The Floating Cradle

Twenty-Four

The balance is slipping. As the hours tick past, one man displaces the other as though they're bound to the same invisible weight.

Jack's scales hang limply from his scalp, their vermillion color leaching away to a dull orange, his skin slick like an amphibian's. An hour ago, he got up to dry heave in the lavatory, but since then he has moved very little, back up against the wall, head bowed between his knees, one foot touching his wife's thigh as she works.

Dan scoops jam from a jar with gusto, eyes fluttering around the room as though seeing it for the first time. His hands tremble when they're not engaged and the rings under his eyes are puce and pouchy, but he's no longer proclaiming nonsense or begging Mama for the pills, despite the frequency with which he glances her way.

"Ain't proper for a son to eye his mother's bosom like that," Daddy says. Dan chokes on his mouthful of muscadine.

"I—I was—" To my surprise, tears film his eyes.

"Ain't nobody in this family mad at you, Dan," Daddy says, adopting his best bedside voice (I hear the tantum stifle the tiniest of snorts to my left). Dan coughs up a laugh, spitting it out in chunks.

"There ain't nobody in this family," he corrects, "who's not dead furious 'bout somethin'."

"Don't talk like that," Felicity admonishes, reaching to take his empty jar, but he snatches it away. "Like Sarah said—we don't have the luxury to worry about anythin' 'cept for—"

"For what, 'the numbers?'" Dan crows. "Yeah, I heard. That's easiest, right? Keep calm and carry on? 'Cept this ain't calm—it's just silence. A fuckin' game. All we seem able to do is shout or shut up—there's no in-between! Even with the apocalypse bangin' on our door, this family still won't talk 'bout nothin'!"

"You wanna talk?" Mama says. "Then talk." She pats the lump under her shirt.

"Why don't you ask Sarah first?" Dan sneers.

I tense. My attempts to shrink into the concrete have failed.

"I wasn't usin' them," I deflect. "They were Dan's to start! He's been snortin' 'em in the bathroom for the past six months!"

"Then why were they in your room?" Pete asks shrewdly. I shoot him my best death stare. I consider lying, saying I had confiscated them for my brother's own good, but Pete has an iron set to his jaw.

"I was sellin' them, okay?" I scuff my shoes on the floor. It's hard to believe they were flawless and white a few days ago. "I found 'em in his bookshelf, and I was gonna flush 'em down the toilet, but I just thought—Hell, there's kids at school dumb enough to pay good money for weed half cut with oregano. I knew they'd pay even more for the pills."

"What even is it? Oxy?" Mama withdraws the sock and turns it over in her hand. Several red, octagonal pills spill into her palm. Dan starts to fidget. Jack lets out such a wild peal of laughter that we all jump; it is not the affected laugh we have come to expect from tanta, approximated to sound human, but a raw, revved up whistle tearing out the upper nostrils without warning.

"That's like tantic Tylenol!" As he speaks, his lips lag behind the words like in a dubbed foreign film, spoiling the illusion. "But it's a nuisance getting it on Earth these days—it's become a 'controlled substance.' Highly addictive to humans. So I switched to NSAIDs..."

He cocks his head, smiling like a drunk.

"You know, I've got the worst headache of my life right now," he says, waving his sheet of paper, the four drawn over with a three. Mama shrugs, drops the pills back into the sock, and lobs it over to the tantum. Eyes fixed on Dan, he shakes four out and pops them in his mouth, flashing his dark teeth.

"Well you two done us real proud," Mama says with just the right blend of acid and apathy. Dan and I can't look at her. "I used to think, 'my kids'll be okay, 'slong as the heroin don't come back to the county.' But y'all're just too good at findin' ways to ruin yourselves, ain'tcha? Y'all like settin' yourselves on fire, that it? And the only one of you kids worth your salt couldn't wait to fly the coop. Lordy, maybe you really was too good for us, Al."

Allie looks up from her tiny metallic labyrinth.

"I sold test scores all of senior year," she says bluntly. "I even took the SATs for another girl. Charged her a thousand bucks. Paid for my plane ticket."

I am too stunned to say a word. The tantum is whistling like a kettle.

"Guess I'm the only one of us four who ain't broke no laws then," Lyle says, clearly stung by Mama's words.

I give him the finger.

"Shut up, Lyle," Dan and Allie say together.

"You did knock up a sixteen-year-old, though," Pete interjects, coloring his nails purple. A part of me wishes Gil were here to enjoy this.

"So what? I married her, didn't I?"

"True. And look how that's worked out."

Pete's always pushing my buttons when he thinks he can get away with it, but I can't remember the last time he sassed his father. For a moment I think Lyle might smack him, but he just snorts dismissively.

"You've never made a lick of sense to me, boy," he says. "What, you wish you'd never been born? Is that what this whole thing"—lassoing Pete with a gesture—"is all about?"

Pete furnishes him with a look to freeze the blood, but Lyle is too full of steam.

"And why the Hell're you blamin' me? How 'bout your mama? How 'bout the squatter? Shelter and feed a man on your land for over twenty years, and how do he repay you? By takin' your wife to bed!"

Of course. My brain rehashes a catalogue of clues from the past few months, but paradigm can make us blind to even the most obvious of shifts—paradigm, and other preoccupations. Lyle whips around to face the guilty parties. Felicity crosses her arms and stares up the stairwell, as though wondering if radiation poisoning might be preferable to her present captivity. Blake is hunched, hollow, his eyes unfocused. Lyle sweeps past him to tower over his wife; when she refuses to look at him, he seizes her by the wrist. Her thin arm stiffens, ineffectually resisting his pull. Blake springs to his feet.

"Don't be an idjit," he warns. "This worth it to you? You ain't gave a damn about her for years, not till she looked at another. But ain't that how it always goes, with boys like you? It ain't 'nuff to leave with yourself—you gotta salt the fields behind you."

"Don't paint me like your cock-eyed cretin pappy," Lyle growls, leaning his face toward Blake's. "We ain't even the same breed. But I ain't above runnin' you offa my land, right now, if that's how you wanna go."

("This is what happens when we talk," I whisper to myself, staring at the ceiling.)

Mama snatches the shotgun from Daddy and thumps the butt on the floor.

"Lyle—can it. And dagnabbit, Lissy, get your men in line—"

"We're dyin' down here anyhow," Blake declares, and there's conviction to his voice, a zealous surrender. The lantern light lodges in the grooves of his face. "I ain't afeared of brutes no more."

"We ain't dyin'," Daddy grumbles, shaking his head like a rankled bear. "Al'll get the message out—"

A strained whimper—then a throaty howl, a horrible unrehearsed sound beyond the territory of words. Allie's flaxen hair drops like a shroud in front of her face and she collapses forward, a wounded animal, prostrate before the wires, the metal, the plastic, the bombs. The tantum crawls toward her, heaves her from the ground, enfolds her in his limbs, presses her spasming body to his. She takes great gulps against his chest as though she is drowning, as though he is the air, and between sobs repeats the same two words: "I can't! I can't! I can't!"