Cemetery Strike

by Christopher Orza

  “Are you a bad guy?” the kid asked, crying through the words.

  I flinched. It felt like a valid question. Was I a bad guy? I had just come from a meeting between two human devils, and I came out of the trailer holding a sack of money. I got high off dead bodies. I only thought of sex and death and getting stoned. Was I a bad guy?

  I said, “It’s me. John. Your mom’s friend. Me and you played with the books together. Knocking them down. You remember me. Go wake up your mom. She can open the door for me.”

  “I’m alone,” the boy said.

  “Open the door.” I felt like he was about to choke on something or cut himself on a piece of glass or start a fire with some matches.

  “She said not to open it for anyone.”

  “Your mom told me to come over,” I said.

  The kid just stood on the other side of the door crying. Then I heard him start to drag shit in front of it, like he didn’t believe the locks could hold me out.

  Was I a bad guy?

  I sat down against the door, my back leaning against it. I wanted to make sure the kid was alright, that no other fuckface would break in or get him to open up. But I should’ve also been running around the city looking for Crystal. She was probably at Woods Edge right now watching a light drip into a galaxy of blooming flowers while masseuses licked the inside of her thighs.

  The kid kept dragging shit in front of the door.

  “Kid.” I banged one more time. I really wanted to believe I wasn’t a bad guy. I want to believe it now, too. That’s a big part of why I’m telling you all this.

  Inside, something heavy squeaked on the floor.

  “I just wanna come in and play a game with you,” I said.

  More shit in front of the door. It was surprising how much the boy worked.

  I said, “That day with the books. It was the only real fun I had in a long time.”

  Inside, a bunch of shit fell over. Then the knob jiggled and the door opened. The kid had been stacking pots and crap against the door so he could reach the top bolt to unlock it for me.

  I walked in, money bag strapped to my shoulder. “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah.”

  I closed the door behind me, locked it. “When did your mother leave?”

  He didn’t know.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  I grabbed the boy and held him in one arm, like a toddler. We walked to the kitchen. At the first cabinet I leaned in so he would open it. There was a can of tuna, a can of baked beans, and jar of peanut butter.

  “You like any of that stuff?”

  “I eat everything,” he said.

  I checked all the drawers and there was no can opener. As for the peanut butter, I don’t ever touch the stuff. But I had stacks of cash and I had to spend it, so I called in a pizza and some sodas.

  Then I looked around for something to do. The place wasn’t suitable for kids. Sure, it was cleaner now, but there weren’t any toys or books or anything. Just a TV.

  I asked, “What do you and your friends play?”

  The kid shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  I took the tie off and knotted it into a ball so we could play catch. That lasted until the delivery guy came. Then we ate pizza and watched TV until we fell asleep on the couch.

  In the morning, Crystal still wasn’t home.

  The boy was already up, eating peanut butter out of a jar. When he saw me look around, he asked if I wanted some.

  “No,” I said. “I’m allergic to peanuts.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “That means I could die if I eat it.”

  He looked into the jar to see if there were invisible knives inside. He said, “What about jelly?”

  “What about it?”

  “Are you allergic to jelly too?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” The kid looked into the jar again. He was really trying to figure something out, thinking harder than I’d ever thought in my life. He said, “Am I allergic to anything?”

  “I don’t know. You gotta ask your mom.” She probably wouldn’t have known, though, but I only realized that after I said it. “You could ask a doctor the next time you see one.”

  The kid sat there, still thinking. Real slow, he said, “How does it kill you?”

  I picked up a lighter from the table and started flicking it. I said, “When I was your age I ate a cookie with some nuts hidden inside and it made my throat close up. My whole fu––my whole mouth swelled. My tongue. My face. I couldn’t breathe, and the teacher was trying to give me a shot to make the swelling go down so I could breathe again. But I don’t do needles. I hate them. Always have.”

  “Even to save your life?”

  “Even to save my life. The teacher had that needle in her hand and I kept swatting at her to get it away. Then I passed out because I wasn’t getting enough air. The teacher shot me up when I was unconscious.”

  After I told him all that, the kid got right up and threw the peanut butter out in the trash. “I don’t want you to die,” he said, “so don’t go near the garbage.” Then he looked over at the cabinets. “Don’t eat anything else, either, unless we read the ingredients first. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The kid took the garbage bag, and, as young as he was, tried to knot it. He couldn’t do it, though, so he just put the open bag by the front door with the trash spilling all over the place. I swear, if the kid had arms long enough, he would’ve swiped every peanut butter jar in the city right into the dumpster.

  After that, we played a game with two coins where each person tries to flick their coin as close to the edge of the table as possible without it actually falling off. I kept letting the kid win, which was hard to do.

  Still playing, Chris said, “Is my mom coming back?”

  “Yeah.” It felt like a lie. I think it shone on my face.

  “Last time she went to the store for this long she never came back.”

  As he said it, Crystal Meth opened the door.

  She walked in with her shirt up, showing her whole stomach. Liquid dirt streaked her belly and arms like paint. Dry blood cracked lines on her hands. Her hair had grass growing out of it. An unlit clove cigarette hung from her lips.

  “That was some goddamn heaven,” she said.

  And I felt like the bad guy.

  She sat on the couch and sighed. Then, right with the boy there, she got up and climbed in my lap and started touching me all over.

  She licked my earlobe and said, “I huffed. Like you showed me.”

  I was pissed off to hell. Probably jealous, too. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

  “Why? You don’t own death.” It was the smartest thing she ever said.

  “Did anyone see you? A whole mess of people were at the cemetery tonight.”

  “No one saw me. I was in a goddamn casket the whole time.”

  All while I watched her kid. Crystal was just like both my parents. Leaving kids for so long they had to drink rotten milk and eat moldy bread to stay alive.

  Chapter Seven

  I don’t know how it was where you live, but the city got fucked real fast. As soon as Crystal let out the secret, every back alley addict was climbing over the cemetery gate, itching to get high off some Moe’s unsaid words. We even had suburbanites coming in, skipping their usual heroin or cocaine. And why not? Dead bodies were free, laying on top of unmarked graves, just waiting to be harvested for something.

  The night after I babysat Crystal’s kid while she got stoned without me, I brought her to Woods Edge so we could huff together for real. She begged me to do it, and she didn’t have the kid that day, so we had all night to mess around.

  Me and Crystal held hands on the way. Our first real date and it was to a cemetery. She even wore the plaid skirt she knew I loved. It was so much of a date I even got Crystal a present. From the first time I huffed, I’d always carried the cross that I used to stab the first man’s chest
. It was a small burden to fit in my pocket, and I liked the weight of it against my thigh, because each heavy step reminded me of what to look forward to. With my new bag of money, I’d found Crystal a smaller version of the cross I had. A pink one. If you saw her reaction when I gave it to her, you’d think it was a diamond ring.

  So yeah, even though I was still pissed off that she left the kid alone to get high, and even though she basically forced me to bring her, we snuck into Woods Edge with the same sexual energy as when we first met.

  Leaning over a dead body that I’d scouted out earlier that day, I said, “Ready?” And I smiled real big, actually excited to share this with her.

  “No,” Crystal said. “Wait. I have to tell you something.” She bit her lip. “I goddamn lied. I didn’t come to the cemetery last night.”

  I ground my teeth to powder. If she hadn’t huffed, then what had she done? I said, “But you were so high.” I waited for her to prove me wrong. She never did. “Fuck, Crystal.” I stood up, took a few steps away. I said, “What about the kid?”

  “I know.”

  “It’ll be a miracle if they don’t take him when your piss tests positive.” I stomped my foot. It didn’t make a sound. Through my clenched teeth I said, “It’s like you’re trying to fuck it up with him.”

  “I know.”

  There really wasn’t much else to say after that. She’d lied to me. She’d tricked me into bringing her to body huff. She’d smoked crack or meth or whatever she was able to get. And she was gonna lose the kid right after she got him. I was gonna lose the kid, too.

  I looked around the cemetery. It was so different from my first day there. Grass tickled your calves in some places. Dead patches burned to dirt in others. There were all those bodies. Mostly, there was the thick smell. Like a million dead fish with a tinge of hell baked into it.

  We still had a body laying there with two perfectly dead lungs, and I felt more than ever like getting zoomed out of this world, so I inserted the crosses nice and neat and held the pink one out to her.

  And we sucked on our metal straws, a demonic version of two lovers at a restaurant drinking out of the same strawberry shake.

  I stood up, exhaled, and the force of my breath pushed me away from her.

  “Come here,” she said, reaching out her fingers, stretching them longer. “I have life in me still.”

  I inhaled and floated toward Crystal. The air between us dissolved like smoke. My hands grabbed her hips, lifted her small body, and pulled her underwear to the side. The world turned rainbow colors as I dropped my pants and slid my dick into her. Looking around at all the dead bodies cheering me on, I lifted Crystal’s Valentine’s Day vagina on and off my sharp tip. Then I plunged so deep I could feel her pussy lips against my thighs. I pulled her in and her butterfly wings sucked my dick completely into her. My dick turned into a periscope, looking all around inside her. There was a bag of blood in there, beating, beating, beating. I wanted to inspect its purity, so I went deeper.

  From inside, I could hear her muffled screams. She moaned. I went deeper. My dick exploded. She choked her scream.

  Stretching my arms out, the outdoors rained in all around me. I squeezed hands into my eyes, looked. Blood covered everything: me, headstones, air molecules. I tried to wipe it off, but wherever I touched, gold flakes appeared.

  Needing help, I stopped, looked around. The ballerina stood there, her pink leotard only half covering her. She licked the tip of her finger and wiped red honey off my lips so I could see better.

  She said, “I would’ve chased her away for you, silly. All I needed was one minute. You could’ve given me one minute?” She stepped in closer, put her hands around my shoulders, and whispered in my ear, “You didn’t have to kill her.”

  I was alone then. Headstones sank into the earth, leaving puddles of pebbles where they should’ve been. A sigh flowed out of my face. The moon threw its wash all over.

  “I understand why you did what you did,” the ballerina said, consoling me. I turned to hear her better. “Because now we have all this dance to room in. But you could’ve just spit on her. She would have left all the same.”

  The ballerina blew glitter on me and I could hear smoking leaves crackle all around us. Everything went up in cold flames. The past didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all.

  I woke up in a tree at the corner of Woods Edge, my pants at my ankles, my belt missing. I didn’t want to go back to where the night had started to see the dead body of someone I knew. Of someone I killed. Of Crystal. But I had to. She was my ex-girlfriend and I worked here. It wouldn’t take the cops very long to figure out why there was a new, unaccounted-for bloody body in the cemetery.

  It was an accident, of course. At least involuntary. Like drunk driving. Or was it more like a hit and run?

  Are you a bad guy?

  No, but I killed your mom after she lied to me. At least now you’ll be better off. You’ll be fed. You’ll be cared for.

  I fell from the tree while trying to climb down. I had no idea how I’d gotten up there. The thing hardly had any branches.

  Standing in the dirt lighting a cigarette, I pictured myself running to the back gate, grabbing my money bag from her apartment, and skipping out of the city. But she had the keys to the apartment, and I knew from experience that I couldn’t kick the door in. So I had to see her one more time. I had to touch her, even. Take the key from around her neck.

  Walking toward Crystal’s body, I planned on leaving her with the other dead bodies. With how small she was, I could stuff her inside one of the body bags and no one would even know that there were two bodies inside. Not until the whole cemetery strike was over, at least. And I’d be long gone by then.

  Before I even got too close, though, above the smell of death I could taste the sweet-spicy fragrance of her clove cigarettes. It gave me hope that maybe she was alive. But then I saw her cuddled up with the body that we huffed, her pink cross stuck in his lungs, my cross jabbed into her crotch. Blood filled her skirt and legs like paint.

  “Crystal?” I nudged her shoulder with the tip of my shoe.

  Being closer, seeing all the blood, I thought of the kid again. He had just gotten his mother back and now he lost her. The kid wouldn’t even have me to play games with. It felt like by killing her, I had made myself again. And being responsible for myself existing yet another generation, to live yet another fucked up life, felt so wrong.

  I kicked Crystal again.

  “The kid,” I said. “We have to pick him up.”

  She didn’t move. I couldn’t bring myself to check for cold skin. I kicked her again.

  “Come on Crystal, you can’t just pass him off to someone else.”

  I kicked her again.

  “I can’t take care of him myself. Even if he wanted me to. I can’t.”

  The next time I kicked her, I wasn’t trying to wake her up or bring her back to life. It was more the way I kicked Brother One and Brother Two’s father. Just to hurt a dead guy. To show how pissed off I was at life and at death. That’s probably why she finally grunted.

  “Fucker,” she said hoarsely, like she’d just crawled out of hell.

  So the kid was saved. I could stay living in the city, and wouldn’t have to start another life, again. I could finish out my parole. I could live without ever having killed someone, all other transgressions aside. Yeah. She was alive, and I felt relief washing through me because all I did was stick my huffing cross into her twat.

  Looking back, though, none of this would’ve happened without Crystal Meth. It probably would’ve been better for the whole world if I had just followed through with it. But in that case, I guess it’d be better if I just killed myself when I first got the horns put on my head.

  “You okay?” I said.

  Crystal sat up, touched her pussy, and came away with grape jelly blood on her fingertips. “My goddamn period,” she said, pulling my cross out of her vagina. Then she held it out for me to grab. I took it
with one hand, helped her up with the other. Then we walked away into the sunrise.

  ––––––

  Just a few days later, marching the picket line with my “Don’t let the dead bugs bite” sign (from the unholy increase of maggots and flies), we saw a Moe with his shirt off climb out of the cemetery and run down the street. He had what looked like a hollow-point knife clenched in his teeth. When he jumped over the gate, all of us on both sides of the street, even the cops, stared at the shirtless Moe like he was a sign of the end of the world. Both sets of protesters got dead quiet, and we just watched the sweaty, hairy-chested Moe run down the street blabbering to himself, every so often stopping to turn and speak with some invisible someone.

  I don’t know who Crystal told, but huffing spread worse than airborne herpes. It was like if sex didn’t exist and then all of a sudden it did. Imagine telling someone: You just rub these two things together and a magic explosion erupts throughout your body. Yeah, that’s how fast it spread.

  But there was a lot of confusion at first. In the very beginning doctors held press conferences outside hospitals, stating the facts, telling people to be cautious but not to panic. You remember all this, right? It was all over the news. The doctors said that their influx of patients suffered from concussion-like symptoms, hallucinations, and smelled of rotting flesh.

  The news, though, and probably with the help of Mr. City, speculated that it was linked to all the dead bodies piled up. And of course they were right, but not fully. They said the dead bodies’ juices seeped into our water supply. That idea lasted a few days, until it switched to a synthetic drug being manufactured in cemeteries. At least they were getting closer. The stations called this hypothetical drug Heaven in Hell because the Moes being brought in mumbled about dead bodies and euphoria and climbing into graves so they could find God.

  So I knew for sure the secret was out, and my only worry was that all the other huffers would get to the bodies before I could. I never thought people would kill for it.