American Dead

by PW Cooper

  They walked. The city breathed around them, dense and arboreal.

  “Something odd happened last night.” she said.

  “Hm?”

  “I saw somebody in the park just before I left, out in the middle of the night. Standing right by my car. He didn't say two words to me, but...”

  Edward frowned. “Did he threaten you?”

  “No no,” she shook her head, “nothing like that. It's just... He reminded me of Joe.”

  Edward had no reply for that. He pushed the smooth round button on the pole beside the crosswalk. Across the road there was a red hand help palm-out at them, blinking. They waited for the familiar silver figure, caught mid-stride, to take its place.

  “Does he have family around here? A nephew or something?”

  “No, nothing like that. It was him, Eddie.”

  “Him?”

  “No, not like that. I don't know... Do I sound crazy to you?”

  “Never.”

  “I wonder.”

  There was a tree, a single tree out of the dozens that lined the road, with wrinkled brown leaves, a scattering of them crinkled on the ground. She looked at Edward, eager to change the subject. “Look at that, turning already! In August... Do you think that's a sign, maybe?” she asked, half joking.

  “It's not turning,” he said, “it's dying.”

  “Oh.” Adelaide looked back at the thin gray tree.

  The sapling seemed to tremble in the wind. One frail brown leaf fell; it caught in the breeze and rushed away, dancing softly across the road fifteen feet off the ground. One leaf flown away, and dozens more stirring restlessly on the sidewalk, like they were waiting to be borne up after.

  Something about it made her nervous, something about the sight of that dead tree, dead so young... She didn't like it.

  The sign across the road changed, the little figure stepping boldly out into the light: Walk. As soon as it turned she stepped obediently out onto the road, suddenly desperate to be back inside.

  * * *

  She is lying on the road, and she's having trouble breathing. She blinks up at the sky. She feels a terrible pain in her chest. She hears it after it happens, like an echo: the screeching of breaks applied too late, the meaty thud of vehicle hitting human flesh. The dazed thought swims murkily through her mind that Edward must have been hit by a car. She needs to help him!

  She cannot stand.

  She sees his face above her, eyes wide, mouth twisted with fear. She hears a car door open, and Edward turns away. She hears him kicking the body of the car and cursing. She hears people shouting. She hears a young woman's voice: “Is she okay?”

  She hears a voice, unfamiliar, strained. “I – I... I didn't see her. I just – I mean – I came over the hill...”

  And then she hears Edward's voice again. Edward is alright. She is very relieved to know that. It's important. To know that he's safe. She knows that this is important, though she's not quite sure why. It's difficult to think, hurts to look. Adelaide stares up at the sky. There are dead leaves dancing above her, dead leaves like puppets dangling from invisible strings.

  It's getting dark. How strange, that it would turn dark in the middle of the day.

  She tries to stand. For a moment she thinks she has, but then she realizes that she hasn't even begun to move. The raised voices swirling around her are growing dim. She wants to ask them why they've started whispering. She hears her husband's voice again, getting louder as the other voices grow quieter and then stop altogether, and an early night falls without a sound.

  Come Home

  There was blood on Scott's army fatigues. He brushed at it, brow knit with irritation. The blood was still wet; it spread. He looked at his hand. There were three fingers missing, the thumb and the ring-finger and the pinkie. He sat down hard in the sand. The ringing in his ears was unbearable. He squeezed his eyes shut tight.

  The robes of the dead Arabs fluttered in the wind. Women and men tangled together as though spent in coital exertion, now laying still and glistening wetly.

  Later in the hospital where the army doctors dressed his wounds, Scott had a dream about his father. He dreamed that he was back home in Verden, back in High Gorge Park. His father was beating him.

  His father who had flat broad hands stained as black as those of an old negro, his father who had worked at the foundry since he was a boy. The foundry had closed down years ago and every day that his father was without work he beat Scott. Scott remembered one time that his father had beaten him until his lips were split and his left eye was swollen shut. And then his father had snapped his pinkie like a dry twig. Scott didn't go to school for a week and when he did he told everybody that he'd been attacked by a pair of immigrant workers. They'd probably all known the real truth. The finger never set properly – he supposed at the time that he'd probably be better off without it. The memory of that made him smile years later in the military hospital in the hot desert country and the smile cracked his broken lips as his father's fists had once done.

  He didn't let anyone help him onto the airplane. It's just my hand, dammit, he protested, I can still walk. And he'd glared at them until the pity slid from their faces and the disgust beneath showed through. Show me your true face. When the plane took off his throat closed shut like someone had wrapped their fingers round his esophagus. He'd always been frightened of flying.

  He slept and when he woke the person in the seat next to him was shaking his shoulder and asking him if he was alright. His hand was bleeding through the bandages. He shoved it under his coat and said that he was fine and he turned back to the window and tried to sleep but he could still feel the hot liquid leaking out, working its way down his belly like hot worms creeping across his skin.

  People looked at him differently when he was in America. Some of them came up to shake him by the hand, and they recoiled when he reached automatically to take their offered extremities in his mangled own. And he colored with embarrassment and snarled in their faces, his hate for them coiling like smoke in his mind. He took the bus to Verden.

  The park was just as he remembered it. He went first to his father's trailer, wandering the familiar path.

  The trailer was gone. He stared at the empty patch of worn earth and his phantom fingers twitched maddeningly. He sat down on the hard gravel and stared at the bare earth, his insides sinking and his belly clenching.

  He looked up, eyes filling with tears. His father was coming down the steps of the trailer, coal-blacks hands cupped plaintively before him like a cripple's beggar-bowl, his craggy face twisted with sadness. He reached down to push his iron fingers softly into his son's hair and he stroked it back from his son's forehead and reached down to cup his son's face in his callused hands and raise it up to his own and smile proudly at him. His father put his hands gently over the mangled afterthought at the end of Scott's arm and he patted his son firmly and proudly on the weather-beaten shoulders and the two of them hunched together in the dust like a pair of gray-bearded old men.

  Scott wiped his eyes and he stood up and he kicked angrily at the dirt where his father's trailer had once been. That old bastard. Let him burn in hell for all I care. That fucker.

  He walked aimlessly through the park. He'd been wrong: everything had changed. Sun-browned children ran naked in the long grass on the edge of the field, darting like nymphs in the mottled shadows. All the familiar filth had bred ten-fold throughout the park. Refuse slopping from torn bags, spilled from overfull trashcans, piled in every corner. The stench of soiled diapers and rotten food assaulted him. Broken glass glinted in every rag like cruel lures for the barefoot children.

  All his friends were gone. Molly was gone. Andrew was gone. Trevor was gone.

  He went to Jeffrey Burke's trailer. One of Jeffrey's brothers was playing in the dirt at the foot of the trailer, driving a broken plastic car on empty axles through the thick dirt and across the shards of gravel. His clothes were stained and his too-large shirt slumped off one shoulder
. He stuck his tiny pink tongue out and spat an ugly imitation of a car engine from his throat.

  Scott called out to him. “Hey kid! Your brother home?”

  The little boy had reddish hair and dark eyes that looked sort of empty, like two pools of oil. He shook his head. “Are you a army-man?” He cocked his head like a dog, squinting up into the sun.

  “Something like that.”

  “Can I see your gun?”

  “I don't have a gun, kid.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don't need it now, I guess.”

  The kid looked at his hand. “Is that hurt?”

  He shrugged. He'd forgotten it for a moment. He kept forgetting it, like it was more a terrible dream on the edge of his conscious than a reality. “I guess it does a bit.”

  “Did that happen in a war?”

  “You could call it that, I guess.”

  The boy nodded, satisfied. “I thought so.”

  “Your brother isn't coming back soon, is he, kid?”

  “Why are you calling me kid?”

  “Well I don't know your name do I?”

  “It's Garrett. I'm seven.”

  “So is he or isn't he?”

  “I don't think so. He fought with mommy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh huh. She cried.”

  “That's too bad.”

  “Are you going back to the army?”

  “Maybe. I don't know.”

  The little boy smiled. There were gaps in his mouth, too wide and dark to be natural. “I wanna be a army-man when I'm grown up.”

  “Great.”

  He left the kid there and walked around the trailer, eying it as he went, half-expecting to see something leap out at him.

  Scott had never liked Jeffrey, but you couldn't help but feel sorry for the guy. Whore-son, they called him behind his back. Some people made sideways jokes about it, but everyone knew better than to come out and say it. Some things you just didn't tell a friend. Anyway, Jeffrey was an angry guy, and everyone decided that it would be best not to bring it up. Most of the blacks Scott had meet were angry at something or other. Better angry at someone else than angry at him, had always been his policy. He left them alone and they did the same, for the most part.

  He'd been older than the rest of the kids from High Gorge Park. Held back twice was why he was in their grade. But he wasn't dumb. School just wasn't for him. And it hadn't been easy, with Dad the way he was.

  Scott had known a guy in the army who used to pray every night with his gun in his lap and it was almost like he was praying to his gun, and the gun stuck up between his thighs like a big steel prick. He'd been all kinds of nuts, even more than the usual praying sort. He used to kiss his gun and say that he hoped God would let him kill some Muslims.

  Scott had always shared his father's impatience with religion. Never seen how it was worth a goddamn in the end. Either you wound up in the good place or the bad place, and it didn't matter worth shit if you said a bunch of prayers or not. At least if you never prayed you wouldn't risk saying something to piss God off at you. The way Scott figured it was, God must be a pretty touchy bastard. He treated God the same way he had treated his father, just kept his head down and hoped not to be noticed.

  God would probably fuck you up good if you gave him an excuse.

  Scott went trudging up the hill towards Mike's big house, his bags still slung over his shoulder. He'd never much liked Mike. Lucky fuck like a kid out of one of those books where the orphans always got adopted by the richest family in the story. And what had Mike done to deserve it? Just luck. Why was one person lucky and another person not? What had Scott done to deserve the life which had been given to him? Nothing.

  He knocked with his good hand on the door of the big house. The wound had opened again and it was bleeding pretty bad. He wondered if maybe he should go to the hospital, but he didn't know what he could say. He'd been taught not to tell the truth to doctors. The doctors all wanna take you away from me, his father used to warn him, and if they take you, you know I'll come after.

  He didn't know what he could say now that Dad was gone.

  Mike's mom opened the door. She wasn't wearing any make-up and she looked old and ugly. He thought that women should have to wear make-up all the time, even the ugly ones. That way you'd always know.

  “Scott?” she said, and he was surprised that she knew his name. Her voice kinda shook, like Dad's used to do when he was drunk, when his breath was hot and his hands were clutching and hard. He hated her now, he realized, though he had thought he was in love with her once. But surely this tired old creature couldn't be the same person he'd once dreamed of undressing.

  “Hi, Mrs Conner.”

  “Oh, Christ," she said, "your hand...”

  “Yeah.” He shifted so that it was behind him a little, but not so much that she would know he didn't want her to see it. “Is Mike here?”

  She blinked at him. “I- I don't know what...” she sounded like she was going to say more, but the words just died in her mouth. Her lips were pale and weak looking. He wanted to push her down and smear red lipstick all over her face. How had she ever fooled him into wanting her?

  “Is he coming back?”

  She started crying. Old women's faces got so bloated when they cried. He'd noticed that. She sort of sank down and she didn't answer him. She shook her head. She tried to talk, gasped half-formed words out through her weeping. He wanted to hit her.

  He backed off. He went down the hill and she didn't follow him or call after.

  He walked out to stand in the road and for a while. He wondered if a car would come and run him over. He hoped that there was no afterlife or anything. He just wanted to sleep. His missing fingers twitched and bled. He gave up waiting and he crossed to the shoulder of the road.

  He stood there a while with his bag over his shoulder, then he started down the road and he just walked. After a few good miles, his hand stopped bleeding.

  Independence

  Kimberly was shivering. The bus stop glowed with soft neon ambiance. She sat on the bench and watched the traffic moving through the sleepy town, the break-lights smeared red through the glass.

  This is the last time, she told herself. That determination had over time become a part of her ritual, a necessary step in the process. She didn't even pretend to believe it anymore, but she needed to at least think it. This is the last time. She stared blankly through the glass, at the street glow, at the far pine trees shiver and sway. Her fingers trembled. She could feel every bone in her body rattling. Her black bag felt like it weighed a thousand pounds at her side. She couldn't just wait! She gnawed her lower lip, waiting for the bus to come.

  It seemed strange: she'd fucked Charles Conner not twelve hours ago. She'd done it for money. Hadn't she promised not to do that anymore? She didn't want to be like that anymore, did she? Why had she done it?

  She had been making breakfast for the kids when he came to tell her that she was more than three months behind on her payments. She'd been standing at the kitchen counter watching the light on the waffle-maker while her youngest children ran aimlessly about the kitchen, their bare feet paddling on the fake plastic tile. The light had been glowing a dim, angry orange. When it was green, the waffles would be done. Turn green, she had urged the machine, turn green. The amber light had gnawed, like a mocking eye turned restlessly on her. And then the doorbell rang.

  She ground her palms roughly against her eye sockets. How long had it been now since she'd last gotten high? She could feel herself starting to shake just thinking about it. She hardly even felt methadone anymore. Where the fuck was the bus?

  She had to work tomorrow, her miserable hostess job at the Garden Grill. She couldn't bear it anymore: standing there at the counter smiling through her teeth at those assholes. She hated watching them eat, hated drowning in the wordless chatter of their inane conversation, shivering and sweating and thinking about just how long it had been since there was anythi
ng in the black leather pouch.

  She would call in sick at the restaurant. The thought of working before she'd had a hit was unbearable.

  When Charles Conner had come to the door, she hadn't recognized him right away. She had stared at the trailer park manager a moment, wondering why there was a stranger at her door. Behind her, Garrett pinched Sally and Sally kicked Garrett back. Walker just hunched over at the table, glowering at nothing.

  Her skin crawled.

  Charles had been apologetic, said that he'd put it off as long as he could, but there just wasn't anything he could do. She did have some money – not three months worth, but enough to satisfy him – but her skin had been crawling, She'd needed a hit so bad! She needed that money. And, anyway, she'd seen in his eyes what he really wanted.

  She'd payed Charles with her body before. Once upon a time, when it was all she'd had. She leaned close to him. His eyes were red, as though he'd not stop crying in all the time since Michael died. She touched her lips to his ear, and she whispered something there. The waffle-maker light was green when she'd gotten back inside, waffles burnt black and beginning to fill the room with smoke.

  She met him at the hotel a few hours later. It had all been so familiar, coming back like muscle memory:

  When it was done she sighed. She shut her eyes, let her hands slid down off his back, let her legs untangle themselves from around his torso, let him slip out of her. Charles was breathing heavily into her mussy red hair, panting like a dog, the breath searing and ragged in his throat. She rolled off him and lay still on the bed.

  “I'm sorry," he said, "I can't...”

  “Don't be sorry,” Kim said, snatching a tissue off the bedside table to wipe herself between her legs. The tissue came away damp and warm. “You're doing just fine.”

  “Am I?” Charles laughed weakly, still struggling to catch his breath. “Thanks for saying so, anyway.”

  She turned towards him, resting her hand gently on his arm. “I mean it.”

  He slid his arm away from her, rubbing his wrists. “I'll bet you say that to everyone.”

  She brushed her knuckle along his shoulder. “I don't do this anymore... Not for anyone else.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “You expect me to believe that?”