was direction in a directionless moment. My foot came up and forward. I took a step. He was suddenly much closer. The blue ghost of the heart’s fire tickled my toe.
Boggs clapped once. “Look at that. You have expressed yourself, son. Now we know where we stand, you and I. That’s teamwork. That was satisfying to me. Was it satisfying to you? That’s fine, that’s fine, don’t answer. There’s no tricks here. No rotter bullshit. I’m all yours, son. Come and get me.”
Now, it had to be now, one second longer and I would be crippled with the fear of movement that had marked my life before becoming the Son. I swooned in a long, slanting step around the fire. I heard the distant note of a wooden finger ringing off of a shopping cart. The distance closed halfway; I raised fists.
“One thing.” He spoke quickly. “My brain’s got just one thing to say.”
The organs in my body continued forward and for a moment pushed against my ribs and belly. I swayed drunkenly and clutched at the air to keep from falling on him. Boggs was a small, dark creature scuttling somewhere below.
“That whatchamacallit,” he said. “That golden spike. I’d be remiss not to mention the spike. Oh, son. That there was a mighty difficult test. I’m sorry I had to do it—I’m sure you get plenty in school. But lord. Joey. Son. You did not disappoint. No one I ever known could’ve done that any finer. You probably didn’t even think of it that way. It was just a rotter you had to dig, some rats you had to rearrange. But there’s beauty in labor done right. I just want you to know that. Before we tangle. You’re a poet of the dirt. That’s what you are, son. A poet.”
It wasn’t the many-clawed feet of Millers Field’s rodent army that I felt. It was other hands, absent ones, my father’s, perhaps, that had been withheld from me after every dig. A distrustful glare—that was all Harnett had deigned to give me after I handed him the replacement spike.
“One night,” Boggs was saying. “Just a crazy thought, hear me out. I wonder what would happen if you gave me one night. The things I could teach you—I wonder if it’d be worth your time. Hard to say. Interesting thing to ponder, though, ain’t it?”
I shuffled sideways until I had a grip on the cart. For months, all those digs done without my father; for a sleepless weekend, my extravagant revenge; for days on end, the traveling and tracking that had led me here—I had worked so hard for so long, and had been so alone. An adult guiding my way again, it was all I wanted.
A swollen palm entered the firelight. “Easy does it, now.”
My collapse obfuscated the fire with dirt. Tiny embers melted upon my slick skin. A cockroach scampered over my knuckles.
“I’m not going anywhere, son. You have at me whenever you’re ready. But anyone can see you need rest. You look right tuckered.”
Crushing fatigue fought against the craving for revenge that had powered me so far. I would sit for a moment, fine; I would rest my muscles for a stretch, all right; I would crouch here and keep watch by the flames that reflected differently in his live eye than in his dead one. When both reflections dimmed, he would be asleep, and that was when I would strike.
A strange question came to me.
“What did you do with it?” I asked.
“What did I do with what?”
“The spike. The first spike.”
I heard the slither of a slow smile. A scabbed finger gestured at a battalion of generic canned foods. The glowing discs of their lids appeared to float.
“What do you think funded this feast?” he asked. “You get hungry, you just help yourself.”
27.
WHITE LIGHT—SHUTTLING CLOSER—THE sensation of floating—this was heaven and I had lost, fallen asleep first, and though I had failed my mother at least I would see her soon. A jolt ripped my eyes open. Sunlight. A rusted satellite dish. Shreds of plastic bags straining from barbed wire. Graffiti tags. A sky, cloudless and blue. A squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak.
Another jolt and I looked around me. I was moving. Bars on either side, the earsplitting shriek of an ungreased wheel—the shopping cart, I was folded inside the shopping cart. I tried to stand but my knees and elbows exploded into the pinpricks of sleep. My head was crammed beneath the push-handle, my body deposited atop