FOUR
On the rare occasions when Exitus dreamed, he recalled very little of them after waking. In the rawest of effects, the dreams raped his mind; he woke only to the feeling of being violated. A few nightmarish images clung to him like a ravenous beast from a Stephen King novel, black talons thrust deep within Exitus’s skin.
The beast, of course, was not something borne of fantasy but of mEmery and in these mEmery dreams he was perpetually eight years old, his head stuffed with cotton and his nose a faucet opened to full power. Always in these “dreams” he was in the RV. The smell of citrus cleaner hung heavy in the air. Though his nose was filled with mucus, he knew it was there. His mother was always cleaning, maybe because in an RV there wasn’t much else to do. She was fond of orange-scented cleaners, the kind likened to a vexed medieval torturer on grime but, a fluffy bunny rabbit to children and the environment. But she wasn’t cleaning in these mEmery dreams.
In the “dreams” little Tod always woke with a cold, coughing his raw throat more raw and groaning in his bed above the RV’s cockpit. Because Dad was perpetually driving, Mom was the one who eternally came to the rescue. She climbed up to her suffering son and felt his heavy forehead, and frowned.
“Toddy Toad,” she said through that frown. “This won’t do at all.”
She pulled down his smoldering comforter and folded it neatly at his feet. Baseball bats and crisp white leather balls disappeared into a sea of navy blue cotton and polyfill. Tod stared down at his feet—twin peaks jutting from the red cotton flat sheet—and lazily wriggled his toes. The movement made him ill, so he stopped and looked to the RV’s wall at his right.
“Do you want some orange juice, honey?”
Tod nodded, the clogged sinuses in his cement-filled head clicking.
Mom kissed his sweaty brow, gently ruffled his hair. “Extra chunky, how’s that sound?”
“Gud,” he replied, his voice emanating from the bottom of a well. He wiped his nose with his arm. The hairs tickled his nose and caused him to sneeze.
Down the ladder and in three large strides Mom was at the refrigerator. She opened the tiny door and pulled out Tod’s juice—and it truly was his, for his name was scrawled across all sides of the carton in black marker.
“Jeffery, we’ve got a sick one back here!” she called, getting a Fraggle Rock thermos from the cupboard.
“Uh-oh!” Dad replied to a bout of Tod’s coughing. “Get my hook from the bedroom. I think we’re going to have to string the boy up—cut a drainage hole in his head.”
“Not on my floors we’re not!”
Mom readied the thermos and set the orange juice back into the fridge, then proceeded to gather provisions: a plastic bag from the holder by the locked front door, a box of tissues from the dinette and back up to her son. He took the juice from her and laced his hand through the handle. The whole family used thermoses; on a moving-shaking-bouncing RV, they were simply easier to hold onto and if they ever did fall the spilling was minimal.
Tod coughed again, the phlegm in his chest feeling like a massive network of honeycomb. The Fraggles undulated in his unsteady hand. When the spell passed, Tod wheezed and looked to Mom. “You really wouldn’t string me up like a fish… would you?”
“Of course not,” Mom said as she set the tissues by Tod’s head. She tied the plastic bag to the ladder. “Toddy Toad goo everywhere? We’d never be rid of the smell.”
“We’d use a bucket! Easy clean-up, just toss it all out the door.”
Tod stared down at his thermos, bright orange tapioca sloshing around inside. He took a deep swig and chewed, setting down the thermos on his bedside shelf.
“Don’t pay any mind to your father, dear, he’s facinorous.”
“Fass—” Tod began to question, but coughed instead. The coughing quickly led him to blow his nose, sounding like an elephant. Unfortunately the mucus did not recede in his head; it grew, like a bad Disney song that just wouldn’t go away.
Mom frowned and climbed down the ladder. She went to the candy cupboard over the sink and took out a small bag of kiddie lollipops—the kind with the safety loop at the base—and brought them to Tod. “Fass-in-or-us. It means atrociously wicked. Say it again, sear the word into your mucousy brain.”
He smiled at what his brain might look like: green and gelatinous and globular, sliding around in his head and leaking mold-colored sludge out his nose.
Tubular.
“Facinorous,” he recited slowly, then once again, faster. He sat up a little more on his mattress, head pounding, and reached for his thermos. He chewed another mouthful of juice, the pulp like a thousand tiny bugs between his teeth, baby termites perhaps. Given enough time, those baby termites would grow and eat miles of scrupulous tunnels through his organs. How even more tubular. If only Mom would let him swallow termites.
“Very good,” she praised. “Now, it’s time for fulvous fulsome fellows to become fainéant.”
Mom had a bad habit of doing that: using big words Tod didn’t understand. He assumed it was the result of the RVing lifestyle; in addition to cleaning, she read the unabridged dictionary.
“Today is sponsored by the letter F!” Dad exclaimed from his captain’s chair. “How many things do you see that begin with the letter F?”
Mom patted Tod between the shoulders as he began to think, blowing his nose for good measure.
Feet, flowers, fingers, Fraggles. Feathers, fowl, Formica, fridge.
“I want a total by supper, Tod. Let’s see if you can beat me. Why, look—a Ferrari! Driven by a ferret in a fedora no less. Twitchin’.”
“Nu-uh, Dad.”
“Swear to Buddah, my real gone cat.”
Tod frowned deeply. “Rodents can’t drive.”
“Don’t be such a fink, daddy-o.”
“Yeah, well….” Tod looked to Mom, unable to come up with a good comeback in the slang of his father’s generation.
Mom leaned forward and whispered something into Tod’s ear. He giggled.
“At least I’m not thicker than a $5 malt!”
“Heavy.”
Mom laughed. “Meanwhile, back at the ranch….” She plunked a light fist on Tod’s arm and started down the ladder.
“Okay, Dad. You’re on.”
With Mom gone again, Tod continued to think through his cold-stuffed head. Every day was sponsored by a letter, revealed by Mom’s silly triplets and declared by Dad. It was then a game, a race to see who was more observant and knowledgeable with words. Mom never played, thankfully, but acted as the referee, who returned in the middle of Tod’s list—flour, fur, fossils—with a portable television and a nigh empty box of Benadryl.
She set the television in the far corner of Tod’s loft. With a pop! and the appearance of a wavy, growing rectangle of picture, the mini TV came to life. A quick search through the stations brought them to VH1—and some guy in a polo shirt and mullet singing about how everybody wants to rule the world. How that correlated to a couple of dudes in fancy suits dancing in front of gas pumps….
Mom gave him the last dose of Benadryl and settled him under the covers. She kissed his forehead for the umpteenth time. He really wished she wouldn’t to that.
Tucked into the sheets like a pill bug, Tod sunk his head into the pillow. He yanked a fistful of tissues from the box and sneezed, the drippings from his nose sludgy and sticky.
“My poor Toddy Toad,” Mom lamented as she situated the safety suckers within easy reach. “If you need anything, we’re right below you.”
Tod nodded and snuggled deeper beneath the sheets.
His mind went after that.
He registered Mom leaving to join Dad at the helm, the commercials on VH1 and some more music. An angry lady named Pat Benatar addressed a lousy heart breaker, dream maker, love taker—don’t you mess around with her. Then sometime during a song by a redundant Mr. Mister whining about his broken wings, drowsiness crashed down upon him. His head was fuzzy and his eyelids suddenly were made of stone.
When Tod finally woke it was to the night, VH1 still on (though muted) in efforts to keep the dark at bay. The Fraggle Rock thermos was gone, replaced by a piece of folded card stock baring Dad’s block printing.
“IN CASE YOU WAKE BEFORE WE GET BACK, WE’VE GONE ACROSS THE STREET FOR SUPPLIES.” Almost as if an afterthought: “HOW’RE YOU DOING ON YOUR LIST, KIDDO?”
Kiddo sat up in bed. His head was a boulder on his shoulders, but at least his nose had dried up. His throat, however, was on fire. The bag of suckers was still sitting beside him, so he took one and threw the wrapper in the plastic bag hanging from the ladder.
As he sucked on a hard disc of grape, Tod looked about the RV—which was parked. Where he didn’t know, but it was parked. There was a cacophony of cars and people seeping through the walls, though, and Tod’s amazing powers of deduction revealed that they were parked in a city. He rolled over across his bed and looked down into the kitchen, those city lights so bright it looked like day down there.
The kitchen walls were tattooed with ethereal discs of light, broken by the blinds, which grew larger and larger until a car came too close to the RV to throw its light up through the high windows. Their menacing shapes hummed by, wraiths in the night.
Through the windows, past the cars, Tod saw the brightly lit curb of a supermarket or gas station—whatever it was the RV was parked in front of. He rested his elbows on the top rung of the ladder, shoulders thrust into space, and watched the cars pass by and listened to the ceaseless drone of city-life. Suck-slurp-suck-clack went the sucker.
Tod didn’t like cities. He much preferred the back woods of civilization: the ghost towns, the silly roadside attractions, the stone monuments and the massive national parks. He liked to sit at the edge of the lake in his kid-sized travel chair, fishing pole in hand and the lure bobbing up and down in the water. He liked the fritinancy, the noise of insects, and the call of birds. He liked the sharp sound of campers’ boots against gravel or the slushy, slippery sound of those boots against wet grass. The soaring operatic melodies of moose and wolves and elk and other woodland beasts filled Tod with a searing wonder and paralyzing awe—but the sound of cars and buses and trucks rushing past the RV, the noise of it all, grated against Tod.
His head was pounding, hanging over the loft like it was, the blood vessels in his eyes and the aggravated sinuses in his nose pulsing feverently. With a sigh, Tod twisted himself around (carefully so as not to choke to death on a safety sucker: that would be “ironic” as his mother would say) and slid down the ladder almost like a fireman down a pole—hands and pajama-footed feet on the beams for maximum velocity.
Tod hit the ground and woozily backed away into the kitchen. He walked over to the sink and looked out the window. The imposing structure of a major pharmaceutical chain staring back at him from across the street. Though it was late into the evening (or early into the morning), there were still enough cars in the parking lot to prohibit the Titanic of the Highway entry.
Mom and Dad weren’t in the parking lot, not that Tod looked hard enough for them. He didn’t come down the ladder to look out the window, but to “book it to the KYBO and take a whiz” as Dad would say. Tod rapped his knuckles against the metal sink, the cold refreshing to his warm skin, and jogged off toward his appointment.
Halfway to the KYBO a woman screamed. The scream superimposed itself onto another sound: the roar of two heavy things fwunk! fwunk!-ing against something metallic and hollow.
Tires tore into pavement and squealed off into the night, charging through the past and into the present—attacking the hearse’s walls and violently assaulting the night.
Exitus woke as he typically did after such “dreams”: sweating and disoriented. He didn’t know where he was, who he was. For several fleeting moments he was still Toddy Toad—dazed and confused and wondering where his sucker had gone off to, why he wasn’t wandering out into the street staring at his bloodied parents, Mom still holding onto a shopping bag exanguinating cough drops and Benadryl. Wondering why he was instead lying in the back of a hearse sixteen years older and one hundred pounds heavier.
Then it came seeping back like flood waters through the walls of a stone cellar.
He wasn’t Toddy Toad but a kid with the moniker of Exitus traveling the country in Uncle Monty’s hearse. He had left home not so long ago with the dream of becoming the American Michael Palin—paid to travel the world and shoot documentaries. But currently he was parked in the lot of Lidia’s Diner in a town in Wisconsin with a name too unimportant to remember.
Exitus tossed the blankets away and rolled out of the makeshift bed, sat on the floor and stared at the crimson drapes.
“For a minute there, I lost myself”, as a man named Thom Yorke (a man with a head presumably made of radios) once sang to a group of Karma Police. And indeed, Exitus had lost himself for a minute there but, that was over now—now he was the dumpy Exitus Quick with a complete disregard for his image.
With a sigh he wiped the sweat from his eyes and kneeled up onto his knees. He searched in vain for a clean t-shirt and at last found a sweatshirt that didn’t stink of road and man. His jeans were freshly laundered from the day before last, so he would wear them again. But if there was anything the horrors of gym class had taught him, it was the importance of clean underwear.
Once dressed, Exitus gathered his toothbrush and battered old razor, a bar of Irish Springs and shoved his supplies into the pouch of the sweatshirt. He shimmied through his homemade partition and eased into the front cab of Genevieve, bid hello and good morning to his beloved vehicle and the morose Laka.
“’Good morning’?” she asked through her evil eyes. “What’s so good about it?”
Exitus gave the hula girl an “Oh, you” grin, then dug into his pants pocket for his wallet—which was getting to be far more brown than it was green. He would have to start looking for work soon, there was no way around it. First, however, was a clean-up and a decent breakfast.
“If they have snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, Laka, I’ll bring some back to you.”
“How considerate.”
“I know. Aren’t I a real prince?”
He pocketed his wallet and slid over into the driver’s seat. Opening the door, he stepped out into a perfect fall morning. The air was stark and cold, but still held a minute amount of warmth to it alongside the dampness from the evening storm. The sun was also still rising in the sky, battling against the night to return color to the world. Brilliant hues of yellow and orange pushed against black, staining it a steely grey.
Gingerly slamming the door behind him, Exitus hiked through the mud to the diner’s easy-to-ascend wooden stairs—his shoes sucking and smacking all along the way. He grimaced down at his feet, at his thrift store, name brand boots now unrecognizable; they were filthy with wet dirt and rain debris. He tried to scrape them off as best he could on the bottom step before proceeding up the rest, though they were still saturated enough to thunk! heavily against the treads. If he tracked mud throughout the diner, at least it would give the poor waitress something to do—that and stare at him strangely when he asked for permission to use the bathroom as a shower (manners had been beaten into him as deeply as the cuddly fat encasing him).
Exitus looked to make sure the “ALWAYS OPEN” sign was still in the window and turned the door handle, opened it to the Dead Fall day.
Quiet met Exitus as he walked into the diner. Horror greeted him when he lifted his head from his shoes.
The door nearly broke Exitus’s nose as he scrambled to get back through it, collided into his shoulder and banged against his elbow. He hurled himself against the railing of the stairs, his gut folding into the wood as Exitus heaved himself over to vomit into the rhododendrons.
