by John Jodzio
Now, though, as they made their way to the station in Kalispell, her gloved hand sat like a white pearl in Ellsworth’s palm. He wrapped his fingers around it, squeezed. Miss Yates looked up at him and smiled.
“Those teeth,” Ellsworth thought to himself, “those beautiful teeth.”
VESSELS
A man recently brought me this metal briefcase. He set it down on the bar near where I sat. Somehow he knew where to find me. He called me by my given name, Ronald. It was getting cold outside, but he was really sweating, this man, these little rivers of water running down his forehead.
“This was your father’s,” he said, pushing the case toward me. “I worked with him. I think he’d want you to have it.”
I hadn’t talked to my father in a long while. Years. My mother had died a long time ago. Last I heard my father was traveling around Ohio selling aluminum siding.
I picked up the metal case. I could tell the handle on it had melted a little, but then had cooled down. It had this drippy plastic look that you see sometimes when things get too hot.
“There was a fire,” the man told me. “At his motel.”
The man proceeded to tell me that someone had fallen asleep smoking in the roadside motel that my father was staying in. This was outside Akron, he said. His briefcase was the only thing left over from his room. It was one of the only things out of the entire place that had made it, he said.
The man told me he was driving through here on business, so he thought he’d bring it along and give it to me.
“Heat like that—everything usually melts,” he told me. He pointed at the briefcase. “This made it through, though.”
The man looked really thirsty, so I got Geno the bartender to put down his tattoo magazine and bring us some drinks.
“Are you okay?” I asked the man. With all the sweat, he wasn’t looking so healthy.
“I need to show you something,” he said.
We walked outside to his car and he popped open the trunk. My eyes took a second to focus, but when they did, I couldn’t believe what I saw—there were three little girls in there, sleeping. There was a bigger one and then the other two got progressively smaller, like Russian stacking dolls.
“They’re still my kids,” he told me. “Even if their mother doesn’t think so.”
I kept on looking in that trunk. It was huge! The kids had pillows and blankets and they looked really comfortable. I noticed that the man had drilled some holes in the trunk for ventilation. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of doing something like this to a car.
“Wow,” I told him.
He shut the trunk gently and we walked back into the bar. He was sweating less now and had calmed down some. After a bit, he pointed at my father’s briefcase.
“Aren’t you going to look at what’s inside?” he asked.
I didn’t think that there would be anything important inside, but I popped the latch on the case and slid it open. There were some invoices written out in my father’s hand, a pack of cigarettes, some siding brochures.
“I was hoping for gold bricks,” I said. “But no such luck.”
The man and I sat silently watching the football game on the TV above the bar. After a while he stood up to go.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I see them once last time?”
He nodded and we walked out to his car and he opened the trunk. The girls were still in there, all three of them, safe and asleep, same as before.
“Great,” I told him. “Thank you for doing that.”
The man slowly closed the trunk. We shook hands. Then he got in his car and drove off down the street. I watched his taillights trail away from me. After a little bit, he put on his blinker, turned the corner and was gone.
THE DEADSITTER
I get paid eight dollars an hour to pretend I am Vincent, Mrs. Ramon’s dead son. I do this on Saturdays from noon to four. I walk next door to Mrs. Ramon’s house and then I go down to Vincent’s old room and change into the outfit lying on his old bed. I wet a comb and part my hair over to the right. When I walk upstairs, there is a bowl of orange sherbet waiting for me on the dining room table. I am supposed to take the spoon and eat the orange sherbet like it is my favorite thing.
Sometimes when I go to Mrs. Ramon’s house, Vincent gets a bad report card and there is no bowl of sherbet on the table. When that happens I sit patiently and listen to Mrs. Ramon lecture me about how important education is for my future. I nod my head and try to look guilty. I make a solemn promise to her that from now on, I will take World Geography much more seriously.
Sometimes it is Vincent’s birthday and there is a cake shaped like a racecar and a new ten-speed bike in the driveway and I have to pretend that a car-shaped cake and a new ten-speed are both very exciting, that these are the things that I want most in the entire world.
Mrs. Ramon is pretty and usually she smells good. It is not really her that I do not like. It is mostly that I am sick of Vincent’s green tennis shoes that are two sizes too small, that I am sick of wearing that acid washed jean jacket with a huge butterfly embroidered on the back, that I am sick of acting like a dead kid when I, Steve Keppler, am very much alive.
“I’m quitting,” I tell my family at dinner tonight. “It is getting way too creepy over there. I am done.”
“You keep going over there until she tells you not to,” my brother Grant says. “She’s a nice lady and hell if you are going to disappoint her.”
Grant was Vincent before I was Vincent. When Grant got too big for the clothes, he brought me over there and walked me through everything. Our older brother Jake did the same thing with Grant a couple of years before that. Jake actually knew the real Vincent, who was only a couple years ahead of him in school. If it was only Grant telling me to continue I would not care, but my parents are on board too. They think that working for Mrs. Ramon teaches me empathy, that pretending to be a dead kid makes me appreciate how lucky I am to be alive.
“You’re just going to leave her in a lurch?” my father asks me as he pushes a bowl of mashed potatoes across the table to my mother. “She’s counting on you and you’re just going to turn your back?”
I am the youngest child and there isn’t anyone else in my family to send. Vincent died when he was nine years old, but I am turning thirteen next week. The legs of Vincent’s jeans end halfway up my calf. A couple of hairs have sprouted on my balls and fuck if I am going over there one more goddamn Saturday.
“What if I find someone else?” I ask them. “What then?”
- - - - - - - -
At recess on Monday, I corner a smallish fifth grader named Todd Billups. I ask him if he wants to make some money.
“How?” he asks.
“You’ve got to pretend you’re a dead kid,” I say.
“Just lay there?” he says. “In one of those creepy kid coffins?”
“You’ve got to do stuff,” I tell him. “You are playing a dead kid who’s alive.”
“I’d be playing a kid who comes back from the dead?” he says. “Like a kid zombie?”
“No,” I explain. “You’re pretending like you’re the dead kid, but that you never died.”
“How the hell does that work?” he asks.
Sometimes I ask myself this question. Sometimes I wonder how this works in Mrs. Ramon’s head. What does she do for the rest of the week? Does she pretend that Vincent is at church camp or boarding school? That he’s off visiting relatives?
“You go there and you put on his clothes and then you talk to the dead kid’s mom,” I tell Todd. “You do whatever the lady wants you to do and then you go home. It’s easy.”
Todd still looks reluctant, so I remind him about the money.
“You can buy a lot of shit with that money,” I say. “A lot of shit.”
This is a true statement, but what I fail to mention to Todd is what the money feels like when you spend it. I do not tell Todd that anything you buy with this mo
ney has a strange feeling attached to it. For instance that when you look down at your new pair of shoes the only thing you think is: death, death, death.
“Do you want to try it out on Saturday?” I ask.
Todd rides his bike over to my house on Saturday morning and we walk over to Mrs. Ramon’s. I bring Todd downstairs to Vincent’s room and point to the clothes on the bed.
“You’ll need to put these on,” I say.
Todd walks over and studies the clothes. He picks up the green shoes and then drops them back onto the floor. He’s a short kid and unless he gets a big growth spurt he can do this job for a long time.
“I’m not wearing any of this,” he tells me.
“It’s part of the job,” I tell him. “It’s what you signed up for.”
Todd slides on the jean jacket, pops the collar on it so it’s up near his ears. He sticks his hands out and front of him and starts to moan.
“And I already told you—no zombies.”
Todd doesn’t listen to me and continues to moan. He picks up Vincent’s thin gray t-shirt that has a picture of a bull’s-eye on it with the words “Hot Shot” underneath. I can tell that now that he is having his doubts.
“I’ll wear the jean jacket,” he says. “But not any of the other stuff.”
“You have to wear the whole outfit or you don’t get the money,” I tell him. “That’s the deal.”
“Then there’s no deal,” he says, peeling off the jacket and starting toward the door.
I know that I should let Todd go. I know that I should find someone else who can follow these simple rules, some poor kid who really needs the money, but I am not sure that there are many people like that in the world.
Maybe Todd can make it work wearing only the jean jacket, I think. Maybe Mrs. Ramon is so whacked out that she only needs a warm body sitting next to her. Maybe she won’t even realize what he’s wearing.
“Fine, fine,” I say. “We can try it your way.”
I hear Todd up above me, tromping across the living room floor.
I want to leave now and be done with this forever, but I decide to wait and make sure it goes okay. I lie down on Vincent’s bed and pick up an old magazine from the bedside table. I page through it, look at these goofy-haired teen stars of yesterday. They are nearly as old as my parents now. Some of them are probably older.
After about five minutes, I hear a low-pitched zombie moan coming from upstairs. Then I hear Mrs. Ramon scream. After that Todd runs back downstairs. He wads up the jean jacket and throws it at me.
“I tried,” he tells me, “but I guess she just wasn’t buying it.”
After Todd leaves, I sit on the bed and listen to Mrs. Ramon wail. Her sobs are high-pitched, sort of like when a vacuum cleaner throws a belt, part whirring and part flapping. It is an awful noise, something that I want to make stop immediately. I put on the jean jacket and smash my feet into those damn shoes. I walk upstairs and sit down on the couch next to her. She does not say anything to me for about ten minutes. I listen to the buzzing of her refrigerator. I hear a delivery truck bump down our street. Finally, I cannot take the silence any longer.
“How about we look at a photo album?” I say.
This is the absolute last thing I want to do, but I go over to the hutch and I pull out a large brown picture album with the words “Family Memories” on it. I open it up and I turn the pages. I ask Mrs. Ramon questions about the people in the pictures. After a bit, she stops crying.
“That is your Great Uncle Joshua,” she tells me, pointing to a picture of a man with a huge belly who is tending a grill.
While we are sitting there looking at these pictures, I can’t help but stare outside. It’s a beautiful afternoon and when I look out the window I can see my father and brother throwing a football in our yard.
While I am looking outside, I see Mr. Ramon pull up the driveway. Mr. Ramon does not live with Mrs. Ramon any more. He lives in a condo across town. He comes over once a week to mow the lawn and bring Mrs. Ramon groceries. He wants no part of this Vincent nonsense either. Whenever I see him, he will not even look my way. Why am I on the hook for this, I think as I sit here, how does deadsitting for Mrs. Ramon fall to me?
“People say you look like Uncle Joshua,” Mrs. Ramon says.
I study the picture of Uncle Joshua. He doesn’t look anything like me. It’s not even close. I’ve got dark curly hair and brown eyes and Uncle Joshua has white blond hair and ruddy skin. Screw this.
“Is Great Uncle Joshua dead?” I ask Mrs. Ramon.
“Yes,” Mrs. Ramon tells me. “He passed away a few years ago.”
I point to another person, this time a woman standing next to Uncle Joshua.
“What about that lady?” I say.
“Your Great Aunt Eunice?” Mrs. Ramon asks.
“Sure,” I say. “What about her? Is she dead?”
“Yes,” she says. “She passed away just after Uncle Joshua.”
We page through the album. Now though, instead of only looking at the pictures, I point at every person in each picture and ask Mrs. Ramon if they are dead.
“What about that lady holding the cigarette?” I ask. “How did she die?”
For a while, Mrs. Ramon answers my questions. Slowly, though, she catches on to what I am doing. When she does she stands up and goes into the bathroom. Through the door, I hear her sobbing.
“Listen,” I say to her. “I don’t think I can do this anymore. I need to be finished. Okay?”
“Vincent?” she says.
“My name is not Vincent,” I tell her. “You know that.”
The door flies open and Mrs. Ramon stares at me with huge, scared eyes. Her mascara has run in black rivers down into the neck of her blouse.
“Vincent,” she tells me, “you need to stop playing these games right this instant.”
“How was the replacement?” my mother asks me at dinner.
“Not good,” I say. “He left after five minutes.”
“You’ll find another one,” my father says.
“Sure I will,” I say.
“It’ll be easy,” Grant says.
I decide that there is only one way out of this and so I call up Todd again.
“What now?” he asks.
“I’ve been thinking this over,” I tell him. “And I’ve decided that you need to kill me next Saturday.”
“For real dead?” he says.
“Not for real dead,” I say. “It just needs to look for real.”
“How are you going to do it?” he asks.
“Stabbing,” I say. “I looked on the Internet and I can make it look real.”
“Can I dress up like a zombie?” he asks me.
“I don’t see why not,” I say.
We plan the specifics the next day at recess. I will tape two baggies full of corn syrup to my chest. At precisely 12:30 pm Todd will run inside the house and stab these bags with a fork. I will scream very loudly and the blood will spurt out of my chest. I will run outside and die very dramatically on Mrs. Ramon’s front lawn.
Todd shakes his head back and forth.
“This plan is stupid,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “It just has to work.”
- - - - - - - -
On Saturday I get up early and mix up the two baggies of red corn syrup and go over to Mrs. Ramon’s house. I go down into Vincent’s old room. I slide into his pants. I tape the baggies to my chest and put on his shirt over them. I lace up his shoes and I slip on his jean jacket and walk upstairs. Every time I move there is a loud sloshing sound.
“Hello?” I say. “Mom?”
All the lights in the house are off. There is no bowl of orange sherbet sitting on the kitchen table. I hear the air conditioning kick on. I am near a vent and the cool air travels up my pant leg.
“Hello?” I yell out again.
I hear a noise in the bedroom and I walk down the hall. I pu
sh open the door. The room is dark, but I can see that Mrs. Ramon is lying on the bed. She is under the covers, her body turned away from me.
“I didn’t know if you were coming back,” she says.
The way these words come out of her mouth makes it seem like she’s in great pain, like each word that travels to her tongue is a struggle to push out of her mouth and into the air.
“I’m here,” I say.
Mrs. Ramon inhales deeply. She sits and puts her feet on the floor. I shift my feet and the liquid in the baggies move across my chest.
“So you are,” she says. She gets up from the bed and makes her way into the kitchen. She goes into the freezer and scoops out some sherbet into a bowl and sets it out in front of me. She sits down across the table.
“Eat,” she says.
I spoon the sherbet into my mouth.
“How is it?” she asks.
“It is the same as always,” I say.
“That’s good,” she says. “Right?”
“Sure,” I say. “That’s good.”
When I finish, I get up and bring my bowl to the sink and rinse it out.
When I turn around, Mrs. Ramon is standing right behind me. She is much too close. I can smell her perfume, something with lemon. An eyelash has fallen from her eye and is resting on her cheek.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
Mrs. Ramon does not answer me. Instead, she pulls me in for a hug. She takes my head and presses it into her chest. I am having trouble breathing, but she holds me close for a long time and when she lets me go, she grabs my shoulders with both of her hands. Hard.
“Mrs. Ramon,” I say. “You are hurting me.”
Her eyes are somewhere else, looking past or through me, I can’t tell which. She loosens her grip and her hands fall to her sides.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I tell her.
She nods and then turns away from me. She walks back down the hall to her bedroom and closes the door behind her.
I stand at the kitchen sink. I hear a branch from a nearby tree scrape against the roof, back and forth in the wind.