The Devil's Alphabet

breathing mask Rhonda had given him. His father could not be soothed. He struggled and shouted, but Rhonda’s boys couldn’t be budged, and in a few minutes his father was exhausted.

“Like trying to shave a cat,” Clete said, and Travis laughed.

“Shave a cat,” Travis said.

Aunt Rhonda excused herself. “Best not for me to get too close,” she said, and went outside.

The boys started with the insides of his father’s forearms. Travis would swipe the surface of a sac with iodine, then slide in the needle. Pax winced every time, his stomach turning. But his father didn’t seem to feel the needle; they might as well have been poking at Ziploc bags. After his arms they opened his robe and lifted his T-shirt to siphon the larger sacs on his belly and chest. They ignored the smaller blisters and pimples.

When the syringe filled, Travis placed it in the Styrofoam cooler, then picked up a new needle and syringe from a box on the floor.

The siphoning seemed to go on and on, but when Pax checked his watch only fifteen minutes had passed. A sour odor filled his nostrils. He felt queasy, and sweat painted his neck.

At some point his father passed out or simply fell asleep; his head lolled to the side and he began to breathe deeply. The robe had fallen open, and Pax was alarmed to see that an erection tented his boxer shorts.

Pax pushed the robe over it and Clete laughed. “Happens every time,” he said. “This stuff’s better than Viagra.”

“Cut it out,” Everett said sternly. It was the first time Pax had heard him speak. Now that Everett didn’t need to restrain Harlan, he could help siphon. He started using a second needle, and the extraction proceeded faster. A few minutes later they had only his father’s back to do. They tilted Harlan forward and sideways, then pushed up his robe to his shoulders. Pax held his father’s head against him, patting with his gloved hand the black-and-gray hair he’d been cutting two hours ago. He could not get used to the size of his father, his helplessness, the zoological strangeness of his body.

The boys began to pack up their supplies. Pax pushed his father back into a sitting position and straightened his robe. Then he followed the boys outside.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Rhonda asked him.

Pax stared at her.

She laughed heartily. “You held it together better than I thought you would. Most skips couldn’t do it-certainly not a man. It’s women who change the diapers and take care of the old people in this world. Most men don’t have the stomach for it.” She held open a plastic garbage bag and he tossed in his mask and gloves. “Do this every day and you’ll get used to it.”

Pax exhaled heavily. “Every day this has to happen?”

“If you want to keep him healthy.” She gave him an appraising look. “Now I didn’t come out here just for your father’s treatment, though I was glad I could help. I came to show you someplace where there’s a different way of doing this.”

“I don’t know,” Pax said, glancing back at the house. Everett stepped out carrying the cooler.

“Don’t you worry,” Rhonda said. “We’ll have you back in no time. Your daddy’s going to be sleeping for a while.”

Chapter 4

THE INSIDE OF the Cadillac smelled like a tub full of lilac petals-Rhonda distilled.

Pax rode in the back alone, while Rhonda sat up front in the passenger seat next to Everett. “My next project is to build our own high school,” Rhonda said. Only the top of her hair-sprayed head was visible. “You know they wouldn’t let Everett play on the football team at the county school? Can’t pass the physical, they said, because he’s morbidly obese. Obese! Not for a charlie, I said. Not for one of our people. They won’t let the argo boys play either, especially not basketball. Lord, they’re deathly afraid of argos playing basketball. Not that they’re any good at it- they got hands like concrete. And nobody wants to even shower with the beta boys. Tell me that’s not discrimination.”

“That’s discrimination,” Pax said.

“You bet it is. We’re going to sue their hind ends off, then use it to pay for the stadium. Everett here can be our coach.” Pax could see the side of his face. The man shook his head, smiling shyly. It was the first time Pax had seen him break his frown.

They skirted the edge of town, taking Roberts Road under the eastern face of Mount Clyburn. The fields of the Whitmer farm opened up to their right, and a new white fence sprang up and raced alongside the road, pickets blurring. As they approached the entrance to the farm, he saw that they’d turned the place into a trailer park. Fourteen or fifteen mobile homes surrounded what looked like a white-painted warehouse, a cheap sheet-metal building with a low, flat roof. The Whitmers’ ancient barn still stood in the distance, but the old farmhouse was gone. Beta children played between the trailers, and a few of the taller girls wore those white scarves on their heads.

Aunt Rhonda rolled down the window and waved at two beta women inside the fence who were unloading bags of insulation from the bed of a pickup. They wore nothing on their smooth heads, and one of them carried a toddler in a pack on her back. The women returned the wave without smiling, but maybe that was a beta thing.

“Those blanks are breeding like rabbits,” Rhonda said, and rolled up the window.

Blanks. Another slang term. Every clade had to be put in their place, he thought. “Was that the Co-op?” he said.

“Jo Lynn started that after you left,” Rhonda said. “Not her best idea.”

“Jo did? But she was living on her own,” Pax said.

“Just the past couple years, hon. She started the farm back in, oh, a year after you left, I guess. Several families moved in with her. She tried to call it a commune at first, but people didn’t like the sound of that. Anyway, more and more of them started moving out there. There’s quite a few blanks still living around town in their old houses, trying to keep their old families together. But I think deep down the betas like living close, sharing the babies.”

“But Jo, did she leave, or was she kicked out?”

Rhonda laughed. “A little of both.”

“How so?”

“Jo was all for planned motherhood. That didn’t sit too well with the younger girls. Every single one of them wants to be the Virgin Mary, even if they’re fourteen. Especially if they’re fourteen. And then when Jo-well, I don’t need to talk about that.”

“About what?”

“Oh, there’s all kinds of rumors. Nobody needs to tell you how people talk.”

Pax sat back, his face burning as if he’d been slapped. Nobody forgets anything in your hometown, he thought. Ten years wasn’t enough. Twenty. He’d die an old man and they’d still say, You heard why his daddy ran him out of town, didn’t you?

Rhonda leaned over and looked between the seats at him, raising her eyebrows. “Paxton, you’re a grown man now. You know how small-minded people can be. Jo Lynn never was shy about sharing her opinion, and what’s more, she was ready to do more than just talk about it-she was going to take action. A lot of the sisters, especially the young ones-well, they thought she was the devil herself.”

Roberts Road ended at the highway, and Everett turned the car south, away from town. A half mile after the south gate, one of the boundaries during the quarantine, he turned off onto a newly paved road that wound up into the hills. When Pax was a kid there’d been nothing out here but trees and scrub brush.

Near the top of the hill the driveway was blocked by a black iron gate set into a high stone wall. Everett stopped and spoke into an intercom set on a post a few feet from the gate. “Aunt Rhonda’s here,” the chub boy said.

“What’s with the high security, Aunt Rhonda?” Pax said. His tone was light, but the fortress set dressing had put him on edge.

“Can’t be too careful, hon,” Rhonda said.