The Deadsong

by Brandon Hardy

  Her jaw unhinged and hung with the words in the air. The snake slithered closer. Her brain told her body to jerk itself away, but she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed.

  “I can taste your thoughts, sinfully tasty they are. It wouldn't be your first rough romp in this house, would it? You know what I'm talking about. Don't act like you've forgotten. Why say anything when your uncle is locked up far from here? Is it because of your mother? What it would do to her? Hasn't she been through enough already, you ask? And your brother would tease you, call you names, and tell everybody. Everybody, Gina. Your teachers, neighbors, friends, classmates––even the clerks at the public library would secretly point and snicker like children. Is that what you want?

  “You're safe now, baby girl. He's afraid of you. Did you know that? Why do you think he's paid your bills, bought your first car, hell––nested for your college tuition? He's afraid you'll tell what he did to you. But you won't. You can't. He'll deny it, dontcha know? Then you'll be the liar.

  “This brings me to lover boy. He has a secret. A dirty little secret indeed. He hides it well. So cunning, so clever. Even I admire his style. It's mighty fine, baby girl. Migh-tee fine.”

  Like fine wine in the summertime.

  “It seems Jared enjoys playing a certain game, you might say. I'm not talking about Candyland or Scrabble, no ma'am, nothing as innocent as that, I assure you. But enough of that. We’d better get this over with.”

  Gina’s heart thudded in her chest as the snake coiled up in a rigid pose, rattling, opening its pink, wet mouth to reveal––

  "Rise and shine, slacker!" Dylan was standing in the doorway with muddy patches of earth on his blue jeans. His voice startled her out of her paralysis and in a fleeting blink, the slimy reptilian shaft smiling beside her was gone. Dylan stared at her blue-trimmed bikini with butterflies on them until she jerked up the sheet tightly below her face. "Eff'n pervo! You ever hear of knocking?"

  "Spare me the bitchy attitude, will ya? I had a blowout up the road a piece. Tried changing it, but the jack sank in the mud. I need a ride."

  "Forget it. I am not going to school today." The sun hid itself, taking with it the golden rods of sunlight that had felt so good. She flipped over to face the window, shaking.

  "I already called for a tow. Pleeease?" His voice grew into a nasally whine that made him sound like a begging child.

  A begging child, he was indeed.

  6

  “What’s it gonna be then, huh?” Martha Kemper paced up and down the linoleum with her eyes stuck out at her son. He reclined back in his chair looping a gold necklace around his index finger. He pointed it at his mother and twirled the chain like a hula-hoop.

  “Dammit, boy! Put that thing down and listen to what I’m a tellin you!” Her syllables tripped over one another, and then she tripped herself on the hem of her robe. Jared swallowed the laughter before it could escape. The gaudy getup she wore reminded him of wallpaper you might find in a sleazy motel out west, one where filthy all-night truckers paid by the hour to catch a few winks and push into a hooker’s meat curtains for a while.

  “I dunno, Ma, I’m not cut out for the service. We’ve talked about this already. I just don’t see myself doing it, that’s all. Coach McGraw says scouts will be looking at me this season, and I gotta be sharp, ya know? I could get a scholarship. A full ride, maybe. Why can’t you be happy about that?”

  Martha craned her head down. She looked as though the waxy skin would melt off her face at any moment. “Jared Galen Kemper, you disgrace your father’s name.”

  “Whoa, whoa, Ma––”

  “Your daddy served in the gulf, your granddaddy in Vietnam, your great-granddaddy in dubya dubya two––he got a Purple Heart. And the Congressional Medal of Honor after he was long gone. Mortar shell blew his bottom half clean off, but he never had a raw word to say about it. He sacrificed his life out of loyalty and patriotic love for this great nation, boy. He did it so his children and grandchildren would live proud and live free. So, show some RESPECT!”

  Jared stole a quick glance at the clock beside the fridge. He should have left for school twenty minutes ago.

  His mother got closer. Her stringy locks hung in her eyes, her breath rancid and sour. For the first time he noticed the tiny craters in his mother’s un-spackled face. Saliva webbed and snapped at the corners of her mouth. “Someday you’ll have children of your own, and they won’t have no respect for a coward or traitor. If you think throwing a ball around in padded tights will get you anywhere in this world, then by all means, Son, take that road, but––,” She held up a thin finger and shook it at him, “remember this: if you take the coward’s path, there ain’t gonna be a thing in this world that’ll wash that yella off your belly. I only pray the good Lord will show you mercy.”

  I hope he shows more mercy on you, Momma.

  7

  It started to sprits along Highway 7, but the sun was out in full bloom––a dose of liquid sunshine, his Momma would have said––with only with a single bruise-colored blotch of cotton candy clouds hugging the sky. The drive to Turd-en High, as he and his friends loved to call it, took under fifteen minutes without the usual school traffic.

  After parking next to the chain-link fence separating the student parking lot from the football field, Jared went inside and spent the next forty minutes in Pearson’s office. By the time he squeezed into Miss Webb’s literature class, he was sopped with sweat and had quietly buried a soul-singeing terror behind the mascot on his blue and gold t-shirt.

  Miss Webb shook a stub of white chalk at her class, obsessing about T.S. Eliot and his contributions to literary criticism. Standing just shy of five feet tall, she was a taut divorcee who spent most of her extracurricular hours logged into internet poker sites that promised little return if any, but that was just fine. She’d sit in her recliner cradling her laptop computer and watch her two Siamese kittens spat curiously at the dangling power cord.

  She approached Jared after noticing he was still standing by the front door of the classroom.

  “I’m glad you could join us, Mr. Kemper,” she said.

  He held up a card between his index finger and the finger he used to greet his mother’s gentlemen callers. Miss Webb snatched it from him and perched her spectacles on her beak to read Mr. Pearson’s scrawl. Her contempt for the slacker jock receded, reshaping her face into one that was rather pleasing to look at, despite the river of wrinkles flowing from the corners of her eyes––no doubt carved there by an eighteen-month feud in and out of divorce court.

  “Oh, I see.” She grinned and handed the card back to him. “Go on, then.” Her tone was encouraging like that of a giddy mother hearing of her son’s daring plan to stop the love of his life from boarding a plane to some distant city and wedding the douchebag who stole her away––the way most Hollywood garbage seemed to end.

  He stepped out in the empty hallway and closed the door behind him.

  She secretly lusted after this young man the way most of her female students (and Danny Rickles) did, but Gloria Webb would never see him alive again.

  8

  They lived only three miles from Durden High. It stood just off Highway 7 near the Hemming city limits across from Ava’s Flowers & Things. Hemming had been an agricultural whore in the 1920’s, peddling corn, cotton, and tobacco to the more well-to-do folks north and east of Tennessee for half the price of the competition. Ruins of the bygone era freckled the community, a stolid reminder of profitable heydays that had given way to more substantial commercial industry such as the aluminum manufacturing plant where Dick Starkweather had been crushed by a metal press two winters ago.

  It had been a dream and nothing more. Still the stench of the nasty thing lingered. It was a dream, right? Gina threw on the AC in her Volkswagen, blasting the cool, faded smell of vinyl and leather through the vents. She sucked it in through her nostrils like a white powder junkie snorting her paycheck.

  "Keep you feet on the mat,
will ya?" Gina barked.

  Dylan looked down at the chocolate muck caked on his sneakers. "They're on the mat," he sneered.

  What was she going to tell Mr. Kessler? The dog ate her homework? Hell, it was a believable scenario, at least to her. Fender would happily feast on a term paper seeping with bullshit just as much as the dime novel he had for dinner the night before. Even actual bull shit seemed appetizing to a senile farm dog.

  “I’ll drop you off at the side doors. All I need is someone to see me and go snitch to Pearson,” she said. Ellis Pearson was the vice principal who had given her some broad marks across the ass for chewing gum in his economics class her freshman year. It was his first term as the almighty peacekeeper with a flaming sword of discipline and a handful of shit-nosed minions known around school as the hall-pass police. It was one of these fine young fellows that had given Dylan a shiner for looking at him the wrong way. You squeal on me you shit-freckled fuck I’ll rip that red mop right off your retarded noggin! Dylan had said nothing about it. No member of Pearson’s personally selected saints would have done such a cruel thing. They had, though. Many times. A handful of them would take turns putting the boot to his guts on the floor of the boy’s restroom between classes. There had been a time when corrective action would deliver justice to the cruel and peace to the weak. But those days were long gone.

  Weak. Just a weak, shit-freckled fuck.

  He shivered away the self-loathing long enough to say “They’ll recognize your car. Just park in the lot and go inside with me. Say you were helping me with the flat tire, and they’ll excuse you. I’ll need a ride home later anyways.” He was afraid, weak with fear.

  Gina wasn’t aware of his suffering or his fear of the Pearson posse, but right now, she was preoccupied with her own tangled emotions and the escalating uneasiness swimming beneath her straw hat. The sight of Jared Kemper’s metallic blue muscle car parked beside the football field had burst open her memory gates, and out of them flooded fragmented images, shapes, and words that brought on feelings of intense arousal and fear.

  (railin and wailin)

  She bit down on her lip, wading through the murky pool of artifacts from…her dream. That’s right. It had been a dream. With a snake––a talking snake, at that. The thought suddenly felt absurd. She laughed out loud, tossing the thoughts back into the deep, piece by ridiculous piece, like a grown-up discarding embarrassing childhood moments frozen in yellowing Polaroids.

  The car slowed and slid into a parking space. Gina sighed, and glanced over at Dylan slouched in his seat. The dark crescents under his pitiful eyes made him look a bit like a frightened woodland creature––a raccoon, perhaps. Yes, that’s it, like Ole’ Rocky Raccoon with his head twisted up begging for mercy from a camouflaged hunter or a droopy-faced bloodhound.

  Dylan’s mercy came more easily than she anticipated. Sisterly love stretched out from behind her ribcage as though it had been quietly sleeping––hibernating for just this moment.

  Over his shoulder, she watched the football team step out of the gymnasium and trot toward the playing field where Jared’s car was parked. It sparkled like a polished sapphire set neatly into the asphalt. After inspecting their faces, Gina whispered, “Come on. We’re late enough as it is.”

  She had not seen Jared among them.

  9

  “I'd suck a fart out of that ass!” Duke Pearson exclaimed, elbowing a dazed kid he didn’t know. The kid dropped his books, not sure of what the preppy dirtbag in the letterman jacket was talking about––until he looked up and saw the girl in a straw fedora approaching them.

  Gina glided down the hallway gracefully, modestly. The halls were filling up after the dismissal of first period, but she could see the boy picking up his chemistry books, and recognized him as the only known homo in school, Danny Rickles––the only one she knew of for sure, anyway.

  She thought it was foolish for Rickles to proudly proclaim his sexual preference considering their small town didn’t take gently to that kind––peter-lickers and casual queers blindly measured up for the gallows or a pair of cement shoes meant for dancing on the bottom of Goose Creek.

  Gina considered how lucky the poor boy had been. The drooling dirtbag to his left was Duke Pearson––the son of Vice Principal Ellis Pearson––who hadn’t recognized him at all and that was a good thing. Luckily she held Duke’s gaze long enough for Rickles to dodge into the school library and out of sight.

  “Gina!” Duke waved a hand at her. He was sure she was totally in love with him. His girlfriend wouldn’t like that so much, but if she ever found out, maybe she’d give in to some three-way action. He kept his fingers crossed.

  “Have you seen Jared Kemper?” Gina asked.

  “Yeah,” Duke blinked away his endearing fantasy and pocketed his hands. “He popped into Webb’s class for a bit, showed her a note, then took off. Didn’t seem sick or anything.”

  He’d never seen closely the beauty of her face. The rest of her he had mapped out pretty well––perfect legs, killer tits, and two tight mounds of ass in the caboose––but her face, he had never examined before now. In it were the bluest eyes he'd ever seen. Her pupils were tiny black islands floating in an untainted ocean. He was lost in them, swimming.

  He ran a hand through his hair, but before he could say anything else, she thanked him and disappeared into a noisy sea of chattering heads and banging locker doors.

  Duke thought she looked worried. Maybe about the test on key figures of the American Civil War, the one she skipped out on in first period? Perhaps. Duke knew because his girlfriend––the hopeful ménage-a-trois participant––had noticed Gina’s empty seat while stammering through a riveting spiel on George Armstrong Custer, although she insisted his last name was Custard, which the class found rather amusing.

  Gina’s attention was indeed directed somewhere within herself, thinking. Not about the report––she would take care of that soon enough––but about the snake.

  How could it have known? How could it have known about what happened to her all those years ago? How could it have known something so horrifying and unspeakable that she herself had buried far beneath a towering stack of memories, feelings, and trivial brain fodder accumulated by a particularly average seventeen-year-old?

  But it knew, all right, she thought. Oh yes, I’m sure it knows everything and more.

  10

  Dylan drew mentholated smoke into his lungs and squeezed out a cool plume of the stuff. It wasn’t as bad as he had expected. In fact, the taste was almost pleasant––like that of medicated vapor rub his mother spread on his chest when he was a wee lad. The buzz crept in, swelling Dylan’s being with a numbing sensation that flowed from his toes to his crown. He coughed then passed the butt to Garrett Eucher.

  “Hey, keep it down, will ya?” Garrett said. He sucked down nearly half of the cigarette while peeking from behind the cafeteria dumpster. He saw the empty picnic tables on the common area in front of the cafeteria. His head jerked back to Dylan. “What time ya got there, Stark?”

  Dylan pulled back his sleeve and checked his watch. “It’s almost eleven. We should be getting back.”

  “Yeah, it’s almost first lunch.” Garrett extinguished the cig on the sole of his hightop.

  They stood up quietly, Garrett’s eyes darting around for signs of life. “Wait!” he whispered, yanking Dylan back down behind the dumpster. Miss Webb stood by the back door of her classroom putting a flame to a non-filter jutting from her lips.

  They tiptoed around the dumpster and squatted behind the concrete wall of the cafeteria’s loading dock. The eleven o’clock bell screamed through the open double doors of the east wing. An orange plastic chair used as a doorstop kept them open. Miss Webb pinched off the burning tobacco, pitched the cigarette out into the uncut grass, and went inside.

  A hand snatched a wad of Dylan’s shirt collar and reeled him up. Before he could react, his freckled face was rearranged with one sharp, fleeting smack into th
e concrete wall.

  “Whatcha doin out here, creep?” Duke was standing over him watching the blood pour from his broken nose. He turned to Garrett. “Beat it, Eucher, or you’ll get some, too.”

  Garrett ran like a spooked rabbit.

  Two other guys stood behind Duke, but Dylan couldn’t remember their names. He had seen them in the halls, but to him they were just faceless, brainless jocks. From this angle, the trio looked like angry gods from Mount Olympus ready to unleash their wrath on the shit-freckled fucks of Durden High. But Dylan seemed to be the only one branded for punishment today.

  “I asked what you were doing out here,” Duke said.

  “We we’re just having a smoke, man,” Dylan replied wiping his face with his shirt.

  Duke bent down and looked him over carefully, grinning.

  “I think you two were getting fresh out here. What do you think, fellas?”

  “Yeah, Duke. Real fresh,” the two jocks snickered.

  The wrinkled pack of cigarettes lay on the cement with one bent filter sticking out. Duke fished it into his palm. He looked at it, scoffed, and stuck it between his lips. “Gimme a light, faggot.”

  Dylan fumbled in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a butane lighter with Avery’s Country Store logo screened on the side. A cocktail of blood and sweat leaked from the corners of his eyes, pink dots splattering silently on his t-shirt. He held out the lighter with a shaky hand. Duke sagged closer. As the tobacco caught fire, Dylan shoved the jet flame into Duke’s face hissing away the neatly groomed eyebrow over his right eye. The sandy blond bangs above it shriveled and recoiled, the pungent aroma of menthol and burned hair floating grossly on the breeze. Duke jerked away screaming and swatting at his face. The jocks just stood there like deer in a car’s headlights, and by the time they realized what had happened, Dylan was gone.

  They helped Duke to his feet. They kept asking him to take his hands away from his face so they could get a look. He shook his head like a rabid dog, grunting and saying something they couldn’t understand at first.