In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  Chapter 1

  Once upon a time, at Denise’s request, Robert attended a performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in Schiller Park. They had been dating for just over five months, and this was to be the first time he’d ever seen her on stage. She had spoken often enough about her love of the theatre, recounting experiences—some humorous, others rather terrifying—that she’d had both on the stage and behind the scenes, but she’d not invited him to see her act until tonight.

  As he sat down that warm July on the sloping green hillside that faced the stage, he couldn’t have been more nervous if he were in the production himself.

  The production was pleasant enough, if a tad long. The director had decided to set the show during Colonial times. Denise, according to the cast list in the program, was playing the role of Betsy Ross. Which actual Shakespearean character Betsy Ross was replacing Robert couldn’t tell, not being familiar with the Bard’s works.

  At some point near the end of the first act, one of the leads made a reference to “our dearest Betsy,” then pointed toward a stoop-shouldered old woman sitting on a tree stump at the far left side of the stage.

  It wasn’t just the makeup, the spirit gum and gray wig and whatever else she had used to give herself the appearance of age; this was no would-be starlet employing every possible artificial trapping, conveying the essence of old-womanhood through crafty affectation: Denise was old. Through some kind of sorcery he hadn’t the capacity to comprehend, she had aged fifty years since disappearing backstage two hours ago. No one was this good. She was an old woman, one who had nearly been broken by the storms but had managed to persevere, despite all the chaos around her. You could see it in the way she lifted her head, slowly, with hard-earned dignity; an old woman who didn’t snap to attention for anyone but made them stand waiting while she decided whether or not they were worth her time; you could tell it in the way she sat with her legs pressed together at the knees, defiant, regal and strong; you knew it by the subtle, nearly imperceptible way her hands trembled when she put down her sewing and let go of the needle—a slight twitch of her index finger, a slow flexing of her thumb, a smooth, liquid unfurling of the muscles beneath her liver-spotted, tissue-paper thin flesh as she lay her hands palms-down on the surface of the flag on which she had been working; all of these nuances and countless others were there, and not in any 1-2-3 manner, not some vain actress moving through a directed series of over-rehearsed, catalogued movements; here was an old woman, not ancient by any means, but old nonetheless—and if he’d doubted that she was the real thing, if he’d had any lingering suspicions that all of it was just part of an intricate (albeit damned effective) illusion, if he’d thought that she’d do something—anything—to break the spell—a small, tell-tale gesture that said, See, I’m still your Denise—all of it went right down the tubes the second she opened her mouth and spoke her one line, because that voice, that weathered, tattered-silk voice that still held the ghost of its bygone youth, that voice of one who’d walked head-first into life and emerged at the far end a bit worse for the wear but still very much her own person, a voice filled with both wisdom and naiveté, with just a raspy touch of playfulness around the edges, this voice told him in no uncertain terms that the Denise he knew and loved was not here at all: She had been replaced for this moment in time—completely, totally, incontrovertibly replaced—by an old woman who’d been summoned forth from her grave somewhere in American history.

  He was so proud of her he might have burst wide open right there and then had it not been for the audience applauding at the end of the act.

  Afterward he found her backstage, packing her makeup into a plastic tackle box. He came up behind her, put a hand on each of her shoulders, spun her around, and kissed her.

  “What was that for?” she asked, looking around to make sure no one was staring at them.

  “That was one of the most phenomenal things I’ve ever seen! Do you have any idea how incredible you were? My God, if I hadn’t known better, I’d’ve sworn it wasn’t you up there. Everything you did was right on the money, was...was—”

  She laughed and playfully smacked his arm. “Take a tranquilizer already! Sheesh. One lousy line.”

  “But you—”

  “—did it well? Thanks. I’m glad you enjoyed the show and—oh, no you don’t. If you want to kiss me again, we have to go somewhere a little more private.”

  “That’s almost coy, coming from you.”

  “It is? Remind me never to do it again. I’ll have to wash my mouth out with vinegar as it is. Coy? Never have I shuddered with more horror.”

  That’s when he knew he was going to ask her to marry him, but decided to wait until they were back at her place. Privacy was very important to her. She thought public displays of affection were inappropriate—her one nod to Puritanism—and had told him often enough that things of an intimate nature should be reserved for intimate places; the least he could do, after having practically attacked her backstage, was wait until they were completely alone before asking the most important question a person can ask and another can answer.

  While driving to her side of town he once again complimented her performance, this time less effusively and with not as much drooling.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ve always liked acting. It gives me a chance to change my face, make it prettier or older, threatening or younger. I long ago gave up any hopes of being cast as the ingénue. I don’t ‘look’ right—at least that’s what every director I’ve ever worked with has told me. You can do everything with makeup to a plain face except make it beautiful, and beautiful’s the only thing that counts with a ‘stage picture.’ Which is a nice way of saying that no one will ever cast me as Juliet, dammit. So I have to be content playing mothers, or grandmothers, or colorful eccentrics, or characters who’ve got no business being in a Shakespearean piece. Betsy Ross, for chrissakes!”

  “Do you at least get a lot of good supporting roles?”

  “Don’t I wish. Oh, sometimes, sure, I get a nice meaty role, but mostly what I get is what you saw tonight—one-line throwaway parts. What most theatre people call ‘stage dressing.’”

  “Is it enough?”

  She looked down at the makeup case on her lap and shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.” A sad silence, then: “You know why I do this? Because I like pretending that I’m different people. Someone other than who and what I am. I get to be all the people I wish I were. Might be. Should have been.”

  “I think who you are is perfect.”

  “That’s sweet, and is probably going to get you laid in about twenty minutes, but it won’t help all that much the next time I spend three hours at an audition to end up with one line. Look, most of the time I’m perfectly happy with the way I am but, still, sometimes....

  “So I pretend. And I like to think that I actually bring these people to life for a little while, that I lower, I don’t know, certain walls, and give them safe passage into this world. I used to have this fantasy when I first started out—still have it, sometimes—that these characters I played actually hung around after the show closed, that they really existed, only on a different plane, you know? Like ghosts. And all of them look a little like me. Isn’t that a scary thought? Dozens and dozens of ghosts roaming the night out there, touring all their various worlds, and all of them looking a little like me.”

  He laughed as he reached over to touch her cheek. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

  Silence. A thin, wistful smile.

  Then: “You don’t.”

  At her apartment he discovered a vinyl copy of Nitzinger’s One Foot in History and regaled her with his views on unjustifiably overlooked 70's rock acts. She’d smiled and asked him his favorite song on the album, then played it, and they danced, he asked her to marry him, she said yes, then they made slow, moist, satisfying love on her small bed; later, they married and tried to have children but Denise miscarried a few times, Robert became more and more obsessed with his car
eer while she waited for him to notice her again, then she got pregnant once more and this time carried the child for almost seven months before something went wrong and she died and the world that Robert once knew disintegrated and he went a little mad.

  As the incident on the bus would soon prove.

  * * *

  For several days after spotting Cathy Pope on the #19, Robert had taken to riding that particular bus in the evening in hopes of seeing her again. Part of him wanted to believe that the girl was just someone who looked remarkably like his dead high-school sweetheart, but another part, the part that was begrudgingly growing to accept concepts such as chronos and kairos and dead babies that clawed their way out of backyard garden graves, that part wanted to find her and know for certain that it was her; what he would do then...well, he’d deal with that question when and if.

  Surprisingly, Robert found that he enjoyed riding the bus. The #19 stopped at several shopping centers, libraries, and movie theaters along its route. He liked watching as people got on with their purchases, or small pull-carts of groceries (a lot of elderly citizens rode the #19, especially on Tuesdays and Fridays, according to the driver), or listening to the young couples who were “just starting out” as they discussed their entertainment budget for that night prior to the movie. Somehow, riding the #19 made him feel more a part of the reality he’d always known and had taken for granted and now wanted desperately to have returned to him.

  He delighted in looking out the window and watching the city pass by. He’d never much noticed before, but Cedar Hill, especially between the hours of 7 and 11 p.m., was actually a very pretty, homey little city. He wondered why it had taken so long for that to register with him. Denise had known it. She’d liked riding the bus, even after Robert warned her that some of the “bus people” (as he arrogantly referred to them) might be of questionable character.

  “Don’t you have any faith in human beings at all?” she’d asked.

  He’d had no answer for that.

  But for well over a week now—a time blissfully free of any night sounds in the house, new matryoshka dolls, meeting up with former lovers, or contact from Rael—there had been (mostly) nothing but pleasant times for Robert-the-Bus-Rider.

  There had also been no sighting of the girl who might or might not have been Cathy Pope. He decided to give it one more night, then to hell with it; if there was no proof, then he could, and would, dismiss it.

  The stitches in his nose had completely dissolved, leaving him with, as Dr. Steinman had promised, a very-Chinatown scar. He chose not to cover it up; he needed to be able to see it, to know that he carried a physical mark from the night Denise had died; he deserved to be marked.

  He’d done his first official interview for the station, and it had aired twice and generated a lot of viewer response. “It’s going to work like a charm,” MacIntyre later told him. “When you come back to work, if this is any indication, the ratings’ll kill the competition.”

  Somehow that didn’t make Robert feel any better.

  Nor did his visit to the library.

  Try as he did to not think about it, Robert couldn’t rid himself of the story about the donor heart that had somehow disappeared in transit. He wondered if other such incidents had occurred, and after two hours at the library’s computers and an hour leafing through the various newspapers they carried, he’d discovered that, in the first twelve hours after Denise’s death, at least three other donor organs had disappeared on their way to those who needed them; two others had terminally malfunctioned shortly after being transplanted; and one—a liver—had not only malfunctioned, killing the recipient, but the autopsy revealed it to be in a state of decomposition commensurate to a five-day-old corpse. The doctors could offer no explanation.

  All of these items were far from front-page news, and none of them mentioned where the donated organs had originated.

  The worst part, though, was the last item he discovered: the child who’d been waiting for the donor heart had died two days after the one taken from Emily (Robert was certain of this now) had vanished.

  He sat weeping at the computer terminal, whispering apologies to the child’s soul and family.

  Something in his mind sputtered.

  Something in his core crumbled.

  And maybe somewhere in there the child’s soul tried to tell him that it was all right, it wasn’t his fault, shhh, there, there, mister, it’s okay.

  Maybe.

  Then came the incident on the bus.

  It was a Wednesday, around 8:15 p.m. Robert was returning home from a trip to the hardware store where he’d purchased (better late than never, at least now he had the nerve to face the thing) a new pane of glass to replace the broken one in the back door. He’d also bought a couple of new pipes to replace those under the bathroom sink (something Denise had bugged him about for weeks before...before). Until the two young men boarded, there was only Robert, the driver, an elderly couple near the front, and a quiet woman who looked to be around thirty-six. The ride had been pleasant, until the Disgusting Duo got on. Dressed in stylishly torn, oversized blue jeans and loose shirts to match, they wore baseballs caps with the brims turned toward the back. One was white, one was black. They took seats in the back of the bus; both talked too loudly and had a decidedly limited vocabulary. The bus driver looked too tired to confront the boys about their loudness and language, the elderly couple held hands and cast concerned looks at one another—We mustn’t do anything to provoke such people—and the quiet woman stared at her lap.

  Robert tried to drown out the young men’s voices by concentrating on the noise of the bus’s wheels and engine, then turning his attention to the conversation of the elderly couple, trying to hear the story the old woman was telling (which he did hear but wouldn’t register with him until much, much later), but it seemed the two punks in the back were determined to be heard.

  They want trouble, he thought. There can’t be any other reason for them to act this way.

  “Man, lemme tell you, when that bitch answered the door and I saw how fat she was, my dick went limper than a noodle—an’ she knew it. I mean, it wasn’t like she was an uggo or nothin’ like that, know what I’m sayin’? She mighta been pretty if she wasn’t so fuckin’ fat. But I figure, what the fuck, you know? Mebbe she don’t get a lot of dick ’cause she’s a tubby and I tole my friend that I’d go out with her so him and her roommate could have the place to themselves.”

  “Hey—more cushin’ for the pushin’,” said the other one.

  “I heard that. Man, that bitch’s pussy was sloppy—y’know, all wet and slick and shit. My cock kept slidin’ out so I decide she’s gonna suck me good, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Fat bitches give the best head, man, don’t they?”

  “Like Roto-Rooter! Kept lickin’ the jism and moanin’ like it tasted so good to her, then she gulps the whole thing in her mouth and groans and I cummed real hard and—you know what that cunt did? Spit it out! Then has the nerve to get pissed at me ’cause she got a little wad of load on her cheek.”

  “You fuck her in the ass? Shoulda fucked her in the ass. Fat chicks like gettin’ it up the poop-chute.”

  “Fuck you! I’s afraid I’d have to push my dick through some old crusty shit she didn’t get wiped. An’ then the fat twat wants me to go down on her! Huh-uh! No way—know what I’m sayin’? Smelled like Alpo between her legs. I’m a class-A Snatch-daddy, know what I mean? I got stan-dards, and I ain’t gonna be eatin’ no sloppy, stank-smellin’ pussy.”

  “Not without one of them things, them—snorkel masks!”

  Then both exploded with laughter, bowled over by their mutual wit and whimsy.

  Now shut the hell up, through Robert, noticing the way the elderly couple looked suddenly ashamed to be members of the human race. These two guys had probably ruined what had been a nice evening for them. They looked scared, but more than that they looked...sad. As if the behavior of these two jerks was proof positive tha
t they’d lived too long.

  “Bastards,” whispered Robert under his breath.

  The woman sitting across the aisle from him looked out the window, then back down at her folded hands—which were now balled into fists. She gripped the strap of her purse so tightly her knuckles were nearly white. Her shoulders slumped as if she were anticipating a blow from an invisible fist.

  “Hey, you ever tongue clit?”

  “Shit! All the time, dude. Ladies like that.”

  “There was this one time when this bitch I’s dating—biggest fuckin’ whore you ever met, but man, could she fuck! Like her ass was on ball-bearings. Anyway, there was this one time I’s goin’ down on her—you know, she had her legs wrapped real tight around my neck and she was scratchin’ my shoulders and screaming! ‘Eat that pussy, baby! Eat it good!’ Bitch was hot. Anyway....”

  Robert stared at the woman across the aisle, the thunder of blood in his temples drowning out the non-stop filth spewing from the back of the bus.

  She made a sound, just one sound, but that was all Robert needed.

  A short, hard, wet sniff.

  She was trying not to cry.

  He saw the way she sat, hunched and tense as if afraid of being struck; he noticed the way she was dressed, a nice skirt, a pretty blouse, and a fall/winter coat that was too old to be the current fashion but was in fine condition nonetheless, maybe given to her by a grandmother now long gone, so she took excellent care of it and wore it with pride because it looked nice and brought back warm, affectionate memories of the woman to whom it had once belonged; he watched the way her lower lip quivered and how her eyes stared unblinkingly at her hands, not wanting to get upset like this in public because then people would notice her and she didn’t like being noticed, didn’t like people sizing her up based on her looks because she’d always thought that you should judge a person on the quality of their character, but how could she not get upset at having to sit here and listen to this; then he saw her eyes, soft and grey, and something behind them let down the scrim for a moment and revealed her fully: Alone but not necessary lonely (though a certain permanent melancholy in her features hinted otherwise), a good person, a decent person, a person you could count on to be there for you when you needed a friend, someone who listened not only to what you said but to the unspoken needs between the words, and here she was, probably on her way home from working late at some tedious office job that she did exceptionally well even though her efforts went unappreciated, sitting here and enjoying the ride, relaxing with her thoughts until these two cretins with their dirty-joke-book vocabulary got on, and now she was trying not to cry because maybe, just maybe these creeps reinforced her fear that there was less and less decency in the world, and if that were true, then what the hell hope was there for someone like her who probably saw herself as plain and ordinary even though she was neither, never was, never would be?