You never saw a boy scattered so.
–“The Story of the Good Little Boy,” Mark Twain
West Texas cold never frosted Hunter Spacks’s eyelashes like working in the post office at Bad Axe where he’d watched the planes scrape across the pale sky over Lake Huron. But Hunter still didn’t like having to hoof it along Highway 67 in the buttcrack of night.
Each step on asphalt bit his arthritis-gnawed knees.
Weighed down by the cargo in his backpack, Hunter puffed harder than ever.
Cold enough. Somewhere below freezing. At least no glaze of ice.
He didn’t dare call Zane to give him a lift because their deal wasn’t anything he wanted the feds picking up with their surveillance.
Damn jalopy stalled out for no good reason other than it was cold and a 1970 Dodge Challenger that had been banged around about as bad as the General Lee.
The Brighter Days Hospice of Fort Davis had its weekly sign, and it had boldly proclaimed, “This Day is the Best One God Can Give to Teach You Righteousness.”
That got him thinking, if this were the best—and it sucked—what was left of the other days? His ma had called him sometimes a Good Boy, and that one day he’d have his reward.
The car had been a good one. He’d driven it up and over the Rockies. And these little Davis Mountains of Texas usually gave no trouble—like rolling to Mount Locke with the MacDonald Observatory where he’d watch presentations by some retired astronomy professor geeking out about solar storms, sunspots, eclipses, black holes, and plasma.
What a wonder the sun was with its churning fire. He’d seen a few presentations there at the Observatory which left him floating in the plasmic clouds of orange and red.
Great big ball of explosions, the sun. Such fury in that hydrogen engine that none of that shit people pulled on Earth was anything to the mighty conflagration.
The blaze of glory in the sky.
Tonight, under the net of cold sharp stars, Hunter felt no such transcendence.
He felt damn old.
And mad.
Steaming mad.
He hated that Lumenox data center with its glowing windows that shone all day and night, even at the nether dawn of night, hot mist drifting up in steam pillars towards the sky.
He’d thought wistfully of blowing it up the first time he saw it after moving to the back of beyond from Lubbock. But Lumenox was too well guarded.
The data center at Shafter put up by Cukatek Solutions was the softer target.
So far out of the way, only the locals suffered from the noise.
Ever since the Data Foundry opened in Austin in the ’90s, it had been just a matter of time with the AI, the factory robots, the layoffs.
The whole damn mess of it spreading, a cyber cancer across the globe.
Who was going to stay employed by 2030?
Hunter lost his job as a network engineer due to that nightmare factory. Or ones like it.
He went home and smashed his own telescope on that day.
Pounded on it with a crowbar. Left it mangled to rust on the dirt lawn.
Over a period of months, not one business had need of his local area network
architecture. Service calls dried up.
Everyone was on the fucking cloud.
He was eclipsed by the cloud you couldn’t see.
After getting canned, Hunter got the occasional IT temp job and walked off some of the outrage when he’d got back into the Post Office work on weekends. Fell right into the pace of the day, sorting mail and tramping around like he’d done during his time in Michigan before he’d saved up enough for college and moved out to get his degree at Texas Tech for IT.
But after just a year of temping at the PO in Fort Davis, his knees went bad, and he got busted for drinking on the job.
Both his jobs.
Double or nothing.
And nothing comes from nothing.
That’s when he started doing other kinds of jobs from The Devil’s workshop.
You can’t beat Lucifuge right out of the gate; you’ve gotta run the maze a bit first.
Then tipsy-turvy, he had his hard fall, hustling stuff over the Rio Grande. Got his scraped up ass hauled out by his ride-or-die pal, Zane. Always came through, that red-moled crazy freak.
Guess Zane was his guardian fucking angel. He couldn’t keep ignoring the signs.
After fifty, Hunter had taken to watching for omens, reading up on occult scientists, and taking pills—on account of his chronic pain and his life debt to Pitts.
He bought stolen shit from Pitts every week. Made a whole new living this last decade.
Maybe he could see his future in those ruby angiomas on Zane’s face. Blood dots of heists, cold cash of jobs well done.
Black nebula star eyes of those señoritas swaying across the Rio Grande.
Tonight at fifty-nine, Hunter was lugging a fifty-pound black box of siren destiny with white and red wires in his backpack.
Hunter passed the blocky outcrop of Elephant Rock. Illuminated by the glow of the data center, Hunter saw what must have been an owl glide over the top of the massive edifice. La Lechuza? Didn’t make a peep. Or a hoot. So not his time yet. He had read a book called I Heard the Owl Call My Name back in junior high. A Washington State tribe not Rio Grande Junta.
Either way, the owl wasn’t talking to this white man with miles to go.
He knew they might rename the elephant “Cibolo Rock” like the creek if they went back to the old surveying maps and gave the Junta and the Mexicans their due, but hell if Hunter gave a fuck about that. Besides these activists were claiming it looked just as much like a buffalo as an elephant, but you could see above where the snout was buried this deep groove clear as day: the squiggle of a sperm cell with its swollen nucleus floating to the right—which made the rocky beast look just like an elephant giving you side-eye for catching it at an awkward moment.
Five miles more to go till he got to Shafter where Zane had his Winnebago, plenty of weed, percs, and meth, and maybe a star-eyed whore or two if this were to be a good night.
Hunter took a deep breath and exhaled the sting of cold out of his lungs.
“One, two, three, four. I’ve got a heap of troubles on my mind, I’m singing, I’m singing those Elephant Rock Blues.”
He tried whistling, but he’d never been any good at that. He needed to save his wind anyway, for the rest of the hike to Zane’s place.
One, two, three, four—he counted to slow his breaths down, like Dr. Stilts had said.
One time after an anger management session had ended for the day, Dr. Stilts had told him that his bad attitude, especially with women, had to do with his mother beating him.
When he saw how mad Hunter got, Dr. Stilts told him to take deep breaths, stop and think.
Well, Hunter beat down Stilts for that set of insights: one, two, three, four.
Didn’t even get around to the problems with his crazy father.
But Hunter kept up the breathing exercises, sure enough: one, two, three, four.
Right through his seven-month stint in jail. Thankfully, the judge gave him some credit for no known criminal record and knocked his assault down to a misdemeanor.
He still laughed when he thought of Dr. Stilt’s jaw wired shut.
Commissary was always out of mixed nuts. He learned to pretend to be content with sunflower kernels, which cost almost as much.
He always took a deep breath and let the hidden complaint sail away in the air.
One, two, three, four.
The art of Zen.
Just meditate on the bombs you’re going to set off later in life.
Hunter took a glance back up 67 before he slammed Pitt’s door shut pretty damn hard, so it didn’t blow back open with that nasty north wind. That’s why the elephant buried its trunk in the ground. Too damn cold or hot any day of the year.
He set down his pack on the linoleum floor.
Zane Pitts got up from his couch, an “I Want to Believe” X-Files hat perched on his long-haired head, his face aflame with those red moles. Few more probably bloomed overnight. Wasn’t that a new one on his right eyelid? A blood red lump contrasting with his blue eyes? Even Hunter had to admit those blue peepers were rather striking. Somebody somewhere might have become both their wives, if they hadn’t been such fuck-ups.
“That’s the way, brother. But look at you, eating like a bird again, brother? Eating like a bird?!” Pitts shook his head at Hunter and did that chin-tilting grin that showed the ribbon of violet, the scar from his days at the yard in Beaumont. Or was it puce?
Ma had always liked talking about puce, though the word somehow made Hunter’s skin crawl even now while he thought of Ma with a mix of pride and disappointment.
Strange how things got tangled up like that.
“They still talking about changing the name of the rock?”
“Yeah, back to the old days. Like the anthropologist said, back to how ‘the way things were.’”
“But you know it’s all just woke shit, right?”
“I don’t know or much care, so whatcha got for my box?”
Zane bent down to drag out a cardboard box wrapped up in black Gorilla tape. “Solid haul. Same Border patrol guy who used to work at Boquillas hooked me up. But less I say about that the better. Tell ya, have to kill ya.”
“You know I’m not afraid of that.”
One, two, three, four.
Zane returned Hunter’s level gaze, his blue eyes not even widening, but maybe just a crinkle of amusement on the edge. “Hear ya loud and clear, partner. Now here’s brass tacks: you got your dozen M6 blasting caps. And your big jug of ammonium nitrate. I know you got the fertilizer covered. Wire it up clean. This RDX is way better than TNT. Get back a good 500 feet with your jalopy.”
Hunter smiled. They shared the word ‘jalopy” like they were passing back-and-forth a flask.
“Yeah, think my jalopy has just about done its last trick.”
“Nah, I’ll get it fixed up for you.”
Pitts was always as good as his goddamn word.
That weekend, at four in the morning, Hunter had his jalopy loaded with its precious cargo in the trunk stuttering out of Fort Davis and down to the data center of Cukatek Solutions in Shafter.
Brighter Days Hospice had another dumbass sign up: “You are an expression of the universe as a human.”
Hunter thought on that a moment. Well then, by God or the Big Bang I am just an instrument, so don’t blame me, Ma, for what I’m about to do. God, you stay out of it too.
He pulled over his jalopy and started snipping away lengths of barbed wire from the fence by Elephant Rock. A little sojourn when the world slept except for rattlers, skunks, opossum, and coyotes.
Hey, a flash of red eyes—an opossum trundled along the edge of the yucca right there.
Hunter caught its anxious look.
Didn’t want to be caught by anyone on two or four-legs no doubt.
Where was it off to?
Get hold of some birds’ eggs and suck out that sweet slurry of yolk or maybe just going to fatten up over some dog or cat food dish.
Hunter remembered the panting of an opossum with a belly swollen from gobbling up cat food when he’d housesat for his last real girlfriend, Ashley. She’d gone off who knows where after getting canned for missing one shift too many for being zonked on pain pills.
He’d heard through the grapevine she ended up in a coma.
He popped his trunk, brushed away the stench of fertilizer that arose, and stared at the black box tied up with wires to the packs of RBX.
He listened to the lonely calls of the coyotes.
Looking back at him also in the trunk was the shadowy disc of the telescope that he’d bashed, broken, and reformed with an artist’s devotion into its present shape.
He’d returned to it months after bludgeoning it with the crowbar. Made several alterations, which he thought quite improved the once-cherished but frustrating instrument.
Amid the stench of the fertilizer in the trunk, Hunter imagined the telescope had become a kind of millipede, decomposing the turds and chemicals, maybe working some strange alchemy.
The barbed wire sets of legs clung to the dirt in tensile readiness while the tripods, which Hunter had bent and twisted with boltcutters into their prehensile scorpion claws, clenched the air before him, as if ready to grab him or whomever to feed the broken glass maw that sat on top of the telescope near the smaller cyclopean eyes of the viewfinder.
The scope was also packed with RBX.
He’d be putting his art on display for the locals to see in just a few minutes.
Turned upon him, he knew that the viewscope would show nothing but a blurry light at best for any curious observer to see. But if he lit up the night in a blaze beyond those stars, all eyes of the world would fasten at last upon something he had done.
Wherever her body was now housed, Ashley might stir from her coma as the news blared about the disaster of Elephant Rock. The ruin of the empire of Lucifuge.
Jack Parsons must have done his best to bask in the glory of Aiwass when he’d blown up amid the wreckage of his home in Pasadena, his arm sailing forth towards the rooftop and his jaw bone clattering upon the floor. They say he had some time to ponder before he died.
Crowley would have welcomed his body of light to the endless sky.
A fist. A jaw. Blinding ache mapping out his cheek in pain.
Was that his father kicking him in the ribs?
Whose father? Jack or Hunter’s? Ashley or Jill’s?
Superman smiling from amid the smoke while the bullets flew?
Broken bottles in the hall. Or was that just from Pink Floyd?
Ma, you didn’t do enough to stop.
One more brick. One more brick.
Maybe it was because he was near his goal that these surreal little memories were springing up, or his connection with the universe was snapping into synaptic explosions of truth.
If at last, he shocked into life the black box and burst the bonds of flame and ammonium molecules, by what strange lights would Hunter see?
Would the elephant wrench free from the ground and shake its pendulous trunk in an arc that would strike sparks from the blocky basalt slabs?
But then those stars sprawling above with their sweep of endless peaceful cold light. What of the Junta elders from time immemorial who might look down and frown at this ignoble Hunter?
He meant no disrespect.
He’d call it Cibolo Rock, fuck it.
He could let it all go.
Close the trunk.
Park by the Rio Grande and dump everything in.
Drive away.
Back to Bad Axe maybe.
Hunter took a deep breath. Felt the prickle of cold in his lungs and thought he saw the buffalo of rough stone shake its haunches slightly in the dark.
One, two, three, four.
Flickering dots of red, white, and blue approached from the horizon.
Had he been gifted a vision? Found favor with the elders, Ma, and God at once?
That cry in the night. An owl at last?
No.
Not an animal, ghost, or UFO.
Police cars. What the fuck? Cameras from the data center? The rancher who owned the land around Elephant Rock?
No, God damn it, Zane Pitts must have burnt him. Sold him out.
He should have divined the treachery earlier: the red of his moles, the white of his skin, and the blue of his eyes. Or was it the wires themselves in the black box. The nervous red-eyed glare of the opossum. The too blue sky where he had for so long lived. . . .
Then as the sirens blared, he noted the oval of the rock set off from Cibolo Rock, lower down by the road.
The cosmic egg.
The Big Bang.
He could see the future in an incandescent flash of light— streaming across the night sky.
A blaze about to bloom more brilliant and oracular than whatever next week would be emblazoned on the sign of The Brighter Days Hospice or whatever dim constellation or solar spot was captured at the MacDonald Observatory.
One, two, three, four.
Would the telescope used by the retired professor discern by what trajectory he scattered?