The Family Fang: A Novel by Kevin Wilson Page A

for an injured boy,” his father said, “and everyone pointed us to the diner.”
    As he hugged his parents, Buster noticed Janie again turn away from her food, her arm draped over the booth, watching the proceedings. “Oh, my baby,” Mrs. Fang cried. “We thought we had lost you,” his father added. “What the hell is going on?” Buster said. For all his talents, he knew he was powerless against his parents. There were two of them. It was not a fair fight.
    Janie stood and introduced herself to Mr. and Mrs. Fang. “Are you Lance’s parents?” she asked.
    “Who?” the Fangs responded.
    “Lance is my stage name,” he told Janie.
    “Did you two go over a waterfall in a barrel too?” she asked.
    His parents had never in their entire lives allowed a stranger to confuse them.
    “We were attacked by a bear,” they said, as if they had not even heard Janie’s question.
    “We were camping in the mountains in Michigan,” Mrs. Fang said, “just my husband and myself and our son here, Buster, when a grizzly bear came upon our camp and we were forced to fight him off in order to save our own lives.”
    “Lance?” Janie said. “What is she talking about?”
    “This was before the waterfall mishap,” he said weakly, but Janie was already paying for her meal, walking out of the restaurant.
    “We lost her,” Mr. Fang said.
    “What the hell is going on?” Buster said. “Why are you all bandaged up?”
    “Oh, we thought, I guess, I don’t know, that we’d play along.”
    “You’d play along with the fact that I almost died?”
    “ Play along is the wrong phrase. We wanted to add our own interpretation of the event.”
    “You folks eating?” the waitress asked. Mr. and Mrs. Fang each ordered a milkshake.
    “St. Louis,” Mr. Fang said. “Can’t say I’ve ever been here.”
    “I always think of the Judy Garland movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, ” Mrs. Fang said.
    “Wonderful movie,” Mr. Fang replied.
    “Little girl in the movie, can’t think of her name, goes around killing people on Halloween.”
    “Jesus, Mom,” Buster said.
    “No, really. She says she’s going to murder somebody and when the man answers the doorbell to hand out treats, she hits him in the face with a handful of flour. It’s so insane. I wanted so badly for you kids to do that one year, but I thought it might be too obvious.”
    “The whole movie should have been about that deranged girl,” Mr. Fang said.
    “I’m the most horrible,” Buster’s parents shouted, “I’m the most horrible,” apparently quoting from the movie. They looked like patients in an insane asylum who had found romance.
    The waitress came by and slammed down their check. “You people need to calm down,” she said. “And pay your bill over there.”
    “We’ll take good care of you, Buster,” Mrs. Fang said.
    “I need good care to be taken of me,” Buster answered.
    “Who better than us?” Mr. Fang asked, and the family walked out of the diner without paying.

the day of the locust, 1989
    artists: caleb and camille fang
    “S ometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” Annie said. She paused, considered what she had just said, and then repeated herself. She said it again, and again, and again, until the line felt like a foreign language, until the words were not words but sounds and the sentence was not a sentence but a song.
    “Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” she said, emphasizing the words some and think and tummy in the sentence, nodding her head in time with the cadence.
    “Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” she said.
    “Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” she said.
    “Sometimes I think my heart is in my tummy,” she said.
    “Sometimes . . . I think my heart is in my tummy,” she said.
    “Sometimes I think my heart . . . is in my tummy,” she said.
    “Sometimes I think . . . my heart . . . is in my tummy,” she said.
    “Somet—” and then a plastic cup hit her in the ear. She