The Porcupine of Truth Read online

  “Oh yeah. Jesus tells people to do a lot of shit, seems like,” my dad says, chewing with his mouth open. “You have no fuckin’ idea how much I hate those Jesus people. Act all holier than you and then do all sorts of crap. Your religious dad kicked you out. You know what mine did? Left us. No note or nothing, just left. Man of God.”

  “Wow,” Aisha says, looking at me. I shrug. “I didn’t know that.”

  “And then my mom, she goes and gets even more religious on me. After he leaves, suddenly she’s the fuckin’ church lady. I don’t have time for that crap. None of it.”

  “Amen to that,” Aisha says. “If I never see the inside of a church again, it’ll be too soon.”

  I sit there thinking about the construction of that sentence. If I never, it will be … When I don’t do something, it will be … It’s a sentence that means nothing. I’ve never noticed that before. My dad gets up and ambles over to the refrigerator. I sit down across from where he was sitting. He takes out a Coke bottle, swigs from it, puts it back in the fridge, and sits down again.

  “So a priest and a rabbi are walking down the street,” my dad says. “They pass by a schoolhouse. Priest says, ‘Hey, let’s screw some kids.’ Rabbi says, ‘Out of what?’ ” He leaves his mouth open after, like waiting for the laugh.

  Aisha snorts, which is more than I can do, because as much as I like a good joke, I’m not sure this is one. This one just seems like it’s in bad taste.

  “Ahh!” he says, pointing wildly at Aisha. “You get me. You’re not so butt-scared all the time like someone I know.” He looks directly at me. “You’re like the son I never had.”

  I cross and uncross my arms, stung. I count by thirteens to 273. He puts up his hand for Aisha to high-five. She just gawks at him.

  “Too much?”

  “A bit,” she says. “I think you just told your son that you don’t have a son.”

  My dad closes his eyes and concentrates, and then he shakes his head. “Ahh, fuck. I’m always too much. Born that way, I guess. Sorry, kiddo. I know I’m a moron.”

  “Yeah, I definitely get that,” I say.

  Dad ignores the insult and motions at me. “What about you? You don’t believe in that crap, do you?”

  At first I think he’s asking if I believe he feels like he doesn’t really have a son — which is debatable — and then I realize he means religion.

  “Nah,” I say. “I don’t subscribe to the Jesus stuff. Not a Jesus subscription holder.”

  “I believe in waffles,” my dad says. “Lots of waffles.”

  “I believe in strawberries,” Aisha says. “You think there are any left?”

  I shake my head, because I know we’re out. “I believe in the Porcupine of Truth,” I say without thinking about it.

  “The porcupine of what?” Aisha asks, leaning back in her chair.

  The rules of improv with the group at my school are simple: One, just come up with stuff on the fly. Two, anything anyone else comes up with you have to treat as true, meaning you can’t deny anyone else’s reality. I nod at her like everyone knows about this stuff and let my brain play. “You never heard of the Porcupine of Truth?”

  Aisha gives me that arched-eyebrow look from when I first met her at the zoo. My dad shakes his head, and I feel like we should be sitting out around a campfire. I place my hand over my heart.

  “In my, uh, belief system,” I start, “when you get to heaven — which isn’t called heaven, by the way, but is instead called, um, Des Moines — you aren’t greeted by Peter or any saint or Jesus or anything like that.”

  “So who greets you?” Aisha asks.

  “The Porcupine of Truth. He meets you at the gates of Des Moines, which are less like gates and more like, you know, a velvet rope in front of a club. And when you get there, he asks you, ‘Truth or dare?’ ”

  She says, “Wow. This is good to know.”

  “Well, yeah. This is important stuff. And if you say, ‘Dare,’ and the Porcupine, say, dares you to run naked through the fields leading up to Des Moines and you won’t, he pushes a lever and you are sent to hell, which is actually Paramus Park Mall, the day before Christmas.”

  “The what mall?” Aisha asks.

  “New Jersey,” I say. “What were you, born in Billings?”

  “Nebraska,” she says.

  “And if you do what he says, you get to go into Des Moines, which as you know is a beautiful place with lots of trees and stuff.”

  I sneak a look at my dad. His mouth is wide open, and it takes me a second to realize he’s a little awed. He hasn’t seen my improv shows like Mom has. He has no idea about any of this.

  I continue. “And if you say, ‘Truth,’ the Porcupine, who is omniscient …”

  “Where’d this all come from?” Dad says, but there’s a smile on his face, and it’s hard for me not to break character and smile too.

  I repeat, “The Porcupine, who is omniscient …”

  “Like all porcupines …” Aisha says.

  “Exactly. Like all porcupines, she is all knowing.”

  Aisha cracks up. “I like the ‘she.’ ”

  “Know your audience,” I say. “So she scans through your life files and finds the four moments that are most embarrassing, and she asks you questions about those moments. For example, it could be the time you were on the school bus and you peed yourself laughing and left a puddle and pretended it was Jamey Foster who did it.”

  Dad laughs. His face is lit up like I haven’t seen it before. I want to bottle this moment. This feeling. For all the times I don’t have it. Which is every other moment of my life ever.

  Aisha says, “For example, not like that’s something that happened to you, right?”

  “Right,” I say. “And the Porcupine of Truth asks you about this in front of a studio audience of all the people who have ever known you who died before you.”

  Dad, still smirking, puts his hand under his chin and rubs. “Okay, so what if you’re a baby and you didn’t know anyone who has already died?”

  “Good question. Then they fill the audience with dead child sitcom stars,” I say, trying to ignore the nauseous feeling in my chest. All this talk about death with my dying dad. Too much.

  He starts to laugh again, hard, and that turns into a cough. “Of course,” he says as he tries to stop coughing.

  “And you have to tell the truth in front of everyone, and if you do, you get to go to Des Moines. And if you don’t, you wind up in the pits of Paramus Park Mall. Or, if you’re lucky, suburban Chicago, which is what they call the place in between heaven and hell. I forget what it’s usually called.”

  “Suburban Chicago, I believe,” Aisha says.

  “Exactly. So that’s the Porcupine of Truth, and I swear on a stack of Bibles, or, where this particular story comes from, Entertainment Weeklys.”

  My dad applauds, clapping his hands above his head. “Bravo, bravo. Now that there’s some good shit,” he says.

  I can’t help but smile.

  We bullshit some more, and it’s awesome. I kind of want my mom to see this, because of all the times she bad-mouthed Dad as I was growing up. And really, he isn’t that bad. Or maybe he is, or was, but he has good qualities too. He’s actually fun.

  The conversation begins to stall, and Aisha stands up.

  “Found some interesting stuff in the files downstairs,” I say, staying seated. “Divorce papers, stuff like that.”

  He screws up his face like he’s annoyed. “My parents never got divorced,” he says.

  “But I just saw —”

  He shakes his head. “Nah. I mean, maybe after he left, she filed. I don’t know. But we never heard from him again.”

  “But he signed —”

  My dad interrupts me. “Stop. Enough. I don’t give a crap about any of that.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But it was in the —”

  “Seriously, kiddo. Stop.”

  I tense my shoulders.

  Dad exhales. “Rel
ax, Carson. I really don’t worry about that anymore. When you’re dying, you don’t have time for that junk. The shit people did to you? It’s over.”

  I nod and look away. The conversation stops, and my dad and I are just sitting there. Aisha looks over at me and says, “Awkward turtle.” She puts her left hand on top of her right with her thumbs out and then rotates her thumbs forward.

  “What the hell’s an awkward turtle?” my dad asks.

  Aisha shows him again, and I think about what funny thing I can say. Nothing comes to mind. And then, I once again do something that doesn’t feel normal to me. In a quiet voice I ask, “When did he leave?”

  Dad makes a frustrated noise, but then he takes a deep breath and actually answers.

  “It was the year my Brewers finally made the World Series. I remember because my father and I used to watch baseball together. Sometimes they’d be the game of the week on Saturday afternoons, because that year they were finally good. Harvey’s Wallbangers. Yep. The Wallbangers.”

  He smiles at the memory.

  “That summer. I was, what? Seventeen? One day I woke up and he was gone. I asked my mom. She had no clue. I figured he’d write or something. Never did. And of course that’s the year the Brewers got to the Series. Finally. We’d waited my whole childhood for that, and there they were, and he wasn’t there to watch it with me. Lost to the Cardinals. Stupid, fucking Cardinals.”

  He shakes his head, and I can hear the despair. All these years later, and he can say whatever he wants to, but it does still matter to him. Like, a ton.

  It’s hard to know what to say. So I just say, “Sorry,” and Aisha says, “That sucks,” and he nods and shrugs, and soon Aisha and I go downstairs and hang out.

  “Well, that was, um, educational,” Aisha says.

  I bow my head. “Yeah,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

  “Not at all,” she says. “Apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

  What does that even mean? I think. He’s a deserter, dying of alcoholism. What a horrible thing to say to a guy. But I don’t say that, of course. I just say, “Yeah, well.”

  She says she’s gonna chill on the porch for a while, and for kicks, I get on my computer and look up the Brewers’ World Series history. I’ve never been big on baseball, which is the world’s dullest sport. But imagining my dad and his dad watching it in this very house makes me feel a little nostalgic.

  There it is. The Brewers and the Cardinals in the World Series.

  I look closer, and the hair stands up on the back of my neck.

  It took place in 1982.

  The year before my grandfather signed the divorce papers.

  WHEN I WAKE up from an afternoon nap, I find that Aisha has created the Porcupine of Truth.

  She is outside, under the big pine tree, lying on her back with her hands clasped behind her head. The Porcupine of Truth — and I know what it is immediately — is sitting up, staring down at her.

  The porcupine’s core is poster board that Aisha has traced and cut out with God knows what, since I can barely find a pen around here, let alone scissors. She has festooned this core with what appear to be bristles, probably from the broom she used this morning when we were cleaning up the basement. For eyes she found black buttons, and the snout appears to be wadded-up waxed paper. The buttons are not inset on the poster board, but instead have been attached to the bristles, like an afterthought. It is not so anatomically correct, but I have to give it to Aisha — it’s a pretty impressive art project. The porcupine stands about eight inches tall, and when I lean down to straighten one of her quills, she teeters back and forth.

  Aisha, still lying down, picks her up and holds her high above her in both hands. “Behold! The Porcupine of Truth!”

  I sit on the grass and applaud. Aisha does a horizontal curtsy.

  “On an unrelated note, do we need a new broom?” I ask.

  “We might.”

  “Well, clearly we must worship her.”

  “Well, clearly.”

  “What does one do to worship the Porcupine of Truth?”

  “Good question.” She sits up, and a brown pine needle is stuck to her tank top. I want to be that pine needle. “Buy a new broom, possibly.”

  “Of course, it is the Porcupine of Truth, so there is truth telling.”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “And if I recall correctly, there’s the Guacamole Festival.”

  Aisha shakes her head. “I think you’re just hankering for guac, which is way different than an act of worship.”

  “You’re breaking the rules. You aren’t supposed to deny my reality.”

  She screws up her face at me, and I realize she doesn’t do improv comedy or know the rules, so I let it go.

  “So there’s a thing,” I say.

  “What thing?” she asks.

  “A thing. I looked up that World Series my dad was talking about. It happened in 1982.”

  “So?”

  “So, that’s the thing. The form I saw, the divorce form, the one my dad said didn’t exist because his dad left one day and they never got divorced and no one ever heard from him again?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was signed in 1983.”

  Aisha is quiet for a bit. I glance over and she is biting her lip, lost in thought.

  “Okay,” she finally says, slowly. “So what do you think that means?”

  “It means my dad’s dad disappeared back in 1982. But my grandparents actually divorced in 1983.”

  She nods a few times. “I mean, it could just be that they divorced by mail.”

  “Right, but my dad has no idea about it.”

  She chews on her lip a little more. “You heard your dad. He doesn’t care about this stuff.”

  “Yeah, I don’t buy that.”

  She seems to consider this. “So who could we ask about the divorce thing?” she asks.

  “The pastor next door signed the form too,” I say. “He knows more than my dad does. That’s weird, right?”

  “Oh good. A pastor.”

  “You just want to meet a real, live pastor. Because of your deep love of religion,” I say, and Aisha says, “That’s exactly it.”

  THE PASTOR IS watching the local news when we arrive, and he seems overjoyed to have company.

  “Who’s your friend?” he asks me as he ushers us into his living room, which still smells like pinecones and old folks.

  I introduce him to Aisha and we three sit down on his couch.

  “You’re very striking,” he says.

  Aisha bows. “Thank you, sir. It’s always been my life goal to bring a little taste of sub-Saharan Africa to central Montana.”

  He clearly has no idea how to respond, so he says, “So are you from here, dear?”

  She nods, not looking at him, and then we suffer through the world’s most awkward three-minute conversation about nothing. No topic is safe, and I can tell Aisha is thinking about turning “striking” into an action verb. Finally, thankfully, she asks if she can use his bathroom, and the pastor points the way down the hall.

  “So I was actually wondering if I could ask you some questions,” I say once Aisha is gone.

  “Of course,” he says, visibly relieved that it’s just the two of us.

  “It’s about my grandfather. He was your friend, right?”

  “Oh yes,” the pastor says.

  “You have any idea where he would have gone?”

  The pastor takes a deep breath and gives me a deeply sympathetic look.

  “I really don’t,” he says.

  “You never heard from him again after he left?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Did my grandparents ever, like, get divorced?”

  He looks up and to the right, like he’s trying to remember.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  He crosses his legs. “Your grandmother and I went through this same process, thirty ye
ars ago,” he says. “We tried everything. We wanted to understand what happened. Nothing panned out.”

  “Nothing?”

  He puts his head down and lets it hang there. “You have no idea how hard it was. For all of us. His … disappearance. Your grandmother … just about fell apart after. Your father, well. He took to drinking, even though he was just a kid, and he never got back on track. I know this all too well. Believe me. I wish I knew how to help. I’ve been trying to help all these years, but your father, he doesn’t want me around. I know that. I just … keep looking after him because I think Russ — your grandfather — would want me to. We’re family, Carson. I wish I could say the one thing to make it all better, but I simply can’t. Do you understand that?”

  Aisha returns from the bathroom and comes to stand by my shoulder.

  “I get it,” I say, wondering how to bring up the fact that I know about the divorce. And his signature. “And thanks. It’s just. There’s this one thing I —”

  Aisha jams me in the back, and I stop talking. The pastor is waiting for me to finish.

  “This one thing I … wanted to say. To you. Thanks,” I say.

  “Yes,” Aisha says. “Thanks.”

  He smiles, and our good-byes are even more awkward than the last time I saw him.

  We walk back across his yard to our house. When we get down to the basement, I say, “What just happened?”

  “I needed to get you to stop talking,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she says, jutting her hands out wide. “He has one of your boxes. In his office. I opened the wrong door on the way to the bathroom, and I saw it.”

  “What?”

  “I saw a box that’s definitely one of your grandmother’s. This one had the same flood mark. That line across the bottom, about four inches up. I’ve seen that line. I swear to you. It’s one of the same boxes.”

  I shake my head at her. “If there was a flood in this house, there was probably a flood next door.”

  “Nope,” she says. “This one had an orange ‘2’ on it.”

  My stomach drops. “While you were in the bathroom, I asked about the divorce. He said it never happened.”

  “He lied,” Aisha says. “And this isn’t like one of those things he forgot.”