Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  Suddenly, I realized I’d finished half my meal. I’d eaten half my meal and not even tasted it. I put the food down next to me on the bed and cried.

  Reverend Joseph put his hand on my shoulder. He just let me cry.

  “Can I ask you something straight?” I said.

  “Of course, Donny. Anything.”

  “Do you know where my body is going?”

  “I know you’ve asked for your eyes to be donated. I know about the little boy.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean do you know, am I going to heaven, if I’ve found God? Do you have proof of it?”

  “It’s written in the Bible that ‘whosoever believeth in Me shall not perish, but have everlasting life.’ ”

  I started laughing so hard I almost threw up. It reminded me of being tickled, that kind of uncontrollable laughter. I don’t know where it came from. And then it was gone.

  A feeling came over me that I needed to see my mom more than anything. “Get my mom on the phone. Rev, call her.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Get my mom. I can’t go without seeing my mom.”

  Frank stuck his head in. “Everything okay?”

  “We’re okay,” Reverend Joseph said, “aren’t we, Donny?” He rubbed my back. He nodded at Frank. “We’re okay. We’ll get your mom.”

  “My mom, my mom.” I rocked back and forth, the feeling I needed her like a live wire inside me, burning me from my heart to my fingertips, thrashing me whole.

  “Don’t worry,” the reverend said.

  Frank let him out and he left and I settled back down on the bed.

  I felt better knowing he was taking care of it, that she would come. If I could just see her again she’d make everything okay. If she would just put her arm around my shoulder, I knew I could do it: I could walk those seventeen steps without fainting. I knew if she whispered “Everything is going to be okay” into my ear, it would be.

  Reverend Joseph came back. His face looked mixed-up, like he didn’t know what to tell me. I guess he decided on the truth because finally he said, “I’ve got some bad news, Donny. Your mom’s not coming.”

  I thought I’d heard wrong. “What do you mean she’s not coming?”

  He sat down beside me and put his hand on my back.

  “What do you mean?” I kept saying.

  I felt everything rush out of me like air from a balloon. Two hours left and now there was nothing but the waiting; I’d rather be dead if this is how I was going to feel.

  “I wish I could have one more piece of cheesecake,” I said. “One more piece of cheesecake. One more of anything. You think they’ll give it to me?”

  Waves of sadness then numbness ran through my body, one after the other. Maybe these waves would wash me clean. Maybe they’d pulverise me, grind me down to the size of a stone, then a pebble, not stopping till I was as invisible as a grain of sand.

  “I wish we could just get it over with,” I said quietly.

  “Soon,” Reverend Joseph said. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  The walls were closing in, and the bed, an open jaw, was waiting to snap. Even the blankets wanted to strangle me. I grabbed one in both hands and pulled against the weave of the fabric as hard as I could, trying to rip it, kill it first. It stretched, but didn’t give. I tried again and again. Exhausted, I crumpled back down onto the bed, my body shaking. Reverend Joseph put the blankets around my shoulders.

  “What exactly does, ‘It’ll be over soon’ mean?” I said. “Over for who? And what? What’ll be over? The pain, the sadness that people can do this to each other, this feeling like an ice pick in my stomach? Can somebody explain it to me? What about you, Reverend? Can you explain it to me? Can you? Come on, I want you try.”

  He let me carry on, and then when I was quiet again, he said, “Would you like me to read you something from the Bible?”

  “No. Tell me a story.”

  “Let’s see. When I was a young man with the seminary, I got fed up with the system and decided I wanted to go to Brooklyn to minister in the streets, to people who really needed it. I was tired of writing term papers on subjects that seemed so far away from the actual practice of ministering. I worked with a youth group and took kids camping. I worked in a kitchen and made terrible soup.”

  “Tell me something. Give me something to focus on, now.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Anything. What you ate or drank. What did you see? Did you see a sunset?” I kept going. “Or train tracks. I like train tracks. I never been on a train before. Um, teeter totters, my sister and me. Popsicles. Birds, the little ones. Flies in the summer. They stick to the window and their wings glint in the sun.”

  “Balloons.”

  “Corn dogs.”

  “The world can be beautiful, can’t it?” he said.

  I nodded. Then he read to me from Paul’s words in Romans, “ ‘For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power or height or depth, nor any created thing, can ever come between us and the love of God.’ ”

  “Life in Jesus Christ,” he said. “Life everlasting.”

  “Well, I think that some people can live more than one life.”

  “You mean reincarnation?” he said. “It’s not what the church believes.”

  “No. I think some people can live more than one life. Some people can live many lives in just one existence.”

  He helped me pin the two photographs of Happyland onto my chest over my front pocket, where I’d put the medallion he’d given me. Then he listened as I talked about my family. I told him about how before we had a car, my father rode a bicycle and my mother used to sit on the rat-trap. Whenever we rode to the Little League diamond on Turner Street, across from the raceway, I felt nothing but embarrassed that a friend from school would see me, sitting there on the bicycle, wedged between the two of them, that close to my mom and dad.

  Around the same time, I used to wear a yellow jacket. I don’t know why but one day I wanted an Indian head on the back. Mom bought some fabric, cut out the shape of a head, and stayed up all night sewing it on so I could wear it to school the next day.

  I told him about how walking home from school, I would collect dead bees from the gutter. I thought their bodies looked like jewels. I carried them home, cupping them in my hand so their wings wouldn’t be damaged, and put them in a jar. I loved to open the jar and breathe in the scent of their bodies, which even in death smelled like honey.

  “Donny.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s time.”

  I nodded. We stood up and I grabbed both of the reverend’s hands, hard.

  “Okay.” “Okay,” he whispered.

  “Okay,” but I couldn’t let go.

  We stood like that until Frank said something about procedures and how the reverend needed to get into the viewing box.

  “I’ll see you soon,” the reverend said again.

  And then he was gone. Soon, the hangman will come. He and Constable Willard will escort me from my cell to the execution chamber where reporters, witnesses, and Reverend Joseph will be waiting. Will my father be there? I hope so, now. If I see him in the window, I’ll give him the thumbs up to show him I can do this. I’ll try to wink – it’s all I’ve got left. I can give him this memory, of me trying to be a good sport, even though I had nothing left to lose.

  Prison guards will stand along the hallway marking my seventeen steps. Someone, maybe Frank, will have thrown roses or yellow irises on the floor. The hangman told me a guard had once done this for a man who was a gardener and now the other guards kept the tradition going for certain inmates, because they liked the ritual of it.

  Will I be able to walk or will they have to get the gurney? Will I know that I’m falling when the trap door swings open? Will it hurt to die?

  I begin to panic, then, and so I try to remember my mother’s face. Not the way I s
aw it last in court, when the prosecutor was speaking, and she looked older and more scared than I had ever seen her look before, but her face the way it used to look, when she was standing at the stove, an apron tied around her waist, stirring the hot chocolate she made me every day after school.

  When Reverend Joseph mentioned the blind boy, I thought about my eyes.

  I’m happy the boy is nine. He’ll see things I could never even imagine. And he’ll see light for the first time. Sunshine when it sparkles on the ocean, a pretty girl’s dress when she’s waiting for you to dance. I hope. And I hope that maybe God will let me see the light too, when it’s time to let the breath go.

  LULA MAY’S LOVE STORIES

  Round and round Clovis spun the steering wheel, every time framing new hills in the windshield, creating a whole new sky – he could do that, easy as a twist. Lula May held her stare on the yucca flowers blooming pink along the highway toward the Brownsville border crossing, growing the same way they did in Hatch. It made her feel better knowing that even here, so close to Mexico, there was something of home; even here it was possible to find something she loved, if only the small yucca blossoms belonging to nobody but the hills.

  “Try to love small, Lula May,” her mother had warned her. “If you love small, you can keep it safe inside you like a secret. Love too big and it can get away from you.”

  Clovis was laughing the way he was liable to at nothing in particular. The Valium he’d foolishly bought on a street corner in San Antonio on their way to the border was hidden in the glove box.

  It was all happening too fast and Clovis was driving her away in his pickup truck like he used to on Sundays, except now she could imagine his I-can-take-you-anywhere hands being just as likely to hold a .38 to someone’s head as to lay a white cloth over a dead bird, something she had once seen him do. That was the Clovis she loved. She tried hard to remember loving him, the way she had yesterday. But now when she looked at him, all she could see was the milky spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth, and his stubble so rough and mean-looking.

  No, it wasn’t just that he looked mean now. Her second thoughts had started before, with Miss Sugar, the town florist. On regular days, Lula May had seen her standing in front of her shop on Merchant Street, smoking and flicking her ashes into a little artichoke-shaped ceramic planter. Lula May blamed Miss Sugar for being the one Clovis picked – because she was so pretty, because her cherry-patterned dress billowed red. What a fool thing Clovis had done, taking her for a hostage.

  Clovis and Lula May would be in Panama by now if Miss Sugar hadn’t started all the trouble. Instead, sheer cliffs the colour of a dusty brown dog loomed in the pocked windshield, and along the road grew mesquite trees where black vultures clumped together above the leaves of desert holly pointed brazenly as hands at the sun and the open sky.

  No, even that wasn’t true. Miss Sugar didn’t start all the trouble. To get to where the trouble really began Lula May needed to go back as far as her parents’ farm, and even to Hatch itself, where, until the robbery, she had lived with her parents and her six brothers and sisters. Along the fractured roads, farmhouses were strung like broken teeth and separated by spines of rusty wire fence, white Dutch clover blooming along dry river beds. The clover had once been sown as forage for cattle and still thrived in the vacant lots and railroad rights-of-way near Elkins Road. Elkins Road, which paused briefly at her family’s farmhouse before rambling on, finally plunging into red earth and a rearing, infinite sky. In Hatch, the sky was so open that people planted stands of trees around their houses just to protect themselves from the blue.

  At dusk, the air cooled, the glaring pebbles faded into softness, the heat of the day forgotten. But evening’s softness brought with it another kind of forgetfulness, which drifted through the catclaw, whitebrush, and guajillo, and was as lethal and impossible to notice as a poisonous gas. The sky would continue to grow a deeper blue, the house sinking into the dusk. And the coolness would make her pause, and it would make her want to sit on the tire swing that hung from the Chinese tallow tree and stare at the swelling sky of stars. She could feel a pull as if from the land itself – roots binding her limbs, tendrils looping through her fingers; a life that, if she sat there long enough, would pick her clean, her bones left to bleach in the unforgiving sun.

  She was sick of the backbreaking, sweaty work of tending beehives and the companion struggle to keep the bees healthy. She was sick of counting screened bottom boards and hive boxes and sending the queens in separate packages to Chicago or Navasota, because until the bees got used to a new queen, they would be as likely to kill her as to protect her. Last week she’d been stung again and had to use a knife blade to remove the barb from the back of her hand. She’d dulled the pain with ice, but it made her think of Clovis Peach as her ticket out of this infernal existence.

  Clovis Peach had the power to open something inside her that had been waiting like a seedpod for the trigger of the first drops of rain. He was a twenty-first-century pioneer, a miner working in the foothills of Buckeye Mountain not far from her pop’s farm, forging new ground. He had the kind of pure unbidden smile that made women and men smile back with genuine happiness. Val the cashier did, as did Lula May, the day she met Clovis at the Trading Post two months ago when she was skipping school. She had noticed his hard-working hands buying bacon and soap – hands she imagined fixing things, uncovering gold, and building a home where nothing had stood before.

  “I’m going to be rich,” he’d told her. “And you will have luxury. Stick with me, Princess.” He winked. “Just watch what happens.”

  From the first time she met him she just knew they’d love each other forever. Clovis Peach made her a woman.

  He was the wisest person she had ever known: “If you’re not in control of what’s around you, you’re as good as a hunk of wood in the river, letting the current butt you around.” Then he’d pick his teeth with a bowie knife, pull out a piece of food with his fingers. “Sometimes a person feels like a wild animal that’s been caged for a long time. They go crazy in there, in their cage, pacing back and forth all day, doing figure eights. And what’s more, if they’re ever let out, they don’t run, they just keep pacing, as if the cage was still there. That’s never going to happen to you or me, Lula May.” At the end of the day she’d happily listen to him talk and talk into the night.

  Most evenings, she’d boil the water she carried in soda bottles to Clovis’s shack from Superstition River, make coffee, and cook eggs and hash browns for him because that’s all the food he ever had, breakfast fixings. Clovis had no electricity or running water. The abandoned two-room pine shack he’d moved into was cozy, even with gaps between the slats and hillocky wood knots on the wall inside. Some of the knots jutted out and were sturdy enough to hang things on: a ten-pound bag of brown potatoes, a coil of nylon rope. He had a single bed made of sweetgum. Soot spilled up the walls above the candles on his nightstand. When the rains came, ceiling drips that sounded musical filled the rusty coffee tins – ker-plink – on the hard-packed dirt floor.

  In the beginning she hiked to Clovis’s shack at least once and sometimes twice a day. Like buried treasure, she used to think, the way his shack hid itself in the rambling hills. Hiking out on the trail from town to see him, she hugged the dry stone walls of the old, pioneer mule tracks lined with sagebrush. Sometimes she daydreamed about getting lost and never being able to find her way out. It would be so easy to confuse this pine for that one or this big rock for any other. What would she do? Would she survive? When she got there, Clovis would be working down the hard stony places, chipping handfuls of the mountain with nothing but faith and a rusty pickaxe. No high-school boy – with their dull homeroom eyes and pimple-faced stares – would ever have done such a thing. Which one of them would have bought mining tools – nearly antique! – from the pawnshop in town with their government welfare cheque and dreamed up the idea of finding gold where none existed. That took guts. To believe you co
uld change things.

  But Buckeye Mountain didn’t yield its gold, keeping it locked from Clovis. Then, after the accident, he seemed defeated. A candle had tipped over while they slept. He’d tried to extinguish the fire, carrying water from the river in the coffee tins, his fingers blistering from the heat of the flames. But the fire went out when it pleased and paid no attention to Clovis, who, when it was all over, was insulted and hurt.

  Instead of soldiering on, he wallowed in the foul-smelling shack, soot on his forehead, the walls still smoking. “What kind of place was this shack if I want to make you my wife? If I had money for real tools – aw, but you already know that.”

  Lula May set to work making two piles, separating what had been burned from what was still good. Clovis looked more pathetic than he had any right to, and she couldn’t decide if she should rub his back or slap him. The fire hadn’t killed them, and who was he to sit there moping. Lula May knew they were pioneers in a boundless land of untamed hills and coyotes: “You got to not give up,” she said.

  She didn’t care that her parents had threatened to call the police: her brother Caleb had told her they were getting right fed up with her neglecting the observation hive they were planning to bring to the Pasadena Strawberry Festival, where people would press their faces against the glass walls and peer at all the bees trapped inside. Lula May had already decided she wasn’t going to California this year. She was tired of giving out honey samples and answering questions: “Do I have to keep the hive outside or can I keep it in my house?” “If the bees die, do you give refunds?” She had nothing to say to people interested in seeing the world’s largest strawberry shortcake, a 1,900-square-foot monstrosity covered with more than a tonne of strawberries and acres of glaze and whipped cream. Let her mother go with one of her other sisters this year. Let her parents threaten to call the police on her if she kept seeing Clovis and cutting school.