Where Things Come Back

by John Corey Whaley

  Gabriel used to do this thing, when he listened to someone tell a story, where he would rest his elbows on a table, cover his eyes with both hands, and rock back and forth ever so slowly. He was doing this the day after my run-in with the Quit Man, on the countertop in my mother’s hair salon as she was telling Penny Giles, the postman’s wife, about Aunt Julia and her night terrors. I know this because I was spinning slowly around in the barber’s chair to the left of Penny, reading a book about a sixteen-year-old who sucks his thumb.

  “She’s gonna be fine. Just you wait. It’ll take no time at all,” Penny Giles said, closing her eyes as a cloud of hairspray enveloped her.

  “I hope so, Penny. I really do,” my mother said in that work-voice that only Gabriel and I knew was insincere.

  “Is she still staying with y’all?”

  “Yeah. She’s in Gabe’s room. The poor boys have been sharing a bed.”

  “You don’t mind, do you, Cullen?” Penny asked, peering at me from the corner of her eye.

  I actually didn’t mind too much that Gabriel had spent the past four nights in my room. He was relatively quiet, didn’t go through my things, and liked to listen to my weird book ideas late at night. When I told him that I wanted to write a book about zombies taking over our town, he suggested that I make myself the hero and said nonchalantly, “You could even have to kill me after I get bitten. Wouldn’t that be an awesome twist?” I didn’t tell him then, but I had no intention of ever letting him die in any book.

  The thing to know about my brother was that even though he was fifteen, he looked to be about the same age as me. Only I’m not sure if that was because he looked older or I looked younger. I like to think it was a healthy mixture of both. The convenient thing about it all was the fact that we were able to share clothes, as long as one of us asked the other nicely. Neither of us was the kind of guy who liked his things tampered with. Gabriel was smart, too, smarter than me even. When we were little, we used to lie up on the roof and Gabriel would point out different constellations. Honestly, I thought he was making most of them up until I looked in an astronomy book at the public library. Which figures, given that I cannot remember one single time that Gabriel ever told anything but the truth. That is not to say, however, that he was rude or outspoken or blunt in any way. If Gabriel was being very quiet, it meant that whatever he wanted to say, which would have been the truth, was inappropriate. That is one way in which we differed greatly. I often found myself in situations where I had, without thinking, said too much to too many with too little caution. This is why Laura Fish still won’t talk to me in line at the grocery store.

  One such situation occurred that same afternoon just as I was dropping Gabriel off at home. I met my father in the driveway as he was throwing cans of Diet Dr Pepper into his ice chest.

  “Cullen, I can’t make it to the funeral tomorrow. You’ll drive your mother and aunt, right?”

  “Sure will. Like always.”

  Those last two words came out of me before I could manage to stop them. It was too late. My father looked at me as if I was the most ungrateful little shit on the planet. He chucked the last can into his ice chest, slammed the lid down, lit a cigarette, yanked his truck door shut, and drove off.

  Here’s the thing about my father and me. We got along just fine. Everything had been great between us since he had stopped drinking when I was thirteen. Then one day when I was around sixteen I decided to start being a bastard to him. I had no real explanation for it. Still don’t. When I was eleven years old my dad took Gabriel and me to this museum about three hours from Lily. It had big life-size dinosaur skeletons and an aquarium with Arkansas fish and alligators in it. It had a mammoth’s fossilized footprint and rock candy in the gift shop. It had a room you could go into that would capture your shadow and a mirror that made you look upside down. And on the way home, as my brother slept in the middle seat between us, my dad told me in a slightly drunken slur that he would, without any hesitation, take me with him to the end of the world. I smiled, confused but happy.

  Book Title #74: Ungrateful Little Shit.

  The next morning, in the churchyard, where I had rarely stood, there seemed to be a familiar feel to the wind brushing lightly against my face and the words being spoken as earnestly as they were eloquently by Reverend Wells.

  “We’ve learned from this that death can hurt us.

  Death can surprise us.

  It can scare us.

  It can keep us up at night.

  But we’ve also learned the things that death cannot do.

  It cannot crush our hopes.

  It cannot take away the love and support of our friends and family.

  It cannot make us lose our unending faith in the world and in God.

  Death has saddened us, but it will not prevail.”

  Dr. Webb says that when someone young dies, it makes older people feel guilty for living. Since Oslo was two years older than me, I felt little guilt in his death. What I felt was disgust and pity. I was sad for my aunt Julia, who could barely utter a sentence without bursting into tears. I was sad for people like Mena Prescott, who tried so hard to pretend that she wasn’t affected by it. Mostly, though, I was sad for my brother. He didn’t act sad, but I knew him better than that. I knew there were feelings there that weren’t being shown. I honestly can’t remember one single instance where Gabriel ever interacted with Oslo. Not one time. The only reason I had to was because I had a license and because Oslo knew that I was like my dad. I don’t say no to people very often.

  When one is standing six feet above his cousin’s body as his aunt Julia is wailing from her metal folding chair and his mother is whispering, “There, there” in her ear, all he can see is a shiny room full of bodies at the Little Rock City Morgue. He turns around and all he sees is a cemetery full of zombies, half out of their graves. They stumble and drag and scoot over to stand beside him. When one is surrounded by hundreds of zombies and they are all looking down at his only cousin, all he can manage to do is softly sing the words to a song he heard on his little brother’s stereo.

  And when we are dead,

  We all have wings.

  We won’t need legs to stand.

  Reverend Wells teared up toward the end. I saw him casually wipe his left eye with the back of his hand as he ended his prayer and the small crowd began to disperse. Lucas whispered into my ear, “I’ll go and get the car.” This is the type of person Lucas was—driving the family of the deceased to and from funerals without ever being asked. Gabriel stood beside me. I looked over at him the way you look at someone at a funeral, and he managed one of those I’m-slightly-uncomfortable-and-would-love-to-leave-as-soon-as-possible smiles.

  “Is she ever going to stop?” I asked Gabriel, looking in the direction of Aunt Julia.

  “Doubt it,” he answered.

  “You’re never going to get your room back.”

  “You mean you’re never going to get yours back.” He chuckled.

  I punched my brother lightly on the right arm the way brothers do to show affection, and we walked over toward the car as Lucas pulled up.

  There was a little too much fog around the house for my comfort as we pulled into the driveway and my mother carefully helped Aunt Julia out of the car and into the house.

  “Poor Julia,” Lucas said, resting his chin on the steering wheel.

  “She did the same thing when my grandfather died.”

  “I was there, Cullen.”

  “Oh. Never mind.”

  “Did you hear about that bird?” Lucas asked me, still staring toward the house.

  Lucas was one of the smartest and strangest people I knew, and so I wasn’t very surprised by his choice of topic.

  “What bird?” I asked.

  “There’s this woodpecker that’s been extinct for, like, sixty years. Only, this guy from Oregon or something was down here and he thinks he saw one.”

  “In Lily?”

  “Right outside of town. I thi
nk he was canoeing down the river and saw it fly by or something.”

  “Weird.”

  “Well, I gotta go. Mom’s gonna think I’m out being wild or something,” he said, laughing.

  When Lucas Cader was twelve years old, he had an older brother who died in a car accident. That was in Little Rock. They moved to Lily at the start of our eighth-grade year. Lucas didn’t talk about it very much, but when he did I’m pretty sure I was the only one he talked to. And, in his words, since his mother couldn’t stop one child from getting drunk and driving into oncoming traffic on the interstate, he had to suffer the consequences, with daily reports of where he had been, where he was going, and why he was doing both.

  This is what I knew about Lucas Cader that most people didn’t: He wasn’t as happy as he looked. When he wasn’t in the hallways at school, he didn’t have that toothpaste-commercial smile plastered all over him, and he sure as hell didn’t have that hopeful, the-world-is-an-amazing-place-so-let’s-get-out-there-and-love-life glimmer in his eyes either. What he had were watery eyes in the bathroom and a look of boredom and confusion when he thought no one was looking. And just before he would go to sleep at night, he would close his eyes tighter than I’ve ever seen and whisper prayers after crossing his chest. When he was done, he would stare at the ceiling until finally dozing off.

  Aunt Julia moved back into her house exactly one week after Oslo was found dead by his friend who used to be a prostitute. Try explaining all that to your fifteen-year-old brother, who still chooses to believe that the world is a good place. That afternoon when Gabriel was collecting some of his things from my room, and I was jotting down some ideas in my notebook, he looked up at me and froze in place.

  “What’s up?” I asked him uncomfortably, noticing a tear in his right eye.

  “What if you die, Cullen?”

  “What?”

  He sat down on the edge of my bed.

  “I mean, what if all of a sudden you up and die and then it’s just me here with Mom and Dad and Aunt Julia down the street with her screaming and crying?”

  “Gabriel, what makes you think I’m going to die?”

  “I don’t think you are. I was just thinking about what I’d do if you did, that’s all.”

  “Don’t think about stuff like that, okay? You’re weirding me out.”

  When one’s slightly shy but sometimes entertaining and dramatic little brother quickly leans in and hugs him tightly, he begins to think about writing a book or making a movie where good guys and bad guys don’t shoot each other or fight with swords, but just hug each other to death. His brother begins to cry very softly, and he really seems to have no idea in the world what to do or say or how to get himself out of this situation. He thinks about crying too but knows that he wouldn’t be able to make it believable. He finally wraps one arm around his brother and pats his back several times, like he’s hugging an old woman at church. His brother finally lets him go.

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said in a whisper.

  “It’s fine,” I replied, not sure if I believed that or not.

  The next day was the last of school before summer break. Why they had it on a Monday I couldn’t tell you, but I had no complaints about not having to finish out the week. It was Lucas’s and my usual tradition to skip the last day of school, but we had decided to go that day simply because we couldn’t think of anything better to do. Also, I wanted to get one last look at Ada Taylor before she graduated and never came back to Lily again. She was one of the few I believed would actually make a life for herself somewhere else; somewhere better.

  If you’ve ever been to school on the very last day of the year, you’ll know that the teachers are completely checked out. They usually assign you cleaning duties as soon as you walk in the door and seem nearly pissed off that you even exist that day. It was for this reason that Lucas and I opted to help move desks out of the classrooms for summer cleaning. We would slide a desk to the door, lift it, toss it on top of the last desk we slid out into the hallway, and then start all over. I always found a certain strange comfort in routines like that. And for the rest of that day, when I wasn’t moving a desk, my body felt like it should be leaning, grabbing, lifting, and starting over anyway.

  Ada Taylor did not show up that day. We knew it was a long shot but were still bummed out to realize that we might never see her again. Lucas put a hand on my shoulder and said, in a strange accent, “Well, brother, it wasn’t meant to be. And if it was meant to be, then you’ve been royally screwed!”

  “Could be worse,” I said. “I could have slept with her and then died.”

  “True. Very true, my friend.”

  “Please stop talking like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a poorly acted James Bond.”

  “Bastard,” he muttered in a perfect Scottish accent.

  After school, Lucas, Gabriel, and I went to Mena Prescott’s house long enough to walk inside, each get thrown a Coke by her overly enthusiastic father, get briefly interviewed by her nosy mother, and finally get Mena out of there and into the car. We went to this place on the river where Lucas first told me about his brother and where I had, some time after that, experienced an R-rated moment with Laura Fish.

  “Where’s Libby?” Mena asked, as she realized one member of the group was missing.

  “Family vacation,” Gabriel answered, a sad look in his eyes.

  Lucas and Mena were soon playing around in the water as Gabriel and I were lying on the bank, using our shirts bundled up under our heads for pillows.

  “Do you think we’d be famous if we saw one?” Gabriel asked.

  “Saw what?” Lucas shouted from the water while being splashed in the face.

  “If we were lying out here like this and saw one of those woodpeckers.”

  “Oh. I dunno if we’d be famous, but I bet we’d at least make the Lily Press!” I joked.

  “That almost seems pointless,” Gabriel added.

  “Yep,” I agreed.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is with the bird anyway,” Mena shouted while trying to avoid being dunked underwater by Lucas.

  “Gabe, you want to take this one?” I said to my brother, having already heard his theory about the woodpecker situation just one night before.

  “We need it,” he began. “I mean … they need it,” he nodded his head toward town.

  “What do you mean?” Lucas asked, he and Mena now listening intently, as we all did when Gabriel decided to share one of his theories.

  “Look at our town,” Gabriel said, “look at the people. How many happy people do you see in a day? How many people do you see who seem fulfilled?”

  “I’m fulfilled,” Mena butted in.

  “You’re young enough to think you can get out of here,” Gabriel said without hesitation.

  “With me,” Lucas added, wrapping one arm around Mena’s shoulders.

  “Go on, Gabriel,” I said, rolling my eyes at the happy couple.

  “That’s the thing—this is a town full of people who used to be like us. You think anyone in Lily grew up dreaming about raising their families here? You think if they all had a choice, they wouldn’t leave tomorrow?”

  We got quiet for a few minutes after that. It was one of those moments when you’re waiting on someone to say something important or funny or just do anything to break you away from the sad thoughts that overwhelm your mind. Thoughts like never having enough money to move away or not getting into college. Thoughts like having to come back to take care of a sick parent and getting stuck here all over again. That’s what happened in Lily. People dreamed. People left. And they all came back. It was like Arkansas’s version of a black hole; nothing could escape it. I lay there silent beside my brother, my best friend and his girlfriend wading in the water before me, and I knew that we were all just in the prelude to disappointment after disappointment. We joked about Lily all the time but knew full well that we were part of it all. There wasn’t anything that s
et us apart from the manager at the Lily Grocery Store, who just knew he’d make it out but never did. We were no different from my parents, both of whom had moved away and moved back to Lily within five years of graduating high school.

  So, the fact that Gabriel believed our town needed that bird to exist made absolute sense to me, whether I liked it or not. They needed something to be hopeful about. Nothing in my seventeen-year-old mind was going to change if that damn bird really did show up, because I still had a slight chance of a future. I still had hope in the possibility of starting a life somewhere else. It was easier for me to hate everyone in town than hate myself for being afraid I’d be just like them.

  “They need it,” Gabriel said, breaking our silence. “They need a reason to believe they’re all still here for something.”

  “So, do you think they’ll find it?” Mena asked Gabriel as if he were Yoda or something.

  “I think they’ll all be disappointed even if they do find it. Nothing’s gonna change this place,” he said, his tone changing from serious and reflective to that of a seasoned actor’s.

  “Thanks for the uplifting chat, Gabe,” Lucas said, splashing my brother.

  “You’re welcome!” Gabriel yelled, jumping into the water to attack my friend.

  Lucas quickly got him into an immovable headlock and looked my direction.

  “So, no more Quit Man then, huh?” Lucas shouted from the water.

  “Hell no!” Gabriel shouted back. We all laughed.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s only until he flunks out of community college and comes right back!”

  Book Title #75: The Black Holes of Arkansas.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Book of Enoch

  After about two weeks of traveling, Benton Sage was starting to get used to the routine of passing out food, water, and Christ as quickly and efficiently as possible. He had talked to his family only once since his departure from Atlanta and just long enough to tell them that he believed he was doing God’s work. In doing so, Benton had told his first real lie. He lay awake at night, reading scriptures over and over, racking his brain for some meaning to words he’d been fed and had preached time and time again. Rameel, sitting up in his bed one night, looked over at Benton and said, with sleep in his voice, “You are always with God, Been-tone.”