Twilight G.S.

1.2

: X : X : X : X : X : X : X : X : X : X : X :

"He's in a wheelchair now."

My attention snaps back to Charlie's droning one-sided conversation on the ride back to Casa Del CheetoStains. C-captain Picard is Professor Xavier? Dad will you really shave all your thinning curly hair off? "What?" I try to stifle the panic and morbid interest in my voice.

"Billy Black, remember? Down at La Push."

Oh. Old guy, friend of the family, lives on the Native reservation down on the coast. Father to Jacob Black, some twiggy kid who used to follow me and the older group of kids around during summer outings. I remembered the scabby brown knees and gape-tooth smiles of my childhood friends, all good-naturedly better than me at everything from fishing to fighting. They were the first and last vote that my name was awful; dad always wanted me to be Charlie Jr. anyway. 'Charles' to future CEOs or Ivy League colleagues or what shit. "Well. You're all getting old."

"Hmp." The Sherrif's half-laugh tells me that he appreciates my masculine cruelty, but I should cut the crap. "So he's not driving anymore and didn't want the truck to go to the junk heap. It's not bad, for a starter."

I pretend not to be as intensely interested as I felt. "How much? No more than eight, right?"

"Eight dollars? Eight... maids a milking? Eight chucks a woodchuck chucked if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

I easily block the hand trying to ruffle my hair, because c'mon way too old for that shit. "Eight hundred. I only got that much saved up for this year, if I cut out new clothes and weekends." I have surprised the old man, but you can only tell by the speedometer.

"It's a late sixties Chevy. You'll be spending that much in gas and maybe repairs if you drive anything like you talk." Zing. But then there is a heavy silence when I forget to laugh.

"Dad. How much?" The cruiser practically slows to a crawl, and we are almost home.

He is reluctant to say anything, just smiles his easy I'm-the-dad smile, and I really am almost home. "Don't worry about it, Chuck."

It was sitting in the front yard, a faded red metal bulk of a truck. It was such a beast I could have wept - large and round, high-mounted with a wide bed.  Well.  So much for implied dick-size compensation!

Ahhh, the prodigal bachelor pad. A sad old couch facing a large but ancient television balanced optimistically on painted cinderblocks. The metal folding table and matching folding chairs in the kitchen. One tiny filthy bathroom upstairs, wedged between Charlie's bedroom and my own. I could feel my skin crawling just stepping on the pinecones scattered before the screened porch, and by the time Charlie and I were huffing our way up the stairs with the luggage I was fully disheartened.

Fuck me, there were cobwebs in the linen closet. Actual honest-to-filthy-bachelor-Jesus cobwebs. If there were cobwebs in the fridge I wouldbe fucking off to a motel, at least until the fumigation was over. The paint job was the same it had been thirty years ago - everything a mix of bright yellow and burnt orange framed by dark stained wood. And white, if rumor is to be believed that those linoleum tiles used to be white. (We pretty much have Renee to blame for this my most overwhelming concern with hygiene and household orderliness. Thanks for making your son an absolute woman, you anal-retentive harridan.)

But enough about me. This isn't a story about a ho-hum redemption in goodhearted Amurica. Nor really about a broken family and the reunification of a gay son with his law-n-order father (he knows and doesn't care and we get along great, thanks). No, my friends. This.

This is a horror story.

I don't get to be the teenager who is making out in the cabin in the woods when the monster attacks. But I don't know that yet. I don't even know that my home-away-from-hometown has changed all that much. I've never spent more than a summer here, never gone to school with the kids that live in the eensy suburban sprawl of scrubbed brick houses and supermarts and hiking outlets. I would learn that my old La Push friends didn't even attend the school I was bound for, that I would actually be completely alone, proverbial deserted cabin-in-the-woods scene.

And I would want to make out with the monster.