by Andrew Smith
“Rider number seven, your heart is beating so hard,” she said.
“I know.”
But I could hardly get the words past the thickness in my throat. Nervously, shakily, I unbuttoned her blouse, and pulled her to me.
Luz always drew me back. She brought me down from the mountain that time I tried to escape, and she kept my head and heart held in a safe place where all my ghosts, disarmed, fell silent.
And I never worried about her father again because I knew there was nothing in this world that would ever pull me away from her.
I told Gabriel that ghost medicine was everything we could ever want; that it was more powerful than we knew, more than we could reckon with. And in the end, I guess it did make us disappear. But it wasn’t like a cheap illusion in a magic show, because we didn’t realize that it took us in pieces, not all at once; and others could see those bits vanish away and I, we, could only feel them in ourselves, thinking all the time, This is what I want, this is what I want, until those lost pieces revisit us in dreams and make us thrash and grab for them only to swish our sweaty, empty hands in the air.
But it never made the other ghosts leave us alone, at least not mine. Not Gabriel’s.
There are things outside of my life that push in. Some of them are second chances. I know that now. Outside the window in the dark, the madness on the other side, pressing toward me. And me, seeing only the signs, the foggy respirations against the glass, but not the faces.
I always wished I could be Tommy Buller; to smile and squint those black eyes and walk all loose and comfortable like him, and never be bothered by the ugliest things. Of the three of us, he held onto himself the best, because he was stronger than the ghost medicine. But he never needed it anyway because he could drive his own ghosts away anytime he’d just squint and smile or shrug and spit. That was what I could feel, hanging on to his clothes like the smell of a horse on a hot day; that day he’d dressed me up in those overalls and boots of his. And I just wanted to feel like that forever, but I forgot about it, too, soon enough. How it felt.
But then I realized, too, how it was just like Mr. Benavidez said; and that when the end of the day comes, it was me, driven, helpless, counting up all the things we had lost while Tommy Buller could smile that coyote smile and embrace all the things he, we, held on to. I want to be like that more than anything and just let those things vanish away. This is what I want.
Giving myself to Luz, our giving, took the biggest part away. Gave the most away. This is what I want. I said that to myself, I know she did, too. This is what I want. Gabriel and Tom saw it, too.
Angels sleep all around us, but up there on that mountain, that was their graveyard. It was marked by that fallen plane, a cemetery cross that says, This is where you come, sitting in the shadow of a stone hand that keeps coming back to me in my dreams, that I see every day, looking over my shoulder like I remember seeing Gabe look back, hearing thunder; those gray fingers pointing upward, saying, This is where you go, this is where you go.
Three boys rode up there.
Not one of them came back.
Maybe all boys die like that.
Sometimes I see myself lying in the dirt, on my back on a warm, starry night, with my feet up on those rocks that contain a swirling and noisy fire, listening, laughing, seeing the sparks spinning above me into the blackness like dying stars, disappearing, becoming something else.
I know you will believe that such a place, and such people, and such events could not be in this world, and that’s okay with me because I don’t need anyone to come looking for anything around here. There’s too much stuff that I haven’t found yet.
But I told the truth here.
I told them all I would.
