Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  Inside, Ember Eyes says, “Is this some kind of a fucking joke?” The corners of his mouth work, the muscles tense and release beneath his sunken mold–colored cheeks. He grimaces. His teeth are yellow, nicotine stained. His glowing cigarette–cherry eyes spark like firewood.

  Brett starts bawling. He sinks against the door, feels Ember Eyes’s heat against his back, jolts upright, swings around. He is surrounded. With those endless hallways at his back, to his sides, and Ember Eyes framed in each one, angry, hurt, betrayed, gesturing helplessly at the cigarettes with his awful snakeskin hands.

  Ember Eyes says, “I don’t think this is funny.”

  Outside, Marco grabs the handle. It burns him. He swears, shakes his hand up and down. The boys gasp. Some of them start to cry, trying not to, still posturing, still make–believing that this is make–believe, even when some part of them deep inside knows otherwise. All they hear on the other side is Brett, sobbing, scrabbling, scratching. Marco says, “Brett, come out. We’re done. It’s okay.”

  Inside, Ember Eyes says, “All I wanted was a smoke. I asked nicely. Why are you being such a jerk?” His voice deteriorates. He’s got a campfire in his throat, eating up his vocal chords, putting runs and holes in them like old nylon stockings.

  Brett says, “I’m sorry,” and cries some more.

  “Give me,” says Ember Eyes, and sucks breath into his rotten lungs, “a cigarette.”

  Brett wants to tell him he can’t, that there are mirrors between them, thick walls where reality separates from myth, sorry, Ember Eyes is stuck in storyland and Brett is standing in the third dimension. But he doesn’t say anything. He shakes his head. Closes his eyes.

  So he doesn’t see what happens next. He doesn’t see Ember Eyes’s frog–fingers sinking through the mirror, manifesting in front of him. His black rawhide hands slip through, the glass clings to them like Vaseline, slips back into place like rubber. Wrists, arms, shoulders, each joint slipping through the mirror, pop, and Brett hears it all, hears each nasty noise and whimpers in response, but his eyes stay closed tight, wrinkling the skin into spider webs.

  Marco is pounding on the door now. Yelling. Someone will come. A prefect, a house head, someone will come and make this all stop, save him from culpability.

  Ember Eyes, slick and slimy and dry and brittle and sad and angry and unreal, steps out of the mirror. And Ember Eyes makes a noise in his deteriorating throat that sounds like nothing Brett has ever heard, and he wraps his fingers around Brett’s skull, twines them in Brett’s swoopy hair. His fingers are longer now. They touch at the back of Brett’s head, his thumbs meet below his chin. Oh Christ! They grow, Brett can feel them! They grow!

  The kids in the common room sit with their hands bound up behind their necks, their arms pressed against their ears, their eyes down.

  Marco throws himself shoulder–first at the door over and over, feels the burning heat behind it radiate through his T–shirt and into his skin, burn him in a way that will never leave him, that will redefine heat for him.

  Ember Eyes presses his mouth to Brett’s, crams his thick purple tongue past his lips, opens his jaw wider and wider and whatever is left of that Brett kid thinks that maybe Ember Eyes is trying to climb inside him. Ember Eyes has a mouth like a manhole, wider, wider, wider, and the edges of Brett’s mouth split, bleed. But Brett is far away. And Ember Eyes begins to suck. His paper–lungs expand and he draws the air out of Brett’s chest and Brett thinks, He’s trying to suck the smoke out of me. But Brett is far away from himself, and none of this really surprises him. He has lost his grip on himself, and now the best parts of him are torn into fours, floating away down the mirror hallways.

  And then…

  Well…

  Whatever happens next is not part of the ritual. And no one will remember it anyway.

  Fifteen years from now, a man who looks much older than he is will wheel a shopping cart past a strip of college bars. He will have a beard that mostly covers the scarring at the edges of his mouth and a comb in his jeans pocket that he will pull out and drag through that beard every five minutes. His beard will be long and straight and shiny, and sometimes he will sit on the curb next to his cart and braid it with slow, precise, delicate care, and the next day his beard will be crimped and kinky and he will have to spend some extra time combing it. He will smell terrible. His shopping cart will be full of empty beer bottles and soda cans which he will bring to the grocery store and exchange for a few bucks, which he will spend on Swedish Fish, the empty bags of which he will crumple and shove into the pockets of his filthy beige Dickie’s coveralls. He will ask people for cigarettes, and then when he gets them, he will smile and say, “I don’t smoke,” and add them to his collection of never–smoked Camels or Marlboros or Basics in a peeling cigar box in the children’s seat of the cart. People will laugh when he says that. He has perfect timing. Natural comedian. Guy’s a riot. The regulars at the bars will call him Smokey, and some of them might even wonder how he got where he is. Most of them won’t. Some winter — when it is particularly frigid and he won’t go to the St. Vincent Hotel because of that long, long hallway leading past the front desk, that terrible hallway, Christ, he never wants to see that hallway again, any hallway again, never ever — he will fall asleep on a bus–stop bench and he will freeze to death.

  Fifteen years from now, Marco will take a job as a biology professor at his alma mater. He will become a student favorite, not because he is lenient, but because he is a smart–ass who smokes cigarettes outside of class and sometimes uses swear words in the middle of his lectures. The kids will like Mr. Almodovar. They will fear Mr. Almodovar. He will make a little bachelor pad for himself on the top floor of Holton House. He will become the housemaster and turn a blind eye to the midnight masses in the common room. Sometimes kids will come into his office and ask him about this story some of the older boys told them about the closet and what happens in there, and he will think he remembers something about that, something bad and scary, and his eyebrows will crinkle and leave a deep V between them and he’ll chew on the inside of his cheek and try to pin the memory down, and he’ll fail and say, “Kids used to tell a lot of stories about that closet.” And then he’ll smile and shake his head and say something sarcastic, and the kid will leave feeling stupid for having bothered him.

  Fifteen years from now, everyone in that room will have moved on. They will have built lives for themselves with varying degrees of success. They will remember that high school sucked, and doubly so for them. Nobody who’s never been at a boarding school can really comprehend just how deep that particular well can go. Still, it wasn’t all bad. Some of them will have nightmares sometimes. Most of them won’t.

  And where will Ember Eyes go? Back down the thousand hallways, sucked in every direction at once. You can follow him if you like. You can look behind him and see the chord in his back, a red–black tendon pulled taut like a high–tension wire that stretches forever down the obscure far–mirror roads, into the crawlspace behind the world.

  That is where we live.

  We love to watch you perform your rituals. We delight in seeing you dance through life, waiting for something exciting to happen. We smile on you, little ones, when you construct your narratives and invent your fantasies.

  And, oh, how we ache for you when you become bored! How we weep for you! How we gnash our teeth at the tragedy of the creeping awareness that your natural state is a forever–plain of bitter, numb, mundane normalcy. We cannot tolerate your meaninglessness. We don’t want that for you. We love you as children love.

  So let’s make a deal, hmm? Let’s put Ember Eyes away for a while. Let’s set him aside in his place next to the hook–hand killers, and the Bloody Marys, and the gang members driving with their headlights off, and the kidney snatchers, and the phantom hitchhikers. We’ll just tuck him away for a bit. Until we cannot stand to see you stumbling like blind men through the haze of the commonplace, wishing with all your hearts for something bi
gger than you, something to give your lives a shape and a substance. Just until you need him again. Don’t worry. We love you too much to forget about you.

  Ballad of a Hot Air Balloon–Headed Girl

  I KNEW A GIRL WHO tied a hot air balloon envelope to her shoulders, just in case her head should ever burst into flames. It was homemade, sewn together from stolen scraps of Dacron, mottled and gaudy. It was as wide as her shoulders and it hung down to the small of her back like a pair of folded oil–slick dragonfly wings. She pierced the thin, tender skin of her shoulders with four strong surgical–steel rings, two just above the delicate cliff of her clavicle and two over the twin plateaus of her shoulder blades, and to these she anchored the envelope.

  I used to sneak away from barracks to see her in the wide grey field outside of Courdray. I was nineteen and obsessed with climbing trees. I used to split my brain apart during drills, sink away into the recesses of daydreams to climb imagined redwoods that never ended, and in rare unsupervised moments I would climb the dry and dying cypress out in the field, with the grass twitching and the sky bruising over, and I would sit in the lowest crotch and dangle my arm down. And she would sit at the roots (she never climbed, afraid that she would tear open her precious envelope on a capricious branch, and that her head would explode before she could patch it up), and play with my fingers, never grabbing hold but always dancing across my fingertips with her own. And we would talk.

  Once, I said, “It’s ludicrous. The thing with your head, I mean. It’ll never happen.”

  “Don’t say ‘ludicrous,’ ” she said, playing with my fingers and using her free hand to pull up handfuls of grass and pile them in the bowl of her crossed legs. “You mean it’s stupid, so say it’s stupid. You don’t need to prove that you’re smart, I already know that.”

  “It’s not stupid. It’s just kind of crazy.”

  “Semantics. And why not? Why won’t it ever happen?”

  I sighed and tried to grab her fingers, but they slid away from me. “Because,” I said, “it’s never happened before. Someone’s head just spontaneously bursting into flame? What’s going to stop the rest of you from burning up?”

  “It’s going to happen,” she said. We spent ten more minutes in silence, and I let her bat at my hand like a cat with a toy.

  These were in the days when we were at war. When all of my friends were soldiers and children, like me, with our pistols and our rifles, and none of us knew death because the war hadn’t yet come to Courdray. We wore our beards trimmed like topiaries, proud of our new ability to cultivate them, and rode horses not much younger than ourselves, and we waited for telegrams with news of when we would become men.

  The Greely Brigade has been defeated on the Eastern Mesa. Stop.

  The forces of the Revolutionaries are moving north. Stop.

  All patriotic young men in the Northern Territories: ready your rifles and sleep in shifts. Stop.

  Once, she said to me, “You might die, you know. In the war.”

  I was in the cypress and she was below me. I was smoking a pipe for the first time, because that had become a popular pastime in the barracks, apparently evidential of our adulthood. I liked the taste of the smoke, hot and deep. It tasted red and brown and old. I choked on it. I said, “I guess. You might die if your head explodes.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. She laughed, but her laugh was always such a sad thing. It always sounded like it was escaping from beneath a crush of bad memories and doomed predictions, a laugh that reminded you of sadness by contrast. “Do you understand what the war means? People die in wars. You could die. The Revolutionaries could die. Someone has to die.”

  “The Revolutionaries are supposed to die,” I said, aiming for condescension, because I was smart, and I did need to prove it. “They want to change everything.”

  “So do I,” she said, quiet and casually defensive.

  “Yeah, I mean, me too. Just, not like that.”

  “Like what?” she asked, and I didn’t know.

  The war came to Fantago, and in those days you could ride to Fantago from Courdray in two days, so our drills became tenser and our rifles got cleaned more often, and nothing else changed. We waited and we trimmed our beards and smoked our pipes, and I dreamed of climbing trees. The Revolutionaries ravaged Fantago and holed up there for three months. Some of our boys defected, and nobody minded too much.

  I kissed her for the first time when I was twenty, standing beneath the cypress tree. We came to the tree at the same time, so I didn’t have time to climb the tree before she got there, which was our usual custom. I was crossing the field lazily, dragging the toes of my boots in the dirt to hear the sound it made, when I looked up and saw her running toward me. She was smiling a little, in the haunted way I still think about when I’m lonely. When we met, she said, “It’s starting. This is the first progress I’ve made.”

  I said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Really? What do you think I’m talking about?”

  I shrugged.

  She threw her fists against her hips and growled, exhausted and frustrated with the seconds that were passing us. She said, “God, just… Here!”

  And she kissed me. Our tongues touched, and I tasted smoke. Her mouth was hot like a stone beneath the sun and she tasted red and brown and old. We kissed for a very long time, with our noses smashed together and my eyes wide, staring at her closed lids, watching the tears slip through them. When we exhaled, the smoke roiled through our nostrils and circled our heads. I put my hands on her waist and she knocked them away. We broke the kiss and a strangle–vine of smoke joined our lips together for a moment before it dissolved. She said, “See, stupid?”

  And I said, “Yeah. I see.”

  After that, the changes happened so swiftly. It came to be that going to see her filled me with an awful excitement that scared me more than it impelled me. I stayed in the barracks every night until one or two in the morning, reading letters from my mother and trying to stop my hands from shaking. The thought of seeing her, the knowledge that each secret meeting held another terrible gift to discover, those things held me in place, frightened at my own need for them. I switched from pipes to cigarettes, because they seemed a better fit to my mania. I would smoke them back–to–back most nights, waiting for myself to make the inevitable decision to escape the barracks and run to the field to see what new mutation had overtaken her. And I always did.

  One night I arrived and the hairs of her thin, fair eyebrows were orange and shining like burning tobacco beneath twin rows of blue flame. She looked happier than I’d ever seen her before, and I said so.

  She laughed and said, “Well, that’s not saying much, is it?”

  In the winter, she couldn’t come too close to the dry cypress, fearing the heat rising from the top of her head would set it ablaze. Instead, we sat a respectable distance away, both of us with our coats removed, her lying back with her hair in the snow to melt it away, and I stared at my tree and wished I were up it. I asked, “Does it hurt?” and I was afraid of what she would say.

  She said, “Not really. But the snow feels nice.”

  She became hotter and hotter, and I wanted her more. She was too hot to kiss, and in any case she wouldn’t let me try. One day, she lifted the envelope over her head and the heat filled it up and lifted her a few feet into the air for a few minutes. I sat on the ground and played with her fingertips from below for a change.

  I told her, “I’m in love with you, I think.”

  And she said, “Well, sure. Now that you’ve said it out loud. Push me up. I want to see how far I can go.” She didn’t get very far that day.

  The war came to Courdray in the spring, and we pushed back the Revolutionaries. Forces from Pendleton and Gumble Township came to our aide. I fired my gun and other boys my age fired their guns, and our horses stomped through the field, which had been made into a slick pit of mud by the constant rain that year, and nobody could tell who was on what side. I fe
ll off my horse, and one of our own boys stepped sideways on my calf, and I limped across the battlefield with my ankle sprained for the rest of the fight. I shot a blonde boy in the face with my pistol, and I didn’t feel any remorse for years afterward. A boy I knew whose name I can’t remember was disemboweled by someone’s saber, and I remember feeling angry with him for being such a poor soldier. That’s how death came to the boys of Courdray. It came as a numb and faraway anger, hot milk in our bellies, destined to curdle and poison us. We were boys with fine beards and nice mustaches and pipes and guns and cigarettes and horses. And we killed. And we were killed. And the worst we felt, in those dreamy and wonderful days of death, was a mysterious gnawing loss, as though something novel but inessential had slipped through holes in our pockets and disappeared. And my girl hid in the forest, somewhere far away from the mud, in the miserable place where she lived, wherever that was. I think the best time for soldiering is youth. If you are going to be made to kill, you ought not to know why. You ought not to understand the permanence of it. A soldier ought to be stupid. Genius soldiers are the most wretched of us creatures, on the dirt or under it.

  Still, we felt the shadow of our impending age, our inevitable learning, in the barracks and in the infirmary. We stared at empty cots, or cots that were full but not as full as they used to be, and we chewed on our cheeks and felt sad.

  After we drove the Revolutionaries back to Fantago, the old men spoke of turning points, of last–minute comebacks, and we were supposed to be proud of what we had done, and we were. Still and yet, again I began to escape the barracks at night, hobbling on crutches, trying to relearn the delicate craft of climbing trees. I mastered the cypress and moved on to a lithe little willow, whose thinness and fragility afforded me more challenge and a shorter way to fall should my injured leg give up on my weight. I didn’t see her for weeks, and I felt guilty. When I did see her, I was hidden in the willow, and I watched her shuffling through the field while the wind picked up the balloon and pulled her around, looking for me. When she called my name, crackling orange embers popped from between her lips and wound down into the dirt. She was careful to step on them to stop them lighting up the grass. I didn’t want to see her. Her sadness and her hope were too big, too desperate, and while I was able to comfort her before, I had been in battle and I had become a man, and the hot milk in my belly had begun to film over and clump. I wish I had been more aware of it then. All I knew at the time was that there was something uncomfortable and frightening happening in my solar plexus, and I didn’t want to share it with her.