After Eli

by Rebecca Rupp

  All Ryan’s uncles have weird nicknames. Bug got his name from once eating a Japanese beetle on a dare. His uncle Rat, who works at Rudy’s Beverage Bar & Barbecue Grill, is called Rat because when he was about ten, he lost a little piece of his thumb by getting it caught in a rat trap, and his uncle Chop is named for Precious Pork Chop, which is what his mom used to call him when he was a fat little baby, though when Ryan told me that, he said never to mention it in front of Uncle Chop unless I wanted to lose my front teeth.

  Ryan’s father, who must have wised up fast about the nickname thing, refuses to answer to anything but George.

  My dad didn’t want me to get a job. He wanted me to spend the summer in remedial school, cranking up my math scores and improving my reading comprehension and study skills, which basically he did not think it possible for me to do.

  “I can’t force you to make an effort, Daniel,” my dad said.

  The “Daniel” being a bad signal, since I had learned in Eli’s Education Days that nothing good comes of an authority figure using your full name.

  “But I’d like you to realize that unless you start thinking seriously about the future, you’re not going to have much of one. Look at Jim Pilcher.”

  Jim Pilcher was Eli’s best friend in high school, and my dad always brought him up after viewing my pitiful report cards.

  My dad thinks Jim pretty much screwed up his life, because by now, instead of hoeing potatoes, he should be working for NASA, designing space colonies, or working for some gaming company inventing something like Half-Life II and making a gazillion dollars. Jim had an engineering scholarship to the state university, but he got hung up on this girl who dumped him, and then he got burned out on drugs and then he dropped out of college in the middle of his sophomore year. Then he was in rehabilitation for a while, and later his grandfather, old Mr. Pilcher, gave him a piece of land and he started an organic farm.

  My dad says that, what with the drugs and all, Jim is now one taco short of a combination platter. Though sometimes he says “two bears short of a picnic.”

  “If I’m so dumb, more school would just be a stupid waste of money,” I said. “Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with Jim. Eli liked Jim.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, young man,” my dad said. “Do you want to spend your life flipping burgers? You want to be one of those guys that says, ‘Want fries with that?’ Well, that’s where you’re headed if you don’t watch your step. This is for your own good.”

  On one of Eli’s Education Days, I’d learned that “This is for your own good” is one of the four crucial Bullshit Alert Phrases, along with “You’ll just have to take my word for it,” “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” and “You kids these days don’t know when you have it easy.” Eli always said there should be some sort of inoculation for bullshit, like for measles and chicken pox.

  “That’s bullshit,” I said.

  “That’s enough of that lip,” my dad said. “And let me tell you something else, Daniel. That book of dead people you keep messing with isn’t doing you any good either. It’s not normal, sitting up in that room and collecting dead people like they were stamps. You think it’s good to be mooning around about death all the time? The best thing you could do for yourself right now is to throw that damn book in the trash.”

  “Everybody in this damn house moons around about death all the time,” I said. “I’m not the one you should be calling sick. Why don’t you go talk to Mom about being sick? She doesn’t even talk to anybody anymore. Don’t you even care that she doesn’t talk to anybody anymore?”

  “You don’t know anything about it, Daniel,” my dad said.

  And he turned on his heel and went out to the kitchen to get a beer.

  “Shut up,” I said, but only after he was out of the room.

  Sometimes I really hated my dad.

  Anyway, before he had a chance to pay the nonrefundable tuition fee to his saving-me-from-burgers remedial school, I talked Jim Pilcher into hiring me to work at the blue-potato farm.

  Back when Jim was all messed up and in rehab, Eli used to go see him a lot. I know because Eli and my dad had a fight about it.

  I was under the dining-room table during the fight, playing with my Lego pirate ship, and the tablecloth was hanging down, so it was like a secret hideout. I used to spend a lot of time under that table. Also that pirate ship was cool. It had all these pirates with cutlasses, and a captain pirate with an eye patch and a parrot on his shoulder. I really loved that little parrot.

  I was in the middle of burying a chest of plastic treasure under a plastic palm tree on a plastic island when I heard my dad say, “Eli, you’ve got to quit this crap. What the hell are you thinking? Cutting out of college to run over there all the time? Jesus, you got a warning. There was a letter sent here by some dean. What is this? Are you crazy?”

  There were creaky noises that were from my dad walking back and forth across the floor like he does when he’s telling you how screwed up you are. The way the floorboards squeak in our front room is as good as a burglar alarm. At least that’s what my parents always said whenever I wanted a dog.

  “Jim’s my best friend, Dad,” Eli said.

  “Well, that kind of best friend doesn’t do you a single lick of good,” my dad said. “People judge you by your friends. Right now what you’ve got to do is get good grades, make good connections, and keep that scholarship. That’s what you’ve got to do, Eli. Jim’s not your responsibility. Jim’s already getting all the help he needs.”

  “I’m not going to lose my scholarship,” Eli said.

  “You’d better not,” my dad said. “That’s not a cheap school you’re at, Eli. Your mother and I can’t pay for that school. So I don’t want to hear any more about you cutting class. Not for Jim. He’s screwed up his life, and that’s his business, but I’m not about to watch you screw up yours. Do you hear me, Eli?”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Eli said.

  “Good,” my dad said.

  After my dad was gone, Eli came over to the table and kicked the tablecloth.

  “You in there, Dan?” he said.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be, but I said I guessed I was.

  Eli hunkered down, pulled up the tablecloth, and poked his head underneath.

  “You hear all that?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got for a bunch of little runt drip-nose friends,” Eli said. “But if you ever get a real friend, you don’t wimp out when there’s trouble or he’s going through a bad patch and acting like a dick. You got that, Danny?”

  He sounded pissed, but not at me. Also really serious.

  “Dad’s mad,” I said. “That’s a hink-pink.”

  “No shit, nitwit,” Eli said. “That’s a hinky-pinky. And when is it okay to say shit?”

  “Never in front of Mom or Aunt Wendy and always when it has something to do with Timmy Sperdle,” I said.

  “You got it, Captain Kidd,” Eli said. “Go back to your pieces of eight.”

  He dropped the tablecloth and I heard his feet going, fast and angry, across the creaky floor, and then the front door slammed.

  My dad still doesn’t like Jim.

  Jim has long hair in a ponytail, and he wears Birkenstock sandals, and he votes for left-wing causes that my dad says would send the country straight to hell in a handcart if Congress ever got its act together and passed a bill. Also Jim’s farm isn’t like normal farms, which my dad says is a sign of something wrong right there.

  Not only does Jim not use chemicals, but he grows all these crops that come in funny colors, like blue potatoes and white pumpkins and black carrots, or in weird shapes, like rattlesnake beans, that coil up like snakes, and these big warty Hubbard squashes that, if you didn’t know they were vegetables, look like something you ought to kill quick with a baseball bat before it eats your house pets. The farm’s name is the Blue Potato, which is also weird, because most farms around here, if th
ey have names at all, are called things like Monroe’s Pigs.

  “I need help weeding and watering and hauling manure and picking the bugs off stuff and hoeing the blue potatoes,” Jim said. “If the help could do all that without stomping on anything or killing anything through neglect, that would be a plus. You think you can handle it?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Sure.”

  “And you’ll have to drink these things that Emma’ll make for you,” Jim said. “They’re all pure vitamins and if you choke one down every day, you’ll live to be a hundred and ten with all your own teeth and hair and your sex drive intact. So just do it, man, and don’t hurt her feelings. Consider it part of the job.”

  I said that sounded okay too, though at the time I hadn’t yet come face-to-face with Emma’s black-carrot smoothies.

  Emma is Jim’s live-in girlfriend, and she’s another thing my dad doesn’t like about Jim.

  Emma comes from River City, which isn’t a city but just the name people give to the bad part of town, that’s all trailers and ratty little falling-down houses with junk cars in the yard. Peter Reilly and I went over there on our bikes once or twice, just to see what it was like, and Peter said that all the guys hanging out were drug dealers, and there was one house with pink Christmas-tree lights that Peter said was full of whores.

  He told me to go up and knock on the door, and I said I’d go if he’d go first, and he said I should go because he’d already done it lots of times, and I said, “That’s bullshit, O’Reilly,” and while we were fighting about it and Peter was punching my arm, some lady came out on the porch and yelled at us to get off her front lawn. She didn’t look like a whore. She looked like somebody’s grandmother.

  Peter’s brother, Tony, says all the girls from River City are whores. So I figured Emma would be really hot, with tight rhinestone T-shirts and high-heeled shoes and lots of red lipstick and puffy platinum-blond hair.

  But as it turned out, Emma isn’t like that at all. Actually, Emma isn’t even exactly pretty. She has this flat, round face spattered all over with freckles, and a lot of reddish frizzy hair, and she wears these baggy jeans. The first thing I thought when I saw her was that Jim really had cooked part of his brain, like in that old fried-egg ad that used to be on TV. Where they had this egg sizzling in a frying pan and a voice-over that said, really ominously, “This is your brain on drugs.”

  Emma made me come into the kitchen and sit down, and she gave me some cookies made out of flax or something that people don’t normally make cookies out of. They tasted funny, but I ate them anyway to be polite.

  “They’re my own recipe,” Emma said, pointing at the plate. “What do you think?”

  What I thought was that she’d given me way too many cookies, but I didn’t want to say so.

  “They’re very healthy tasting,” I said.

  “Jim’s real pleased that you’re going to be working here this summer,” Emma said. “I am too. But I think we should get some things straight right off, so you’ll know what you might be getting into.”

  “Okay,” I said, but not too clearly, due to flax being hard to chew.

  “I know what your dad says about me,” Emma said. “Jim and I go places, and there’s always somebody wondering why Jim has anything to do with me. My whole family is messed up. My dad took off and left us when I was four, and my mom had all these boyfriends that used to beat us around. My sister got pregnant when she was sixteen, and I don’t even know where she is anymore. And I ran around with a lot of guys and did a lot of stupid-ass stuff I shouldn’t have done. I didn’t even finish high school. I dropped out my junior year.”

  “That sounds great to me,” I said.

  “Well, it wasn’t,” Emma said. “But I hated high school. The kids were mean and the teachers were mean and my guidance counselor made it pretty clear that she didn’t think I was heading for anything but six kids and welfare. I was probably pretty hateful too, if you want to know the truth. The only one nice to me was Miss Walker.”

  “She talked at Eli’s funeral,” I said.

  Emma said, “She’s something else, Miss Walker. When she heard I was quitting school, she asked me over to her house. She made Earl Grey tea. Like I would know from Earl Grey tea.”

  I knew Earl Grey tea due to it being the drink of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise. Though at home we have Lipton’s.

  “It was real nice,” Emma said. “She didn’t try to talk me into anything or out of anything, and she didn’t act like a teacher. We just talked. And she gave me a copy of The Secret Garden. She said everybody has a special book, and she thought maybe that one might be mine.”

  I thought about what might be my special book. Probably one of those pathetic old kindergarten readers with little stories about seeing Spot run.

  “So what’s it about?” I said.

  “It’s just an old kids’ book,” Emma said. “It’s about this girl, Mary, who comes from India to live in a big old house in England. Her parents are dead and her guardian doesn’t care about her and she just hates everything. Then she finds this locked garden and she finds a way to get inside and she starts bringing the garden back to life. And by the end of the book, she’s saved the garden and she’s saved her whiny little crippled-up cousin and she’s saved herself too.”

  “That’s your special book?” I said.

  “It’s what I thought of right off when Jim told me about the farm,” she said.

  She took a bite of flax cookie and chewed for a long time.

  “I met Jim when I was waiting on tables at Bev’s Caf,” Emma said.

  Bev’s Caf used to be Bev’s Café, but the é fell off the sign and nobody ever bothered to put it up again, so ever since it’s just been Bev’s Caf. Anybody who wants to get elected to something or to collect money for something always starts out at Bev’s Caf, and it’s where you put a sign up if you’ve lost a cat or a dog, and where all the kids go after prom or graduation or a football game. My mom and dad got engaged at Bev’s Caf. Every year they used to go back on their engagement anniversary and play “Some Enchanted Evening” on Bev’s extremely old jukebox, and split a bottle of wine. One anniversary Eli and Jim sneaked up under Bev’s window and serenaded them on trombones. Eli and Jim were the entire trombone section in the Fairfield High School Orchestra and Band.

  Emma said, “Jim’d come in all the time and sit in one of the booths, and I thought he was nice. Quiet, but nice. Not that we talked about anything much but the weather and did he want another cup of coffee and how about the special on pie. But I could tell. Then one day I just got up the nerve and asked what all he was doing now that he wasn’t going to college anymore, and he said, why didn’t we go someplace when I got off work and he’d tell me. That’s when I heard all about the farm. And I thought it was just like The Secret Garden, you know? How there he’d been, all screwed up, and then he started growing things. And I thought I wished I could do that too. I think I fell in love with him right then.”

  Then she asked if I’d like another cookie, but I said no, thanks, because I’d had enough flax for one day.

  “Jim told me all about what happened, how bad off he was,” Emma said. “He said your brother never gave up on him. Jim thought an awful lot of your brother. He says it’s because of your brother that he’s still alive.”

  I think that’s the real reason my dad doesn’t like Jim.

  Because Eli’s dead and Jim is still alive.

  I became friends with Walter in the graveyard.

  I used to stop by Eli’s grave every once in a while, and if nobody was around, I’d sit down and shoot the breeze and catch him up on stuff.

  If you spend enough time in a graveyard, you really get to know the place like you do any other neighborhood. Pretty soon you even have your favorite graves. Mine were Beloved Henry, who got kicked by a horse at the age of six and ended up with a smirky little marble lamb, and Amos Pettigrew, who had a creepy carved skull and a badass epit
aph:

  Here lies AMOS PETTIGREW

  As I am now, so shall you be

  Prepare for death and follow me

  Gee, thanks, Amos, I used to think, but I visited him anyway. I bet in life he didn’t have many pals.

  The most interesting graves were in the old cemetery, which you could get to from the new one by stepping over the fence, which wasn’t hard, since most of it was lying on its side. That’s where the five little Wheeler kids were, and theirs were some of my favorite graves too. I used to go over and sit on the big Wheeler-parent gravestone and look at all those little stones lined up beside it like a row of granite ducklings.

  SAFE IN THE ARMS OF THE ANGELS, the big parent stone said.

  I wondered what the angels had been doing while whatever happened to the little Wheeler kids was happening, like lightning or bears or bubonic plague. Not doing their guardian-angel thing — that was pretty obvious. Maybe they’d all been goofing off at some celestial harp jam.

  I was so wrapped up in blasphemous anti-angel thoughts that when this voice behind me said, “Hi, Danny,” I nearly jumped out of my skin. The first thing I thought was Zombies! which goes to show the kind of thing you’re primed for if you’ve spent Halloween at Peter Reilly’s house with the lights out, watching Night of the Living Dead.

  But when I turned around, it was just old weird Walter, in a pair of ratty corduroy pants and geeky high-top sneakers and that haircut that made it look like his head had been chewed by squirrels.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Walter said. “I thought you heard me.”

  “You didn’t scare me,” I said. Lying slightly.

  “I see you up here a lot,” Walter said. “But I figured you wanted to be alone. Most people in a graveyard want to be left alone. I can leave if you want me to. Do you want me to leave you to be alone?”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “Stick around.”