Where the Dead Sit Talking

by Brandon Hobson

  “Seriously, I’ll be happy to help you,” she said. “Just come by anytime, okay?”

  I turned away and walked out. I went into the bathroom and put on eyeliner. Two other guys were in there. One was looking at himself in the mirror, combing his hair. The other guy was leaning against the wall. I could tell he was staring at me.

  “Shit, man, what happened to you?”

  I ignored him, kept putting on my eyeliner.

  “You get your ass kicked?”

  The guy combing his hair turned and looked at me. “Whoa, man.”

  “Eyeliner?” the first guy said. “Do you suck dick?”

  I looked at him in the mirror. They both sort of laughed. I stared him down. I didn’t care that he was bigger than me. I was ready to fight them if I had to, but they walked out.

  I hawked up something from my throat and spat on the mirror. I took my finger and smeared it around. I thought again about ditching, but went ahead to my first class, science. When I walked in, some of the students already in the room stared at me. I saw a couple of girls whispering. I walked past them and sat in the back. The teacher was a wrestling coach. He was a dumpy-looking man, balding, wearing wrinkled brown slacks. “Your brain is like a muscle,” he told the class. “The more you put into it, the more it expands.”

  I went from class to class. Every school I’d been to was the same: people standing in hallways, huddling in groups. I watched everyone drift past, talking in pairs, in deep conversation. Someone ran down the hallway, laughing like a lunatic. Someone else threw a doughnut at the lockers. Nobody paid attention. In my classes I slouched in desks, stared at teachers.

  I lost my schedule and had to go back to the office to have it reprinted. While I waited I overheard two teachers talking:

  “Listen to all the noise here, the yelling, lockers slamming, loud bells, odd echoes in the halls. The kids are feckless. I need a quiet place, somewhere absent of noise and people. I need a quiet room, a work space without sound. I need to sit in quiet and not think about anything.”

  The second teacher said, “Did you say feckless?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good solid word.”

  “Thanks. Are you up for a game of Scrabble? We have twenty minutes left.”

  At lunch I sat as far away from people as I could. A few other students were at the table with me. I recognized a short kid with green hair from one of my classes. “Welcome to hell,” he said. “Does your first day suck?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “It gets worse,” he said. His expression never changed.

  The kid next to him was poking his milk carton with a straw.

  “Do you smoke?” he asked me.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Bring your smokes to school,” he said.

  They watched me eat. They stared at me the whole time, consumed by my scars, unsure whether I was dangerous or nice. I kept my head down and ate.

  “I was totally a fucked-up kid,” a girl sitting near us said. She leaned in and cupped her chin in her hands. “You want to know what happened? I drank drain cleaner a few years ago. It’s old news, you know, that was a long time ago. I lost my voice for six months. I’m better now.”

  Her hands were pale and dry, her nails unpainted and cut short. She talked without hesitation, and I didn’t know how to respond. Some boys down the table were laughing, and the noise of the cafeteria made it hard for me to think.

  “I was in the hospital for a while after that,” she went on. “I couldn’t eat anything hard. Lots of soup, ice cream, Jell-O. I didn’t mind it at all. All these nurses would come in and immediately they’d feel sorry for me. That’s what happens when they find out what you did. They end up doing all sorts of shit for you. What about you? Ever been in the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “I used to be happy,” the boy with green hair said.

  “Nobody’s happy around here,” the girl told him. “Everyone would rather be dead.”

  After lunch I saw two boys fighting by the stairs. A teacher ran down the hall to break it up. Two girls were laughing at me as they walked by.

  I overheard some guy say, “Dude, did you see that kid’s face?”

  I overhead another guy say, “Looks like he was burned.”

  Another guy said, “Faggot,” as he walked past me. I turned and pushed him hard from behind and he fell against a locker. I hit him in the back with my bare hand. He dropped his books and went into a fetal crouch. I wanted to grab him by the hair and pound his face against the locker. Suddenly a crowd of people was around us, watching me. The kid remained crouched down. I couldn’t see his face but it appeared he was trying to catch his breath. I was ready for him to come swinging at me. I moved in but the bell rang loudly and everyone rushed past us, hurrying to class. I had a sense of satisfaction. I had never felt this way in such a situation. I turned and went down the stairs to my next class.

  As I walked into the classroom, the algebra teacher, whose name was Mr. Gillis, looked at me through thick glasses and asked me my name. His eyes were large and magnified by his lenses. When I told him, he started shuffling through papers on his desk. “Did they send you here?”

  I handed him my schedule and he looked at it. “Sequoyah. Sequoyah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have a book?” he asked.

  “What book?”

  “The algebra textbook?”

  “No.”

  He stared at me, as if trying to register my response. He looked to the hall, then at my schedule again. He seemed confused. “Sequoyah,” he said. “There’s an extra textbook here somewhere. What day is this? Go ahead and have a seat.”

  “Is it a tardy,” I asked.

  “Is what a tardy?”

  “Me.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, it’s your first day. You’re a new student.”

  “So no tardy.”

  “Correct.”

  I sat in the desk by the window and watched him. He removed his glasses then put them back on. He spent a good minute trying to get everyone’s attention, then he turned on the overhead projector and walked over to turn off the lights. The room dimmed and a calmness fell over everyone. A couple of boys in the rows in front of me turned around and looked at my face.

  Mr. Gillis sat at the overhead and started writing problems that appeared on the screen. He wrote in green marker despite the fact that one of the students, a girl in black lipstick, reminded him she was color-blind. He stared into the projector. The light illuminated his face. A few students came in late, but he seemed neither aware nor interested. Three or four students in the back of the class were facedown on their desks. A boy was mouthing something to a girl, making smoking gestures.

  “Negative six,” Mr. Gillis said.

  I started feeling sleepy. A boy in the row over from me was sketching a fighter jet on a piece of notebook paper. His concentration was intense. I rested my head on my desk and drowsily watched him. He shaded in details with his pencil. He puckered his face as he drew, really into it. Mr. Gillis squeezed an inhaler into one nostril, which made a horrible sound. I looked away and stared out the window, where a bird was perched on the ledge, preening itself. In the distant sky I saw the dot of a plane drifting slowly into a cloud. The bird suddenly flew away.

  Mr. Gillis stared into the blue light of the projector.

  “Negative,” he kept saying.

  Later, during the last period of the day, I saw Mr. Gillis again in the restroom on the third floor. He was standing under the window. I went to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. I turned on the cold water and washed my hands, drying them afterward with a brown paper towel from the dispenser.

  “Hello, Sequoyah,” he said. He was looking at me as if waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say.

&
nbsp; “Don’t mind me,” he said loudly. “I’m just taking a break, trying to find a quiet place to gather myself after a long day. The teachers’ lounge is full of smoke. I’m a conversationalist but not a smoker. What can I say? I’m on meds for severe anxiety. It causes insomnia and stimulates a ringing in my left ear.”

  He took out his inhaler and sprayed it into both nostrils.

  “Nobody wants to talk anymore,” he said. “My ex-wife and I used to stay up late in the night talking about everything. Constellations, Sequoyah. Cepheus and Lyra and Aquila in the sky. She made us hot tea and then we played checkers. We played Monopoly, The Game of Life. We talked about adopting kids from Vietnam. Troubled kids. Tell me, what happened to your face?”

  I went to the urinal. On the wall in front of me someone had drawn a stick figure holding a gun.

  At the end of the school day, George and I had to ride the bus home since Rosemary worked part-time at a thrift store after school. The bus let us out at the edge of Old Fort Road, so we had to walk for a while before we made it home. George lagged behind, out of breath.

  “What happens when it rains or snows?” I asked him.

  “Pray we don’t freeze to death.”

  Agnes was the only one home when we got there. She was sitting in the living room, crocheting an afghan. “Harold’s still at work,” she said without looking up. George tossed his backpack on the couch and headed for the kitchen. Agnes looked up at me.

  “Are you feeling okay?” she asked. “How was the first day?”

  “Everything was fine.”

  “Are you cold? Can I make you some soup?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll go upstairs a while.”

  “Oh, good idea,” she said. “Go upstairs for a while and unwind. Take time for yourself. We’ll have dinner around five-thirty.”

  I went upstairs to the bathroom and sat on the rim of the tub. I took out a cigarette from the pack of Camels I’d kept in my coat for a while. The guy who worked at the mini-mart near the shelter sold them to me.

  In the bathroom I lit a cigarette with a lighter and opened the window. I blew smoke out the window and ashed in the toilet. A moment later the door suddenly opened and my heart jumped. I saw Rosemary standing there.

  “I didn’t know you were in here,” she said. “Do you have on eyeliner?”

  “Sorry,” I said. I dropped the cigarette in the toilet and flushed it. She came in and closed the door behind her, locking it.

  “It’s cool,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything. You have one of those for me?”

  I handed her one and lit it for her, then another for myself. I’d seen my mom’s boyfriends do it a bunch of times. Women seemed to like it.

  “So you smoke too,” I said.

  “What do you think I do in my room all the time?”

  “I guess Harold and Agnes don’t know.”

  “They smoke so they never smell it. They don’t know anything. I like the eyeliner.”

  “I don’t think Agnes noticed.”

  “She’s half blind. Both of them are. That’s why they don’t watch much TV. We don’t even have cable TV. They pretend to be religious.”

  She stopped herself. We both smoked. Her hair hung down and covered part of her face. I sat on the rim of the tub and held my cigarette between two fingers. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall. The silence between us never felt awkward or out of place. The silence was there more to help. Maybe she was thinking about us, that I was someone she could trust. Smoking was our secret from then on. We both knew this and knew we could trust each other.

  “What do you mean they pretend?” I asked.

  “Harold’s a bookie,” she said. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People place bets with him almost every day. You’ll see him meet with people outside. He leaves at night sometimes. He stays downstairs in the basement and follows the bet line in the newspapers. You’ll see all the sports papers if you go down there. It’s wild. He doesn’t know I know.”

  “Does Agnes know?”

  “How could she not? That must bring in easy money, people paying you all the time.”

  “But what if they win? Doesn’t he pay them?”

  “Most people lose,” she said. “That’s why there’s a betting line, to protect the bookie. It gives him the edge. Anyway. Do you read?”

  “Yeah, I love to read.”

  “I have some books in my room. What tribe are you?”

  “Cherokee, but only half. My mom calls me Yellow Sky.”

  “Yellow Sky,” she said.

  “What tribe are you?”

  “Kiowa.”

  “I know lots of Kiowas from my old school.”

  “The spirits told me you were coming,” she said. “Come to my room later tonight. We’ll smoke and I’ll show you my books. You should wash your face.”

  I turned on the faucet in the sink and washed the eyeliner from my face. Rosemary handed me a towel. I dried my face and looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was pale and ghostly. I had darkness under my eyes.

  “Tell me how you knew I was coming,” I said.

  Rosemary took the towel and tossed it onto the floor beside the tub. “A man told me in a dream,” she said. “Pay attention to dreams, Yellow Sky.”

  After dinner that night I went downstairs to the basement where Harold was sitting at his desk, writing on a pad of paper. He looked up when I entered.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He leaned in and inspected his work. “Give me a minute,” he said. He consulted a newspaper and wrote something else down. I sat in the chair in front of him and waited for him to finish. He set his pen down and took a drink from his glass. Almost every night he drank a Bloody Mary on the rocks, and there was never a day you wouldn’t see a glass on a coffee table or on the counter that had leftover tomato juice and bits of celery in it.

  “You follow football, Sequoyah?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Baseball?”

  “No.”

  “Basketball, hockey, tennis? Anything?”

  “No.”

  “I see,” he said. “George doesn’t either. George doesn’t want to watch the Super Bowl. He doesn’t care. It’s understandable, though. People have different interests.” He had a ballpoint pen in his hand that he kept clicking with his thumb. He seemed to be thinking about something.

  There was an RCA TV on the table beside him. The basement was full of film reels and VHS tapes on a bookshelf along one wall. Cans of old paint, various tubes, and tools. There were a couple of leather chairs and an older couch against the far wall. When Harold saw me looking at the bookshelf he told me the reels and tapes were mostly football games, the Cowboys and the Steelers. Super Bowls. College bowl games. Also the home movies he’d made since the seventies.

  “Agnes and I were young,” he said. “I filmed us doing everything. I started with an old 35mm camera, then upgraded to a Zenith a few years ago. I still use it on occasion. They’re home movies.”

  “Home movies,” I said.

  “I converted most of them to video cassette and keep them down here. We don’t watch them anymore but maybe someday.”

  We heard the phone ring upstairs and Harold looked up toward the door.

  I drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair. I felt the need to talk. There was something comforting about Harold I couldn’t figure out. Maybe it was his solitude, or that he talked gently with everyone. He was unlike any man I’d known outside of a male teacher in elementary school, Mr. Lewis, whom I didn’t have as a teacher but who always spoke to me and smiled and seemed genuinely friendly.

  “School was okay,” I told him.

  “Your first day. Glad to hear that.”

  He leaned back in
his chair and looked up at the light. “Sometimes I take naps down here,” he said. “It’s relaxing. I can relax on the couch down here where it’s good and quiet. No thumping from Rosie’s music upstairs. No typewriter pecking from George working on his book. I’m the only one to take naps anymore. I tell the kids, one day they’ll love it. What about you, did you hate naps when you were little?”

  “Probably.”

  “Solitude is good,” he said. “Naps, being alone in a room. To be separate from other people and be alone with your thoughts is never a bad thing.” He seemed to wait for me to say something, but I had nothing to say.

  “For me it’s in here,” he continued. “I come here every night after dinner. Sometimes in the mornings too. I try to rid myself of all the bad stuff and not worry. It’s hard. The best thing I can tell you is to let go of your ego and be kind and giving. George is brilliant. Such a spiritual boy. Last year he read Saint Dimitri’s book, and the Upanishads, and some Vedic books. He likes science fiction, too.”

  I watched him lean forward in his chair. He scratched at his chin, looked at me. He seemed to be looking into me, as if he knew I wanted to listen to him talk about anything.

  “It’s quiet out here where we live,” he said. “We like it this way. Out here in the country you might see possums or skunks. Those kinds of critters.”

  He sat forward and looked at me. “Little Crow is a good town, Sequoyah. You might see a few strangers, though, like Willie Ray Jones. He walks around with a knapsack full of dirty magazines that he tries to give away to people. If he approaches you, run. Get the hell away from him. About once a week the sheriff or on-duty police officer has to drive him home. Poor guy is cockeyed. He wears a tattered old fedora hat and overalls and work boots even though he doesn’t work. He has mental issues and lives with his mother and aunt in a small house behind C.J.’s Seed and Feed. Stay away from him. His mother and aunt drag him along with them to play bingo at the community center every Saturday night. He apparently has to be supervised at all times. His mother, poor woman, has a terrible gambling problem. That’s the way it is. She plays bingo and backroom slots at the VFW while Willie takes off all his clothes and walks around town naked. A couple of weeks ago I saw him walking south on Main in only his boxer shorts and boots.”