The Shoebox Trainwreck

by John Mantooth

  Jonas dropped the hoe, a good thing, at least in retrospect because his first instinct (and maybe he was still drunk) was that the kid had come back as a zombie. Jonas staggered back as if struck. A tree broke his fall, and he stayed there, braced against the tree trunk, ready for anything.

  In a way—a very real way—the thing that came out of that hole was a zombie. The only thing you could say for the poor kid was that he wasn’t dead yet. He climbed out of the hole, still oozing brain matter and blood. His eyes shined like the eyes of a feral night cat, one that you glimpse skulking around your yard at midnight. He tried to stand, but his legs couldn’t do much; they wobbled and he teetered like a heavyweight after getting pummelled with one too many shots to the jaw. Still, he maintained his balance, and Jonas saw how twisted his body was now, that his legs did not align with his torso, and his neck seemed limp, unable to hold his head on straight.

  Jonas slid down the tree, ripping his shirt and scraping his back on the bark. He hardly noticed. His eyes never left the boy, who was now losing his battle to stand. Just before he toppled over, Jonas broke his paralysis and rushed forward. He caught the boy and held him up. Something wet fell on his arm. He refused to consider what it was. The boy’s head lolled up at him, his blue eyes flashing, reflecting the stars. The boy’s mouth opened and closed. Jonas heard a wet sucking in his lungs and thought blood, he’s drowning in his own blood. He turned the boy around and struck his back with the flat of his hand. The boy coughed and whimpered. He hit him again, harder and the boy fell limp in his arms. Jesus. Jonas lowered him gently to the ground.

  “Stay with me, son. Oh God, stay with me.” His voice sounded disembodied, like it came from above him, a wind through the trees that only sounded like a voice.

  His eyes still seemed alert, but his breathing had gone all wrong again, like his lungs were full of broken glass. He tried to speak. The words died on his lips. He tried to sit up. He didn’t get far. At last, he breathed a word. Jonas leaned in close, an overwhelming need to hear what the boy had said—he didn’t know why.

  The boy’s breath tickled his ear.

  “Mama.”

  2007, Alabama

  Four months later, the news was still talking about Marcus, the eleven year old who disappeared walking home from his bus stop. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the local news, Jonas couldn’t turn the television on without seeing his face. One afternoon, he came in from work, turned the television on and there he was—that same forlorn picture they always showed of him looking away from the camera at something in the distance. He knew they’d chosen it for effect, those bastards because they were sensationalists, every last one of them. They imagined a million scenarios—kidnapped by a pedophile, taken by the stepfather (ex-stepfather), lost in the woods, abducted by a cult for God’s sake—but he’d never heard any of the so-called experts theorize the truth, that a drunk failure had mowed the kid down and just buried him a few yards from where he landed. Lately, he’d developed a certain anger towards these people, their assumption that Marcus was the victim of some deep and conspiratorial kind of evil. He wanted to shout at them that they could have done the same thing. It was a blind curve. He was drunk. Not evil.

  Or was he? He knew—from the psychology classes he took in college, the few books he read in passing on the subject of guilt—that anger usually stemmed from being the very thing people accused you of being. Sometimes, he felt evil. Sometimes, he felt it right down to his bones, and had to fight off sudden and vicious urges to enact violence. He usually quelled these inexplicable urges by destroying furniture, the sheetrock in his bedroom, kicking his bed until both feet were numb.

  “You don’t fucking know!” he shouted and picked up his old RCA in his arms. The cord stuck in the wall outlet and he wrenched it free. It whipped around and struck his knee. It probably hurt, but in his rage, he couldn’t feel pain. He carried the television out to his back deck. Propping it atop the railing, he surveyed the grass below for the point of greatest impact. A few stones surrounded a little area he’d started to dig for a fountain last year. He’d never finished of course. His life had stopped after Marcus. He slid the TV along the rail, digging out splinters from the unfinished wood, and then he shoved it hard toward the rocks. It fell in a slow arc, missing the stones completely and landing in the soft grass. This infuriated him even more. He could break a kid in half, but his television was invulnerable to his anger. He spit on it, threw both his hands up in the air, let out a guttural scream, not caring in that moment who the hell heard him (not that there were any neighbours to hear), and he went back inside for the shotgun he kept under his bed. He was halfway back, almost to the deck when he stopped in the kitchen, thinking what a cliché. What a damned cliché I am. If I had any real guts, I’d turn the thing under my chin and let the real fireworks begin. Shooting the damned TV. He laughed and dropped the shotgun. Then he dropped himself to the floor beside it and lay there for a very long time, thinking something had to change.

  He started driving by her house, mostly late at night when he couldn’t sleep, sometimes during the day too, if he’d called in sick to work because he couldn’t get Marcus out of his mind. The warm feeling of his hands when he dragged him into the trees and kudzu—he should have known then that he wasn’t dead—the glassy look of his eyes, the fat cheeks, his voice, oh shit . . .

  Mama.

  So he would get in the car and drive. It was his first instinct born from the memory of an old neighbour when he’d been a kid who kept odd hours and drove around the block late at night, listlessly, barely pressing the gas. That man had disappeared when Jonas was a teenager to little fanfare, just there one day and gone the next, but Jonas had later learned the man grieved for his child who had fallen out of a window left unlocked. Jonas never had to ask who had left the window unlocked. The answer was written in every late night drive around the block, and underlined when the neighbour vanished.

  Jonas didn’t have a block to drive, just winding county highways that meandered into dirt roads and sometimes less. Sometimes, he enjoyed driving them until he couldn’t turn around and the kudzu crowded his car. The roads out here eventually just stopped. A strange thing to think about, but he found some comfort in this somehow. He thought of his neighbour, driving until he found a road like this, and then just flooring it, going off road, slipping away from everything into a tilting darkness, a shadow world where you could leave behind the past like a discarded jacket. When Jonas found one of these dead ends, snowed over with kudzu and shadow, horizonless, he always backed out, inching slowly, his foot on the brake. Once he stopped for a long time and wondered how long it would take for the kudzu to roll over him, his car, everything that made up his world. He wished to be buried in a peaceful slumber like Marcus and when he sat long enough and the light from the moon was obscured by a scrim of clouds, he thought maybe the boy was better off being away from all this, taking an early exit.

  That was the night he hit bottom. His soul felt like something foreign to him. He was cold and kept blowing on his hands. His mind reeled back to the day it happened. He had it all just so in the flashing images of his brain. The drunk turn, the moment of clarity when he realized what was about to happen, the squeal of the brakes—so useless—the pop, the boy in the air, foot snagged on the mirror, his body twisting, flailing before the car released him and he landed yards away at the side of the road.

  Later, the dark, the promises he’d made to convince himself it was the right thing to do. Those promises to take care of the family—he’d learned since then it was only the mother, single, widowed, then divorced—had sounded so good to him. He’d barely thought of them since. What a selfish, evil bastard he was. Yes, that’s right, evil.

  He cranked the car, turned on the lights and started backing up. He knew where she lived. He’d go sit outside her house. Be a guardian angel, make damned sure she suffered no more.

  She liked to sit near a willow tree at night. She’d wear a dress without shoes, and sit o
n a little picnic table while the moon rose and sunk in a sky so vast, Jonas felt dizzy looking at it. He always parked across the road, out in the cotton field, headlights off, and watched. He wished he smoked, but he didn’t, so he kept the radio on low, listening to an AM station out of Chilton County that played old time country. Sometimes he cried, watching her. She seemed so lonely.

  It was spring, nearly warm, when he saw her sobbing for the first time. At first she seemed to be talking, arguing with someone who wasn’t there. Jonas had been about to doze off, something he did more and more on these nights because it was the only time he’d found he could sleep, but he sat up abruptly when he saw her stand up, lifting her arms in the air and shout. It was as if someone was in the willow tree, but he knew that was unlikely. No, he told himself, she’s yelling at me.

  The yelling lasted a few short minutes. Like Jonas, she had no neighbours to speak of. In fact, the nearest house was his own, two full miles away. She collapsed on the picnic table and he could hear her sobs.

  He glanced at his watch. Nearly 3 AM. He cranked the car, watching her carefully for any sign of awareness. She lay on her back on the table, her face to the sky, her fists like little hearts by her sides, beating rhythmically at the picnic table.

  Keeping his headlights off, Jonas drove through the cotton field, easing back onto the road. He drove away from her house until he was out of sight, then turned on his headlights and turned the car around. He came back by her house, driving slow, pretending to just be passing by, stepping on the brake near her front yard, cutting the window down.

  “Are you okay?”

  She turned around, the look on her face was shock and something more—hope?

  She tried to answer but another sob came out. Jonas put the car in park and got out, leaving it running. He stood in her front yard, close enough to his car to feel the heat of the engine. He did not want to frighten her.

  “My name is Jonas,” he said. “We’re actually neighbours. I’ve been meaning to come by, after the . . .” He trailed off, suddenly realizing how utterly foolish this was, acutely aware that his leg was just inches away from the point of impact, that first hollow pop before Marcus went flying.

  She threw her hands up in the air. “It’s okay,” she said, and his heart flip-flopped due to the raw emotion in her voice, the nakedness she was revealing to him, the ultimate stranger. “I don’t know what to call it either.”

  He looked at his feet, his own hands—they hung listless by his sides, his fingers trembling—and his eyes moved unconsciously to the bumper, the almost imperceptible ding that he’d been unable to buff out.

  “Thanks for stopping,” she said, the emotion and nakedness in her voice, now covered up by a suspicious reserve. This is how he’d expected her to be. She was ready for him to move on, not to stay, because staying would be too awkward, too weird, like a stalker, which he was.

  “I . . .” he faltered, not knowing what to say, where to go. Like those roads, he thought. He’d hit a dead end. Then it came to him. “I lost a boy too. That’s why I felt like I had to stop.”

  “Oh?” her voice was kind, but still not inviting.

  “I see you on television, and I drive by your house, and sometimes I can’t sleep at night because I remember what it feels like. Nobody can understand how much that hurts.” Was he crying? He wiped at his face, and his hand came away wet.

  She got off the table and walked over to him. “Stay and talk. I need someone to talk to.”

  “Okay.” She touched his arm, guiding him over to the picnic table.

  “Tell me,” she said, “what happened.”

  He never hesitated. It was as if the story was his now. “I was twenty-four. My wife and I had been married for five years. Our boy, Jonas Jr., was four. My wife was always on me to take care around Jonas, to keep things safe, but I was a smoker, and sometimes I’d be too lazy to go downstairs. My wife hated me smoking in the house, insisted I go outside, but when she wasn’t around, I’d open our bedroom window and smoke one or two. One day, I forgot to shut it back. Two days later, Jonas was gone.”

  He was surprised at the emotion he felt in telling this lie. It was as if on those nights driving to the dead end roads, he’d internalized his neighbour’s plight without even realizing it.

  “I’m Wanda,” she said.

  “I know.”

  2010, Texas

  The lies he told her. Jesus, he just let himself talk. The worst, the one he’d regret later was about his parents. Texas? But, it had been a necessity. If she ever met his real parents, it would be blatantly obvious that he’d lied about Jonas Jr. But he never considered the consequences as he spoke, just as he’d failed to consider the consequences of what he’d done.

  Now, he was faced with a new set of consequences. At any moment, she’d return from the restroom. He could smile at her, ask if she wanted dessert—she’d probably say yes because being pregnant had made her crave sweets, especially cobbler and pie. And this diner, this was definitely a cobbler kind of place. That was all fine. No problem, he could pretend like he’d done for the last three years. Except, it wasn’t all an act because he did love her. He cared about her life, her happiness more than he did his own, and wasn’t that what marriage was supposed to be about?

  But—and this was the thing, wasn’t it?—they were going to see his parents. He had no way to explain this lie. His carefully constructed house of cards was about to come fluttering to the ground. He reached for his keys, plopping them down on the table. When the bathroom door swung open, he was halfway out of his seat, his eyes fixed on the parking lot and the trucker readying his rig. Jonas froze, the instant seeming to draw out like an old reel to reel stuck on the same piece of film. Everything stopped.

  Hadn’t he given her exactly what he’d taken and more? She was pregnant with a child. He’d brought her through her grief, made her happy again. Did he owe her something more?

  His legs twitched, anxious to move. He looked at the kid at the next table. Marcus made over. The kid waved. Jonas waved back and sat down.

  Wanda came out of the bathroom. She was smiling.

  He smiled back at her, wishing he could erase the past, and focus only on her smile, their future. That was impossible. Hell, he didn’t even know how he’d explain about his parents, but he would do it without telling her about the fall afternoon over three years ago. She didn’t deserve that.

  She sat back down. “You won’t believe what I overheard in the restroom.”

  He shrugged. He’d believe just about anything.

  SHOEBOX TRAIN WRECK

  I imagined Suzy running across a great expanse of prairie, hair swept back by the wind, mouth opened to a laughing smile. For the prairie I used cut grass from the yard, taking time to glue each blade to the inside of the shoebox. Above her, cotton-ball clouds hang beneath an orange-peel sun. On either side are the things she loved in life: Skittles; Barbie dolls, represented by tiny, colour cut-outs from Girl’s Life Magazine; miniature plastic puppy dogs I found at a garage sale; and a beaded necklace, each bead painstakingly looped along a filament of thread no larger than a wisp of hair. Her hair, or so I like to imagine.

  As for Suzy herself, I found her at the flea market, a glorious little figurine at the bottom of a box of toys. I knew the second I saw her. Something about the eyes, the smile, the windswept hair. It was Suzy.

  I found the others in much the same way. Oh, not all of them were ready made like Suzy. I had to piece Samantha together from old action figures, but eventually, I got her right.

  When I started them, three years ago, just after the wreck, I had plans of calling the parents, the families, inviting them over to my room, showing them what I’d done, how hard I’d worked to denounce that day, to make their children alive again. I imagined them impressed, murmuring to their significant others, pointing at the level of detail, marvelling at how I seemed to get everything just right. There would be tears, of course, but I’d wrap them up with hugs, and
the tears would never hit the ground. Instead I would soak them all up in the folds of my shirt, so that when they left, I could hang it in my closet unwashed, and touch it each day, another reminder of what I’d wrought.

  Today, I stand inside my room and survey the six shoeboxes, wondering what might be done. I can think of nothing new, so I go to them, one at a time, starting with Michael, ending with Suzy, Adriana, Phillip, Adam, and Samantha in between, the order I see them when I dream. I listen, their voices welling up from deep inside the boxes, soft sounds, like murmuring wind. Leaning closer, I mould the sounds into words and they become a chant I cannot understand. Later, when the house is silent, and I’m in my bed, drifting freely from sleep to waking and back again, I’m able to just make out what they are saying:

  The dead do not haunt the living.

  I thought about moving. By the time I got around to putting my house on the market, I’d already started the shoeboxes, and I needed to be here on the south side of San Antonio to finish them. Not that anyone has ever bothered me much about it. Most people assumed that the bus driver, Jake Crowley, was at fault because he put a shotgun in his mouth three hours after the wreck and blew off the top of his head.

  Nowadays, if people talk about the accident at all, they speak of phantom trains and ghostly images of Crowley prowling the crossing at Buck’s Creek with a lantern looking for all the children he lost. There’s also a widespread belief that parking your car on the tracks where the accident occurred will cause the spirits of those six children to push your vehicle to safety. Teenagers like this last one. It’s common enough to see them heading by the carload out to Buck’s Creek with six-packs of beer and bags of Gold Medal flour to sift like dust over their back bumpers. Drunk enough, they can convince themselves of anything, even that the demarcations in the flour are the prints of angelic fingers rather than where moths have landed, drawn to the warm glow of the taillights.