American Dead

by PW Cooper

  Gena couldn't help but laugh. She reached into the car to give Trevor an awkward hug. Molly took the opportunity to pull herself against the seatbelt and plant a wet kiss on Gena's forehead.

  “When did you guys get back in town?” Gena asked breathlessly, the stale taste of the cigarette hot in her mouth.

  “Yesterday,” Molly breezed, “I was done with my finals on Thursday. Trev finished on Tuesday, he just took his sweet time getting back.”

  “Yeah, but you know Molly. She had her bags packed before she'd even taken her last test.”

  “Fucking right!” Molly pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead. “Wanted to get back and see my cuz first thing!” She grinned at Gena, her bright red lips flashing. “How's Verden High treating you?”

  Gena shrugged. “It's okay. Kinda sucks now that all you guys are gone, but it's been alright.”

  “Senior year,” Molly said. It was a phrase both congratulatory and empathetic.

  For as long as she could remember, Gena had idolized her older cousin. They'd grown up together in High Gorge Park, their trailers on opposite sides of the lot for years before Molly's family had moved away. They'd always been friends – but of course Molly could make friends with anybody, seemingly without trying. She knew every kid in the trailer park, and so they became Gena's friends too. She'd been like the big sister Gena never had.

  Her senior year at Verden High, very nearly over now, had been almost unbearably lonely without them all. She was the last of the trailer park kids, the last still at home. Scott joined the army. Alice got married, Andy moved to Ithaca. Molly and Trevor and Jeffrey had gone to college. And Mike had... well, he was just gone.

  Trevor snatched the burning cigarette from her fingers. He peered at it like a TV detective studying a bit of crime scene evidence. “When did you start smoking?” he asked, his soft voice quietly recriminating.

  Gena shrugged. “I dunno. Last year, I guess.”

  Trevor flicked the cigarette away with a grimace. “Yeah, well... don't make it a habit.”

  Gena reached into her coat pocket and took out another from the pack and lit it almost without thinking, her motions automatic. “Sure, sure.”

  Trevor rolled his eyes.

  Molly leaned back into the conversation. “Hey, you seen Jeffrey around?”

  Gena frowned. “What do you mean? Is he in town?”

  “Has been for, like, three weeks now. You didn't hear?”

  Gena's heart was in her throat and she couldn't quite understand why. “Didn't hear what? Why is he here?”

  “I have no idea, sweetie. He's just back. And you haven't seen him?”

  Gena tried to hide her disappointment. “No.”

  Molly sighed. “Typical Jeffrey. He should start a club with Mike, the two of them could sit in a basement together and pretend that none of the rest of us exist.”

  “Do either of you guys know what's up with Mike?”

  Trevor grimaced. He seemed to be trying to disappear back into his seat.

  “Not sure,” Molly shrugged, “Nobody seems to know where he is or what he's doing. I take it you haven't heard from him, then?”

  Gena shook her head, an odd feeling stirring in her gut.

  Far above the high school there were wisps of cloud gathering themselves into dense black shapes, cumulus auguries spilled out against a bloody sky. She could feel it, something bad was coming.

  * * *

  A soft rain pattered on slick black branches. The forest spoke to the wind, rustling soft arms and murmuring wordlessly. Gena walked with her hands deep in her pockets and a shiver between her lips. The frosted ground cracked beneath her boots. It had been a cold spring.

  She could see the back of the old movie screen through the woods. All those dreams and horrors of the human mind still sloughing off it after all those years, Hollywood memories like pine sap stuck to the boards. She hated it. Hated just to look at it. It had towered there over her entire life, useless and broken and faceless.

  Gena went a little further into the woods, towards the gorge.

  She loved High Gorge, both loved and feared it, that deep black gash cut through the rocky ground. It was the inverse of the screen: raw and natural and subterranean, all mystery and wilds. Heavy growth curtained the walls of the gorge like shaggy green hair, crusted over now with white frost like the pale points of dead stars. There was rusty guard-chain strung along the edge of the gorge, supported on iron poles at six foot intervals and tangled with dry brown vines. The chain had never stopped anybody; its purpose was strictly symbolic. Here you are, it said, on the edge of the world. Beyond this point you are on your own. The trees were thick and dark on the far side, out across the chasm.

  A young man was sitting just beyond the chain, his legs dangling over the edge of the gorge. He picked apart a small red flower with his quick brown hands. One by one he released the petals into the abyss, watching them cascading down into the slimy dark. The trickling water below echoed strangely in the depths.

  Gena approached without a word. She wrapped her hands around the chain and leaned out, peering into the chasm.

  “Is that a real flower?” she asked.

  Jeffrey Burke held up the carnation and looked at it as though seeing it for the first time. It was half-plucked, naked on one side. “Fake. Plastic.” He shook it, as if to demonstrate the illusion. “I was going to give my mother... I can't think why.” He grinned tightly, “Maybe it means something. You think?”

  She shrugged. Rain tumbled through the furled pines above. The warm air rose from the gorge black and silver, all twisted together like a braid of cooling ephemera.

  They'd spent a lot of hours at High Gorge when they were growing up. The whole gang would waste away the sunny summer hours out here in the woods, climbing trees, throwing rocks across the gorge, running half-naked between the pines. It felt like another time, like another girl's memories in her head. Nobody else seemed to miss it the way she did. Had they all forgotten?

  “I almost didn't recognize you,” she said, struggling for conversation. Jeffrey seemed content to keep staring quietly down into the gorge. “You changed your hair.”

  “Yeah,” he grimaced self-consciously, putting his hands up to his curly blond hair like he was trying to hide it from her. He frowned, “You're Molly's cousin, right?”

  Gena blushed. He didn't even remember her. “Gena.”

  He still hadn't looked at her. “I remember.”

  Gena's toes dug in the dirt. “Didn't your mom like the flower?”

  He shrugged. “I never gave it to her. Haven't seen her yet. I... meant to, I guess. I don't know...” He played with the cuffs of his heavy gray jacket, tore another petal.

  “I get it. Does anybody really like their parents?”

  “I guess some people probably do.”

  Gena pushed her knuckles against her mouth, breathing on her hands. It was far too cold for May. “Do you like Kim?”

  Jeffrey savaged the petal in his hand. “How well do you know my mother?”

  “A little. I babysit Sally and Garrett sometimes.”

  “That's brave of you.”

  “Not really. I get paid for it.”

  “Probably not enough.” He tossed out another petal.

  Gena shuffled from one foot to the other. Rainwater drizzled down her collar. “What are you doing out here anyway? It's cold. And wet.”

  “I'm fine,” he muttered, “I don't mind the rain.”

  “Sure you don't,” she rolled her eyes, teeth chattering.

  He shrugged. “So what about you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why are you out here?” He studied his fingernails.

  “I was looking for you.” She blushed. “I... Well, I saw you walking out this way.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  She watched him. He still hadn't looked at her, his eyes darting and nervous. His hands were shaking. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  Jeffrey was silent fo
r what seemed a terribly long while. She was about to say something when, at last, he looked at her. “There's something down there. I've been wondering... you know, what to do about it...”

  Gena looked back at him, their eyes locked together. There was something awful in his voice. She stepped over the chain, edging towards the drop. She knelt down beside him and leaned out, gazing into the depths, vertigo swooping through her.

  Jeffrey grabbed her arm. She flushed at the unexpected touch, quivering. He pointed to what seemed to be a tattered piles of clothing down in the bottom of the gorge. “Looks like it's been down there awhile,” he said.

  Gena studied his face. “I don't understand...”

  “Just look,” his said, his voice soft.

  She looked again into the murky blackness, so thick it was almost liquid. The little stream running through the rock was like a strand of woven silver. When her eyes had adjusted to the gloom she saw a shape inside the clothes. A figure, human yet inhuman.

  “I think it's a body,” Jeffrey said, his voice oddly quiet.

  Gena lay at the edge of the gorge. Her hair hung down. The shape below, clad in sludge, splayed in the river and surrounded by a heavy layer of sloughing foliage. A terrible breathlessness rose up in her.

  “Who is it?” she asked, her voice choked in her throat.

  “I don't know.”

  Gena's head swam. She felt nauseous, felt strangely excited. She clung to him, feeling as though the gorge were drawing her very slowly out towards its edge, pulling her down into that darkness.

  “We have to tell somebody.” Jeffrey helped her to her feet and the two of them stepped, very slowly, back over the old chain. There was a red plastic petal caught in a fold of his coat; the wind caught it and swept it away, out across the gorge, out over the trees. Gena froze. She stood perfectly still with one foot still beyond the chain, and she watched the artificial petal dancing into the silver rain.

  High Gorge Park – Summer

  The body fell to pieces when they brought it up out of the darkness. They all watched: the medical technicians in their clean blue clothes, the police with arms folded tight across their chests, the residents of the park frozen like statues. The body-bag was laid before the decaying movie screen like an offering to some neglected god, and the congregated people of High Gorge Park stared out from the windows and doorways of their homes like timid worshipers.

  The re-assembled body lay in the wet new grass, waiting for the last of its components to be retrieved from the frozen stream. An EMT watched it from a distance, standing on the edge of the forest and fighting the urge to vomit. The emergency was long since past, and the corpse had made a lie of her title. Its decayed hand seemed to be reaching out from the sagging mouth of the glossy black bag, as though eager for life, eager to rise apart and be carried away upon the digits like spider's legs across the spring mud. She looked up at the screen and thought about the zombie movies her brother used to make her watch. She couldn't understand why anybody would set out to create horror when there was already so much of it to go around.

  The dead never really died until they were buried, she thought, they only rotted. She'd read that in a book, she thought, but of course she couldn't remember which. She didn't have much of a memory for that kind of thing, when people's birthdays were or which actors were in which movies. She stood there, waiting for the final pieces of the corpse puzzle to be carried up, the final parts to be fed into the black bag, and she tried to remember.

  The sun dropped noiselessly behind the low blue hills. Summer was only weeks away, yet the air still tasted of Winter, bitter on the tongue. It had been an odd Spring.

  * * *

  It was dark when they finally took away the body. The swirling police lights flashed luridly across the somber faces of the residences who had come out to stand and watch. The body's identity had been discovered late that afternoon, taken off an old school ID in the pocket of the jeans. There had been no announcement, as further examination would be required to verify the news, but somehow everybody knew, everybody had heard.

  Adelaide Anderson stood in the open doorway of her trailer, smoking a cigarette. She held one arm across her hips, fingers working idly at the denim waistband. There was a distant sort of hardness in her eyes, a glazed-over anger. She took slow drags, the glow of the cigarette flaring on her face when she did.

  Jeffrey Burke watched from inside his mother's trailer. His half-sister Sally laced her little fingers through his. She asked him, quite solemnly, if anyone had died at college. He told her no, and she nodded. The little girl he scarcely knew picked herself up and climbed onto his lap. She lay her head against him and told him that people died in the park sometimes, but that he should stay anyway, because she would take care of him. He smiled, and brushed her hair away from her face.

  Nathan Riley watched his wife. She stared out the window, her eyes agleam with suppressed anger, with grief. The flashing lights washed across her features, spilling deep shadows in the contours of her cheeks and her glistening eyes. Her slim fingers were twisted, the first and second fingers intertwined as though she were praying for luck. She looked at him briefly; their eyes met across the narrow space. She said nothing, but he knew what she was thinking: Now that he was dead, would the secrets all come out?

  Kim Burke felt a horrible sort of resigned dread as she watched the black bag borne away. She felt as though she were standing on the edge of an abyss, staring down into a malevolent underworld. The world seemed full of angry darkness. She shivered, imagining a cold set of claws running up and down her naked back, and she told herself to stop being so over-dramatic. It would only make things worse.

  Edward Smith sat on a folding chair in front of his trailer. The greasy porch light above him was filled with bodies. In the summer it supported a swirl of minuscule gray insects, endlessly hurling their bodies at the light and burning out on the filament, like children flinging themselves thoughtlessly into heaven. He cried gently, pressing his fingertips to his temples. He wanted to take a picture, but he couldn't bring himself to raise the camera.

  Gena Riley's eyes were red-rimmed. She wasn't crying anymore, though she found it very hard just to keep breathing. Nobody she'd known had ever died before. She'd never lost a friend. She trembled, and she watched them taking him away.

  Michael Conner left the park in a glossy black bag, left it in pieces. His face once so familiar, now warped and twisted and mortified, was scarcely recognizable.

  Spring crawled limply after him, creeping pale and sightless from the shadow-clad forest, as slick and dripping and bloody as a newborn child.

  Part II: After the Fall

  Being Children Again

  “What do you think this is?” Edward laid his hands flat on the Formica table. His palms were scared, the fingertips stained a faint purple as though they had long ago been dipped in ink and never properly cleaned.

  “What do I think what is?” Adelaide set aside her tea and leaned across the table for a closer look.

  “This here.” He pointed to a slight discoloration on the back of his wrinkled hand. There was a faint darkness beneath the skin, subcutaneous night-flower in full bloom. “What is this?”

  “I don't know. One of those ink-blot tests?” She smiled indulgently, lifting the steaming mug to her curved lips.

  Edward made an irritated sound in the back of his throat. He rubbed at the spot with his thumb. “It's cancer, I know it.”

  Adelaide laughed. “It's not cancer, Eddie. You're just getting old.”

  He glared at the treacherous limb, clearly still suspicious. “I don't know...”

  They sat in the dim glow of late afternoon, sipping tea under a naked lightbulb. Cool sunlight pooled through the window pane. The kitchen area in Edward's trailer was so narrow that Adelaide could touch the walls to either side of her. Almost like being in a coffin.

  There was a police car parked outside the Conner's house. It had shown up about an hour ago and disgorge
d two uniformed officers. Adelaide had watched them through Edward's window as they went somberly up the well-trod path to the house and knocked on the door. It had seemed a very long time before they were let inside.

  She studied her tea. Adelaide's grandmother told her when she was a child that you could see the future in tea leaves, could see the curve of your life along time's broad arc. Even when she was a girl, Adelaide never believe in any of that nonsense.

  “What do you suppose happened, Eddie? To that Conner boy, I mean.”

  Edward paused, his mug poised in his hand. His lips opened like he was going to say something, but closed again still silent.

  She couldn't bear to think of it. The poor boy. “How can a person just... die?” She know even as she spoke how ridiculous the question was, but she could not but want for an answer.

  He didn't meet her eyes, didn't seem to want to acknowledge the subject. “Do you want to go out for a walk?” he asked. Edward was one of those who believed that simply by walking regularly a person might prolong their life almost indefinitely. A beating heart summoned in the chest as though for proof of life.

  She shook her head. Adelaide was almost seventy-two years old. She didn't need to walk to know she was alive. Sometimes she lay awake in the darkness and listened to the insects bounce fatally against the lights outside, wondering if she had lived long enough.

  She took a heavy swallow of hot tea. Everybody had gotten a bit morbid now. Just stepping out of her trailer these days felt a bit like walking into a graveyard. Everybody felt it when they heard the news. They'd all known Michael, all watched him grow up in that house up on the hill. Many of them had known him since he was first adopted by the Conners, fifteen years ago. They had observed from a distance, their lives intimately entwined at a remove from their trailer park royalty.

  And now the crown prince was dead.

  There had been rumors, of course. He'd dropped out of high school, some said. Others that he'd been arrested for drug possession or been thrown out by his parents for burning his father's bible. There were always stories. The only fact they knew was that Michael had left the park. Of course, that wasn't such an uncommon occurrence; everybody was trying to leave. In the end, though, even that supposition had proved false: he had never left. She shivered, thinking of the jagged gorge out there in the woods grinning like a crooked mouth. She pictured him laying down there in the throat of it, staring up at the dripping black rocks rising above him on both sides, crying uselessly for help, broken and bleeding, his body shattered in the stream.