Plantation of Chrome

by R. J. Coulson

  "Who... the hell... throws someone else’s letter in a goddamned fountain... you bastard!"

  "I didn't know... it was important, god damn it! It's not even written in English!"

  "Some... people... use other languages than English, you know!"

  And the two young men fought on, the letter continuing to float between them. The young man grabbed Frank's head and forced it under water. Frank's lungs filled up and it felt like they were collapsing in his chest. His eyes and mouth still open, he struggled to pull himself back up. He grabbed the other man's foot and, pushing him off balance, he managed to break free from the water. The young man fell down, but he quickly got back up.

  "Wait, wait," said Frank. He was suddenly sad. He picked the letter out of the water.

  "Just let me set it to dry, and..."

  The young man watched how delicately the letter was set to dry on the edge of the fountain. "It's ok. Just take the letter home with you. I don't want to fight anymore," he said. He sloshed through the water and crawled out of the fountain.

  "I can't read it at home,” said Frank. “That's why I took it out in this goddamned wind."

  "Why can't you read it at home?"

  "I just can't."

  "Okay, okay, I get it. You throw a mean left hook, though. What's your name?"

  "Frank."

  "I'm Noah.”

  Noah put out his dripping hand. Frank looked at it, still gasping for air. “Are... are you serious?”

  “Why not? That damned letter is obviously important to you. I shouldn't have just thrown it out.”

  Frank shook Noah's hand.

  “I'm sorry,” said Noah, sitting down on the edge of the fountain.

  “It doesn't matter,” said Frank and, for reasons that seemed to elude his mind at the moment, he joined Noah. The letter was drying next to them.

  “I hope the ink isn't flushed,” said Noah.

  “Nah, it looks legible enough.”

  “You can read it if you want.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Frank leaned over the letter and bobbed his head left and right as he read. When finished, he simply turned his head and stared out into the empty air.

  “Who's it from, anyway?” asked Noah.

  “It's from a friend,” said Frank.

  “All right. How come you can't read it at home?”

  “It's... it's hard to say, and I'd rather not try to explain.”

  “That's all right.”

  “And what about you? Why are you here?”

  “No reason.”

  “No reason?”

  “No... not really.”

  Frank tucked the letter and folded it into a little square. He put it in the envelope and packed it all back into his inner pocket. He stood.

  “Well, thanks for the... fight.”

  Frank started walking away from the fountain.

  “Wait,” said Noah, holding out his hand.

  Frank turned around, but he didn't see the same person that he had fought mere minutes ago. There was an expression of sadness in the man's face. “Can... Can I come with you?” he asked. “Can I?”

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “I don't care. But I don't think you'll like what I'm about to do.”

  Young Noah Stone felt like he was watching the world in slow motion as they approached the shed in the backyard.

  “I'm sorry,” said Frank. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  Frank opened the door to the shed and walked inside. Noah turned around and looked at the back of the big house. As they had walked from out front, through the locked gate and to the backyard, he had noticed that its front had been covered with decorative carvings in stone, wide windows, all painted a light blue, but in the back it looked almost like a haunted house. The gutter was hanging down near the edges of the house, the paint on the window frames was flaking, and the entire back porch was crooked, as if a weight had been put on top of it and increased ever since. The entire garden was surrounded by big, tall, unkempt bushes that blocked the view to each of the neighboring houses.

  Noah heard rusty ramblings from inside the shed, and when Frank finally came outside, he was holding a pickax across his shoulder.

  “What the hell do you need that for?”

  “As I said, it's none of your business.”

  He was already headed for the back porch. Noah followed. The grass was pale and sick under their footsteps, not at all like the grass in the front yard, which Noah remembered being like sheets of sparkling emeralds. He followed Frank, a stranger he'd just met, up the stairs of the porch. Frank opened the flimsy back door and walked inside, the pickax weighing down his slender frame. The room was huge, but simple. It was divided into three sections: one for dining, one for reading the newspaper and drinking coffee, and one for reading books in general. Noah looked at the many bookshelves that lined up the one corner of the room. There was everything from R.L. Stevenson and Victor Hugo to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. He ran his fingers across the books.

  “Did you read all these?” asked Noah, but just as the words left his mouth, he heard a thundering crack. He turned around and saw the pickax rooted to the floor, buried in between the chunks of floorboard, the floor ruined. Frank raised the pickax above his head and let it fall back down, and another section of floor exploded in a cloud of splinters and dust.

  “Holy Jesus, what are you doing?” asked Noah. He ran across the room, towards Frank. He tried to wrestle the pickax away from him.

  “Leave me alone!” said Frank. He shoved Noah away and took another swing with the pickax. Noah grabbed the tool while it was still in midair and pulled it out of Frank's hands. Frank turned around without immediately acting on what Noah had did. Noah just stood with the pickax in his hands and waited. Then Frank looked down into the hole that he had made. He crouched down and picked up a little piece of paper and held it up towards Noah.

  “I need these,” said Frank without raising his voice. “They were taken from me and I need them back.” Frank's voice was trembling. “I don't care who you are... I don't care about you. I don't care about any of this. I only care about these small fragments.”

  Noah nodded and handed Frank the pickax. He then turned around and left the room.

  Frank picked up another piece of paper and stuffed it in his pocket. He already knew from the few pieces he had collected that he had to go deeper and wider, and that it would probably take longer than he'd expected. Sweat was running down his brow and into his eyes. He raised the pickax, held it high above his head, and let it drop to the floor with a fierce crack. Another white square of paper was revealed, and as Frank bowed to pick it up, he heard a crunch behind him. He turned around and there stood Noah, shovel in hand, picking off the loose pieces of floorboard.

  “I figured,” said Noah. “I figured that since those pieces are so small, that they could be hiding between each individual board and not just beneath them.”

  Frank nodded, but something seemed stuck in his throat. He looked at Noah standing there, but this time he couldn't see the man he'd seen by the fountain; the man that had begged him to come along. He didn't understand this chameleon that had come into his house, and he found it odd because Frank had always seen himself as one.

  “Hey look!” said Noah. “I found one of them. See.”

  “What's your last name?”

  “My last name?” asked Noah. “Stone. My last name's Stone.”

  “I'm De Gracy,” said Frank.

  They nodded at one another and continued digging up the floor.

  Frank looked at Noah in between raising and lowering his tool, wondering what sort of kindness he was witnessing; if it was a kindness at all. Maybe it was a fundamental lack of kindness even, he thought; one that seared through both of them like in unspoken unison, one that would keep them bounded from that very day.

  CHAPTER 31

  Stone drove without stopping until he could see the two spires of the church. He stopped at an intersecti
on just across of the cemetery gates and let the sounds of the engine die out. There was momentary relief in the silence that surrounded him; no one had followed. He took off his coat and unbuttoned the lowest button of his bloodstained shirt. There was blood all over, and some of it was dripping on the seat, but as he felt around the area with his fingers, there seemed to be no discernible entry wound. The bullet had grazed him. He ripped the two sleeves off his shirt, tied them together, and created a sash that he then tied up across his stomach to cover the wound. He groaned as he tightened the knot. He then put his coat back on and started the truck.

  Stone drove up the street and turned right by the church. The cemetery was empty of visitors. Stone wondered if he could see Eckleburg's grave from here. He drove up and turned left, passed the church and led the truck up past the forest where Messenger was buried. There was a broad expanse of empty hills that rolled away from the forest and out towards the farms that encircled the northern part of the Plissbury outskirts. Stone stopped the truck where the forest ended and got out. He went to the back of the truck. Grundy's body lay as he had remembered leaving it. He grabbed the body and as he pulled it out of the truck, the wound at the side of his stomach tore with pain. Stone flinched, dropping Grundy on the street.

  "I'm sorry, Grundy," groaned Stone. "It... It just hurts like hell."

  He grabbed the body once again and dragged it along the edge of the forest. The moon sent fickle beams of light down through the tree's leaves, and as Stone was pulling Grundy across the grass it looked as if they both sparkled. Stone looked through the woods to see how far he needed to go, and when he started seeing the cemetery wall past the heavy tree trunks, he decided to slow down. He let go of Grundy's body and walked up to the edge of the forest. It was just barely possible to see the mound that covered Messenger from where he stood. He looked back at Grundy.

  There's no way. No way to get him all the way in there. Not alone. Not like this.

  Stone walked away from Grundy's body and back to the truck. He opened the passenger seat and took out the shovel, which he then carried back with him. He walked up next to the body, took off his coat, and slammed the shovel straight into the soft earth. Every single stab with the shovel sent a shock through him, tearing at his wound, and by the time he had finished digging a hole adequate for a man of Grundy's size, he was drenched with sweat, and the blood from his wound had eaten through the makeshift bandage like a ravenous cancer.

  Stone slouched to the ground, collapsing from exhaustion and pain. He then took out his hand and put it where Grundy's heart was. Through the cloth of Grundy’s undershirt, Stone felt something crease under the pressure of his hand. He lifted up the shirt and saw a folded piece of paper sticking out. He took it out, unfolded it. The letters were big and bold, almost ineligible, as if they had been scrawled down in great haste.

  'The magician is distraught. The barbarian attacks had stopped, but innocent villagers were still dying, all of them at night. The magician walks up to the window of his laboratory. We see him tremble from the cold in the room. He looks up at the stone golem that stands there. There is a table full of pots, herbs and a knife by the golem.

  MAGICIAN

  There is no greater truth than your being, golem. You are built of this very earth, and every day you sink a little deeper into it. I built you, and that is why I know who kills the villagers at night.

  The magician walks up to the golem and stares at it. A tear runs down his cheek, leaving a streak in the moonlight. He puts his hand on where the golem's heart should have been, had it been a real being.

  MAGICIAN

  Had I but only given you a heart, I might have seen it today, but I see nothing now, and I blame you not, for I can never blame you, but myself instead. 'I' built you, and that is why I know that it is 'I' who have been killing the villagers at night.

  The magician bows his head. He then looks at his staff in the corner of the room. He walks to it, picks it up with a careful hand and starts inspecting it like he has never seen it before. His face turns instantaneously red, and the magician breaks the staff in two over his knee, falling to his knees immediately after. His hands go to his face and he weeps.

  MAGICIAN

  I am a sorcerer no longer, and thus I only conjure death. And as my last act...

  The magician rises and takes the knife from the table of herbs. He takes one last look at the golem before stabbing himself.

  MAGICIAN

  I will conjure my own...

  The magician falls to the floor, a pool of blood quickly surrounding his dead body. The golem walks to its master and bows to pick him up, but is only left with red stains on its mechanical hands.'

  A distant flash of thunder showed, followed by a thunderclap that ripped through the entire sky. Stone folded the paper in his hands. There was a long and terrible pause, and Stone felt his outermost layers come peeling off. The words the guard from earlier had said echoed inside of his head.

  Stone looked at Grundy's dead body, and in that moment he saw everything as in a flash; the room under the stage, the farmhand from the stories. and the little chrome figurine that Grundy had found on his first night in Stone's apartment. Another flash of thunder. He took the figurine out of his pocket and put it on the ground next to the hole he had made.

  He got up and grabbed Grundy for the last time. He dragged him to the grave and let the heavy body plump down. He grabbed the shovel and filled the grave. He then picked up the little chrome figurine; it looked nothing like a human being with its two faces, and yet it was the one of all the figurines he remembered as a child that had the ability to look straight back at him. For a moment Stone even doubted if he should stuff it into the ground. He wondered if he should keep it to remind him of the sin of losing, but then he thought of Eckleburg and Messenger. He thought of his father.

  Stone dug the piece of chrome into the mound and stood. There was a distant flash of thunder, but this time, the sound never quite reached Solomon Grundy's grave.

  CHAPTER 32

  Young Frank De Gracy didn´t take his eyes off the poster. He stood in front of it, biting his fingernails, his back slouched into a small hunch. It was late afternoon, and grey, heavy clouds were slowly rolling in from far out of town. Young Noah Stone looked up at the clouds, stroking the sweat away from his forehead and back into his hair. “You coming or what?” he said.

  “A minute,” growled Frank, moving from one nail to the next. The poster still spoke to him. There were a lot of phrases on the poster that were supposed to jump out and catch the passersby, blemish the sprawling, lazy youth with guilt of foreign affairs, but what had caught Frank weren't the brownish tones of misery in a faraway continent or the promises of a better future, but instead a little image of two men. They were in the background of the poster, squeezed in between the O and the M of the word 'PROMISES', and the one, an American soldier, was helping the other to get up and fight. Frank noticed that the two soldiers exchanged a glance of comfort, as if they were telling one another that everything would be all right.

  “You wanna actually go, or do you wanna stare at the damn poster some more?” said Noah.

  “I'm coming, I'm coming,” said Frank.

  “Where's the address at?”

  “It's further up in town, past the church and up by the city hall.”

  “In the city hall?”

  “No, just past it.”

  They continued down the street, the clouds above them rolling along with them. Noah caught a glance at Frank, who quickly noticed his ogling.

  “What is it?” asked Frank.

  “I'm just wondering why you wanna do it, that's all.”

  “Well, why are you? Because we have to?”

  “I wouldn't be doing it at all if it wasn't for you. I'd just've dodged it.”

  “Well, I'd gone even if it wasn't mandatory.”

  “And what's your reason for that? What could possibly make you do that?” asked Noah.

  Frank's f
ace stiffened. “No reason,” he said, a blank expression clouding his eyes. “I just need to go to Europe and help... I have to go fight.”

  “Fight? Fight?! And who the hell you've got to be fightin' for? Look around, Frank. No use of fighting here. See that mother with her child over there by the street corner. She's safely crossing the street, and no fighting's gonna make her any safer.”

  “Maybe because that's an American mother and an American child, Noah. If you'd only read about the horror in Europe, how people die; how people return to their mothers and fathers with no recollection of who they are, and then, when--”

  “But who are they to you?” asked Noah.

  Frank swallowed. “Nothing,” he whispered. “But they shouldn't have to be anything for me do to something. They shouldn't have to be.”

  They walked on past the Plissbury park and took a right by Juniper square. The tall spires of the church shot up in front of them.

  “Look at them towers,” said Noah. “You wouldn't think there'd ever been a fire.”

  Frank shook his head. He looked at the many tombstones that lined up the rows of the cemetery. A woman was crying in the distance, but Frank couldn't see her, only hear her.

  “Must've lost her husband... son or something,” said Noah.

  “I hope I'm never buried here,” said Frank.

  “Why not?”

  “They'd have to put my name on a grave, and people would know where I was for the rest of my... well, rest of time.”

  “That doesn't sound too bad,” said Noah.