return to issue
go home
1.
At Michiana Pawn, The Noahide, Noah, spends his time behind the case with the golden rings. This is where there is the most money to be made. Marriages, most of them not even sanctified by church or state, only by thin hammered bands slipped over tattooed engagement rings in the presence of a witness, a child or a neighbor, or, rarely, a friend, break up easily, brittle from whatever is here.
He has a face with flat planes and he has flat feet that ache as he stands behind the case of rings, his back bent into a permanent curve like the backs of the old women with columns of broken vertebrae. When I come in with my own set of rings, the gold-plate one with an onyx that I took from the floor of the apartment I used to share with a man and my own ring, made of a metal that stains my skin green, that has a cloudy glass purple gemstone, Noah is there, over the case, waiting for me. There's a thin gold chain around his wrist. I wonder who it belonged to before it was pawned. I wonder if it's real. I put my rings on the black mat he pulls out and he nudges one with a finger. "I'm not sure what I can do for you." He has a gold tooth, too. I want to suck on his tongue. I imagine a fat, hot muscle, thick like what you find folded in wax paper in a butcher's shop, but he doesn't look at me.
When the store is empty again Noah takes the gold-plated ring and puts it in the case and throws the other one into the trash. Besides wedding bands, the pawn shop has guns and instruments and a few electronics, but he doesn't know anything about buying and selling those, so for the most part he tells those people to come in on Sunday between ten-and-four when his father is there.
The bell above the door rings and he looks up. "Noah," a man says. It's his father, Jonah. "I brought you a coffee." Noah's father puts the styrofoam cup on top of the glass case. Noah knows it will leave a stain but he doesn't move it. He wants the coffee but his urethra has burned every time he's urinated for the last few days, so he's scared.
The bell above the door rings again and a man comes in.
2.
Above the pawn shop lives Noah's son, a ten-year-old fourth generation spiritual healer named Sandy. Sandy doesn't go to school. He is the only child in Paw Paw who comes from men of God, so his father says he has to stay at home. Sandy has known how to shoot since he was eight. When he sits on his bed reading, or looking out the window twice a day during the times he knows he can see other kids out in the street playing or squatting behind some debris while they take a shit, he does so with a Soviet machine gun hanging across his chest. Noah tells his son to be ready for anything when Moshiach returns.
3.
Outside with forty generous dollars in my pocket, I do my best not to squat and excrete the pain in my bowels, or fall to my knees and press my head to the ground, or say, "God kill me." Forty dollars is something to live for! I walk downtown past the shelled-out gas station and the department-store-sized Mega Liquor where the prices are too high, and I go down to the former fair ground, a dying swath of land where the flea market lives during the summer. I've been in Paw Paw my entire life. I grew up around Noah, back when he was a child spiritual healer, before he started working at the pawn shop, but I don't think he remembers. I would say we grew up together but we didn't grow up together, insofar as we hardly have any common memories.
The Noahide. We only knew him by that name. Not Noah. Just the Noahide. It's the name he used at the time and people said it was the name his father once used, too. The Noahide was a few years older than me, he was seventeen when I was fifteen. I think about this time as I lay on the cold ground of the abandoned fair ground. It was a time before I became sick with ulcers.
At fifteen most everyone had stopped going to school. I knew this was the case in Paw Paw, at least. The same happened in Cassopolis, where I knew a few people our age, people who'd come looking for others they could fuck. The school building still stood and there were a few teachers left who worked with the remaining students, although what those students' aspirations were, I don't know. A few might have believed Southwestern Michigan would re-open. Or that when everything came to an end and a new time started there would be a place for them. Most of us counted on jobs at the dump at sixteen, by the old bypass under the giant flame. And they didn't ask about school at the dump. The Noahide's father kept him apart, though. He left school like most of us but he didn't go to the dump, and he wasn't out at night with the rest of us, laying in the dirt doing speed when we could find it, otherwise pawing at each other's genitals or even our own, neurotically chasing the opium-trance that comes after an orgasm, trading diseases, sure, but not scared of pregnancy. The adults noticed when chlamydia and warts had made their rounds two or three times with us but no babies had resulted that their children seemed to suffer from plague of sterility. In the end, some people could have kids, though, but not many.
There were a few rumors about the Noahide and what he did during the day in the apartment above the pawn shop while his father worked downstairs, but most of us didn't care enough to think about it one way or the other. We'd always known them as strange. And now, when those of us who are left see him, it is as if he has never met any of us.
I pull the money out of my pocket and hold it up to the gray sun. I have no idea where I'll spend it. It's a lot of money but there's not a lot to do with it. There is still an army surplus by the old pharmacy where we buy our clothes and food. I could have spent it at the pawn shop. There's also a man half-way to Cassopolis who still cooks speed. I think of the few men I know who would be able to take me. When the sores in my stomach start up again, I push myself up from laying down. Laying down makes it worse. I sleep in a chair these days, an ate-up recliner. I'm not the only one with the ulcers. They will probably be the thing that kills me, but I know it could be worse.
4.
The gun is not for killing. This was the first thing Noah taught his son. Sandy has a few of them, they hang from hooks in his bedroom. He sees them when he lays down at night and when he wakes up. Once a week he and his father push the diesel bike out of the shed behind their house and ride it past the last house in Paw Paw so they can practice shooting. Sandy's big for his age. He's never had a problem with it.
It took some time for Sandy to realize he lived differently from the other kids in Paw Paw. When the Noahide brought Sandy back to Paw Paw in a cobalt blue bundle through the door of the pawn shop, the other children heard him cry just once through the window on the second floor, through a drawn yellow shade. They'd never seen a child from another mother. A seven year old, four year old twins, and their three year old brother lingered around the pawn shop for a few days, hoping to catch a glimpse of Noah's baby. The pawn shop didn't open though, and the lights remained off. The yellow curtain remained drawn. As the days passed the seven year old would wipe feces and urine off the genitals and legs of his younger siblings, and portion out the small amount of food they were allotted by their mother each day. They would wait as long as they could until it was too late to be out, too dangerous in the dark, so they'd go home and return the next day, and the next, and it went this way for a little while, until, with short attention spans, they couldn't remember why they even cared enough to try and see. They didn't hear any more crying, they didn't see the Noahide or his blue-bundled baby. By the time the pawn shop reopened for business, they didn't care at all.
When Sandy was born, his grandfather Jonah stopped working as a guide ferrying paying customers up and down the waterway to the Upper Peninsula. He'd made some money doing it, enough that he could stop for a while to move to Paw Paw to help with the baby while his son worked downstairs in the pawn shop. By two years old, Sandy's father and grandfather discovered he had sensitive and easily infected skin. By four he was reading.
When Jonah moved back to Paw Paw, I asked the woman at the liquor store where the mother was.
"Noah's mother?"
"Yeah?"
"I don't know. I don't know about Sandy's mother, either. The men in that family seem to have no mothers."
I hadn't even thought about Sandy's mother; I hadn't wondered who Noah had a kid with. I, with a fifth of liquor under my arm and a bag of slightly crushed cigarettes in my hand, tried to remember Noah's mother from when we were kids. I couldn't, though. I couldn't remember anything about his mother. Above me, the light on the ceiling worked hard, it could be heard, as could the bell on the door behind me, and the whir of the coolers holding the beer, and breathing of the woman waiting for my money. I could hear her breath. I could hear her heartbeat. I could hear her swallow her saliva, or try to, I could tell she was as dehydrated as any of us, her saliva thick as mine.
5.
Noah knew from a very young age that he had no choice but to have a baby. This is the only thing, his father told him, that he really had to do. He didn't mind the idea. He'd only ever stuck his erection in his own cold hand. There was nobody in Paw Paw who'd let him have sex with them, even though they all did it with each other, all the teenagers and all the adults. He watched them from the apartment above the pawn shop, laying in the scratchy field, the old fair ground, until they were all raw with infected urethras and torn rectums. When Noah was old enough to dependably ejaculate without getting nervous or gun-shy, his father sent him away from Paw Paw, to the North, to some of the bigger cities where there were more people, and, his father hoped, a woman Noah could impregnate. Nobody knows why he even came back but he did, two years later, with the baby wrapped in a blue cloth.
Nobody besides Noah knows exactly what happened when he left. He took a diesel bike and headed for Muskegon. He didn't expect much in between Paw Paw and Muskegon, but there was. He stopped in Wyoming, Michigan. There was an old hotel with yellow stucco walls and a corporate sign that was still bright enough to see from the road, so he made his way over to it and when he walked through the glass door, over the black puddles on the ground, to the old reception desk, he met a woman named Alice. She had to be thirty-four or thirty-six to his sixteen. He was shocked to see anyone at the hotel, really. There'd been no cars or bikes outside. Nobody on the street.
"Do you work here?" he asked.
"This is my motel."
"Are you busy?" he asked.
"Does it look like it? What are you doing out here, anyway?"
And so Noah told her. She told him she was too old to have a child, but they could try. It would be a good experience for him, anyways. So she locked the front door of the motel where nobody was coming to stay and they went into a gray room on the first floor with a window that overlooked the cracked cement floor of what was once a small, shallow pool, and Noah did his best. Afterwards they had some packaged food from the safe behind the check in desk, some spicy chips and instant noodles, and he fell asleep. When he woke up she was asleep on the chair in the corner. He didn't understand why she didn't sleep next to him. Her legs spread, her thighs flat on the worn, green upholstery, spreading like pancakes, the rolls of her stomach, and a single thick one under her chin. He didn't know if he was supposed to stay or go, so he closed his eyes and waited, staying absolutely still for two hours at least. He heard her get up and piss and run the water from the sink, and then the sound of her pulling on the polyester work shirt and her pants, and then she was gone. Noah didn't know what to do. She'd left some food on the table, so he put it in his bag. He showered under the cold water and took some of the water bottles collecting dust from on top of the broken tv. It took years, but eventually Sandy came.
6.
There is only one fertile woman left in Paw Paw. Her name is Cameron. She lives in a little sinking house by the cracked tennis courts behind the old school where we used to go. She has six children. Nobody knows who the father of the children is, or if it is even just one man. A lot of people know about this woman. I've never met anyone who's been able to push out as many, not even heard of a friend of a friend, not even someone from before the fertility problems. Cameron sends her kids out of the house in the morning and then locks the door behind them. The oldest few know how to take care of the younger ones. It's normal to see those kids running through the dirt streets. Everyone knows them. Kids are rare, but Cameron isn't scared of them being snatched up. She might not mind if they were, a few of them, at least. I have no idea what Cameron does in that house once the kids are gone. She stays away from everyone. She's probably scared of getting pregnant again, although everyone knows she knows how to scrape a baby out of her uterus with some tea and a hook. That she's done it once or twice. Kids are rare but nobody can blame her for that. A woman can only take so much.