Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  A background of static appeared to drift out of the phone. He could feel it entering, filling his head. Then another sound: metal against wood, metal against wood, chopping, scraping, chopping some more.

  Eric turned off the phone and snapped it shut, slipped it into his pocket, vowing not to turn it on again until he was on his way home. Walking back to the house, he met the sheriff’s car as it sped out of the yard. He started to wave the sheriff over, then lowered his hand. The sheriff barely nodded, eyes fixed on his custom horse hood ornament, and the beginning of the overgrown drive beyond the weeds. Eric waited for the car to pull out of sight, then ran toward the house.

  He must have somehow misjudged where he was, however, and before he knew it he was actually in the tall weeds, their long stalks weaving together like rows and waves of bamboo curtain being made and remade as they frayed apart with his thrashing. Now and then something would snag his lower pants legs, and despite his best efforts he could feel the panic rise, spill over, and flood his senses.

  Then when the weeds in front of his right foot appeared to separate of their own accord, the gray and yellow stalks twisting across the ground, across his foot, he heard himself yelling, the sound issuing from everywhere but his mouth.

  “Just take a slow sip. You’ll feel better.” Jim’s big tanned hand, holding a beer can by his cheek. Eric didn’t drink, but he grabbed it anyway, put it to his lips and focused on its bitterness like medicine going down. He immediately felt stomach-sick, bent over slightly and coughed. A tease of bitterness came back up, but he held on to the taste a few moments until the sick feelings passed.

  “Told you there were snakes out there, brother. You should have sense enough to stay out of those weeds.”

  “I took a wrong … step.” Eric choked slightly, then swallowed it away. “Believe me, it wasn’t intentional.” They were sitting on the chairs Jim had brought out, several beers on the small table. The sun going down behind the house. Eric remembered Jim grabbing him by the shirt while he was in the weeds, but he didn’t remember making it to the chair.

  “These chairs and the table,” Jim said, then pulled another long sip. “Good idea. I may just keep it this way.”

  “You know I had to call the sheriff,” Eric said.

  “I know. About the most regular thing you’ve ever done, I bet. I would’ve done the same, different circumstances.”

  “We have to get her out of here, put her someplace else,” Eric said. “Especially if you plan to keep living here.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “She called me, Jim. She broke into my phone call with Marie and just started talking to me, about the “job” you did for her.”

  “And Marie is?”

  Besides the fact that Jim was focusing on entirely the wrong thing in the information Eric had just imparted, hadn’t he talked to Marie? But then he remembered—Marie didn’t like to answer the phone. “My live-in girlfriend. I’m sure I’ve mentioned her at some point.”

  “Don’t think so. But hey, congratulations.”

  “It’s not like we’re married.”

  “No, but still—more than I got.”

  They sat together and drank, watching it get dark and the farmhouse and yard get strangely beautiful. “Anyway, you just tell me where all she is, Jim, and we’ll take care of this thing.”

  “What did you talk to Mother, and this Marie, with, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?’

  Jim’s features had grayed out, his eyes bluish-white and too large. It made him look a little crazy. “What did you talk on?”

  “Oh. My cell phone.”

  “You got a cell phone? Where is it?”

  “Cut it out.”

  “No, just show it to me. I’ve been thinking of getting me one.”

  Always the big brother, Eric thought. What’s the big deal, anyway? “Okay.” He hoped he sounded disgusted enough, “Here it is.” And reached into his pocket. And then the other pocket. Patted himself down. “Shit! It’s gone.”

  “I see. That’s too bad.” Jim made a long, stretching sigh. “So, was it expensive?”

  “Not really, but I have to …”

  “Fifty dollars? Hundred dollars? A little more?”

  “A little less, I think. I don’t know—there was, is a payment plan. I must have lost it in those weeds!”

  “Yeah, there’s always a payment plan, I reckon. You pay a lot now, or you pay a lot over a long time. Look, you want to, I’ll help you look in the morning, or, I’ll keep the salesmen away while you look. You can look all day if you like.”

  “I need my phone.”

  “Course you do. But until it turns up, you can use mine. No cell, just regular. But I keep the payments up, so I can call people, like you. And you can call … whoever it is you call.”

  “Marie.”

  “Right.”

  “But she doesn’t like answering the phone, and I don’t think I ever taught her your number.”

  “Taught her?”

  “Well, told her.”

  “I gotcha.”

  Eric felt as if he’d just been cross-examined by a teacher, or Mother, except Jim seemed to be a lot better at it than Mother had ever been. Mother would have lost herself in the conversation about halfway through.

  “So are you going to tell me where you buried her?”

  “I’d almost like to, but I don’t think Mother would like that much. Better not risk it.”

  “Well, I’m going to start digging without you then.”

  “I pretty much expected that.”

  “Do you have a flashlight?”

  “I’ll bring you a lantern. I’ve also got a couple of brand new shovels to give you.” He started trotting off to the house, more energy in his step than Eric thought he’d ever seen in him before. Then Jim stopped, turned around. “I’m gonna make us both sandwiches. What do you want on yours? I’ve got pretty much everything there is, having to do with sandwiches, in that old fridge.”

  Eric was standing in one corner of the yard, looking into the wall of weeds, when Jim came back with the equipment. The top-heavy stalks swayed whip-like in the wind, beating their heads against the dark. Movement complicated movement, and as much as he tried, he could not determine if it was all an effect of the wind or signs of creatures moving through the overgrown lot.

  “Don’t bother,” Jim said behind him.

  “What’s that?” Eric turned around.

  “I said don’t bother digging in the weeds. She may be in there … hell, she may be everywhere we are. But I didn’t put her there.”

  “Thanks, Jim.” Eric shuddered in relief, and gazed hopefully around the sculpture garden they used to refer to as their front yard.

  “But I’m not telling you any more than that.” He handed Eric a sandwich and a shovel, then gestured with the lantern out toward the corner. “Might as well start there, I guess, assuming you want to be thorough.”

  “Absolutely,” Eric tore a piece of bread off with his teeth.

  The digging wasn’t as hard as he’d expected. The ground was loose, as if worked over by a million earthworms, but he tried not to imagine too far in that direction. The shovels—-a long-handle as well as a short-handle for close-in—gleamed, and were extraordinarily sharp, and he decided he’d have to be careful using them or he might lose a toe or something worse, and again decided that was an unfortunate area for his speculations. His brother told the truth—they must have been brand new.

  The sandwiches were absolutely delicious. Eric had two, and was too shy to ask for a third.

  Jim sat in a chair, drinking, eating, and observing Eric’s labors, but without any anxiety that Eric could tell. Now and then he’d move his chair to match the pace of Eric’s progress, stretching out awkwardly from his seat and gazing down as if something particular had caught his interest, but Eric never could discern any pattern, nor could he see anything in what he’d uncovered so far that should have interested anyone—a few roots
that looked like fingers but weren’t, odd lumps and twists of brown rusted metal, something leather, something glass.

  “Remember taking out the garbage when we were kids?” Jim said.

  “Yeah, but that was usually your job, wasn’t it?”

  “Most of the time, but you did it once or twice, I think.”

  “I did—there was this big wooden box out here with a hatch on it. The stuff went in there.”

  “Remember how Daddy, and then Mother, would move it around?”

  “Oh yeah. It was weird. Every few weeks or so it would be in a different place.”

  “We didn’t have city trash pickup back then.”

  “Well, no, I don’t suppose we did. So what?”

  “So the city didn’t empty that box. You could truck the trash out yourself to the landfill, but they charged you a fee, and some folks didn’t feel they could pay it. But it was illegal to do anything else with it. One of the sheriff’s big jobs back then was to watch out for illegal dumping—the county did pretty good on the fine money, I hear. Do you remember Mom, Dad, anybody hauling our trash away, or our old furniture, junk, anything like that?”

  Eric stopped and leaned on the shovel handle, watching Jim. “No.”

  “That box had no bottom. I’d been wondering about it for awhile, so one day I pried up one edge. No bottom. There was a big hole in the ground, though. The trash went in there. When it was almost full Mom or Dad would cover the hole with dirt, dig another hole, move the box. It all went out here. It’s still under here.”

  Eric stared. “That’s a lot of digging, especially after Mother got older.”

  “I took over the digging when I was about fifteen. In fact, I think that’s why she gave me the farm to manage. I knew what was buried and where.”

  “God … how long did it take you?”

  “It wasn’t that bad. I enjoyed it, actually. And there are things about this ground—a lot of underground limestone beds, a lot of porous rock—things shift around, traveling god-knows-where. This is sink hole country. I’m surprised the house didn’t just get swallowed up one day.”

  “Are you saying I’m not going to find her because of all the other stuff that’s buried out here? And all the shifting?”

  “Oh, I’m sure she’s going to turn up, eventually. No, I just didn’t want you to be too surprised.”

  “I’m past surprises,” Eric said, returning to his work.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, brother.”

  Eric paused. “She worried about being called white trash, remember? She hated white trash. She could be awful, but she was human. She wasn’t trash to be buried with all the other trash, Jim.”

  “Whoa, now—that’s not what I was doing. She asked me to do this, remember? She was damn specific.”

  “So you say.”

  Jim didn’t reply, and it occurred to Eric that having an argument with his brother with his back turned, after what Jim had confessed to doing, was perhaps not the wisest thing he’d ever done.

  Eventually his brother got off the chair and lay down on the ground, falling asleep beside where Eric was digging, the temperature began to drop, the lantern flame flicker agitatedly as if threatening to quit. Eric was ready to quit, but could not. Some things, once begun, had to be played out until an ending was achieved, of whatever sort.

  The ground seemed to know this, and peeled away more easily with each scrape of the short-handled shovel. He was working in a trough almost five feet deep now, the shovel nibbling away at the forward end, the trough not much wider than his shoulders.

  The speed with which objects were revealing themselves, he was seeing, had more to do with the decreasing proportion of dirt to everything that had been buried here. He had already pulled out two old stuffed chairs, their mud-encased frames piled together on the ground above like the skeletal remains of extinct mammals. During the past hour or so they’d been joined by a broom, numerous cans and bottles, an ornate wooden box with rotted and unreadable papers inside, a tricycle that looked suspiciously like one from his oldest and least focused dream, the odd shoe, skate, and tractor part.

  Eric raised the shovel high above his shoulders, brought it forward and down like a child stabbing, holding a knife awkwardly in its two weak hands. Dark dirt like powdered blood drifted down from dull gun metal features. His mother’s eyes opened, tongue pushing the dirt out of her mouth.

  “Jim! Jesus, Jim!” Eric was scrambling out of the dig like a kid, calling for big brother to come save him.

  “Damn, Eric. Was it a snake?”

  “Her face … behind the dirt there. You see it in the light?”

  Jim stood and grabbed the lantern, lowering it just into the mouth of the trench. Metal glinted in the dirt: pots, wire, and chain. “Hey, I recognize this one. It’s one of the earliest she did.” He jumped into the hole, grabbed the chains, and pulled. A number of things came out all at once, connected. Jim climbed back out, dragging the construction like a big metal rag doll.

  “See, you got one pot for the head—she beat those bolts in there to give it eyes. There used to be something attached there for a mouth—I forget what it was. I helped her weld the chains on—they’re like … bones, or ligaments, connecting things up. She’s got a few old bed springs for arms and legs, and those twisted up spoons and forks were supposed to be hands, I guess. More chains for the legs, and see those chains attached to her belly? The big pot’s her belly, and she had me weld all kind of chains to that, and they’d wrap all around her, and connect back to her head somehow. Mother would make these babies out of clay, and fill the big belly pot full of water, and set it up on the stove, and boil those babies in the water in the pot. She’d do one after another like that, just sitting there in the kitchen watching them while they boiled. She said if she could get her “Pot Woman” and the babies and the stove too to an art gallery, and just boiled clay babies in her all day, she could make maybe a million dollars. I didn’t really understand much about that, do you? Do they do that stuff in art galleries?”

  “I’ve heard of things like that, I guess. Installations. Performance art—that’s probably what she was talking about.”

  “So she could have made some real money.”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. Possibly. It sounds … creepy. Some people might say it was meaningful.”

  “And that wasn’t the only one. All those things in the yard were things she made like that. Sometimes with a little of my help, but most of the time by herself. And there’s a lot more of them buried like this.”

  “All of them weird? Crazy stuff like that?”

  Jim played with the Pot Woman, brushing more dirt off her. “I guess you could say that.” He pulled a chair over, sat down while still tinkering with the Pot Woman and her various connections.

  Finally he set her down on the ground beside him, draping parts of her over his feet and calves like a drunken girlfriend. “So,” he said, as if continuing an interrupted conversation, “what do you do to make money these days?”

  Eric poured beer into his hands, splashed his face to help clean himself off. “I never thought you were interested.”

  “Oh, I was interested all right. I was just afraid if you told me I’d get too jealous, and then get to feeling bad.”

  “Nothing to get jealous about,” Eric said, smelling his fingers. They stank so badly. “I work in an insurance office. In a cubicle. I check people’s records, financial and personal, I make out reports, I make recommendations based on pre-defined tables and graphs and definitions.”

  “You do something out in the living world.” Jim shook the Pot Woman’s shoulder as if to rouse her. She made a dullish clinking noise. “I don’t do anything outside the things that get done on this farm, and you know the kinds of things that get done on this farm.”

  “You could do something else,” Eric said.

  “Yeah, I’m prime recruiter’s meat. That the right word?”

  “Meat?”

  “Recruiter, you
ass!” Jim laughed, a little too long. Then he sobered, swallowed. “You know, there was a few months there, a few years ago, that every morning I got up I saw this other guy, looking like me, but with a suit on, standing in the bathroom, shaving, checking his tie. And then he’d show up at the breakfast table, drinking his coffee while I was eating my stale cereal. Mother never noticed him—hell, she barely noticed me. She was depressed when she wasn’t making her things, and when she was making her things she was just plain angry.

  “Then this same guy, looking so much like me, but different enough, you know, that I knew he couldn’t be me, he stands up, every morning, and this woman comes in and kisses him goodbye, and this little kid comes running in, this gorgeous little girl, and he takes her up in his arms, like he doesn’t care even if she gets peanut butter and jelly on his good suit, and he hugs her, and he hugs her, until all three of them disappear.”

  The Pot Woman rattled as Jim rocked ever so slightly in his chair on the loose earth.

  “Jim.”

  “Hey, ghosts, right? This family, we’ve got ghosts coming at us from all sides. What was and what might be.”

  “You can do whatever you want. Especially with Mother gone, you don’t have to stay here.”

  “Yeah, like I know anything else, any other way to be. When you’re a kid, when we were kids, we never thought that the very hardest thing about living would be knowing what to do with ourselves every day. Just knowing what to do to fill that time. I don’t know if I know anybody got that figured out.” Jim turned to him, looking angry. “So dig, brother. You just keep digging because I’m not going to let you quit. Mother’s down there, and she’s, we’re losing our patience.”

  Jim didn’t exactly drop hints after that, but he’d move his chair around the yard, as if waiting for Eric to dig in those particular places, and so Eric did, always finding something, but not the pieces of his mother he was looking for. He didn’t know if Jim was just using him to fish around because he’d actually forgotten where he’d buried her, or if there was a story he was trying to tell with things he led Eric to dig up.

  More of the sculptures came out of the yard, some adult-sized, some the height of children. The child-like figures bothered him most. Their proportions were usually off—pie plate hands bigger than their heads, mouths so wide and open they left little room for any other facial features. Twisted legs. Twisted little hearts in hollow, tank-like abdomens. Now and then a clay effigy of a demon or some feral-looking creature wedged inside a coat hanger rib cage or a splintered tin-can brain.