Dead Rules

by Randy Russell

  “It hurts,” Jana finally said without looking at either of them. Her socks and shoes and bra were in a pile next to her.

  “Shut up, Webster,” Wyatt said angrily. “One of us wants to throw you back in.”

  Mars trembled inside the towels. He couldn’t get dry enough, warm enough. He chewed his lower lip to keep it from quivering.

  “It’s cold in here,” he said.

  Jana sat for the rest of the day at the back of the empty bus.

  Wyatt stayed with her. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about what you did,” he said. He sprawled across the seat in front of and across from her, his leg blocking the aisle. “You make your own choices and you can make that choice again.”

  He pulled himself up with his good arm, his hand on the back of the seat. With his remaining eye, he stared at Jana’s head of wet hair, her slumped shoulders. She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Before you do, there’s one thing I want to show you. Tonight.”

  Jana didn’t respond.

  “Tomorrow you can go right back and jump in that pool again. But tonight, you’re with me. You got that?”

  Wyatt dropped back down in the seat.

  “Okay, we’ve got a deal, then,” he said.

  Michael didn’t go to school.

  The detective called after Michael didn’t show up for their appointment. Michael didn’t answer the phone. When the unmarked police car rolled to a stop in front of his house, Michael hid beneath the windows. He didn’t answer the door.

  As soon as the car pulled away, Michael moved his car out of the driveway. He wore a baseball cap that covered his eyes from the side or whenever he ducked his head.

  They were after him, he thought. They had a warrant by now. His license plate number would show up on the computers in police cruisers and county sheriff cars. Michael had to leave the county. He was careful to drive the speed limit, to signal every lane change and turn.

  Mars didn’t live on the third floor anymore.

  Still wearing her school uniform, Jana sat on his old bed and waited for Wyatt. She had her own room at the other end of the hall, with Slider girl dormmates waiting to tell her how they’d died. Jana didn’t feel like meeting anyone dead tonight.

  She thought about that old movie from the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde. Warren Beatty. Faye Dunaway. Jana had always hated that movie, hated the way it ended. Now she thought getting riddled with bullets together was what should have happened to her and Michael. The together part, anyway. If they had died together, Webster and Haynes would have lived forever.

  Wyatt slipped through the hole in the fence behind the dorm. He talked on her cell phone while he tramped through the vacant lot to the street out front.

  “Check it out,” Wyatt said. “You call that butthead right now and tell him to answer his phone when I call.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Nathan stammered. “I will, I will.”

  “Right now. And I know you will. I’ve got something you want. I’ve got something he needs.”

  The drive to Lookaway Rock was a sullen one.

  Wyatt’s good side faced Jana. He had to keep turning his head to look out the driver’s window. Once they were on the state highway, he handed Jana a stick of gum.

  “It’s from the Planet. Open it. Take the wrapper off without thinking about it too much. That’s your first test.”

  Jana slipped the gum out of its green paper sheath and unwrapped its foil covering. She put it in her mouth.

  “Chew carefully,” Wyatt warned. “You’ll bite your mouth if you aren’t careful.”

  It wasn’t all that difficult. The flavor sluiced over her tongue, rich and sweet, almost choking her. She hadn’t eaten since she’d died. She wasn’t supposed to.

  “And don’t try that on campus. You’ll choke. You stay out of the pool, we’ll go get pizza in a week.”

  The paved highway wound into the mountains, into the night. The sky was clear and the air was warm. Jana’s bottom fit snug against the car seat. She was no longer fearful of falling out when she leaned against the inside of the passenger door.

  “He’ll be there?” Jana asked. “Are you sure?”

  “He was most agreeable to the arrangement,” Wyatt said.

  The aerosol canister of silicone lubricant that Wyatt had taken from Sherry’s house rode in the backseat of the borrowed car.

  “I told him to bring a flashlight for the trail,” Wyatt added. “He said he’d been to the rock before and knew how to get there.”

  Jana’s hair was a mess. She still wore her school uniform. It would have been ghoulish to show up in the clothes she’d worn the night she died, she’d decided. She remembered her death and decided not to go over it again. She would think about someone else’s instead.

  “How did you die, Wyatt? Will you tell me?”

  Wyatt took a breath, then began. “It was a hot, sultry day,” he drawled. “The sun blazed down through the trees, trapping the little birds in their nests under wave after wave of glistening heat. . . .”

  He broke out laughing. Jana managed a grin and almost swallowed her gum.

  When Wyatt stopped laughing, he told her the truth.

  The old man wore a paper hat.

  He sat in a plastic chair next to his bed at the nursing home. His grandfather’s large frail hands shook in his lap.

  Wyatt held out a small sack and said, “Happy birthday, Granddad.”

  The old man smiled. He wasn’t wearing his teeth.

  Wyatt tried not to notice how red his grandfather’s eyes had become. Removing the saltwater fishing lure from the sack, Wyatt held it out so his grandfather could see it. He carefully set the large shiny lure on the dresser next to the bed.

  Stories of fishing off the coast were the ones his grandfather still told with excitement in his voice. But Wyatt knew his grandfather would never cast lures into the ocean again.

  “How’s your car going, boy?”

  “Like new,” Wyatt lied.

  His grandfather had given him his car when they put him in the nursing home. It was a 1972 four-door Chevy Biscayne and Wyatt was lucky when he could get all four doors to close right. If he turned off the engine after the car had been running a long time, it wouldn’t start again until the motor cooled down. No one knew why.

  He told his grandfather the name of the lure and the type of big-game fish it was designed to catch.

  Wyatt was going to be late for work. He’d left the car running in a parking space at the nursing home. His afternoon job three days a week, for which he received vo-tech class credits, was filling in on various job crews with a local construction company.

  He parked the Biscayne at the side of the building and turned it off. He grabbed his work gloves and rushed inside the employee entrance only to find out that the crew had already left for the job site. The receptionist gave him the address.

  “Hurry on out there now,” she said. “They’re ready to let you go if you’re late again more than a few minutes.”

  Wyatt’s car wouldn’t start. It might be twenty minutes. He couldn’t wait.

  There was a motel and restaurant across the parking lot from the construction company. The motel manager’s Suzuki 250 motorcycle was sitting there doing nothing.

  It was a rash decision and a stupid one. A helmet would have been sensible. There wasn’t one. That, and the single-cylinder Suzuki was about the least powerful motorcycle they made. It would barely keep up with old ladies and church buses in the slow lane of I-40. And that was going downhill.

  Still, it was a pretty day. The sun was out. The wind blew through his hair and Wyatt remembered how much fun it was to ride a motorcycle. He pretended his work gloves were leather gauntlets. He pretended the little Suzuki was a full-throttle Harley.

  In his rearview mirror, Wyatt saw the speeding car top the hill behind him. It felt to him like he’d seen the car top the hill before. The passing lane was full. The car was on his tail in seconds, still coming at a ridiculous rate of sp
eed. Wyatt figured he was done for.

  He leaned forward. It was all he had time to do. The car swerved to the right to miss him. The driver had two tires on the shoulder. The speeding car swerved to miss him, but a little too late. It clipped the rear fender of the Suzuki.

  Wyatt heard the bark of brakes. Then everything upright sort of disappeared. The motorcycle fell on its side and Wyatt let go of the thing. The pavement grabbed his shoulder, his hip, his legs. The bike spun away from him.

  The pavement was hot and hard. And rough. At first, he seemed to be sliding along without damage, without slowing down. Then the pavement grabbed his face. A bone in his leg snapped. His elbow banged down hard and bounced up.

  Wyatt’s flesh felt like it was on fire. He was engulfed in pain. Then his head bounced and everything went away.

  The pavement was gone. The sun was gone. Wyatt was gone. His grandfather wasn’t the only one who would never go fishing again.

  “It happened fast enough,” he said. “But I wish it had been a little faster.”

  Wyatt left out the part about how hot the highway was, how the searing pavement felt like it was burning him alive. It was like riding fire as he slid at nearly sixty miles an hour on the downhill surface of I-40. Torn-away pieces of his clothing smoked from the heat of friction.

  Jana thought about the violence of Wyatt’s death. At least she had died quickly. Snap, crackle, pop. It had to be difficult to die more slowly, to die painfully. It had to make you feel things differently once you were dead.

  “What were you doing wrong when the car clipped you from behind? You were doing something bad or you wouldn’t be a Slider. Were you speeding?”

  “No. I could barely keep up with the traffic. If anything, I was going too slow.”

  “Mars was speeding when he crashed and he was driving drunk,” Jana said. “He told me that much. That’s what made him a Slider. And that’s why he wanted to save a life. Another person died in his wreck, he said. He wanted to make up for it while he had the chance.”

  “I guess that’s it.”

  “So what were you doing wrong?” she tried again. “Why are you a Slider, Wyatt?”

  “Oh, that,” he said, tossing it off. “I took the motorcycle without asking. I could get it started without the key. So I did.”

  He shrugged. “I was going to bring it back. With a full tank of gas.”

  Jana believed him. It was just like Wyatt to steal things and bring them back.

  “Was it his girlfriend?” Jana asked.

  “Who?” Wyatt was confused.

  “Mars,” she said. “Was it his girlfriend who died in the car with him?” She wanted to know if Mars was in love when he died.

  “He was alone, Webster. Didn’t he tell you that?”

  “He said someone else died.” Jana watched Wyatt’s face, the way his hand moved on the steering wheel, the way it tensed.

  “You know who it was,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You want me to name it to you,” Wyatt said. “The old ladies in my family, that’s what they say when they’re mad. My grandmother and her sisters. They’re from way up in the back hills, like Christie’s family. Anyway, they say they’ll ‘name it to you’ if you really want to hear it.”

  This was the first time Wyatt had talked to Jana about his life. What you remember when you’re dead isn’t what you think it’s going to be. It’s dumb stuff. Things you don’t really need. Like handkerchiefs.

  “So name it to me,” Jana said.

  “It was me, Webster. Mars was driving the car that came up behind me over the top side of the hill, the car that clipped the bike. He swerved to avoid it, but not quite in time to keep either one of us from dying.”

  Wyatt pulled the borrowed car into the small turnout where only last night the pickup truck had been. He turned off the lights and took his foot off the brake pedal.

  He handed Jana her cell phone. “You can call him here. You won’t be able to farther up. The mountain blocks the signal.”

  Jana didn’t open her phone.

  “Go ahead, Webster. I know you want to talk to him. Ask him if he’s on time.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I ran the battery out last night.”

  “I put a new one in at the dorm. It’s working fine.”

  Although she was a Slider now, Jana’s Earth skills were slim. She flipped her phone open, and pleased to see that her fingers worked the buttons, she punched in Michael’s number. His face showed up. And he answered this time.

  “Michael, it’s me.”

  He could hear her voice. Michael said hello in reply. He sounded nervous and confused, but he talked to her.

  Jana was excited. Hearing Michael speak made her heart race. But something had changed. His voice sounded small. Michael sounded littler now, not quite as tall. He told her he was at the rock. She said she would be there soon.

  “Will he be able to see me?” she asked Wyatt after she closed her phone.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “You’re too new to this, Webster. I’ll help you when it’s time. He’ll be able to hear you, though.”

  Jana smiled for the first time in what seemed like forever. She smacked her gum on purpose.

  She watched Lookaway Rock rise above them as they drove into the gorge. The solid granite wall reached to the sky. It was hard to believe that she had jumped off that rock, had fallen that far. That fast. That hard. She smiled at the thought of it. She smiled at herself. High above the top of the rock, there was a star tied to Jana by a tiny string of light. She wanted to climb to that star.

  And jump.

  Wyatt parked the car in the clearing at the top of the switchbacks. Michael’s car was there. She and Wyatt carried flashlights to the head of the trail. Entering the darkness under trees at night, Jana tripped twice. She dropped her flashlight. It hit a flat rock and went out.

  Wyatt came back for her.

  Jana banged the flashlight against her hand. It wouldn’t come on again.

  “It’s broken,” she said.

  “Leave it,” Wyatt told her. “Grab my belt. We’re almost there.”

  His awkward gait jerked her arm to the left with every step, but she held on. Jana walked through what seemed like a hundred separate strings of spiderwebs she hadn’t felt the night before.

  Leaves brushed her skin. She could feel and smell everything the Planet had to offer. The air was heavy with the scent of balsam and hemlock. Little dabs of perfume, the fragrance of moon vine and wild briar rose, hid in the darkness alongside the trail.

  Michael stood at the juniper-moss edge of Lookaway Rock, the treacherous slope of mountain granite drifting off behind him. Michael was a tall silhouette in the darkness when Jana first saw him. The stars sparkled over his shoulders and to either side of him.

  She stepped from the trail behind Wyatt, who turned his flashlight on Michael. The updraft of air that swam over the rock, from the bottom of the gorge to the top, bathed Jana like gentle hands lightly combing her hair.

  “Michael,” she said. He looked left, but not at Jana. He couldn’t see her.

  “Turn her voice off,” Michael said to Wyatt. “That game is over. I’m not putting up with it.”

  Wyatt leaned close to Jana and whispered for her not to talk.

  The circle of light from Michael’s flashlight found Wyatt’s face in the darkness.

  “Oh!” Michael said. He saw a monster. “Who are you?”

  Wyatt closed his one eye slowly and opened it. “Blind date,” he said. “I hope you’re not disappointed. I like walking on the beach and summer picnics.”

  Jana laughed. Sometimes you had to love Wyatt.

  Michael looked to the left again, moving the beam of his flashlight. He saw nothing where Jana stood. He moved the flashlight back to Wyatt, and when he did, the half-face monster was standing closer. Wyatt’s full Earth body was there looming in front of Michael like a threat.

  “You’
re the guy from Sherry’s house,” Michael said. “The police are looking for you.”

  “That’s not the way I hear it,” Wyatt growled. Nathan had told him that Michael was on the run, looking for a way out of the mess he was in.

  “Look, I don’t care what you think. I didn’t kill that stupid bitch. She killed herself. Now, where’s the can of locksmith spray?”

  Jana was stunned by what Michael had called her. His words repeated themselves over and over in her head.

  Her heart was ice.

  Stupid bitch.

  Then it shattered.

  “The one with your fingerprints on it?” Wyatt said. “It’s right here.” He cradled the flashlight in the crook of his bad arm and held up the aerosol can so Michael could see it.

  As far as Wyatt was concerned, the date was over. Michael had said enough. Jana had heard him. It was up to her now to take in the truth and accept it or to stay trapped in her love for Michael for eternity.

  “Give it here,” Michael said. “Give it to me now.”

  Instead of setting down the canister, Wyatt sprayed the air in front of him with a fine mist of dark gray silicone particles. They sparkled in the light from Michael’s flashlight like dust mites in bright sun.

  “Why don’t you hand me one of your shoes for a second?” Wyatt suggested. “Then put it back on and take a walk on that rock behind you. You know, as a joke. A prank. It would be kind of fun.”

  “Set the can down and leave,” Michael said. “I have a gun.”

  “Sure you do,” Wyatt said. He stepped forward, leaning into it and straightening up quickly. His flashlight beam brightened a circle of empty sky to the side of Michael.

  Wyatt held the can inches away from Michael now. He sprayed it again.

  Michael fired from the hip, accidentally. Nervous and scared, he’d only meant to lift the gun, to show it to Wyatt. To keep the monster from coming closer. Jana saw the bright flash of light before she heard the loud report.

  Wyatt wobbled. His stance faltered in his own teetering sideways fashion. He lurched somewhat forward, like he was going to walk but couldn’t. He folded to the ground on one bent knee. His flashlight fell and went out. Wyatt rolled on his side then his back, his good hand gripping his stomach where the bullet had entered. His head rested on granite rock. The aerosol can was under his leg.