Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

As big as these dogs were, and as sharp as the bottom of the skirt would be, they were going to have to really tunnel. But I trusted that they hated me enough to do just that. The prize would be worth the work.

I’d imagined it would smell like an animal den in here, that it would be moist and sticky. It was just dry and dead.

I beat the side of my fist on the bottom of the living room, even though I’d seen my mom leave already. Moms are capable of a lot, I knew. I didn’t put it past her to hear me needing help somehow and shrike across the thirteen miles from her work, tear into this pack with her bare hands.

I didn’t have to act like a hurt rabbit for them anymore. It wasn’t an act anymore, I mean.

If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable. Especially when there’s teeth involved.

The whole way there, it was just dirt and the old dead weeds and grass that must have been live weeds and grass when this house got delivered here. They’d turned into mummies of themselves, mummies that crumbled into less than dust when I touched them.

It didn’t smell like anything, really. And animals always have a scent, don’t they? Even the hunter animals, the reason they face into the wind, it’s that they don’t want their scent to get ahead of them, give them away. Not this hunter. It could come from any direction.

But you have to come from something, don’t you? I told myself yes, you had to.

When you come back from the dead, you’re a spirit, you’re nothing, just some leftover intention, some unassociated memory. But then, then what if a cat’s sneaked into a dark space like this, right? What if that cat comes here to die, because it got slapped out on the road or hit by an owl or something, so it lays back in the corner to pant it out alone. Except, in that state, when it’s hurt like that, when this cat isn’t watching the way it usually does, something else can creep in. Something dead. It’s the injury that opens the door, I knew. The corruption. But a cat isn’t a person.

You can build a self like that, if you compact it all together. If you remember how you used to be.

The whole time I was getting stitched, the neighbor was yelling that I was a menace, that I wasn’t natural, that I wasn’t right. That a human couldn’t do this to four dogs, and any human that did needed to be put down, and that it was his God-given duty to do just that, he didn’t care how many deputies the county sent.

The sheriff’s deputy kind of knew it too, I think. In his job, you see what a human body can and can’t do, I imagine. You assess a scene right when you walk onto it, so you can apportion blame out appropriately. And some of it comes down to simple laws of nature. Can a slight twelve-year-old tear into a pack of dogs like that, when each one of those dogs outweighs him?

The reason she got a different lightbulb, it was that when she’d turned it on for the sheriff’s deputy, it had shone red, had been misted or splashed or clumped with gore—I never saw the actual bulb, just the bloody light it smeared onto the porch.

I woke hours later, thought I was finally dreaming at last, because I couldn’t feel myself standing. That meant I was floating, right? Wrong. It meant my feet were asleep again. I’d deadfooted it out of bed. And I had the distinct feeling in my throat that I’d just been saying something. That left me two questions at once: what had I been saying, and who had I been saying it to?

You can’t rub a bruise off, no matter how hot the water is.

There was a man standing in the doorway of Dino’s room. There were feathers coming off him at all angles. He was just a shape, a shadow in the glass, but I knew him. I closed my eyes, let him leave.

That night, after cornbread with beans cooked into it like Grandma used to make, I got my science notebook out. The one with the map I’d drawn of the interior of our house. I turned the page, made a chart now.

I sighed my best big-brother sigh, made a production of setting my notebook aside, and pulled my way across the room, down to the living room.

“I’m all right,” I told her. This is the lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too. You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

I turned, regarded it up and down its whole fourteen inches of long triangular darkness, and finally, like a trade, picked all Mom’s old butts from the coffee can and pushed them through one at a time. It was an offering.

Then I put the can back but tipped it over like the wind might have blown it over, so it could get a last drag on all those cigarettes.

In my head I was walking the floor plan in my science notebook. I was a stick figure pacing the halls, lo...

Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal. Maybe when you need more, though, maybe then you get a person. Maybe then your father gets special permission to come back, so long as he stays hidden. So long as nobody tries to rat him out.

“Watch this,” I said, and flung the ball at a spot in the dirt maybe six feet in front of me. The string grabbed it in a perfect parabola, flung it high and around, so I had to fall away from getting hit. I kept on falling, too, caught myself on my elbows.

When the headlights turned to wash across the front of our house, they cut off just in time. Just the brake lights flaring in the barely there dust the tires had coughed up.

Dad—my years-dead father—he was leaned over Dino, had maybe been listening to his heart or whispering into his mouth. His fingertips were to either side of Dino’s sleeping shape, and he had one knee on the bed, one foot on the ground. And he was looking across the room like an animal, right into my soul. His eyes shone, not with light but with a kind of wet darkness. The mouth too—no, the lips. And curling up from them was smoke. From the cigarettes and ashes I’d funneled behind the skirt.

My breath choked in my throat thinking about that, that taste, and I wavered in place there in the hall, caught between a scream and a fall, and when I sensed a body behind me, in the back door that was just a doorway because I’d left it open, I knew it was because I’d looked away from Dad in Dino’s bedroom. That I’d broken eye contact just long enough for him to step around the rules of the physical world come out here with me for a little father-son discussion.

And—just because he couldn’t get whatever he needed from my neck, that didn’t mean he...

I shot five times. And the sound—I heard the first one deep in my head, and felt the other four in my shoulder, in my jaw, in the base of my spine.

He’d clawed and fought his way back to us, and he’d come back better, he’d come back in the regalia he’d been supposed to wear, before everything else found him. And he danced. He was dancing now, with each shot.

But whatever Dad was drinking from him, whatever Dad needed from him in order to get whole again, to come back, it was something Dino needed. It made me hate him.

One with a few more ounces of lead in it now. A few shards sprinkled down, coated in blood for the bugs to crawl over and lick, if bugs even have tongues.

If a cat and bugs and drinks from Dino could bring him far enough back to drag a full-grown, shot-dead man under the house, then what could a full-grown, shot-dead corpse do for him? I pulled back inside the house, shut the door, twisted the dead bolt, and hated that I had to call it that in my head.