Going Underground

by Susan Vaught

  My house seems as quiet as the graveyard. “Mom!” I call out again, knowing I saw both cars in the drive. The wild joy I’m riding shifts to irritation and a little worry. “I’ve got her. I’ve got Fred! Can we get her to the vet to be sure she’s okay?”

  I see them then, coming toward me from the living room side by side. My parents have on matching jeans and matching Adopt Pets T-shirts, and they’re wearing the same sad, stunned expressions.

  Didn’t they hear me? I hold up the cage. “She’s not dead. Fred’s right here and she’s alive.”

  Tears slip out of Mom’s eyes as she gets to us. She puts one arm around my shoulders and with her free hand, she touches the cage bars, careful not to let Fred take a chunk out of her fingertips.

  I don’t get it. Mom should be happy, like me—and Dad’s putting his hand on my face, my head, ignoring the cage and the bird.

  Before I can go ballistic with confusion and frustration, Dad makes me look at him, and his simple statement blows up everything in my world all over again, one more time.

  “Son, I’m sorry,” he says, looking more miserable than I’ve ever seen him look. “It’s Harper.”

  Now

  What do you say at a funeral, when you’re talking about one of your only real friends in the world, and he’s lots older than you, and he died in a bad way?

  After all he did for me, helping me keep my shit together and giving me a job and warning me about Cherie every chance he got and searching for Fred and driving me past Livia’s and never once judging me for my past, Harper died alone. He bled to death in his little house at the back of the graveyard from esophageal varices—some horror-movie condition that happens to people who drink too much. One of the funeral home reps found him when he didn’t come to the door to sign off on a burial plan, and he’d been dead for a while, probably since that morning, just after he wrote the grave list and note for me.

  We got the preacher from the church where Harper was baptized, where his father and his grandfather went, and he’s talked already, and now he’s standing in the newly opened Dogwood Section of Rock Hill with his Bible, smiling like preachers do at funerals, and he’s waiting.

  He’s waiting for me because I’m supposed to say something now.

  “I …” I look down at the pine box, which is what Harper bought for himself a long time ago, through Johnston’s Mortuary in Duke’s Ridge, according to the papers I found in the envelope on his fridge. The envelope was marked Open this when I croak, so that was easy enough. It had all his burial information inside, and a lawyer to notify, and that’s how we found out that the cemetery, his house, and his piece-of-shit truck are mine when I turn eighteen, and how we knew he wanted a pine box, and which church to go to for a preacher.

  The pine box is closed, and I can’t see Harper, and I didn’t get to see him after he died. It wasn’t pretty, according to the doctors.

  “I … you …”

  My parents stand around the open grave that I dug by myself, and Dr. Mote’s there, and Branson, too. Marvin and his mom came, and Cherie and pinhead and their folks. It’s Tuesday, but everybody’s dressed Sunday-nice.

  I keep choking up. My words don’t want to come out at all. Everybody looks as sad as I feel, and I know I’m smiling, and that’s wrong, but that’s what happens to my face when I feel like this. Angry. Alone. Helpless. Made of paper and cut away from the rest of the world. Only the smell of dirt and pines and the first hint of spring dogwoods keeps me anchored to the planet.

  I put my hand on the smooth pine, imagining Harper’s beer-soaked peanut butter breath. “If I’d been there, I would have done something.”

  There. That’s something. Better than nothing. It’s stupid but true. I keep imagining I could have grabbed him and stopped the bleeding, maybe got him to a hospital in time to save his life. People always think that, right? When bad stuff happens. If only I’d done this, or Maybe if I’d tried that—but it’s all dumb.

  Harper’s dead, and that’s reality, and I have to live with it.

  I close my eyes, then open them and try again, keeping my hand on the pine box. “Maybe I should have done a lot more to save you even though you didn’t think you needed saving.”

  My mother makes a funny little noise, and my father pulls her closer. I’m not sure what she’s thinking or why she’d feel guilty about Harper, who was my problem and responsibility if he was anybody’s. Marvin’s mom reaches out and takes her hand, and they share a look that tells me I have no idea what Mom’s really thinking and maybe it’s better that way. I can’t even handle my own thoughts, much less somebody else’s.

  For a long time, seconds, then minutes, which seem endless when it’s quiet, I can’t think of anything else to say to Harper. It sucks that he’s dead. It sucks that I lost him. It sucks that he lost himself.

  Before I start blubbering, the right words come to me, and my hand makes a fist on the pine box lid. I bang it once and the sound’s so loud it’s like a gunshot in the graveyard, startling birds out of trees and making Fred sit up straight and whistle in her travel cage that I draped with a black cloth. She’s hanging in the closest tree and I don’t even care if she calls Harper names. Right now, I’d like to call him a few.

  “You deserve better than this,” I tell Harper. I bang his pine box again, and again, and I tell him that, and it’s louder each time I’m saying it, and I feel like something in my gut is unclenching and turning loose, flying at the sky like the scared birds. “You gave me a chance, and you deserve better than this. Why didn’t you give yourself a chance?”

  Bang!

  Bang!

  The crowd’s jumping each time I hit the pine box, but nobody’s running forward to stop me. The minister’s backing away, giving me more room.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do now. What am I going to do?”

  Bang!

  Because I don’t know. No college wants me and I’ve got a graveyard and an old truck, and all that’s doing is pissing me off and scaring me in weird ways and making me sure about one thing.

  Bang!

  “I know this much.” Bang! “Whatever I do, I’m not going to live your life. I’m not going to be you.”

  Bang!

  The last blow almost knocks the pine box off its stand, but I’m through now. I’m breathing hard and sweating and feeling like I finally, finally said the right thing.

  I back away from the pine box and have a weird thought that maybe banging on coffins is illegal and I’m going to be in trouble, but I shove that right out of my brain. My folks and Branson and Dr. Mote are probably swapping looks and murmuring about how to have me carted away.

  The preacher doesn’t seem able to move even though he’s supposed to finish the ceremony now so Harper can be lowered into the ground he’s tended since he was a little boy.

  My hand hurts.

  I finally make myself look at my parents—and I start feeling like the preacher, all frozen with surprise at exactly the wrong moment.

  They’re crying. They’re all crying, even Branson and Marvin and Cherie. Pinhead’s the only one giving me you’re-a-freak eyes, but that’s because out of everyone present, Jonas Blankenship is probably the most normal person in the whole bunch.

  That’s sad. And it’s funny.

  Thank God I manage not to start laughing—or crying—until I’ve got Fred and we’re walking home, leaving everyone else to watch Harper’s pine box slowly disappear under the dirt I piled neatly beside his grave.

  Now

  I’ve read about how different types of parrots can be—well, different. South American parrots like macaws and Amazons have to find a lot of food in not a lot of space, so even though they look really different, they tolerate each other and sometimes form “multispecies flocks.”

  Bet that’s noisy. And colorful. And probably crazy as hell.

  African parrots like Fred, though, have plenty of room to eat, but they spend time eating on the ground, which makes them vulnerab
le to predators from the air. Some bigger bird could just dive down and snatch them up and eat them whole. The thing is, African Greys all look alike, with their gray feathers and red tails, so if I were a big, mean parrot-eating bird in the air looking down on a flock of African Greys, all I would see would be like a moving carpet of gray. I wouldn’t be able to pick out a parrot to eat, so I’d blow it off rather than risk diving when I can’t tell what I’m grabbing.

  This is why Fred doesn’t usually accept new people into her “flock,” because she’s not sure if they’ll get her eaten or killed or something. It’s also why she grieves if she perceives somebody in her flock has gotten lost.

  I’m sure I’m in for shit when Marvin and I start arguing in my bedroom, because Fred’s in her big cage listening. Her eyes look weirdly wide and her wings are drooping, and I know she’s sad.

  Marvin isn’t sad or tense or wary or anything simple like that. He’s pissed.

  “I have to do it,” I tell him. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only way out I see.”

  My already quiet bedroom gets that much quieter. Marvin’s got his cookie uniform on without the big rubber hat, and he makes the room smell sweet and chocolatey as he stares at me. Just about everything from the goofball manga books on my little computer desk to the retro Cocoa Puffs sheets and bedspread on my bed seems stupid, especially me. I feel like I’m sticking out to Marvin or like I’ve changed into something he doesn’t recognize, because that’s how he’s looking at me—sort of new Marvin, but mostly old Marvin, and his face is saying a bunch of things.

  I’ve stuck by you.

  I’ve been the best friend I could be.

  I don’t ask you for anything, and you can’t give me this?

  “I have to do it.” The words pop out of me again. “I know you don’t want me to, and I’m sorry, but—please.”

  “Please what, Del?” He shakes his head. “Shit, man. I’m finally eighteen. You’re finally eighteen. It’s finally as over as it can get. Why would you crack it all open again?”

  I glance down at my sneakers, at the faint brown stains from graveyard dirt, marks that never clean all the way out no matter how much I scrub and rinse. “I think it’s the right thing to do for my future, like Notre Dame’s right for you.”

  Marvin’s voice gets hard, and it seems deeper as he raises both hands sideways, like he’s about to karate-chop the world. “Because Dr. Mote says it is? Because Branson says so? People haven’t exactly given you great advice through this, have they?”

  His brown eyes seem like they’re on fire. I don’t like what he just said because it gives me the sick butterflies like I felt back then, in court, when I was listening to my sentence. When I think I can talk without my voice cracking, I say, “Somebody’s got to stop this. The system’s out of control.”

  Marvin lets his hands drop back to his sides. “It’ll be new publicity. News shows and papers and blogs—they’ll print stuff about us—about you—all over again, Del.” He turns away from me, staring at Fred’s cage, and at Fred. She’s drooping big-time now. “I can’t go through it a second time, all the reporters, the stories, the calls and letters, watching your life flush down the toilet—no way.”

  “I’m not asking you to go with me.” Maybe that’ll help. Something needs to. His turned back and Fred’s sagging wings are making me too jumpy for words.

  “Good, because I won’t have anything to do with it.” Marvin tilts his head back. His eyes are closed, but that’s about all I can make out from behind him. “I’m leaving for South Bend in two weeks. I can’t be there for something like that. It’ll be in the papers. It’ll be on television. You know how that’ll look.”

  Ouch.

  Yeah. I know.

  Marvin doesn’t want to be there because it might look like he was supporting sex offenders. Some of the people at Notre Dame probably wouldn’t approve.

  Absolutely nothing at all to say to that.

  He turns slowly to face me, and his expression goes through a lot of funny changes, old Marvin, new Marvin. He looks like he wants to take back what he just said, like he knows how it probably sounded to me. Then his eyes shift off to nowhere, and I’m not sure he’s seeing me anymore. Or, he’s seeing me, but I’m like a motorcycle rider in his rearview mirror, getting smaller and thinner as he drives hard and fast away from me.

  New Marvin wins out, and new Marvin doesn’t have anything else left to say because he just might be thinking, Finally. Let that image in the rearview go ahead and fade.

  I think …

  I think Marvin’s done.

  With the past. With everything we went through. With me.

  He’s done because he can be done, and I’m getting that, even if he doesn’t understand it yet, even if he may never put what’s happening today into exactly those words.

  It’s stupid, but I have to try one more time. I have to see if I’m right, to find out if there’s any way for us to stay in the same flock. “Don’t make me pick between you and doing what I think is right.”

  Old Marvin would have frowned, maybe sat down, and at least given this some serious thought. Old Marvin would have considered my side and his side, but maybe I’ve been asking Marvin to look away from his own side too long, without even knowing it.

  “I have to,” I tell Marvin again, and maybe my own voice is different.

  New Marvin says, “You’re grown, Del. Do what you want.”

  Then he’s out the door, and he’s gone, and the sound of my front door slamming feels as final as my fist on Harper’s pine box.

  For a long time after Marvin leaves, Fred and I sit in our cages looking at the door with our wings drooping.

  Now, Also Known as the Day I Pull My Head Out of My Ass

  When people testify before Congress in the movies, it’s always in Washington DC, and everything’s made out of marble and tile, the ceilings stretch to the sky, and everybody listening looks stern and interested and intelligent. People whisk down the shiny halls, have a moment of angst outside the heavy doors, then walk courageously into the echoing chamber and valiantly say everything that needs to be said.

  In real life, there’s nothing shiny. There’s carpet. Bad carpet. It’s old and frayed with multicolored squares. If I look at it too long, it’ll blind me. The walls are done in heavy, dark paneling instead of marble, and I have no idea about the legislative people listening to everybody, because Mom and Dad and Branson and I have been waiting six hours for my part, and I’ve run through the snacks we bought, and I keep going over my notes even though I know I can’t memorize them because I’ve been trying for weeks. I’m not courageous or valiant or anything else. I’m hungry, I’m alternating between roasting and freezing, depending on whether anything’s blowing out of the rattling vent over my head; my butt hurts from sitting on a wooden bench with no cushions in the hallway; and I’m nervous.

  I’m sad, too. I miss Marvin and I keep thinking I shouldn’t be doing this, but then I think about Harper and the rescue rooster and my life, and I get back to believing that I’m doing the right thing. That I’m doing the only thing I can do, even though it’ll get me nothing but more trouble.

  “They won’t vote for it, not when the other party will accuse them of being soft on sex offenders.” Mom rubs her eyes with her fingers, shifting her butt around on the bench next to mine. She’s not really talking to any of us, so none of us answer her.

  Dad’s sitting beside Mom, butt firmly in place, and as people stream past us in the hallway, he says, “They’re sticklers for the time limit. They keep a little timer running like it’s some kind of swim meet or track race. When it’s over, they ask you questions, then say thank you and you’re done.”

  “Ten minutes goes by fast,” Branson agrees from the bench on the other side of mine. He’s holding a black CD player he carried in for me, since I couldn’t have walked it through the metal detector. “But the questions can take some time.”

  I look at my rum
pled, Fred-chewed fistful of notes, then drop them on the bench beside my leg and close my eyes. I’ll never be able to say anything I wrote down. It all sounds as lame as the college letters I wrote. How could I be so stupid?

  Why did I ever agree to do this?

  I should have let Branson or Mom or Dad or all of them read over what I was thinking about and give me pointers. Maybe they should have written my speech for me.

  Dad wiggles closer to Mom. “The audience is good sized for us.”

  So casual, like he’s wanting to make conversation.

  Gee, thanks, Dad; that helps so much.

  I wonder if I spur him or peck him in the face, will he give me quiet space like he gives Clarence the rooster?

  The doors to the chamber aren’t heavy wood. More like leather or vinyl-covered metal. Big and not in sync with the paneled walls or the bad carpet. Nothing matches.

  WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

  About an hour later, when those doors finally open for me, I’m still asking that question. Then I’m walking down the mismatched carpet, trying not to notice the audience to my left or my right, or all along the back walls on either side of the doors. Reporters. People. Cherie and some other chicks in black. Those things I catch. Everything else I shut out.

  Cherie being there makes me feel weird, but also happy, like maybe somebody other than my parents, PO, and therapist actually gives a shit. She gives me a thumbs-up, and I mouth, Thanks. I called Jonas when I found Fred, and he let her know everything was okay—even though I still didn’t want her coming back to the graveyard. She hasn’t, except to attend Harper’s funeral.

  If I could have brought Fred, I would have, but at least I have her beak marks on my notes.

  Um, no I don’t. The notes are still on the bench outside.

  Oh, wonderful.

  I’m a few feet from a long table with a microphone. In front of the long table, more seats line the left and right of the room, sweeping around to center. Most of these seats are filled with men and women with suits and very, very bored or irritated expressions.