Where the Dead Sit Talking

by Brandon Hobson

  I got down and, very slowly, managed to do maybe five or six push-ups, but that was all. I really tried. I stayed down there on my hands and knees since he didn’t tell me to get up.

  “Stay there,” he said. “You’ll like being on your knees once you’re in prison.”

  That’s the way it was there, a place full of guys who liked to bully kids. It was way worse than any shelter.

  George busied himself with writing at night, in our room, telling me he was becoming more and more observant of his surroundings. There were all sorts of strange people living in Little Crow, he said. There were drug addicts and deranged derelicts and farmers who raised wild animals. There were sick criminals and gamblers and religious cult members. People slept homeless in the streets while others lived in grand homes. He finished off his beef stew as he sat on his bed then set the empty bowl on the nightstand beside him.

  “I’m working hard on my novel,” he kept saying, looking over at me and waiting with new hope for some sort of reaction.

  “You want to read me some of it?” I asked.

  “Not really. I can’t read it aloud to you. I hope you understand. I wanted to tell you that my mom kept talking about my dad after he died. She started drinking.”

  “Mine too,” I said.

  He had to think about this. “Your dad died?”

  “No, he left. But my mom started drinking, too.

  He was flipping through his novel manuscript pages. “All right,” he said, “I’ll read a short section of my book. You still want to hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  He took a minute before he started to read:

  “There are many men from our town who were executed for doing horrible things. Jimmy Lowry and Elmer Pigmel headed east on Highway 66 to the little town of Agnew to rob the First National Bank on Main Street. They ate at a small café down the street from the bank beforehand. Jimmy stayed in the car while Elmer went inside and pointed the .45 at the teller. ‘No vault,’ he told her. ‘Just the drawers.’ The teller emptied the drawers and he stuffed the bills into a paper sack and then ran out as the alarm was going off. They made it fifteen miles outside of town before the police caught up with them.”

  He stopped reading and looked up to see my reaction.

  “I thought it was a science fiction novel?” I asked.

  “This is early in the novel,” he said. “It’s going to be a big book. I want to write big books. Do you want to hear more?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Paul Laffenfly,” he continued, “a sixth grade teacher at Jefferson Middle School, went berserk one afternoon when his students wouldn’t cooperate. It happened near the end of the school year, when the weather outside was warm and bright and the students were restless. Paul screamed at his students, who laughed at him. He wrestled a student to the floor of the classroom and hog-tied him with rope he kept, for whatever reason, in the bottom drawer of his desk. Also executed that year was Officer Plummet, who was charged with involuntary manslaughter and second degree murder for the death of a mentally ill homeless man who was looking in the windows of parked cars. Officer Plummet claimed the homeless man had raised his arms in a gesture of threat, which caused Plummet to fire his weapon and shoot the man in the chest three times. Officers Gaines, Stolp, and Ricks were all involved. They were held in the county jail but were later released on bond. They eventually confessed to helping Plummet with the murder by holding the mentally ill man down before Plummet shot him. They were executed the following October.”

  He looked at me again, and this time I nodded to let him know I was listening. He continued: “Last October, Archie Moon was executed for indecent exposure and performing lewd acts in public at the M.E. Griffin Nursing Home. Moon, who had been a staff member for over fifteen years, was working the night shift on a blustery winter night in January. After residents went to bed, Moon removed all his clothes and entered the rooms of Eleanor Eldenhurst, Marjorie Peele, and Ethel Wurth respectively, waking them and forcing them to watch him as he held his genitals and grunted. All three women had difficulty describing the specific details. Pastor Hughes continues to meet with them once a month for counseling and support.”

  He stopped reading there.

  “Where’s the bloodbath,” I said. “The wives should lose it and start killing everyone.”

  He sort of shrugged.

  “Weird stuff. Maybe you’ll get rich.”

  He didn’t seem pleased. I didn’t know what else to say. He wouldn’t read any more.

  “I’m going to bed,” he said. He turned off his lamp and rolled over in bed.

  “Hey,” I said. “What the hell? What’s the problem?”

  He didn’t answer.

  That night, in sleep, I dreamed a band of outlaws buried my father somewhere in Mexico, but he returned from the dead. In the dream I was sitting on a bench in the park with my old friends Coco and White Eagle when I saw him standing by a tree.

  “We’re going to Hollywood,” White Eagle said. “That man over there is taking us to Hollywood.”

  “What man? I asked. “The one by the tree?”

  “Ask Coco,” White Eagle said. “He’ll tell you all about it.”

  Coco was looking at his nails and humming.

  “What man?” I asked Coco.

  I looked at my father standing by the tree. He was polishing his trumpet, about to play. He had a long, white beard. He was dressed in an expensive suit.

  “What man?” I kept asking.

  Some kids were climbing on the monkey bars nearby. One of the boys was chasing another boy. A woman, maybe their mother, sat on a bench watching them. Next to the tree, my father started playing his trumpet.

  “I’m leaving,” I said to Coco and White Eagle.

  “Wait, don’t leave us,” they said. “Don’t go now. We’re going to Hollywood, right?”

  But I stood and walked over to my father and didn’t look back at anyone.

  When my father saw me, he stopped playing his trumpet and looked at me as if he recognized me. I saw dirt and grass and bits of twigs in his hair. I saw tiny worms on his clothes and in his ears. His hands were dry and cracked and bloody.

  In my dream I knew he had returned from the dead. They had buried my father, but he returned to me.

  “It’s a sad dream,” Rosemary later told me. “I understand you.”

  We were in her room. It was late, and Rosemary liked to keep her room dim, lit only by a small lamp. Her curtains had a floral pattern but she’d marked all over them in black marker, scribbled shapes, drawings of arrows and ears and tongues. I hadn’t noticed it before, and when I asked her about it she waved it off.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said.

  I lit a cigarette and watched her on the bed. She brought her knees to her chest, and her hair fell over part of her face.

  “I had a lover last year,” she said, “but only briefly. Harold and Agnes had no idea. She was older. She was really beautiful. She told me she was a traveler. We talked about living in Paris. She’d climbed rocks in Ontario, hiked in the Chiricahuas. I would sneak her in at night after they went to bed.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Thirty. She was from Ecuador.”

  “I thought you liked guys.”

  “I do.”

  “In a sexual way?” I said this quickly, maybe too quickly, so that it came out sounding meaner than I intended.

  “Trust me, I like boys,” she said. “Last year I met this Greek guy at a party by the lake. The next day he came to my work and picked me up on his motorcycle. He took me to his place and we fucked for two hours.”

  I wanted to hear more.

  “He undressed me,” she said. “He tied my wrists behind my back and forced me to the floor. I didn’t mind, though. I watched him sit in the corner and reveal himse
lf. I waited for him to come over to me. I yelled for him to come to me.”

  She hooked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked at me. She was trying to see my reaction. I think she was surprised I didn’t seem shocked, which made me question whether she was telling the truth.

  “We fucked for two hours,” she said.

  “You already said that.”

  “You think I’m lying.”

  “No, I believe you.”

  “You look like you don’t,” she said. “He crawled out of the room while I got dressed. He crawled to his shoes. He couldn’t walk.”

  “What happened to your lover, the woman from Ecuador?”

  “All that matters is that I like older women. I like to be touched by a woman, which is better.”

  “Like Nora,” I said.

  “Funny you bring her up. She fucking hates you.”

  In the days that followed I felt as though my hatred for Nora Drake only grew worse. My hatred for the way she talked to me. My hatred for her overall demeanor as it related to everyone else in our house. And my hatred for life when I was around her, and how I thought about death, other people dying, the death of my mother and father, Rosemary, even George. To think of Nora Drake years later in this way is to think of resurrection, a body rising from the earth, covered in dirt and bugs and sickness.

  For a while, right after my mother was locked up, Liz had me seeing a counselor every week after school. Her name was Karen and she was a soft-spoken woman in her forties, I guessed. I had been in Karen’s office so many times that I had her body language down. I knew that by nodding she was comforting me. I knew that when she leaned back to cross her legs and spread her hands over her skirt she was about to offer a suggestion, which was usually followed by her removing her glasses and putting the handle in her mouth to await my reaction. From the beginning, after recognizing these things, I could tell that she would try to make me aware of my problems. She did this by basically repeating whatever I’d just said, which I figured out early on was probably a tactic to reassure me that she was listening. I didn’t mind, though.

  Karen and I had already been through all the drama of me dealing with my mother being locked up, and also my loneliness issues, and there were times when I opened up completely and told her how I sometimes felt manipulative, like the time when I’d stolen my aunt Desi’s Godiva chocolates and ate them, then ran upstairs and smeared the chocolate from my fingers all over my cousin’s bedroom door so she’d think he did it. Desi was a firm disciplinarian and spanked him, and I curled up in my bed and listened to my Walkman to avoid hearing him cry. I didn’t really care, though. Karen listened silently to everything I had to say. Then, out of nowhere, things just stopped working. I had nothing to say and felt compelled to make conversation: our conversations were always forced and awkward, consisting of me saying things that made her lean forward and nod a great deal and give lots of praise, which seemed overly dramatic and hollow, as if she liked to make a big production out of nothing.

  One time she asked me if I ever felt like harming myself or anyone else, and I lied and said I didn’t. But the truth was that I wanted to harm lots of people, especially the other kids at school who laughed when a teacher called on me because I wasn’t paying attention. Soon enough I felt the counseling wasn’t helping. I always liked Karen, but things weren’t getting any better, and she never gave real answers, only her usual replies: “What’s most important is how you feel about it, Sequoyah. How do you feel about that?” and so forth. I looked to her for peace and came away with nothing. During our last visit, I told her I was angry and hurting, and that I wanted answers about my mother being locked up. Everything seemed unfair.

  “I understand,” she said. “But you’ll have to give it time.”

  She told me that if I were to cup my hands in water and squeeze, then the water would run through my fingers and be gone. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” I said. “But how can I not miss her?”

  After that last visit, I left with the hope that I would be able to put everything in the past—all those horrible nights I’d had and the dreadful days that would try to haunt me in the future. I walked away without ever wanting to return.

  But I hadn’t been angry at anyone in a long time until Nora started coming around. I continued to see her at the house, and she and Rosemary spent time in Rosemary’s room with the door closed. Whenever Nora saw me she gave me a look like she detested me for some reason. I’d never even had a conversation with her, yet she despised me.

  Then, on a Saturday afternoon when I was sitting with George at the kitchen table, she came up to me and asked if I would accompany her and Rosemary to a spot near the lake. Her pet rabbit had died, she said, and she needed someone to dig a small grave so she could bury him.

  “It won’t take long,” she said in a quiet, low voice. “Do you mind going with us?”

  “Where’s the rabbit?” I asked.

  “In the car. He’s in a garbage sack in the trunk.”

  “It’s a nice day outside,” Rosemary said. “Can you help us out?”

  I agreed, but only because Rosemary asked. I went out to the shed and got a small shovel, then met them at Nora’s car in the driveway. She popped the trunk and I saw the garbage sack. I set the small shovel next to it and slammed the trunk closed.

  I was sitting in the back seat, alone, when my head started hurting again. Rosemary sat in the passenger’s seat directly in front of me. Nora backed out of the driveway and drove us through Little Crow, passing the downtown stores, over the railroad tracks and past the body shop, Whirlwind Cleaners, Green Carpet Motor Lodge. As we turned onto Lakeview Road, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a row of fluttering colors, pinks and blues, reds and whites. I found doing so was calming and meditative and I hoped it would help my headache, but it didn’t. Now and then I opened my eyes to see Rosemary gazing at Nora from behind her sunglasses, and I found myself longing for Rosemary, or anyone, really, to look at me in such a way.

  Swiftly we turned off Lakeview Road and drove down a winding dirt road toward the lake. We passed the boathouse and the bait and tackle shop, then pulled into a secluded area surrounded by trees. Across the road the grass was as tall as me.

  “My head is hurting,” I said.

  Rosemary gave me two aspirin, but nobody had any kind of drink so I had to chew the pills up. They were chalky and gross, but I needed something to help.

  “Well?” I said to Nora. “Where are we doing this?”

  She popped the trunk and we all got out of the car. “You’ll need to follow us,” she said, looking at me. “Oh, and what’s the deal with the eyeliner? Is there something you want to tell us?”

  I ignored her. From the trunk I took the small shovel and black garbage sack with the dead rabbit. As I picked it up I felt the rabbit, and I imagined its body inside already turning stiff, its big ears and open eyes. “Do you want me to bury it in the sack?” I asked Nora.

  “It doesn’t matter. You can keep him in the sack if you don’t want to see him. I can’t stand to see him dead.”

  Rosemary shivered in the cold. Though it was sunny, and the sky was a deep blue, the wind blew in chilly bursts. I knew the ground would be hard to dig, even a small hole.

  I slammed the trunk and followed them down a dirt path, through the sticky grass, with interlaced branches on both sides of us. We followed the path down a hill as it led to a clearing near the lake, where they stopped walking. Nora was looking around. Rosemary dug in her purse for a cigarette and lit it in the wind. I waited for them to tell me something.

  Nora looked at Rosemary. “This is the spot,” she said. She looked at me. “It’s really sad. I hope you know. We’ll walk down to the lake while you bury him, okay? Come down when you’re finished.”

  “You’re not staying?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “It’s too sad,” she said.

  Rosemary handed her a cigarette. Nora leaned in close and Rosemary lit it for her. I wanted one, too, but she didn’t offer, and I’d forgotten to bring mine.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do this then come find you guys.”

  “Thanks, Sequoyah,” Rosemary said. Then they walked away. I watched them head down the path to the lake until they disappeared into the trees. Then I set the box down and started digging in the dirt. The ground was hard from the winter freeze, so it took a little while for me to dig deep enough for a rabbit. When I finished I set the shovel down and picked up the trash sack and opened it. I’m not sure why I wanted to look inside, whether it was some grim curiosity or whether I wanted to make sure Nora was being honest. I felt like maybe this could’ve been some sort of mean trick she was playing on me, and had dragged Rosemary into it, simply to humiliate me. But when I looked inside there it was, a brown rabbit curled on its side. Its eyes were dark and wide open. I immediately tied the sack and dropped it into the hole, then covered it with all the loose dirt. When I finished I patted it with the shovel. My heart was racing.

  I carried the shovel down the path toward the lake to find Rosemary and Nora, but as I made my way through the grass and trees, closer to the water, they were nowhere to be found. I looked off in the distance, where the path led around the lake to a park, and wondered if they might’ve walked down there.

  The view of the lake was blocked by tall weeds off to the side, and the path continued down a slight hill, winding around a large rock. I followed the path without looking back from where I came. It was like being in a dream where you’re walking down your neighborhood street on a sunny day, then turn a corner and suddenly you’re trudging through a brutal blizzard. I was afraid of looking back in case the scene had changed completely, but somehow I felt better knowing I needed to only pay attention to what was ahead of me.

  From the brackish water I smelled dead fish as I walked along the bank, and I kept thinking it was the smell of dead things—dead fish, dead rabbits, maybe another dead animal somewhere. I wondered what a dead person smelled like. I wondered if someone found Nora dead here, would she smell worse than the dead fish? Would she become as rotten as a dead animal, curled up from rigor mortis, with bugs and maggots crawling in her hair and covering her body?