Where the Dead Sit Talking

by Brandon Hobson

  “Hello,” the man said when he noticed I was looking at the dog. Though I couldn’t see his eyes, up close I noticed he had mostly gray hair. He was smiling behind sunglasses. “You can pet him if you want. He doesn’t bite.”

  I leaned down and scratched the dog behind the ears. The dog was panting.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked.

  “Sequoyah,” I said, still petting the dog.

  “I’m Jack,” he said. “This is Bo. He likes you, Sequoyah.”

  I stood back up, and Jack asked if I had a dog of my own.

  “No, we had a dog when I was little but it ran off. My mom thinks he got run over.”

  “Oh my, that’s sad,” Jack said. “What was his name? Was it a boy?”

  “Girl. Her name was Sabine. She was a Lab.”

  “I bet she was sweet, Sequoyah. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Thrift store for my ride home. I better go.”

  “All right,” he said. “See you later, Sequoyah.” He was still smiling.

  I walked past the dark windows of downtown stores, past the barber shop and travel agency, where a woman was standing out front, smoking a cigarette and looking at her nails, bored. She caught my eye as I walked past. Half a block down I made it to the thrift store, finally, where I saw Rosemary through the front window. I stood outside a moment and watched her. She was standing at the register, talking to her friend, Nora Drake. A moment later she looked up and saw me. I opened the door and a bell chimed.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m not off work just yet. There’s still like fifteen minutes if you want to wait outside. Cool?”

  Nora was looking at me like I’d interrupted something important.

  “Okay,” I said, and went back out.

  I sat on the curb and smoked a cigarette. A man carrying a briefcase walked to his car and looked at me in disdain. He kept watching me, even after he got into his car and pulled away. When Rosemary and Nora came out, they were still engaged in conversation. I stood and she told Nora she would call her later. Nora never said anything to me. She never even looked at me.

  In the car, as we pulled out of the lot, I told Rosemary about Jack, the man with the dog, and asked if she’d ever met him before.

  “There he is,” I said, pointing to him. He was still sitting in front of Edson’s Pharmacy with his dog.

  “I don’t know him,” she said. “I’ve never even seen him before.”

  One time I saw Jack at the supermarket, but he wasn’t wearing his hat, and he didn’t have his dog. I was grocery shopping with Agnes and George, pushing the cart for Agnes, when I saw him in the breakfast cereal aisle, reading the label on a box of cereal. He saw me, and I knew he recognized me, because he gave an abrupt smile, but I kept pushing the cart.

  While we were in the checkout line, George flipped through a magazine. I kept looking around to make sure Jack wasn’t following us.

  At school I kept hearing stories about Rosemary. Late in the night certain teenage boys and some of the girls from school engaged in strange sex acts and witchcraft. Rosemary’s name was brought up during these stories. I heard of similar adult sex parties, where people dressed like mannequins. Some of the women wore wigs or hair extensions, and they all wore flesh-colored bodysuits.

  Even backyard birthday parties involved a game in which children were blindfolded and had their wrists tied behind their backs. They bobbed for dead snakes from a tub of water.

  “I went to one of those parties last year,” George later told me. “One of my friends from school has parents who are supposedly in some sort of religious cult. I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but at my friend’s younger brother’s birthday party we were invited to bob for real dead snakes. I saw them.”

  “Did you do it?” I asked.

  “No, but my friend did.”

  “What kind of snakes were they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think the ones they used in church.”

  Around town, many women had long dark hair and wore ankle-length dresses, and I always wondered if they were trying to look like Rosemary. It wasn’t a radical thought. The local beauty shop downtown started giving a 40 percent discount on all hair extensions, so that when women walked out their hair hung down past their shoulders. Husbands bought long dresses and threw away their wives’ makeup. George told me that Ed Krim, the retired school superintendent, brought his wife to the beauty shop for their golden anniversary. She wanted a makeover. Mrs. Krim was seventy-three and used a walker to get around. In the “Around Town” section of the newspaper, a picture showed a beautician posing with her hands in Mrs. Krim’s hair while Mr. Krim watched in horror from the shadows.

  Even Agnes wore her hair long, though it was often up. I asked George why she did this. Was it a coincidence that all the other women in town were doing the same? Why did the entire town seem to have the same strange habits? The question made him think for a long time.

  “Little Crow is just a really weird place,” he said. “The police promote prostitution. There’s a brothel out by the lake. The police know all about it and they don’t care.”

  “The police promote prostitution?”

  “They’re so crooked,” he said. “Don’t look so surprised. It’s this town. You’ll see. You could probably get away with murder here.”

  The next day at school was the same old thing. I tried to stay awake, but my boredom left me preoccupied with hurting myself in the classroom, in front of everyone. Look, look, look, I would say. Look: I punctured my skin with my ink pen. Look: I stabbed myself with a knife. I could slice my thumb or my arm. Everyone would watch the blood ooze out and spread across the desk. I thought of the color red, and blood, and the slimy organs in my body, and the parts of my body that were covered with clothes. I thought of my body as a disfigurement, with putrid flesh, the skin underneath my shirt stretched and molded into a deformation.

  “The five civilized tribes,” Mrs. Speck was saying.

  Mrs. Speck stood in front of the class wearing a skirt and black knee-high socks. Mrs. Speck was an older, homely woman who was rumored to hide vodka in her desk and drink whenever she smoked in the teachers’ lounge on her free period. She talked about Oklahoma’s history, the Dust Bowl, winds sweeping across the plains bringing giant billows of dirt like smoke, a plague of jackrabbits invading fields and pastures. I imagined myself suddenly standing on my desk and shouting curse words. I imagined Mrs. Speck removing her blouse and unfastening her bra, freeing her sagging breasts. Mrs. Speck, a large, lonely woman in need of attention from boys. They would rush to her. They would play with her breasts while she drank vodka from a flask. The girls would run out of the classroom in horror.

  “The Creeks,” Mrs. Speck said. “The Choctaws, the Seminoles.”

  Someone could’ve held the class hostage. Someone could’ve walked into the school and started firing a gun, though such things were rare in the late 1980s. In 1989 we had no school security officers, no police patrol, no metal detectors. There were no drug dogs or locker checks or gun fears. I imagined some psychopath walking into the school and pointing a military semi-automatic assault rifle at the class, ordering us all to get on the floor. He would walk slowly around the room, all crazy-eyed and spitting as he yelled at us. I thought of the sounds of classmates crying out while the psychopath tied Mrs. Speck to her chair. And what would he do then? Because just shooting everyone wouldn’t be enough, not for him or for the media. Because he would execute Mrs. Speck and force us to watch, shooting her in the head. Because he would then turn the rifle on himself and shoot himself in the head so that the effect would be an entire bloodbath splattered around the room.

  “Periodic warfare,” Mrs. Speck said.

  At the end of the day I sat in detention while the dumpy teacher sat readi
ng his newspaper. Everyone was so quiet you could hear someone’s stomach growling in the room. This time more students were there, including an older boy who scribbled zigzag lines on his desk with a pen the entire time. He saw me watching him and leaned over and asked me in a whisper if I smoked pot.

  “Sometimes,” I whispered back. “You got some?”

  “I know where some is,” he whispered.

  “No talking,” the teacher said from behind his newspaper.

  After detention ended, the boy told me his name was Jamie. He asked if I knew Horace Prairiewolf.

  “No,” I said. “Who’s Horace Prairiewolf?”

  “He’s got some weed,” Jamie said. “He lives in that house on the corner.”

  Five minutes later we were standing on Horace’s porch while Jamie beat on the door with his fist. When Horace opened the door I saw a large man, maybe in his thirties, standing nearly seven feet, with long dark hair that partly covered his face. He looked vicious. He was shirtless and dark-skinned and wearing blue jeans. I wondered if he’d been asleep. Horace looked me over. “This your cousin?” he asked Jamie.

  “No, just a kid from school.”

  “I’m Horace,” he said. He studied me for a minute then invited us in. His house was small and dark and warm. A ceiling fan hummed in the living room. We followed Horace into the small kitchen, where he pulled on a T-shirt and said he had porcupine meat in his freezer. “Also deer and bobcat meat,” he said. “You guys hungry?”

  “I’m not,” Jamie said. “We were just wanting to see if you had any weed.”

  “Porcupine liver is good,” he said. “I can clean it if you ever bring it to me.”

  Jamie looked at me, then back at Horace.

  “Venison roast is good, too,” Horace said. He told us deer meat is healthy to eat, low in fat and high in protein, with natural salts. He said he’d killed a deer with his bare hands. He said he shot a hawk and ripped out its guts.

  “I do it to keep living,” he said. “People who are dying are desperate, my friends.”

  “You’re dying?” Jamie said.

  “I need medicine.”

  We sat in his living room watching him roll a joint. He lit it and handed it to Jamie, who took a long drag. Jamie handed me the joint and I took a drag, holding the smoke in my lungs. I’d smoked before and knew I could get high easily.

  “Pretty good weed,” Jamie said.

  “I didn’t put much in when I rolled it,” Horace said. “Take another hit.”

  I took one more drag, then handed it back to Horace.

  We watched TV for a while. An old western movie showed a cowboy in a saloon. The cowboy knocked back a shot of whiskey and kicked over a spittoon. Another cowboy came up to him from behind and beat him over the head with a chair, shattering it. Then the two cowboys started fistfighting.

  “Muskrat and bobcat is good,” Horace said. “You like meat, you’ll like it. Deer meat is good. Brown the loin in a skillet. Braise the shoulder and neck. Put it in a pot and make a good stew.”

  “My grandma makes stew,” Jamie said.

  “Meat is undercooked, you get sick,” Horace said. “The muskrat had roundworms. Shit, it made Otto sick as a dog.”

  I yawned and realized the sun was going down outside. I’d stayed too long. Agnes would be waiting for me.

  “My ride,” I said, “Shit, I forgot about it.”

  “I’m staying,” Jamie said.

  “Be good, brother,” Horace called out.

  I left and ran down the street back to the school, where I saw Agnes’s car and a police car waiting. My heart was racing. I thought I’d blown everything and that the police would take me back to Liz and I’d have to go back to a shelter somewhere. I felt sick to my stomach at the thought of it. Throughout my life, I’ve always had a sense of distorted reality whenever panic sets in—time seems to suspend and colors and shapes become more vivid. As I approached Agnes, who had gotten out of the car and was talking to the police officer beside her, I felt as though everything around me had intensified in color and sound: the rustle of trees lining the street, the blinding blue of the sky, the leaves tumbling across the school lawn. They both saw me coming and were talking, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. When I reached them the first thing I did was apologize.

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize it was this late,” I said.

  “I waited for thirty minutes,” Agnes said. “Where were you?”

  “I walked to a friend’s house and lost track of time.”

  “I waited thirty minutes,” she said again. “I went inside the school and they told me you’d left. So I had to call Liz and she told me to call the police.”

  My throat felt swollen. Agnes apologized to the police officer, who told her it wasn’t a big deal. “The important thing is that he’s okay,” he said, then turned to me. “Your social worker is worried,” he said.

  Agnes said we would call her the minute we got home. Suddenly I felt relieved. I was worried they could smell the pot on me, but the wind must’ve helped cover the smell. I didn’t want to go back to a shelter and start taking drug tests.

  “It’s always important to be aware of the time,” the officer told me, whatever that meant.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Agnes apologized and the officer got into his patrol car and pulled away.

  “You’ll need to call Liz when we get home,” Agnes said as we got into the car.

  I apologized again and she fell silent. We drove through downtown. I saw the man in the hat sitting in front of the pharmacy with his dog. As we drove by he saw me and waved. I didn’t wave back. We drove east out of town in silence, past the refinery and older vacant buildings, heading for the countryside.

  “I’m just thinking,” Agnes finally said, “you need to be careful about friends.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I think maybe you’re easily manipulated,” she said.

  Agnes was right—I was always easily influenced. A couple of years before going to live at the Troutts, I’d spent a weekend in juvenile detention. My friend Coco and I got caught with weed when we were walking through the park. He’d talked me into going with him to get a baggie and some rolling papers from a friend of his older brother. Coco had a part-time job so he always had money. For a while he bought our cigarettes from the cigarette vending machine at the bowling alley. In the park, on a Friday night, the police caught us, handcuffed us and drove us to the detention center. Coco and I were both lucky to get released the following Monday with juvenile probation and fifty hours community service, which I did that summer at the public library.

  As I recall, the detention center was very different from any shelter. The staff graded you with points based on your behavior, and if you really screwed up they immediately dropped you to level four. The higher the level meant the more privileges you got, like getting to stay up later and getting an extra snack and getting to play ping-pong. Level fours didn’t get a snack and went to bed at eight.

  Everybody there looked basically the same since we were all wearing green jumpsuits. Most of the residents were boys. My first night there I got in trouble for sitting down before being told to, and as punishment I had to sit in a chair facing the wall for ten minutes. It was very military-like, really strict. You couldn’t look around or talk or even move your hands without the staff thinking you were giving gang signs. And ten minutes lasts an eternity when you’re facing a wall.

  Luckily, I’d managed not to get in any more trouble for the rest of the weekend. At one point we were instructed to line up at the door to go outside for our daily group exercises. Three guards accompanied us outside. Two stood at the corners of the fence, and the third walked around, making sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to. We did exercises—jumping jacks, sit-ups, leg lifts, butterfly kicks. The outside court was sur
rounded by a tall fence, probably twelve or thirteen feet high. I wondered if anyone had ever tried to make a run for it. There wasn’t barbed wire on the fence, but the guards were positioned and appeared ready for anything. I couldn’t imagine anyone trying to escape out there.

  We did about thirty minutes of exercises, then got to rest while the staff set up the volleyball net. Outside was the only time you could whisper to someone without the staff catching you. The kid who was beside me tried talking to me. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t even look at him. While watching the guards set up the net, he whispered, “Hey, what happened?”

  “Shut up,” I said, shielding my face with my hand.

  “I hate this fucking place,” he whispered.

  I paused for a moment, since one of the guards was looking in our direction. He looked away. After the guards positioned the volleyball poles, they divided us into teams and we played volleyball until it was time to go in. The boy didn’t try whispering to me anymore. I didn’t want to get into trouble, I just wanted to go back to my room and wait for court on Monday. We lined up against the wall again, and one of the guards led everyone inside while the other two followed behind us. It did cross my mind to turn and make a run for it. If I didn’t think I had a chance of going home at court, I really might’ve tried it.

  Later that day, in the bathroom, I ran cold water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror. A moment later I heard a knock on the door. It was one of the male guards telling me to hurry up.

  “Give me a minute,” I said, and touched my face against the mirror, but he kept knocking. Finally I opened the door, and he was standing there with his arms crossed, yelling at me that I’d taken too long. I told him I didn’t realize I’d taken that long.

  “Don’t backtalk me,” he said. “How would I know you weren’t trying to hurt yourself? Get over here and give me twenty push-ups.”