American Dead

by PW Cooper

  It simply didn't do to think about such things.

  She set her mug down. “I think you're right, actually.”

  Edward's eyes wide with fear, his thumb touching the discoloration. “Cancer?”

  “No. We should go out. Come on. Let's take a walk.”

  His eyebrows twitched, brushy and gray above his milky eyes. “Alright then.”

  They drove north in Edward's car. He shuddered, hands trembling on the wheel as the old convertible rattled across every pothole in Verden's crumbling streets. The town was gray in the sunless Saturday afternoon. Half the buildings on Main Street had For Sale signs in the windows and those that were left were mostly drab office buildings, their inner workings a mystery to Adelaide.

  They drove past the gas station convenience store where she bought her cigarettes and lottery tickets. There was an out of order sign hanging on one of the pumps, black marker scrawled on torn cardboard. Edward fiddled with the radio dial, searching for a station clear of static. The weary voice of an old singer murmured through the hum, fading at every turn. Edward switched it off in disgust, and silence poured in after.

  They drove by the public library, a shaggy gray-stone building. Reading gave Adelaide a headache these days, and anyway there didn't seem to be much worth reading. Every once in a while she picked up a mystery novel, losing herself in the unwinding knot of some inconsequential post-mortal riddle. Such books seemed perverse to her now, after what had happened. Still, she'd been a member of the book club for too long now to simply stop. She would have to keep going.

  Neither she nor Edward spoke for the entirety of the cross-town drive.

  The parking lot at the trailhead was deserted, and there wasn't a soul in sight. They walked out along the path which traced the sinuous coast of the too-generously named Gardenview Lake. The so-called lake was little more than a long and shallow pool, brackish and murky along the shore. Further out the water was clear and dark and in constant motion. There was a stream which eventually fed into High Gorge, splintering off the main water like a vein from an artery.

  The soft black gravel crunched under Adelaide's shoes. The trail traced long-vanished train-tracks, and the path was black with the ash and coal remains of stream-belching machines gone now for nearly a hundred years. Edward walked slightly behind her, looking out at the water. They didn't talk much. They had known each other so long now that speech was no longer necessary. Silence was enough.

  It felt good to be away from the park. She could breathe properly out here. Water dripped from the budding tips of the damp black boughs laced overhead. There was a fresh and clean smell in the air, like that which followed a rainstorm.

  They came to a clear place in the trees where they could see out across the glossy water and Adelaide felt her breath catch in her throat at the sight. The sun was beginning to set, sinking down into the heather-tufted hills and spilling gold and scarlet light on the lake. She could feel the moody heat of it on her face. A copse of trees on the far hill stood out black before the setting sun, their silhouetted forms reaching like twisted fingers from the earth to the sky.

  “Look at that,” she said.

  Edward nodded. “Wish I'd brought my camera.”

  They watched the shimmering red disk sink down beyond the crest of the hill, and only when it had submerged completely did they continued on their way in the gathering dusk.

  “You wouldn't have believe it,” Edward said, his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes on his shoes, “last time I went to get my film developed, the guy, this kid, he gave me a whole speech about goddamn digital cameras. I kept telling him I wasn't interested, but he wouldn't shut up. What am I supposed to do with a digital camera?” he said the word with a sneer, as though it were a mild curse.

  “Hm.” Adelaide tuning out, more or less, his increasingly incensed defense of traditional film. He didn't seem to need much encouragement, plunging ahead about the degradation of the art form and the technical inferiority of digital film:

  “And it's too damned convenient, if you ask me,” he said, gesturing wildly, “No one even bothers to put any effort into taking a picture. They don't have to! The cameras practically work themselves these days. It's-”

  And then Adelaide saw something which stopped in her tracks. She caught his arm, a sudden panic running through her, and she pointed at the muck off the edge of the trail. “Eddie,” she said, “what is that?”

  The two of them went together and looked into the shallow ditch:

  It was a swan. The long and elegant neck was awkwardly twisted, its face pushed down in the soft mud and filthy water. Its great white body was dark with filth, wings wrenched back, feathers scattered. Something had torn into its body. Garishly bright organs pooled out, oxidizing in the muck. The mire was stained with blood and the creature's snowy wing-feathers were spattered with it like red ink on blank paper. Flies buzzed thickly around, hundreds of them crawling over the body, dense as static.

  Adelaide stared at the bird, unsure how to react. She had never seen a swan before, never even heard of one in New York. Where did swans live? she wondered. They didn't seem like they belonged in the wild, seemed almost too perfect to be naturally occurring. And how had this swan died? It seemed to have died violently, but surely there was no creature which would have killed it and then left it practically untouched.

  She could feel her insides churning horribly, a bilious taste rising in the back of her throat. She could smell death. The flies were unbearably loud, buzzing in a horrible whirling frenzy about the corpse. The sight was almost more than she could bear, and yet – even in death, torn open and bent into a lifeless heap – the swan remained somehow beautiful. There was a desperate grace to its brokenness.

  The sun had gone down now and its metallic sheen upon the water had given way to a misty gray twilight. Adelaide felt unbidden tears streaming down her face. She wrapped her arms around herself, wondering what she was supposed to do now, trying to understand.

  It simply didn't make sense to her, seemed wrong on a fundamental level, illogical. She didn't want to accept it, but the fact was simple and inarguable: the swan was dead.

  * * *

  The park was quiet when they returned. The police car was gone.

  They both got out of Edward's car without saying a word to each other. She looked out into the blackness of the pine forest on the border of the trailer lot, and wondered if it could have been her imagination somehow, if she could have dreamed the dead bird. It had felt like a dream.

  Edward went silently back to his trailer, keys jingling as he worked the lock. He left her with a curt nod and shut the door against her.

  Adelaide wandered aimlessly through the park, searching vainly above for a star in the clouded night sky. She stopped at the edge of the lot and looked up towards the house on the hill. It stood over the trailer park like a fortress, second story lights burning. She hesitated, her feet twisting indecisively in the gravel.

  And then, without realizing that she had even started up the slope, she found herself at the door. It was only a dream, she thought, and struck the brass knocker.

  Minutes passed before the door opened and Patricia Conner peered out into the gloom. “Oh,” she said, her usually-boisterous voice reduced to a murmur, “Miss Anderson. Is there something...?” she trailed off, never to finish the question, as though she had forgotten what she'd meant to say.

  Patricia was a tall brunette woman in her late forties. She favored rich colors, clothing that hung in folds of drapery from her slim frame. Tonight her makeup was smeared and her clothes wrinkled. The heavy rings on her fingers were turned at odd angles, inset gems tilted haphazardly. Her eyes were dry, puffy and wreathed in red.

  Adelaide found herself dumbly open-mouthed, waiting for something sensible to come stumbling out her mouth. “Yes, I... I just wanted to know if there was... anything I could do. Anything at all. I'm sure that everyone else has already been here, but I just wanted to do whatever I could
. To help, I mean.”

  Patricia's mouth took on a wan curve. “Oh. How very sweet of you. Won't you come in for a coffee?” She withdrew without waiting for a reply, leaving the door hanging open behind her.

  Adelaide followed. She'd never been inside the Conner's house before. It wasn't quite what she'd expected. The house seemed curiously bare, as though even after all those years they still hadn't properly moved in their things.

  “You're wrong, you know,” Patricia called back over her shoulder, leading on towards the kitchen. “There haven't been any others. I suppose they're all too frightened. My friends...” She laughed harshly, “I don't blame them, of course. Can't imagine what I'd say in their places. And it's not as though I actually want to talk to any of them, the vultures... Best all around, I suppose... My mother hasn't even called, can you imagine that?” she turned on Adelaide, her eyes blazing with sudden fury, “Imagine not calling your own daughter. Of course, she never did approve of... but never mind that. You didn't come here to listen to my problems.”

  The kitchen was oddly spotless, full of chrome and plastic that looked like it was right out of a catalog. Patricia sat at the far end of a long mahogany table. “Easier to just pretend that nothing's happened,” she murmured, reaching for the coffee pot, “Do you take sugar?”

  “Decaf?” Adelaide asked, sitting across the table from her landlady.

  Patricia laughed softly. “I should think not, Mrs Anderson... I have no interest in sleep.”

  “No?”

  “Isn't it obvious?”

  “I'm sorry. I don't mean to pry.”

  “I can't sleep. There are things that I don't want to dream about.”

  “No sugar for me.”

  “All right then.” She poured the steaming liquid out, first into her cup then into Adelaide's. “Black.”

  They drank silently. Adelaide sipped timidly at the scalding coffee, but Patricia drank it as though it were cool; she didn't seem to notice the temperature.

  “You will tell me if there's anything I can do?” Adelaide asked.

  The other woman looked at her with an expression of bemused surprise. “Oh... there's nothing, really.” Patricia looked pensively around the kitchen, seeming to make a mental catalog of the plethora of doubtless expensive appliances and tools, many of which betrayed no sign of ever having been used. “I just...” she started, then let out a burst of sudden laughter, “I feel like a little girl again!” There were tears welling up in her eyes even as her laughter subsided, “It's funny. I... I just want someone to come and make it all better.” She looked across the table, meeting Adelaide's eyes for the first time. “You don't have children, do you?”

  Adelaide shook her head. “I never did.”

  Patricia's cheek twitched. “Hm.” She took a long sip of her steaming coffee.

  They drank together, waiting.

  Her husband Charles wondered into the kitchen, as though he'd sensed their aimless anticipation. He held a crumpled tissue in one hand. “A spider,” he said, lifting the tissue as evidence, “was on the wall.” The broken creature's legs thrashed weakly. “It's the biting kind,” he said, his foot pushing down on the petal which opened the lid of the garbage can, into which the tissue and arachnid were together deposited. That task accomplished, Charles wondered out. Patricia stared at the garbage can, a sort of horror in her eyes, such a desperation that Adelaide couldn't bear to look at it.

  The digital numbers on the microwave clock glowed a cool and lifeless blue, immaculate in their place. She stared and stared for what felt to her like hours, but they never changed.

  Graduation

  “Shit!”

  The bottle seemed to fall in slow motion to the hardwood floor, spilling out amber fluid as it tumbled. Everybody started to rise, much too slowly to do anything. The bottle shattered. The green glass flung itself out; foamy beer poured into the cracks between the floorboards.

  Andrew was up off the couch in an instant, cradling his own drink protectively. “Jesus Christ, Trevor!”

  Molly laughed, then hiccuped loudly, prompting another round of hysterics. Todd, her new boyfriend, laughed obligingly along and ran his hand across her back. Todd, Gena had observed, liked to keep his hands on Molly as much as he could, like he was afraid she'd run off if he didn't maintain constant contact.

  Trevor winced. “I'll clean it up, where's your towels?”

  Andrew waved him off, stomping towards the kitchen nook. “I got it, I got it. Nobody step on the damn glass, alright! Just don't anybody move, okay?”

  Jeffrey lifted his heels lazily off the floor. He was already on his third beer of the night. Not that Gena was policing him or anything. Or even paying him any special attention. It was none of her business, she knew that! She swallowed. The spreading pool of beer looked like it was going to start soaking into the shag rug any second now.

  “So how's it feel?” Jeffrey leaned towards her, a predatory curve to his spine. His eyes were sharp, locked onto her face.

  “Huh?” She flinched. God, she sounded so stupid! He must hate her. It was so different now that they were all together again. The Jeffrey she'd spoken to there on the edge of the gorge was either gone or else so deeply submerged that she could not see him anymore. She did not know this new person who had taken his place. “How's what feel?” she said, blushing despite her best efforts.

  “Having graduated,” he said, and leaned back.

  “Oh. I... I dunno. About the same?” She looked at the floor, her cheeks hot. Jeffrey had been in a weird mood all night. They were all a bit on edge, more than a bit.

  The ceremony earlier that evening had been surreal. The gym where it was held seemed horribly empty, as only a handful of their none-too-large graduating class had bothered to show up. Those who were there, draped in their dark purple robes and stirring in anticipation as the speakers droned on, quickly came to regret their decision. Gena had felt like an insect in a little hive, dizzy and lightheaded as she watched the principle's mouth forming words which seemed to make individual sense, yet somehow didn't fit together into any sort of meaningful logic: responsibility, commencement, accomplishment, pride. None of it seemed to make any sense. Was she was going crazy? She listened harder.

  “When you're out there, never forget that you can count on what you have learned here?” Principle Brock's voice had a horrible lilt to it which made nearly everything she said sound like a question. “You will remember your time at Verden High for the rest of your life? I know that you will treasure those memories, and I know that you will all succeed beyond your wildest hopes, because I know you? It has been my privilege to be your principle for these past years. I know that you will all make us proud? And I wish you the best. Let's have a big hand for the Verden High class of 2002!” She stepped back from the podium, her pale hands leading an applause that seemed to die out before it had even begun.

  Gena's parents offered to take her out for dinner to celebrate. She refused, thanking them all the same. A few hours later, Molly pulled up outside the trailer, Trevor and Todd in her backseat, and said that she was taking Gena to a party. Gena wanted to argue, but she knew better than to try and convince her cousin of anything. They went together to Andrew's apartment in Ithaca.

  To be entirely truthful, it didn't feel much like a party. They all sat on Andrew's couches drinking Andrew's beer, hardly talking. Gena kept expecting to see Mike come walking through the door, a sloppy grin on his face and a bottle in his hand. There were so many people missing! Alice was God-knew-where with her so-called husband. Scott had been deployed almost six months back. And now Mike was gone too, gone for good.

  Everybody was leaving. They would never be together again, not like they'd been back in the old days, back when they were children. It was over now, lonely adulthood was all that remained. She felt hot tears forming in the corners of her eyes. She brushed them fiercely away. Oh, they would tease her if they saw! They'd always picked on her, she was a youngest. She'd never minde
d it, though, she knew that they all loved her.

  Andrew returned with a ragged towel and a glossy black garbage bag. He started picking up the chunks of glass and tossing them into the bag. Trevor stood behind him, insisting that he should be the one to clean it up, though he made no motion to help. Gena watched, and shivered. The trash bag looked eerily like Mike's body bag, weighted down with shards of glass.

  Molly was making out with Todd. She'd always favored well-groomed guys with big arms and tight stomachs, the kind of guy who put out but wouldn't get too clingy or take the relationship too seriously.

  Jeffrey wasn't talking to anybody, but he watched them all, drinking quietly. The little table beside the couch was crowded with his empty bottles.

  Molly climbed up onto her boyfriend's lap. Her hands clutched at his shirt, fingers circling the faux-ivory buttons. She straddled him tightly, pressing her lips against his like she was trying to climb into his mouth. Soft music was playing on the stereo in the corner, too quiet for Gena to make out any of the words.

  Gena moved away from her cousin, crossed her legs. Jeffrey was watching her.

  She tried to smile at him. “So, you're staying here with Andrew?”

  He shrugged.

  “This is kinda awkward, isn't it?” she said, glancing around.

  “What, because Mike's dead?” Jeffrey's voice was flat, slightly slurred.

  Molly broke away from Todd. “Jesus Fucking Christ, Jeff!” She glared at him, mouth twisted.

  “Something wrong?” His voice had turned to an acerbic sneer, every syllable laced with venom.

  Molly snorted with disgust, disentangling herself from her companion. “What's your fucking problem, anyway?”

  “Problem?” he rose unsteadily to his feet, jabbed a finger at the man on the couch. “Who is this fuck! We don't even know this guy, why did you bring him here! You think we wanna watch you get fucked by this shithead, huh? Well, we fucking don't, you pathetic whore!”