Cemetery Strike

by Christopher Orza

  “Excuse me, Alyssa Alliano here. Are you part of this demonstration here?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Do you mind saying a few words about it?”

  “To you?”

  “For the camera,” she said, like she didn’t like my tone. “First, what is the motive behind the strike?”

  I looked away. I had to, so I could think about something other than her legs up above her head. Down the block, street vendors traded hotdogs for cash and a mother held a baby that had its whole fist in its mouth. I said, “I guess we want what everyone wants.”

  “And what is that?”

  “More.”

  “More what?” She raised a lip when she said it, shining her inner bitch.

  “Money. Acknowledgement. A pat on the ass. Drugs. Sex. Fun. Happiness. Sadness. Cookies. More of whatever it is people want.”

  That’s when Sonny grabbed my forearm and said through gritted teeth, “Can I talk to you in private?” He led me back to the picket line. When we were far enough from the cameras, Sonny said, “What the hell are you doing? Weren’t you told not to correspond with media outlets of any kind?”

  “Do you see her legs?” I said.

  “You’ll never see legs again if you pull another stunt like that.”

  I really needed to keep the job so I could get off piss tests, so I could get my life back. So I said, “Sonny, I got it. No more fuckups.”

  After that I walked back and forth with one of the picket signs and then it was time to go. Before leaving, Sonny told us to huddle up by the gate.

  “Most of you did a fine job today, and under very strange circumstances. That doesn’t mean I want you showing up tomorrow not ready to work, thinking we’re gonna let this place fall to pieces. Come with your boots on. Hopefully things will be back to normal.”

  Ha! Think about what normal is now. Even grown men are scared to go outside alone, thinking a group of huffers will suck the air out of their lungs while they’re still warm. Nothing’s normal after an organization decides to stop burying the dead. Nothing’s normal if an organization is allowed to stop burying people. It’s such a basic thing that makes us human. It’s so human that Neanderthals did it. Think about it. We’ve been burying the dead since before we were even human. And just the fact that it could ever not happen because of greed, it helps me not feel as responsible for all the killing, even though I am responsible for it all.

  ––––––

  I went straight home to Crystal. We’d met in a group home for addicts. I’d fucked her before I even knew her real name. But once I did talk to her, I started calling her Crystal Meth, because that’s what she was to me.

  Her pussy’s what got me through the last part of rehab. It’s a stupid rule that they had: no sex. We were supposed to sit in a circle and gush about our feelings. We had to role play different situations that might set us off in the real world. We could fake argue, but we couldn’t fuck each other in the bathroom, or in the bedrooms, or in the kitchen. But me and Crystal Meth, we did it everywhere.

  She always looked underfed, like she needed a basket of spinach and some gummy vitamins. The dark rings around her eyes. The weakness in her thin wrists. Shoulder blades like skeleton wings. It was a wonder how she ever birthed a human out of that tight pussy of hers. For me, it was all part of the attraction. Just how small she was. Like she needed to be taken care of.

  She smoked clove cigarettes, so you could always tell if she was around, or even how long it had been since she’d left. To me they smelled like spiced baby powder. And the crackle when you drag on them, it’s like the warm hit of a pipe. I don’t know how she could listen to it all day without wanting.

  “Crystal?”

  It was a one room apartment, but I didn’t see her anywhere and she didn’t answer. The television was on, though, and the door had been unlocked, and it smelled like newly lit cloves, so I knew she was home.

  I think the excitement of the new job gave me so steel in my dick. I wanted Crystal, bad. So I crept to the bathroom. I didn’t call out her name again. I just pushed the door open and got ready to give it to her.

  “Oh fuck Johnny!”

  She had her panties down around one ankle, her other foot up on the toilet seat, and her fingers were slipping a tampon into her raw, bald pussy.

  I grabbed her waist and pulled her into my crotch.

  “Johnny I got goddamn blood dripping down my leg.”

  “It’s lubrication,” I told her. Blood doesn’t bother me if it’s someone else’s. It’s my own I’m squeamish about. I started kissing her and unbuckling my jeans. I needed it, and at the same time I knew things were swinging the wrong way.

  “Johnny, get out.”

  “Just use me as a tampon.”

  “Get out!”

  She pushed me away like I was joking.

  For her, each period lasted two weeks. It meant two weeks of dry handjobs, if I was lucky. And I’m not that lucky.

  She came out of the bathroom with her baggy sweatpants rolled up on her tiny hips.

  I don’t know how to explain that type of disappointment to people who aren’t addicts. The best I can do is to say that it’s like a toddler’s tantrum in an angry old man’s body. It’s like a period you didn’t expect. It’s combing the rug for any kind of crystal you could sniff, smoke, or swallow only to find sand and lint. It’s boiling down nail clippings and ripping out your hair because you heard that the chemicals are stored there. It’s worse than your father dying before you get to tell him how much you hate him, when the words just kept building up in your lungs like blood and you were just about to say it and couldn’t get it out.

  It was my day and Crystal Meth had to be the one bleeding.

  I would’ve jerked off right in front of her, tore my pants off and just started beating it in the hallway, but I couldn’t get hard by myself. Porn didn’t even do it for me anymore. I needed another warm body touching me.

  So we didn’t even talk about anything that had happened that day. What I said to The Hole of a Bitch. How I had a boss I actually liked. Me being part of something as tripped out as a cemetery strike. My four month anniversary of being sober.

  That night I didn’t fall asleep until right before I had to wake up. I just watched Channel Twelve News all night. Every so often I came on screen standing next to Alyssa Alliano with a sexually induced smile.

  Crystal woke me up with her cold nipples poking through a tight t-shirt, complaining that my alarm was going off in the bedroom. Seeing her all cute made me need her even more. Usually she knew when I was at that point. It was part of what kept us together for so long.

  Trying to warm her up, I said, “I was on the news yesterday. It wasn’t anything bad. They interviewed me about the cemetery strikes. They stopped burying people.”

  She said, “How do you get involved in these crazy things?”

  I thought she was being flirty, so I grabbed her hand and put it on my crotch. She pulled away.

  “I’m still on my period,” she said, like it mattered. “It only started yesterday.”

  I said, “I could’ve told you three days ago your fucking period was coming.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Looking back, I know it makes me seem narcissistic and self-absorbed. Like I thought she owed me sex because I needed it, or that she should’ve given it to me no matter what she was going through. But if you added up our whole relationship––the way we met, the fact that we had sex on her period before, and that she knew what would happen if she didn’t give it to me––we could’ve just taken a minute to bust one out.

  Also looking back, I know I shouldn’t have said what I said next.

  “You’re like a fucking ellipses with all these periods.”

  She looked at me like I was a moron. I could see her pig snout melt into a dog’s snarl. She said, “What the fuck is that?”

  With my pointer finger I jabbed the air in between us three times. I said,
“It’s three periods in a row to show information’s missing. It’s fucking grammar.”

  “I’m like an eclipse? You’re like a fucking…”

  Chapter 3

  I left for work without changing clothes, walking the whole way. It would’ve been faster to take the train, but I didn’t think I’d be able to stand still while everything else blurred all around me. I had to keep moving.

  By the time I got to the cemetery, Woods Edge had already turned into the demon circus that it would remain. Several news vans were parked across the street with their cameramen set up like snipers in the open. Behind them, protesters gathered to protest our protest, a riot of sound, drowning our ten men like a stadium. And damn did we look dumb, asking for money with dead people at our feet and the whole world watching.

  It was less than twenty-four hours since the strike began and there were already five bodies piled up by the front gate. The caskets took up most of the sidewalk. During the morning pep talk, Sonny said, “Whatever you do today, do not disturb the bodies. I know it’s going to be difficult walking around them, the way they’re set up. It’s almost like someone laid them out like that on purpose. But I’m asking you, please don’t disturb the bodies. Also, be aware of those nuts across the street. They’re an angry bunch. Any of them does something funny, like throw something or say something that can’t be taken back, report it to me.”

  During our march, we walked a wide sort of figure eight through the caskets. It drove the protesters crazy, us parading around the dead with our conga line. And those protestors, unlike us, were professionals. They yelled as if we’d hurt them with a unique, specific pain. They outnumbered us and knew it. They shook their fists like they wanted to hurt us.

  I looked away, kept my eyes on our side of the street, to where the Garden Nymph shot me snarls whenever he could. He even pushed in closer to me on the picket line, probably so I could bump into him again, so he could say some real clever shit this time.

  Not wanting to lose my job over the Whole Bitch and not wanting a team of protestors hating me for something I didn’t do, I took a break from picketing. My legs ached and felt full of blood anyway from not sleeping the night before.

  I’m pretty good at falling into habits fast. That’s why, while leaning against the gate, I ordered egg drop soup again.

  The same Chinese delivery guy rode up on his bike. He wore the same apron with the same splatter of greasy stains. And he had the same anxious smile. After you hear what he said, maybe you’ll even think he should share some of the blame for all this, or some of the thanks, depending on who you are and how it all turns out.

  While exchanging money for food, the Chinese delivery guy said, “Dead body no good. Too much meth gas, rye?”

  “Meth, huh?”

  “Veddy harmful. You wear mask. No breathe in fume.”

  “I breathed in worse shit than that,” I said, smiling all the time, happy to be thinking about something that curled my lips the right way.

  The Chinese delivery guy gave me a terror grin. He took his money, but he stood there straddling his bike, waiting for something to make sense. Not much did, though, so he eventually rode off.

  In the middle of lunch or breakfast or whatever it was, the Hole of a Bitch came right up to me ready to start some shit for real. He’d been eyeing me the whole time I ate and finally built up the courage.

  “Oh my God-a,” he said. “I can’t believe you came back.”

  I didn’t say a word, so he stepped closer, peeking into my container the way a nosy neighbor looks over a fence. He said, “Mmm. Sodium and trans fat. That’s perfect for someone like you. Eat up.”

  I felt like he was telling me to go die a slow death. I didn’t think it was very nice. Still, I couldn’t afford to get fired. Holding a job was a condition of my parole, and I needed so badly to get away from my PO.

  He went on. “Let me know if you can’t afford it one day because you had to buy a new shirt. I’ll gladly support your endeavor to add some plaque to those arteries.”

  He must’ve thought all night about what I’d said to him. He must’ve been fidgety rolling around on his silk sheets, the way he kept jabbing at me. You think I’m joking about the silk sheets, and I am, but I also found out later that he really had them. Bridal white silk sheets with pillows to match.

  “That’s what I thought,” the Bitchole said, like he’d challenged me to a fight and I didn’t do anything.

  So, still sitting with my back against the gate, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  He squeezed his nose into his brain.

  I said, “You get hard off dicks, don’t you?”

  The Hole of a Bitch stared like he could taste my sour breath. He trembled all over. I think more from anger than fear.

  I said, “You get hard off dicks and you have one. So? Do you get hard off your own dick? I guess I’m asking if you can jerk off to your own dick. I mean, if I had a pussy in my back pocket, I’d fuck it.”

  He snarled, whipped his head around, and walked away into the city. His hands shook the whole way down the street. Only when he was far enough from me, he said, “Fuck you.”

  “My house or yours,” I yelled after him.

  The rest of the shift was fine, but because of that bullshit that Sonny came up to me at the end of the day and said, “I can’t have any of my boys upset with each other. So listen carefully. This is important. He’s talking about filing a sexual harassment suit with the union. It’d be like getting all three strikes at once. You’d have to go.”

  “That’s not how strikes work,” I said.

  Sonny sighed. “Then I guess it’d be more like someone catching your foul ball. Either way, if he files this paperwork against you, you’re out of here. For Christ’s sake, John. It’s your second day. The union won’t even send a lawyer for you if something like this gets filed. They can just let you go without any grounds. You’re still in the probationary period.”

  “Sonny, he came up to me starting shit. I was sitting down eating and he came up to me. I didn’t say anything to him until he told me to eat my soup until I died.”

  Sonny said, “Frankly, I don’t need this now. I have things going on at home. It’s bad enough I have to keep working, if that’s what you could call…”

  I stopped listening. I looked around trying to take in something else, just letting Sonny talk. Armando, the other new guy, held his own picket sign written in black paint. He jabbed it into the air at the same beat as everybody else. It said, “Dia De Los Muertos.” The Day of the Dead. I guess he had the right idea.

  Sonny went on with his lecture. “You have to do something about it. Buy him a beer. Take him out for ice cream. Write him a friggin apology. Whatever it takes, because I’m not dealing with a ton of paperwork on top of all this other nonsense.”

  I said, “I’ll fix it, Sonny. Don’t worry.” So, for better or worse, I still had my job at Woods Edge.

  ––––––

  After a week of the cemetery strike and Crystal’s period, a week of death and blood, all the really crazy shit started to happen. I’d been going to work early every day to stand there in the quiet, before the media and protesters started the show. But on the seventh day things were different. Sonny was already there trying to unlock the gate.

  About twenty bodies plagued the sidewalk, spilling over each other, some in caskets, others in body bags. Arms with cufflinks dangled out of the caskets, rings choking their swollen fingers. One casket stood right in the middle of the sidewalk, placed perfectly open, the dead woman laying there like a vampire fried to stone in the morning light.

  In one week Sonny’s spotlessly clean cemetery had become littered just like the rest of the city. Just like Crystal’s apartment, only with dead people instead of dead things.

  The problem that Sonny was having was that a body bag had been stuffed under the gate right up to its belly so tight that Sonny couldn’t slide it out. The genius that crammed it in there probab
ly did it while the body was still fresh. Overnight, though, in all the strange October heat, it had bloated, securing itself tightly under the gate.

  When he saw me, Sonny said, “Oh, John, you’re early.” He let go of the gate. Then he just stepped back and looked at it, hoping that some kind of solution would present itself before the media arrived to get some footage of us wrestling this dead body out from under the gate.

  I said, “Maybe if we both pull on him.”

  “You didn’t sign on to handle dead bodies.”

  I’d been around them all week, though. And I didn’t care. It wasn’t my dead body.

  I moved closer and grabbed where the dead Moe’s feet were. Again, Sonny looked around to check for people. Then he grabbed the bag around where the knees were. We pulled, but nothing happened. The dude didn’t move an inch. Then I tried lifting the gate so Sonny could slide the body out. Sonny grabbed the dead guy’s legs through the body bag and pulled. Again, nothing happened. The gate, forged from black iron bars during a time when things lasted forever, did what it was made to do.

  Sonny said, “We’re gonna have to try something else.” He took a step back and looked at the gate.

  By that time protesters started to gather across the street. Cops moved barricades into place to keep each party separated. The cameras set up their scopes.

  “Why can’t we just leave it there?” I asked. “Deal with it tonight, after everyone leaves.”

  “We’re gonna have to open the gate,” Sonny said.

  I could tell he knew it all along, but that he wanted to exhaust every other possibility first, just so he could feel like he did everything he could before having to crush the dead body by rolling the iron bars over it.

  Sonny took a single key, the same black iron as the gate itself, out of his pocket. He put it into the lock, twisted. We both put our hands on the gate and pushed.

  Pushing, the body bag acted like a rubbery, human-sized doorstop. We kept leaning our bodies into it, and the canvass bag tore, crunching against the gravel underneath. You could hear moaning across the street, like we were tearing up some screaming newborn baby. It sounded like rocks chewing up pebbles.