Where the Dead Sit Talking

by Brandon Hobson

  I kept feeling guilty about not accepting her apology. I wasn’t sure why it kept bothering me so much. After everyone was asleep I went and knocked lightly on her door. When she opened it I held up two cigarettes.

  We sat on the floor by her window, smoking. Outside, I could see the blue parts of the night sky and dirty clouds above what I imagined was Snake River in the distance.

  “You’re really sensitive, I can tell,” she said.

  “It isn’t a big deal.”

  “But it’s not a bad thing.” She tried to explain that it was all a matter of dreams. My dreams reflected the things I worried about, all my fears and anxieties, while at the same time they could provide hope.

  “You’re really spiritual,” she said. “I told you, I can sense that about you. It’s not a bad thing.”

  She allowed me to approach her without fear. She let me place my hands in hers. I’d discovered a frightening, dark world in her room that was unlike any other place I’d been. She tried to explain that everything I was afraid of was a matter of dreams. I told her about my dreams of my mother and father. I told her I was willing to do anything for her, and that I trusted her like a sister even though I’d never had a sister.

  Outside, the stray dog started howling. It was a hound of some sort, she told me. A stray from somewhere, probably a farm. The dog barked and howled all the time at night.

  “That fucking dog,” she said.

  On the table beside her bed I saw a photo of her sitting on the grass with another girl, maybe a park somewhere. They were both wearing shorts and looked happy. When I asked her about it she changed the subject.

  “So what has Harold told you?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Have you talked to him much?”

  “No, not really.”

  “And do you know any secrets?”

  “About you?”

  “Would you even tell me?”

  “I’d tell you if I knew anything,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to get out of me, so I rested my head in her lap. We both fell silent, and I could feel her hand on the back of my head. We were like this for a while, in the dim, quiet room.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” she told me, but I knew it wouldn’t be.

  We could hear the stray dog howling outside.

  I sometimes thought of Rosemary emerging from the grave as if in some horror film, twitching and laughing, approaching me so that we could search each other’s faces and bodies.

  “I was thinking we could be twins,” I told her one night.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We look alike, don’t you think? I mean if I grew my hair longer. I mean our eyes are similar when we smile.”

  “I don’t know what that means, Sequoyah.”

  “Maybe I could look more like you if I tried harder.”

  She had to think about this.

  “All I’m saying is we look alike,” I said.

  Despite her reluctance to admit how alike we were, one afternoon when no one was home she invited me into the bath with her. She had the tub full of bubbles. I pulled off my shirt and got into the tub, still wearing my jeans. The air felt heavy in the warm water. I felt slightly drunk from the moment.

  “Weirdo,” she said, splashing me.

  “Don’t get water in my eyes,” I said.

  “Take a bath like a man,” she said.

  We spoke slowly, awkwardly. My words felt drunk as I spoke them. They hung there in the room like steam in the heavy air. The water trembled around me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was staring at me.

  “We’re in the tub,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m starting to freeze.”

  She pulled the drain, then got out and put a towel around her. I stood from the tub, watching her as she left the room.

  Later she wrote tiny words in French and Spanish in ink on my arms. I didn’t want to wash them off. I wanted them drilled into my arm, like a tattoo.

  “You should be a tattoo artist,” I told her.

  “But they aren’t my words.”

  “Drill your art into my body. Your naked people. Your deranged shapes and figures.”

  “Tribal art for you.”

  “I want to give you my body when I die,” I said.

  I sat on her bed and let her smear lipstick on my mouth. She pulled off my shirt and poked around on my chest. She touched my face where my burns are. She let me wear one of her nightgowns. I had on boots and stomped around the room. We smoked cigarettes and listened to Lou Reed.

  “Maybe we are alike,” she said.

  At school the next day, a boy named Simeon Luxe told me he wrote a play about Rosemary called The Lightning Crash, because he was secretly in love with her. He said he spent weeks writing it, thinking about her, dreaming they would one day be together.

  “Are you jealous?” he asked me.

  “Jealous of what?”

  “That I’m in love with her.”

  “No.”

  “Good,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you liked her or what.”

  He told me his play was about a boy struck by lightning who develops a special superhuman body glow in the night that sparks the attention and interest of a certain girl named Mary Rose. Simeon Luxe wore turtleneck sweaters and colorful threaded bracelets on both wrists. He listened to bands like X and The Damned on his Walkman and told me he could play a guitar solo, note for note, with his teeth.

  “I’ve never actually talked to her,” he said, “but I’d give anything to go out with her. Tell her I play the guitar. Or tell her I play drums in a band. Tell her I can play guitar like Keith Richards. I practice in front of the mirror, moving like him. Tell her Slash. Tell her Hendrix.”

  “I’m not sure,” I told him.

  “Don’t be a goddamn queer,” he said. “You got it?”

  “Whatever,” I said, walking away. I was angry he’d told me all of this, so I never said anything to Rosemary about Simeon Luxe, dumb Simeon Luxe, who later died on October 13, 1999 of mysterious causes.

  I have had some time to reflect on those late night confessions when Rosemary was most vulnerable to self-pity, and I was able to witness the honesty in those confessions—one in particular in which she was comfortable enough with me resting my head in her lap. Out of the blue she admitted that, before coming to live with the Troutts, she had attempted suicide, twice.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said. “How did you do it? You tried to kill yourself. You wanted to be dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you do it?”

  She took a cigarette from the pack and lit it, then looked to the window, where a luminous half-moon appeared in the dark sky. I felt a chill in the air—not from the room temperature, but from my own nerves. As I think back on it, I’m sure she could see the look of anticipation in my eyes.

  “The first time I took a bunch of pills,” she said. “They found me on the floor and rushed me to the hospital. I was sick for a while and on suicide watch at the shelter.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “Benzos. I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up.”

  “What about the second time?”

  “Um, that’s a different story,” she said. She showed me the scars on her arm and wrist where she had slashed herself with a knife.

  “I don’t want to tell you about it,” she said.

  She lowered the blinds, but a beam of moonlight still slanted through.

  “My dad was really good at disappearing,” she told me. “He would be in one place and then instantly in another. As I read in bed at night he’d come in to tell me to turn the lamp off, and when I’d look up he would be gone. He helped coach my second grade soccer league one year. I quit after the
first game when he didn’t show up. Something came up, that was his excuse. My mom told me not to worry about it, but I knew he was secretly relieved that I’d quit. There really weren’t many things he liked to do except go hunting. Sometimes I watched him clean his shotgun or feed the baby quail he kept in a big pen in the backyard. He would let me hold the birds. They were tiny and fragile, their heads jerking, too little to fly. I considered them pets and told my class all about them, how they hopped around in their pen and gathered like mice, and that someday I would train them to fly around in my bedroom and bring me my dresses just like in Cinderella. But it wasn’t like that at all. My dad raised them. He wanted to set them free to hunt.”

  “It bothered you?”

  “I asked him why he had to kill them, and he said for the sport. He drank coffee from a thermos on cold winter mornings before he went hunting at dawn. I would wake up and look out my window to see him carrying his shotgun to his pickup. He wore his camouflage hunting clothes and a hat. I tried to think about him out in the fields with his friends, trudging through brush or creeks in pursuit of deer or quail, how the sudden blast of the shotgun must’ve sent so many birds scattering from trees. I once saw a dead deer with its belly sliced open. My dad’s friend showed it to us in the barn behind his house. The deer’s hooves were tied as it hung upside down, its belly cut open and dripping with blood. It was one of the saddest fucking things I’ve ever seen.”

  When I got into bed later, I looked over and saw George asleep, snoring with his mouth open. I hadn’t heard him snore before, and it took a while for me to fall asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night I woke to his hand on my brow. It frightened me at first. I told him to go back to bed. He insisted on brushing my hair with his hand despite my telling him to stop. I pushed his hand away and told him, again, to go to bed. He never spoke, but eventually he stopped when I sat up and squeezed his hand.

  “Go to bed,” I said.

  The next day he claimed he didn’t remember, blaming it on sleepwalking. “I’ve walked downstairs all the way to the back porch,” he told me. “I’ve walked into the kitchen and turned on the oven. I’ve walked into the bathroom and pulled on the shower curtain. But it only happens about twice a year.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  Agnes confirmed, saying it’s never been a problem. “I’ve only seen it happen once. He was trying to get into Rosemary’s room, but the door was locked. That was last year sometime. I just led him back to bed and it was fine.”

  When Agnes left the room, I followed George outside to the shed. The sun was still out, but it had gotten colder. I helped George open the shed door, which required a lot of force as it tended to stick. I’d never been in this shed before, had never had a reason to go inside. George pulled the chain for the light, and I thought it looked like any other shed: full of tools, a garden hose, those sorts of things. The light bulb swung over our heads.

  “I need to show you this,” George said, walking to the corner. There was plywood and two-by-fours stacked against the wall. The shed was a dark, lively place full of a sawdust smell.

  The floor of the shed was made of bricks. George knelt down and removed two of the bricks and pulled out a brown paper sack. He opened it, looked inside, then motioned for me to come over and look.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Come see.”

  I was expecting a dead animal or something. A rat, a rabbit’s foot, something grotesque and strange, maybe some artifact George was hiding from everyone else.

  When I looked inside the sack, though, I saw money. One hundred dollar bills wrapped in rubber bands. The sack was full of them. I’d never seen so much money in my life.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “How much money is here? Is this yours?”

  “It’s Harold’s,” he said.

  I reached inside and pulled out a couple of stacks. We emptied the sack and counted ten stacks.

  “They’re all one hundreds,” he said. “In stacks of ten. So that’s ten thousand.”

  “Shit,” I said again.

  “Last time I checked there was six thousand. I think it changes every week.”

  I’d heard of people burying large amounts of cash back then. I never knew if it was true, but I did know that people back home didn’t trust anyone with their money. They especially didn’t trust the banks or the IRS. There was also the matter of avoiding taxes when large amounts of cash were at stake. I’d heard of tribal members doing it on their land. The way I saw it, there was a million dollars probably buried around the state.

  “How did you find this?” I asked. “Did he tell you about it?”

  “I was in here counting bricks one day. I noticed these were loose, so I pulled one out and noticed the sack.”

  I put the stacks in my lap. I wanted to hold it, all that money, like it was mine.

  “We can’t take it,” George said. “He’ll know we took it. But I wanted to show it to you.”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you show it to me?”

  “You’re my friend,” he said. “I figured you’d want to see it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The thought of stealing only one of the hundred dollar bills crossed my mind, but I knew I didn’t want to take it. I put it back into the sack, and George stuffed it back into the floor, covering it with the bricks.

  Outside, the wind was cold. I waited for George to lock up the shed. The sky was full of dark clouds. A flock of geese flew over our heads, making noise.

  My best daydreams happened in school, when I thought about my mother and me before we left Cherokee County. There was one time in particular, when we were at a pond on the outskirts of town, just the two of us. We caught a couple of perch and threw them back into the water. The pond was small and we walked around it, casting our reels. My grandpa had taught me how to fish when I was very young, as he had taught my mother and her brothers when they were kids. He’d died young, in his forties, from a heart attack. As my mother and I fished, she told me about how her father had died mowing his lawn. My grandmother found him lying in the grass, the lawnmower still running. He was dead, staring into the ground. My grandmother knelt among a ragged confinement of leaves and grass shavings and touched his cheek. He was a good, hardworking man, my mother told me.

  This was probably the only time we ever talked about death.

  At school I had trouble concentrating and struggled to keep my eyes open. I thought about my mother sitting tense in prison, sleeping on a concrete bed, curled up under a small gray blanket. Or sitting on the floor of her cell, stricken with guilt, crying as she thought of me. I thought of the days she took me to the library when I was very young. I thought of sitting on her lap while she read to me until I fell asleep to her voice. I fell asleep in Oklahoma History class and woke to the clanging bell, my head on my desk. People were rushing out of the room.

  In the third floor bathroom I saw Mr. Gillis standing by the far wall.

  “Hello, Sequoyah,” he said.

  I went to the urinal and relieved myself. Mr. Gillis was making clicking noises with his tongue. When I finished I went to the sink and turned on the water. I leaned in close to the mirror and examined the redness on my cheek from where my head had been resting on the desk while I slept in class. We heard the siren of a police car from somewhere outside. We both looked out the window for a moment.

  “Do you happen to know a student named Marissa Flores, by chance?” he asked. “She’s a sophomore on the pep squad.”

  “Sorry, I don’t think so.”

  “Medium-length brown hair?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Forget it. I’m just taking a break here. I tend to get lonely during the day, thinking about my life. I miss my house. I miss the living room, with the Oriental rug I bought in Santa
Cruz. I miss the mauve curtains. I miss the bedroom, with its updated light fixtures and wallpaper. I miss the dining room, the cherrywood and oak table. I miss the bathroom, with the tub, where my ex-wife smoked Virginia Slims while I sat on the floor beside her.”

  “I should head back to class,” I said without looking at him.

  “Who knows where she is,” he mumbled. He slouched into the wall.

  In the last class of the day, I stared bored out the window. It was cloudless and dead outside. I saw the desolate street leading into the old downtown of Little Crow. I saw branches of trees, cars parked along the curb. I saw a delivery truck stop in the middle of the street, its taillights flashing. The light from the window moved at various angles, which made me sleepy. I thought of an old neighbor, Paolo Valensi, a local artist, who lived next door to my mother and me when we were in Cherokee County. Paolo found himself in such a deep depression that he could no longer paint. “Nothing comes alive on canvas,” Paolo told my mother. Paolo struggled with his own personal demons, having developed a reputation for being moody, drunk, and a little crazy. He had never married, and his loneliness caused an emptiness and decline in his work. Most nights he spent in the town pub, getting drunk. I wondered what happened to Paolo.

  I was given detention for sleeping so much in class. I had to call Agnes and lie that I was staying late for extra help in math. Agnes told me to walk downtown to the thrift store where Rosemary was working and she would bring me home. In detention I sat in a classroom with three other boys, all of us with our heads down. The teacher at the desk was a coach of some sort, wearing a warm-up suit and sneakers. He was reading the paper. A girl came in late and sat by the window. She pulled out a notebook and started doing homework. The teacher kept reading the newspaper. He never said anything until it was time to go.

  When detention ended I slung my backpack over my shoulder and walked a few blocks toward downtown. It wasn’t too cold out, though there was a chill in the air and the sky looked like a frozen lake. Outside Edson’s Pharmacy, an older man wearing a hat and sunglasses was sitting in a chair with a small dog at his feet. The dog was a black-and-white bulldog with a pug nose.