American Dead

by PW Cooper

  High Orbit Over A Distant Planet

  Gena shrugged on her jacket and stepped down off the porch. “You got money?”

  “Yeah yeah, I got it,” Trevor was trying so hard to look in every direction at once that he seemed like he might tie himself in a knot with all his twisting around.

  “What, are you worried we'll get robbed? Give me a break, Trev.”

  “You never know.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Shut up. God, you're so paranoid!”

  “It's not paranoia if it's, you know, real.”

  “Whatever. Let's go already!”

  The sun shone angry hot and dim through thick cloud, flooding High Gorge Park with defused light and illuminating the dust thick in the air. A pile of old chains were coiled like rust-red entrails in the scrub grass behind the Riley's trailer. Gena gave the raspy steel a kick as they passed, cursing it for the thousandth time.

  Trevor shoved his money back in his pocket. “Where's this guy at, anyway?”

  “Down that way.”

  They threaded their way through the sprawled array of trailers, treading familiar paths through the waste. How many times had they walked together in this place? Gena had missed him so much, missed them all. She ran her hands lightly over the side of somebody's trailer. When they passed the window the curtain inside parted and a yellowed eyeball pushed into the crack.

  “Somebody's watching.”

  Gena just shrugged. “Fuck them. I don't care.” She wasn't afraid of being watched. People didn't scare her. Being alone, being unwatched... now that was frightening. She lit a cigarette and tucked it into the corner of her mouth.

  Trevor grimaced. “You shouldn't do that.”

  Gena laughed. “You hypocrite! Did you forget what we're doing?”

  Trevor sighed dramatically. “Nicotine is addictive, Gena.”

  She laughed again. “So's caffeine. Who cares?”

  “You don't wanna be dependent, Gena.”

  “You'll be alone forever with that kinda attitude, Trev.”

  “Maybe, but at least I'll be healthy.”

  Gena wrinkled her nose and blew capricious smoke into the air. Trevor coughed, waving his hand in front of his face his face.

  She tapped her knuckles against the sides of the trailers as they walked, daring something to happen. The park seemed dangerous to her now, as though anything might happen. She'd seen a story in the newspaper a few days ago about a rape-murder in Cortland Country. Bad things were happening all over, not just here in Verden. There was a picture of the killer in the paper, and nothing of the victim but her name and age: Vanessa Jenkins, 15 years old. Gena wondered what she'd been like, if she'd had friends. Did anybody miss Vanessa Jenkins?

  Richard Ewan's trailer was on the far edge of the park. The curtains were drawn and the door locked. Gena pressed the doorbell button with her thumb. It seemed to be broken, so she gave the door a hard knock after what felt like an appropriate interval.

  Trevor and she stood there for several uncomfortable moments, waiting for some sign of life. The door creaked open and a thin face peered out. The lights were all off inside the trailer, draping the man's face in shadows. He had a thin black beard, sort of patchy and sick. “Yeah?” His voice was oddly distant, as though it were coming from deep underwater.

  “We need something,” Gena said

  The thin face, Richard Ewan's face, twisted. “Yeah? You selling Girl Scout cookies or something?”

  Gena made a face right back. “No, I mean we need something.” Trevor pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket.

  Richard looked at them a moment longer, then he laughed, an eerily high-pitched sort of laugh, vaguely rodent-like. He looked Gena up and down, “Shit... I know you. Okay okay, come in already.” He eyed the money in Trevor's hand. “And put that crap away, right? Come on now.” He shook his head at them, sort of paternally dismissive. Why did everybody still treat her like a child?

  Gena and Trevor followed him inside the trailer. There was an foul, faintly acrid smell, like dirty laundry and chemicals. Filthy dishes were piled in the sink and garbage strewn across the floor. Leaning against the wall beside the television there was a small painting of a nude woman with empty eye sockets, holding the bloody orbs in her upturned palms like a pair of pitted cherries. Gena stared at the painting, unable to tear her gaze away.

  “You like that?” Richard asked, following her gaze back to the blinded woman. “I did it back in art school.”

  “It's... interesting,” Gena managed, struggling to keep her stomach steady. There was something about the painting which struck her as inexpressibly grotesque. There was a perversity there which she could not clearly define.

  “Anyway, I'm in the middle of something. Give me a second, okay? Sit down or whatever." Richard nodded at a couch covered in half-folded newspapers and food wrappers before he disappeared into the rear of his trailer.

  Richard Ewan, it was said, was the disowned offspring of some ludicrously wealthy Long Island family, living here in self-imposed exile. He had no job to speak of, aside from dealing pot from his trailer on a scale so small that nobody could quite figure out why he went to the trouble. Gena had only come once before, and truth be told, she'd been too frightened to return without company. Evidently, Richard didn't remember her very well.

  Gena pushed aside a crumpled newspaper and sat gingerly down on the filthy couch. She still couldn't stop looking at the picture of the woman. It gnawed at her, like a buried memory fighting to surface. Why? What did it mean? Why paint it? Why did it bother her so much? Her skin crawled.

  A moment later Richard came back into the room. Trevor gave him the money, and he gave Trevor a little bag which Trevor immediately stuffed deep into his pocket. Richard frowned. He pushed his shaggy hair out of his eyes, pressed two fingers to his temple. “You kids have fun, right?” And with that he drifted back out of the room, like they'd already gone and he was alone again.

  They wasted no time leaving. Gena looked at the painting once more before they went out the door. She almost thought she saw the eyes in the woman's hands blinking. Only the light playing tricks.

  Fifteen minutes later they were back in Gena's trailer, alone with an ounce of reasonably tolerable weed.

  “Do you ever think about killing yourself?” Trevor stared at her through the haze of pungent smoke. He was stretched out on her bed, his head propped up on her pillows.

  She looked back at him, her back up against the wall.

  “Do you think about killing yourself?” he asked again.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  She could feel the dope kicking in. Her brain felt untethered inside inside her skull, like her head was growing larger around it. “I guess I don't know.”

  “What do you think happened to Mike?” he was still staring at her.

  “I think he fell.”

  “Just fell?”

  “Just fell.” She nodded heavily.

  “What if he didn't just fall?”

  “I don't care, Trevor! I mean, it hardly matters anymore, does it? I can't think about that shit!” She felt a sudden swelling of anger. Goddamn Michael! Did everything have to be about him? She hated him for dying, for leaving her, for changing everything. She couldn't understand why everyone cared so much, why they all seemed to want to talk about it. Even her Dad had felt the need to bring it up. Couldn't they just let him be dead?

  “I care. I do care about him.” Trevor hardly seemed to be talking to her anymore. His eyes were glazed over, staring sightlessly towards the window.

  “Good for you, I guess.”

  He wrapped his arms around her pillows, drawing them to his chest. He spoke into them, his voice getting muffled and soft. “He was the first one.”

  “The first one what?”

  “Huh?” Trevor stared at her, like he had just notice that she was in the room with him. His lids were heavy.

  “What does that mean? About Mike bei
ng the first one?” Gena closed her eyes. The room was revolving slowly around her. It was making her a bit dizzy.

  Trevor didn't seem to have heard her. “I think about it sometimes. Suicide, I mean. I think I'd want to do it really simply. I used to wonder about how would be the best way, you know, so everybody would miss me after I was gone. Now... I guess I'd just want it to be over quick.” He looked back at her, his gaze eerily open, eyes bloodshot. “I think I'd hang myself in my basement. You know, from one of those like... water pipes...”

  The wind moaned outside, soft and guttural.

  Gena lit a cigarette, trading off the two and feeling like she was drowning in smoke. Her parents would smell it when they got home for sure. Maybe she wanted them to know. “I'd want to be run over by the train,” she said, “I've always wondered what it would be like. What would happen to my body... if train would jump the tracks. I think I'd like it, just laying there real still on the rails feeling the earth shake beneath me.”

  Trevor's eyes were wide open, the pupils fully dilated. “Really?” He stared at her all owly and ruffled.

  Gena burst out laughing. She slumped over, giggling so hard that her gut hurt.

  Trevor laughed reflexively along, “What? What? What's funny?”

  The carpet was getting in her teeth. She waved him off. “You. You're funny.”

  “I'm funny?”

  Gena bit her tongue until she stopped laughing. She stared at the dark space beneath the bed. “I wish I had a boyfriend,” she said, the thought suddenly occurring to her.

  “Me too,” Trevor muttered, and Gena started giggling again. The laughter bubbled painfully in her chest, driving the breath from her lungs.

  “Just think about it,” Gena said, pulling herself up onto the bed, “think how good it wold be. To have somebody who would... buy you things. Love you. Want to be with you all the time. Somebody who... cared enough.”

  Trevor took a long hit. “Don't forget sex.” He groaned.

  “Right, sex too.”

  “You ever do it?”

  She shook her head. “No. I told you that. What, you think I'm a whore?”

  “No!”

  “You do! You think I'm a whore, Trevor!”

  “Shut up.” He waved her off, giving up.

  “What about you, have you done it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Seriously? Not even once?”

  “Well... No, I guess I haven't.”

  “So, uh... how do you... you know... How do you know? If you're gay, I mean?”

  Trevor gave her a look which was half-indulgence and half-annoyance. “How do you know if you're straight?”

  “Shut up! I just... know.”

  “There you go.”

  “Have you told your parents yet?”

  Trevor rolled back onto the pillows. “What, about smoking pot? No way. Not that they'd give a shit, long as I'm still doing okay in school, they're happy.”

  “That's not what I meant...”

  He rolled his eyes. “I know what you meant. Nah, I haven't told them about that yet.”

  “Don't you think you should?”

  “What's the point?”

  “I don't know. Don't you want them to know... you know, who you are?”

  “They're my parents, Gena. As far as they're concerned I'm still just a kid. I don't think they want me having sex with anybody.”

  “They're gonna find out eventually.”

  “I guess so.” There was a sort of regret in his voice, an untempered resignation. “Maybe they already know. I mean, everybody in High School knew.”

  Gena nodded. It had been crazy, Trevor was the first person “out” in the whole school – first ever, as far as Gena knew. It hadn't been easy for him, to say the least. When he wasn't getting teased he was getting beat up, and when he wasn't getting beat up, he was simply excluded. His list of friends that year had dwindled fast, until it was only the trailer park kids, and none of them ever seemed too comfortable with it, Molly and Gena excepted.

  “I still think it might have been better not to tell everybody,” she said, “I mean, it was really brave and all, but it-”

  Trevor was frowning at her. “What are you talking about? I never told them. Do I look stupid?”

  “Well... then how'd they find out?”

  Trevor shrugged, slumping back into the pillows. “I guess Mike must have told them. I mean, some of them probably just figured it out on their own, but...”

  Gena stared. “Mike? Mike Conner? When the hell did he find out you were gay? Did you tell him? I thought I was the only person you ever told...” She felt a bit hurt, even though she knew it was selfish of her.

  Trevor groaned, rubbing his eyes and waving at the smoke hovering in his face. “I didn't tell him, really, it just... fuck, I don't wanna talk about it.”

  Gena went and sat on the edge of the bed. “Come on, tell me.” She grabbed Trevor's big toe through his sock. “I always tell you everything...”

  He laughed. “You do not,”

  “I do too!” She thwacked his leg. “I told you about getting my period in math class, didn't I? And that's the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me. I didn't even tell Molly about that.”

  “Fine, fine. I'll tell you about me and Mike, but you have to tell me something first.”

  “Something like what?”

  “Something that I don't know. That nobody else knows.” He propped himself up on his elbow.

  Gena thought about that for a while, then she got up and lay down next to him on the bed. She could feel his eyes on her. “Okay,” she said, “I'll tell you something you don't know.”

  Frame – Gena's Story

  “Is that it?” Molly peered over my shoulder. She laughed breathlessly, pressing her fingertips to her lips.

  I held the picture by the sharp corners, like it was a heated shard of metal. “I guess that's it.” I was thirteen years old.

  My father in the picture didn't yet look like himself:

  His hair was thicker and darker in the picture than it is now, his face more narrow. His chest and arms and legs were covered in fine black hair. His cheeks were unshaven, and between his legs there were thick pubic curls glistening with sweat. His chest narrow, his skin pale, his arms hanging limp at his sides as though he was unsure what to do with them. I recognized the room in which he stood. It looked new in that picture, just as my father did – nude as birth.

  Molly reached out to touch the picture with the tip of one painted fingernail, and she laughed again, her brassy deep-in-the-throat laugh.

  I looked at it, hanging between my father's legs, and I felt queasy inside. I didn't want to look, but I could not look away. I had seen them before, of course, hidden away in school encyclopedias, scarcely more than outlines, just an innocuous nub like a misplaced finger, just black ink on white paper. This was real. I could see the color of the skin, could see the way the shadow formed around it, could see how it looked as though it was in the process of uncoiling, like a lazy reptile lifting its long neck from sun-scorched dust to gaze up at you.

  We stared at the picture. We hadn't set out to find it. I don't remember what we were looking for in my mother's dresser drawer, but it wasn't that. We found the smell of old wood and old perfume, and we found the picture stuck in the far back corner of the faux-ceder drawer.

  Molly and I were alone in the trailer, listening to its empty body creaking around us like the straining ribcage of a digesting beast, listening to the maddening silence like a tick inside the brain. We strained our ears for the crunching sound of a car in the drive, for the snick of a key into the lock, for the moan of the door hinges. My fingers tightened like a vice-grip.

  I turned the photo over. There was a date written in smeared pen-ink, beneath that an illegible caption in scrawled cursive. That date, 1985, it was the year that I was born.

  Molly sat beside me. The bed springs creaked like a dirge and I turned the picture back over. I blus
hed, dropped it to the pale green carpet. I couldn't bear to look at it again, not at that, not him.

  Molly picked it up. “This is really him?” she asked, and pushed it back into my hands.

  There was a boy in school, a grade below me, who used to sit away from the rest of us at lunch and, in some dark corner of the cafeteria, he would spread across the table his collection of the glossy pictures he'd cut from his father's magazines. The other boys gathered around him and leaned over the table, lips curled and limbs taut. Whenever one of us girls walked by the boy would snatch back his jagged-edged photos and hold them secreted against his narrow chest, corners bent or folded out to show a creased shoulder or a torn leg or a curl of retouched hair. The boy's voice cracked angrily, ordering us away, a child's voice breaking into adolescent baritone. And he watched us walk from him, unbearably slow while the women in his hands burned. The others watched us go also, and their eyes were so hungry that I wondered if they actually saw us or if they saw only the women from the magazines.

  I looked at my cousin. I couldn't bear to see my father's body again. “Let's get rid of it.” I said, my tongue dry, my cousin's body pressed against mine.

  Molly grabbed my arm. Her fingers were cold. “We should put it back, Gena. We should at least just put it back.”

  I shook my head. It couldn't go back, not ever. The picture didn't tear easily. It felt plastic, invulnerably malleable. My father's image warped in my hands, tormented and, finally, ruined.

  Crush – Trevor's Story

  I remember thinking as the school bus left Verde that the town was swallowing itself, we were all caught in its closing maw.

  I pressed my face against the smeared window of the school bus and imagined that the rumblings of the vehicle were death spasms running through the earth. As we drove out of the town I saw the sign on the roadside: Welcome to Verden, a little bit of heaven. It terrified me to see those words, I don't know why. My head sank down against the seat and I felt the bus through my skull, sound through to the bone drowning out the chattering of the Verden High Senior Class. The grinding gave way to a low hum when we got onto the highway, and I lifted my head.

  We were going to Washington DC; others had gone before, and now it was our turn. Mike Conner was sprawling on the seat beside me, bored with the world and picking at a scab on the back of his thumb. It was early September of the year 2000.