The Phone Company

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The Phone Company Page 5

by David Jacob Knight


  Sarah crossed her arms. She looked away, fighting back the tears. Anastasia had just left her. She couldn’t believe it. That skank.

  “See your dog around here anywhere?” Bill asked, scoping out the restroom and the empty lot.

  “No,” Sarah said.

  “Hmm.” Bill’s eyes scanned over the woods. “Anyone else out here with you? Guy in a suit?”

  “What? No. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just curious.” After a few more seconds, Bill patted the roof of the cruiser. “Well, come on then. Let’s get you back to school.”

  Sarah rode in the backseat of the cruiser, glaring out the window at the passing trees. She had never ridden in a cop car, hadn’t been arrested once until now, thanks to her “best friend” Anastasia. Sarah couldn’t get comfortable on the plastic seat.

  “Hungry?” Bill asked, offering her a french fry through the partition; most of it was plexiglass, but there was a meshed window in the center. The diamonds of the mesh were surprisingly large.

  Sarah glared at the fry, like everything else. “Those things don’t even rot, you know that?”

  Bill smiled at her in the rearview. “You won’t eat a french fry, but you’ll smoke your Montclairs?”

  “They’re not mine. They’re Anastasia Disney’s.”

  “Oh yeah,” Bill said, then chuckled. “Her mom’s brand, right?”

  Sarah stared at him, wondering how he even knew that.

  Bill chuckled again and pushed in the cruiser’s cigarette lighter. “Can I bum one?”

  He had let her keep the pack. She didn’t know why. He hadn’t even searched her. But Sarah just kept staring at him, suspecting some sort of trap.

  Bill seemed serious, though. He wanted a smoke. And Sarah didn’t see how giving him one could get her in any more trouble. She handed him the whole pack through the mesh, squeezing it a bit to get it through.

  “Are you going to tell my dad?”

  Bill tapped the top of the pack against his steering wheel until a filter poked out of a hole in the foil. “Yeah, I imagine he’d be upset to hear you’re out here and not at school.”

  “He’s always upset,” Sarah said. Whether it was this business with the cell phone factory or whatever JJ had done (or hadn’t done) that week, her dad was always unhappy about something.

  “It’s hard on him, is all,” Bill said. He didn’t explain, but Sarah was pretty sure she knew what he meant. Her dad was only unhappy because he cared. About everything. It was annoying.

  The cigarette lighter popped out, and Bill reached for it. “I guess the first thing I’ll do is give these back to Mrs. Disney. This is stolen property, right here.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  Sarah fell silent, knowing if she said anything more, it would be used against her. Bill was just like her dad.

  She crossed her arms and watched him light the cigarette. “I didn’t know you smoke,” she said, not bothering to hide her tone. What for?

  “Just at the bar sometimes. It’s a social thing.” Bill grinned then, and his eyes grew keen, as if he knew some big secret she wasn’t in on. “How else did you think I knew these belonged to Anastasia’s mom?”

  Sarah gave an awkward shrug, and Bill’s grin got wider, slyer.

  “That’s the thing you probably don’t know about us adults.”

  “You all smoke?”

  “We all know each other. And we all talk. Hell, I went to school with the Disneys.”

  “Apparently you shared cigarettes with them, too,” Sarah mumbled off to one side.

  Bill laughed, and she nearly jumped at the sound. Then Bill laughed again, more heartily this time, and Sarah giggled too, nervous but glad he was amused. Maybe he wasn’t anything like her dad.

  Looking out the window as the trees gave way to houses and hills, Bill said, “Your mom loved this place, you know that?”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said, even though she’d never heard her mom express her love for Cracked Rock, ever. People were always telling her things her mom did, or who she really was. It was weird. Sarah had her own memories and didn’t always care to hear someone else’s interpretation of her mother.

  “She used to say we’re all one big family. And that’s just what families do, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said, feeling braver. “They gossip.” She expected Bill to laugh this time too, but he gave her a blue-eyed stare in the rearview.

  “They also take care of their own,” he said.

  For the next few miles, Bill smoked and Sarah sneaked glances at him in the mirror.

  Her pocket buzzed.

  Anastasia had sent her a text:

  Another buzz:

  Sarah doubted Anastasia was all that sorry. She was way more popular than Sarah, and sometimes it seemed like Anastasia kept her around just so the clique had someone to ostracize.

  She shoved her phone back into her pocket. Let the bitch think she’d gotten arrested. Maybe then she’d actually worry.

  As they pulled onto the long, paved drive to the high school, Bill put out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Tobacco-free campus,” he said with a slight grin.

  Sarah didn’t return the smile. All she could think about was what would happen next. She kept picking at a puckered gouge in the plastic seat.

  “What are you going to tell my dad?”

  Bill smiled. “Tell you what. I’m going to do you a favor this time and let you off with a warning. But you have to promise me.”

  “Promise you what?” she said, arching an eyebrow.

  “You have to promise that the next time I catch you, and if I’m on duty, you won’t hate me for turning you in.”

  “What?”

  “You have to promise.”

  “Are you going to tell my dad then?”

  “No, that’s not my job. My job is to cite minors smoking cigarettes. So let’s say, just this one time, I’m sleeping on the job. But only if you can promise.”

  “I don’t even understand what I’m promising to do.”

  “That you won’t hate me if, the next time, I do my job.”

  “Oh.”

  Bill parked in front of the school, then opened the back door for Sarah. Her legs felt wobbly as she climbed out.

  “Tell your dad I said hi.” Bill left before Sarah could make her promise.

  She got out her phone and punched the keypad a bunch of times to text Anastasia.

  Bitch, she thought.

  * * *

  As he drove away, Bill watched Sarah in his rearview. He’d seen Anastasia Disney’s Jetta in the school lot where it should be.

  Lawfully he should have stopped Anastasia at the park, but Bill didn’t like punishing people for small mistakes, especially when the threat of getting caught was enough to put them back in line.

  Once Sarah was inside the school, Bill set his eyes on the road. She was a good kid, Sarah. Great grades, looked a lot like her mother. She had the same hair, never quite combed all the way. And her eyes were always so open behind her glasses, oddly dilated, making her look incredibly kind and expressive. She came across a bit cold, but she was a nice girl once you convinced her it was all right to thaw out and drop the act.

  It was painful sometimes, looking at her and seeing Janice. Bill didn’t understand how Steve could stand it. Then sometimes he didn’t know how Steve could carry on if he didn’t have some daily reminder that there was once a woman named Janice in the world who made everyone feel at home.

  If Candy McCurdy had been born to a mother like that, she might have stood a chance turning out half as good as Sarah Gregory.

  “Hey, Bill,” Aaron said over the radio. He’d hung up with her on the hands-free device after seeing who Barksdale had led him to. “You still alive out there? Over.”

  He picked up the handset. “Barely. Over.”

  “Dog lead you to anything interesting?”

  Bill’s thumb hovered over
the PRESS-TO-TALK button as he pulled to a stop at the end of the school drive.

  “Nah,” he said, pressing the button. “Barks just ended up eating half my lunch.”

  “Ah. Well, apparently Marvin’s causing a scene again out in front of the courthouse. I guess he smashed some lady’s phone with his sign. They could really use your help over there, over.”

  “Roger that.” Bill hung up the handset and sighed.

  After some thought, he picked up the partially smoked cigarette from the ashtray. His hand shook as he raised the lighter to the burnt tip.

  Mondays, he thought, steadying his hand. Then he made it tremble, exaggerating it, consulting it as if it were some sort of Richter scale. “I need a drink.”

  He didn’t laugh.

  After a few puffs, Bill pulled back onto the main road, hoping that the rest of the week would go smoother. He didn’t realize yet, but the next day his plate would be full of corpses.

  CHAPTER 4

  “They’re digging up the bodies,” JJ said.

  Sarah, who had been resting her head against the passenger window, hair matted, instantly perked up. Barksdale sat in the back next to JJ, paws on the door as he barked at the glass.

  “I see that,” Steve said, scanning over the open graves. What had once been a scenic hill of grass and granite crosses now looked like a lower jaw with all its teeth pulled out. The only decorative thing left was the monument, the plaque and granite pad in the center of the five-acre lot.

  They called it the First Step. That very first step when Christopher Harcum, town founder, knew that this was where he would bury his wife.

  Cracked Rock, here between the ancient hills, only became a town, not because it was ripe for settlement, not because of the creeks and natural springs and local populations of deer, but because Harcum refused to leave Mrs. Harcum behind.

  The man’s famous statement, inscribed on the plaque, was “I shall lie by my wife.” The same quote was etched into the entablature of the Cracked Rock Community Library.

  Now the centerpiece, the marble angel, had been removed from the Step, along with its cherubic likeness to Harcum’s wife. Cracked Rock’s birthplace had been reduced to a granite pad with an empty pedestal and a corroded plaque.

  Steve didn’t even know how to feel about that. Apparently, though, the rest of the town did. A temporary construction fence had been thrown up around the graveyard, and protestors had gathered at the barrier’s edge.

  “Where the hell am I supposed to even park?” Steve said beneath Barksdale’s bark.

  The protestors had not only clogged the diner lot with their trucks and cars, they had also crowded the narrow shoulder of the road. A van from the local news was parked there, too.

  Steve’s blood pressure went up. Just by a few millimeters of mercury, but he could feel it.

  If he’d had his blood pressure cuff with him, he could have proven it, right then and there; he could always tell when he was running a little high.

  Farther up the shoulder, he noticed Bill standing in the open door of his cruiser. Steve parked in front of his friend and got out.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he and the kids joined the deputy. Barksdale, barking at a backhoe up the hill, lunged, but Steve caught him by the collar, nearly falling out into the busy road.

  Bill gave Steve a look, like he’d had too many peppers in his omelet, and particularly acidic orange juice. “They had the headstones removed before I even got here,” he said.

  Steve surveyed the excavation. The backhoe had already scraped away a layer of topsoil from each gravesite. Now a surprisingly large team of what appeared to be archeologists were working the individual graves, carefully exhuming every bit of bone, coffin fragment, and any clothing that had been preserved in the dirt.

  “Are they relocating it?” Steve asked. “What’s happening?”

  Bill worked his cowboy hat up and down. “Yeah, well, apparently they, uh—”

  “They’re breaking in!” JJ said. “Look!”

  With a loud clash, the protestors plucked one of the chain-link panels out of its moorings and dropped it against the rest of the fence. People poured in around the open graves, shouting, lining up along the dirt road of the graveyard. Local cameramen captured the whole event.

  Steve tugged on Barksdale’s collar, but the dog pushed forward, still barking and spraying spittle out into the road.

  “I don’t think I’ve heard him bark in all my life.”

  “He’s upset,” Bill said. He took a curt step forward and pointed at the ground. “Barksdale, sit!”

  The German shepherd shot him a look over his furry shoulder, then continued to glare at the backhoe. He stayed standing, haunches aquiver, ears atwitch. At least he had stopped barking and trying to lunge.

  So now the loudest sounds in all of Cracked Rock were the backhoe and the demonstration.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Bill said. “I gotta handle this.” He grabbed his bullhorn out of the cruiser, looked both ways for cars, and then rushed across the road to the graveyard.

  Steve watched him go. He wished he could help. He knew, though, from offering countless times before, that Bill couldn’t let him. Wouldn’t. Bill would tell him he’d just get in the way.

  Over in the diner lot, the morning crowd stood in front of the restaurant, along with some of the waitstaff. They were all watching, some were smoking, and everyone was talking amongst themselves, arms crossed or shivering in the cold.

  Steve saw Mr. and Mrs. McLean and steered Barksdale and the kids that way.

  The old man shook his head in greeting and lifted his steaming cup. “Some of those graves are over a century old.”

  “Yeah,” Steve said, still in shock.

  “Some of what I’ve seen them pull up out of those holes looks like nothing but dirt and rock.”

  Indeed, the team of archeologists sometimes lifted from the older graves what looked like fill dirt, yet they dumped it into the plastic containers that supposedly enshrined human remains; Steve imagined most of the old wooden coffins, and much of the bone, had disintegrated, dust to dust.

  “This town wouldn’t even be here if not for those people planted up on that hill,” said Mr. McLean.

  Steve nodded and stared out at the First Step. When people went digging for the roots of their family trees, they came to graveyards like Harcum to do rubbings of the tombstones.

  This was where it all began. In his time, Steve had even seen a few séances there. At a more tender age, he’d actually been to one, he and Bill. And Janice. He couldn’t even comprehend what was happening to his town now.

  “Think they’ll relocate them?” Mrs. McLean asked, hand at her crucifix. “Maybe over to Mountain View or something?”

  “Who knows, dear?”

  “And that beautiful angel.” She came close to tears, clutching her cardigan to her neck. “They broke off the poor thing’s head.”

  Steve dry-washed his face with his hand. “What in the hell is happening?”

  “Read the signs,” Mr. McLean said.

  Up the dirt road, where Bill and his bullhorn were addressing protestors, Steve could see Marvin “the Martian” Jones bobbing around in the crowd with his CIA hat. He had made a new picket sign for the event:

  THEIR LISTENING

  “Wrong word,” Steve said. Behind him, Sarah chuffed like she usually did when he corrected someone.

  “Heritage, not coverage,” he said, reading another sign aloud. “So it’s got something to do with the PCo then?” He saw, too, a quote from Ambrose Bierce:

  TELEPHONE, NOUN

  AN INVENTION OF THE DEVIL

  “I like the one that says my phone just makes calls,” Mr. McLean said.

  Steve nodded while the old man took a sip from his cup. “Said that myself, how many times?”

  “Yeah,” Sarah interrupted, “it’s, like, your motto. Can we go inside now?”

  Steve shot a look back at his kids. From the way Sarah hudd
led in her coat, he knew his daughter was getting cold, but that didn’t excuse rude behavior.

  “So,” Steve said to Mr. McLean, “what’s this got to do with the, uh . . . JJ, what the hell are you doing?”

  “It lasts longer,” JJ said, adjusting the aim of his camera phone. He snapped a shot of two archeologists passing off a human skull.

  “Oh, shit,” Lawrence, the line cook, said. “The browns!” He went bursting back inside to the smell of a smoking grille.

  JJ’s smile melted as he appraised the picture on the tiny screen of his clamshell. “I need a new phone.”

  “Define need,” Steve said.

  JJ snapped shut his clamshell and tucked it into the pocket of his black hoodie. “As in the next time someone digs up dead bodies, I need to be able to post it on Follow without landing on the FAIL Blog.”

  Steve shot his son another look and opened his mouth to say something, only to hear somebody else’s scream come out.

  “He’s here,” Mrs. Hayworth said, making everyone near the diner jump. “The tall man. He’s in the garden.”

  Everyone gawked at the boneyard, and Steve saw it too. Where the angel used to be, there stood the man in the black suit with his blue pocket square. He was holding the old receiver up to his ear, but he wasn’t saying a word.

  CHAPTER 5

  Before everything went to shit, Bill was having a good talk with the protestors.

  “Screw you, fascist pig!” one of them shouted. Bill suspected Marvin. He could see the CIA hat near the back of the demonstration. He recognized the faux Scottish accent, too.

  The Martian had a way of rousing a mob. He was like some trickster, never fully seen (despite his tie-dyed shirts) but always moving among the crowd, shouting out in different voices to falsely inflate and bolster the rabble to its cause. Now everyone took up the charge, shouting at Bill and brandishing their signs.

  “You’re one of them!”

  “A company man!” a now-Southern Marvin cried out from somewhere else.

 

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