Mapping the Interior Read online

  He really could have been anything.

  What he was, though, it was dead. Again.

  When the dogs started dragging this feast deeper into the night to take some time with it, pull muscle from bone and tilt their heads back to help it down their throats, I stepped Dino and me back, closed the door as quietly as I could, pushing with my left hand up high, my right hand pulling on the knob, slowing this down.

  It didn’t matter.

  Mom was already there, sitting at the kitchen, her head ducked down to light a cigarette, her hair a shroud over that process.

  “What is it?” she said.

  I looked out the door again, at the impossible thing happening out there, and then back to Mom, waiting to mete out punishment for whatever was going on here.

  “A moose,” I told her, and this stopped her second roll on the lighter’s wheel.

  She stared at me through her hair.

  Had Jannie—we used to call her “Jauntie”—told her the truth of what happened to Dad? Had she been carrying this alone for all these years, promising herself to move us away from the stories, so we would be sure never to hear that one?

  I should maybe say that we were down in the flats, here. Not that moose are only on the reservation, but they’re for sure not all the way down here where they’d be taller than everything.

  It was then that I cued in that I was soaking wet.

  Mom had noticed too, was about to say something about it, it looked like, when Dino cut in.

  “One two three four!” he said.

  Mom redirected her attention over to him, then back to me.

  “You two are the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” she said, her cigarette still not lit. “I’m—I’m not sorry, I would do it all over again . . . your dad. Everybody told me to stay away from him, that he’d break my heart. But it was worth it, wasn’t it? It was all worth it?”

  At which point she was sweeping forward to gather us in her arms, in her robe, in her hair, and I think this is where a lot of Indian stories usually end, with the moon or a deer or a star coming down, making everything whole again.

  Those stories were all a long time ago, though.

  That was before we all grew up.

  * * *

  What finally killed Mom, it wasn’t her lungs. It was just being sixty-three years old, and nearly a whole state away from all the girls she was in first and second grade with. If she’d had someone to talk with about the old days, I think she’d have maybe made it a few more years.

  If she’s sixty-three, that would mean I’m thirty-nine now, yeah. Except she died two years ago already. I’m in my forties, Dino his late thirties.

  Mom’s not why Dad coming back matters now, though. Why I’m feeling through it all again.

  Why it matters—well.

  It’s hard to know where to start, exactly. Each thing has one thing before it, so I can go all the way back to when I was twelve again, easy.

  So, after that night, we just kept growing up. High school was high school. The reservation wasn’t the only place with parking lots to fight in. Mom got a desk job, Dino got checked into the first of his facilities and institutions on the tribe’s dime. At some point in there, a girlfriend took me to her uncle’s house while he was enlisted overseas. He had all the regalia, and when he didn’t come back, she smuggled it out to me.

  It’s backwards, I know—you’re supposed to start dancing, then accumulate your gear item by item, piece by ceremonial piece—but this is how I did it. The first time I looked at myself in a full-length hotel mirror, I felt lake water was rising in my throat.

  You can dance that away, though.

  You can lower your head, raise your knees, close your eyes, and the world just goes away.

  I’m not a champion, can’t make a living off what I win, but I get around enough, and there’s always odd jobs.

  News of Mom passing caught up with me two weeks after the funeral. Evidently, Dino had been taken there. He’d fidgeted in the front row, I imagine, not sure what was going on.

  In movies, after you beat the bad guy, the monster, then all the injuries it inflicted, they heal right up.

  That’s not how it works in the real world.

  Here’s one way it can work in the real world: the son you accidentally father at a pow-wow in South Dakota grows into the spitting image of a man you remember sitting in the shallows of a lake that goes forever. Like to remind me what I did, what I’d had to do.

  You don’t see him constant, this son, this reminder, but you see him a few times every year. At least until word finds you—this time, the day after—of a car rolling out into the tall yellow grass. Rolling faster and faster, slopping burger bags and beer cans up into the sky. My son was dead by the time they all landed.

  I showed up at the funeral, most of the family and friends strangers to me, and that night, instead of getting in a fight, I walked out into land I didn’t know and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes down to the butts. Just staring at the sky. Interrogating it, I guess.

  I’d never smoked—you need your lungs if you dance—but after that night, I kind of understood why Mom always had. It makes you feel like you have some control. You know it’s bad for you, but you’re doing it on purpose, too. You’re breathing that in of your own volition, because you want to.

  When you don’t have control of anything else, when a car can just go cartwheeling off into the horizon, then to even have just a little bit of control, it can feel good. Especially if you hold that smoke in for a long time, only let it out bit by bit.

  But eventually I stood from that first pack, and made my way back to my camper, back to the circuit.

  Until I got to thinking about what happened when I was twelve.

  Which is why I pulled my truck into Dino’s parking lot this morning.

  Because I’m family, I can check him out with a signature and proof of ID.

  He remembers me, too. After his third grade, nothing really changed for him. Just, it’s the rest of us who kept changing. But he still sees me as the twelve-year-old I was, I think. The one who fought the monster for him. For all of us.

  On the drive out, I tell him about my son. How, if he’d been able to make it through that wreck, how he was going to have taken over the world, Indian-style. Maybe he’d have been a male model, maybe he’d have played basketball, or maybe he’d have been an architect.

  Just—that was all gone now.

  Unless, right?

  When we pull up to the old rent-house, there’s nothing there, of course. Instead of dogs in the neighbor’s long yard, there’s goats behind the chainlink now. They stare at us, never stop chewing.

  The house burned down years ago—again, not from cigarettes—but what’s still standing, what I wasn’t expecting even a little bit, it’s the tetherball pole.

  There’s no ball, no string. But even that it’s just still there, it means this can work.

  Once, years ago, in the old-time Indian days, a father died, but then he came back. He was different when he came back, he was hungry, he was selfish, but that’s just because he already had all that inside him when he died, I know. It’s because he carried it with him into the lake that night.

  My son—I won’t say his name out loud yet—all he would have taken with him, it’s his smile, and everything he could have been.

  So what we do, it’s wait until dark, and walk into the burned pad where the house used to be. The cinderblock pylons are still there, holding up my memory of the floor plan.

  I settle us down under what was Mom’s bedroom.

  Something happened here once, see.

  A cat or a possum or a rabbit, it crawled into this darkness to die. But because it was hurt, that gave something else access to it.

  Under the tarp in the bed of my truck is all the roadkill I could scrape up, to be turned into body mass, and in raccoon traps at the front of the bed are four hissing cats.

  They’re not hurt, yet.

 
There’s four because four’s the Indian number.

  But that’s all later.

  Right now, I’m just sitting across from Dino. Waiting for him to remember. Is there the least amount of blood seeping down from behind his ear, from where a razorblade might have traced a delicate X?

  There is.

  He turned his head to the side for me to do it, like he knew this part already, and I almost couldn’t press that metal into his skin.

  Almost.

  Before him in the dead grass I’ve set four action figures.

  One of them—one of them, I know its life cycle. That morning after, it showed back up on Dino’s dresser in his bedroom. Because Mom had found it floating in the dishwater.

  It was the only artifact from then. Except for Dino himself.

  And now, if he picks that one up instead of the other three, now they’ll be together again, and it can all start all over.

  Except—like I say, I know the life cycle, here.

  What’s going to happen, I know, is that Dino’s going to pick up the superhero, not any of the other action figures, and then, because this is part of it, I’ll force the left leg into his mouth as gently as I can, as gently as any big brother’s ever done a thing like this, and then I’ll come up under his chin with the heel of my hand once, fast, so he can bite that foot off.

  Maybe he’ll swallow it on his own, maybe he’ll need help, I don’t know.

  We’ve got all night, I mean. He can sit there trying to figure this out and I can dance softly around him in my regalia for as long as it takes, chanting the numbers up to twelve, to prime him, to remind him, the balls of my moccasin feet padding into the dirt over and over in the old way, to wake anything sleeping down there. Anything that can help us get through this ceremony.

  And, for my son—Collin, Collin Collin Collin—for him to get as solid as he needs to go out into the world like he was supposed to, he’s going to need the same thing Dad needed, the same thing Dad got with the neighbor’s corpse, the same thing seeping down the side of Dino’s neck already.

  When will the facility miss him?

  It doesn’t matter.

  They’ll never find us way out here, at an address that doesn’t exist anymore.

  It’s kind of like we never even left, really.

  I can see the old walls rising around us. I can see the shadow of the roof, the way it was.

  When I was twelve years old, I mapped the interior of our home.

  Now, sitting across from my little brother, I’m sketching out a map of the human heart, I guess.

  There’s more dark hallways than I knew.

  Rooms I thought I’d never have to enter.

  But I will.

  For him, for Collin, I’ll walk in and pull the door shut behind me, never come back out.

  Acknowledgments

  The shape of a father walks through the room. I’ve had that in my head a long time, now. When I was young-young, I used to be certain that every time I closed my eyes, everything changed, just for a moment. I was always trying to catch it. When I never did, the certainty shifted, such that my eyes being closed weren’t necessary. There could be things happening in my peripheral vision all the time. A shadow crossing that doorway. A hand retracting back under the couch. A reflection in a certain pane of a window, just for an instant. I say I’m a horror writer, but really what I mean by that is I’m a neck-twister: I’m always snapping my head around, trying to see what I know’s there. The shape of a father, walking through the room. I’m sure I stole from a lot of people and texts—is there a difference?—to get this one down on paper the way it is in my head, but the one I remember best is that moment in the movie of The Sentinel, when that old dead guy steps across the room, out of nowhere, and then back into it. And I’m still terrified that I got the dimensions of that modular house wrong. We never had one of those. It was always trailers for us. But I wanted something more permanent for this family. I wanted them at least to have that. Anyway, if it is wrong, the mistake’s all mine. And, all the mistakes you’re not seeing, that’s thanks to Ellen Datlow and the team at Tor.com. And? Mapping the Interior doesn’t exist, if not for Ellen Datlow. It also doesn’t exist if not for my wife, as always. She gave me the hours I needed in my study, to get this one down in words, let it stop coursing through my veins for a day or two. Those days or two, they’re what I write for. And then I’m looking over my shoulder again, telling myself just to walk, walk normal, don’t run. But I always do.

  About the Author

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the author of sixteen novels, six story collections, more than two hundred and fifty stories, and has some comic books in the works. His current book is the werewolf novel Mongrels. Stephen’s been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Fiction, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, three This Is Horror Awards, and he’s made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels of the Year. Stephen teaches in the MFA programs at University of Colorado at Boulder and University of California Riverside–Palm Desert. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife, two children, and too many old trucks.

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  Also by Stephen Graham Jones

  The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong

  All the Beautiful Sinners

  The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

  Bleed Into Me

  Demon Theory

  Ledfeather

  The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti

  The Ones that Got Away

  It Came from Del Rio

  Seven Spanish Angels

  The Last Final Girl

  Zombie Bake-Off

  Growing Up Dead in Texas

  Three Miles Past

  The Least of My Scars

  Sterling City (novella)

  Flushboy

  Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth

  The Gospel of Z

  States of Grace

  Not for Nothing

  Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly(with Paul Tremblay)

  After the People Lights Have Gone Off

  Mongrels

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Stephen Graham Jones

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  MAPPING THE INTERIOR

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Graham Jones

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Greg Ruth

  Cover design by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Ellen Datlow

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark ofMacmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9509-2 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-9510-8 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: June 2017

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