Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  SHE’D BEEN HEARING her name—Leanda? C’mon sit with us!

  The wedding dinner at Chilmark. Long tables beneath the trees.

  They’d prayed it wouldn’t rain and it had not rained. Moonlight glittering on the ponds linked, a visitor had once said, in Leanda’s hearing, like the hemispheres of the brain.

  Across the larger of the ponds was the old stone icehouse, you had to know was a stone building, to identify in the dark. Black rectangle amid the trees she’d had an uncanny feeling, like an optical illusion, but stronger, a hole gouged into the trees you could step into, and disappear.

  Nearer the house were hydrangea, snowball bushes. Such beauty! Like a Chinese watercolor.

  She told herself if I can think this, if I am seeing this, I am on island. I am not in the city. I am not tied down in a hospital bed, in a bright-lit screeching hospital. I can’t be dying because someone would say Oh Lee-lee! How silly, you know you aren’t dying. You are too young to die and besides, Daddy needs you.

  You know, Daddy is waiting for you on island. Daddy can’t walk without you. Daddy can’t work without you. The new exhibit—retrospective at the I.C.P. It will be the opportunity of a lifetime. Daddy needs you.

  DADDY WAS LIFTING HER, high over the beach grass so that she could see the Atlantic Ocean on the far side of the dunes. A fierce chill wind rushed onto land and through the spiky grasses making them shiver and shudder, like living vertebrae.

  FORKED RIVER ROADSIDE SHRINE, SOUTH JERSEY

  KEVIE WE MISS YOU WE LOVE YOU

  Kevie may God be with you

  SOMETIMES HEARING THIS makes me want to bawl. Sometimes it just pisses me, why they can’t say five fucking words without dragging God into it.

  Like God-damn fucking God gives a shit about what happened to me or’d give a shit about what happened to any of them, which they will discover for themselves. Jesus I have to laugh, or bawl, look at those girls’ faces.

  Kevie can you hear us? O Kevie we miss you we love you

  Kevie?

  FIRST THING YOU see from the road is the God-damn cross.

  Three-foot-high homemade cross painted Day-Glo white.

  And on this cross in red letters where the paint kind of drips down like smeared lipstick:

  R

  E

  S

  T

  K E V I N O R R

  Dec. 4, 1991–May 30, 2009

  I

  N

  P

  A

  E

  C

  E

  (Maybe paece is spelled wrong? It looks wrong. Shit!)

  (Once you’re a decaesed person all kinds of embarrassing shit can be said about you, you can’t defend yourself.)

  That shiny stuff wound around the cross is silver foil, looks like, the kind you put on a Christmas tree. And there’s green-plastic vines and snowy-white-plastic flowers shaped like trumpets. At the foot of the cross are (laminated) photos, mostly iPhone pictures Chloe took of me, and pictures of Chloe and me, and me and the guys, and my mom and me, etc. There’s pots of flowers—real flowers—that have got to be watered or they will wither and die, fast. And hanging from the crossbar is one of my sneakers—size twelve, Nike.

  Must’ve come to the house and Mom told them to take whatever they wanted from my room. Whatever they needed for the shrine out Forked River Road. By this time she’d have been totally out of it on Xanax or OxyContin or whatever the hell it is, the God-damn shithead doctor prescribes for her she’s not supposed to take when she’s drinking, or not supposed to be drinking when she takes it, but for sure Mom does. Ohhh—what’re you kids taking of Kevie’s and Chloe says Just one of his sneakers, Mrs. Orr.

  I’m guessing: soon as the news came of Kevie Orr, dead at Lenape Point they got together, at my house. Hugging one another, crying and wailing, and some of them hysterical, and fainting like Chloe would do, hyperventilating, and my mom looking stunned like she’d been hit over the head with a mallet. No matter she’d been pissed as hell at me, and Chloe wasn’t so fucking happy with me, nor any of the relatives in Mom’s family—once it was known that I was dead, they’d want to remember me in a better way.

  Jesus I am glad I was not there for that.

  KEVIE—WE LOVE YOU.

  Kev-ie? D’you hear us? Can you—see us?

  It’s Chloe, and Jill, and Alexa, and—

  Oh shit they’re bringing more crap for the shrine. Plastic lilies. Plastic roses, tulips. Plastic daffodils. Little stumpy candles what’re they called—votive candles.

  The little cross by the road is getting crowded so they’ve started putting things on a tree trunk a few feet away. This is the beech tree the SUV scraped rolling over downhill, tore off the left front fender like you’d tear a wishbone in two, and the tree trunk is scratched like a crazed tiger clawed it.

  Josh is with them on crutches, Josh’s face banged-up and part of his head shaved, but the motherfucker is alive, and there’s Casey, and Fred, bringing Michelob beer, Red Bull, Cokes to position at the base of the tree. My kid brother Teddy looking like he hasn’t slept since the accident, and what’s he got to put by the tree—my hockey stick? And VGHS—the complete set, we’d watched together.

  Each time they drive out here, they bring more pictures. There’s me with my friends, and with my family—(minus my father). iPhone pictures of Chloe sitting on my lap, both of us laughing, Chloe’s eyes look wet with tears, my eyes are shiny-red like a demon’s squinting into the flash. Jesus, I wish I could remember when that was—wish I could slip back in time, to that moment.

  It’s like I am losing it—who I was. Whoever Kevie Orr was.

  WHAT HAPPENED WAS, some kind of hot-white-blinding explosion—then out.

  It was like getting tackled, that time in ninth grade—concussed they said it was. One minute I was OK and the next, I was being dragged on my knees, and my safety helmet was being yanked off, and there was dirt in my open mouth, and I was—out.

  And this time when I woke it was quieter—a smell of something sweet and familiar—(lilac?).

  The tow truck had taken the wreck away, in pieces. The body was gone, and buried. All that was finished. All that was just material stuff.

  Just me left—me. And so lonely, my friends were gone . . . And I lifted my hand to see how bad it was, if my arm was broken or twisted which is how it felt, and I could see—nothing there.

  Later, I looked and saw some kind of an arm, a grown guy’s arm, a left arm, I think had to be Dad’s.

  This arm was attached to me, where my own arm was gone. And it was a muscular arm, and there was Dad’s spider tattoo, with the red eyes, that was a consolation.

  Dad? Hey Dad it’s Kev—Kevie . . . Dad c’n you help me, please?

  Dad I am so fucking scared. And cold, and—I guess kind of blind . . .

  It wasn’t Dad, but kids from school. Tramping in the grasses taking pictures on their cell phones. The big-toothed girl Barbara Frazier president of the senior class was tying ribbons around the beech tree, with knots and bows. And other girls, their faces known to me but not their names, shit! These kinds of girls that weren’t anybody I’d gone out with, or had the slightest interest in, now Kevie Orr is dead anybody can drive out to the shrine and leave flowers and notes and all kinds of shit that’s embarrassing to me, but can’t be stopped.

  Girls kneeling to hide their faces in prayer in the churned-up grass and rubble where the Jaws of Life tore open the SUV to pry me free too fucking late, the body pinned under the dashboard had bled out.

  Blood mixed with oil, gasoline. The stink of gasoline.

  Ohhh this tree, this is a beautiful tree. (What kind of tree is this?)

  Let’s put the balloons here.

  I wanted to shout at them Go away, Christ’s sake! I don’t want fucking kiddie-balloons, what the fuck are you thinking?

  (These are the hard-plastic balloons more like pillows than balloons. They don’t deflate so easy as regular helium-balloons. And ugly brig
ht colors so you can see them from the road, like fucking gonads or something, inner-body organs some asshole might think were Kevie Orr’s insides strung up on a tree.)

  Also there’s a Christmas-tree star, a Christmas-tree angel, a plastic crucifix, pictures of Jesus Christ—(though I am not Catholic, none of the Orrs are Catholic).

  A little American flag stuck in the ground, my grandfather Joe who’d been in the Korean War brought that out.

  The poor kid. Threw it all away. Jesus!

  Seventeen years old. Fuckin life should’ve been all ahead.

  IF SOMEBODY ASKED THEM Why make this shrine here, why when his body isn’t here but buried in the cemetery in town they’d have to think for a few seconds so you could (almost) see the thoughts rising in their heads like bubbles and then they’d say Yes but Kevie’s spirit is here. For here is where Kevie died.

  WHAT IS MEANT by died, I am not sure.

  There was the body that bled out.

  There was the body pinned beneath the dashboard of the SUV.

  There was the body broken, shattered, gutted, wasted.

  There was the body like a sack of skin, leaking from a thousand wounds.

  There was the body that had been Kevie Orr, trapped in the wreck.

  WE WERE RACING on Forked River Road. The guys in the Dodge Ram fell behind. Pressing the gas pedal to the floor, crazy sensation like wildfire rushing over me, such a terrific feeling I’m thinking it’s about time—usually I’m kind of pissed, shitty-feeling, angry, resentful—the crystal meth we’d been smoking makes your heart pound really hard and that’s a good feeling too—like gusts of wind lifting you, like you’re a kite made of some crappy heavy material like wet canvas and it lifts you—Jesus!

  We’d scored in the field behind the high school. We’d had a few hits and some beers and the idea was to see who could get out to Lenape Point fastest, and onto the beach.

  The night sky was riddled with clouds. The moon was behind the clouds very bright. So you could see light through chinks in the clouds like torn cloth. It was a weird excited feeling that seemed to come down, from the sky. From the moon-like-an-eye, weird!

  The Jersey shore at Lenape Point. The beach is pebbly and littered and the tide there leaves all kinds of crap behind some of it wriggling and smelly. The Jersey shore you don’t think is on the Atlantic Ocean, seeing the ocean on a map you’re—whoa!—that is fucking large.

  Racing to Lenape Point in the SUV. Mom said, you can use it if you don’t waste gas, OK Mom I told her, that’s cool. I’m a good guy basically, I know this. I’m protective of my mom like Mom has any clue of any fucking thing. Seems like I’m always trying to argue this. People looking at me, at school, younger kids at Forked River High looking at Kevin Orr, Josh Feiler, Casey Murchison like they’d give anything to be us. And the girls. And this, our last God-damn year. Graduation in three weeks. And it wasn’t clear what we’d be doing this summer let alone next year or the rest of our lives, at least not what I’d be doing—maybe a job at the stone quarry, if my uncle Luke could still get me in, maybe more likely we’d enlist in the U.S. Army where they train you for a job. The war in Afghanistan—where we’d be sent—is supposed to be ending. That’s what people say. And we’re saying There’ll be another war maybe—Iran? There’ll always be a war. We were high laughing how the “armed services” is a way of seeing the fucking world, there’s no future in fucking Forked River, New Jersey, for God-damn sure.

  Going into the turn at seventy-three miles per hour, the road sign posted for forty, sure I knew (I guess) that the (blacktop, much-cracked) Forked River Road turns sharply here, up onto the narrow ramp of the Lenape Point bridge which is one of those God-damn old single-lane plank-floored bridges of Lenape County and beyond it is an entrance to Lenape State Park and a half-mile inside the park, the Jersey shore at Lenape Point.

  Should’ve known about the turn. The bridge. Jesus we’d been driving out to Lenape Point all our lives, far back as we could remember, young kids in such vehicles as the SUV driven by our fathers or older brothers or older guys but now three weeks from graduation from Forked River High we’re the older guys and the weird thing is, this stretch of Forked River Road isn’t so familiar by night, there’s a mist rising out of the grasses at the edge of the road or out of the narrow strip of river you can’t see from the road. Big sand-colored boulders, rocks and pebbles at the edge of the river where the water is just puddles or has dried up. The headlights behind us were blinding in the rearview mirror but are falling back now, the SUV is pulling away from the pickup Jimmy Eaton is driving, that belongs to his old man. Even at this time when the gas pedal is essentially pressed to the floor I’m kind of distracted by some fucking thing on the dashboard, can’t keep my hand off the AC or the radio dial or the fan or whatever the fuck it is, lowering a window, raising a window, and so going into the curve I’m feeling the sick sliding sensation even before the SUV begins to veer out of control, the SUV that’s registered in my mom’s name, that’s thousands of dollars from being paid off so at the back of my brain just before the moment of impact against the guardrail there’s the shamed knowledge

  It will never be paid off now.

  SKIDDING TIRES. SUV hits the guardrail, smashes through the guardrail, overturns, rolls over, and again over down the (eight-foot) decline to the dry-bed edge of the Forked River, crashing against shrubs, trees, shearing bark from trees, overturned in the dry-bed and tires spinning, steam lifting from the radiator. The driver is pinned behind the wheel, and beneath the wheel, crushed beneath the dashboard. The driver wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The three passengers were not wearing seat belts. Pretty badly injured Josh, Casey, Flynn manage to crawl out of the SUV, broken and bleeding like snakes that’d been stomped (you can stomp a snake so you’d think the thing was broke, all the vertebrae broke, so it’s like a flattened piece of hose but a snake can fool you, a copperhead can fool you, even the little brain inside the bone-head you can stomp beneath your booted foot but the fucking thing is not-dead and if you’re not alert it can leap at you and sink its poison-fangs in your leg)—and when the ambulance comes they are carried away and taken to the ER (at Atlantic City) fast enough to save them but not Kevie Orr who’d been driving impaired and speeding, estimated thirty-five miles above the speed limit on the narrow winding road, not wearing a seat belt, pinned inside the vehicle and pried free by the Jaws of Life but too late.

  THE LENAPE LEGEND of the Death Song dreamt in the womb.

  The Lenape Dream Festival. Ceremony of the Great Riddle.

  Lenape Indians of all ages came forward to tell their dreams. The tradition was, women as well as men. Young as well as elders. A Jesuit recorded in 1689 that the Lenapes were pagans, they had no God but the Dream. The Lenapes follow the Dream in all things blindly. Whatever the Dream bids them, they must do.

  In ninth grade New Jersey state history we learned. So much we forgot of what we’d learned. Like wind whistling through our empty heads like wind stirring the tall grasses of the cemetery behind the red-brick Forked River Church of Christ. But I remembered the Death Song. Don’t know fucking why, when I forgot so much, I remembered the Lenape Death Song. How before the Indian baby was born the Death Song came to it in the womb and each song was different from the others. When the baby was born, the Death Song was forgotten. You open your eyes, you suck in your first deep breath of air—the Death Song is forgotten.

  The young Lenapes would fast, hunt until they were exhausted, the young boys beaten with sticks by the older braves, their own male relatives. Dancing by firelight, torture by fire, starving so their bones showed through their skin, sweating—these are ways of bringing back the Dream. But these are incomplete ways. The Death Song is the song to be sung at death, your special revelation which is your Death Song. No one will know this Death Song except you.

  O Jesus no one knows this except you. And you—you are obliterated now. You are gone.

  AND MY MOM IS CRYING saying it’s nasty and cruel for
people to be blaming me, like it wasn’t terrible enough how I died, bled to death trapped inside the upside-down SUV that she was nowhere near paying off and behind on insurance payments also. Jesus I wish she wouldn’t drive out to the shrine, Mom and her sisters Stace and Claire, crying, and angry, and stumbling in the grass and Mom is saying How dare they judge us what are they thinking for her sisters have been telling her what people in town are saying, people who’ve pretended to be Mom’s friends, shitheads she’s known most of her life and never judged them—How dare they judge my son, how dare they say anybody deserves such a thing to happen to them and Kevie such a sweet kid and only eighteen, his whole life before him.

  WET WIND OFF the Atlantic, pelting-down rain. Days of rain.

  Parts of the shrine are sodden, ruined. Some of the photos are blown away in the grass. The Christmas-tree angel is gone. The geraniums survive, barely. The plastic vines and flowers have survived. The lone sneaker has survived, fallen onto the ground, soaked and leaden. The little American flag has toppled over in the grass.

  But there’s sunshine, suddenly—always, there is sun.

  Sound of car doors slamming. Excited voices.

  D’you think Kevie can hear us? Like, his spirit is here?

  Walking in the sand wears you out quick. I remember that.

  Trying to run along the beach, that’s such a crappy “beach”—your feet sink in the sand, a kind of wet marshy smelly sand. Big trees had fallen over in some hurricane, years ago. Must’ve been ninth grade. We’d been drinking beers, smoking joints at the shore. And the day was hot-windy, the ocean waves were high, tall and white-frothed like some kind of video-game threat you’d have to waste with a submachine—quick before they got you.

  Red-hot sun slip-sliding down behind the Lenape State Park pine forest.

  Sometimes it’s my mom, at the shrine. Mom with her sisters Stace and Claire, or Mom with my kid brother Teddy looking sick and scared and resentful at being here.

  The shrine requires maintenance. The shrine is looking shabby after five or six weeks. Mom kneels in the grass, trying to repair it. Teddy stands back staring. Wide-eyed, anxious. Teddy’s eyes drift over mine unseeing. Hey Ted! Hey dude! It’s me.