The Thor Fish
The Thor Fish
by Eric Scott
It was a sticker, black and white, about five inches by seven. It showed a stylized picture of a fish, drawn in outline. The fish wore a viking helmet, and just below its mouth was a warhammer. Inscribed within the fish was the word THOR in capital letters.
Austin took the sticker from his brother's calloused hunter's hand and ran his thumb across the glossy surface. Then he looked up, grinned at his brother's pale, firelit face.
“Thought you needed something to remember me by,” said Tommy, his brother.
Tommy leaned against the rear tirewell of the pickup truck, once his, now Austin's, and slung his long, thin leg over the side of the tailgate. He pulled another bottle of beer out of the styrofoam cooler sitting against the wall of the truckbed and popped the cap off with an opener on his keychain. “And you've been getting into all that Norse stuff lately...”
“Where the hell did you find it?”
“There's this website,” he said, tipping back the bottle. “It has all kinds of fishes. Jesus fish, Thor fish, Darwin fish. I swear to god, I saw a Vishnu fish. I thought about getting that for dad...”
Austin set the sticker aside and frowned at the dying fire. He poked at the embers with a stick and got it circulating again, kicking up a curtain of sparks that dashed up and burnt out in an instant. The fire made his brother more distinct; the slivers of firelight broadened across his lanky body and revealed the faded mud on his jeans, the twigs and grass pattern of his sweater, his John Deere hat. Tommy looked a lot like a heroin addict-- there was a skeletal quality to his thinness that didn't seem natural.
His brother sat his beer down and stared out past the fire. A light autumn rain fell on the truck camper; it punctuated the otherwise quiet glen they were camped in, but wasn't heavy enough to smother the fire.
“What are you looking at?” Austin asked.
“Just the island, man. Takin' in one last look.” Tommy scratched himself and reached for a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. “I remember once we came out here, when you were real little. About Lammas time, must have been. Place was fucking crawling with baby toads. Could not take a step anywhere without upsetting about a dozen of the little bastards.” He lit his cigarette with a fluorescent blue lighter and took a puff. “You loved 'em. We were halfway back home when mom realized you'd stuffed your pockets with them.”
Austin was pretty sure that story was bullshit, one way or the other. Any story where Tommy described him as “real little” had to be taken as apocryphal, considering Tommy was all of two and a half years older than him. If he was too young to remember it all, it seemed pretty unlikely that Tommy would remember it either. But Tommy had always been a natural huckster, and whether he actually could recall any of the stories he told never mattered much. It wasn't like he would tell it straight if he actually had seen it, anyway.
“Bet you'll miss it.”
“Of course I'll fucking miss it. I'm gonna be in basic for four months. By the end I'll be pining for Arnold, much less Kaskasi Island.”
Austin nodded and got a beer for himself out of the cooler. Technically Austin wasn't supposed to be drinking for another three years, but this was his brother's last night in town and there seemed to be a more communal element to sharing beers than sharing Pepsi. He popped the top off and took a drink. It was a wheat beer, and the flavor was almost entirely in exhalation.
“We should have held a festival here. This'd be a good place for one.”
“Which one, you think?”
Austin took a deep breath: he could taste woodsmoke and rain. “Beltaine would be nice. The island's pretty in the spring. We could go down to where grandma's place was, before the flood...”
Tommy nodded. “Maypole would look nice out there, a little ways from the pond. But who knows when the grass down there was cut last. The best part of this place is that there aren't any people around anymore, but... Well, also means nobody's around to keep the place civilized.”
“I thought that'd be something you'd like about it.”
“Oh yeah, for sure,” said Tommy, pointing at his brother with the beer bottle. “Hell, if it were up to me, I'd say we do it skyclad and pray for chiggers. But most people ain't me.”
“Heh. Yeah, and thank the gods, huh?” They chuckled. “Well, I guess that's something to do when you come home.”
They watched the fire for a moment.
“Yeah. Something to think about, for sure,” said Tommy.
“You figured out anything about that? About the festivals? What are you going to do about that in the army?”
“Eh. I figure I'll keep them in my own way, when they come around. I did some reading on it. Not going to make a big deal about it, of course, but I don't think they'll care all that much.” He took another drink of his Blue Moon. “World's come a pretty long way, man. I mean, shit, they made it so that servicemen could get a pentagram on their tombstones.”
Austin frowned. “Don't talk about tombstones, Tom.”
Tommy rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you're just like mom. I'm gonna be a quartermaster, man. It's not like they're trainin' me to be an infantryman. Anyway, I'm just sayin' that we made the Approved List, man. That's pretty damn mainstream.” He chuckled. “Even if the pentragram isn't nearly as cool as the Atheist symbol.”
“Atheists get a symbol?”
“Yeah, it's like Doctor Manhattan or something. This little atom cloud with a great big A in the middle. You see it and you're like, 'not only did this man serve his country, but he served science!'” His voice changed at the word science! so that he sounded like a Flash Gordon villain.
“That doesn't make sense. Atheism's not a religion!”
“I guess they didn't just want a big blank space where everyone else gets a cross or a Star of David or whatever. Can't really blame 'em. People get invested in their symbols.” Tommy took another drink and looked at his watch. “Jesus, it's one in the morning.”
Austin nodded. “Yeah. You got a long day tomorrow.”
“Mmhmm. And so've you. Don't forget, you have to drive my ass to the airport.” Tommy crawled up towards the cab of the truck and pulled a sleeping bag out of a sack in the corner. “I was kinda hoping to sleep outside, but that wouldn't be such a great idea with the rain...”
“Really? You're probably going to be spending plenty of time sleeping on the ground soon enough.”
“Quartermaster, little brother,” he said. “I'm sure it's less than you'd think.” Tommy crawled into the sleeping bag and killed his beer. “Oh well. I lost track of the number of nights I slept in the bed of this truck. I guess one more's appropriate.”
Austin kept sitting on the edge of the tailgate, occasionally poking at the dying fire. He decided it wasn't worth the effort. He got up and paced around their little camp, a few minutes' drive from the old family farm that had been destroyed in the flood of '93. The island always made him think of his grandmother, and the line of ancestors-- in reality probably only a handful of generations, but in his mind, a chain with countless links-- that used to live here. His mother had moved to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri when she got together with their father, which was a little town but a metropolis in comparison to Kaskaskia; after that they'd moved up to the southern suburbs of Saint Louis.
The land spoke to him, in some ways. When Austin walked around Kaskasia, he certainly felt like he was walking in the footsteps of his ancestors; whole families of Mersebergs walking beside him. He could feel the Goddess-- Jordh, as he was getting used to calling her-- around him, in the glens and the fields, and see her in the lilies grown in ditches along the roads. It seemed like a good place for goddesses: grandmother country.
But he thought too much, and every time he got to thinking about the grandmother country, he remembered that his grandmother had been a Baptist who didn't speak to his mother for a year when she found out her daughter had turned into a witch. She certainly wouldn't have appreciated a bunch of naked heathens dancing around a maypole outside her farmhouse on Mayday. Grandmother country evoked a powerful set of images for him, but every time he felt close enough to connect with them, he remembered the reality of who his grandmother was and who she would never be.
Plus, Austin couldn't name half the trees on the island, much less the grasses or flowers. All those farmers that shared his blood knew things about the island-- about the world-- that Austin was sure he would never know. He was a city mouse, for better or for worse, and didn't really belong here, except to visit.
He wasn't sure how Tommy had managed to keep his kind of roots, but Austin always envied it.
Austin put the fire out with some dirt and sand. The rain was starting to fall a little harder, and already his skin was wet to the touch. He reached into the bed of the truck for his own beer and finished it, then climbed in himself. He nearly stepped on the sticker of the Thor Fish with his muddy boots before he saw it, and stopped to pick it up. He smiled and stepped back out of the truck.
He closed up the tailgate and ran his hand over it: it was still dry. He peeled the sticker off the paper and smoothed it across the metal, just above the Chevrolet logo. He noticed, too late, that it was a little cocked, but maybe that just added whimsy. He got into the truck for the second time and closed the back window behind him.
Tommy stirred as he crawled in, yawning and turning over.
“Sorry Tom. I was trying not to wake you.”
“Don't worry about it,” said his brother in a lazy voice. “Was barely asleep anyway...”
“Alright. Well, go back to sleep.”
“Right-o.”
The brothers lay in the truck for a moment, listening to the rain patter against the metal roof.
“You're gonna take good care of my truck, aren't you?” asked Tommy.
“My truck now,” said Austin. “I gave you good money for it.” He smiled and rolled over to face the windows. “And yeah. Of course I am.”
* * *
It had been six months since Tommy left for Fort Leonard Wood, and Austin felt like he had spent every minute of them in this drive-thru lane.
The party he’d left had been mediocre. Most of the people there were other college students; he only knew a few of them, and didn’t care that much for them. Austin, for whatever reason, tended to get invited to hipster parties, and while he enjoyed their musical tastes-one of these parties introduced him to Television and the Talking Heads-it didn’t take long for the belligerent music snobs to get to him. When he observed another gin-sloshing partygoer yelling that Stevie Ray Vaughn deserved to die in that plane crash, he knew it was time to go.
It was two in the morning when he left the party, and he lived half an hour away by highway. As he was pulling away from the walk-up apartment complex, he realized he hadn’t eaten anything but a handful of Doritos in nine hours.
And that brought him here, to this McDonald’s in Bella Villa, one of the least accurately named suburbs of Saint Louis, where the wait lasted longer than many world governments.
He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel of the truck and sighed. There wasn’t even a line, as such-there had been one other car there when he arrived. It just took ten minutes for them to finally send that car up to the pay window. Austin pulled up to the speaker and waited for it to emit any kind of noise.
The speaker crackled after two minutes. “HiwelcometoMcDonald’scanyouholdforamoment?”
“Yeah,” mumbled Austin. “It’ll be a big change of plans.” He turned to the Thor’s Hammer hanging from his windshield and rolled his eyes. “Give me a little strength here, huh?”
He leaned back in his seat and turned the radio back on. Some modern rock, the kind where all the guitars are tuned like basses and the singer practiced by rubbing his throat against sandpaper while singing Gregorian chants. He wished they were playing Zeppelin.
Another truck pulled into the drive-thru behind him. Austin considered yelling back to the poor bastard that he’d be better off going somewhere else. Austin was invested now, but that guy, he could still get out.
Austin hummed along with the bad music and looked over the menu for an eleventh time, even though he was going to get the same thing he always got. Then he noticed that the cab was brighter; he looked back at the other truck and saw it had turned on its high beams.
“Hey,” called a voice: it was bassy, and it warbled just a touch. Austin squinted against the bright headlights and saw a man leaning out of the driver’s side window. He couldn’t make out much about him: he looked like an older man, wearing glasses and a dark baseball cap, but that was it. “Hey!”
Austin ignored him and kept his attention on the speaker, wondering when he was finally going to get to order his damn Big Mac.
“Your sticker is making fun of my lord,” said the voice.
Austin blinked when he heard that. Sticker? He must have meant the Thor Fish…
“Great. A fundie.” He shook his head and kept staring at the grille of the speaker, as if the presence of the attendant’s voice would dispel the other truck. It didn’t come. His cab got brighter, and he realized the other truck was pulling up on him. Then the cab went dark again as the other truck’s headlights fell beneath the edge of his tailgate, and he felt a slightly lurch as their bumpers met.
“Did you hear me?”
“No, sir!” Austin called back. He hoped the deferential tone would make the guy back off.
“I said that you’re making fun of my Lord.” The man paused. Austin got a better look at him now: he had a gray mustache, looked to be about in his mid-fifties. He was wearing a Cardinals sweatshirt. “You better get out of your truck and tear that sticker off, right now.” He said it in the same tone of voice a policeman uses to tell somebody to get out of a car. “You better tear it off right now.”
Austin balked. “I think you ought to back off my truck.”
“I’m only going to say this one more time. Your sticker is making fun of my Lord, and I don’t appreciate that. You get out of your truck and you tear that sticker off, right now.”
Austin was now convinced the speaker attendant was intentionally staying quiet, hoping that whatever was being argued over in his drive-thru lane would burn out without his involvement. Austin frowned and stuck his head out the window, looking back at the man in the truck behind him. “It’s my sticker, and no, I’m not tearing it off. And you should back off my damn truck.”
The other truck backed off from his bumper, and Austin sat back in his seat and reached for the gearshift.
“A Big Mac is completely not worth this,” he said, and then lurched forward as the other truck slammed into his bumper. He was caught by his seatbelt and managed to put his hands on the steering wheel to balance himself. He looked up, a little stunned. “What the fuck?” He felt the other truck back up again, and before any other thought crossed his mind he dropped the truck into drive and drove over the short concrete barrier diving the drive-thru lane from the parking lot. He drove to the exit and turned right without even looking and pressed the accelerator to the floor. He looked at his rearview mirror and saw high-beams from a truck behind him.
“You’ve got to be fucking with me…”
Austin swallowed. The radio had moved on to some rock/rap hybrid that was at least as bad, but he left it on. Having the radio on, just having music playing, somehow felt necessary, even reassuring. He barreled through Bella Villa, the little ten square block town, back towards highway fifty-five and ran the situation over in his head. He was not the kind of person who got into confrontations often: most of the people he spent time around were stoner pagans or passive-aggressive hipsters. There wasn’t much fear of a fight breaking out among those people. He pulled onto the highway and the truck kept pace; occasionally it revved its engines and pulled closer, but Austin kept ahead. He absently rolled up his window before he thought to call for help.
“Phone. Call the police. Right, right…” He fumbled around in pockets, feeling for the little plastic rectangle, but all he felt was his wallet. “Oh, come on, come on, where is it?” He opened the glove compartment, but there was nothing there except old oil change receipts and he knew it. He shuffled through the papers and heard the rough sound of the shoulder, and looked up just in time to jerk himself back to the lane before hitting the barrier. “You would pick tonight to forget your goddamn phone, wouldn’t you, Austin?”
His eyes never got used to the high beams of the truck: every time he looked back he was only blinded again. The truck was keeping within two car lengths behind him, so the lights were trained exactly on his mirrors. Every now and again they would suddenly fade away, which was worse, because that meant the truck had dipped back close enough to his rear to hide behind the tailgate. Every time it happened Austin had to fight the strange urge to slam on the brakes and let him slam into him: out of fear, perhaps, or out of spite, or out of a simple longing to get it over with.
But he’d promised to take care of Tom’s truck. That thought was always enough to save him in time.
The particular stretch of northbound highway they were on was more or less desolate-until it got towards downtown, the highway raced through industrial wastelands, huge white towers full of lights that belched steam into the air. There weren’t many exits, and what few there were didn’t lead to public places. He needed to get to a payphone, or a gas station-or, hell, another McDonald’s.
The next exit advertised a Shell station, half a mile to the west. Austin got off the highway, convinced the other truck would hit him as he slowed down to the exit. When they got to the bottom of the ramp he ran the stop sign and turned left towards the station. The bright yellow clamshell glared at the dark street around it, and Austin quietly promised he would never say a cross word about Shell Oil again.
He pulled in, the other truck coming in closely behind him. Austin pulled into a parking space, and the other truck came in directly to his left. It was the first time he had ever actually gotten a look at the vehicle itself: it was a faded green color, a Ford, with posts in the back instead of a camper. Austin put his truck into park and without thinking turned the engine off, which he immediately cursed himself for. He stared at the man in the other vehicle, who was looking dead at him. The man’s face was deeply lined, and now his baseball cap clearly read GOD BLESS AMERICA. He seemed to be chewing tobacco.
They sat and stared at each other for an uncomfortable amount of time. Austin considered dropping the truck back into drive and trying to speed out, but he was sure that the man was just keeping his foot on the brake, ready to pull out and follow him as soon as he was given the opportunity. Austin shot a glance inside, trying to see if a counter worker was paying attention, but nobody was at the counter. He realized then that although some of the lights were on, as was the sign, the actual convenience store was closed.
The other truck’s passenger window rolled down. The man said something that Austin interpreted as “roll your window down,” but Austin shook his head. The man said it again. Another shake of the head. The man sighed and reached down to his floorboard, and Austin was certain at that moment that this man had a pistol in his car and that he was going to die. The man took whatever it was in hand and opened his door and got out without the object coming out of the shadows.
As soon as the man cleared the doorway Austin opened the door and ran for the payphone. His head was a train riding on two tracks: the one said that if he got to the payphone and dialed, police would arrive and everything would be fine. This was the same track that had been convinced that if the McDonald’s server had just asked him for an order, all the trouble would have passed back there, too. The second track said that was moronic and he should have kept the damn engine running so he could hit reverse and get out of there when the man got out of his truck.
He picked the receiver off the cradle and dialed 9-1-1, jabbing his finger into the cold metal payphone keys. He heard a ring and turned around, ready for the man to come around the side of the trucks with a baseball bat or the hypothetical gun. But the man did not appear.
Another ring. And then he heard a scraping sound.
Ring. Scrape. Ring. Scrape.
“Emergency services.”
“A man is following me, I think he wants to hurt me…”
“OK, OK, hold on. Where are you, sir?”
“I just got off 55 at, at Arsenal. I’m at a Shell station.”
He kept looking up expecting to see the man come rushing towards him, but there nothing. The scraping continued for three more beats, and then stopped.
“We’re sending a patroller right away, sir. Stay on the line if you can.”
The man finally came around the side of Austin’s truck. Both of his hands were full. In his right hand was a razorblade; in the other was a collection of paper shavings. The man didn’t seem to pay any mind to the payphone; his steps were slightly haphazard.
“He’s got a razor…” Austin spoke slowly and incoherently, as though he were speaking in his sleep. The 911 operator was saying something, but he didn’t pay any attention to it. The man at last came up to him, in his jeans and his sweater and his GOD BLESS AMERICA baseball cap, and stood just off the curb of the sidewalk outside the Shell station. He stood there and looked at Austin and then held up his left hand and turned it over, letting a loose clump of glossy paper shavings fall to the concrete. The shavings were white, with occasional glimpses of bold, black outlines. One fell to Austin’s feet; it read OR.
Even from that distance, Austin could smell whiskey when the man talked. “You kids today, you don’t care about anything,” said the man in the baseball cap. “You don’t care about Jesus or morals or family or anything in the world. You make me want to puke.”
Austin stared at him dumbfounded. The man at last walked back to his truck and got in, turned on the engine. His high beams flooded the front of the Shell station: Austin winced at the sight. Then he flipped them back to normal headlights, put the truck in reverse, and pulled away. Austin saw the license plate, but was still too stunned-still thinking too hard about the mere feet that had just been between himself and that razorblade-to get it in his head.
“Sir? Sir, are you there?” Austin realized the operator was still talking to him.
“Yeah, I’m still here,” he said, and swallowed.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m… The man, he left.”
“The patrol car is still on its way, sir. Stay where you are.”
“Yeah, I will,” said Austin, and he put the phone back in the cradle.
He walked around to the back of the truck. It was the first look he’d had since McDonald’s. The bumper was punched in, and the tailgate had been dented; flakes of pale green paint were stuck to the metal. Austin grimaced and ran his smooth, city-boy hand over his brother’s truck. He paused at a spot where the paint had been scratched away except for a few patches of glossy white paper, about five by seven. No details remained, no traces of whimsy. Just a spot of empty, corroded metal.
He felt like getting in the truck and flooring it, chasing in the direction of the other truck and running it down. Austin was more angry than he had ever been in his life: angry at the assumption that his silly little fish had anything at all to do with the man in the baseball cap, angry at the self-righteousness, angry that believing in Thor meant he didn’t care about anything important. He was angry enough to do something stupid and violent-
Austin shook his head and walked back to the sidewalk to pick up the scraps of the Thor Fish. The anger fell through him as if he were made of cheesecloth. Now it was mostly fatigue and cowardice. In the name of “American values,” an asshole in a truck had just ripped off Tommy’s sticker, and instead of doing anything about he, Austin, just accepted his role as the villain, the marginalized, the outcast.
And despite himself, he wondered about his grandmother, and whether or not she would have approved.
He knew what would happen next: a cop would show up, and he would tell his story and tell them that he didn’t see the license plate, and maybe the store would have had a security camera pointed outside and maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they would catch the guy, and he could-what? Press charges to fix his bumper? Demand damages on a five dollar bumper sticker?
He would call his mom and tell the story again, and she would cry at the thought of her baby boy being in such trouble; his father would tell him he did the right thing by trying to get out of there, and not getting into a real fight; endless family friends would hear and ask about it and give advice. Someone would offer him a can of mace to keep in the glove compartment, just in case; someone else would suggest a baseball bat.
And every one of them would say what a shame it was that things were just the same for pagans in 2009 as they were in 1979, no matter whether it was true or not, and find one more piece of proof that the Christians were simply always going to be bad news. Austin didn’t want to believe that, but he didn’t have much to offer as counter-evidence.
He threw the scraps of the Thor Fish into the trash and walked back to the truck. He got in and waited, solemnly watching the hammer hanging from the windshield as it made its slow pendulum arc from one side of the cab to the other, and waited for the moment when he could look into the rearview mirror of Tommy’s truck and see bright lights coming for him again.
by Eric Scott
It was a sticker, black and white, about five inches by seven. It showed a stylized picture of a fish, drawn in outline. The fish wore a viking helmet, and just below its mouth was a warhammer. Inscribed within the fish was the word THOR in capital letters.
Austin took the sticker from his brother's calloused hunter's hand and ran his thumb across the glossy surface. Then he looked up, grinned at his brother's pale, firelit face.
“Thought you needed something to remember me by,” said Tommy, his brother.
Tommy leaned against the rear tirewell of the pickup truck, once his, now Austin's, and slung his long, thin leg over the side of the tailgate. He pulled another bottle of beer out of the styrofoam cooler sitting against the wall of the truckbed and popped the cap off with an opener on his keychain. “And you've been getting into all that Norse stuff lately...”
“Where the hell did you find it?”
“There's this website,” he said, tipping back the bottle. “It has all kinds of fishes. Jesus fish, Thor fish, Darwin fish. I swear to god, I saw a Vishnu fish. I thought about getting that for dad...”
Austin set the sticker aside and frowned at the dying fire. He poked at the embers with a stick and got it circulating again, kicking up a curtain of sparks that dashed up and burnt out in an instant. The fire made his brother more distinct; the slivers of firelight broadened across his lanky body and revealed the faded mud on his jeans, the twigs and grass pattern of his sweater, his John Deere hat. Tommy looked a lot like a heroin addict-- there was a skeletal quality to his thinness that didn't seem natural.
His brother sat his beer down and stared out past the fire. A light autumn rain fell on the truck camper; it punctuated the otherwise quiet glen they were camped in, but wasn't heavy enough to smother the fire.
“What are you looking at?” Austin asked.
“Just the island, man. Takin' in one last look.” Tommy scratched himself and reached for a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. “I remember once we came out here, when you were real little. About Lammas time, must have been. Place was fucking crawling with baby toads. Could not take a step anywhere without upsetting about a dozen of the little bastards.” He lit his cigarette with a fluorescent blue lighter and took a puff. “You loved 'em. We were halfway back home when mom realized you'd stuffed your pockets with them.”
Austin was pretty sure that story was bullshit, one way or the other. Any story where Tommy described him as “real little” had to be taken as apocryphal, considering Tommy was all of two and a half years older than him. If he was too young to remember it all, it seemed pretty unlikely that Tommy would remember it either. But Tommy had always been a natural huckster, and whether he actually could recall any of the stories he told never mattered much. It wasn't like he would tell it straight if he actually had seen it, anyway.
“Bet you'll miss it.”
“Of course I'll fucking miss it. I'm gonna be in basic for four months. By the end I'll be pining for Arnold, much less Kaskasi Island.”
Austin nodded and got a beer for himself out of the cooler. Technically Austin wasn't supposed to be drinking for another three years, but this was his brother's last night in town and there seemed to be a more communal element to sharing beers than sharing Pepsi. He popped the top off and took a drink. It was a wheat beer, and the flavor was almost entirely in exhalation.
“We should have held a festival here. This'd be a good place for one.”
“Which one, you think?”
Austin took a deep breath: he could taste woodsmoke and rain. “Beltaine would be nice. The island's pretty in the spring. We could go down to where grandma's place was, before the flood...”
Tommy nodded. “Maypole would look nice out there, a little ways from the pond. But who knows when the grass down there was cut last. The best part of this place is that there aren't any people around anymore, but... Well, also means nobody's around to keep the place civilized.”
“I thought that'd be something you'd like about it.”
“Oh yeah, for sure,” said Tommy, pointing at his brother with the beer bottle. “Hell, if it were up to me, I'd say we do it skyclad and pray for chiggers. But most people ain't me.”
“Heh. Yeah, and thank the gods, huh?” They chuckled. “Well, I guess that's something to do when you come home.”
They watched the fire for a moment.
“Yeah. Something to think about, for sure,” said Tommy.
“You figured out anything about that? About the festivals? What are you going to do about that in the army?”
“Eh. I figure I'll keep them in my own way, when they come around. I did some reading on it. Not going to make a big deal about it, of course, but I don't think they'll care all that much.” He took another drink of his Blue Moon. “World's come a pretty long way, man. I mean, shit, they made it so that servicemen could get a pentagram on their tombstones.”
Austin frowned. “Don't talk about tombstones, Tom.”
Tommy rolled his eyes. “Jesus, you're just like mom. I'm gonna be a quartermaster, man. It's not like they're trainin' me to be an infantryman. Anyway, I'm just sayin' that we made the Approved List, man. That's pretty damn mainstream.” He chuckled. “Even if the pentragram isn't nearly as cool as the Atheist symbol.”
“Atheists get a symbol?”
“Yeah, it's like Doctor Manhattan or something. This little atom cloud with a great big A in the middle. You see it and you're like, 'not only did this man serve his country, but he served science!'” His voice changed at the word science! so that he sounded like a Flash Gordon villain.
“That doesn't make sense. Atheism's not a religion!”
“I guess they didn't just want a big blank space where everyone else gets a cross or a Star of David or whatever. Can't really blame 'em. People get invested in their symbols.” Tommy took another drink and looked at his watch. “Jesus, it's one in the morning.”
Austin nodded. “Yeah. You got a long day tomorrow.”
“Mmhmm. And so've you. Don't forget, you have to drive my ass to the airport.” Tommy crawled up towards the cab of the truck and pulled a sleeping bag out of a sack in the corner. “I was kinda hoping to sleep outside, but that wouldn't be such a great idea with the rain...”
“Really? You're probably going to be spending plenty of time sleeping on the ground soon enough.”
“Quartermaster, little brother,” he said. “I'm sure it's less than you'd think.” Tommy crawled into the sleeping bag and killed his beer. “Oh well. I lost track of the number of nights I slept in the bed of this truck. I guess one more's appropriate.”
Austin kept sitting on the edge of the tailgate, occasionally poking at the dying fire. He decided it wasn't worth the effort. He got up and paced around their little camp, a few minutes' drive from the old family farm that had been destroyed in the flood of '93. The island always made him think of his grandmother, and the line of ancestors-- in reality probably only a handful of generations, but in his mind, a chain with countless links-- that used to live here. His mother had moved to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri when she got together with their father, which was a little town but a metropolis in comparison to Kaskaskia; after that they'd moved up to the southern suburbs of Saint Louis.
The land spoke to him, in some ways. When Austin walked around Kaskasia, he certainly felt like he was walking in the footsteps of his ancestors; whole families of Mersebergs walking beside him. He could feel the Goddess-- Jordh, as he was getting used to calling her-- around him, in the glens and the fields, and see her in the lilies grown in ditches along the roads. It seemed like a good place for goddesses: grandmother country.
But he thought too much, and every time he got to thinking about the grandmother country, he remembered that his grandmother had been a Baptist who didn't speak to his mother for a year when she found out her daughter had turned into a witch. She certainly wouldn't have appreciated a bunch of naked heathens dancing around a maypole outside her farmhouse on Mayday. Grandmother country evoked a powerful set of images for him, but every time he felt close enough to connect with them, he remembered the reality of who his grandmother was and who she would never be.
Plus, Austin couldn't name half the trees on the island, much less the grasses or flowers. All those farmers that shared his blood knew things about the island-- about the world-- that Austin was sure he would never know. He was a city mouse, for better or for worse, and didn't really belong here, except to visit.
He wasn't sure how Tommy had managed to keep his kind of roots, but Austin always envied it.
Austin put the fire out with some dirt and sand. The rain was starting to fall a little harder, and already his skin was wet to the touch. He reached into the bed of the truck for his own beer and finished it, then climbed in himself. He nearly stepped on the sticker of the Thor Fish with his muddy boots before he saw it, and stopped to pick it up. He smiled and stepped back out of the truck.
He closed up the tailgate and ran his hand over it: it was still dry. He peeled the sticker off the paper and smoothed it across the metal, just above the Chevrolet logo. He noticed, too late, that it was a little cocked, but maybe that just added whimsy. He got into the truck for the second time and closed the back window behind him.
Tommy stirred as he crawled in, yawning and turning over.
“Sorry Tom. I was trying not to wake you.”
“Don't worry about it,” said his brother in a lazy voice. “Was barely asleep anyway...”
“Alright. Well, go back to sleep.”
“Right-o.”
The brothers lay in the truck for a moment, listening to the rain patter against the metal roof.
“You're gonna take good care of my truck, aren't you?” asked Tommy.
“My truck now,” said Austin. “I gave you good money for it.” He smiled and rolled over to face the windows. “And yeah. Of course I am.”
* * *
It had been six months since Tommy left for Fort Leonard Wood, and Austin felt like he had spent every minute of them in this drive-thru lane.
The party he’d left had been mediocre. Most of the people there were other college students; he only knew a few of them, and didn’t care that much for them. Austin, for whatever reason, tended to get invited to hipster parties, and while he enjoyed their musical tastes-one of these parties introduced him to Television and the Talking Heads-it didn’t take long for the belligerent music snobs to get to him. When he observed another gin-sloshing partygoer yelling that Stevie Ray Vaughn deserved to die in that plane crash, he knew it was time to go.
It was two in the morning when he left the party, and he lived half an hour away by highway. As he was pulling away from the walk-up apartment complex, he realized he hadn’t eaten anything but a handful of Doritos in nine hours.
And that brought him here, to this McDonald’s in Bella Villa, one of the least accurately named suburbs of Saint Louis, where the wait lasted longer than many world governments.
He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel of the truck and sighed. There wasn’t even a line, as such-there had been one other car there when he arrived. It just took ten minutes for them to finally send that car up to the pay window. Austin pulled up to the speaker and waited for it to emit any kind of noise.
The speaker crackled after two minutes. “HiwelcometoMcDonald’scanyouholdforamoment?”
“Yeah,” mumbled Austin. “It’ll be a big change of plans.” He turned to the Thor’s Hammer hanging from his windshield and rolled his eyes. “Give me a little strength here, huh?”
He leaned back in his seat and turned the radio back on. Some modern rock, the kind where all the guitars are tuned like basses and the singer practiced by rubbing his throat against sandpaper while singing Gregorian chants. He wished they were playing Zeppelin.
Another truck pulled into the drive-thru behind him. Austin considered yelling back to the poor bastard that he’d be better off going somewhere else. Austin was invested now, but that guy, he could still get out.
Austin hummed along with the bad music and looked over the menu for an eleventh time, even though he was going to get the same thing he always got. Then he noticed that the cab was brighter; he looked back at the other truck and saw it had turned on its high beams.
“Hey,” called a voice: it was bassy, and it warbled just a touch. Austin squinted against the bright headlights and saw a man leaning out of the driver’s side window. He couldn’t make out much about him: he looked like an older man, wearing glasses and a dark baseball cap, but that was it. “Hey!”
Austin ignored him and kept his attention on the speaker, wondering when he was finally going to get to order his damn Big Mac.
“Your sticker is making fun of my lord,” said the voice.
Austin blinked when he heard that. Sticker? He must have meant the Thor Fish…
“Great. A fundie.” He shook his head and kept staring at the grille of the speaker, as if the presence of the attendant’s voice would dispel the other truck. It didn’t come. His cab got brighter, and he realized the other truck was pulling up on him. Then the cab went dark again as the other truck’s headlights fell beneath the edge of his tailgate, and he felt a slightly lurch as their bumpers met.
“Did you hear me?”
“No, sir!” Austin called back. He hoped the deferential tone would make the guy back off.
“I said that you’re making fun of my Lord.” The man paused. Austin got a better look at him now: he had a gray mustache, looked to be about in his mid-fifties. He was wearing a Cardinals sweatshirt. “You better get out of your truck and tear that sticker off, right now.” He said it in the same tone of voice a policeman uses to tell somebody to get out of a car. “You better tear it off right now.”
Austin balked. “I think you ought to back off my truck.”
“I’m only going to say this one more time. Your sticker is making fun of my Lord, and I don’t appreciate that. You get out of your truck and you tear that sticker off, right now.”
Austin was now convinced the speaker attendant was intentionally staying quiet, hoping that whatever was being argued over in his drive-thru lane would burn out without his involvement. Austin frowned and stuck his head out the window, looking back at the man in the truck behind him. “It’s my sticker, and no, I’m not tearing it off. And you should back off my damn truck.”
The other truck backed off from his bumper, and Austin sat back in his seat and reached for the gearshift.
“A Big Mac is completely not worth this,” he said, and then lurched forward as the other truck slammed into his bumper. He was caught by his seatbelt and managed to put his hands on the steering wheel to balance himself. He looked up, a little stunned. “What the fuck?” He felt the other truck back up again, and before any other thought crossed his mind he dropped the truck into drive and drove over the short concrete barrier diving the drive-thru lane from the parking lot. He drove to the exit and turned right without even looking and pressed the accelerator to the floor. He looked at his rearview mirror and saw high-beams from a truck behind him.
“You’ve got to be fucking with me…”
Austin swallowed. The radio had moved on to some rock/rap hybrid that was at least as bad, but he left it on. Having the radio on, just having music playing, somehow felt necessary, even reassuring. He barreled through Bella Villa, the little ten square block town, back towards highway fifty-five and ran the situation over in his head. He was not the kind of person who got into confrontations often: most of the people he spent time around were stoner pagans or passive-aggressive hipsters. There wasn’t much fear of a fight breaking out among those people. He pulled onto the highway and the truck kept pace; occasionally it revved its engines and pulled closer, but Austin kept ahead. He absently rolled up his window before he thought to call for help.
“Phone. Call the police. Right, right…” He fumbled around in pockets, feeling for the little plastic rectangle, but all he felt was his wallet. “Oh, come on, come on, where is it?” He opened the glove compartment, but there was nothing there except old oil change receipts and he knew it. He shuffled through the papers and heard the rough sound of the shoulder, and looked up just in time to jerk himself back to the lane before hitting the barrier. “You would pick tonight to forget your goddamn phone, wouldn’t you, Austin?”
His eyes never got used to the high beams of the truck: every time he looked back he was only blinded again. The truck was keeping within two car lengths behind him, so the lights were trained exactly on his mirrors. Every now and again they would suddenly fade away, which was worse, because that meant the truck had dipped back close enough to his rear to hide behind the tailgate. Every time it happened Austin had to fight the strange urge to slam on the brakes and let him slam into him: out of fear, perhaps, or out of spite, or out of a simple longing to get it over with.
But he’d promised to take care of Tom’s truck. That thought was always enough to save him in time.
The particular stretch of northbound highway they were on was more or less desolate-until it got towards downtown, the highway raced through industrial wastelands, huge white towers full of lights that belched steam into the air. There weren’t many exits, and what few there were didn’t lead to public places. He needed to get to a payphone, or a gas station-or, hell, another McDonald’s.
The next exit advertised a Shell station, half a mile to the west. Austin got off the highway, convinced the other truck would hit him as he slowed down to the exit. When they got to the bottom of the ramp he ran the stop sign and turned left towards the station. The bright yellow clamshell glared at the dark street around it, and Austin quietly promised he would never say a cross word about Shell Oil again.
He pulled in, the other truck coming in closely behind him. Austin pulled into a parking space, and the other truck came in directly to his left. It was the first time he had ever actually gotten a look at the vehicle itself: it was a faded green color, a Ford, with posts in the back instead of a camper. Austin put his truck into park and without thinking turned the engine off, which he immediately cursed himself for. He stared at the man in the other vehicle, who was looking dead at him. The man’s face was deeply lined, and now his baseball cap clearly read GOD BLESS AMERICA. He seemed to be chewing tobacco.
They sat and stared at each other for an uncomfortable amount of time. Austin considered dropping the truck back into drive and trying to speed out, but he was sure that the man was just keeping his foot on the brake, ready to pull out and follow him as soon as he was given the opportunity. Austin shot a glance inside, trying to see if a counter worker was paying attention, but nobody was at the counter. He realized then that although some of the lights were on, as was the sign, the actual convenience store was closed.
The other truck’s passenger window rolled down. The man said something that Austin interpreted as “roll your window down,” but Austin shook his head. The man said it again. Another shake of the head. The man sighed and reached down to his floorboard, and Austin was certain at that moment that this man had a pistol in his car and that he was going to die. The man took whatever it was in hand and opened his door and got out without the object coming out of the shadows.
As soon as the man cleared the doorway Austin opened the door and ran for the payphone. His head was a train riding on two tracks: the one said that if he got to the payphone and dialed, police would arrive and everything would be fine. This was the same track that had been convinced that if the McDonald’s server had just asked him for an order, all the trouble would have passed back there, too. The second track said that was moronic and he should have kept the damn engine running so he could hit reverse and get out of there when the man got out of his truck.
He picked the receiver off the cradle and dialed 9-1-1, jabbing his finger into the cold metal payphone keys. He heard a ring and turned around, ready for the man to come around the side of the trucks with a baseball bat or the hypothetical gun. But the man did not appear.
Another ring. And then he heard a scraping sound.
Ring. Scrape. Ring. Scrape.
“Emergency services.”
“A man is following me, I think he wants to hurt me…”
“OK, OK, hold on. Where are you, sir?”
“I just got off 55 at, at Arsenal. I’m at a Shell station.”
He kept looking up expecting to see the man come rushing towards him, but there nothing. The scraping continued for three more beats, and then stopped.
“We’re sending a patroller right away, sir. Stay on the line if you can.”
The man finally came around the side of Austin’s truck. Both of his hands were full. In his right hand was a razorblade; in the other was a collection of paper shavings. The man didn’t seem to pay any mind to the payphone; his steps were slightly haphazard.
“He’s got a razor…” Austin spoke slowly and incoherently, as though he were speaking in his sleep. The 911 operator was saying something, but he didn’t pay any attention to it. The man at last came up to him, in his jeans and his sweater and his GOD BLESS AMERICA baseball cap, and stood just off the curb of the sidewalk outside the Shell station. He stood there and looked at Austin and then held up his left hand and turned it over, letting a loose clump of glossy paper shavings fall to the concrete. The shavings were white, with occasional glimpses of bold, black outlines. One fell to Austin’s feet; it read OR.
Even from that distance, Austin could smell whiskey when the man talked. “You kids today, you don’t care about anything,” said the man in the baseball cap. “You don’t care about Jesus or morals or family or anything in the world. You make me want to puke.”
Austin stared at him dumbfounded. The man at last walked back to his truck and got in, turned on the engine. His high beams flooded the front of the Shell station: Austin winced at the sight. Then he flipped them back to normal headlights, put the truck in reverse, and pulled away. Austin saw the license plate, but was still too stunned-still thinking too hard about the mere feet that had just been between himself and that razorblade-to get it in his head.
“Sir? Sir, are you there?” Austin realized the operator was still talking to him.
“Yeah, I’m still here,” he said, and swallowed.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m… The man, he left.”
“The patrol car is still on its way, sir. Stay where you are.”
“Yeah, I will,” said Austin, and he put the phone back in the cradle.
He walked around to the back of the truck. It was the first look he’d had since McDonald’s. The bumper was punched in, and the tailgate had been dented; flakes of pale green paint were stuck to the metal. Austin grimaced and ran his smooth, city-boy hand over his brother’s truck. He paused at a spot where the paint had been scratched away except for a few patches of glossy white paper, about five by seven. No details remained, no traces of whimsy. Just a spot of empty, corroded metal.
He felt like getting in the truck and flooring it, chasing in the direction of the other truck and running it down. Austin was more angry than he had ever been in his life: angry at the assumption that his silly little fish had anything at all to do with the man in the baseball cap, angry at the self-righteousness, angry that believing in Thor meant he didn’t care about anything important. He was angry enough to do something stupid and violent-
Austin shook his head and walked back to the sidewalk to pick up the scraps of the Thor Fish. The anger fell through him as if he were made of cheesecloth. Now it was mostly fatigue and cowardice. In the name of “American values,” an asshole in a truck had just ripped off Tommy’s sticker, and instead of doing anything about he, Austin, just accepted his role as the villain, the marginalized, the outcast.
And despite himself, he wondered about his grandmother, and whether or not she would have approved.
He knew what would happen next: a cop would show up, and he would tell his story and tell them that he didn’t see the license plate, and maybe the store would have had a security camera pointed outside and maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they would catch the guy, and he could-what? Press charges to fix his bumper? Demand damages on a five dollar bumper sticker?
He would call his mom and tell the story again, and she would cry at the thought of her baby boy being in such trouble; his father would tell him he did the right thing by trying to get out of there, and not getting into a real fight; endless family friends would hear and ask about it and give advice. Someone would offer him a can of mace to keep in the glove compartment, just in case; someone else would suggest a baseball bat.
And every one of them would say what a shame it was that things were just the same for pagans in 2009 as they were in 1979, no matter whether it was true or not, and find one more piece of proof that the Christians were simply always going to be bad news. Austin didn’t want to believe that, but he didn’t have much to offer as counter-evidence.
He threw the scraps of the Thor Fish into the trash and walked back to the truck. He got in and waited, solemnly watching the hammer hanging from the windshield as it made its slow pendulum arc from one side of the cab to the other, and waited for the moment when he could look into the rearview mirror of Tommy’s truck and see bright lights coming for him again.