Scraps & Chum Read online

  “Hang on, hang on, Jesus you guys don’t know shit about patience, do ya?”

  So I wrapped it around my fingers because, you know, I had to keep trying, right? Had to hope one of these times the bite would work for me.

  And you know what she did, as I gave her my hand and said, “Here comes the plane, into the hanger.” Know what she did? She unwrapped it! Took it off my hand and wolfed it down and didn’t touch me at all.

  “Oh, come on!” I shouted. There was no way she was getting off that easy, so I grabbed her head and opened her mouth and stuck my nose in it and pushed her jaws closed until white light erupted behind my eyes and blood ran down my throat. Did that for about ten seconds until I realized I wasn’t going to do shit but lose a nose and have to walk around sounding like a teakettle as the wind blew through the new hole in my face.

  Needless to say I gave up.

  Afterwards she sat there, blood streaked on her cheek, her dangling eyeball starting to droop a bit lower, and just kind of looked at me.

  “Brandy,” I said, calling her by my granddaughter’s name—it just came out of nowhere. She didn’t look like Brandy, who’d had blonde hair and freckles before she died, didn’t look like her at all, save for the age part. “I miss you.”

  And then it just came out, outta nowhere, outta that part of my head where important things get buried: “I shouldn’t never have yelled at you that day.” She, it, whatever, made a sort of cooing sound and dribbled some blood onto the bench and I chuckled a little bit, which was a good feeling. “I shouldn’t never have hit you neither, young as you were. Not for that anyway. Not for breaking a watch I hardly wore anymore. Fact is, I shoulda laughed at your ingenuity, cooking it in that pot of stew like that. Pretty funny now. Certainly shouldn’t have smacked you in the face for it. I get angry, you know, just can’t help it. I…I’m…Maybe I can make it up to you? Maybe we can go—”

  Before it went any further though, she got up, shuffled over to the Coke can, picked it up carefully like it was a crystal vase or something, and walked away into the shadows.

  Leaving me alone. Again. With tears. Tick tock. Tick tock.

  And so here I am, sitting under the moonlight in a forgotten park, writing to you—whoever you are, who finds this dog-eared notebook—getting ready to head south. The world’s most unwanted man. Me. Tomorrow morning, way I see it, I’ll grab some Chef Boyardee and get going on down the I-5. Maybe the Mexican Zees got a better bite.

  Can’t help but keep thinking—hold on…this teenage one’s licking my neck…please please please…Shit! No dice. He’s leaving now…back to wherever he goes at night I guess.

  Can’t help but keep thinking about what my wife said a few weeks before all this began, before she died and came back and ate our granddaughter. She said I was dead inside, that my heart was nothing but a ball of mud, all stinky like skunk cabbage. We didn’t get along so great those last years, always fighting and cussing and ignoring each other. And, well, shit, I don’t know you—whoever finds this—so I’ll just admit that I hit her too. A few times. Great, now I’m getting these words all wet.

  Yeah, I hit her. Hard, more than a few times actually. I get angry, you know.

  And she said all my bitterness and anger killed any sense of humanity I had.

  I told her I didn’t care, and went to my TV room downstairs and just stayed there, alone, and didn’t come out for…well…until those reports started about the dead people.

  I bet she’s staggering around back there in Dallas, laughing inside that bloody husk she got as a body now. I bet she’s laughing hard as I used to hit her.

  No Humanity left.

  Maybe she’s right.

  Because here I am.

  SIREN

  The first morning I heard it, I thought I had left the television on overnight. You know, that extremely high-pitched whine, almost on the edge of hearing, yet audible on some peripheral plane. The sound of an electrical component silently sucking juice from an outlet. I wiped the jeweled crust from my eyes and reprimanded myself; I could not afford to be so negligent these days. Electricity cost money and my wallet was thin, especially with gas prices so high and me having been let go by the school. I rolled over in bed and saw the empty bottle of Black Label tipped sideways on the floor. Had I finished the whole damn thing last night? I didn’t even remember making it to the bedroom.

  The whining sound did not sit well with the heat peppering the backs of my eyes. Whiskey dries me out, gives me pimples to boot, but mostly makes my eyeballs flame up. Problem is once I start drinking it I don’t stop.

  I rolled out of bed, intent on finding the source of the whine. When I was a little boy, a friend of mine had a dog whistle that emitted a similar tone. He’d blow it and nearby mongrels would howl and look at us longingly before barking and finally whimpering, begging us to stop the torture. This was the sound I heard that first morning, as I threw back the blankets and stared at the blue sky outside the window. It persisted as I held my head and stepped over the pile of clothes on the floor and ambled to the living room.

  “Ow,” I said to whatever ghosts might reside in my home, and hit the power button on the cable box. I was walking toward the bathroom when I realized I could still hear it. “Ugh.” I returned and hit the power button on the television this time. The TV turned on, an annoying talk show, so I shrugged and turned it off again. I headed once again to the bathroom, convincing myself the distant high-pitched wail in my ears was actually just my head playing tricks on me.

  You’re hung over, take a shower and you’ll feel better.

  I did regain a semblance of humanity as the hot water beat into the back of my neck, the pulsing behind my eyes slowly disappearing. I let the water pound my face and head, and drank big gulps of it as well, hoping it would hydrate me.

  Thoughts of the previous night’s writing session came back to me. The story I had been working on was still unfinished, and I was clueless as to where it was going. It seemed I’d been writing some version of it for years, though I only had twenty pages to show for it. The story was boring, unimaginative, and stagnant. That I was able to get the twenty pages out of it was a pathetic moral victory. I had not been able to write anything of merit in some time, and my last novel had gotten less than stellar reviews. A review in one of the more notable literary magazines said it felt like McGovern (that’s me) had employed a new method of writing while lobotomized.

  It’s hard to teach English to high school students when they know you’re a joke. Even harder to keep teaching it when you tell them they’ll never amount to anything. The district frowns on such truth.

  After the shower, I dressed myself and sat at my computer, looking over what I had written the night before. It was pitiful, so I sighed and deleted the entire thing. “I’ve read better shit on bathroom walls. Read better stuff by that Davidson kid.”

  I dwelled on Davidson. One of my former students who had sold his first story to a magazine I’d been rejected by repeatedly. It was infuriating; the kid couldn’t spell his own name. But editors stopped caring about prose long ago; nowadays they just want tropes that sell.

  I tell myself that anyway.

  Frustrated, I went to the kitchen and rifled through the cabinets until I found what I was looking for: a bottle of aspirin and some Bagel Bites. I put the coffee pot on and rifled through yesterday’s mail. Nothing but bills I couldn’t pay now that I’d been fired.

  That was when I realized I could still hear the hitch-pitched whine in my ears.

  II

  Over the course of the next day I convinced myself not to go on a bender. I wrote a little, hated it all, deleted it, and then watched bad talk shows. The whine remained. And what’s more, it got louder. I checked every electrical component in my apartment but could find no source for the sound. By the second day the whine was making me irritable and I felt like those dogs from my youth, shaking my head to rid myself of the annoyance, sticking my fingers in my ears for a brief re
prieve. Unfortunately, my fingers did nothing to block it out.

  On the third day, the sound was too loud, simply grating, and I gave up trying to write or understand the slang and memes on the talk shows, and walked down the road to O’Connor’s Pub. The sound followed me like a loyal dog, slowly and steadily getting louder, like car brakes squealing across town. I glanced up at the power lines and transformers as I made my way to the pub, but could find nothing that might betray its origin.

  It was inside the pub that I first realized something was truly amiss. Several patrons were pressing their fingers into their ears. I took a tattered stool at the bar and motioned Pat O’Connor over to me.

  “Hey there, McGovern,” the Dubliner said. “Been a while since I’ve seen you. Working hard or hardly working?” As he spoke he gave his head a slight shake, an obvious testament to the uncomfortable effects of the sound that was somewhere in the air.

  “Pat,” I said, glancing around the pub, “do you hear that noise?”

  “Does the pope shit in the woods? Yeah, been hearing it for a couple of days now. Damndest thing. Any ideas?”

  “Not a clue. But I’m glad I’m not going crazy.”

  “I think it’s the power lines,” he suggested. “Or that new complex down the street . . . they got that free internet set-up. Uses all them cables and whatnot. That’s probably what it is. Damn annoying. I’m gonna call the electric company if it don’t stop soon, give them a piece of my mind.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, knowing full well that such connections did not create irritable resonances.

  A pair of twenty-somethings walked in, wearing jeans three sizes too big and t-shirts with marijuana leaves on them. They sat next to me at the bar and one of them waved for Pat’s attention.

  “Muthafucka!” the bleached-blond one said, “Yo, Pat, you got the windows open or sumptin. You gotta shut ’em. My ears are killing me, yo.”

  Pat told the kid that the windows were all closed.

  The kid’s friend, an angry-looking man with a shaved head and sideburns that met under his nose, slammed his fist on the bar. “Fuck, man, this shizzle is givin’ me a straight-up headache. I can’t hear myself think or nuthin’.”

  Blondy pretended to swat a fly for emphasis. “For rizzle, my nizzle.”

  My ears, hurting though they already were, seemed to throb a bit more at such poor English. I was unaware that I was staring at them until the blond addressed me.

  “What up, Pop? I look funny to you or something?” He turned to his bald friend, said, “Yo, dog, check this muthafucka out. Like he’s mesmerized by my beauty an’ shit.”

  “Straight up, Bee. Pops thinks you a shorty or sumptin.”

  I felt like I was back in my classroom just last week, listening to the devolution of language by the same primates who would someday be wiping my ass in an old folks home. As an author and teacher who had devoted his life to the written word it disgusted me to hear such ignorant speech. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about colloquialisms and fun slang. I remember saying Far Out and Groovy and confusing my father until he just shook his head at me. The last ten years teaching high school English gave me the ability to interpret teenage nonsense, but the way these idiots talked sounded like someone had injected a virus into the nature of coherent communication. As I listened to these two youths, who probably spelled “ask” by rearranging the last two letters, I couldn’t help but fear for the art I loved so dearly. It was bad enough all these horror and sci fi authors were making the bestseller lists, with their penchants for gore and sex and robots—-such drivel—but to think one day there might be novels published in such incoherent nonsense made me want to leap off the nearest cliff.

  “Sorry,” I said, and ordered a whiskey from Pat. I drank it down and left.

  III

  The weekend passed, a meaningless couple of days to a newly jobless man such as myself. The high-pitched sound rose steadily and I now found myself getting a headache, eating Tylenol as if they were Tic Tacs and stuffing cotton balls in my ears. I finally called the electric company and tried to get some answers. They had a prerecorded message saying they were aware of the problem and were trying to solve it.

  I sat in front of my computer, desperately trying to ignore the noise and complete chapters to a novel I’d started years ago. Again, though, my writer’s block kept me from turning out anything meaningful, so I turned the computer off and stared at my kitchen cupboards. I was out of chips. I was also out of booze. I am not a drunk, despite what you might think. The other night’s drinking session was a capricious incident, an attempt to find a muse and forget recently being made redundant. And visiting O’Connor’s just gives me something to do now and then. But I did consider the notion that perhaps some alcohol would help me deal with the grating noise.

  “Welcome to the Bank of Desperation,” I said as I dug through couch cushions looking for dimes and quarters. As I treasure-hunted, I listened to the television, which was now showing news reports concerning the strange whine that seemed to be everywhere. Nobody had yet been able to find its source. The phone companies were also reiterating, rather angrily at this point, that they had no idea where the sound was coming from. The news flashed B-roll as the story unfolded. The entire town was wearing earplugs.

  “Sound specialists and geologists from several Universities are running tests,” the reporter said, “but have not concluded anything significant yet. We also have confirmation that the sound is being reported in other cities, both domestic and international. Officials are assuring people they will find its cause very soon.”

  Captions scrolled across the bottom of the screen as the man talked. He too, was wearing earplugs. I noticed they used the word ORAL when they meant AURAL. Idiots.

  As I walked to the store the sound level jumped up emphatically. It made the backs of my eyeballs twitch in pain.

  The store was suddenly full of people racing about in a panic. Like birds at a feeder, they fought one another for the remaining stock of bread and milk. I laughed at the notion that such items would serve any purpose at the end of the day. Everywhere I turned, people were holding their ears and asking each other what the noise could be. Babies were crying, and the store was cacophonous with their collective wails. I grabbed two bottles of Jim Beam and paid for them in the checkout line. Beyond me, a young mother in her early twenties was yelling at her child. “Oh please, Chelsea, just shut yo mouth. Damn, girl, I can’t deal. There ain’t nothing I can do about it. For real.”

  I took my liquor and shuffled outside as quickly as I could, once again sad for our dwindling sense of eloquence. Was I really that much of an elitist, I wondered. Some people did not have access to an education such as I’d had. Should I blame them for being raised with that type of vernacular? Still, I couldn’t help but fear that perhaps the reason my books weren’t selling was because people weren’t reading anymore. My students had thought a gerund was a small animal, and took greater pains in learning what rhymed with the N word so they could be hip hop stars when they failed out of school. I felt like the butt of a joke, like the subject of dramatic irony. Everyone around me knew our precious written language was dying out, evolving into senseless code, and they embraced it; I still believed I could utilize its dying breath to secure my future. What a joke.

  On the way back home, eyes squinted and fingers in my ears, I passed by a park. Some children ran in a circle and threw a rubber ball at one another while an older woman in a long blue coat watched them intently. A young boy threw the ball at a young girl and hit her in the face. The girl fell down crying, and the woman rushed over and picked her up. She grabbed the boy, and made several wild gestures at him. The boy responded in kind, and I realized that he was deaf, that it was a class of deaf children. I can’t read sign language, but I could tell some sort of heated argument took place next among all the students. Hands maneuvered quickly, fingers dancing and wrists twisting, conveying thoughts I could only guess at. I stared fascinated for a few min
utes, ignoring the grating sound in the air, thinking what a hard life it must be to not hear. Then remembered I was carrying my booze. As I turned toward home, I noticed that none of them were wearing earplugs.

  IV

  By morning the sound was unbearable. If I closed my eyes I envisioned someone standing right next to me scraping a fork on a ceramic plate. My neighbors began congregating in the street, staring at the sky and shaking their heads. A few of them wore earmuffs, while others had hats pulled over their ears. Surprisingly, no dogs or cats seemed to be in any discomfort. The pug nestled in my neighbor’s panicked arms was as happy and excited as he was any other day.

  I had given up on writing or looking for a new job and focused solely on alleviating my ever present headache; even with my earplugs in and my mind succumbed to the alcohol, the sound was too intense to ignore. It seemed to radiate from thin air, which explained the people in the street staring at the sky. Only by getting drunk had I been able to ignore the noise and fall asleep the previous night, but when I woke up it was right there again, everywhere and nowhere at once. Incredibly piercing. I felt lucky to have gotten the little sleep I did. The black circles under my neighbors’ eyes told me they were not so lucky.

  “Time to get the hell out of Dodge.” I looked for my car keys, trying to decide between heading to my parents’ house up North or going out West to the beaches. Then I remembered the news and realized I might not be able to get away from this maddening sound.

  The television was still reporting on the phenomenon on every channel, tired reporters pointing toward space and shaking their heads. Images from the Middle East and Africa and every other place imaginable showed similar scenes of confused and terrified people yelling at the sky. Everybody on Earth seemed to be experiencing the same thing.