by Brian Hodge
Grandpa had died of old age, his only crime decrepitude. The seedy, grime-etched ragbag seated across from Russell in the deuce booth could charitably be described as decrepit.
Russell's father, however, had fried like a pork chop in napalm. The mortician had bypassed any attempt to gussy him up in favor of the sealed box plan–no fuss, no muss, no blood on the chapel carpeting.
Char and biologic goo ebbed slowly down the window.
"Prob'ly thirsty. He burned, you know."
"That was not my father." Russell envisioned a zombiefied corpse lurching into the nearest 7-11 for a Big Gulp. "That was–"
"Some kinda sick joke, yep, I figured you'd say that, you being so rational and all. Heh." The old man's chuckle kick-started a raspy cough. The cough stuck, midway out. He sneezed and raised a cloud of dust.
"Gesundheit."
A moth zipped from between his lips and headed for the ceiling. A film of charnel soot now layered the table between them. The waitress–the one with the good calves–hurried over to ask if he needed a glass of water.
"More coffee, darlin," he smiled. His teeth were the color of good tobacco.
Russell's eyes kept traveling back to the black-red paste congealing on the window. It had stopped moving and started drying. God, he thought. No way that's part of my dad.
"Yep. That's him awright," asserted the Grandpa imposter. "When he was a scamp he was always leaving his crap everywhere."
A whomping migraine had needle-pointed Russell's brow to his sinuses. "Old man … I have to get out of here. Leave. You are a grade-A, vitamin-fortified fruitcake. With big chunky nuts."
The old man nodded big, smiled bigger.
"I have to find out what the hell happened to my family. Their bodies."
"Sure. I know that. Cynic." He slurped his coffee. Added more sugar.
Decorum insisted Russell say more in taking leave of this stranger who had at least the kindness to front bail money. But in the end, his hands did a useless, air-grabbing dance and he bolted, lending the smear of gore on the window a final doubtful look as he passed outside.
"Shoot," said the old man to his coffee cup. A baby beetle crawled out of his left ear, fell, and missed the cup. "You shoulda showed up on time, youngster, you wanted everything to be so damned normal and boring. We'd'a stayed in the holes if we'd known you'd be so damned upset."
8.
Russell was jogging by the time he regained Valley View. His shirt had ripped out of tuck; its tail flapped and sweat moons darkened the
pits. He'd forgotten his jacket back at the booth. Fortunately he still affected a hip-pocket wallet even though its bulge tended to spoil the line of his better trousers.
The shirt, he could trash. He had five hundred shirts, all of them on Aloft Limited hangers, none worn more than the mandatory thirty dry-cleanings. When you manufacture coathangers it's easy to get the best shirts for free.
A funeral was in progress. Russell saw a parked row of limos and sedans bumper-to-bumper against one side of the path in a long snaky train. He turned heads when he clambered through the iron gate. No one here knew him.
Some bum, they'd think. A derelict sniffing for a secluded cubby in which to snore off his sterno.
To be dead was to be past tense. Old news. Forgotten and unknown. A relief, given the right circumstances.
He ducked into the grouping of cottonwood trees and found a wrought iron bench picked out in spatters of bird guano. He sat and evened his breathing until he was calmer. Just over the rise, he knew, Mister Mort stood steadfast sentry duty, unaware that his flock had given him the slip.
He felt the sting of the ire and contempt fired at him by the anonymous mourners–mild revulsion, cheap pity, glaring anger. Where was his respect for the dead?
Russell heard muffled laughter. The dead were ridiculing him. Snickering not behind his back, but below his shoes.
Then Russell Pitt saw a singular thing.
Ten yards from where he sat, the grate securing the entry to a modest crypt squeaked open. The granite lintel was graven with the name TROWBRIDGE. A middle-aged man in a black three-piece suit winnowed past the stuck gate. Leaving, not entering. This was no mirage or resurrected cadaver, but a normal-looking human–as normal as a yip-yup dressed in a $150 bargain suit could look. Russell watched, himself unobserved. The man brushed tomb dust from his jacket, eyes darting around. Then he sidled uphill to blend with the troupe of mourners. It was like watching a kid sneak into the movies.
"Still spying on me, Russ? Catch an eyeful?"
It was Simone, his elder half-sister. She had no trouble swinging back the metal door to the TROWBRIDGE crypt. The laughter had been hers, and she smiled poisonously at him as she buttoned up the heirloom gown in which she'd been buried the year after Grandpa died.
The first woman's breasts, live ones, Russ can remember seeing as a kid are Simone's.
She is spinning "Blue Angel" on a portable phonograph. You have to stack nickels on the tone arm to keep it from skipping. She is dancing before the vanity mirror in her bedroom. She is also feeling herself up in a very odd way, and Russ concludes that Simone is making herself, well, kinda hot and bothered.
She is thirteen, Russ is ten.
She sort of hoists one bare breast in her hand, then lets it drop back into shape. She glides the palms of her hands over her nipples until they stand out. Russ wonders what they feel like.
Simone finally catches him peeking through the keyhole and whales the spit out of him.
About six months later she lets Russ feel her tits. He calls them tits now. A trade-off; some you-feel-mine-I'll-feel-yours skullduggery after bedtime. She touches him there and he gets an instant hard-on. Four seconds later, he ejaculates and it startles him. She teases him about it for a week or so, then forgets it.
Nearly thirty-one years later he will still feel that pang of shame and confusion.
Simone is what was once called precocious.
She spends her high school career getting impregnated by a rogue's gallery of deadbeats and losers with good cars. Her real mother, Aunt Jae, dies. Of broken heart, claims Russ' mom, who tries an inappropriate level of understanding to deal with Simone. Dad turns to stone in the face of this womanly problem child. It is a mess that only gets more rancid. Simone's blazing youth is responsible for the near-traumatization of Russ' younger sister, Darianne, who as a long-term result is sheltered and protected to the point of near suffocation.
Simone is sixteen, Russ has just turned thirteen.
Simone sneaks into his room, drops her robe and tries to get something going. Russ makes her leave … more out of fear than anything.
And he can still hear her laughter in his head, ridicule aimed right at his sexuality.
Like the scorn from the funeral attendees.
From that moment they are polarized. No petty insult or mean trick is beneath opportunistic use by one against the other, the enemy.
When Simone finally rides a speedball too hard and catches a slight case of death, Russ pointedly does not attend the services in Lewistone.
Only six people do. None of whom have ever slept with Simone. Or loved her, truly.
There was no mistaking Simone. The gown would have done it even had Russell not recognized the simmering blue gaze and aggressive folded-arm stance that had always been her battle trademarks.
The gown had belonged to Grandpa's late wife. Someone was supposed to have gotten married in it, but things had not worked out.
"So I suppose you just sat there, buffing your woody and moaning, just now." She nailed him, steely-eyed, one hand stroking the rusted barwork of the TROWBRIDGE tomb. "Good old Russ. The king of second-hand gratification."
He was dying to hit something. Simone seemed like a bull's-eye, begging for it.
"So what? You crawl out of your hole and somebody crawls into your hole, right?"
She indicated the funeral service in progress on top of the hill. "It's just some aunt getting planted. Tha
t dude had nothing better to do." She laughed. Russ knew the laugh well. "I can turn men on even after I'm as dead as your dick."
"Why the hell couldn't you just stay in your box?" The afternoon was effervescent with sexual puns.
"Had to come, baby. Had to have that friction, that heat again. SOOO delicious. It's been way too long and I needed a fill-up. Top my tank. You care to make a contribution, little brother?"
She lifted her gown to expose her naked groin to him. Tangled in her pubic hair were rose petals, brittle and long-crushed.
A new perversion: Necrophilia where the corpse helped you get off.
Simone's body was the same rib-strut thin, knob-kneed, ninety-pound fever dream to which the dope had scarified her years back. Her nipples were gray. On her thighs Russell could see the glint of spillage from her most recent lover, the guy in the bargain suit.
He imagined being inside her. No, he imagined that guy fucking her. Feeling non-muscular squirmings in there. A decade and a half of rotten meat and parasites.
His scrotum contracted, flinching defensively.
"Come on, Russ. Chow down. Sloppy seconds. What's the matter–aren't I man enough for you?"
"Fuck you, Simone. Slither back into the mulch where you belong."
He had risen and was closer now, stalking her, knuckles bloodlessly tight, hands snapping shut to close her mouth, to break her face, to smash her jackstraw skeleton, to vent all the times he'd never fought back, all the times he'd spared her and tried to hurt her verbally. Because Simone had always been enough trouble already. Because Russell had always been so fair.
Wasn't that nice. Look where it got you.
"Fuck you, Simone." This time he said it with feeling.
"Yeah, fuck me hard, you dickless wonder. Eunuch. Bat boy. I'll have to teach you how to fuck me, fuck me until I can't–"
"Shut up!"
He pasted her once, a single hammer blow into that maw of derision. Simone's face caved in like papier-mâché and clouded the foyer of the crypt with thick, floating dust the tint of cosmetic powder. She crumpled and imploded; the gown pooled. Russell remembered bashing the mannequin. This had been easier. Killing something that isn't dead. Exorcism by collision.
His throat pulsed. He had been yelling, loudly, things he could not recall. Tears streaked his cheeks. They cut through the dust that had been Simone a moment before.
He inhaled her and gagged, turning from the tomb and covering his mouth and nose. His handkerchief was still in his left-hand back pocket.
Calm. Calm. He mopped his face and raked back his hair. Exhaled her. Back at the crypt lay an empty, worm-eaten gown.
He exhaled her.
After all these years, at last, Simone was gone for good.
9.
"I thought I told you never to strike your sister, Russell Leaver Pitt."
He only got his full legal name when major poop was slam-piping toward him. He hadn't even finished dabbing Simone off his brow.
"Mom…?" It was necessary that he say it. He was so drained of surprise, so void of shock, that speech was needed to benchmark in his stunned brain the impossible return of his mother.
"I don't care if you didn't love her. Or if you don't think she was really your sister…"
Obviously there was going to be a severe problem with tense if dead people insisted on doing encores.
"…a gentleman never strikes a lady. I suppose you hit Darianne, when my back was turned?"
Mom was playing a tape from 1965, back when he had first said:
"Mom, I hate her guts, okay? I've always hated her guts. She's not my sister, she's not my blood, and she certainly ain't no lady, and I'm surprised at you. I'd never lay a finger on Darianne; you know that."
"Don't say ain't. It's ugly. Ugly as the thoughts of boys when they get in a certain mood. You know what I mean."
Mom's speech was hideously slurred. Russell recalled how the stroke had fuzzed her voice. Her funeral corsage hung, long dead. She had insisted on being buried in her wedding gown, a morose touch Dad had never challenged. Perhaps she'd gotten the idea from Simone, and that was why she was defending her now. The gown was–had been–white. Now every detail of the elaborate brocade and lace was highlighted in grave dirt.
"Don't you dare stand there silent when you've got something to get off your chest, Russell Leaver Pitt."
It wasn't his chest. It was his back, and Mom was on it again. He had never wanted to do the nasty with Simone. Never, in his heart. What he had wanted was to punch her lights out, just once. And Simone had accommodatingly risen from her grave to goad him into that one-time-only roundhouse–a liberating blow some thirty years in the making.
A cleansing blow.
And now here came Mom, urging him to speak his mind, to say whatever had been left unsaid. Back for him, one final time, her complexion blanched by the Reaper and her voice lumbered by the attack that had claimed her. But her eyes, my god, Russell thought, her eyes. All coffee and chocolate brown, loving eyes that accused him lightly yet loved him deeply, eyes that considered him now, and waited for him the way they always had.
"Mother. Mom…"
Once he permitted the portals to open, the words rushed forth easily.
"…you never mentioned anything to me about love. We never got around to talking about the one thing that's more important than grades, or jobs, social station or making money. I did all that. And when I had the things I wanted–the possessions, the position, the bonded-and-certified future I'd been through two marriages and I don't think I've truly loved anyone yet. I sort of have an idea of what it's supposed to feel like, and I can go through the motions, but I always know I'm just performing the way other people expect me to. My marriages were social contracts. Mergers. Co-op collaborations. My spouse was a perk, an arm doily for public functions. The only thing we ever worried about during either divorce was who got which car; who kept the house and who vacated.
You never met Maggie, but you knew Elise."
"You two were so young." She spoke softly, almost subaurally. No one but Russell could hear her, and his mind filled in gaps and made it her voice, the voice she'd had when vibrantly alive, the voice she'd used as a mother saying the things mothers are supposed to say to their sons.
"Not young in age. Young to the world. You needed each other so you could both learn what not to do. So that when you moved on, you would both know how to properly treat the next person to whom you would come close in life."
Mom had treated Elise with polite but distanced tolerance, as though she alone knew when Elise's train would be leaving. Russell had trapezed into marriage sans net, to learn from scratch since he carried no baggage of motherly advice. He hated to admit it, but Elise had brought him out of himself, opened him up to feelings and experiences that, as a result, had left him much more civil and charming by the time Maggie chanced along. This chrysalis, unfortunately, had not been shed in time to do Elise any worldly good. She had a working knowledge of all Russell's internal mechanisms, even the defensive and painful ones…and she would never trust any change in his character.
"You didn't mean that about boys being ugly, did you? You didn't think that of me."
Celeste Christine Pitt had not been a perfect storybook mommy, okay. Who ever was, in the real world?
"Russell, I need to tell you something now that I never would, before. When your father and I were married, that last year of the War, I was totally smitten. You could call me a starstruck girl. It's impossible now to convey what VE day was like. But the first night I slept with your father was the finest night I had ever spent with a man. The finest. Because until him, men had never taken the time to pleasure me. Men lived up to their worst caricatures, and only took, and jumped away clean before sunup. They didn't stay the night, you see."
This was scandalous. His own mother was admitting she'd slept around prior to getting hitched. It was eminently probable, yet wholly ungraspable for Russell–like trying to visualize your own paren
ts clawing and heaving and going oh god oh god and making you.
"He and I signed up for the duration. When our Julia died, he and I both died, just a little." She paused to cast a respectful eye toward the Pitt graves. "But we had you, and Ricky and the girls, even though Simone was forever a hellion. That was my sister Jae's way of doing things, you see. Just shove kids into the world to paddle or drown. Sometimes I thought Simone was my punishment for some wrong I'd done your Aunt Jae when we were children. But you listen: As bad as you got, as wrong as you did sometimes, there was never a second I didn't love you heart and soul. Death doesn't have the power to take away the fact that you're my baby. Death can't overshadow the fact that I lie with your father still, every night here in Lewistone. We lay down together, then we signed up."
"What about you and Dad?" Perversely, Russell found he wanted to hear a lot more.
She smiled at some private thing; something she'd keep, for now. "I wanted to feel, all the time, like I felt when your father and I made love. And you know what? I think that we started with pure lust for each other, and love came later. We'd left it an open door, you see, and it walked right into our lives to sustain us when our family began to die piecemeal. It helps us even now. What do you think brought you all this distance back to a town you hate, after all these years, with no kin and nothing to visit but graves?"
Where Simone had brought Russell an insane strength, a fury to charge his metabolism and muscles, he now felt an emptiness, a profound weakening, as though a pipette had been jammed into his spine to siphon off his bone marrow.
Mom drew closer, drifting, a shade. It was an obvious effort for her to move. More fallout from her stroke. The sounds from beneath the bridal gown suggested the awful grinding of dry joints and the splitting of withered flesh. Russell ignored them. He had to.
"I love you so much." Mom embraced him gently, a ghost making tentative physical contact.
He touched but dared not hold her. He forced his arms to hang about her, laying no weight or pressure. Superficially, it resembled a hug.