Minor Prophets Read online

  “What are those for?” I said.

  “It’s time we check out this trunk situation,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, you saw a bunch of weird shit in your vision, right?” she said. “One of those things was me in this goddamn dress opening Horace’s trunk. Since it’s going to happen anyway, I figure we might as well get to it.”

  “You really want to do that?” I said. “I mean, it wasn’t a happy vision. And besides, my visions don’t always come true. You remember all the times I’ve been wrong.”

  Murphy was the only person I still told my visions to, the only person who ever listened and gave a shit. But Murphy knew as well as I did that for each one of my visions that came true—each one that happened more or less how I’d foreseen it—I had another that fell way off the mark or flat-out didn’t make sense at all. That was just the way with visions, and it was a tricky business to count on them.

  Murphy smiled at me a little sadly.

  “Well, you’ve been right so far this time,” she said. “I might as well check.”

  Murphy walked over to Horace’s car. She stuck the keys in the trunk and popped it.

  “Please don’t,” I said. “It’s not worth it. Horace will kill us.”

  “There’s something in here,” she said. “Look.”

  I peeked over her shoulder as Murphy rummaged around the lining of the trunk, moving aside a bunch of clutter and a particularly heavy-looking tire iron, then lifted the cover off of a secret compartment. Inside were a bunch of manila file folders and a ziplock bag full of handwritten letters.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  Murphy went for the folders, and I snatched up the ziplock bag. I pulled one letter out of the bag and read.

  Please just let me see them, Jenny. Please bring them to me just once. You know I can’t bear to leave the Farm. I can’t travel. I just want to see my grandchildren once before it’s too late.

  Holy shit. These letters were from Grandma, and there must have been hundreds of them. Why didn’t Mom ever tell us about them? More importantly, why were they in Horace’s trunk? Was it because he was afraid we’d go snooping through Mom’s things after the funeral and find them? Was he trying to keep us from contacting our grandmother for some reason? I mean, I understood that she and Mom didn’t get along, but what did Horace have to do with it?

  “Uhh, Lee?” said Murphy. “Look at this.”

  She held up a stack of pages, and I read over her shoulder. It was a bunch of legal documents, all signed and notarized. Murphy flipped through them. They seemed to be adoption papers.

  Our adoption papers.

  “What the hell is this?” I said.

  They didn’t have anything to do with Mom or our birth. They were newer than that, dated not more than a month ago. Murphy flipped to two typed, identical statements, one for each of us, that read, “I hereby consent to my formal, legal adoption by Horace Dunluth Powell III,” complete with our signatures. Forged, of course. There was no way in hell either one of us would ever consent to be adopted by that asshole.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “Horace adopted us.”

  “Why would he do that?” I said. “He hates us.”

  “The trust from our grandmother,” she said.

  The garage got quiet then, eerie. I wondered about all the bugs and spiders hidden in the corners of this place, tucked away in boxes, lingering there, silent and listening, waiting to hear what we would do next. It felt like the moment before one of my visions came, when the world went sharp and strange, when I felt the electricity of the whole earth in my fingertips.

  “In your vision, you said Mom’s wheel fell off, right?” said Murphy. “Like it had been loosened or something?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked back and forth between the tire iron and the adoption papers. We were both thinking it, but only Murphy was brave enough to ask.

  “Does that mean Horace killed our mom?” said Murphy. “So he could have all the money to himself?”

  That’s when I realized Horace was standing right behind us.

  “The fuck do you kids think you’re doing?” he snarled.

  Murphy whipped Horace’s tire iron from the trunk and whacked him across the skull with it. There he lay, facedown on the floor, a red, swelling, dripping welt on his bald head.

  “What do we do now?” I said.

  Murphy looked up at me, eyes all sad and scared and full of wonder. “Run, I guess.”

  I know what you’re thinking. If you found a folder full of forged adoption documents in your shitty stepfather’s trunk, not to mention the tire iron he probably used to sabotage your mom’s car, why wouldn’t you go straight to the sheriff with it?

  Well, I’ll tell you: It’s hard to report your stepfather to the county sheriff when the county sheriff is your stepfather.

  We had no choice. We ran.

  We took Horace’s trans am, the only non-government-issue vehicle on the premises. We made it about thirty miles out of town before Murphy finally spoke up.

  “Shit,” said Murphy. “I forgot my phone. I must have left it back in the garage. And goddammit, I got blood on me.”

  It was true. It looked thick and scabby against the black of her dress. I handed her a tissue out of my left pocket, and she dabbed at it, but the stain was there for good.

  “I hate this dress,” she said, her eyes watering. “I hate funerals.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  I kept the car steady on the highway, trying not to cry, the sunset like a gaping wound up in the sky.

  “Oh god,” she said. “What did I do?”

  “You did something smart, that’s what you did,” I said. “You saved both of our hides.”

  “But what happens now? You have another vision or something? The cosmos tells us where to go next?”

  “You remember how I saw Mom in my vision that night, but an older version of her? I think maybe that was Grandma. I think we’re supposed to go and find her.”

  “Are you kidding me? She didn’t even come to the funeral.”

  “But you saw all the letters she wrote, right? Grandma’s been trying to talk to us forever. She has to take us in now. We need her.”

  We’d never been to Grandma’s before, of course, but Mom had sometimes talked about the house where she grew up in Benign, Louisiana, this placed called “the Farm.” None of the letters I had seen had a return address on them, but I was pretty sure Grandma still lived there.

  “I know it isn’t the best plan,” I said, “but do you have a better one?”

  “Will Grandma even want to see us?” said Murphy.

  “Judging from those letters, definitely,” I said. “Besides, she set up that trust for us, didn’t she? We’re her family, Murphy, and that means something in this world. At least it should. We’ll hole up with her until we figure something out. And we need an adult to protect us from Horace, since for all legal purposes he’s our father now.”

  “Fuck that,” said Murphy.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said.

  “A’ight,” said Murphy. “To Grandmother’s house we go.”

  I remember the first vision I ever had. It’s maybe my oldest memory.

  I was around five years old, sitting on the floor of our old house, nestled in that deep white carpet, playing with a yellow Tonka truck. Vroom-vroom, squealy breaks, that kind of thing. Regular kid stuff. When this cat came slinking across the den floor. Which was a big deal, because Mom was allergic to cats. Like, majorly allergic. Her eyes would swell shut, and her throat would close, and she would go around wheezing and snotting for days. So there was no reason a cat should have been in our house. It was probably a good idea for me to go chase it out.

  But then I realized it wasn’t a normal cat. Not even kind of.

  See, this cat was rainbow-colored, glowing stripes all up and down its body. It shimmered like fish scales in the sun. The cat pawed its way ac
ross the room as I laughed and clapped my hands.

  “Mom, look!” I hollered. “Come see!”

  I was pointing at it and jumping up and down while the rainbow kitty rubbed and meowed around the room.

  “What is it, Lee?” said Mom, running in like the house was on fire.

  “Look at the pretty cat!” I yelled, or something equally five-year-old-ish. “Look how pretty!”

  “What cat?” said Mom.

  “That one,” I said, “right there!” I pointed at the rainbow cat.

  But Mom wasn’t so enthusiastic. Instead she had this strange, lip-bitey look on her face.

  “Lee, there’s no cat here.”

  “Yes, there is,” I said, and I turned back to look at the cat. Only it wasn’t a kitty anymore. It had become a tiger, all rainbow-striped and fierce, at least six feet long. It opened its mouth at me, its fangs glistening white in the fluorescents.

  Then it roared.

  I fell over backward, screaming, covering my ears, sure I was about to get eaten, sure that this was the end of me already.

  Mom ran over and yanked me up into her arms.

  “Look, Lee,” she said. “Look! There’s nothing there.”

  And there wasn’t, not anymore.

  “But I saw it,” I said, all tears and wailing. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  I’ll never forget the look she gave me then, this miserable droop in her face.

  Mom set me down on the ground and grabbed me by the cheeks and looked into my eyes. “Just because you see something, that doesn’t mean it’s really there. Never forget that.”

  “But Mom,” I said.

  “If you see something that shouldn’t be there,” she said, “you just ignore it, okay? Don’t tell me about it. Don’t tell anyone about it. Just close your eyes until it goes away. Got it?”

  “The cat was real!”

  “Lee,” said Mom, “listen to me. You don’t want people thinking you’re crazy, do you? You know what they do to people who see things that aren’t there?”

  I didn’t.

  “They lock them up,” she said. “In special hospitals. For the rest of their lives. And no one ever gets to come visit them, and they never see their families again, and they’re alone forever. You don’t want that to happen to you, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good,” said Mom. “Then we’ll keep these little hallucinations to ourselves, won’t we?”

  I nodded at her.

  But it wasn’t as easy as all that. It was hard to ignore it when reality broke, when it was like time snapped in half and some new world would wash over me like a flood. Remember, these were visions, not simple hallucinations. They weren’t just little images conjured up by my mind or chemicals or drugs or something. They had an extra dimension to them. They had heft, is what I’m saying.

  A real vision refuses to be ignored.

  And in that case, the vision came true. Not a week later an orange tabby cat showed up on our doorstep, mewling something awful. It had just been in a fight, you could tell—it was all mangled and bloody, like a dog had gotten to it—and I was pretty sure it was pregnant. The cat limped around, its back left paw curled up under its body, moaning that horrible sound hurt cats make. I opened the door and let it in, even though I knew Mom would be furious. Because something in me knew that this was the cat from my vision, more or less, and that this cat needed me.

  I picked up the bloody, wounded thing, and she went slack and quiet in my arms, which seemed like a miracle to me. And I demanded that Mom take us to the vet. I told her I’d hold the cat the whole way, that she wouldn’t even have to touch the thing, just could we please help this poor creature?

  Mom agreed, and we went to the vet. The cat lived, and so did all the kittens. Of course Mom wouldn’t let me keep any of them. Her eyes were already swelling shut just from having the cat so close to her in the car. We ended up leaving them all at a shelter. I cried and cried, but Mom wouldn’t relent.

  “But it was supposed to be my cat,” I said. “Remember? I saw it last week.”

  “I thought you said that was a rainbow cat,” said Mom, smirking at me. “These were just normal little kittens, as far as I could tell. The whole thing was just a coincidence. Besides, it all worked out just fine, so let’s drop it, okay?”

  But it wasn’t so easy for me. The older I got, the more intense the visions became and the fiercer I was punished for telling Mom about them.

  Sometimes, though, I had to tell her about them. There just wasn’t any other choice. I mean, it’s one thing to keep quiet about a rainbow cat in your living room. It’s something else to ignore your own doomed future flashing before your eyes.

  Like once when we were riding in the car and I had a vision of the three of us dead and mangled after our car had struck a deer. I’d seen the whole thing—the deer running in front of us, the Jeep flipping, the death of each and every one of us. Now I was sitting in the passenger seat, Murphy in the back, begging Mom to be careful, that we would all die if she didn’t stop the car right then.

  “What have I told you about these goddamn daydreams of yours?” said Mom.

  “But they aren’t daydreams, I swear!” I said.

  Mom turned to me and pointed her finger right in my face. “I have just about had it with you.”

  That’s when the deer leapt into the road.

  It was a big one, maybe an eight-point, and it raised its head all regally, the antlers like a woodland crown, its eyes gone green in the headlights. It looked like a forest spirit, like some kind of ancient lord of the woods come out to meet us. Fate is what it looked like.

  “Mom!” I screamed.

  She slammed on the brakes, yanking the wheel hard.

  We spun, skidding across the cold, wet road. We clipped the deer, the antlers smashing into the hood of the car. We hit it so hard the car flew the other way, slamming into the metal barrier on the side of the road.

  The airbags deployed, breaking Mom’s nose. Mine hit me too, but it didn’t hurt much.

  Murphy got whiplash.

  We stood on the side of the road then, huddled together, the three of us, waiting for the ambulance. Shattered glass was all over the highway, reflecting the moonlight like diamonds. The deer’s head had been ripped clean off, a long trail of blood and gore slathered on the pavement between the body and head like a grotesque stretched neck. Its antlers were snapped off, gouged into the hood of the car like claws.

  I was crying. I said, “I told you, Mom. I told you there was a deer in the road.”

  Mom looked down at me, her face all busted and bruised.

  “What you saw was wrong, Lee,” she said. “We didn’t die, not Murphy or me or you. Whatever you saw, it wasn’t the truth.”

  “But I saw the deer coming,” I said.

  Mom’s eyes went fierce. “Yeah, you saw the deer,” she said. “But everything you saw after that—the car flipping, us dying—all of that was a lie. That’s why you can’t believe in visions, not yours or anybody else’s. They never tell the whole truth.”

  How could Mom know something like that? But by then the ambulance had arrived, all lights and sirens, and we had questions to answer, and they loaded Murphy and Mom onto stretchers, and we had to go to the hospital.

  Three times I asked Mom what she meant that night.

  Three times I was punished for it. The last time, Mom locked me in my room for a whole day and night, only letting me out when I had to pee.

  So I gave up. And I almost never mentioned my visions to Mom again.

  At least not directly.

  A few hours later Murphy and I stopped at a gas station. I didn’t have any idea where Benign, Louisiana, was, and my phone reception was getting spotty. So while Murphy pumped gas, I went inside to look at a map.

  I have this thing where I love gas stations. They’re like shitty airports, you know? All these people from probably-not-that-far-away places converging to eat junk food and get gas an
d use the bathroom. I love watching them file in and out and wait in line—cops and lawyers and truck drivers and personal assistants. Everywhere sells the same boring crap, the same ironic T-shirts, the same Coke Icees and Gatorades and burnt coffee. Gas stations are some of the only places where we all belong.

  And yet there’s something different about each one, something unique. Once in Arkansas I found a gas station with a boar’s head mounted in the bathroom, giant tusks ready to gore. In another one I saw in Pensacola, they had a functional bait shop, minnows darting around Styrofoam coolers and cages of scritching crickets all over the place.

  This one had something special too. In the middle of the dirty tile floor was a foldout table full of pickled eggs. These were home-canned in mason jars, swirling with green liquid like science experiments. I wondered who had made them, if it was all some old lady’s handiwork. I could imagine her then, this bent-backed woman with crazy gray hair dropping eggs into the brine like a weird witch casting spells. I could see her beleaguered husband on the couch, the TV blasting COPS while their beautiful daughter smoked cigarettes on the roof, watching the sunset. I could picture this old woman wandering the woods outside her house, snatching up eggs out of nests, praying for her daughter to turn into a bird and fly away, wishing her husband’s bones would dissolve and he’d sag into a fleshy pile of guts she could just scoop up and dump in the trash.

  I bet all those eggs tasted bitter. I bet they tasted like captivity, like the desire for freedom.

  I found Benign on a foldout road map. It was only a few hours away, tucked off in northwest Louisiana. I bet the town was so small it barely merited the dot on the map. We should be there by evening, I figured.

  Back in the car, Murphy and I cruised the Trans Am easy, sixty miles per hour on the dot. We weren’t about to risk getting pulled over, this being a sort-of-stolen car and all. Outside there was nothing but trees and billboards and the occasional Arby’s sprouting ugly out of the landscape, some abandoned wreck of a shop or half-hearted strip mall nearly overtaken by kudzu. I turned on the radio to a classical station that was half-buried in static. It seemed appropriate for the landscape—the best intentions of humanity being swallowed whole.