April covers the stretched dough with apple slices, bitter green slivers with skin to hold the vitamins, and sprinkles it with a slight sugaring, cinnamon and dabs of butter. She weaves the strips over the top and thumbs the ridges to make a border without leaving scraps. She’s making it for my birthday, because I told her I hate cake. I say no more than that, though having an apple pie is ten times worse—what’s to celebrate over shreds of sour fruit and a waving brown crust?

“What’s the matter with cake, is it the taste?” she asks. “You like sugar well enough—you and your Dr. Peppers and Milky Ways .”

“I hate the frosting. I can’t stand the way it melts down and sticks to your fingers and then kind of slides down the sides.” I didn’t want candles either with their shifting shape, dripping down in wax streaks, but I didn’t say so. They make me queasy. At least a candy bar takes a clean bite and it's consumed. Here in this dead desert town everything melts and dries up. Cassettes curve and dashboards crack and crayons waver and flow out into a hard enamel pool. Popsicles drip down sticks as fast as you can lick and leave behind only their grape and orange dye. The truck’s vinyl seats soften like they’re ironed and fuse to my skin like a wetsuit. In the white heat of Death Valley , all the melting flows from inside to out--weeping out and withering up. But back home in Texas , on those humid flat plains where you can see everything straight-on and nothing can hide, the warm sweatdrops bead over your skin and then dark clouds gather them up above over your head, and split open again and drench you and your T-shirt and jeans in rainwater. Then you just stick your tongue out and sip the drops back in instead of getting all parched and shriveled up.

“Wouldn’t you rather drown than be desiccated?" I ask her.

“What’s that?”

“You know, get dried up like prunes or apricots.”

“I never thought of it like options.”

I did all the time, when I was a kid and watched The Wizard of Oz where the witch melts, sizzles and mistifies into nothing under her clothes. If someone drowns, at least the body washes up. Or some divers might find you on the ocean floor and pick you up. Or maybe not. I see the skeleton of some lost dude lying prone on the sandy floor rippling beneath the waves, and eventually the bony frame, with its curved ribs and hard hinged skull, getting munched out by crustaceans, and in the end the remains burrowed to extirpation by tube worms.

No matter how many times mom told me that it only happens to bad witches, I was pretty careful with water as a kid. I wouldn't play with squirt guns or let other kids spray me with hoses. I really thought I might melt, like my Grandma Patty did, or that’s what I understood when I heard she passed away.

My dad got mad about how I didn’t want cake--like I didn’t appreciate all the trouble April was going to for my birthday. She didn’t see the difference: why shouldn’t the birthday boy choose any special dessert he wanted? She offered me a party, but I refused that too. It’s August, I’ve only been here since February, and the one guy I might invite, an acquaintance really, lives ten miles further down the school bus route. In Texas it would have been easy to get a party together--we would have gone to the pizza parlor and fed quarters into those gorged metal boxes that gobble coins with a clunk and strobe out pulsing lights and push rolling metal balls down chutes and ring all the bicycle bells at once.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” April tells me. She’s been saying that since February. My mom sent me to my dad’s because I didn’t get along with her boyfriend, or he didn’t get along with me--at any rate it was mutual. I was the one who got to go. My father tried to get out of it--said he didn’t have an extra room. Mom said I could sleep on the couch in the den. What does April mean by “we” anyway?

“Why do you think he would be better off here?” my dad asked my mom, or so I filled in his side of the phone conversation, as I sat on the stool tangling my legs in the spokes so badly I almost toppled myself.

“Because it’s not working out here,” she actually said. “And it’s your turn for chrissake.”

It’s a different custody battle over me, alright: who gets the job. For Chelsea, my ex-girlfriend from next door in Texas , it was completely different—until junior high, that is. Chelsea’s parents sliced her days up into half-hours and squeezed them into the lines of a spiral organizer: fifty-two hours on Thanksgiving weekend with mom, forty-six with dad, which leaves four catch-up hours to give to the one and take away from the other. Sleeping hours count for half of waking ones, and prime weekend time at a parental home is worth twice the schoolday hours—it took a spreadsheet. The lawyer, whose workdays instead were measured in tenth-hours, quit when Chelsea’s father couldn’t pay the bills for all the contracts they needed written up and court dates to enforce them. One day we were sitting on my porch talking, and her mother actually came out and yelled: “Get back inside. Don’t you know this is my time right now, young lady?”

Chelsea was eleven then and had two of everything in two places: two beds, two teddybears, two toothbrushes, and two TVs in her own two bedrooms. Including the extra stepfather and stepmother, she had two parents on each side. By the time we broke up the next year, she and her mother were fighting all the time. I heard them every night as I shot hoops on the driveway. That was before George moved in and started handling my time. Her mother Sylvia wanted to put her on a diet—and she wasn’t even pudgy. Of course she cheated at it—stuffed her locker with puffy Twinkies and curled-up corn chips. Sylvia wanted her to get involved with sports, because that’s supposed to keep children of divorce out of trouble, so instead Chelsea bored three holes in her earlobe, wired them with silver safety pins and cranked the stereo to rock the block. Her zits were out of control too, but do you think she’d see a dermatologist? Nobody could tell her anything. I saw the glaring red tracks over her mom’s cheek from Chelsea ’s black-coated fingernails and the orange and blue bruise over her forearm from her daughter’s skin twist. By high school, Chelsea was mostly at the skate park or the gulley behind it until dawn with her friends, when they didn’t get picked up for curfew. They took beer bottles from their parents’ refrigerators and stole cherry schnapps from the grocery store. Around the same time George moved in with us, Chelsea was sent to live with her father.

My mom and I never fought much. We had this long rambling house which was big enough for the two of us, with our bedrooms on opposite ends. At least we could get away from each other. But there was no room after George came. A toothbrush belonged back on the hook. I had to be home by 8:00 and not 30 seconds later. My mother never cared, but suddenly I had to leave a phone number where I would be. He took it on himself to scrutinize my homework, as if I didn’t already get mostly A’s. If it wasn’t neat enough, I had to rewrite it, whatever it was: essays, math problems, vocabulary lists. It’s not like he ever threatened me—he doesn’t even yell like my mom does. But he’s always there, right behind me or at my shoulder, and the whole space has been taken up by him, with some fog of aftershave which spreads over the whole house, especially in the hallway which was always neutral ground. At least at Chelsea’s house they can slam doors on each other and cuss each other out, and the anger like dust settles somewhere for a while, until it gets stirred up again.

Here, like I said, I stay in the den. I hide away my bed when I get up, push my clothes back in the closet, and shove my other pair of shoes deep under the couch where the toes won’t show. I erase all traces of my presence here—the National Geographics, my Swiss Army knife, some sappy old letters from Chelsea—only because she’s still my friend. I bury them in hidden places around the house—in the basement in old coffee cans or under the mattress in manila envelopes. It’s like I don’t really live here. My father’s rules. It’s actually April’s house, my mom told me. Not like my father could hang onto anything like a house, she said, he’d drink down the very bricks. April got the house from her parents when they died.

“Don’t worry--you’ll be back with your mother before you know it,” he told me when he picked me up from the airport. “She’ll never last with that turd more than a month or so. Just consider this a vacation.”

“We never made a big deal about birthdays in my family,” April says, “but probably that was a mistake." April has no children of her own. She never married; she and my dad are shacked-up basically. She’s probably forty at least, and she’s pretty huge. It’s hard to tell exactly how big she could be, because she wears these loose flowered housedresses every day. She wheezes a lot when she’s working in the house, like she has asthma or used to smoke too much.

“They’re overrated,” I said.

“I was the caboose; my sisters were already teenagers when I came along. You know how it is--nobody takes pictures of the third one. Makes you think you’re adopted or something. There’s plenty of the other two.”

There were plenty of me though—my years were jammed into shoeboxes. They got taken out sometimes and looked at, mostly by me, and they’re always signed with some silly slapped-on smile. The blank border around the pictures is like the stuff you kept out that was going on around those times. There I was smiling like a goofus on my birthday when my dad had already moved out. The pictures are all mixed-up, and the days are reshuffled like a deck of cards and dealt out in any order. A school picture from last year could be a Monday or a Friday, October or June--the day’s been and gone, and I don’t remember a thing about it. Which vacation came first-- Yosemite or the Grand Canyon? The five boxes have no dates, and sometimes I can’t even tell which place it is. The babies aren’t always identifiable—my cousins look a lot alike when they’re brand new. And when did my parents get that new gold Oldsmobile? I can just remember being in the far back seat, looking out on the road and waving and counting how many people waved back. Usually I only remember times in reference to other things. Like that dog I got before my father left—or come to think of it now, my mother must have kicked him out.

I got Sooner on my ninth birthday—I wanted nothing else. Sooner, because I wanted him that fast--but I didn’t know what to want. My mom made birthday cake for me then, of course, because I hadn’t thought about that melting problem yet; maybe that’s how it started. It was a very warm day, my birthday was in August as always, and the frosting melted--it sure did. The candles burned down to their plastic stakes over the cake, and the wax spread over the dissolved icing, fixing it into these gaggy-tasting globs. Maybe I was distracted by the dog and didn't blow them out? Now come to think of it, that’s why I got the dog. My father always said no, no, no. She gave the dog to me practically while my dad was packing.

“You sure you don’t want to have a couple of friends overnight? You can play video games,” April asks.

“I don’t feel like it.”

“What do you want for dinner?”

“Anything’s fine.”

“Your father will probably be late--he has a lot of work.” I already know he won’t make it for my birthday tonight. I’m not stupid like other divorced kids I know, who are always thinking their dads will call them this time, or their moms will keep their promise this time like they forgot to before. April covers for him. Her big blonde curls bob with her lies because she trembles a little. She’s not good at it. I don’t mind because she’s nice to me. As for my dad, I guess she thinks she can’t get anybody else. But they get along OK.

“Hamburgers?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

April sets the pie in the oven after slashing six cuts into it like the lines of light from a Bethlehem star. She pulls out the hamburger and starts palming the patties. Then she cuts up the red onions, slices the tomatoes, and pulls apart curved leaves of lettuce; then she puts out all the condiments—ketchup, mustard, horseradish, steak sauce, Worcestershire, three kinds of pickles, jalapeños—a lot of extras for just two hamburgers. She cuts some potatoes into matchsticks and throws them in the fryer; they spit back and tumble and slowly sizzle from blonde to brunette. I set the table. After we eat, as we watch an old western in the living room, she immediately falls asleep on the recliner. I climb into bed after the bad guys are all dead and the family is settled back on the ranch in peace.

 

 

My door is open, and I’m sleeping with the ceiling fan clicking over me on high, when I hear my father come in. The late show is still on in the other room where April is dozing. He walks through the front door smelling of barf—he must not have opened the window of his truck fast enough. He doesn’t quite close the door, and the night is snickering after him through the doorway. His retching isn’t even as loud as the summer racket of the cicadas and junebugs. April wakes up from her chair.

“Can I do anything for you, honey?”

“Lea’me alone.”

I get up and go out to the porch. It’s an old habit. Probably so I can get away if I need to. I lie flat and face down on the porch swing, as the balmy night swarms and sparkles over me. I fall into this sway; I’m lifted over and carried, and it’s more calming than being spread fixed across the four pikes of my couch.

After I hear the doors slam, I listen for his whizzing snore. He never touches April or me now when he’s angry--I guess he learned since then. He still might put his fist through the wall, or break something of his own, like the glass clock with the skinny gold hands he got from grandma, but he doesn’t take a dive at anybody. And the next day he’ll just get the plaster from the garage and set to work patching it and then he’ll match the paint color for a few swashes or paint over the whole wall. April will clean up the pieces of glass so no one steps on a piece. She won’t say anything about it. It’s true it’s not so bad as it was.

My mom knew all about what it was like: she saw him slam me against the wall and roll me across the floor like a bowling ball, and that wasn’t just once. She still sent me back to him. She said she did the first fourteen years, and her job was over. I told her: don’t think I’m staying with him one day after I’m eighteen, and I’ll probably run away before that. And I would defend myself--there would be problems, I told her. She said I would see--it would be different now that I’m almost grown up. We would just have to not provoke each other, which is pretty much what we don’t do.

Lying here in the night, watching the porch floor fall away, I finger the smooth piece of petrified wood I always carry with me in my pocket. It’s almost always in my hand since I keep my left hand in my pocket most times. I hold it out over the floor as I fall asleep, and eventually my hand unclenches and the rock drops to the ground, which does it no harm and doesn’t wake me. I like to roll it around in my hand; it’s part of me like my skin—smooth outside, hard underneath. At dinner I kind of hide it in my left fist while I eat with my right hand, and I can still manage the fork and knife—it’s not a big rock. I somehow talked my mom into buying it for me at some park gift shop. April never says anything about it, though she definitely has seen it; I hide it back in my pocket if my dad is around, but he honestly doesn’t notice too much of anything.

 

I get up early since I’m outside and there’s no curtain for the sun to hide behind, and I walk out to the weedy field behind the house. The sky is bright white with clouds and a blazing sun ready to slice through the billows holding it back. I’m looking for blue belly lizards hiding under the rocks. I walk farther past our property into the no man’s land, although it falls under some preservation laws, following the tire treads printed when it was mud and now caked dry as plaster with the grooves crisscrossing over crushed brown weeds. When I find a lizard, I’ll carry it around for a day and give it one night hidden in the shoebox under my porch. There I’ll feed it a grasshopper if I can catch one, and I’ll put some wet green leaves inside. In the spring there’s a creek right near here with a squatting swarm of mosquitoes and other flying edibles, but it’s barely a muddy trickle by May’s end, and now there’s nothing but a rock dry gully waiting for rain.

I walk around the barrel cacti and prickly pears and creosote bushes until I finally turn over a rock that has a lizard waiting under it. It’s a sleepy thing that settles easily into my right hand, while I continue to hold my rock. I have the touch with them now—they don’t feel the need to run away. The thing I’m not so good at is keeping them alive in a box. After having two of them die on me, I decided to keep one just overnight and let it go each morning and find a new one. Whatever harm there might be in the captivity would be healed by the shortness of it.

When I was younger, I accidentally killed my lizards, caressing them like my rock and crushing them in my affection. Needless to say, it makes you feel terrible. April asked me why I don’t catch some rabbits with that old BB gun in the garage. She likes to cook them into rabbit stew, something she used to do as a kid in her home in the mountains. It would make her feel like she’s at home. But I’m not much for doing that to rabbits or anything else. Not to mention my dad would make me eat them afterward when she turned them into dinner.

In the distance, black clouds push across the white sky; a canopy of rainwater is stretched out over the brittle dry earth. It’s late in the summer and the ground is ready for a warm drink, the furrow of creek is waiting for a trickle from an autumn rain, and the lizards are looking for a lick in a puddle or from the cool bottom side of a rock.

When I come inside to find breakfast, I hear my father still snoring in his bedroom. April is making oatmeal, and when it’s ready, she tells him and me. I wash my hands and face and examine the bite marks around my nose I got from Sooner, who got vicious when I was filling his food dish. He didn’t know better, and neither did I. It could have been worse than the 27 stitches and Tetanus shot I ended up with. Everybody says I can get plastic surgery, but I’m used to the scar which is a crescent shaped line of pegs from my earlobe to the meaty center of my cheek. My mom argued with animal control that it was my own fault, and I don’t know how she managed it, but they never did put him down, which I wouldn’t have wanted anyway. We got along OK when I was awake and looking at him, and I left him alone to eat; at night I shut my bedroom door so he wouldn’t get in.

There are no holes in the wall this Saturday or broken glass. After breakfast, my dad plans to work on his car, the one that’s not running. I sit in the kitchen eating leftover apple pie--I like it better in the morning because it has a bittersweet bite to it that goes down well with black coffee.

“That car has a problem with the fuel line,” he says to me, as he eats his oatmeal. “You think you should have dessert for breakfast?” April sits down with us. He generally doesn’t converse with April in front of me, but they often talk quietly in their room. If he yells about something, it’s not directed to anyone in particular. He’ll say, “Somebody forgot to pick up milk,” or “Why is that two socks can’t never be matched up right.”

“It’s got fruit in it. I’ll help,” I say.

“I’d rather not get it messed up,” he says down at his plate of oatmeal. In the silence, he glances up.

“Alright, I guess. Just do what you’re told and don’t get in the way. I might have you drive this one later.” This is something new, that I might still be here six months from now and even get my permit. I wonder at it as I chew my pie.

“Chores first,” he says, staring out the window. I have the outside jobs April gives me--sweeping the dirt off the wraparound porch and washing the outside of the windows and weeding the garden in the evenings. April does all the inside work. My father works an outside job, so she says you can’t expect him to do chores. He’s a self-employed handyman who works mostly for old widows, and he is a pretty good plumber if you don’t want to pay a professional. Besides that he works on his cars and fixes things around the house.

He nods at me and pulls his green cap back down to shade his veined red eyes and walks out to the detached garage. I start on the outside windows with a squeegee and a bucket. He pulls the car out in front of the wind-bitten splotchy blue structure, onto the driveway. It’s jacked up and he’s climbing under it, with his cap back off.

I’m rushing through the chores, because this is the first time I get to do something worthwhile, and I’m finally done with the windows and the porch. I’m almost there, ready. A minute or two later I would have been next to him, handing him the wrench, the screwdriver, whatever he wanted.

I’m next to the garage when I hear the explosion first as a dull thud, then a whistle of metal, and finally a roar of fire; I actually get knocked off my feet and get back up quick. I turn and see the car coughing out black smoke mortal as dragon’s breath. April runs out of the little clapboard house, and the sparks keep shooting up like fireworks, so she gets pushed back by the heat, and later she says—I don’t remember it—that there are choo-choo-like sounds and gasses fizzling and what looks like the gray geyser of an old diesel engine smokestack. I guess I just tear into the old garage like I’m already on fire, though I’m not yet, and I yank on my dad’s legs which were sticking out from under the engine. I haul him out fast, scraping him, bumping him along, and the flames are leaping over him. Drop and roll, drop and roll, I must be thinking to myself, the way I learned at school, and he’s not moving. So I’m dropping, rolling.

So then the neighbor, Carl, drives up, unfurls the hose and sprays down the fire and us, and the blaze spits back at him. I don’t remember. It finally hisses down to the wet roofless frame of a garage with shards of boards and a green sedan burnt black and my father and I fused together on the driveway until the fire department comes and brings us in together like that to the hospital, on one gurney, not daring to separate us outside of the OR, with two IV’s hooked up to our two tangled arms. And wouldn’t you know, by the time they’re strapping us in, the clouds open up and rain down on us. First shower in months and it’s splashing fat cool drops all over us and muddying up the yard fast. Nobody ever saw anything like it. The firemen came by to visit in the hospital, often, nice guys. We were there for weeks. And one of them, Gene, kept saying that: nobody ever saw anything like it, two people fused like that, like Siamese twins or something.

April says first I was trying to blow the fire off of him and then tried to smother the fire using myself for a blanket. We both took in smoke down our throats, and our skin and shirts kind of melted and melded together. Our rippling brown crusted chests now look kind of like the tops of her pies. She says it’s about time we hugged, but did we have to be so extreme about it? So we have these twin scarred chests, and my dad’s hair got all singed off permanently, and I suppose some of mine will never grow in. They had to take some skin from here and add it there, stretch it on, stitch and patch. We’re still not positive that I don’t have some of his skin and he mine, but April points out that that’s the way we started out anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

I had April take a picture of the driveway for me, of the crumpled molten metal of the chassis, the metal that ran down like silver and the black tires all melted right into the asphalt.

2005