Keepers

SEVEN

I became Carson’s legal guardian after his mother died from a heart condition that no one-including her, as it turned out-knew she had. (“All these years, I thought it was just gas.”) My sister was a woman of singular grace who never let anything phase her; hangnails were met with the same dogged composure as broken bones. In all the toofew years she’d been in my life, I don’t think I ever once saw her panic. Even when she awoke after an emergency C-section to discover that her child had Down’s syndrome and that her peach of a husband had left her because he couldn’t handle it, she never allowed any setback or misfortune to best her. I loved her dearly and miss her every day.

Carson spent three weeks every month at the group home; the fourth week-and all holidays-he spent with me. He wanted it that way, and so did I. After seven days, we started getting on each other’s nerves a bit, so one week a month was just the ticket for us. And I could visit or call him whenever I wanted… which I usually did somewhere around the middle of Week Three.

He was never lonely. That was important to me.

One of the things my nephew and I discovered we had in common was a love of comic books. Admittedly, I hadn’t really been involved in the comics scene since the heyday of Ghost Rider, Aquaman, and The Silver Surfer (though I have to admit to a shortlived renaissance during the early appearances of Sandman), but Carson didn’t care. Spider-Man united us. We were of one mind when it came to the Green Goblin (he was an annoying wuss), Doc Ock (dangerous, scary, and kind of cool), and Kingpin (very fat and rude but never turn your back on him, uh-uh). Carson always helped out at the Cedar Hill store on those weeks he stayed with me; he was my unofficial Comics Manager.

One of our rituals whenever he stayed with me involved his hauling out his latest batch of comic book acquisitions and reading them to me. Another ritual involved our driving out toward Buckeye Lake for dinner at the I-70 truck stop, Carson’s favorite place to eat. (The food is surprisingly excellent.)

As I drove toward the group home, I began thinking how, a few months ago, these rituals had converged.

Carson had adopted a cat that he kept at my house. I had no arguments about his keeping it at the house, as long as he paid for the food and litter from the money he earned working at the AARC sheltered workshop. Besides, the cat proved to be agreeable company at night, was always very affectionate, and didn’t shed nearly as much as I’d feared at first.

The cat-which Carson named Butterball-ran away one night as I was taking out the trash and failed to close the back door behind me. I dreaded telling Carson about it as I drove to the group home to pick him up for our week together. I had the radio tuned to Cedar Hill’s National Public Radio station where two agricultural scientists were discussing the remote possibility that an outbreak of scrapie was starting to infect sheep in Montana.

By the time Carson and I got back to my house (after cheeseburgers at the Sparta and a matinee at the newly renovated Midland Theater, the pride of downtown Cedar Hill) I knew there was no avoiding it.

I pulled up in front, killed then engine, then turned to him and said, “Carson, I need to tell you something. I’m afraid it might be bad news.”

“I know,” he said, softly bouncing up and down in the seat.

I grinned for only a moment. “Oh, you do, do you?”

“Uh-huh. Butterball ran away and-hey, you know what? I got some new slippers. They’re real warm and-”

“Whoa, Carson, hang on. How… how did you know about Butterball?”

“‘Cause Long-Lost told me.”

“And who’s Long-Lost?”

He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a comic book, then rifled through the pages until he came to a dog-eared page. “ This is him.” He handed over the comic.

The whole thing-front and back covers included-was drawn in black and white. The paper stock was cheap (some of the ink rubbed off on my fingertips) and it was hand-bound with plastic spirals. A homemade comic if ever there was one.

It was open to a full-page drawing of a creature that was so incredible I was momentarily taken back in time to my first encounter with Bruce Banner’s alter ego, The Incredible Hulk. “Wow. That’s pretty cool.”

And it was. This creature named Long-Lost stood in the middle of a futuristic-looking city where it towered over every building around it. It had the head of rat with a unicorn’s spiraling horn rising from the center of its forehead; the snout of a pig, the body and wings of a bat; the legs of a spider; a horse’s tail; and two semi-human arms jutting from its chest, one hand gripping a pencil, the other a sketch pad. The more I looked at it, the more details registered; its body was composed of fish scales, its wings were a mosaic of hundreds of different varieties of feathers, its underbelly looked slick as a dolphin’s skin, and its spider’s legs ended in paws that were a combination of dog and cat.

It was both grotesque and remarkable, the work of an underground artist who was obviously gifted in a way only the truly and happily demented can be; despite all of its disparate parts, Long-Lost as a whole seemed at once organic and correct, as if it should look no other way than this.

“So this is who told you about Butterball?”

“Uh-huh. He’s the Monarch of Modoc.”

“What’s Modoc?”

Carson shook his head and made a tsk -ing noise. “Boy, you sure are goofy sometimes.” He took the comic from my hand and closed it, turning the cover toward me.

And there it was: Modoc: Land of the Abandoned Beast.

“Modoc is Long-Lost’s kingdom?” I asked.

“It ain’t a kingdom like with knights and stuff, y’know? It’s like in the future, only it’s not, really. It’s like a… a hidden world. There’s people and everything and they all love Long-Lost and he protects them.”

I nodded my head and asked him if I could see the comic again. He reluctantly handed it over. I flipped through the pages, stopping here and there to read the dialogue in the various balloons… except there wasn’t any. In each frame where a character was speaking, its speech-bubble was blank. It was only through the badly printed narration in the squares that I was able to discover that Long-Lost was preparing Modoc for something Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know. (That’s how the phrase was written every time it appeared: Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.) I handed it back to Carson.

“How could Long-Lost tell you about Butterball when there are no words?”

“There’s words there. I can see ’em but you can’t, yet.”

“Yet?”

Carson nodded. “It’s a secret.”

“Okay.” But it still didn’t explain how he’d known about the cat. Or how he’d come up with the phrase hidden world. I wondered if he even knew what that meant.

“Carson?”

“We gonna go to the Sparta again tomorrow? They make good cheeseburgers.”

“The best known to mankind, yes-but I was about to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“Is this a joke you’re playing on me? Did you sneak out last night and get Butterball and take him back to the group home?”

“Nuh-uh. Butterball went to live at the Magic Zoo.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“Yeah… but not about this. I lie about Christmas presents-like telling you I don’t got one for you. I lie like that. But not this. This Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.”

I decided to let it rest for a while. If this was a joke of some kind, Carson would tell me eventually; if it wasn’t, at least he wasn’t upset. I only hoped that Butterball was all right. I really liked having that cat around.

Later, after dinner, Carson pulled out a whole stack of Modoc comics and sat next to me on the couch, showing me each page of every issue, in order, so I could follow what was going on.

Long-Lost ruled Modoc, a place where human beings and animals lived together in perfect accord. Long-Lost kept everyone in Modoc happy and entertained by drawing their wishes and then making those wishes come to life. It was a good-enough place. But there was an evil hexer, Tumeni Notes, who was trying to cast a spell so that the animals would revolt against Long-Lost and force him to show Tumeni where the Great Scrim was located. The Great Scrim separated Modoc’s world from our own… On and on it went, becoming dumbfoundingly complicated as it threw in everything from simultaneous-universe theories to Darwinism and a dash or two of modern DNA research. I found it difficult to believe that Carson-though categorized as a “high-functional” Down’s and capable of reading at a fifth-grade level-could understand all of this, let alone keep it straight.

He came to the most recent issue and opened it to the first page, then let out a little gasp and immediately closed it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can’t read this one yet.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause I’m not supposed to.”

“I don’t understand.”

Tsk -ing again. “You’re goofy. I can’t read it ’cause Long-Lost won’t let me see the words yet.”

“But there aren’t any words in the first place.”

“Are too.”

I grabbed up three issues at random and opened them to various pages. “Look at this-Carson, come on! Look! Nowhere, see? Nowhere in any of these comics does any of the characters say anything. See? Just empty space.” I was shocked at how angry I suddenly felt.

“I told you already, there’re words in them, you just can’t see ’em.”

“Yet,” I added, all at once too frustrated to care.

“Uh-huh. Long-Lost does it to me, too. When I get a new Modoc, the words aren’t always there ’cause he don’t feel like talking to me yet. I gotta wait.”

“Like I have to wait?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why do I have to wait? Why can’t Long-Lost just let me read the same words he says to you?”

“‘Cause he won’t say the same thing to you. He told me that, just like he told me about Butterball. He says different things to different people… but only if he likes them.”

Time for aspirin and sleep.

The next morning Carson woke me at seven-thirty and told me that we had to go to the truck stop for breakfast.

“Carson, my head hurts and I’ve had about four hours’ sleep. Can’t it wait?”

“No!” He sounded both excited and slightly scared. “We gotta go now.”

“Why?”

He showed me the latest issue of Modoc -the one he couldn’t read to me the night before-and opened it to the first page.

I was looking at a black-and-white drawing of the I-70 truck stop near Buckeye Lake. There was a car driving into its parking lot. My car. With Carson and me inside. And something that looked like the ghost of a bear floating behind us.

I took the comic from my nephew’s hands and turned to the next page. It was blank.

Okay; if Carson wanted to continue stringing me along with his little joke, I’d go with it for a while. It was kind of nice to see him putting this much effort into pulling the wool over my eyes.

All the way to the truck stop, I found myself glancing in the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see some diaphanous form pursuing us; Ursa Major, P.I.

We took our usual booth and ordered. While we waited for the food to arrive, Carson opened the Modoc issue and turned to the second page and showed me the “new” panels. They displayed, in order, our arriving at the truck stop, eating, paying our bill, and driving away. There were six panels per page, and in each frame we were joined in ever-developing degrees by ghostly creatures of myth; the centaur, the manticora, the chimera, and a griffin.

What started making me nervous was how the illustrations showed both of us eating precisely what we had ordered: pancakes, sausage, and a large chocolate milk for Carson; a western omelet and coffee for myself.

I knew from his monthly status reports that many of the specialists at the group home believed Carson possessed a gift for artwork. I wondered how he’d managed to draw these panels without my seeing him do it.

Carson was twenty-six, having outlived doctors’ estimates for his life by more than a decade. He was getting sneaky in his old age. Or I was becoming obtuse in mine.

For the first time in ages, the two of us ate in silence. We then paid our bill and left.

As we were driving out of the parking lot and getting back onto the road, Carson turned to the next page. So far, only one frame was there. In it, our car was making a right onto Arboretum Road-a good twelve miles away.

“Well, at least Long-Lost is giving us a little time,” I said.

Carson turned on the radio. It was still tuned to the local NPR station. This time the subject was “Foot-and-Mouth Disease: Is It Coming Back Again?”

I slowed the car as we neared the turnoff to Arboretum Road.

“We could just keep driving,” I said. “Nothing’s forcing us to do what’s drawn there.”

“Long-Lost says we gotta. He says it’ll cause all kinds of trouble if we don’t.”

“Tell Long-Lost for me that he and I need to have a talk.”

“He knows. He’s planning on having a special talk with you. About me. An’ stuff.”

And with that, I turned onto Arboretum Road.

This time we didn’t consult the comic book. About half a mile down the road there was a large fallen tree blocking the way. We would have to turn around and go back the way we came, and the only way to do that was to turn onto another, much narrower, unpaved side road-which was really more of a glorified footpath-then back out slowly as I worked the wheel.

As soon as we turned onto the path I looked up and realized where we were.

“Audubon’s Graveyard,” I whispered to myself.

“What?” said Carson.

“Nothing.” Which, of course, wasn’t the truth. Having lived in Cedar Hill all of my life, I’d heard of Audubon’s Graveyard-it was something of a local legend-but had never actually seen it, knew only that it was located somewhere in the vicinity of Arboretum Road.

I killed the engine and stared out at the small rise a few dozen yards ahead. A couple of pigeons lay there, dead, stiff, wings splayed, eyes glassy and staring up toward the sky they would never know again.

Carson reached over and gently touched my shoulder. “Where are we?”

“It’s, um… well…” How could I explain this place to him?

There was a five-acre plat on the other side of that rise which some smartass reporter had long ago dubbed “Audubon’s Graveyard,” actually thinking the name displayed wit and irony. There were still some locals who referred to this area simply as “The Nest,” but it was “Audubon’s Graveyard” that stuck.

Since the spring of 1957, those five acres of county-owned land had been the focus of several official investigations (conducted by everyone from the State Department of Health to Federal Haz-Mat teams), and for good reason: twice a year, for a period lasting about three weeks, every bird that flew over the area dropped from the sky, dead before it hit the ground. The soil had been tested countless times for contaminants, as had the air, the small creek that ran through the plat, and even the other forms of wildlife that inhabited the woods surrounding it. Nothing was infected, and only birds were dying. In every case, their hearts exploded. No tests, no dissections, no theories were able to explain why this happened. There weren’t even good legends from ancient Hopewell Indian mythology to shed any light on the cause. It was simply what it was: a huge and eerie question mark.

Carson nudged me with his elbow and showed me the next page: there we were, on the other side of the rise, on foot, walking toward the body of a dead hawk whose right eye took up a full half of the panel, while Carson and I were little more than minute, hazy ghosts in the background.

“Carson, I need you to be honest with me, all right? It’s really important that you understand that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“ Is this some kind of a joke? I know from your supervisors that you have drawing talent. Are you drawing those pages in when I’m not looking?”

“Oh, no! No. I ain’t very good at drawing. Sure can’t draw like this.”

“Swear?”

“Swear.”

I looked at the comic book in his hand and nodded my head. “Well, then; let’s go see what Long-Lost has in mind for us.”

We climbed up the rise, Carson taking care not to step on the bodies of the pigeons.

The sight below made my breath catch in my throat.

Scattered across the field were hundreds of dead birds; purple grackles and blackbirds, flickers, brown thrashers, loggerhead shrikes, bohemian waxwings, multi-colored kestrels, kingfishers, starlings, bluegrays, and a magnificent marsh hawk. I had no idea how any of these birds had died; there were no broken necks, no gunshot wounds, no animal bites. Only their eyes held a clue.

Every set was a deep, disturbing red.

There were not only the bodies of birds, but bones, as well. Neither Carson nor myself could walk more than a few paces without hearing the tiny crunch and snap of birds’ bones under our shoes. Carson looked once again at his comic, then unzipped a pocket of his knapsack, moved its contents to the pockets of his coat, and began gathering up as many bones as he could stuff in there.

“Carson, you can’t be-”

“I gotta,” he replied, thrusting the comic into my hand.

In the new set of panels (Jesus H. Christ, how was he doing this so quickly?), Carson was moving through the field, gathering up bones. In the final panel on the page an old barn suddenly entered the picture, albeit far in the background.

I looked up, and there it was; deserted, neglected, falling only slightly to decay.

“Carson, stop, we’re going home.” I was now seriously creeped out. Unless the fantasy before me is up on a movie or television screen I really have no use for it, nor it for me.

“I can’t! ” Carson yelled back at me. “Long-Lost says I gotta.”

“Long-Lost is not driving the car, and Long-Lost sure as hell isn’t the one taking care of you, so Long-Lost can go fuck himself!” Even I was shocked to hear that word come out of my mouth, which should have given me some indication of how panicked I was becoming, but at that moment I was too caught up in wanting to get the hell away from there so I could start denying any of this had happened to care about my language.

Carson whirled around and pleaded. “Please, UncGil? I just gotta do this.”

“I said no.”

Now he glared at me. For a few moments we stood there like two half-assed cowboys in some showdown from a Sergio Leone Western epic, then I stormed across to Carson and grabbed his arm, which was stupid, because my nephew, though not very tall, is nonetheless a beefy and very compact man, one whose physical strength is easy to overlook.

He jerked away and I made to grab him again, but this time he was ready and met my movements with a swinging elbow that caught me in the center of the chest, knocking the wind and about three years of life out of me. I dropped to my knees and began to fall forward, stopping myself with my hands. I stayed that way for several moments, my vision blurry and lungs screaming for air. I looked down at the soil under my hands. I remember thinking how very much like clay the soil felt. I wondered if I could possibly dig up several handfuls and fashion them into clay crutches, because there was no way in hell I was going to able to get up under my own power.

Carson helped me up. He was crying. He hugged me tight, saying, “I’m sorry, UncGil, I’m sorry, I love you, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t! ”

“It’s… it’s okay… okay, Carson. Come on, let’s… whew!… let’s get back to the car so I can sit down, all right?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. Me, too.”

Ten years and several rest stops later we were finally back in the car. I leaned against the seat and waited for my chest to stop hurting. I’m still waiting, but eventually I was able to rally, turn the car around, and drive out. We had to wait to turn off Arboretum Road because the traffic was starting to get heavy. On my third attempt we were almost broadsided by the #48 express bus that ran between Cedar Hill, Buckeye Lake, and Columbus, but managed to get back on the road in one piece.

Carson looked behind us.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What bus was that?”

“The number forty-eight express. Why?”

He shrugged-a bit too nonchalantly, but that didn’t really register at the time. “I dunno.”

Back home that night there was no comic book reading. Carson demanded that I sit on the couch and watch TV and relax, he’d take care of me. I kept telling him that I was feeling much better, everything was okay-just make sure he never hit me again-but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was going to take care of me, even make dinner.

Dinner turned out to be grilled cheese sandwiches, underdone on one side, overdone on the other, but seeing how proud he was of his accomplishment, I ate two and told him they were the best grilled cheeses I’d ever had. The truth was, they were. His company did a lot to enhance their taste.

The rest of our week together was more subdued than usual. Except for a trip to a comic book store to see if they had the new Spider-Man (I knew damn well he was looking for a new Modoc, but didn’t say anything), nothing happened to remind me of the events at the truck stop and Audubon’s Graveyard. I am very good at denial.

I took Carson back to the group home the following Monday. He gave me a long, hard hug on the front steps before going back inside. I stood staring at the door after it closed behind him. The empty space where he’d stood a few moments before seemed to hum with his absence.

The next few weeks kept me very busy preparing for the opening of the Columbus store. Cheryl, the other employees, and I spent many long hours cataloging the inventory, moving displays, changing the locations of various areas (“I really think the prints should be over here…,” “Maybe the movies should be closer to the middle of the store than right up front…,” “Is there any way to have the CDs closer to the posters…?”), and generally making ourselves crazy.

The store opened. It was a big hit. I drove Cheryl home from the store one afternoon. We saw an old man chase his hat across the highway. Two black dogs watched everything. I came home to find a dying dog on my lawn. A woman whom I thought to be dead for the past twenty years sent me a package full of memories. And Carson disappeared from the group home.

A day in the life.

(Leaving a few things out there, aren’t you, pal?)

Shut. Up.