[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Vegetables.Karl’s stomach growled.He wished he had more of Dabney’s vermin jerky.Rat.Pigeon.Squirrel.Whatever it was, it was good.The way they meandered down there, individual forms swallowed by the massiveness of the crowd, Karl could cross his eyes slightly and blur the overlapping double image.Meat.Vegetables.The surface pulsated like stew burbling in a boundless Crock-Pot.Meat.Vegetables.His life had been reduced to a sad homage to those cartoons where starving castaways on a desert island pictured each other as anthropomorphized hot dogs and steaks and hamburgers.Karl’s stomach lurched and he cursed himself for having purged Dabney’s vittles.The shadows were beginning to deepen as the sun started setting.Soon the oppressive darkness would spread, drowning everything in pitch black, and another seemingly endless night would begin.Another reason Karl had been seduced by the city was that like heights, the dark was not one of his favorite things.When Karl had first moved here, he loved the fact that the streetlights kept the city bright all night long.Now it was country dark.Back in Rushsylvania, Ohio—a tiny blip in the already bliplike Logan County—it got so dark at night you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face after a certain hour.There had been streetlamps outside, but they didn’t saturate everything with that pervasive sodium-vapor lambency that city lights did.For most of his childhood Karl slept with a night-light, much to his father’s chagrin.A night-light was a crutch, and Manfred Stempler wasn’t raising any cripples, emotional or otherwise.Manfred got the bright idea to go camping in Hocking Hills State Park.Nine-year-old Karl had been dead set against it, preferring to stay home and watch late movies under his blanket on his eleven-inch black-and-white TV.“Manfred Stempler is not raising a sissy,” had been his dear papa’s response.So off they went.Could his father spring for one of the cottages in the park? No way.That wouldn’t be “roughing it.” A tent was pitched, a campfire was made, and with as much detachment as a spooked nine-year-old could muster, Karl observed his older brother, Gunter, and their father enjoy themselves in the great outdoors.“Is this so bad?” his father kept asking, and though Karl’s shaking head said, “No, no, no,” his eyes held a different answer.When the last traces of daylight ebbed away, swallowed by the earth and foliage, the campfire’s light seemed pitiful and inadequate.The woods made noises.Karl wasn’t a superstitious kid, so he didn’t believe in monsters—which in light of the current state of affairs was kind of funny—but there were things creeping about, rustling the leaves, crunching the soil, which unsettled Karl.Small oases of light had dotted the periphery from nearby RVs, accompanied by the purr of generators and the occasional drunken whoop, but it felt like the surface of Mars to Karl.Just because someone is born in the country doesn’t mean he’s not a city boy by nature.At home he’d secreted away a prized single from destructive Gunter and evangelical “all contemporary music is the devil” Manfred: David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose.” Roth was Manfred’s worst nightmare: a sex-charged metropolitan hedonistic Jew in showbiz, put on this Earth to lead impressionable youths—like his sonny boy—down the primrose path to Hell.Karl would listen in secret to Diamond Dave rhapsodize, “Show me your bright lights, and your city lights, all right!”That had been 1986.And Karl started planning his run from Logan from then on.New York City was to be his Yankee Rose, resplendent in bright lights, city lights.Even with its Lugosily ghoulish name, Rushsylvania—population just shy of six hundred—boasted a nearly 100 percent white populace, all good Christian folk.Everyone was pink and fair-haired.His father—Big Manfred—was very active at Rushsylvania Church of Christ on East Mill, epicenter of nowhere.Every Sunday Manfred escorted Karl, Gunter, and their mom, Josephine, into the bland house of worship.White faces upraised praising their lily-white version of Jesus, all soft, mousy brown hair and blue eyes, very European, very not Middle Eastern—very, extremely, super not Semitic.If Christ had been portrayed in art as he actually looked in life, Christianity never would have caught on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]