Other Voices, Other Tombs

by Joe Sullivan

  “Thanks. Ready?”

  His dark greasy hair is long enough to obscure most of his face. It wasn’t when we first met, but he didn’t have chronic acne then either. He nods curtly and shoves himself off the hood of the car. I note that the button on the seat of his Levi’s has scored a small scratch in the red paint and my guts quiver. I’m glad we’re heading to the pool today because it’s somewhere Dougie won’t think to look.

  Robbie doesn’t have a bike. Dougie tossed it into the back of the garbage truck after one particularly contentious argument back in April, so I walk the warhorse along beside him down the middle of the street, idly registering the goings-on, or the lack of, in the neighboring houses. Millicent Grable, eighty-two years old and seldom seen without a cigarette clamped between her shriveled lips, sits on her porch swing sipping from a glass of what we have speculated is vodka or gin, but might just be water. Her hair is a bird’s nest of silver and white, hooded eyes perpetually narrowed in suspicion at a world that constantly validates it, bony legs crossed beneath a sunflower dress. By her feet sleeps Gomer, an Australian Shephard, all but blinded by the twin cataract moons eclipsing his eyes.

  I nod at Millicent, who coughs into one gnarled hand while waving halfheartedly with the other.

  Next door, Garrett Hopkins, former high school coach and full-time bully, is an ass crack shrugging free of a pair of baggy jeans while the rest of his bulk rolls around inside the exposed belly of his battered old GMC truck, the hood shading him into invisibility but for one flabby arm. The clinking of tools competes with grunts of disdain as we hurry past his oil-spotted driveway. If he spotted us, he’d have tried to make awkward small talk about local sports and we wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, which would have disgusted him.

  Three doors down on the opposite side of the road is a Cape Cod painted a vibrant pink with cream-colored shutters. The yard is an explosion of blooming shrubs and flowers. It’s beautiful chaos, impeccably maintained, and impossible to ignore. This is the home of the Scarsdale Family, who seem to have time only for their garden and the God who allowed them to have it. As we pass by, a lofty ceramic Jesus on the stoop shows us his glowing heart. Minds abuzz with sin, we are forcibly unmoved by the gesture. Tacked to the pristine picket fence is a wooden plaque declaring the Good Lord and Savior’s Policy on Soliciting. From one of the windows, a young blonde girl looks out at us. Jeannie Scarsdale. She looks bored and waves with an enthusiasm that would have caused Millicent Grable’s hand to snap off at the wrist. Robbie and I wave back and, delighted, she makes further gestures we cannot hope to understand, so we don’t try.

  Instead we move on until we are clear of the neighborhood and heading down the hill, flanked by walnut trees, to the strip mall, which spreads around the Texaco gas station like a surge barrier. Despite its size, there is very little to interest us here except for the Blockbuster and Pete’s Pizza Palace. The movie theater is further on in the heart of town, as are all the best restaurants (McDonald’s and Burger King.)

  While we wait to cross the intersection, Robbie squints at the inflatable green dragon draped flaccidly across the flat roof of The Electronics Store, its mouth moving soundlessly in the faint breeze as if gasping for air.

  “You think dragons were ever real?”

  I shrug. “I don’t think so. I think they were made up by whoever writes legends and fairytales. Probably like Frankenstein and Dracula and ghosts and stuff are now. Creepy things meant to scare people.”

  “They’re not scary though.”

  “Well that one isn’t. But that’s because it’s plastic or whatever, and all the air’s escaped. If dragons were full of air, they’d have been easier to kill. You wouldn’t even need a sword. Just a needle. And they’d never have been able to stop flying because landing might have punctured them.”

  The little green man on the crosswalk sign wakes up and we make our way across the intersection, paying little mind to the people crammed into the procession of cars to our right. The air is heavy with exhaust, and it fuels our eagerness to reach the pool.

  “I think Dougie’s going to kill somebody someday,” Robbie says.

  “Like, for real?”

  “For real.”

  “He wouldn’t do that, though, right? I mean, he’d go to jail.”

  “He choked me out once and if my Dad hadn’t come home just then, I don’t think he’d have let go. I think he’d have held on even after I stopped breathing. He’s a maniac, dude. I mean, like, totally crazy.”

  We pass the gas station, where a longhaired homeless man in a stained overcoat cackles and dances around the irritated clerk tasked with getting rid of him. At the pump closest to us, a man in a Bengals baseball cap chuckles while he watches. We can smell the gasoline. It turns the air above the pump to smoked glass. In another car, a baby squalls from the backseat while in the passenger seat, the mother stares straight ahead, hands on the steering wheel, eyes vacant.

  “Do you think you should tell someone?”

  “Like who?”

  “I dunno. Your Dad?”

  “He wouldn’t do anything. He’s afraid of him. So’s Mom. Maybe I am too, sometimes.” He produces from his pocket a pair of Jolly Ranchers and offers me one, which I accept, if only to get the taste of bacon out of my mouth. “I can’t wait to get the hell out that house,” he says. “Maybe I won’t even wait until I’m old enough. Maybe I won’t even wait until next year.”

  The thought of him one day being gone fills me with a heavy sadness I don’t have the words to express. Even if I did, I doubt I’d have spoken them aloud. Robbie was a lot of things, most of them good, but he’d likely have called me gay and socked me in the shoulder if I’d told him I’d miss him. Because a truth of which I’d only recently become aware was that for all his hatred of his brother, Robbie was slowly becoming him. As sure as a hammer will a nail, his brother’s fists were driving meanness into him, and I was as afraid of what my friend would become as much as he feared what Dougie already was.

  I decide to lighten the mood, which has become as oppressive as the humidity. I straddle my bike, ignoring the creak and squeal, and prop one foot on the pedal. “Race you to the pool!” Rather than point out my obvious advantage, which given the condition of my bike, is actually no advantage at all, Robbie takes off like a rocket, and has cleared the strip mall before I’ve even steadied the handlebars.

  3

  The pool was a community project, built by some enterprising locals during the crippling heatwave in the summer of 1983. They chose a patch of land between an abandoned construction site and the neighboring woods, and even though they never sought out official permission, the general consensus had been that it was too goddamn hot to make too much of a stink over it. It wasn’t like the weed-choked land was being used for anything else and should the day come when that changed, well then, a pool was an easy thing to fill. The locals scored out an eighteen by twelve-foot rectangle in the earth, dug six feet down and lined it with black plastic. Then they tapped a nearby hydrant and filled in the pool. It was crude, leaky, and nobody cared because it was free, and it was cool. They cribbed some concrete blocks from the building site to wall off the area on three of the four sides, leaving it open to the woods on the northern side. This tactic ensured not only shelter and shade, but privacy too. Part of the problem with the other civic amenities was overcrowding, though of course, that would occur here too once the neighborhood grapevine got word of it. Still, it afforded the site a certain measure of discretion so as not to provoke in the authorities a change of heart. Grills and generators were hauled to the site and it quickly became a neighborhood hangout, and if the proximity to the woods meant the bugs were worse than usual, well, it was better than dying from heatstroke.

  The pool outlasted the heatwave, but just barely. The hasty and imperfect construction meant it didn’t take long before the plastic started to move, the soil drained the water, and the earthen sides began to crumble underfoot. There we
re some accidents, but nothing too serious, and soon the locals found a better use of their time.

  Thanks to the warhorse, I reach the pool first, and it’s nothing like it was during that long dry summer in 1983. The walls are gone but for a few broken concrete blocks in the weeds, and thanks to the overgrowth the pool itself cannot be seen until you’re almost upon it, making it a clear danger zone nobody in the intervening years has bothered to sign. What remains of the area dug out by the locals is more of a lagoon now, the water dark, cloudy, and threaded with bulrushes. It is approximately half its original size, the sides ragged and loamy. The appeal, and one we might have struggled back then to adequately express, is its isolation. The area beyond the strip mall has been in steady decline. Businesses have begun to shutter. Housing prices are in flux. There’s talk of recession. But we’re kids, so the import of these matters is only legible in the lines on our parents’ faces. We seek out places where fantasies can be explored, where grownups hold no sway and magic still thrives, where there are no rules and no consequences, where anything is possible. The pool is such a place. It cannot be seen from the road, the weeds rising up long before the wall came down, and though its definitions were known once upon a time, it is depthless and mysterious now. We’ve waded in it and felt or imagined strange creatures brushing against our bare pale feet. We’ve ducked under the dirty water and wondered if we might see an opening down there, an aperture to other worlds. We’ve discussed Gill-Men and mermaids, gods old and new.

  This No Place, is our place, alone.

  I set down my bike and squelch across the soggy earth toward the pool. The ground seems more porous than usual, but that’s to be expected. We had near-record rainfall the month before and I consider it fortunate the whole area is not a swamp.

  The applause of worn shoes on the verge of ruin tell me Robbie’s not far behind.

  I wonder how long it will take him to notice what I already have.

  I wait, looking around at the tall weeds, listen to the faint hiss of the breeze through the woods to my left. A couple were found dead in there once. Murder-suicide they said. The girl was pregnant and feared her father would kill her, so she shot her boyfriend in the head and then killed herself. It was all people talked about, but then, much like the pool, the excitement died, and people moved on.

  Beyond those woods is an embankment that leads down into a drainage ditch. Past that, the highway. If I strain, I can hear the whoosh of endless traffic. But none of that matters now. I am here, where I wanted to be, but though people rarely come here anymore, there is someone else here now. And it is to that presence I return my gaze.

  “Slipped off the damn curb,” Robbie says, drawing to a halt beside me. He braces his hands on his knees and bends to catch his breath. “Nearly busted…my…ankle.”

  “Robbie. Look.”

  He straightens, my tone quieting any inquiry. Instead, he joins me in looking through the lofty weeds to the water, where there is a girl in the water.

  “Woah. Who’s that?”

  I shake my head. She’s facing the opposite bank so we can’t see her face. The brackish water reaches midway up her back, which I register, as any thirteen-year-old male would, is bare. If not completely naked, she is, at the very least, topless. I know, at my age, with my body hurtling chaotically through the hostile terrain of hormonal hell, with hair appearing in strange places and my voice disintegrating on the high notes, I should feel a stirring at the situation, and indeed I do. But it is not arousal. It’s fear.

  “Maybe we should go,” I tell Robbie, but I know what he’s going to say before he says it.

  “Are you crazy? Dude…there’s a naked chick in our pool.”

  It is not our pool. It’s never been ours. For a time, it belonged solely to the people who dug it out of the abandoned earth and used it, but since then, it has been nothing but a depression in the earth collecting rain. Anyone who wishes to use it has the right, but few ever would.

  I think of my bike a few feet behind me. Of how easy it would be to turn and retrieve it and just go home. It seems like the best thing to do. I don’t want to be here when that girl notices she has a pair of horny boys ogling her and screams for the police. At least this is what I tell myself is the basis for my unease, but it’s a weak justification for the turbulence rippling through my body and brain.

  “We should go,” I mutter again.

  “Excuse me!” Robbie cries out and I flinch away from the sound as if it were a gunshot.

  The girl cannot be more than fifteen or sixteen. She is slender, her hair the same verdant shade as the grass surrounding the pool. It is soaking wet, suggesting she has been under the water. Her arms are down by her sides and she is motionless, not swimming. She must be standing on the bottom, though that’s something neither Robbie nor I have ever been able to accomplish. Maybe she’s just very tall.

  “Let’s just leave her al—”

  “Hey,” Robbie calls. “Hey, Miss. Are you okay?”

  Robbie’s interest is not in the girl’s well-being, but the story he may get to tell once this episode has run its course. I imagine him a few months from now regaling the other boys with ever-more enhanced versions of this event. I totally boned her right there in the pool. Last summer he swore he made out with a girl at summer camp. When her name kept changing, I questioned the veracity of this claim, which angered him, so I let it go. Like a lot of boys our age, he needs proof that he’s the man everyone else wants and expects him to be and to challenge that means risking our friendship.

  The girl still hasn’t moved. There isn’t even a ripple in the water, which refuses the light from the sun. Robbie moves away and I clamp a hand on his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?”

  He looks back at me, eyes glassy with excitement. “I want to get a look.”

  “Don’t.”

  He shrugs off my hand and takes a few steps closer to the bank opposite the girl. Heat flushes my cheeks. I’m mildly annoyed at myself. Why am I so afraid all the time? Why am I not as roguishly excited as Robbie by this discovery? Isn’t it perfectly natural to feel the thrill of the forbidden? Isn’t that the essence of childhood?

  I look up in time to see something I can’t understand, and it instantly validates my fear, though not in a way I would ever want. For a moment, just a flicker, really, the girl appeared to turn her head to the side to look at Robbie, or me, and I saw through her. Not like a ghost. She is, without question, there, but her skin appeared see-through, translucent, like light through a wet plastic bag. I shake off the absurdity of that thought, but it clings to me like the water droplets racing—

  —racing up her back.

  My heart becomes a ball of ice in my chest. Robbie is closer now. He is making his way around the pool toward the girl, moving like a thief. He has stopped casting gleeful glances back at me because this is no longer a joint adventure. He’s doing this by himself, for himself. I may as well not be here. He’s homing in on the crux of the matter, the core of the story that might yet make him a man in the retelling.

  I try to force some maturity into my thoughts, but it doesn’t take. I want to believe I’m overreacting, but if so, then why hasn’t the girl moved since we got here? If you say fear, okay, she’s afraid, but tell me, then: why is the water running up her body instead of down? Fear can’t alter physics. And why the fuck is she see-through?

  Robbie draws abreast of her and I watch, rooted to the spot as sure as the old trees in the woods to my left, as at once, both smile and color fade from his face. The girl looks slowly up at him, and I believe in that moment, he lost his mind, or it was taken from him. I like to believe this because it means he might not have been fully present for the next part.

  The part where the pool bubbled as if from some massive expulsion of air from way, way down deeper than the pool was supposed to go, and all I can think of is my father at the kitchen table bemoaning the amount of rain. Rain causes rivers to swell, oceans to rise. How often
do things end up where they have no business being, carried to us from elsewhere? I latch onto my father’s voice, the mild annoyance in his tone, as if it’s an anchor, as I watch the girl turn from Robbie to look at me. There is no front to her. She is a hollowed-out statue, a broken mannequin, perhaps stolen from a department store, or maybe just tossed here by someone who had no use for it. I want to be relieved. I almost allow the warmth of that shaky reassurance to reach me, but then the mouth beneath the jagged hole where the rest of the face should be twists upward into a vicious smile and I am aware in ways I can’t know, of something lurking just below the surface of the water. Perhaps it was there all along, invisible, or playing the part of calm water. I drop to my knees on the loam and feel it undulate beneath me as if someone is pulling cables through the earth. Across the pool, Robbie is sitting in the muck, his unfocused eyes like moons that forgot how to shine. They are the eyes of Millicent Grable’s dog.

  I have to reach him.

  I have to reach my bike so I can get away.

  Only the second of these options makes sense to me, because this is not real life. I am trapped inside another nightmare, the sheer terror indistinguishable from the one in which I wake without my limbs. Therefore, my choices won’t matter, will they? Won’t waking into the real world absolve me of the choices I made in the one populated by inexplicable things?

  The girl shudders and the top half of her head splits open like a shelled egg. The cavity, fully exposed, allows the pink filaments within to whip and snap at the air like maddened worms. Surely there is a limit to what a young mind can witness before it pulls down the shades, and yet I am spared nothing and cannot look away for fear that something will grab me as soon as I do. There is a sound like a clogged drain being cleared and suddenly the girl/mannequin/monster is yanked beneath the surface of the water so fast there is hardly any displacement at all.