by Tom Deitz
“What’s a hearse?”
“That big black station wagon—except it’s not exactly a station wagon: bigger for one thing; built on a stretched Cadillac frame. They’re only used for funerals. Now please be quiet, I’ve only got three pages to go. Okay?”
Little Billy was quiet for almost three lines.
“They’re goin’ in that old graveyard across the road. Are they gonna bury somebody?”
David slammed the book abruptly shut, a sound like a tiny thunderclap.
Little Billy jumped, uttered a small yip of surprise and dropped the handful of straw he had been fidgeting with into the muddy backyard below. He looked up at his older brother, and their eyes met, and he knew he was in trouble.
David erupted from the rocker, setting it into riotous motion on the rough old boards. Little Billy was quicker, though, and darted down the narrow aisle between the hay bales.
“I’m gonna get you, squirt!” David cried loudly. He ran after his brother until he saw Billy’s head disappear down the stairs that led to the ground floor of the barn, then stopped suddenly and tiptoed quickly back to jog noisily in place by the hayloft door. His mother’s Friday wash flapped optimistically on the line below. And directly underneath . . .
Little Billy ran as if the devil himself were chasing him—down the stairs and into darkness, and then across the red clay floor, deftly leaping piles of cow manure and bales of hay as he went. Abruptly he bounded out into the broken sunlight of late afternoon and paused, his mouth slightly open in confusion. He glanced fearfully back into the gloom.
“Whoooeeeee!” cried David as he leapt from the hayloft in a sweeping arc that landed him directly behind his little brother. He made one frantic grab for the boy, but miscalculated and stumbled forward on his knees in the mud.
Little Billy shrieked, but his feet were already carrying him through the laundry and down the hill beside the house.
David recovered quickly and dodged left, skirting between his daddy’s four-wheel-drive Ford pickup and his own red Mustang, hoping to ambush Little Billy as he came around the other side. But Little Billy saw him at the last instant, squealed joyously, and threw his luck into one last wild, reckless dash toward the road where the slow train of cars continued to pass obliviously.
David caught him halfway there, grasped him by the belt of his grubby jeans and jerked him quickly into the air. He locked his elbows and held the little boy above his head, kicking frantically in five-year-old indignation.
“Now that I’ve got you, what should I do with you, I wonder?” David glanced meaningfully at the procession and then back at his brother.
“Maybe I’ll take you down the hill and give you to the undertaker and tell him to put you on ice. Would you like that, Little Billy?”
Little Billy shook his head vigorously. “No, Davy.”
“Maybe I’ll take you up to the house then, and hang you from the rooftop first. Would you like that better?”
“You better quit it, or I’m gonna tell Pa!”
“Pa’s not here,” David said fiendishly as he lowered his brother to his shoulders and began to stride purposefully up the slope.
Little Billy tried to crawl headfirst down the front of David’s body, but his attempt at escape only resulted in David grabbing him by the ankles and holding him with his head bobbing up and down between David’s knees. It was not an efficient mode of travel, David realized before he had gone three steps up the hill. He stopped and began to swing his brother pendulumlike between his legs, lowering him slowly until the white-blond hair brushed the long grass of the yard.
Little Billy alternately screamed and giggled, but David could feel his grip slipping. He made one final sweep and released his brother at the bottom of the arc to send the little boy scooting downhill between his wide-braced legs.
On the follow-through, David abruptly found himself peering between his knees at the bright-eyed face of a very smug Little Billy lying in the slick grass further down the hill. He suddenly felt very foolish.
Little Billy laughed. “You sure do look funny with your butt up in the air and your face down by your feet!”
“You’ll look funnier when I get through with you, you little . . .”
David started to straighten up, but paused, blinking, as something attracted his attention. The air around his head suddenly seemed to vibrate as if invisible mosquitoes swarmed there, and the hair on the back of his neck began to prickle inexplicably. He froze, still bent over.
Beyond Little Billy he saw the funeral procession halt as the hearse turned into the seldom-used cemetery of the Sullivan Cove Church of God across the way. It was strange, David thought suddenly, to see a whole funeral procession at one time, from between one’s legs.
The air pulsed again. David felt his eyes fill up with darkness, as sometimes happened when he stood up too quickly from a hot bath. His head swam and he felt dizzy. He blinked once more, but the darkness lingered. Oh my God! he thought for a panicked instant, I’ve been struck blind! But that was ridiculous. His whole body was tingling now; he could feel the hair on his arms and legs stiffening as chill after chill raced over him. And then the darkness was burned away by a hot light, as if he stared straight into the sun with his naked eyes, but with no pain.
Another blink and the world returned abruptly to normal, leaving only a faint, itchy tingle in David’s eyes. He shrugged, executed a lopsided somersault, and got up to chase Little Billy.
They had nearly reached the rambling old farmhouse when their mother hollered from the back porch that David had a telephone call.
“I’ll get you yet, squirt,” David shouted, bounding up the porch steps.
“I just washed them pants,” his mother groaned as he passed.
The screen door slammed behind him.
The phone hung on the kitchen wall next to the back door. David took a breath and picked up the receiver. Probably his father calling from Uncle Dale’s, wanting him to come help with the stuck tractor. “Hello?” he said, somewhat apprehensively.
“Well, Sullivan, what’re you doing?” came a voice young as his own, but slower and smoother, more like a lowland river than a mountain stream: his best friend, Alec McLean. An undercurrent of irritation surfaced on the last word.
“Oh, it’s you, Alec,” David said breathlessly, glancing nervously out the back door. “I was just trying to impose a little control on my brat of a kid brother.”
“Well, why don’t you impose a little of it on yourself while you’re at it, and check the time every day or two. You were supposed to pick me up half an hour ago.”
David shot a glance at the yellow electric clock on the wall above the stove and grimaced in dismay: It was nearly four o’clock. He rubbed his eyes absently.
Alec went on blithely. “Camping, remember? If it quit raining? Got me out of bed to ask me? Remember?”
“Son-of-a-gun!” David groaned. “Sorry. I’ll be right over. I just got so engrossed in my reading that I lost track of time.”
Alec sounded unconvinced. “I thought you were controlling your brother; I’d suggest a rack, thumbscrews—”
“Before that, stooge. No, really, it was one of those books I got out of that bunch the library was throwing away: Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory. It’s great stuff, Irish mythology. You know, about—”
“Not now, David. I’m sure I’ll hear more than I want to about it anyway, before long . . . at least it’s not werewolves this time,” he added.
“You’ve got something against werewolves?” David replied archly.
“I do when my best friend tries to turn himself into one, like you did last time we went camping.”
“Alec, my lad, I would prefer to forget that unfortunate episode. I’m at least a month older and infinitely wiser now.”
“Well, I prefer to remember it—in all its excruciatingly embarrassing detail. I mean, how could I forget you running around up at Lookout Rock, stark naked except for the fur collar off one
of your mother’s old coats, smeared all over with fat from a dead possum you’d found beside the road, muttering incantations out of another one of those old library books. No, my friend, that’s not an image that dies easily . . . nor, come to mention it, was it a smell that died easily—and I don’t intend to let you forget it, either.”
David sighed melodramatically. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am,” Alec replied drily. “If I wasn’t, I’d have taken my camera.”
“Well, I can assure you that this is just a plain camping trip—a celebration of the end of this confounded rain we’ve been cursed with the last two weeks, if we need an excuse. And if I time it right, I may get out of having to help Pa. Uncle Dale got his truck stuck, and Pa went over with the tractor and got stuck too, and . . .”
“David?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up and come get me.”
“Oh, yeah. Guess so. Be there in twenty minutes.”
“You can’t get to MacTyrie in twenty minutes.”
“I can.”
“You coming in a jet or something?”
“Nan, just my Mustang.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Well—try not to set the mountains on fire on your way.”
“It’s been raining for two weeks straight, Alec. The mountains are very, very wet.” David’s voice dripped sarcasm.
Alec turned serious. “Really, Mom almost didn’t let me go this time, because of what she’s heard about your driving—not from me, of course . . .”
“Of course.”
“. . . but then Dad came in and said ‘Go! Get! No telling what your wild-eyed maniac friend will do if you don’t!’ ”
David rolled his eyes toward the dingy ceiling. “Your father thinks I’m a wild-eyed maniac?”
“But he likes you anyway, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked you all to put me up while they’re at that conference next weekend.”
David nodded. “Uh huh. No doubt he thinks you’ll be a good influence on me as well, is that it?”
“Something to that effect, yes.”
“Boy, is he mistaken!”
“Huh?”
“Never mind, old man,” David said. “Gotta go, we’re burning daylight.”
David hung up the phone and flopped back against the doorjamb, grinning mischievously. Damn, I feel good! he chuckled to himself.
One reason, he knew, was the imminent return of good weather—just a little sunshine did wonders for his state of mind. And partly it was the promise of getting out of the house and off the farm for a while, away from the oppressive ordinariness of his family. And, too, there was the anticipation of good fellowship—he and Alec had not had a good long bull session in some time, and there were things that needed discussing.
But there was something deeper underlying it all, he realized as he started down the hall to pack. It was that rare and almost mystical elation which accompanied the discovery of some new thing that he somehow instinctively knew would be of lasting significance for the rest of his life. When it happened right, it was like the opening of a door in a high stone wall; and this particular door had opened when he had begun Gods and Fighting Men. From its first ringing line, the book had filled him with that same wild and unexpected joy he had felt when he’d first read The Lord of the Rings two years before. That book had given him “a new metaphor for existence”—that was the phrase Alec’s English-teacher father had used. And now he had another.
He grinned again, in fiendish anticipation. He would tell that infidel Alec all about it—whether he wanted to know or not.
David’s slim, blond mother was leaning against one of the back porch posts when he emerged from the house five minutes later. A frosted glass of ice tea tinkled in one hand; white flour patterned her faded blue Levis. She looked tired. “Somebody’s dead,” she observed flatly, pointing down the hill.
“Somebody’s always dead.”
She frowned, so that the crow’s-feet in the tanned skin around her eyes deepened, as they had of late. “Don’t get smart, boy!” she warned.
“Oh, I already am—got it from my mother.” David flashed her his most dazzling smile as he leapt from the shadowed gloom of the low porch into the sudden glare of sun-dappled yard, his worn knapsack flapping loosely on his back as he sprinted toward the car. Little Billy was nowhere in sight.
In the harsh light the Mustang seemed somehow to shine even redder than usual, as if the steel of which it was made had been rendered red-hot by the afternoon sunshine. Its narrow chrome bumpers glittered so brilliantly they made David blink and his eyes water. Indeed the very air seemed to sparkle in some uncanny way, as if every floating dust mote were a minute, perfectly faceted diamond that materialized out of nowhere to gyrate crazily before him in a swirl of multicolored particles like iridescent dust thrown before a wind, briefly outlining every tree and leaf and blade of grass with a glittering halo of burning, scintillating color.
David stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth hanging open in curious incredulity, then wrenched off his glasses and stared at them foolishly. Though the lenses appeared clean, he wiped them on a corner of his shirttail and glanced up again, blinking rapidly.
The effect had ended.
A shrug. “Too hot, or something,” he muttered to himself.
Little Billy came out from where he had been lurking behind the car. He stared at David uncertainly and extended the blue volume. “Here’s your book, Davy. I’m sorry I bothered you.”
David blinked again, smiled absently, and ruffled his brother’s tousled hair. “No problem, kid.”
Little Billy’s eyes were wide, hopeful. “You’re not really gonna give me to the undertaker, are you?”
“Couldn’t get enough for you, squirt,” David grinned. “No, of course not. Thanks, though, for getting this for me.”
As he unslung the knapsack to stuff the book inside, David glimpsed the name neatly stenciled on the fading khaki canvas: SULLIVAN, D.
A chill passed over him, and he paused and looked up to see the crowds of people still clustered among the weathered tombstones and scruffy oak trees across the road. It was startling how clear the air had suddenly become, how much more sharply focused everything seemed. He almost felt as if he could read the names carved on the stones, count the leaves on the trees, see the tears glistening on those grief-stricken faces.
And David remembered another funeral three years before.
SULLIVAN, D—not himself, but that other David Sullivan, his father’s youngest brother, after whom he had been named; David-the-elder, Uncle Dale had called him, to differentiate the two.
David-the-elder had embraced life with a burning enthusiasm not often seen in his family—and had found a sympathetic outlet for that enthusiasm in his precocious young nephew, whom he had taught to read by the age of four, and how to fish and hunt and camp and wrestle and swim and drive and a hundred other skills before David was twelve.
Then he had joined the army.
Two years later he was dead, blown to pieces where he wandered off duty on a Middle Eastern street. “An unprovoked terrorist action,” the government called it. A twenty-minute funeral had marked barely twenty years of life. Not enough. But that night twenty-one shots had sounded over the family cemetery at Uncle Dale’s farm, and a clench-jawed David-the-younger had fired each one into the star-filled darkness. It had been the least he could do. David felt his eyes mist over as he fished for his car keys. Once they had been David-the-elder’s keys.
“You okay?” Little Billy asked hesitantly, concern shadowing his small features.
David shook his head as if to clear it, and smiled wanly, feeling too good to keep long company with such dark thoughts. “Yeah, sure.”
He got in the car, cranked it, and turned on the radio. The nasal twang of some female country singer berating her long-suffering husband about “drinkin’ and runnin’ around” that suddenly assailed his ears sent David hastily fumbling in the glove box for
a cassette instead. The song reminded him too much of home, sometimes.
Big Country, maybe—or U-2? No, that wasn’t quite what he wanted. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? Close, but maybe something a little older. Ah—he knew just the thing.
A moment later, the Byrds’s recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man” pulsed and jingled through the car. David found himself singing along as he paid token obeisance to the stop sign at the end of the gravel road and turned left onto the long straightaway that passed through his father’s river bottom on its way from Atlanta to the resorts of western North Carolina. His tires chirped softly, leaving twin black streaks as he accelerated off toward MacTyrie. He frowned. There was a buzz in one of his new rear speakers.
He had already forgotten the funeral.
Seven minutes later David slid the car to a halt at the intersection that marked the effective center of downtown Enotah, where the MacTyrie road ran into Georgia 76. Twin signs pointed west toward Hiawassee and eastward to Clayton. To his right a hundred-year-old courthouse raised crumbling Gothic spires. The only traffic light in Enotah county blinked balefully overhead. Abruptly the car’s engine stumbled. “Damn,” he cursed as he glanced down at his gas gauge. It barely registered.
Fortunately he was in sight of Berrong’s Texaco, where he had worked the previous summer pumping gas. A moment later he pulled in by the self-service pump, got out, and unscrewed the cap between the taillights. Behind the pyramid of oil cans in the station’s plate glass window David saw chubby Earl Berrong nod and give him a thumbs-up sign. He grinned in turn, unhitched the nozzle, and inserted it into the car, drumming his fingers restlessly on the red paint as he watched the numbers roll by. Always something when he was in a hurry; he’d never make MacTyrie in twenty minutes now.
A Loretta Lynn song blared from a tinny speaker in the litter-strewn parking lot of the Enotah Burger across the highway, mingling discordantly with a car radio playing heavy metal—Def Leppard, maybe?—and the voices of the several youthful loiterers lounging by the service window.