The Son of Every Man

Chapter 1.4

Gabe threaded his way through the narrow parting in the brush with the windows down. The only sound to denote his low-gear crawl back out to the highway was the undulating grumble of the four cylinder. He often imagined what he might look like to a spectator high above the dry earth—perhaps a passenger on a departing redeye flight: two dots of light, red and white, a tiny glowing insect roving through the empty vastness of the desert.

Much to Eddie's annoyance, Dan and Whitey had loaded the car early, during the meeting inside the trailer. The clock in the dash now read twelve-thirty. Gabe had passed out of the checkpoint more than a mile ago. He was ahead of schedule, so he picked his way off the road into a clearing in the brush. He shut off the engine and climbed onto the roof, listening as coyotes made themselves known from scattered, far-off ridges.

There was an unsettling presence that resided in the night air of the desert. Some in the area believed this presence took on a physical form known as the Willow Man, whose apparition was alleged to be the most horrific of potential ends. Pray you will never come to see it, warned his shriveled and elderly neighbor. (Anyone who had been around as long as Mrs. McAllister had would know.) Pray you will never see the way he dances before you, jangling his bony, sinewy appendages, wearing his lipless smile. Avert your gaze from the empty sockets where his eyes should be. They are bottomless voids, like black holes, and with the very same will to consume. Only a strange blue light flickers dimly, she told him, deep within those eyes.

Most believers also claimed that the threat of the Willow Man depends absolutely on one's own fear of him. Gabe had no cause for alarm. He was not afraid. If the car's engine had shut off on its own, if a sickening form had clattered in on moonlit, spindly limbs and pinned him against the base of a saguaro, perhaps Gabe would have been able to meet his father again, in whatever place he had gone to, which did not sound like a bad fate.

A brief, hot wind arrived at his face, swept up out of a large basin to the east. A supernatural hum flowed within it, metallic taste lingering on his lips. But he was alone in the desert tonight. He knew that. He was alone here with the coyotes, and the scorpions, and the beetles creaking in the bushes.

His mother's western name was Bonnie. She spent the first sixteen years of her life in Vietnam, where, Gabe was certain, she had known few men of much integrity. Her father was a man of none. Bonnie's mother passed away when Bonnie was seven years old. Her death had been a suspicious one, though no investigation ever took place. Bonnie managed to run away from her father's home three times in adolescence, and each time was forcibly returned to him. She finally escaped pregnant and alone by way of a small, severely overcrowded vessel, on which she miscarried her child and nearly lost her own life before finally reaching asylum in Hong Kong. By the time she reached California, it was 1979 and she was eighteen. She worked as a maid in a large hotel by day and took classes for english at night, where she met Marco, forming a fast bond with him as they shared their histories. His interest in her was an eager, flattering one, and it was also respectful—the first of its kind she had ever known. They were married three months later, and around that same time, she became pregnant again.

Gabe could recall evidence of his mother's profound sadness from an early age, though she managed to keep its effects away from him until he grew older. Gabe's father never wavered in his dedication to her, offering an endless supply of strength and optimism. In turn, Gabe knew, his mother felt a deep gratitude and love for her husband.

He hoped she had made it to bed already, and he hoped that she was sober. Increasingly in the year since his father had departed, most of her went away to be with him. Always, as she returned to her senses, grief welled inside her and spilled over, flowing from room to room. When he was at home with her he waded through it, level still rising by the day.