by Poppy Brite
But the graveyard gave off only a quiet buzz like crickets in the sun, like the cogs of a watch beginning to wind down. Set back at the shady dead end of Burnt Church Road, surrounded by woods on three sides, it was a place that felt like surcease from pain. Trevor had never seen the burial place of his family. As soon as it came into view, he knew that this was a fitting prelude to going home.
Of course they hadn’t let him attend the funeral. As far as Trevor knew, there had been no proper funeral. Bobby McGee had burned most of his bridges when they left Austin, and they had no family but each other. The town, he supposed, had paid for the interment of three cheap pine coffins.
Later, a group of comics artists and publishers had taken up money for a stone. Someone had sent Trevor a Polaroid snapshot of it years ago. He remembered turning the picture over and over in his hands until the oil from his fingers marred the slick paper, wondering who had cared enough to visit and photograph the grave of his family but not enough to rescue him from the hell that was the Boys’ Home.
He also remembered a drawing he had done soon afterward, a cutaway view of the grave. He made the headstone look shiny and slick, as if some thick dark substance coated the granite. The earth below was loamy, seeded here and there with worms, nuggets of rock, stray bones come loose from their moorings. There were three coffins, two large ones with long shrouded forms within, their folds suggesting ruined faces. The shape in the littlest coffin was strange—it might have been one form grossly misshapen, or two small forms mingled.
Mr. Webb, the junior high art teacher who hid Listerine bottles full of rotgut whiskey in his desk, had called the drawing morbid and crumpled it. When Trevor flew at him, skinny arms outstretched, hands hooked into claws going unthinkingly for Webb’s eyes, the teacher backhanded him before he knew what he was doing. Both were disciplined, Webb with a week’s suspension, Trevor with expulsion from art class and confiscation of his sketchbook. He covered the walls of his room with furious art: swarming thousand-legged bugs, soaring skeletal birds, beautifully lettered curse words, screaming faces with black holes for eyes.
They never let him take an art class again.
Now here was the place of his drawing and his dreams, the place he had imagined so often that it already seemed familiar. The graveyard was much as he had pictured it, small and shady and overgrown, many of the stones listing, the roots of large trees twining through the graves and down into the rich soil, mining the fertile deposits of the bodies buried there. Trevor wondered whether he might find Didi’s face in a knothole, the many colors of Momma’s hair in a shock of sun-bleached grass, the shape of his father’s long-fingered hands in a gracefully gnarled branch.
Maybe. First, though, he had to find their grave.
Trevor rummaged in his backpack, found a can of Jolt Cola, popped the top, and tipped the warm soda into his mouth. The sickly-sweet taste foamed over his tongue, trickled into the cracks between his teeth. It tasted horrible, like stale carbonated saliva. But the caffeine sent immediate electric tendrils into his brain, soothed the pounding at his temples, cleared the red cobwebs from his vision.
It was the only drug he had much use for. Once he’d started to develop a taste for speed, but quit the first time he detected a tremor in his hand. Pot reminded him too much of his parents in the good days, back when Bobby was drawing. Alcohol terrified him; it was nothing more than death, distilled and bottled. And junk held such a morbid fascination for him that he dared not try it, though he had been in plenty of low haunts and back alleys where he could have had some if he’d wanted to. He knew it was supposed to be clear, yet he imagined it black as ink, swirling out of the needle and through his veins, lulling him into some dreadfully familiar nightmare world.
He drank the last vile swig of Jolt, stuck the empty can back in his backpack, and set out on a meandering path through the graveyard. The ground was uneven, the weeds in some places tall enough to brush the tips of his fingers. He caught at them, let them slip through his hands.
This was not Missing Mile’s only burying ground. Trevor had glimpsed a few small church cemeteries on his way into town, and he remembered that the surrounding woods were seeded with old Civil War graves and family plots, sometimes just two or three rough-hewn stones in a lonely little cluster.
But this was the oldest one still in use. There were recent stones, letters and dates chiseled so sharply that they seemed to float just above the slick surface of the granite. Flecks of quartz and mica caught the receding light. There were old markers, stone crosses and arched tablets of slate, their edges crumbling, their inscriptions beginning to blur. There were the small white stones of children, some topped with lambs like smooth cakes of soap partly melted in the shower. Some graves were splashed with gaudy color, flowers arranged in bright sprays or tortured into wreaths. Some had gone undecorated for a very long time.
And some had never been decorated.
Pain shot through his hands. Trevor found himself standing before a long, plain slab of granite. He realized he had been standing there for several minutes, working his hands against each other, twisting his fingers together until the joints screamed. He made himself flex them, one by one.
Then he raised his head and looked at the gravestone of everyone he had ever loved.
McGEE
ROBERT FREDRIC FREDRIC DYLAN ROSENA PARKS
B. APRIL 20, 1937 B. SEPT. 6, 1969 B. OCT. 20, 1942
DIED JUNE 14, 1972
Trevor had forgotten that his brother’s middle name was Dylan. Momma had always told people it was for Dylan Thomas, the poet. Bobby pointed out that the kid was born in ′69; no matter what anyone said, everybody would assume he was named after Bob Dylan. It would haunt him all his life.
But Bobby had taken care of that.
During his walk out here Trevor had wondered if they might all start yammering at him, their voices worming up through six feet of hard-packed earth, through twenty years of decay and dissolution, over the chirrup and buzz of insects in the tall grass and the slow rumble of the storm coming in. But, though he still sensed the soft hum of the collective dead, his own dead were silent. Now that he was here he felt curiously flat, almost disappointed; no one had spoken to him, no skeletal hand had thrust up to grab his ankle and drag him down with them. Left out again.
Trevor knelt and laid his palms briefly against the cool stone, then put his backpack down and stretched out on the ground. In the center of the grave, over Didi, he supposed. It was hard to believe that Didi’s body, the body he had last seen stiff and cold in bed with its head smeared like overripe fruit across the pillow, lay directly beneath him. He wondered if any reconstruction of the heads and faces had been done, or if Didi’s fragile skull had been left to fall to pieces like a broken Easter egg. The ground was warm under his back, the sky overhead pregnant with clouds, nearly black. If he was going to do any drawing here, he’d better get started.
He unzipped his bag and took out his sketchbook. A pencil was wedged into the coiled wire binding. Trevor fingered it but did not pull it out just yet. Instead he turned to the drawing he had finished on the bus. Rosena Black: the dead version of Rosena McGee, with none of her wit or warmth, with nothing but a cold ruined shell of a body. Seven fingers broken as she tried to fight Bobby off in the doorway to the hall, beyond which lay her sleeping sons. Had she been trying to grab the hammer, and if she got it, would she have killed her husband with it? Trevor thought so.
That would have changed every part of the equation but one: Bobby would still be dead, and Trevor would still be alive. Only if it had gone down that way, at least Trevor would know why he was alive.
He reached into his backpack again, felt way down deep in the bottom, found a battered manila envelope and took out three folded sheets of paper. The folds had worn through many times over, had been taped back together and refolded until some of the photocopied words on the paper were nearly illegible. It didn’t matter; Trevor knew them by heart.
They a
ll followed the same format. Robert F. McGee, Rural Box 17, Violin Road, male Caucasian, 35 yrs, 5-9, 130 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes. Occupation: Artist. Cause of death: Strangulation by hanging. Manner of death: Suicide. Other marks: Scratches on face, arms, chest area …
He knew Momma had made those scratches. But they hadn’t been enough, not nearly enough. Fingernails weren’t much use once the fingers were broken.
He folded the autopsy reports and slid them back into the envelope. He had stolen them from his file at the Home and carried them with him since then. The paper was worn soft and thin, read a thousand times. The ink was smudged with the whorls of his fingerprints.
The storm was very close now. The hum of insects in the grass, the trill and call of birds in the surrounding woods seemed very loud. The afternoon light had taken on a lurid greenish cast. The air was full of electricity. Trevor felt the fine hairs on his arms standing up, the nape of his neck prickling.
He flipped to a clean page in his book, freed his pencil, and began sketching rapidly. In a few minutes he had roughed out the first half of his idea for a strip.
It stemmed from an incident in a biography of Charlie Parker he had read at the Home. In his thirteen years there, Trevor had read just about everything in the meager library. Most of the other kids wondered why he wanted to read anything at all, let alone a book about some dead musician who had played a kind of music that nobody listened to anymore.
The incident had happened when Bird was touring the South with the Jay McShann Orchestra. Jackson, Mississippi, was a bad place for black people in 1941. (Trevor doubted it was any great shakes for them now.) There was a curfew requiring them to be off the street by eleven P.M., so unless they wanted to risk arrest or worse, the band had to be finished and packed up by ten-thirty. There was no hotel in Jackson that would admit them, so the musicians were farmed out to various shabby boardinghouses and private homes.
Bird and the singer, honky-tonk bluesman Walter Brown, drew cots on the screened porch of someone’s house. They were out of the converted barn where they had played and back at the house by eleven, but since their usual lifestyle kept them up until the small hours, the musicians were far from sleepy. They lay on their cots under the meager yellow glow of the porch light, passing a flask and sweating the liquor from their pores as fast as they swallowed it in the sodden Mississippi heat, slapping at the mosquitoes that slipped through holes in the screen, shooting the shit, talking of music or beautiful women or perhaps just how far they were from Kansas City.
At midnight the police showed up, four beefy good old boys with guns and nightsticks and necks as red as the blood they were itching to spill. The burning porch light was a violation of the “nigger curfew,” they said, and Bird and Brown could come along to the station with them, and if they didn’t care to come peacefully like good boys, why then, they were welcome to a few lumps on the head and a pair of steel bracelets.
Charlie Parker and Walter Brown spent three days in Jackson jail for sitting up talking with the porch light on. Charlie had the sharpest tongue, and so came out of it the worst; when McShann was finally able to bail them out, Bird’s close-cropped hair was still stiff with dried blood where the nightsticks had split the skin over his skull. He had not been allowed enough water to wash the crust of blood away. Brown claimed to have kept his mouth shut, but sported some lumps and bruises of his own.
Bird had composed a tune to commemorate the incident, first called “What Price Love?” but later retitled “Yardbird Suite.” His fury and wounded pride wound through the song like a crimson thread, a sobbing, wailing undertone.
How to get all that into a single strip, a few pages of black-and-white drawings? How to best show the tawdry tenement where they had been sequestered, the weathered wood and torn tarpaper houses, the narrow, muddy streets, the stupid malice on the faces of the cops? It was the sort of thing Bobby had done effortlessly in the three issues of Birdland. His stories had taken place mostly in the slums and beat sections of New York or New Orleans or Kansas City, not Jackson, Mississippi, and his human characters had been fictional junkies and street freaks and jazz musicians, not real ones.
But the mood of Birdland, the stark, slick, slightly hallucinatory drawings, the distorted reflections in puddles and the dark windows of bars, the constant low-key threat of violence, the feeling that everything in the strip was a little larger than life, and a little louder, and a little weirder—that was what Trevor wanted to capture here.
For now, though, he was just sketching in the panels and their contents, space for captions and word balloons, rough figures and backgrounds, the barest hints of gestures and expressions. The faces and hands were his favorite part; he would linger over them later. He had already drawn Bird hundreds of times. The handsome fleshy features appeared on the margins of his pages and woven into his backgrounds nearly as often as the face of his father.
He reached the part on the porch, just before the police arrived, and the first time Walter Brown’s face appeared in closeup. His pencil slowed, then stopped, and he tapped the eraser against the page thoughtfully. He realized he had never seen a picture of Brown, had no idea what the singer looked like.
No problem: he could wing it, improvise the man’s face like a jazz solo. He already had a hazy picture in his head, and even as he thought about it, the features grew clearer. His fantasy Walter Brown was a very young man, about twenty—but then they had all been young, mostly younger than Trevor was now—and boyishly thin to Bird’s fleshiness, with high cheekbones and slightly slanting dark-almond eyes. Handsome.
This was how he usually worked: pondering an idea for months, turning it over and over in his head until he had nearly every panel and line worked out. Only then did he put pencil or pen or brush to paper, and the thing spilled full-blown onto the page. Bobby had been the same way, working in feverish bursts and starts. And when the inspiration was gone, it was gone forever.
At least if that happens to me, Trevor reminded himself, I won’t have anyone to kill. There was no person he had cared that much about. Incidents like the one with the art teacher were a different thing altogether. You could cheerfully rip such people’s heads off and drink the fountaining blood from the neck-stumps in those first few minutes of blind rage, if the fragile constraints of civilization and lack of physical power did not bind you.
But later, when you had time to think on it, you realized that nothing could be gained by hurting such people, that perhaps they were not even alive enough to feel pain. You could make better use of your anger by keeping it to yourself, letting it grow until you needed it.
Still … if you loved someone, really loved them, wouldn’t you want to take them with you when you died? Trevor tried to imagine actually holding someone down and killing them, just breaking them apart, watching as the love in their face turned to agony or rage or confusion, feeling their bones crack and their blood flow over your hands, under the nails, greasing into the palms.
There was no one with whom he would want such intimacy. Kinsey had hugged him last night in the club, had held him as naturally as one might hold a suffering child. It had been the first time Trevor had cried in another person’s presence in twenty years. For that matter, it was as physically close to another person as he had been since the man with gentle hands carried him out of the house, since his last glimpse of his father’s swollen face. These two brief meetings of clothed skin were all he’d had.
No, he remembered. Not quite all.
Once, when he was twelve, a slightly older boy at the Home had caught him alone in the shower and pushed him into a corner. The boy’s hands had scrabbled over his slick soapy skin, and Trevor had felt something in his head snap. Next thing he knew three counselors were pulling him off the kid, who was curled in the fetal position on the stall floor, and the knuckles of his left hand were throbbing, bruised, and blood was streaking the white tiles, swirling down the silver drain …
The older boy had a concussion, and Tr
evor was confined to his hall for a month. His homework and meals were brought to him. The solitude was wonderful. He filled eighteen notebooks, and one of the things he drew over and over was the shower stall with the boy in it: head smacking the cold tiles at the precise moment of impact; skinny body curled in a half inch of water threaded with his own blood. His blood that Trevor had spilled before he even knew what he was doing.
And the weird thing was, the boy’s hands had actually felt good sliding over his skin. He had liked the feeling … and then suddenly the boy had been on the floor with blood coming out of his head.
He had plenty of time to think about what he had done, and what had made him do it, the violence inherent in his genes, in his soul. That was the first time he could remember considering the comforts of suicide.
Trevor stuck his pencil behind his ear, laid his sketchbook on the ground in front of him. He let the fingers of his right hand slide down the soft inner skin of his left forearm. The skin there was mottled with old scars, years of slashes and cross-hatchings done with a single-edged Exacto razor blade, the same kind he used for layouts. Perhaps a hundred thin raised lines of skin, paler than the rest of his arm, exquisitely sensitive; some still reddened and hurt once in a while, as if the tissue deep inside his arm had never quite healed. But if you went deep enough into the tissue, no scar ever healed completely.
And this map of pain he had carved out of his skin, this had been no half-assed attempt at suicide, anyway. Trevor knew that to kill yourself you had to cut along the length of your arm, had to lay it open from wrist to elbow like some fruit with a rich red pulp and a hard white core. Had to cut all the way to bone, had to sever every major artery and vein. He had never tried it.