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U n iversity M icrofilm s International A B ell & H ow ell Inform ation C o m p a n y 3 0 0 North Z e e P R o a d . A nn Arbor. Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1 3 4 6 U S A
3 1 3 /7 6 1 - 4 7 0 0 8 0 0 /5 2 1 - 0 6 0 0
A ngelina. [Original writing]
Welch, Stephen Roger, M .F.A . The American University, 1992
U M I
300 N. Zeeb Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48106
~-
by
Stephen Roger Welch submitted to the
Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Fine Arts in
Creative Writing
itures of iCommit Signatures of^Committee:
Chair:
bU.Jj.
an on the College Ld.
Date
1992
The American University Washington, D.C. 20016 TH? AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
73
® STEPHEN ROGER WELCH 1992
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
To Rashmi
For your love and understanding.
ANGELINA BY
STEPHEN ROGER WELCH ABSTRACT
It is the summer of 1979 and David Platt, a recent graduate of a rural Colorado high school, has been
devastated by the suicide of his closest friend, Gary. The suicide — unexpected, bizarre, and committed with what had seemed a wilful perversity — has shaken Dave's trust in their nearly lifelong friendship. In this portion of the novel, David, desperate to regain his innocence, begins to search for a portal back into his childhood, back to the era of magic boyhood summers when he and Gary had been bonded with a ritualized, almost obsessed, attachment. But in his search, David begins to realize that perhaps the true
perversity lies in himself, and that Gary's act could have been a product of — or a warning against — David's own desires.
In the long adventure of creating this novel, it has been only through the encouragement, advice, and
criticism of many friends and colleagues that I have been able to surmount many of the obstacles — technical,
personal, and aesthetic — that have appeared (or I have placed) on my path. To all of these people I owe tremendous gratitude. Among them, my thanks go to Kermit Moyer for his thoughtfully written critiques, painstaking line-editing, and empathy with the vagaries of boyhood drama; to Alice McDermott for her earnest care and interest in my
manuscript, and her talent at piercing to the heart of a problem; to Barbara Esstman for her optimism and her
sympathy for those baffled by the fickle creative process;
and for Richard McCann for his advice, humor, and patience with my occasional tardiness. And thanks also to my friends and fellow adventurers at A.U. Good luck to you all.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract... ii
Acknowledgements... iv
Part I Chapter 1... 1
Chapter 2... 11
Chapter 3... 18
Part II Chapter 1... 24
Chapter 2 ... 44
Chapter 3 ... 56
Chapter 4 ... 73
iv
"ADULATION"
Chapter 1
Under the rock, in a hole lined with stones, lay the fetish, the What He Made. With razor knife, model glue, carpet thread and clay, he'd shaped its bones, he'd stitched
its skin and filled its belly with counterfeit things.
Flies worshipped it now, congregated in its grave and
murmuring their approval with humming wings. Wrapped in a stained towel it lay as if dead, though it had never
breathed or moved, its limbs. He had fooled the flies.
He was embowered beneath a shrub whose boughs sagged nearly to the ground in a tattered hem of vines and leaves. Crouched inside, David sat absorbed in private ritual. With his arm outstretched, he hovered his palm above the rock in a posture of suspended benediction, summoning miracle. The spell of superstition was
agonizingly near, promising to possess him. Beneath the rock something powerful was fermenting. Stubbornly,
anxiously, he waited for its magic to congeal, to move into the alcove like an invisible floating gauze and shudder away the awful doubt that was poisoning his fantasy.
"David, where are you? . . . "
1
2
His name was called again, cast into the locust and scrub where he was hidden. The boy's voice lilted with exasperation and boredom. Irritated, David stiffened his arm in a gesture of rejection. Gary had spoiled the
imminence that had filled this alcove, the taboo that had dwelt here among its musty confines. Now it whined with an aria of flies' wings. From beneath the rock seeped the cloying smell of rotten meat. He fidgeted uncomfortably.
The What He Made, buried underneath, had become corrupt. A combination of revulsion and morbid excitement tugged at him. The compulsion to lift the rock and look underneath was almost unbearable, but he resisted it, afraid of
disappointment. While the fetish remained covered its mystery was perfect, and its power to fascinate him preserved.
It's not a game, he demanded, straining to steady his arm, to keep it aloft, as if his exertion could prove Gary wrong. It's not a game, it's real.
" . . . where are you? C'mon, come out . . . "
Outside the trees Gary called impatiently, riding the waves of grass like a lost boat.
"Go away," he whispered, secretly satisfied that Gary was still out there pacing the field searching for him.
As long as he stayed hidden here, Gary, who lacked a sense of direction, wouldn't go far. It was Gary's fault that he'd come here to disturb the spell of What He Made. Gary
had said something terrible, something hurtful, he had said, It's only a game. So David had punished him with
abandonment, left him to wander the meadow grasses, pilotless.
Guiltily he brooded down at the rock, half buried in damp and decaying leaves. The leaves were the color of bruise.
11. . . n o fair ditching me like this. C'mon, come out . . . "
He gathered himself closer, turning his frown like a collar against Gary's voice. He had cursed Gary aloud before running into the trees. But rather than avenging Gary's denial, the words seemed only to have upset David more. Crawling inside the alcove, he had huddled with his face hidden, choking back tears.
" . . . always take off when you get mad. C'mon, man, where are you? . . . " Gary's voice moved beyond the trees somewhere to his right. ". . . 1 could find you, if I wanted to, you know . . . "
David scowled, knowing Gary would never come into the stand of dark, stunted locusts because David could
spring out from his hiding place and frighten him.
This was David's secret place, his sanctuary. The alcove was enclosed by the arched branches of a chokecherry shrub. Honeysuckle vine had climbed up and slowly begun to strangle it, forming a slumped lattice of twisted vines and
4
sinking limbs. Even at the height of summer, new leaves collected underneath, tossed from the dying branches.
Black-shelled creatures crept through them unseen along carpets of legs. This was his secret place, a shrine, hallowed by the sacrifice of the things he'd built. He brought them here, totems of plastic and wood, to undergo trials, ordeals, rites he'd invented to make his creation real. To make miracle happen.
Skin smooth and marble white, the rock rested among the leaves, softly exhaling the odor of decay. It whispered at his hovering palm, urging him to reach down and slide his fingers underneath, to lift the edge and see. He had to know the flies' progress on the What He Made.
Davidavidavidavid . . .
A superstitious dread, like the shadow of an unseen gesture made above and behind him, passed over the surface of the rock. He drew his arm back.
" . . .C'mon, man, where are you? . . . "
Briefly David uncurled his fingers and looked into his palm. With a fingertip he traced ridges of scabs, spots of blue-black that speckled peeling skin. He'd attempted a tattoo there, pushed in with the point of a sewing needle and dabs of India ink, one of many rituals he'd devised, held in solemnity until it had proven a disappointment. His
lip began to tremble and he sat huddled, staring at the rock.
Outside, rolling up to the shore of locust and scrub oak in silent waves, was the yellow grass. On hot and sullen days pollen hung above it in breathless suspense.
Grasshoppers buzzed in conspiracy out there, monitoring the movement of red-armored ants who hunted among its stalks.
Sometimes he heard the syllables of his name suggested in their rhythms. Sometimes, standing alone out there with his arms raised above the blades, he was sure he could feel it roll past him in a current, transporting some message that rose in bubbles to the surface, releasing the coded gestures of an intelligence that lay submerged beneath. Now Gary walked in it with his long legs and his loud voice and it seemed to be only grass anymore, as if his presence had brought an end to its enchantment. Bringing Gary here had been, he thought, another disappointment.
Evening was beginning to settle into the trees, coloring their leaves a fading yellow. When darkness came it would fall quickly, in a long sigh. Soon, as the days moved by, the daylight would grow shorter and the afternoons cool. Winter would come and this summer would be gone.
Damn you, he'd shot the words out before plunging into the trees, Damn you forever.
" . . . C'mon, quit hiding," Gary's voice returned across the waves, tired, dragging restlessly over the grass.
". . . I'm going to go back," he threatened with a whine.
"How do I get back? . ."
6
In the afternoon they had followed the dry
irrigation ditch in procession from his house, leaving the signature of a sneaker printed on his bedroom windowsill.
Ghost currents molded the ditch's dried bed, which wound under cover of milkweed and skunkbrush tufts toward the trees. It was an act of initiation they had rehearsed many times over cobwebby attic boxes, in the bewildered disorder of abandoned houses, at the wordless unfolding of limbs in glossy photographs.
"David . . . "
Davidavidavid. He wanted to stop up his ears.
He'd been leading Gary here, to the secret place in the trees at the head of the ditch, to force him to believe by proving that he was a part of the magic, part of David's secret, his creation, as he was a part of the secret that David had buried under the rock.
" . . . Dave, I'm sorry, okay? . . "
Tears quivered in his eyes as he stared into the ruined tattoo. Another David, an older David, would return here some day and prod, with a half-sad smile as if at old curiosities, the bleached bones of his summers. He didn't want that. Clutching the peeling tattoo in his fist, David whispered, "I'll never change my mind, I never will, never."
A dark shape winked past along the boundary of the trees. Emboldened by impatience, Gary was moving in closer.
David ducked back, a branch cracked under foot. His heart
leapt and he sat very still, holding his breath. For several moments there was no sound of Gary's movement
through the grass. David became aware of the thickness of the smell that was rising up from the rock. He was certain it was being carried like pollen out to the edge of the meadow where Gary was standing.
" . . . I'll do it, okay?" Gary's voice groaned, closer now. Then, reluctantly, "I'll let you mark my hand.
C 'mon, man . . . come out . . . "
The tattoo was to have been an inoculation against faithlessness. David nipped at the rock with a guilty,
uncertain glance. He hadn't meant to make the fetish in Gary's image, at least not at first.
See. I told vou. he was going to cast up the rock before Gary's amazed eyes, and proclaim, It's the best thing I ever made.
Leaves crackled softly under his knees and for a moment the buzzing wavered, as if the flies had become
agitated. Something perverse was buried under there, something more than rotten chicken meat, he believed, or globs of wax and fat. It had things of Gary's buried with it, wore bits of Gary on its skin. He swallowed, feeling suddenly afraid of the insistent buzzing. At that moment he wanted to get up, to dive out to the grass and sail home with his friend, to forgive, and let the rock and the awful thing under it become forgotten.
8
" . . . Man," Gary complained, near enough to brush the reefs of skunk weed and thistle, "I'm bored — c'mon, come out. I didn't mean what I said, okay? . . . "
"Liar," David hissed.
" . . . hey, I thought you 'had something to show me' . . ." A taunt this time, impatient and irritated.
Unsheathing his hand from his lap, David jabbed at the covering of leaves. The buzzing heightened to an excited pitch and he quickly pulled his hand away.
With his pulse throbbing in his temples he stared at the rock. On its surface was the symbol he'd scratched into it before entombing the What He Made. He rubbed at his flaking palm. Unlike the symbol on his hand, this symbol was not dying, it seemed to have gathered leaves to cover
itself, had become stained in the rains and dust, had taken up residence out here and no longer belonged to anyone.
Unlike the other things he had made, broken and burned and tortured by his dissatisfaction, the What He Made had not become useless after leaving his hands. In its hole under the flat rock, enshrined beneath cathedral-arch
branches gilded with leaves and vines, the fetish was still being created.
From miles away it seemed, his friend called. He didn't listen. He had to see.
A swarm of flies whirled out. Fingers gripping the edge, he pushed the rock higher. An orange-speckled
beetle skittered away in a panic. Underneath was a rectangular hole, lined with dozens of small stones, arranged meticulously. He craned his head for a look inside.
There it was in the bottom of the hole, a small human figure wrapped in a dirty dishtowel. Its face was covered. The stench of rotting meat rose up in a wave.
Swallowing against the urge to gag, he reached quickly down and plucked away one corner of the rag. The staring eyes had shriveled. A subtle, busy movement was going on under the rag, a throng of soft activity, blind and white. And, matted and falling away from the skull like the fluff of a dead flower, were strands of long black hair. Even in decay, its face was Gary's.
The rock went down with a thump. Scooting away in a clamor of leaves, David swatted at the flies with a spasm of fear. He believed they'd poison him if they touched him.
It was dead. He'd made it with his hands and then he'd murdered it.
Panic swelled in his throat. He shouldn't have done this, he shouldn't have ever.
Swirling and flickering, the flies filled the alcove in a choking cloud, softly pelting him. He watched helplessly as they floated into the air, escaping his
sanctuary. And coming to meet them was Gary, who'd heard the rock thump down and who was now stepping inside, his
10
hand reaching out to part the branches.
Scribbled flowers, the word "peace," the names of rock-n-roll bands decorated his blue jeans in ballpoint.
Browned by the sun, Gary's arms and legs had become defined with new muscle tone this summer, his thirteenth. Finger
marks the color of plums dotted one arm. "I found you," he called into the trees triumphantly, peering, his gaze
beaming across the trellis.
David sat wide-eyed and unmoving as a rabbit.
With fascinated horror he watched his friend1s face as the scent of rotten meat sifted through the leaves. He saw Gary grimace, then pull the branches back.
Sunlight dappled the long black hair that hung to Gary's shoulders. "Hey Dave, what're you doin in there? . .
ii
The branches were parted and light splashed into David's blinking face. With a gasp he turned away, holding his hands to shield his face from the sun, from discovery, and the flies swirled around his crouched figure, escaping, scattering like spores.
Boots had scuffed across the snow in a long arc, inscribing a question-mark of prints over its surface. The field was white and anonymous as a blank page. Oversized and rubber-soled, the boots had proceeded with uncertain familiarity to the trees as if navigating by memory through fictitious grasses, razed months ago by snow and freezing winds. Winter had returned. Fleets of clouds hung in blockade overhead, laden with erasure.
Gray and skeletal, the grove echoed with the emptiness of a dismantled stage, its greenery unhinged and stowed away, it seemed, into some inaccessible keeping- place. The figures of the locusts looked drawn in charcoal and the soft lead of pencil. Within the shelter of their gaunt limbs the snow, untouched by the wind or thin
sunlight, was deep and soft, and through it the boots had pushed their wake to the threshold of the thicket where they halted, leaving deep prints from a long and pondering
motionlessness. The alcove was a mere wickerwork of twigs.
Birds, scavenging for seeds, had tracked the snow
underneath. A coded intention seemed spelled out in the clusters of strokes; but whether the message was a
reassurance left behind by the summer or was simply an
11
12
enfacement of winter, written in a tongue indecipherable to the walkers above earth, it was impossible to tell. After a long moment the boots had turned in their tracks and
returned through the trees, trudging with unfulfilled mission back across the field. In the days that followed, their prints melted slowly, grew large and distorted, then the clouds rallied and erased them in a new sediment of snow.
Down the valley, the town was besieged in winter.
Days were easily measured in the cycle of steam through the schoolhouse heaters; like measured respiration, steam would hiss softly through leaking hallway valves, then swell in succession into the grilles of each classroom^ causing a warm and contented ticking sound. The breathing of the
school building was a constant undertone, quietly intrusive, stealing attention away while voices droned lessons before chalk-streaked faces of blackboards. Behind the ranks of wooden desks, David, always at a seat in the back, would look up from the pages of a paperback and drift his gaze outside, to watch the snow fall in great, silent clusters.
Over Christmas break of their sophomore year Gary bought the car. With four-hundred dollars in mattress- pressed bills, some wadded, some folded, the collected savings from odd jobs or gifts slipped into birthday cards, he answered an add in the Thrifty Nickel for a 1969 Buick Skylark, black-topped and robin's-egg blue. The vinyl
coating on top was as peeling and scaly as old snake skin, the finish faded and almost colorless, all its lustre gone.
When Gary brought the Skylark home, his father welcomed it with loud and immediate objection. Gary stood his ground.
The car would thereafter be seen parked in the evenings inside the yard, faithfully sitting in its dirt-worn space near the front door.
In the cold sunlight the Buick appeared almost an ash white, tinted with gray; when the day was overcast the car seemed a powder-blue, contrasting against the sky with an apparent wilfulness. Charging up the highway, it
challenged the complacent whiteness of the snowy field,
which, sparkling and seamless, was marked now and again only by sprinting rabbit paws.
The Skylark became their confessional, their diligence. As if impervious to harm or time they burned hours away parading up and down Main Street with deliberate routine, or parked on quiet back roads with cigarettes and bottled beer. With the radio barely audible, to mask the listening silence, they confessed fears, great dreams, and hatreds. One evening at the Rialto, waiting for the sky to darken and the lights to go up on the big screen, Gary made them swear that each would be best man at the other's
wedding. Gary wanted his wedding photographs to be staged like the cover of a Beatles album, everyone in dark suits except Dave, who was to be dressed in white, with a black
1 4
corsage.
One weekend Gary disappeared with the Skylark and was gone, without a word, for two weeks. When he returned, he wore tie-died T-shirts like the robes of a neophyte, bringing with him stories of Red Rocks, Laguna and the Grateful Dead. The car was different, too. A decal of a skull, with red and blue streaks of lightning cleaving its crown, had been fixed inside the windshield, in the upper corner, like an icon. The car seemed older, its acceleration was weaker, hesitant, and there was a deep rattling noise inside the engine. Something had happened to the Skylark during the trip; it had been winded from overrunning, from being pushed to endurance in pursuit of, or perhaps escape from, something. There were gaps in Gary's account of the trip, gaps of whole days which he never volunteered to fill.
David didn't press with questions. For the first time, there was an awkwardness between them. A distance, veneer thin, had intervened in their trust. David knew then that they were harboring secrets from one another.
For three months the Buick was shut away in the high-school shop building. Light would shine through the apertures in the cinder-block walls, sometimes late into the night, glowing orange through the dirty glass panels as if a furnace were burning inside. Some nights Gary didn't go home, sleeping instead on the back seat of the car. They saw each other in the hall between classes and would talk
briefly, laugh over superficial things, evading by silent agreement deeper subjects. As the final winter waned before the graduation ceremony, they both privately anticipated the march across the gymnasium floor in polyester caps-and-
gowns, red and white, the spring ritual when they would be sown like seeds. The stiffened loam of seasons-old thistle, the deadfall of locust and oak, had begun to soften with thaw, and the ice of the creek, sour from winter, began to buckle during the warming days with loud sounds, the
cracking of deep bone within the earth.
On a Friday morning in April, the doors of the shop building rattled upward and the Skylark rolled out into the daylight, its rebuilt engine humming. Its faded finish had been waxed, the chrome grille polished. Bright morning glinted briefly across the windshield obscuring all but Gary's hands on the wheel. Then the amber turn signal blinked on, the car turned up Main Street and was gone.
The following Sunday flooded over the valley's brim in a slow tide, leaking reddish light into Dave's bedroom window. Tangled in his covers, Dave turned away, shunning it. Hundreds of miles to the east, below the curve of horizon, the tide was already hours deep. The sky,
filled with daylight, rested atop the earth like a huge, inverted bowl. An endless seam of highway, running from Salt Lake through the mountains, to the Mississippi, and on to the crowded East, bisected the plains. Over a stretch of
16
the highway, at a place which seemed to lie directly beneath the center of sky, squatted a concrete overpass, gray and inscrutably solid.
Soft wisplike hair had grown out on Gary's face.
Smiling vaguely, Gary flung first one, then the other license plate into a nearby field. They spun briefly,
slicing the air, and then fluttered down to the ground with a soft tinny sound. They were incongruous on the dark
tilled dirt, shiny, metallic, white letters stamped on green mountain backdrops, looking like bottles washed upon a
strange shore, hastily corked but holding no message. Gary gazed after them a moment, considered their distance, then strode to the blacktop where the Skylark sat patiently idling. He walked calmly, an evenness measuring his movements. Then he got in, fitted his round-rimmed
sunglasses over his eyes like pilot's goggles, and closed the door.
Amber turn signals blinking, the car moved into the high-speed lane, steadily accelerating. Gary put in a cassette and turned up the volume. He pressed his foot fully to the floor. The decal of the skull, red and blue lighting streaks bursting through its crown, floated in the corner of the windshield, mirage-like. His heart beat thinly as time, and the goal before him began to expand with
incredible speed. In the last moment, as the Skylark left his control and plunged him forward, he felt for the first
time a sense of certainty, and the relief of burden.
With a sudden and violent gasp the Skylark met the guardrail and leapt upward. In blue and red, with a
resounding clang Gary met the edifice, an exploding light streamed into his mind, and he was gone. Glass and steel scattered in an exhalation and the wreckage of the Skylark fell to the ground. The concrete shuddered briefly, then returned to stillness. Rolling over the empty cornfields, the sound of the collision travelled north and south, and east, and west toward the mountains far away, below the western horizon, where pinkish morning faded into the sky and Dave tossed in his bed, hearing nothing.
Chapter 3
It was evening. They had been looking for hours now.
"I'm sorry, Dave, I don't believe we're going to find it." Schultz placed a hand on Dave's shoulder and looked out at the sky. "It's getting late," he said, his grip applying gentle pressure, holding Dave back from
further searching. The sun had set an hour and a half ago.
Before them in the twilight lay mountainous heaps of discarded auto bodies, crushed and stacked in piles like folded grocery bags.
"Yeah," Dave answered.
After the funeral they had driven out to the edge of the city in search of auto salvage yards and scrap heaps.
They had bought a street map at a gas station and, after consulting the Yellow Pages borrowed from the motel, followed a boulevard out to the industrial zone. The boulevard tapered to a residential street flanked by row- houses and weedy vacant lots, then, passing beneath the
Interstate, it emerged a narrow and potholed lane
crisscrossed with railroad tracks. The Reverend drove
slowly. Crouched behind the wheel of their rental sedan, he peered uncertainly through the chainlink fences of places
18
with names like Johnny's Junk and Ace Auto Salvage.
Advertisements enticed scavengers with promises of Tires Good as New, or Reconditioned Armatures, or Quality Parts All Models Domestic and Foreign. Like a butcher's shop, the best parts were on display inside, behind glass cases.
Wheel rims were in careful stacks outside, mufflers lay on the ground in rows, jagged stumps of tailpipe cut jaggedly by torches.
They threaded their way through aisles of hulks, some abandoned, some violently torn; others had simply outlived their usefulness and now stared bewildered and blind through empty headlight sockets. Among the hulks, Dave had searched for a familiar glimpse of powder blue or snake-scaled vinyl, his heart cringing, waiting for the shock of recognition. In fantasy he'd expected a silent, morgue-like moment, the dramatic drawing back of the sheet.
But the accident was not so prominent in local memories; the city was large, it had been an exchange of goods, that was all. Schultz had done most of the asking and talking, but his inquiries had been met with shakes of the head, awkward apologies, and advice to ask down the road.
Dave shivered. A deep, barely audible vibration rumbled through the ground, a sound he'd noticed earlier, the noise from an electric plant a mile or so away. The threatening shape had shadowed his mind all the while he and Schultz had been out here, searching through the salvage
2 0
yards. The plant watched over the neighborhoods of warehouses and scrap yards like some dirty cathedral.
Because of the cluttered landscape, the stacks of crushed and folded auto bodies, he couldn't see across to the plant's point of contact with the earth, had nothing
identifiable — not the shape of tiny doorways, no parked vehicles or coal cars lined up in a queue — to judge its distance and therefore its scale. He tried, in his
imagination, to project himself against one of its oblong buildings or against the base of one of its cooling towers, but it was impossible. The difficulty haunted him.
The low humming sound, the pulsation of great turbines or machinery, echoed faintly across the distance.
Something of immensity was happening over there, something incomprehensible that had been keeping the fabric of reality together and that was now reaching him for the first time.
"It's been a couple of weeks, Dave. I don't believe that we're going to find it."
They walked back towards the car.
"I'm sorry, Dave."
"It's okay," he said.
He couldn't get the humming out of his head. It seemed to emanate from the belly of things, as if everything in sight were an illusion produced by some great engine
which was now powering down, fading with the growing dusk.
The ground he was walking on, the hulks of hallow autos, the
shadow of Schultz1s back several paces before him threatened to shimmer, seemed on the verge of slipping away.
David, where are vou? The memory emerged, almost palpably, from the shadows. Grief clutched him, black and cavernous and too terrible to examine. The chrome of the door handle of the sedan was solid and cool, reassuring. He grasped it.
They left the scrap yards behind. Schultz switched on the headlights on their way back.
Back at the Best Western Motel, Schultz bought him dinner. They said little to one another. In the motel room Dave pretended to watch an alien weatherman gesture at the symbols on the map of an alien state. His eyes drifted to the yellow curtains, stirring in a mild breeze. As they swayed, a crack of the floodlight outside slipped through.
It had all been a dream, he felt, his life before so pleasant, so perfect, that he had gotten lost in it and
forgotten how to find his way back. Now it was over, and he couldn't recognize where he was. He wondered if Gary had felt pain.
"You might as well get some sleep, my boy," the Reverend told him. Schultz had a note of disappointment in his voice, but whether at their failure to find Gary's
crushed Buick, to confirm the finality for Dave, or because of the impenetrable glass behind Dave's expression, he
didn't let on. "We have a bit of a drive tomorrow." He
2 2
smiled. Schultz had volunteered to drive him here for the funeral, all the way to Minnesota, the place of the family plot and the scene Gary had chosen for his accident. A three-day drive.
"Thank you," Dave said. Schultz smiled.
At the funeral he had stared at the closed casket, not able to see into it, not able to imagine the reality inside. While it remained sealed and impenetrable, the
contents writhed too much with the possibility of emptiness.
Behind his pain, Dave had stood beside the casket, hating it for being closed, wanting more than anything to lift the lid, to peer inside and see.
"Goodnight," Schultz said after switching off the television. For his sake Dave pretended to sleep. In the next bed the old man's breathing soon became heavy with
exhaustion, and sleep. Dave turned his head toward the open windows.
The yellow curtains swayed, moved by a breeze from an approaching spring thunderstorm. It was coming in from the west the weatherman had said, from the mountains. He stared into the curtains, watching them sway. Perhaps, if he stared long enough, he would catch a glimpse of the
yellow grass, miraculously waiting for him. Then, quietly, so as to no wake Schultz, he could simply climb through the curtains and emerge, forever, on the other side, in the past. Perhaps he could bring it all back.
As the distant sound of thunder rolled in, Dave closed his eyes, and waited.
si
PART II
"ANATHEMA"
Chapter 1
After the jack hammers came and carved up the
street, big loaders peeled it up and hauled it away. Through the windows of Rx Drugs and the A-l Drive In, the high-
school kids watched longingly as if an old favorite blanket were being taken to the dump. Dust chalked the town for days, and the stench of sulphur, bubbling inside the bellies of the asphalt machines, lingered in the air. It was like the world had come to an end. Sometime during those weeks, the dogwoods went into bloom.
Eventually the road crew made everything right again. At sunset one Friday the crew put away their leather gloves and orange helmets and, as if escorting engines of siege, followed the machines up Airport Hill and out of town. The machines made their lumbering return to Highway Barn #3. There they were consecrated with Kerosene, then the steel doors were padlocked. Main Street was young again, until next time.
On Dave's keyring jingled a perfect trinity: his gold housekey, the small bronze padlock key to the shed at the cemetery, and the chrome-plated key to his truck. Home,
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work, and vehicle, the things that triangulated the routine of his day, were all easily grasped in his hand. In one of his dresser drawers at home lay an aluminum duplicate of the key to the garage, left behind so as not to ruin the
symbology.
With a snap of his hand Dave snatched up his keys and hopped onto the sidewalk. He was in a good mood. Work was done, he was out of the house, and his truck was parked at the curb, its engine ticking as it cooled after his
habitual race into town. Old Spice tingled under his
collar. In spite of Danielle having canceled out on their plans for the night, he'd dragged an iron across a fresh shirt, put on his dress shoes, and decided to head into town anyway. The evening was open now, unplanned. He felt oddly relieved.
Up ahead was a cafe. The name "Chuck Wagon"
appeared in big red letters along a western-style false front. Old wagon wheels had been built into the wooden railing at the entrance, their rims painted the same bright red. Before reaching them Dave stopped to count the bills in his wallet. He had four ones, one five, and a ten,
enough for a full tank of gas and a couple bottles of wine.
Eddie would be working in the kitchen this evening. He was counting on Eddie to do the buying.
From the curved necks of the streetlamps red and blue streamers hung like disheveled corsages, the remains of
26
the weekend's 4th of July parade. In the first official recognition of Main's rejuvenation, hundreds of feet had scuffed its surface while the Mayor and his Cadillac proceeded from the railroad tracks to the A-l Drive In,
followed by the Garden and Rotary club floats, and the clop of horses pulling wagons, children, and antique firefighting equipment. Clumps of horse manure still lay demurely in the gutters. It was hard for Dave to get used to Main's new surface, smooth, taut, and tucked trimly at the sides with new gutters. From years of repaving it had been nearly eighteen inches thick at the crest, higher than the curbs.
Parallel parking had been an adventure. When he was eight or nine he'd pretended that the family Ford was the submarine Nautilus, threatening to capsize in its parking place. While his mom shopped in the market, Dave would push open the
driver's door like a hatch opening to safety, or else boldly unlatch the other side, risking it swinging out of his hands and striking the sidewalk with a painful scrape and a sharp,
"Watch it with that!" from Mom as she emerged from the store, and certain death by imaginary flooding waters.
He jingled his keys, ringing them like tinny bells to invoke distraction, then stuffed them safely into his pocket. They were his amulet against boredom. With them he could escape the endless evenings, which would settle their weight on him after dinner time and fill him with a vague anxiety. He liked to get out on the highway and just drive.
Sometimes he wished he could let go of the wheel, slide on over to the passengers' side, and let his empty space pilot the truck, following the bright beams off the curve of the earth.
It was nine on a Wednesday night, near closing time, and the dining area was empty. From the recesses of the lounge, lit by the soft red, blue, and yellow neon of beer advertisements, gurgled a conversation about a wetback who'd gotten kicked in the groin by a horse.
"You're all spiffed up," Doreen the fat waitress commented, grinning as she placed a plastic-sheathed menu on the counter before him. He slid onto a stool.
"I'm going out," he cheerfully lied.
A slow and unenthusiastic game of pool was being played in the back. Mostly patronized by local ranchers, the Chuck Wagon Restaurant and Lounge was considered more of a bar than a restaurant and was not a popular place for
dining. On Saturday nights during the summer the tables were cleared from the small hardwood dance platform and Country Western bands set up to play in a corner. The Wagon had gone through three owners in the last five years, and the latest, William McDowd, was the former owner of the Exxon station
and new to the restaurant business. According to rumor, McDowd had been an army cook in Korea, and had a terrible temper. His french fries were unpeeled and his burgers routinely fat and juicy, more in the shape of a meatball
28
than a patty, as if for the sake of defying convention.
While Doreen went into the kitchen to fetch Eddie, Dave's attention was drawn to the conversation in the
lounge. Around a small table sat a cluster of men, slouched over their beer bottles as if shading them from the neon with the tilted brims of their cowboy hats. A voice drawled on about the wounded wetback, belched a slurred exclamation, then returned to murmuring. He had been found in a stall where a mare had just given birth. Curled up next to that colt in the straw, his eves bulging. There were groans and goddamns of sympathy, and a uncomfortable fidgeting which suggested a protective cupping of groins under the table.
While Dave listened he absently crunched spilt sugar granules with his thumbnail. There was a loud smack as a rack of pool balls was broken up, and the table became silent.
'"Jito," Eddie gave him a nod and an awkward smile, "you come to visit me?"
On Eddie's apron was a tomato stain in the distinct shape of a handprint. "Wow, Ed . . . gainful employment and everything, huh?"
Eddie stood with his arms wet to the elbow and hanging limply at his sides, and quickly rambled accolades for the owner, "Bill," and what a great guy he was for giving him two dollars an hour and all hours he wanted.
Dave's leg jiggled impatiently on the rung of the stool.
Restless anxiety was churning in him again. He didn't want to sit here for too long.
Short, irritable spatula scrapes from the kitchen warned Eddie to get back to work. The little man was
nervous, trapped by courtesy and wanting to get away. Dave frowned, eyes on the tomato stain. Eddie was less vulnerable and pathetic, it seemed to him, when drunk.
". . . So, you keepin out of trouble, Jito?"
Dave shrugged. "Yeah, I guess," he said. "Hey, Ed," he lowered his voice, "I need a favor."
Eddie slumped a little, as if expecting the next question. He glanced nervously toward the kitchen. "I don1 know, Jito, ---"
"Come on, Ed. It's just for me, I'm going out tonight. Just some wine, that's it, I promise." He leaned
forward on the stool. "I won't even be in town with it.
Come on, Ed . . ."
A few loud slaps of the spatula, then a gruff voice called out. Eddie looked guiltily down at the floor.
"Sure, Jito, no problem," he finally mumbled, and then hurried back to the kitchen.
The smell of cigarette smoke followed Dave out the door. He stood at the entrance with his hands in his
pockets, flanked by the two gaudily painted wagon wheels, and fingered his keys in his pocket. Then he started off to the liquor store, where Eddie was supposed to meet him.
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While Eddie been talking to him there had been disapproving stares from the table inside. Eddie was known as a town wino. And Dave had a reputation now; strangely, it had developed after Gary's suicide. Suddenly he had become a problem for everyone, an unraveled thread in the town's tapestry that had gone unnoticed, somehow, and had to be accounted for. So, with post-office gossip and telephone chatter, over dinner tables and at the check-out of the Cash N Carry, he was quickly woven into a scheme of things.
After returning from Minnesota with Schultz he'd found himself briefly at the center of attention. Some people were full of kindness and condolences, like Mrs.
Wagner at the Cash-N-Carry, some were full of droopy-eyed pity, or were awkward, visibly uncomfortable with how or whether to say anything at all. Mrs. Quintane who drafted his paychecks at City Hall, made a point of refusing to acknowledge anything at all, as if doing so would be an unfair imposition which she resented. Others, like the
cowboy-hatted men in the bar, considered him with a reserved but vindicated pity, as if, had he only cut his hair and associated with the right crowd, he wouldn't have gotten mixed up in such problems. A tragedy like this, a rare and willful act of violence, seemed to fulfil everyone's sense
of rightness.
For quite a while he'd felt as if people were waiting to see what he was going to do next, watching for
symptoms of Gary's self-destruction. And, though no one had yet asked him to his face, he knew that the question buzzing around town was whether he knew why Gary had done it. Even his parents, in the way they kept a respectful distance from the topic, appeared to believe that the secret was his,
something he would disclose in time.
As the weeks wore on, the immediacy of his attention in town had worn off. Things went on as usual.
Time passed, routine set in. Then restlessness, and the shapeless anxiety, began to grow on him.
It was a continuous thing, his need to keep
moving. It had been with him since April. The object was to prevent hardening and cracking like the pavement of old Main, where layers of memories and wishful thoughts had built up until the crest had swelled higher than the curbs.
When that happened, renovation was needed; machines were hired, the chalk lines snapped out and the inconvenience removed.
He sighed. All summer, Eddie had been out on Main after dinner around nine o'clock, like he had always been, where Dave could find him. Not anymore. The repaving of Main had changed Eddie, too. The construction crew had come along and dismantled the old wino's loitering places. Now Eddie had moved to a timeclock, washing dishes.
Maybe the old wino could afford to buy me a bottle for once, Dave thought. He'd probably spent a hundred
32
dollars on Eddie's booze habit over the summer.
His dress shoes clicked him past a fly-spotted back room window and he saw his image drift across the glass. He pulled up on his shoulders and against the mood that had begun to sag with them. If he wasn't careful he was going to become depressed.
In his closet at home was a chunk of the True Main, hidden in a cardboard shoebox. He'd pulled it, gray and hard like a mummified fist, from a pile of rubble one night. It proved that the last twenty years had existed.
Now, on renovated Main, a pickup truck rumbled through the arc of a streetlamp, the light pulling the silhouettes of the driver and his girlfriend, melded in shadow beside him, across the back window like putty. He watched the red taillights move away into the darkness outside the city limits. Engine rumble drifted back in quiet waves. He had listened to the endless aaahhh of dial tone for several minutes tonight before getting up the nerve to call Danielle. Before he could ask, she'd told she'd already had plans. Soft static had crackled awkwardly over the line, and behind the mutual silence Dave understood that she didn't want him to come along. There was nothing either of them could think of to say. He said goodbye, then hung up.
The evening suddenly began to loom ahead of him.
Main Street was empty. He no longer felt like driving
around, but there wasn't much else to do.
He sighed, "Shit."
At the brink of the curb he stood as if stranded, wanting to cross but hesitant to step out. Inches from his feet the pavement lay flat and motionless. There was a
faint, rapid pulsation in the anemic blue-white cast by the streetlight. He gazed into the pavement as if at a
reflection on water. The asphalt seemed to be flowing, flowing noiselessly with a terrible speed.
Slowly, he leaned forward on his toes until the shadow of his hand pooled and stretched to meet his
fingertips. He waited for the surface to break at his touch, to ripple away in a long, streaming wake. Everyone had driven over it for all these years, after all, and
hadn't known how deep it was. The surface was thin now, he imagined, like a crust of ice over a river. Reaching
forward, he pictured himself falling into the pavement,
being sucked into the invisible current and pulled violently away. Somewhere miles away his drowned body would snag on the post of a sign and he would float, bloated and unseen, his legs trailing in the current like weeds, while the traffic moved above him and the surface of the asphalt slowly sealed up behind him in a frozen black scar.
There was a voice behind him. He jumped up, startled.
" . . . Jito." Eddie stood at a respectful
34
distance, not wishing to interrupt. "I got your stuff, Jito." He held up a brown bag.
"You don't look so good, Jito."
Embarrassed, Dave looked at Eddie and shrugged.
"Nah," he said, "I'm okay." He took the bag and looked inside with a confused frown. Nestled inside the bag were two green bottles of white wine. The bag crackled as Dave held it protectively against his stomach. "Hey, Eddie," he began hopefully, seeing the glum expectation on Eddie's face, "you wouldn't want to drive around with me for a while, would you?"
Eddie shuffled uncomfortably, trying to avoid the plea in Dave's eyes. "What happen to your girl," he asked of Dave's feet, "She stand you up, huh?"
"She wants to go out with her girlfriends," Dave shrugged. "They're going to hang out at the bowling alley."
He swallowed, watching Eddie expectantly.
Eddie's eyes flickered up to his face. "Sure, Jito, I'll go with you."
The first empty bottle was tossed from the window while they drove and tinkled to a rest in some sleeping clumps of oakbrush. Dave kept away from town, as he'd
promised, now that Eddie was working and was supposed to be on the wagon. Gravel popped inside the fenders as Dave followed a swath of headbeams along a gravelled county road.
The air smelt of sage.
" . . . kicked in the juevos by a horse, eeeech,"
Eddie commented, hunched up on the passenger's side with the second screw-top bottle of wine freshly opened and cradled in his lap. Eddie was becoming drunk and repeatedly
inserting self-conscious accolades for Bill McDowd, like the refrain to a song. Dave barely listened. Eddie had had jobs before, stacking boards at the lumber yard or pushing a broom at the Cash-N-Carry for two weeks, three weeks, a
month. Whenever he lost them he would disappear from sight for a while, then reappear one day on Main drunk and back to his old self again. Entitled to condescension for his brief bout with employment, he would take back ownership of his title of town wino, which was reserved and waiting for him.
" . . . They said he couldn't breathe to talk, he was just layin there with his eyes poppin in his face. Eh .
. ." he shuddered, fingering the neck of the bottle. "That wetback from Mexico ain't gonna be makin no more babies."
"Yeah," Dave said. A languid buzzing was
spreading over his face. The wine had churned his thoughts into a slurry, and his anxiety over the long stretch of evening ahead, with its accompanying restlessness, emerged for brief moments before sinking away again. He
concentrated on the road. An orange eye blinked into view as a mailbox slid past in the dark, its reflector glowing, designating the entrance to a rutted lane. In one of the
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dark and shuttered barns set back from the road a man had lain, rigid and covered with sweat, curled up beside the warm and glistening body of a stillborn foal.
"They'd have to shoot me in the cabeza," Eddie said.
"Huh?"
"If I was layin there like that, I'd tell them, 'shoot me in my head,'" Eddie answered with a guttural flourish.
Dave scowled. "That's easy for you to say." He irritably noticed the sourish smell of sweat and dishwater that was lingering from Eddie's side of the seat.
"If my juevos were broken, I'd say, shoot me in la cabeza," Eddie insisted.
"Since when are your balls that important to you, Ed?"
"Go to hell," Eddie waved him off angrily then turned away, insulted. "Wouldn't matter if he could talk anyway," he muttered, facing his window. "Those wetbacks don't talk English."
Neither of them spoke for a while. Gravel churned under the wheels as the truck moved along. Outside, clouds
flitted fast and high across a nearly full moon.
"You don't speak Spanish, do you, Jito?" Eddie turned to him.
"No," Dave said, sighing.
Eddie nudged his shoulder slyly. "You know how to learn Spanish from a Mexican girl, don1 you?" he asked.
With his hands he made a parting motion before his face, then stuck his tongue out and flicked it lewdly. He sniggered proudly to himself.
"You're a riot, Ed," Dave said uncomfortably.
"Gimme a break." He sniffed the sour smell emanating from Eddie and glanced over at the balled-up kitchen apron on the seat. His mood had changed. He wished now that he was
alone.
"You never do it to your girl?"
Dave flinched, instantly aware of the Old Spice still clinging to his neck. "When was the last time you did it, Eddie?"
Eddie swayed limply in the seat and confronted him with a bleary stare. "I was doin it," he told him, "when you were still making la kaka in your diapers."
"With who," Dave snorted, "Pulvansky's goats?"
"Go to hell, you bastard," Eddie waved him off again and returned to sulking at the window. Dave drove along, muttering irritably, his head swirling from the wine.
He slowed down. They were coming to the top of a short hill, where the road ended at an intersection with another.
Dave pulled over to the side and stopped the truck in a wide area bare of weeds. The shapes of aluminum cans, crushed flat, glinted dully in the rutted road. Kids often parked
3 8
here to drink, or neck. No one else was around.
Dave killed the engine. "Where's that bottle, Ed?" he asked, reaching over for it. Eddie handed it over without a word, his face still turned to the window. He seemed to be nodding. Dave wiped off the mouth and took a big drink. Quiet had settled into the cab. From the hill the lights of town could be seen, twinkling in the valley a mile or two away.
Dave rolled his window down. In some nearby weeds a cricket was chirping. Dave thought glumly of Danielle, envisioning her long legs and skinny arms. He'd brought her up here a few weekends ago and she'd sat on his lap while they sipped green bottles of import beer. I've spent more time with you than any other guy I've gone out with, she'd said of their six weeks of dating, making it sound like a compliment and a complaint at the same time. It had been her way of confirming that they were "going out," he'd supposed, though he wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean, officially. She was full of wise-cracks and innuendos which he could never decipher as either encouragement or warnings. He grimaced. Danielle was only fifteen, a high-
school sophomore.
He stared sullenly out at the gleaming shapes of beer bottles scattered among the weeds. Some of them were undoubtedly his, sucked down to their foamy dregs and then thrown over the fence. Among them, anonymous and
indistinguishable from the others, were ones Gary had drunk from, Gary had touched with his lips. A sense of immediacy tightened his stomach. Only months ago he'd tossed those bottles away with an unconsidered casualness, and now
gleaming like ghosts, like relics, they lay there separating him from the past by an unspannable distance. He wanted to go back to April, during the week when his class was on the road trip to Texas and the last time he was really happy.
He wanted to see Gary again. Desperately, he wished he
could go to sleep and wake up before everything had changed, and to see Gary's long black hair, Gary's leather jacket, to hear Gary's voice talking beside him. He shut his eyes.
". . . I'm your buddy, man." He felt a hand on his shoulder and then the acrid smell of Eddie's breath
reached his face. Dave turned away, swallowing back a quick knot of resentment at the little man's intrusion in the
passenger's seat. Eddie's drunken hand pawed at him.
"I'm sorry, Jito. I'm your buddy, you know. Your buddy." A bleary attempt at understanding shone in Eddie's eyes. A mood of shared remorse became mingled in the
combination of Old Spice and sour kitchen smell, and there was a subtle collapse in Dave's face. When he turned his eyes were wet. He laughed a little, softly.
"You used to always say that to us," he said to Eddie, "when Gary and I would go to his place and you were drinking with his dad. You'd try shaking our hands about a
4 0
million times."
Eddie said indignantly, "He wouldn't shake. You told him I was queer for him, you pendejo."
Dave began laughing, and then Eddie did, in spite of himself. When they'd both stopped, Eddie picked up the bottle.
"Hey, let's get drunk, Jito."
The engine came to life and Dave pulled onto the road, wheels spitting dust. They stopped at the end of the road.
"Which way should we go, Ed?" he asked, his face numbed with wine. Before them another gravel road, obscure and unimproved, crossed their path. To the right it went into a valley, meandering past dingy rental cabins and the algae-covered hot springs from which the town got its name.
To the left the road swooped down a long incline toward an intersection with Rte. 114, the paved road that became Main Street. A barbed-wire fence stretched along the opposite side of the road, caught in their headbeams as if barring their path. "Which way?"
"I'm your buddy," Eddie muttered, his head sagging, the bottle in his lap.
Turning left, Dave began the long descent down the hill into town. The road dropped away in a steep grade,
curving down like a ramp, like an amusement park
rollercoaster. Like the "Hurricane" at Six Flags Over Texas.
He pressed the accelerator.
There was a quick lurch of his stomach as the hill dropped away. Eddie's head lifted up briefly like a drowner going for air, then slumped to his chest again. With the rising whine of the engine, a glance showed the needle at sixty, seventy miles per hour and then the stop sign at Rte.
114 materialized at the edge of the beams like a glowing red bead. He steadied the wheel, turning his eyes quickly toward the dark figure, aglow in the greenish light of the
dashboard, beside him.
His head was swirling. Be there, he thought, trying to ignore the sour smell, trying to see a leather jacket in the shadow of Eddie's workshirt. Depressing the accelerator further and with stubborn grip on wheel, he gritted his teeth as if to dare it.
Be there, he demanded, imagining the head turning and a glint on the little round glasses materialize, a smile
• • •
A flurry of gravel rattled loudly inside the right fenders, and the truck lurched sideways. Dave's heart
jumped. Looking up, Eddie made a sick grab for a handhold, his eyes suddenly open wide. "Aaah, sonofabitch . . . "
The stop sign came swooping toward them. Dave's foot went to the brake and the truck fishtailed sharply, going into a sidelong skid. As the stop sign slid by Dave braced himself against the cab's ceiling. With a sickening
4 2
spin the truck careened across the pavement and went down into the bar ditch on other side. It came to a rest with a cloud of dust blowing across the slanted beams of
headlights.
Dave was pressed up against his door and Eddie lay sprawled across the seat.
" . . . sonofabitch," Eddie fumbled to orient himself. He was sprawled across the seat, bottle still in hand. Dave was pressed up against his door, shaking with adrenalin. The truck was canted at a weird angle, lights shining up over the highway.
" . . . crazy bastard, you try to kill us"
"Huh?"
The bottle plopped down on floor and the smell of spilled wine rose up. "Crazy bastard, you try to kill us,"
Eddie cried, groping madly for the door handle.
"No I wasn't . . . " Dave stammered. The door opened, and Eddie climbed out as if the truck were a sinking ship.
"Hey, Ed, take it easy. We're okay . . . "
"Crazy sonofabitch, you grave digger . . . "
"We're okay, Ed, for Chrissakes."
" . . . try to put me in a grave, you wanna dig my hole, you crazy bastard . . . "
Eddie began staggering away at a half-lope, into the dark. Dave climbed out and ran around to the front.
There was the sound of heavy collapse in the grass followed by a curse, then more running. Eddie's dark shape melted away in the moonlight.
"Hey, Eddie . . . " Dave yelled. He peered into the darkness but could see nothing.
"Come on, Ed," he said half-loudly, his arms hanging at his sides. Eddie was gone.
He inspected the truck, which didn't seem damaged.
On the floor of the cab he found the wine bottle, still half full. With the bottle in hand he climbed up on the hood, then settled himself back against the windshield. His head was no longer spinning. Leaning back against the glass, he stared into the dust cloud blowing across the headbeams in tatters and drifting globs of shadow. He watched it for a long while, waiting hopefully for a sign of return, for a figure to materialize from the slowly settling dust. No one emerged.
Chapter 2
Once, while pushing the mower along, his foot fell through suddenly and he sank up to his knee in a grave. No pale hands with long and yellowed nails grasped for his ankle, he was not pulled by dead arms into the ground, leaving only a bubble of brown earth behind. He had only stepped into a cavity, concealed by a ceiling of rootbound sod, that had formed when some casket deep below had
collapsed upon itself like a spoiled gourd. After pulling out his foot he brushed off his pantleg, disappointed that it hadn't frightened him, that he couldn't have claimed later, I thought they were coming to get me . It was only the ground, and the solidity of the was sometimes deceptive.
The bologna sandwich he had packed for lunch had fallen out of his hastily crumpled plastic wrap, so he gave it a quick sniff before taking a bite. This was his second summer up here mowing, trimming dandelion stalks that lolled lazily at the base of headstones, disposing of vinyl flower bouquets after Mother's, Father's and Memorial Days, or after weekends when the weather was good, and sometimes, with a bonus added to his check, he dug graves. Today was such a day; a dozen yards from where he stood, chewing his dry sandwich in the shade of the cottonwoods, a shovel's
44
handle, smooth and shiny from use, protruded from a large hole in the ground. Nearby, sod lay in defeated clumps upon a tarpaulin and a sizeable mound of dirt, much more than seemed would have come from the waist-deep hole, was already heaped to the side. At eight this morning, his mouth clammy and eyes dry from the drinking the night before, he'd ambled up to the rectangular plot that Willard had marked out for him with twine and wooden stakes, and, with a yawn, pushed the shovel into the sod with a clean, stiff, slice.
It wasn't for a summer job as far as he was concerned, it was secluded, there was no pressure, and he enjoyed the authority of looking down over town. From the cottonwood grove which crowned the cemetery hill he had an unobstructed view of the solitary access road leading up
from town. A dust plume was rising from below the hill and there was the sound of an approaching car drifting toward the gates. Dave took another bite and stuffed the remaining sandwich into his lunchbag.
Leading a phalanx of dust, a beige Rambler station wagon rolled up to the gates, slowed, and rumbled over the
iron rails of the cattle guard. The driver hesitated and then, spotting Dave, glided up the lane towards him. Dave moved from the shade of the trees and sauntered into the sunlight.
"Dave, my boy . . . " Schultz greeted him cheerily from the driver's seat, his blue eyes beaming through the
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silver-rimmed glasses. He climbed out and extended his hand enthusiastically, as if having arrived at the end of a long journey. "How've you been, how've you been?” Schultz
appeared untouched by the heat of the noonday sun, freshly dressed in a polo shirt and gray J.C. Penny slacks. Having woken late this morning, this was the Reverend's first stop out of his house for the day.
"Alright," Dave answered.
"Glad to hear it — hey, you look like you've been doing some digging," Schultz observed.
Dave glanced down at his bare chest and stomach.
His pores were speckled with dirt. "Yeah," he said, "I've got a 'special project' the next couple of days."
The Reverend frowned, then looked over his shoulder at the dirt pile and protruding shovel handle
several feet from his parked Rambler, noticing them for the first time. He turned back to Dave with a troubled
expression.
"It wasn't anybody you would have heard about,"
Dave informed him. "They were from out of town."
Schultz followed him pensively to the edge of the grave. It was small, three feet by four feet, made to
accommodate a smaller casket. A rich, moist smell, the scent of beetles and worms, rose up from the opened ground.
"Oh dear," Schultz sighed, more out of fatigue than lament, as he looked down into the shallow hole.
Dave told him, "It's for a baby that died back in the Sixties. Its family's from up in Pueblo, and they're having it dug up and reburied here because this is where the
family plot is, according to Willard."
"I see," Schultz said, relieved. They both stood over the unfinished grave as if waiting for it to do
something. Dave's stomach gnawed at him. He uncrumpled his brown bag and pulled out the sandwich.
"I just started it this morning," Dave said, motioning with his foot toward the cut sod lying on the tarpaulin. The sod would be replaced, like grassy mosaic tiles, after the grave was filled in and packed down.
"They're forking out a thousand bucks for this, if you can believe it," he said, chewing. "I don't know why they had to wait for twenty years. The bones couldn't be much more than a handful of little twigs by now."
Schultz said, seriously, "People often get sentimental as they get older, Dave, you know that."
Absently, almost sadly, he prodded a stray dirt clod with his shoe. "Decisions like that aren't made for the benefit of the dead."
Dave had heard much the same logic when Gary was put into the ground this April, next to aunts and uncles and cousins thrice-removed, buried far from their high school, from home, from him, in a grave two thousand miles away out in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. "Yeah," Dave snorted,
4 8
"families tend to stay together."
Schultz continued to gaze into the grave, a pained expression on his face, and gave no response. Dave's
sarcasm sometimes offended him. Regretting it, Dave tried to steer the topic of conversation away. Taking another bite, he offered, "You want some?" and held the sandwich out as if remembering himself. Mustard grinned between the bread slices.
"Oh — no thanks, no thanks," the Reverend looked up. "I had quite a breakfast this morning."
They moved away from the grave and began ambling across the grass. The noonday sun glimmered off the
headstones. Resting In The Bosom of Our Lord. In Loving Memory. Names, dates, inscriptions were carved into pink granite, gray granite, tall white marble with rusty
weather-streaks. The cemetery was situated on a hill, as many were, with the markers all facing toward town as if to be kept in constant sight of the living below, or, if the banks of the small river that trickled through town were to swell with some sudden deluge, the dead and their monuments would survive. As the Reverend passed each headstone, he glanced down, seeking a familiar name. She Was The Best of Mothers.
"Have you told your folks yet, Dave, that you've decided not to start college in the fall?"
"No."
