The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  “Stop it,” he said.

  Barry said he constantly imagined a bony hand reaching from a tomb to grab his leg or poking up from the ground to snatch at the cuff of his pants. As a result, he tried to stay in the center of the group and kept bumping and jostling the others until they grew quite annoyed. Perhaps they were all nervous. After all, they were trespassing and it was midnight. There was only a quarter moon, but Aaron had a flashlight, as did Shannon and Bob Jenks. Barry hadn’t thought to bring one.

  Near the center of the cemetery was a slab of granite in front of an obelisk about fifteen feet tall. This was the family plot of Hyram Peabody, a nineteenth-century Aurelius banker. The slab was eight feet by six feet and across it was written: “The Spirit of Progress Was His Constant Charge.” On either side of the obelisk were smaller tombstones, belonging to Hyram Peabody, his wife, and his sons and daughters, several of whom had died as young children. The oaks in that part of the cemetery were quite old and near the obelisk stood five or six dignified marble tombs with Greek pillars. One, belonging to Cyrus Tucker, was as big as a small cottage.

  When I was in high school in the late fifties and early sixties, it was said that daring couples came at night to have sex on Hyram Peabody’s slab of granite, and several times fellow students claimed to have seen condoms in the grass or on the stone itself, though who knows if they told the truth.

  The granite slab was Aaron’s destination. They would dance on it. They would drink screwdrivers, be obscene, and discuss Marx. As they made their way between the graves, Aaron teased the others by saying, “What’s that over there?” or “Did you hear that?” Then they would crowd closer together.

  Shannon set the boom box at the base of the obelisk. Aaron put on the Doors. Oscar made drinks. Bob and Joany danced to the Mahagonny song about the moon over Alabama: “Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar.” They danced jerkily, ironically. Jason turned his back to the others, then crossed his arms, putting his hands over his shoulders and undulating his body so that he seemed to be embracing somebody even thinner than he was.

  “Give it to her,” said Shannon.

  “Ya-hoo,” said Jesse.

  Barry stood as close to Aaron as he could without touching him. He was afraid to sit; he imagined the ground’s opening up and his being sucked inside. He didn’t know why he had agreed to come. Wherever he looked, he saw something potentially terrifying.

  “What’s the difference,” asked Oscar, “between epistemological dialectics, ontological dialectics, and relational dialectics? Whoever gets it rights gets a blow job from Joany.”

  “Shut up,” said Joany indignantly.

  “Then from Harriet,” said Oscar.

  “Leon could answer,” said Barry, feeling he should stand up for the one person smart enough not to attend.

  “That’s why we didn’t want him here,” said Oscar.

  “I’d hate to blow Leon,” said Harriet. She laughed and Aaron laughed with her.

  Barry felt a wave of terror that Joany or Harriet would want to touch his penis with their mouths. He drank his screwdriver. He couldn’t taste the vodka but he knew it was there. The flashlights made zigzagging patterns of light across the ground.

  “Do people die because they deserve to die?” asked Jason.

  “They die because they’re old and sick,” said Harriet.

  “They die because they’re bored,” said Aaron.

  The moon shone through the leaves of the oaks. Harriet had set six candles on either side of the boom box. Though the night seemed windless, the candle flames flickered as if to the music.

  Aaron and Bob Jenks began discussing pauperization and the difference between relative and absolute pauperization. They had both had several drinks. Bob said that pauperization was now mostly confined to peripheral third-world countries.

  Oscar Herbst said, “Let’s fuck a pauper!”

  “Hey,” said Shannon, “paupers are our people. Let’s fuck a capitalist.”

  “A dead capitalist,” said Jesse.

  “I bet we can push over some of these stones,” said Oscar. He pushed at the obelisk but it didn’t move.

  “Don’t!” said Barry.

  “Hey,” said Oscar, “Little Pink doesn’t want to upset the sleeping capitalists.”

  “Yow, wow, wow!” howled Jesse.

  “Be quiet,” said Harriet. “You want someone to call the police?”

  “This stone’s loose,” called Shannon from five yards away.

  “That’s a small one,” said Aaron indignantly. “Clearly that belonged to a poor person, one of the impoverished.”

  Oscar began pushing at a larger stone belonging to Wilhelm Bockman, who had owned a knitting mill in Aurelius. “Come on,” said Oscar. Jesse and Shannon joined him. They rocked the stone back and forth. Barry covered his ears. He was sure something terrible would happen. The stone was about six feet high. Bob and Jason joined them; Joany pushed as well. The stone teetered, then fell backward with a thud.

  “That fixes the fucker,” said Oscar.

  “Who else?” asked Shannon.

  “Let’s push over the obelisk,” said his brother.

  They began pushing it, but it wouldn’t budge. Aaron helped. The obelisk soil wouldn’t move.

  “Come on, Little Pink,” said Aaron.

  “No.”

  “Do what I say.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Barry. He turned his back to the others but it made him feel too alone, so he turned around again.

  “Fucking capitalists,” said Oscar. “Let’s get more stones.”

  In the next half hour, they pushed over ten tombstones. Barry stood by the obelisk, mostly by himself. He found some comfort from Jim Morrison’s voice but the song scared him: When the music’s over, turn out the light.

  At one point Harriet joined him. “You’re a sissy,” she said. There was a hint of kindness in her voice.

  “I know it. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t tell the police.” Her face was a pale circle in the darkness.

  “I’d never do that.”

  “You’ll make a silly revolutionary, Little Pink.”

  “I don’t want to be a revolutionary,” he said.

  After a while the others came back to the Peabody obelisk. Oscar threw himself on the ground and appeared to go to sleep. Shannon and Jesse drank beer. Aaron made several screwdrivers and handed them to Harriet, Jason, and Bob.

  Barry reached for one.

  “You don’t get one,” said Aaron. “You’ve been bad.”

  Oscar was lying on his stomach with his face in the grass. “Bad, bad, bad,” he said.

  “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection,” sang Jim Morrison.

  Aaron looked around, first in one direction, then another. “My mother’s buried in here,” he said.

  “The murdered lady,” said Bob Jenks.

  “I think she’s over there,” Aaron said. He began walking to his left. Harriet went after him. The others watched. Oscar jumped to his feet and followed. Shannon and Jesse went as well.

  Barry was left by himself. He looked around, then ran after Jesse. “Wait up,” he called.

  Janice McNeal’s grave was in a recent part of Homeland; its tall rectangular stone still looked new. There were flowers on the grave and Barry wondered who had put them there. Aaron, Bob, and Shannon shone their flashlights on the stone.

  “Should we knock it over?” asked Oscar.

  “Don’t even try,” said Aaron.

  “What was she like?” asked Harriet.

  Aaron didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “She liked to get fucked.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “She liked to jack men off and see their jism shoot into the air.”

  “She told you that?” asked Harriet.

&
nbsp; “Other men told me,” said Aaron. “They thought I should know what my mother was like. I can sit in Bud’s Tavern and some drunk will come up and say, ‘Your mother liked to jack me off.’”

  A car passed on the street.

  “Fuckers,” said Shannon. The beam from his flashlight danced on Janice’s tombstone.

  Aaron appeared to get angry. “You think there’s something wrong with jacking somebody off? Maybe she liked it. She liked lots of stuff.”

  “What do you think about her murder?” asked Barry. He didn’t quite mean it that way. He wanted to know if Aaron suspected someone of having done it.

  “What the hell do you think he thinks?” asked Jason.

  “It seems to me,” said Oscar, “that Little Pink’s been getting away with a lot tonight.”

  “Shame on Little Pink,” said Shannon.

  “He didn’t help with the capitalist stones,” said Jesse.

  “I think,” said Oscar, “that it would be honoring Janice McNeal’s memory if we gave her Little Pink’s pants.”

  Shannon laughed. “Great,” he said.

  “And underpants,” said Oscar.

  Barry stepped back but was immediately grabbed and pushed to the ground. Shannon knelt on his shoulders as Oscar and Jesse began to work on his belt buckle. The others stood back, then Bob Jenks joined them as well.

  Barry struggled. “No!” he cried, and Shannon put a hand over his mouth. They pulled off Barry’s sneakers, then began tugging at his pants. As he twisted back and forth, he could see Aaron and Harriet standing above him, looking down at him. Harriet had a little smile. Aaron’s face showed nothing at all.

  When Barry’s pants and underpants had been removed, Shannon and Jesse continued to hold him down. Oscar stood up and focused his flashlight on Barry’s genitals.

  “No wonder they call you Little Pink,” he said.

  “Hey, Barry,” said Shannon, “when do you think it’ll start growing?”

  They continued to joke about his penis.

  “Maybe it needs vitamins,” suggested Joany.

  “Or Rapid-Gro,” said Bob.

  Aaron didn’t say anything. He looked at Barry, then looked away. Barry squeezed his eyes shut and wanted to disappear.

  Oscar draped Barry’s pants over Janice’s tombstone.

  “Oh dear departed one,” he said, “we place this tribute upon your tomb so you will know that you have our unending devotion.”

  They shone the flashlights on the tombstone. Hanging down, the legs of Barry’s jeans made an upside-down V bracketing Janice’s name.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Aaron. “I’m bored.”

  Oscar grabbed the pants and ran off toward the street. Jesse followed and Shannon ran off as well. The others hurried after them. Barry stayed on the ground with his hands over his eyes. He realized he was lying above Janice’s remains. He didn’t move. The dark grew darker. A night bird called. After another moment, he could hear nothing at all.

  Barry kept his hands over his eyes. “Little Pink,” he said out loud. “Little Pink.” In the silence, it was as if he were shouting. He no longer heard the others, but then a car rushed away squealing its tires. He still expected to be dragged down among the dead, but now he wanted it to happen.

  But nothing happened. Barry lay there for nearly an hour, then he got too cold. He made his way to the street. They had taken his shoes as well. By his watch he saw it was three-thirty in the morning. He stepped on gravel and hurt his bare feet.

  “Little Pink,” he said out loud.

  Once he got to the street, he stood behind a tree. There were no cars and the houses were dark. It was a mile to where he lived. It was less to his mother’s house, but he couldn’t go there. Barry imagined walking across town without his pants. He was bound to be seen. He wanted to stay in the cemetery and never leave. He felt the dead were lucky.

  Around four-thirty he heard a car. He hid behind the tree. The car pulled up in front of the fence and a door opened.

  “Barry!”

  It was Aaron.

  Barry came out from behind the tree.

  Aaron stood by the fence. He held Barry’s pants. He looked at Barry, then tossed his pants to him.

  “Get in the car,” he said.

  Twelve

  Aaron was ten years older than Sadie, surely too much to make them contemporaries, though I have friends ten years my junior or senior and I see them as contemporaries. But Sadie was thirteen. No one approved of their friendship and Sadie was warned against it. Just the fact that Aaron was interested in Sadie was taken as evidence that something was wrong. And that was another point: Why was Aaron interested in Sadie, why did he want to spend time with her? It is one of the complications of life that nothing is done for one reason. There may be many reasons, both conscious and unconscious. My favorite chair for reading is the one in which my mother used to read to me. Yet when I moved back to this house, I didn’t realize it was the same chair, even though I probably sat in it for several hours each evening. It had been reupholstered from a dark brown fabric to a light blue fabric with yellow flowers. It wasn’t even the most comfortable chair in the living room; the arms were lumpy and the seat sagged. Yet something led me to pick it out as my reading chair. Psychologically, it was the chair most comfortable for me. This is an example of an unconscious reason.

  Aaron may have liked Sadie because she was uncorrupted and looked at the world with wonder. That certainly was one of my reasons for liking her: her vision was not yet jaded. Beyond that she was energetic and enthusiastic, courteous and pretty. And she had a sense of humor, a delight in the slightly peculiar that I found charming, such as the stories she made up about my fetal pig or the nearly hairless rat in its jar of formaldehyde, which she named Tooslow and for which she invented adventures where nothing turned out right.

  Aaron must have had some other reasons too. Given his history, he was familiar with the dark side of human life. With Sadie there was no dark side, or perhaps she was pre-dark side. Even the idealism of the IIR, as foolish as it seemed, was based on the hope that the dark side could be erased from human experience by changing human institutions, though I’m sure this insight would have surprised some of its members. That idealism, however, was one of the reasons Aaron had joined, even if he had half a dozen others. Sadie’s innocence attracted us both. On the other hand, I would never have done anything to put Sadie in danger, but that didn’t seem entirely true of Aaron.

  Ten days after the graveyard incident Aaron took Sadie to a flooded quarry several miles east of Aurelius to go swimming. It was private property and the sheriff’s department patrolled it because over the years there had been three or four drownings. There was also old machinery either under water or poking up through the surface: contortions of rusted metal so deteriorated it was impossible to guess its original function. Franklin would have been upset had he known that Aaron was taking Sadie to such a dangerous place, but he knew nothing about it until later.

  I gather that Sadie had been begging Aaron to take her all summer and so perhaps he wasn’t one hundred percent guilty. On the other hand, he had told her about the quarry and had probably made it sound exciting. People went swimming in the quarry when I was a boy and even then it was known as dangerous. I never went myself for fear of making my mother angry.

  Aaron parked his old Toyota under some trees about a mile away and they hiked across the cornfields and through a patch of woods to the quarry’s edge. Sadie had made salami sandwiches and they had a six pack of Pepsi in a small cooler. It was mid-August and hot. A blue, cloudless day. Cicadas were whining. It hadn’t rained for over a week and everything was dry. They left Aurelius around ten and reached the quarry an hour later. Sadie had wanted to bring her dog, Shadow, a black cocker spaniel who hated exercise, but Aaron told her to leave it behind.

  The incident at Ho
meland Cemetery had drawn a lot of attention but no one was charged and the vandals remained unknown. There was an article in the Independent and Franklin had written an editorial about how the character of the present could be judged by its respect for the past. A dozen tombstones had been tipped over and one was cracked in half. Many beer cans had been found. It was assumed that high school students were responsible. No one seemed to suspect the IIR, though some people must have. A few months later and the IIR would be suspected of everything from stealing missing dogs to throwing trash on the streets. A local Boy Scout troop volunteered to clean up the graveyard and the police patrolled more carefully.

  When Sadie mentioned the graveyard to Aaron, he admitted he had been there.

  “Did you tip over tombstones?” asked Sadie.

  “A couple. They were heavy.”

  They had reached the quarry and were following a dirt path around the edge, a low bluff above the water. The pond was about a hundred and fifty yards across and had a ragged oval shape. Four boys were jumping into the water from a tree branch on the other side and a dog was barking.

  “Weren’t you scared of getting in trouble?”

  “We didn’t think about it. The dead don’t care and the living weren’t around.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “Boredom, I expect.”

  They chose an open spot by the water where three logs made a triangle. A fire had once been built in the center, leaving a dark burned place. Beyond the logs a bluff rose up about twenty feet above the water. Sumac grew along the shore. Aaron and Sadie were directly across the quarry from the four boys, who were at the end of a dirt track where sheriff’s deputies now and then appeared. The dog kept barking. One of the boys shied a stone at it but missed.

  Aaron, who was often silent with others, was talkative with Sadie. I’m not sure he was really different with her, but he appeared less guarded, less ironic. He, too, had grown up in Aurelius and seemed a happy child. The change came in his teens. Superficially, it could be blamed on Hark Powers, but Hark simply represented the world. One could also blame Aaron’s change on the arrival of puberty and an awareness of his mother’s life. His father’s life, too, for that matter.