Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  Adam isn’t far away. He’s standing there on the sloping concrete embankment rubbing his forearm. He’s got the joint pinched tight between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes dance in double–time, spotlighting each shadowy corner of the drainage ditch. He says, “Danny, we should go,” and his voice is high and fragile. He says, “We should call the cops.”

  Danny leans a little closer. Works the stick deeper. He can feel his pulse in his ears. He pulls it out. Studies it. He smiles, and he thinks he shouldn’t be smiling, and that makes him smile wider.

  “Oh, dude,” he says. “I think this is his brain.”

  Adam looks up and Danny watches those dancing eyes of his lock on the dark scrap dangling from the stick’s end. He turns, bends at the waist, says, “I’m not going to throw up,” and then throws up anyway.

  Danny hears himself mumble, “You all right?” but he doesn’t mean it. This is exactly what Danny has been waiting for. This is the gaping window into… what? Into the big UnWorld, the slippery space beneath. This right here, a bloated naked body, some guy drowned in the sewers and washed into a ditch. This is what Danny’s whole life has pointed toward.

  Somewhere up above them, a car crosses over the asphalt above the drainage pipe. The pipe eats the sound of it and belches it back out into the culvert, louder now and with teeth it didn’t have before. Danny feels his scalp tingle. He can’t smile wide enough.

  “I want to go home,” says Adam. “Somebody ought to call the cops.”

  That dark little mess on the end of the stick. Man. Just — wow.

  You remember that feeling? I do. I think we all do.

  Adam says, “Danny?”

  And then he says, “Jesus, Danny, please?”

  So Danny rolls his eyes. He jabs the stick back into the dead man’s head. It sticks there like a lightning rod. He says, “Fine.” And they climb back up the slope.

  His car is waiting, the ’86 Volvo with a backseat caked in fast food wrappers and Mountain Dew bottles, that old rubber skeleton left over from Halloween and hanging from the rearview. Somehow the skeleton embarrasses him now. Danny feels like he’s wasting his time on it. It’s like, you think you know what macabre means. You think EC Comics reprints and Texas Chainsaw action figures are pointing you in the right direction. Then you see the real thing and everything else seems stupid by comparison.

  He leans over the steel barrier where the cul–de–sac ends and the ditch begins, glancing one last time at the rotten purple thing down there. The man. And the stick in his head.

  Adam leans on the car, stares at the hood.

  Danny says, “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Okay,” Danny says, and swings himself into the driver’s seat. “You want to go get a milkshake?”

  §

  …see the parking lot… it’s empty except for these two. They sit on the hood of Danny’s car and Danny listens to the sprinklers hiss in front of the drive–through menu, quick and syncopated, matching his heartbeat pulse for pulse. He shoves French fries into his mouth. He doesn’t taste them. He says, “You saw his… you know, his dick, right?”

  Adam stares at his milkshake.

  “Like a big rotten bratwurst. Jesus.”

  Adam says, “Don’t really want to talk about it, okay?”

  So they don’t for a while. Danny eats his fries and drinks his milkshake. Adam stares at his straw with his mouth open.

  Then Danny says, “How do you think he got like that?”

  Adam shakes his head and mutters, “I dunno, Danny. Chrissakes, the guy is dead.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “So,” Adam says, then pauses, sets his milkshake aside, wraps his hands around the back of his hanging head. “So he’s got like a family somewhere, right? People worried about him?”

  Danny smiles and says, “Probably homeless.” Already he is constructing a back–story, writing a biography for the thing in the culvert.

  Adam drops his hands in his lap and stares at Danny. For a second he doesn’t say anything. Then, “Fucking… Jesus, Danny. Why would you think… He didn’t look homeless to me.”

  “He didn’t look like anything, dude.” When the thought hits him, he giggles. “Other than a bratwurst.”

  “I can’t believe you’re joking about it.”

  “Well, what the fuck do you want me to do, Adam?”

  “Call the cops maybe?”

  There is almost a noise, a sibilant snap, when Danny’s patience breaks. See, Adam’s been saying that kind of shit all evening and Danny has been ignoring him, knowing that Adam would back down, like Adam always backs down. Except now there’s no getting away from it. The pot is wearing off and he thinks about grabbing the last little knot of dark curly weed from the glove box and sharing it with Adam, getting him stoned again, getting him to shut the hell up for a while. But his mouth is dry and he’s angry now. He’s angry that Adam would want to ruin this for him, suck this town back into normal before it even gets a chance to see what’s beyond that.

  He says, “No, Adam.”

  “What?”

  “No cops.”

  “Dude, you can’t be serious. That’s a dead guy down there.” Those tiny eyes again, never meeting Danny’s, never meeting anything for too long, and now they’re shining and Danny swears inside his head and prays that Adam doesn’t cry.

  So he says, “Do you remember how things were before? Spending lunch in the library so nobody calls you a fag? Dude, you had a bag of dice tied to your belt when I met you, you remember that? You want to go back to that? Because I swear to God, Adam, if you mention the cops one more time I’ll never fucking talk to you again, okay? You’ll go back to being a library fag and getting your ass kicked at gym and nobody will be around to stick up for you.”

  He knows it’s stupid. He knows how it sounds. Like an ultimatum, like he’s the abuser and Adam is the abused. Like they’re breaking up. And he doesn’t care.

  Adam says, “Okay.” And he doesn’t cry.

  They drink their shakes. They listen to the sprinklers.

  Danny says, “What time you supposed to be home?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Shit, it’s almost one. Your mom going to be mad?”

  “No, it’s okay. She’s in bed. I’ll let myself in.”

  “Your eyes are red. I’ve got Visine in the glove compartment if you think you’ll need it. Just in case?”

  “No. She’s in bed. It’s fine.”

  So they get back in the car. And Danny drives. And he feels like the biggest douche bag in the universe. But it doesn’t matter. Because he keeps thinking of the thing they found in the creek, purple and naked and all for him. And that makes him feel better.

  He pulls his car up next to Adam’s house and they shake hands and Adam gets out. Danny says, “Am I picking you up for school tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” says Adam, staring at his shoes, the grass, his shoes, the grass. He says, “See you tomorrow,” before he turns and starts walking toward his front door.

  Danny sighs, closes his eyes tight, opens them and says, “Hey.”

  Adam turns. His blond hair looks blue in the moonlight, like its sucking up the dim and gorgeous glow of that great and magical after–curfew hour. And Danny forgives him.

  “Sorry about… making you stay at the creek. And yelling at you.”

  Adam shrugs. “Don’t worry about it. I won’t call the cops.” Like that’s still what they’re talking about.

  “Yeah. See you.”

  Danny rolls up his window and drives toward home. And he smiles at that warm wonderful feeling of having your very own special secret.

  He parks his car. He goes inside. The lights are out. The house is silent. His mother and father are dead to the world, sleeping in separate beds in separate rooms. This is the way it’s been for a while. Since Danny can remember.

  He lets his knees dissolve, lets himself fall onto the sofa. Turns on the television. He can’t f
ocus on it. The great big window to the UnWorld is shining in his mind, shining with the light of a secret sun.

  We remember the window, you and I. All of us remember the window.

  He stares at the painting above the television, a Thomas Kinkade print his mom bought at the Dollar Store, all roses and ranch homes and cloudless sky. His mom loves Kinkade. She likes to stare at that painting and say, “Someday, Danny, that’s where we’re going to live, okay?”

  That painting makes Danny anxious as hell.

  So he gets up. He turns off the TV. He steps toward the front door and crosses his arms over his chest and looks out. He stares at his car for a long time. And then he opens the door and goes chasing the light from the window in his head.

  §

  …see the ditch… see it and see it well. To Danny, it’s Exhibit A. The first artifact of the UnWorld beneath this place. The ditch runs all over town, through people’s front yards, through their back yards, and they call it a creek and line it with pretty stones and put statues by it and build bridges over it. And then it dips below, runs underneath the roads and spits filthy water through concrete tunnels where kids go to fuck and spray–paint swastikas and smoke pot and drink stolen cans of Natural Light, and they call it a drainage ditch or a culvert. You can trace the savage trail of reality through the names people give things. The things with pretty names are the things you ignore. The things a little deeper, down in the bloody red musculature of the world, the things with dirty names — those are the ones you want to keep an eye out for.

  And is that what UnWorld means? No, Danny knows better. It’s a hint, that deep dirty secret part of the ditch, a flashing neon arrow that says THIS WAY TO THE WINDOW.

  And that’s the way Danny goes.

  The filthy water stands half an inch above the soles of his Converse sneakers, soaks through the canvas and makes his socks heavy and sticky and cold. And he keeps going. Down here in the sly slick night, this place is a shadowbox, lined with arching concrete walls and ribbed steel floors, barely lit at all by the streetlights sneaking through at either end of the curved tunnel. Black–hole shadows grow like weeds, move like worms. And he keeps going. He’s scared as hell. And he keeps going.

  The guy — the thing — its bloated sagging face stares out of that window in Danny’s head. Those eyes, the whites gone, drown out by the slow leakage of its thick dead blood. Danny fixates on them.

  And he keeps going.

  He doesn’t stop until he hears laughter at the end of the tunnel. It sparks between each vertebrae of his spine. Sizzling frozen electricity. He walks deeper, watches the bend in the tunnel straighten out in front of him, and every footfall is like a backfiring car. And when the sparkling moonlight creeps from behind the edge of that curve and floods the corridor with luminescent blue, he sees.

  Oh Jesus, the things he sees.

  It’s all rendered in silhouette by the light beyond the tunnel’s mouth. What he thinks he sees cannot be what he actually sees. Because the thing from the ditch — the dead man drowned and made tender and awful — when a person gets like that, they don’t do what he’s seeing that thing do.

  Standing.

  Walking.

  Danny sees each slow and jerky step splashing in the shallow water, sees it leaning forward like it might fall down, then going rigid and straight backed and wobbling in the other direction before each new step.

  That’s what Danny sees.

  And there’s something else that Danny sees. Something else that can’t really be there. Something on the dead thing’s shoulder, small and skinny and covered in hair. It giggles. It tugs on the stick — Danny’s stick — still sailing high and proud and anchored in the dead guy’s head. It turns its neck, and now Danny’s eyes are locked, just straight nailed to the eyes of that hairy giggling thing. In silhouette, it smiles, and its teeth are like iron fence–posts. It sucks in breath, lifts one hand to its mouth. It says, “He came back! The curious thing!”

  We remember the first time we heard him speak, too.

  Danny ought to run right now. He ought to. But he doesn’t. He won’t. He can’t. Even as his brain twists and spasms in his head, even as his sanity shuts down, flashes and chirps like a fire alarm. Because the window isn’t a window anymore. It’s a door. And, oh, what wonders lie on the other side.

  The hairy thing jerks the stick with its wormy black fingers and the dead guy takes a few steps forward. A few more steps. And it’s not stopping, and it’s gaining speed, running in this lazy clumsy stomp that makes its — his — its thin purple skin shake. It’s not stopping, still not stopping, just coming forward, ever forward, until Danny can see the toothless gums peeking out from behind its slack lips. Danny stumbles, whimpers, falls into the shallow dirt–water, scrambles backward until he knocks his head against the concrete wall.

  And the dead thing stops. And the hairy thing grins.

  What it says is, “Quite curious. Don’t you think, Stickhead?”

  Close up like this, Danny sees and sees well. The long red face, the bristly grey pelt, the awful teeth between the fat black smiling lips. Danny thinks of the poster in his room, The Garden of Earthly Delights, thinks about how many nights, bored and stoned, he has stared at it and imagined he was there, strolling through the fields of hungry demon–beasts and broken souls. This bizarre skinny caricature of an ape, it’s like one of the demons from that poster. A cartoony Bosch animal–monster made flesh.

  There’s that patented Danny smile again. The beaming helpless grin. And does he know he’s smiling? Oh, yes.

  “Would we like to know his name, Stickhead?” the monkey–thing, the Bosch, asks and jerks the stick to make Stickhead nod.

  Danny’s tongue twists without thinking about it. His teeth chatter. His name falls from his lips and into the air, hangs in every reeking inch of empty space down here.

  The Bosch eyes Danny. He tugs on the stick and Stickhead bends a little at the waste. He leans close. “Hypothesis,” he says and his breath stinks of dirt and dead fish. “You are curious in two distinct and separate ways, yes? Number one.” He holds up one of those long black fingers, each fat segment waggling in the air. “You are curious in the same vein as the aphoristic cat, yes?” He turns, makes a kissy–face at — Jesus, Danny has already adopted the name for the dead thing — Stickhead. “Isn’t he, Stickhead? Number two.” Another finger. “He is curious in the sense of the noun, ‘curiosities.’ As in ‘cabinet of’ or even the noun, ‘curio.’ As in the term, ‘curioser and curioser,’ yes?”

  Those sharp and yellowed teeth are only inches away from Danny’s face. Danny doesn’t say anything. Some part of him knows, absolutely knows, that he is about to die.

  “We wish to hear your counter–hypothesis, yes?” says the Bosch. These short snorts keep coming from his flat slit nostrils and Danny thinks maybe that the thing is trying not to laugh. “To elaborate, we — being Stickhead and I — have asked you — being Danny–thing — to refute or support our own hypothesis — id est, are you or are you not curious?”

  “I — ” Just that one word coming out in an endless hiss. He looks at the Bosch, looks at the dead guy — Stickhead — and both of them are looking back at him. The Bosch grins, his eyes wide, expectant, waiting. Finally, Danny says, “I don’t know.”

  The Bosch looks at Stickhead, cups a long fan hand over the dead thing’s ear and whispers, “He doesn’t know, Stickhead! Did you hear? He doesn’t know!”

  The Bosch jerks the stick and Stickhead nods. Danny sees something then. This sort of whimpering resignation, this admission of defeat, in those red sightless eyes, flooded to the iris with blood.

  The Bosch turns back to Danny. “Stickhead and I agree, Danny–thing, that you are indeed curious. We believe we have collected the necessary evidence to support our claim and are prepared to present you with our findings, yes? Do you wish to change your hypothesis, Danny–thing?”

  A jerk of the stick. Stickhead goes to his knees. The Bosch reac
hes out slowly, runs one fat finger beneath Danny’s chin, and Danny can feel the thick black nail, hard like a beetle’s shell, scratching against his skin. “Yes,” he says, hearing his own voice crack. “I’m curious.”

  And he is. We all were.

  This is better than sex. Better than that awkward prodding in the back of his Volvo with Theresa Sales last November, the uncomfortable fumbling and contorting to find a comfortable position among the fast food wrappers and Halloween decorations back there, the way she stared at him, like she expected him to perform for her. Man, how he had built up that moment, when he wouldn’t have to wear that awful V–word like a badge of his lameness pinned to his chest, and man, what a letdown it had been.

  This, though. This is real. And worth every awful moment. It’s the only thing in seventeen years that has seemed worth it.

  Stickhead stands up and the Bosch claps its hands. “Good!” it says. “Good, good, good, Danny–thing. Curiosities are a great passion of mine, yes?” It runs a finger down the dead guy’s purple cheek. “Stickhead is a favorite of mine, Danny–thing.” He sighs and his smile rots into a burlesque frown. “Believe me when I say, Danny–thing, that I am most bereaved that he has become vastly less curious as of late, yes?”

  Silence, while the Bosch sighs and Danny once more reminds himself to blink. Then a wet smack as the Bosch claps one hand down on Stickhead’s shoulder and his wrought–iron grin reappears. “Not to worry! Stickhead serves his purpose, yes? Curiosities attract curiosities like quicksilver, my dear Danny–thing.”

  Danny’s lungs refuse to function at all, and suddenly he’s reliving the first time he ever smoked pot. Over at Anthony Rigby’s house, those few seconds just after the first toke, he was sure he was going to choke on the smoke and die. And then, like now, he coughed, sucked in air, coughed again, and he was free and high and just shy of escaping from the world.

  “After all, where would Stickhead be without you? Would he be merely Head? How absurd! You and I together, yes? We’ll call it a collaboration.”