by Vicki Grove
Steve’s last music should have been Memphis blues, not this. Anything but this.
We reached the pew near the front where Aimee had organized the cheerleaders and class officers and people like that. She sat us down and I saw that everyone had a white rose at the ready, twirling it or letting it rest on the padding of the pew. Jawbones clenching and unclenching above stiff-collared dress shirts. Red, red lipstick and nail polish on the girls, and that hat of Aimee’s with a coolness factor right off the charts.
We were the stars of a heartbreaking movie about fast cars and sudden death. The good-looking friends, the tragic survivors. Except that these people, this row of the class royalty, hadn’t been Zero’s friends, or Trey’s, or Steve’s. Trey and Steve and Zero were their own friends, we four were, the three of them and me. They were my friends. Mine.
I glared, hard, at each of the three shining boxes strategically placed right up front among the worst of those massive clots of flowers. Do you see me, guys, alone here?
The organ gained some volume and the families were paraded to the front, held up by ushers. They looked doped up and out of it, especially Steve’s mother. She looked like she was just learning how to walk. Jasper Nordike was pretty much holding her up. His face looked so weird that for a second I thought he was doing something strange with his wife’s makeup to be in solidarity with Steve’s trip down the bluff. Then I got a grip and figured out Jasper Nordike had an extreme cowboy tan, his forehead ghostly white from his Stetson, everything beneath it rawhide dark. Two people with Steve’s mother and Jasper Nordike but not looking at them must have been Steve’s dad and stepmother.
Zero’s grandfather had the hot, roving eyes of a lunatic, and Trey’s kid sister, Emilie, spotted me and waved a tiny sad wave. I automatically winked and gave her the thumbs-up sign, the sign I gave her about a million times when Trey put me in charge of teaching her how to ride her bike a couple of years ago. Stupid! That had been a stupid, stupid gesture that made me sick.
So I wouldn’t do anything that stupid again, I slouched down, crossed my arms, and braced my neck over the hard curve at the top of the pew. I focused my eyes almost straight upward and concentrated on the border that ran just beneath the high ceiling of the room. Somebody had painted a long, skinny picture up there of old marble buildings surrounded by deep woods. Lots of sleepy-looking people in white robes lolled around the woods and sailed golden boats along a blue river that ran between the trees.
If that picture was supposed to be heaven, it looked way too slow for Trey and Steve, let alone Zero. I knew it wasn’t exactly supposed to be heaven, though. It was just some imaginary place meant to lull you into thinking things would always stay the kind of bland that must pass for beautiful if you were as old as you were supposed to be to die. Beautiful like the odorless flowers and the going-nowhere organ chords and the cloudthick pink carpet. I began peeling strips of green from the stem of my rose.
The organ droned on. Time went by. People walked to the podium and read things. A trio of girls from the senior class sang a sad song. Aimee finally dug into my ribs with her elbow, indicating it was nearly time for our big moment here on royalty row, for us to lead the exit from this place by filing past the grief-stricken families and then the three caskets, leaving our perfect white roses in heartbreaking disarray on their closed lids.
I looked down and saw that my hands were suddenly shaking quite badly. My heart had somehow morphed into a flopping fish in the oxygenless river that ran along the border beneath the ceiling. I was drowning in that fake water. I broke out in a sweat that soaked my shirt, and my lips went numb. I couldn’t remember how buttons worked, so I grabbed my collar and ripped it open with a jerk of my fist.
And then I shot to my feet, panting, swaying a little in that ocean of seated people.
Aimee clutched at my sleeve, trying to pull me down. I saw an usher hurrying toward me. A few of the family members turned to see what was going on behind them.
When Zero’s mother saw me standing there alone, she stood as well. In fact, she eased quickly past some of the knees between her and me and then leaned over the back of her pew to grasp my wrist. We locked eyes and I saw that hers were completely blank, as though all the crazy fun inside her, all the silliness and laughter, had been carved out and thrown away.
One rainy week near the end of last May, I spent hours each afternoon with Zero and his mother, watching movies at the crazy, cluttered trailer where the two of them lived. I was there because Zero had a free trial week of the movie channel, and with all the rain neither of us could work outside at our lawnmowing jobs or even think about organizing a barbecue. All the dishes were usually dirty, so we used paper cones made from the Sunday comics to hold the cheese popcorn Zero’s mother was always making for us.
Once, when the movie was bad, silly-bad, a real howler, Zero and I started throwing popcorn at each other. From where she’d sprawled on the couch, Zero’s mother jabbed her bare toes into our sides, tickling us like we were little kids. Then Zero and I rolled around wrestling on the littered carpet while his mother threw her popcorn at us and laughed herself into a coughing fit.
Now she whispered my name in that hushed place. “Tucker?”
I looked at her, waiting.
You saw him, didn’t you? she asked me with her hollowedout eyes.
“Yes, I saw him,” I whispered back to her.
And then she looked slowly down the rest of that aisle of white-rose-bearing junior class royalty. She focused on them one by one, and they all dropped their eyes quickly so that not one of them had to meet her bruised, withering gaze.
When she’d finished that, she gave a hard smile and looked at me again.
“They need to see too,” she breathed so quietly no one else could have heard.
She beckoned to the usher that loomed nearby, and he scuttled to her side and leaned one ear close. She gave him whispered instructions, and you could tell from his expression that he didn’t like what he was hearing. He whispered something back, but she glared a response so firm that he gave a sigh and nodded, then grimly signaled for the other three ushers to join him up front.
Together, they unlatched the lid of Zero’s casket and propped it wide open.
Aimee shrank back, but I suddenly felt true hot anger making me brave and foolhardy. I took her arm and pulled her to her feet, almost yanked her, and together we walked past the two closed caskets and then stopped before the single open one.
She glanced at Zero, then she jerked her arm from me and hurried on down the aisle that led outside. All the kids that came behind us did pretty much the same, dropped their roses, trampled them into the carpet as they gave Zero a quick look, then made toward the exit with wide eyes, gulping or even retching. A couple of the varsity football players loped down the exit aisle with their hands over their mouths.
I stayed at the casket until everyone on royalty row had left, then I looked at Zero’s mother. She stood again and began unwinding a long and beautiful cloth she had around her own neck. It was this batik stuff she makes, a real art form, Janet says. She held the blue scarf out to me and I got it and took it back to Zero’s casket.
It wasn’t that his head was still missing clear to his eyebrows, like it had been at the beach. No, the funeral people had molded him a replacement skull with some sort of clay. But it was so obviously fake that it was really worse than no skull at all. For one thing, it was slightly the wrong color, too gray for his skin. And all his beautiful dreads were gone; what hadn’t been taken by the rough stone of the bluff had now been shaved.
I leaned down and wrapped the batik around and around his head, giving him the protection of all those Haitian animals his mother had designed—antelopes, fish, turtles.
I glanced at her again over my shoulder, and when she nodded, I closed the casket forever on Zero’s interesting, intelligent face. Then I walked outside, into the clear air.
Aimee was waiting. She slapped my face.
“What’s the matter with you, Tucker? Don’t you have any respect at all? Doesn’t his own mother? You should . . . you should be ashamed of yourselves!”
I looked down at the grass. I wanted to drop to my knees and smell it, just to smell something with a smell. I wanted to disappear into it like rain.
Instead, I turned away from Aimee, slung my jacket over my shoulder, jerked my tie the rest of the way off, and trudged home.
Bud was sitting on the bottom porch step when I got there, and the weird dog was with him, sitting on its haunches with its three tongues out. One of its feet was on Bud’s shoe. It looked sort of . . . blurry. Like it was made of light or something?
“Bud? That’s . . . the dog,” I told him in a hoarse whisper.
Bud and the dog both looked at me. Bud had his hands on his knees, and he was sitting in his usual straight-backed way. The dog had the hazy look things have when you come out of the swimming pool with water and chlorine in your eyes.
“Whaddaya talking about?” Bud growled. “You don’t look so hot, by the way. Must’ve been bad, that funeral, those boys so young?”
“Pretty bad, all right,” I told him listlessly. My legs hadn’t been a factor during the funeral, but now they suddenly throbbed. Did things hurt worse when infection set in?
“You need a diversion,” Bud said, “something different to put your mind on. I got just the thing. Listen, I called the fools at the driver’s license office today, the ones what gave me the eye test last week? I figured out it was rigged, so I called and told them so. Threatened to have the authorities after ’em for elder abuse and eye discrimination. You can bet that scared ’em plenty. They’re giving me the test again, tomorrow. You’re taking me, see?”
He pulled a key fob from his shirt pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it and looked down at it. These two keys weren’t to the Taurus. They were different, longer, older-looking. They had four capital letters stamped into their greenish copper—OLDS.
“So . . . that car in the garage is . . . is yours, Bud?”
That old green Oldsmobile had just been collecting garage grit out there for years. I’d assumed it belonged to my dad, that it was one of the many things he left behind when he walked away. No one drove it. No one talked about it. It just sat like some bloated green insect, using space Janet could have used to park the Taurus instead.
Bud gave a snort. “Think Janet would have a muscle car like that?”
“Guess not,” I murmured.
“It’s a shame I don’t have my old Ford truck. They’d see something if I was at the wheel of that big old Ford, I’ll tell you that. This Olds has plenty of style, though. They made ’em pretty in the seventies. Lotsa power in a V-8 engine.”
The dog had been fading and now was gone. I climbed the stairs, stepping wide around where it had been. “Later, Bud,” I said, pocketing the fob.
“Yeah, we go tomorrow!” he called after me. “Don’t forget! No need to tell Janet.”
I couldn’t think about any of this. It was all I could do to block the pain of my legs enough to slowly climb the stairs to my room, leaning hard on the banister. I dropped my jacket and tie on the floor and fell face forward across my bed, where I lay the rest of the afternoon listening to the tiny chattering of Trey’s rock there on the windowsill. I remember it starting to get dark. Then I guess I fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning still in my funeral clothes, though my shoes were off and a blanket had been thrown over me. I felt a small pain where Bud’s keys were grinding into my leg near my right hip bone. I rolled onto my back and pulled out that key fob.
I held it up and stared at it. Bud was expecting me to drive him to the license office this afternoon, but I just couldn’t any more than I could sprout wings and fly. I couldn’t drive anyone anywhere ever again, that was just a fact of life.
I dug a wadded candy bar wrapper from under my bed and wrote a single word on it, then added another word. Can’t. Sorry.
I went quietly down the stairs with my boots tucked under my arm, feeling every inch like the coward I was. I dropped Bud’s key fob and my two-word note on the table by his LaZ-Boy as I left, trying not to think how he would feel when he saw them.
The damp wind pushed my hair across my face as I slunk along. My hair had that nothing smell of the funeral home. The rest of me smelled like sweaty, slept-in clothes and jeans that were going rank with dry and not-so-dry blood from the backs of my legs.
I got to the school at least an hour early, maybe two hours, but the night custodians were there and one of the side doors was propped open with a cleaning bucket. I slipped inside and wandered around.
Without people the school had a metallic, spaceship feel. It also hummed, and I noticed there was a slight, mysterious vibration coming up from under the floors. It could have been the heating system, but then again, it could have been anything.
I eventually found myself standing in front of Zero and Steve’s side-by-side lockers. They both had shiny new combination locks on them that hadn’t been there before. Steve’s old lock had been busted, and Zero had recently been using his to chain his skateboard to the school bike rack. What were these new locks supposed to be for?
Possibly to protect their stuff till somebody could take it home. But more likely the police were planning on dragging Clyde the drug dog out here in hopes of sniffing out something illegal that had caused the wreck to happen. It seemed like the police would assume that druggies with stuff hidden inside their lockers would be careful to have locks, but what did I know about it? Nothing. I knew nothing about that or much of anything else.
Too much thinking was making my head hurt, so I walked on to Trey’s locker, which is next to my own. It also had a new combination lock on it. I couldn’t even remember Trey’s last lock since for so long he’d preferred the risk of having stuff stolen to the work of remembering his combination. I sat on the floor with my back against the cold green metal and imagined how Trey’s brown leather jacket was probably still under the multiple layers of mess in the bottom of this locker, the arms shaped like Trey’s arms from the great age of the thing and its general grungy stiffness.
Hey down there, Tucker Graysten, you innocent wonder, you . . .
I felt sick each time I remembered the way Trey had sounded when he’d dropped that quick sentence into my hoop house dream, his sarcastic tone of voice. I bumped my head back hard against his locker, then again, this time harder.
And then I heard the squeak of distant tennis shoes on floor tile and turned my head to see Trey rounding the corner by the principal’s office and coming in my direction. I wasn’t even all that surprised. He was coming to get me, picking me up so we could go together to wherever it was he had to go. I’d be going along for the ride, I got that. I deserved to be where they were, so I stood, resisting the urge to run as he came closer and closer through the glaring path the fluorescent lights cut down the center of the windowless, shadow-shrouded gloom of the locker hall. Calm down, breathe!
“Trey, I’d give my life in a second, I would, if I could just try again to . . .”
Trey’s brother shrugged off his backpack and called, “Try again to what, dude?” He laughed a sharp laugh. “Hey, Tucker, get ahold of yourself!”
He shoved his long red hair behind his ears and jogged toward me the last twenty or so feet. “I’m Aidan, dude! See? Not Trey. Aidan!”
I nodded and then couldn’t remember how to stop nodding.
Aidan grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me back against Trey’s locker, pinning me there until I could get myself together enough for my legs to hold me.
“I’m fine,” I whispered, staring at the floor.
“Yeah, that’s clear.” Aidan snickered and let me go. “That was clear at the funeral yesterday and it’s clear by how you’re acting right now. In my opinion you’re pretty messed up, dude. Maybe you need more sleep or a girlfriend or something.”
He said all this lightly, in the same slightly conde
scending way he’d always talked to Trey’s friends, then he motioned with a waggle of his fingers for me to step aside so he could explore Trey’s new lock. “Who put this thing on here, anyhow?”
I rubbed my neck. “I’m thinking maybe the police.”
Aidan let go of the lock and stood up from his crouch, frowning. “Listen, where’s my ID? I figure it might be in this locker of Trey’s, huh? I can’t get into the library or a bunch of other places on campus without it.”
I murmured, “I think Trey . . . had it with him. Yeah, I know he did.”
“Had it with him?” It took Aidan a few seconds to figure that out, then he gave a nod, followed by a grimace. “It’s gonna suck, trying to get another one. They got all kinds of security stuff you have to go through.”
I stared at him and didn’t say anything. He looked so much like Trey it was incredible. But there was also something the opposite of Trey about Aidan.
He’d been on Trey’s hologram list in eighth grade. “About one out of every ten people worldwide is a two-dimensional mock-up,” Zero had told Trey and me that year we turned fourteen. It was before Steve came. “In other words, they’re holograms.”
Zero developed this theory of holograms to explain the fact that about a tenth of our classmates took regular naps during class and never showed enthusiasm about anything except violent video games or the nasty cartoons they’d watched on latenight TV.
For several months we amused ourselves by making a list of probable holograms from the people we knew, adding people, taking other people off. You got off our snarky little list if you gave out a burst of positive emotion, or laughed a good nonridiculing laugh, or if you quit asking our teachers to repeat instructions three or four times. If you did something generous or otherwise surprising in a good way, you stood a fair chance of getting off our list. Even signs of life in someone’s eyes would often work.
I added three or four people a week and took approximately that many off.