“I’ve never seen so much money.”
“Sometimes people who live in the country bury money,” she said. “They bury money for themselves. It’s Harold’s money, you know, since he’s a bookie.”
“We didn’t take anything.”
After only a few drags, I ground out my cigarette in the ashtray. It was the first cigarette I’d had in several days and it was making me light-headed. Rosemary set the ashtray on the window ledge and opened the window a little more. We heard the dog howling from outside again.
“I hate that fucking dog,” she said. “He’s sick. All he does is bark every goddamn night.”
I stood and tried to look out, but there was only darkness. “I bet he’s hungry. That’s why he’s howling. It sounds like he’s crying.”
“Dogs bark for no reason. They bark for attention. They bark because they hear shit twenty miles away.”
“Maybe he’s hungry,” I said.
“I want you to do something for me,” she said. “Get rid of that dog for me, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Shoot him,” she said. “Kill him, whatever. Or just scare him away. Would you do that for me?”
I looked out the window.
She got up and opened her closet door and told me to come have a look. Inside the closet I saw a rifle.
“Is it a BB gun?” I asked.
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a .22, which is a little bit heavier. I’ve had it for a couple of years. I took it from a friend. It’s light, only like three pounds.”
I went to the bed and sat down.
Her mouth curved at the corners. She studied me. “It’s an animal, not a person. Would you do it for me?”
“I’ll do it if you want,” I said.
She handed me the rifle. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked. Then we went downstairs quietly so we wouldn’t wake anyone. We slipped out the back door and went out into the night. It was freezing and I could see my breath in front of me as we walked. We walked through the yard, past the shed. A little farther I could see it: a large dog, digging in the dirt. As we approached, it looked up at us.
“That dog has rabies,” Rosemary said, motioning for me to stay back. “Look at him, Sequoyah.”
I moved closer and quickly kicked the dog. It cowered and moved away, but then it turned and looked at us.
“He’s not foaming at the mouth,” I said.
“I saw him foaming,” she said. “I saw it!”
The dog started digging into the dirt again.
“Shoot him!” Rosemary shouted. “Shoot him before he ruins everything. Before he gets aggressive!”
I moved closer and kicked the dog again, this time so hard the dog let out a whimper and started to run away. Then I aimed and fired. The gun went off and my eyes must’ve been closed, because I don’t know where I shot. The dog ran off into the woods.
“You fucking missed,” she said.
“He ran off,” I said.
“You missed. It doesn’t matter. Next time I’ll shoot him myself.”
This is how it was. She could’ve talked me into doing anything. She had talked me into killing a stray dog.
Later that night I lay wide awake in bed, thinking about the dog. And how ruthless she seemed about it, how much she hated it. I started hating it, too. I remember lying in bed thinking about it over and over, imagining myself holding that rifle, blasting some terrified animal into another life.
Rosemary later asked me: “Do you ever think about dying?”
“I think about other people dying,” I said.
“If you could choose how you had to die, what way would you choose? I would die in a fire. Or drowning. Or suffocation or being choked to death.”
“Choking sounds good,” I said.
“I’ll just say there’s something weird and wonderful about dying,” she said. “There’s something that moves me, deep inside. It’s too hard to explain or to understand without actually experiencing it, unless we’re there. I think of it as a circle we step inside. We feel something we can’t feel right now, alive. Maybe inside the circle is a warmth that stimulates you and makes you feel weightless, floating on air without any effort, and there’s a light of brightness inside you like no other light out there you’ve ever seen or felt. Does that make sense? The light is unidentifiable unless you experience it. A secret among secrets, a thing of movement. It’s transcendence.”
I stared at her bottom lip, which was red with lipstick. It was dark, the color of dried blood. I wanted to have her mouth for my own. I liked her voice, especially when she talked quietly like this.
“I would die quick in my sleep,” I told her.
“That’s painless,” she said.
No matter what, I could not bring myself to think of Rosemary any less. Little by little, the days were like thieves, stealing parts of me, including any courage I had to confront my feelings toward people: my growing interest in Rosemary, my hatred for Nora Drake, my friendship with George. At night I began to think more and more about my mother, as her court hearing grew closer. I worried about her release. I worried about her remaining locked up. And I worried the days were taking my feelings, how the more I thought about everyone, the more dead I felt inside.
Slowly, my body began to feel better physically. Around this time George and I started playing a game in which one of us was an intruder the other had to kill by pointing a water gun and shooting. It was a form of hide-and-seek but with a simulation of death attached. I don’t remember whose idea it was to start playing, or why we started playing, only that we played for about a week or two. We took the game seriously, exaggerating death. We hid behind doors, crouched in dark hallways. The water guns shot a thin stream that reached almost across a room. You only needed one shot. George killed me upstairs in the tub, where I slumped to my death. He killed me by the stairs. He killed me outside by the elm. My deaths were dramatic, spent clutching my stomach and falling to my knees before collapsing. I shot him in the head one morning when he woke. I shot him in our closet. I found him under my bed and shot him there. I crept up behind him in the kitchen and shot him in the back. George’s deaths were slow-motion, way more exaggerated than my own. He sidestepped after being shot, clutched his head or gut, held onto cabinets or tables to brace his fall, slowly, slowly dying until he reached out, always, before letting out one last breath.
To die, when the game ended at least for the time being, meant I needed to play harder, to take it more seriously, to be better.
To kill meant victory, a sense of accomplishment since it was never easy to find the intruder. To seek out, to find. To hunt and be hunted. It was a game of survival. A game of strategy and defense. The last time we played it, I pulled back the shower curtain and found George crouched down and begging for his life. I lifted him by the collar and pointed the water gun to his head. He closed his eyes and pleaded for me to let him live.
“Intruder!” I yelled, and shot him dead.
After that, George quit playing. His reason was he was bored with dying, he said. Dying and killing each other had exhausted itself, unfortunately, though I was sad to stop playing.
I wanted to hunt and be hunted. Growing up without a sibling, and even at the shelter or in foster homes, I had never played anything like it before. At school, some of the guys in my grade played Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy role-playing game, and soon everyone was talking about their characters at school as if they were real people. We wanted to exist in other worlds. We wanted to lose our own sense of reality, to be other people with other lives. Lives unlike anyone else’s.
“It’s fun to hunt the intruder,” I told George.
“I’m tired of hiding, Sequoyah. You always find me. The house doesn’t have any new hiding places. We’ve used them all.”
/> He was right. We used the same hiding places all over the house, which made the hunt less challenging. Still, I found myself longing for the thrill of sneaking up on him and catching him when he wasn’t expecting it. I liked moving quietly throughout the house, seeking him out. We had started hiding outside, but even that grew boring at some point.
One afternoon Harold came into the bedroom and asked whether we had seen Rosemary. I hadn’t seen her but assumed she was at work. George confirmed her work schedule.
“That’s funny,” Harold said. “I thought she said she was off today. What do you make of that?”
George and I were both quiet. It was rare to see Harold upstairs unless he was in his bedroom with the door closed, and it was even rarer to see him standing in the doorway of our bedroom. From the angle where I was sitting on my bed, he somehow looked taller.
Harold asked us, “Have you guys been outside today by chance? In the shed?”
We told him we hadn’t, at which point George asked why he was asking.
“No reason,” he said. He was looking at the floor, thinking. “I was looking for something but it’ll turn up.”
He turned and left. George went back to writing in his notebook without saying anything about it, so I spoke.
“What do you think that meant?” I asked. “What was he talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think he knows we found his money?”
“Money?” George said, and tapped his pen against his chin. “Oh, I don’t think so. I bet he’s just looking for something. He misplaces things all the time. He’s so secretive, he probably hides his own shoes.”
A little while later Harold was back in our doorway again, this time asking us for help. “I need to go up to the attic,” he said. “You guys mind helping me out?”
We agreed and followed him into the hallway, where he reached up and pulled the cord that lowered the stairs leading to the attic. We climbed the stairs and Harold turned on the light. We found ourselves in a dusty attic filled with boxes. It smelled of cedar and mothballs.
The room was full of boxes of useless items: batteries, steel-wool buffer pads, poker magazines, paperback books, and comic books. There were kerosene lamps and cloth-covered picture albums. There were flashlights and paintbrushes and spiral notebooks and old greeting cards. There were boxes of toys: wind-up plastic boats, racecars, a wooden Mickey Mouse doll, a stuffed teddy bear, a miniature birdcage, a tiny plastic house with a red roof, and so on.
“There are so many things in here I don’t know what’s trash and what isn’t,” Harold said. “Once a year I come up here to bring down the Christmas decorations, all these boxes full of ornaments.” He tapped his toe on a box, and I saw Christmas ornaments sprinkled with glitter, holly berries, strands of silver tinsel, and tangled strings of blinking lights. I ran my hand along the curved back of a wicker chair while George blew the dust from an old cigar box. When he opened it there was nothing inside.
“I’m building a bookshelf for our bedroom,” Harold said. “Somewhere there are shelves in here, but I forgot where I put them. Look around.”
“Are you sure you didn’t put them in the shed?” George asked.
“I already looked there,” he said. “I think they’re in here somewhere.”
We couldn’t find them. We looked everywhere and they weren’t there. Harold seemed confused.
“I guess I just don’t get it,” he said. “They’re definitely not in here.”
We climbed back down and followed him into his bedroom. Harold reached into his dresser for a pencil and placed it behind his ear. He turned to us. “What we need to do,” he said, “is pull the bed away from the wall for a minute. The frame’s got wheels.”
The bed was huge: a king-size with a burgundy comforter and four large pillows. George and I pushed the headboard while Harold, kneeling, pulled from the other end. We slid it a few feet away from the wall. He came over and examined the wall. “The shelves will go here,” he said, “all six of them.”
“Are you putting them up today?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I need to figure out where those shelves are first. I bought them a couple of years ago. It’s a lot of work. There’s measuring. There’s sanding and polishing. I need a new hobby. I’m a sports buff. Too many games on and I need to keep my mind occupied. It’s not easy.” He produced a tape measure that was clipped to his belt loop and had George hold one end of the tape measure against the floor while he stretched it vertically, then horizontally, drawing two little marks on the wall with the pencil. “Right,” he said. “Okay, that’s good. Let’s push the bed back where it was.”
George and I pushed it back.
“Thank you, boys,” he said. “I guess that’s all we can do for now. Oh, by the way, have you guys been out to the shed lately?”
George looked at me.
“Not really,” I said. “Why?”
He looked at his watch. “Never mind. Something’s missing. I need to make a phone call downstairs.”
We followed him out of the room and he went downstairs. George and I stood in the hallway, watching him. When he got to the bottom of the stairs he stopped for a moment and looked at his watch, then walked away.
“I think he knows we found his money in the shed,” George said.
“That’s what I told you,” I said.
He cocked his head, thinking. “You didn’t say anything to Rosemary, did you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive.”
“Well, I’m going to meditate,” he said.
“Meditate?” I said. “When did you start meditating?”
“Since last year. I read an article by a swami called ‘Meditation on the Self and Super Conscious.’ It talks about three different stages in meditation. Do you want to read it?”
“No.”
“Well, if you do it’s on my bookshelf. I’ll just need some quiet time alone, if you don’t mind.”
“I said I don’t want to read it,” I told him.
George bowed his head in gratitude and headed down the hall to our room. I went downstairs to the living room, where Agnes was dumping an ashtray full of cigarette butts and ashes into a wastebasket. She carried the wastebasket into the kitchen and returned with her purse over her shoulder. “I’m going to the grocery store,” she said. “I’ll be back later. Rosemary’s at work but Harold’s downstairs in his office if you need anything.”
I watched her walk out the front door. Through the front window I saw her get into her car, back out of the drive and pull away. I was standing alone in the living room. Even though Harold was downstairs and George was upstairs, I felt as though I was the only one there.
I sat looking at photo albums for an hour. Photos of Harold and Agnes, their wedding, on vacation, playing golf. Photos of people I didn’t know. Photos a decade old. People in bell-bottom pants and long hair. Photos of houses, children, pets. Photos of Rosemary and George.
One photo of Rosemary, asleep on the same couch where I was sitting, caught my attention. Something about her expression, mouth curled downward, made me think she wasn’t really asleep. With her eyes closed, she looked angry or upset about something. It was such a strange and interesting photo that whoever snapped it must’ve known she was faking. She was lying on her side, eyes closed, part of her hair covering her face. And I, too, lay on my side, taking her same position, right there on the same couch. And I, too, closed my eyes and curled my mouth downward, attempting to replicate the expression as best as I could. I wanted someone to take my picture. Maybe someone would find me, I thought, and snap a photo the way they did of Rosemary. Years later we would look at it and laugh. Years later someone would ask all sorts of questions about me, and Harold would tell them I was a good boy with a good mind. I kept my eyes closed. I
stayed in that position until my face began to hurt, then I opened my eyes to an empty room.
There was some dissent between Rosemary and Harold. I could sense it in the way she acted around him and fell quiet in his presence. And I could see the frustration in his face when he looked at her, though I didn’t hear them argue. When she spoke to him, she wouldn’t look at him. She crossed her arms, lowered her head so that her hair fell over and covered her face.
I began to study her more and more. She let me watch her sit in front of her mirror and put on makeup, put on jewelry, pick out her shoes. She let me watch her sit by the window and smoke in the moonlight, with the window cracked open and the sounds of the cold wind blowing outside. When she wasn’t aware, I watched her walk from the dinner table to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the stairs, from the front door to her car in the driveway. I watched her grip the handrail of the staircase when she started upstairs. I watched her sit cross-legged in her room when she put on headphones and closed her eyes to the music. Her posture was better than mine or anyone else’s. Her skin was tan and darkened near the elbows. I watched the way she sat on the floor, pulling her knees to her chest. I watched the way she sat cross-legged on the edge of the bed, and the way she tilted her head to listen, like she was really interested in whatever I was saying.
As much as I watched her, other times I would refuse to look at her. I refused to look at her as we sat across from each other at the dinner table. I refused to look at her in the car when she drove us to school. When she looked at me I looked away, avoiding eye contact, as if looking directly at her in the eyes would convey some great meaning. I wasn’t able to understand what I was feeling. And yet I imagined her wearing my clothes, shirts and coats, as if it meant we shared some sort of connection. I imagined her sleeping in my favorite T-shirt, a royal blue Ocean Pacific brand shirt with a graphic of a surfer riding a wave and the orange sun setting behind him. I thought of her wrapping herself in my bedsheet or blanket, walking down the hall in the middle of the night to find me and let me know she needed to wear my clothes to keep my scent close to her, to breathe me in, to keep me near. That she needed to cut my hair, tie it with a rubber band and keep it in a bottle. To open the bottle was like opening perfume, filling the room with me.
Where the Dead Sit Talking Page 13