “Of course it matters!” Lewis says. “The whole claim of those books is that there are actual wizards doing actual supernatural things. That’s the basis for all the excitement. Otherwise, it’s just fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons, and no one cares.”

  “Hey, a lot of people care about Dungeons and Dragons,” Seth says. “More people care about Dungeons and Dragons and Castañeda than will ever care about Virgil or John Clarence the pig-fucking farm poet from the 17th Century. Now why is that?”

  Lewis concentrates on Cody. “It’s like: did Jesus really and truly rise from the dead or not?”

  Seth holds up
a hand. “I’ll handle this, Cody.”

  “He totally did!” Cody says, eyes huge with outrage and belief.

  “Cody, what did I just say?” Seth says, shaking his head, and is about to reply to Lewis when a volley of shouting male voices can be heard through the ajar front door. Seth gets up and dashes inside, in the direction of the kitchen.

  16

  It’s a strange scene. Donald is shakily spooning coffee from a filter in the Braun coffee maker back into a clear molded plastic container. Bishop is seated in a chair at the table in the breakfast nook, shaking his head, eyelids at half-mast, as if disappointed by a child’s misbehavior.

  Seth has taken up a wide martial-arts stance in the middle of the floor, looking from Donald to Bishop with an open-mouthed smile. “Yo, what the hell is going on in here?”

  Donald goes on grimly spooning ground coffee back into the plastic container as if baling water.

  On the floor between Bishop’s legs is a large shopping bag filled with eye masks in cellophane sheathes. Bishop has a pair on, Lewis sees now, pushed back on his head like riding goggles. “I Don’t Do Mornings” is printed in white script across it.

  “Hey, someone tell me something!” Seth says, shoving Donald lightly.

  “I simply came in to make a cup of coffee—” Bishop begins.

  Wheeling around, Donald shouts, “You make yours OUTSIDE!”

  Seth slides over to block Donald’s view of Bishop. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

  Donald stands glaring past him at Bishop, face red, shoulders rising and falling with big breaths.

  Seth pinches a sleeve of Donald’s T-shirt and gives it a provocative tug. “You keep your voice down in my house, mister!”

  Cody glances at Lewis: this is gonna be good!

  To Donald Seth says, “Hear me? You keep it down in my house or I’ll kick your ass to the curb. You’re homeless. You’re living in a Hefty bag, fat man.”

  “Oh, Donald’s all right, Seth,” Bishop says soothingly. “Right, Donald? Donald’s just having some issues around territory today.”

  Donald has faced away from Seth, toward the counter again. He’s picked up the spoon as if to resume ladling.