by Paula Guran
The air was cold and electrified, the sky black. It was two minutes till game time and the opposing team still had yet to show, as had their fans. The bleachers opposite ours were bare, the sidelines equally so.
“If they don’t show, do they forfeit?”
“They’ll show.”
I sat in the top row of bleachers with Art and Roland.
“I need a smoke,” Roland said. He and Art, along with the rest of the hushed crowd, watched the field intently. The players on our side had already made their big entrance and were sitting on their benches, waiting and watching the field. “Wish I could hold a cigarette.”
That afternoon, the pep rally had proceeded as all such events do—cheering, clapping, yelling, clapping some more and yelling louder, followed by more cheering, and, time permitting, more yelling and clapping. All throughout, however, there had been something in the air between the fans and the players, something in their distant smiles that made our good wishes sound almost mournful—some unacknowledged dread, as though our boys were going off to war, that we might not ever see them again.
“But if they don’t show up,” I repeated.
“They’ll show up.”
My breath came out as a fog. Nobody else’s did.
“But if they d—”
A sound rang out from On High—a lone trumpet echoing down from the cloud cover. I looked up at the sky, as did everyone, and felt fear choke my heart. The horn sounded once more, like a distant cavalry charge. As it did so, a solitary ray of golden light, no wider than a child’s arm, pierced the clouds and focused on the fifty-yard line. A third time the trumpet sounded. My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to hide, to cover my face, so terrible was this sound that said your dreams are over, a sound that told you, convinced you, that everything you thought you would become you will never become; all the plans you have laid for yourself, will never come to pass. It was the bang of an unseen gun pointed at your heart. It was the sound of The End.
The fourth time the horn sounded it was joined by a chorus of bellicose brass, horns of war that wrung all will to resist from my body as the tiny spotlight that shone down on our home field widened suddenly, split the sky like a knife ripping open a wound, flooding the terrain with a rapturous, unflinching blaze as a host of seraphim in gold and white football jerseys poured down from the break in the clouds and stormed the field, a beautiful, thunderous stampede of infallible athletic ability with the greatest record of any school in the history of the universe. These were our opponents. This was Paradise High.
“We have to fight Heaven in our Homecoming Game?” I asked, totally flabbergasted. Across the field, a glowing body of halos and white robes filled the opposing stands.
“They’ve never been defeated,” Art said and bit into a corndog.
“Why am I not surprised?”
“It ain’t that bad, son,” Roland offered. “It’s like, this one doesn’t count, you know?”
“Doesn’t count?”
“Yeah, you know,” Art said. “They can’t be beat. Nobody’s ever even scored on these guys. When God’s sitting in the other team’s bleachers, the bookies take the day off.”
“Is that Genghis Khan looking through their playbook?”
“He’s their head coach.”
“But wasn’t he, like, a bloodthirsty conqueror?”
“And a strategic genius.”
“But wasn’t he, like, a bloodthirsty conqueror?”
“Did the first-string linebackers at Harvard score 1600s on their SATs?” Roland asked.
I stared blankly down at the fetus.
“I don’t think so,” he answered as the whistle rang out for the kickoff.
I left when the scorekeeper lost count. The hometown crowd hadn’t made a peep for the better part of three quarters. Whether we were too sorry to cheer for Middle Plain or too guilty to root against Heaven I couldn’t say, but I supposed it didn’t matter. My mind hadn’t been on the game anyway.
I wandered back to the cemetery. Every grave was empty. Everyone had shown up to see their team get clobbered. I wondered why.
“You know, you’re quite a unique young man.”
I whirled around, surprised. I was going to school in the land of the dead, but a strange voice in the middle of a cemetery was still mildly alarming.
Ms. Needlemeyer, the Clown of Dachau, leaned against the wall of a mausoleum, trying to light a cigarette without the ability to inhale.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“You’re a very unique young man,” she reiterated. “You are, after all, the only one who’s ever been unhappy.”
“Wha . . . huh? I don’t get it.”
“That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”
I stopped, looked at her with her painted skull and fallen stockings. She looked like a hooker who’d died propped against a lamppost and no one had noticed while she wasted away to nothing but bleached bones and a low-cut dress.
“No,” I replied, softly.
“Here,” she held out the as-yet unlit cigarette. “Little help?”
I plopped down on the tombstone beside her, lit her cigarette, handed it back.
“So what do you want to hear?”
I thought about that question, tried to look past the immediate thoughts of fame, money, sex. I thought about Ginger, and my ’rents. Most of all I thought about how everyone on the planet seemed to kind of suck, in a general way, while I, clearly the only one who didn’t suck, seemed to be the only one that was unhappy.
“I want someone to tell me it’s going to be all right.”
A dry chuckle sounded in Ms. Needlemeyer’s throat, the sound of drumsticks on a pelvic snare drum.
“What?” I asked.
“You, young man, are the only person that can honestly say that to yourself. That’s what growing up is, hon.” She held the cigarette between her bare teeth, let the smoke float up into her eye cavities in a dead French inhale. “Becoming that person.”
Mercifully, across the churchyard and over the last hill, the final whistle of the game blew. We turned and watched the sky tear open behind the school. The angels flew home quickly, whooping and hollering and cheering like a parade.
“Everybody always wants to be somewhere else,” Needlemeyer noted. “Always making plans to be somewhere they’d rather be. I don’t imagine it’s any different in Heaven. I’d just like to know where they’d rather be.”
I looked at the painted bag of bones, at the dirt caked on my shoes.
I had to keep my distance from Ginger at the Homecoming Dance. No one but our inner circle of friends knew how serious things had gotten between us and no one else could know, or there would be hell to pay. Literally. So I stood against the wall with Art while Roland danced on Missy’s outstretched palm and Ginger boogied beside them. After a few songs he came back to catch his breath. Missy went to the bathroom with Ginger.
“What the dilly, son?” Roland asked. He sounded like a winded rubber squeaker toy. “You upset about the game? Don’t let it get to you, bro. We always lose Homecoming.”
“Huh?” I looked up from my feet. “Oh. Nah, I don’t care about that shit.”
“Then what’s up?” Art asked.
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You love her?” Roland asked.
On the dance floor, Misty and Twisty and everybody else danced. Everyone danced differently. I wondered what it had been like, years ago, when nobody danced alone. You found a partner or you waited for one, looking for someone to ask.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“That means no, son. When it comes to love, anything but yes means no.”
I watched Ginger and Missy come out of the bathroom. Ginger looked for me across the dance floor, found me. I met her gaze, held it as I walked out to the dance floor and took her hand for a slow song.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I made no response. We fit our bodies toget
her and started to move.
“I think I love you,” Ginger said after the first refrain.
She said it the way everybody says it the first time, when what they really mean is I think I want to tell you I love you. She looked at me, wanting me to say it back. I wanted to say it back, but I couldn’t speak. All the blood in my body reversed its flow. I felt like I did in the cemetery, when Art, Roland, and Missy had played the prank on me, convincing me that I’d been dead the whole time.
“Aren’t you gonna say it too?”
There was a pause between songs, long enough for someone to bet it all and lose; long enough for a plane to make an emergency landing; long enough for the next song to load, and begin.
“I, I—”
“I mean, if this isn’t love, what is?” she asked, needing me to have the answer.
Again I found no words. I couldn’t speak to her. Couldn’t look at her.
“What are you thinking about?” she pleaded softly. She pressed her head against my chest, let the familiar cold of her tears soak through my shirt.
“Nothing,” I replied, the old conversational parachute that worked more like an anvil tied to a ripcord.
“Please tell me.”
I looked down at her, and for the first and probably last time, spoke with absolute honesty to a woman who I cared about:
I’d been thinking about my mother, about a certain Christmas morning when I was seven years old. It was our hardest holiday together. My father had been laid off before the previous semester had begun and it had plunged him into a crisis of being from which it seemed he might never emerge. He slept most of the day and haunted our house at night while we slept. Once, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d gone down for a drink of water and found the old man standing in front of the open refrigerator, talking to the appliance’s innards like a door-to-door salesman might present his product on some anonymous stoop, trying his damnedest to get his foot in the door. He’d sold vacuums door-to-door one summer when he was nineteen to save for the down payment on a car. He was brushing up the old pitch. I didn’t know this at the time.
Months later, when Christmas came, my mother picked out my presents, spent hours poring over the discount bins at Toys “R” Us and JCPenney’s looking for toys I might like that wouldn’t break the bank. When the morning of December twenty-fifth finally came around, I found her asleep on the couch. She’d waited until late to bring out the toys and had fallen asleep wrapping them. When I saw what Santa had brought, I cried. I said they were stupid. I said they were awful.
Like everyone, I’ve done some shitty things in my life. I’ve hurt good people, most of the time without meaning to. And I’ve forgiven myself for those misdeeds, because like everyone, I convince myself that the things I do, I do because I must. But I’ve never forgiven myself for what I said that morning.
My mother had tried to explain, rapidly wiping tears from her eyes before I could see them. She said that there must have been a mix-up. Santa, she explained, had confused our house with someone else’s. She said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often. But all I could do was cry and whine and complain about how good I’d been all year.
“I know, sweetie,” she sniffed, comforting me, hugging me. “You’ve been so good. We’ll write Santa a letter. We’ll write him a letter and he’ll clear everything up. You just have to give it a little time to get there.”
By the following Christmas, I didn’t believe in Santa Claus. Yet to this day, my mom still writes “From Santa” on a couple of presents every year.
“I don’t get it,” Ginger replied when I finished telling the story.
“That’s what I think love is.”
“But it’s such a sad story,” she explained. “What does that have to do with me?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
The second slow song ended. The DJ came on to announce that the next song would be the final slow number of the evening. I’d reason, years later, that neither of us really loved each other then. I’d also figure that it didn’t really matter.
“I love this song,” she said. It was a song about dreams, about having a nightmare that the singer’s true love had died. “You know, I’ve never had a nightmare since I’ve been here. I don’t think I’ve had a single dream.”
I looked down at her, at the people staring at us with attraction and disgust.
“I love you,” I said again, to the whiskers on her head.
“I love you too,” she said as I pulled away, turned around, and began to run.
I found Paul in the gymnasium, trying to dribble a basketball and failing. As I approached, I watched him pick up a ball with both hands and drop it. He swatted at the bouncing thing and missed, waited for it to settle at his feet, then picked it up again. I looked at the floor around him, at the equipment he’d dragged from storage: dodge balls, footballs, soccer balls and nets, tennis rackets, swim caps, and racing hurdles. He was wearing a gym uniform. The shirt was inside-out. I picked up a metal baseball bat, felt the weight. I watched him pick up the basketball again. Outside, moonlight streamed in through the high windows. I held the bat over my shoulder, stood like a major leaguer. I thought about Ginger. I thought about Art’s blood in his mom’s ice cube trays. I thought about Christmas, and swung the bat.
They were asleep when I got home. The TV was on and the color bars watched over them silently. My father sat at the end of the couch with my mother sprawled out on the adjoining cushions, her head on Pop’s lap. The old man’s brow was creased, his throat moving and sounding, talking to someone in his dreams. His head ticked to the left and he spoke again, in his throat. His mouth opened suddenly, breathing in.
“Hey,” I said quietly. I put a bloody hand on his twitching shoulder. “I’m home.”
About the Author
Nik Houser was born in a small town which, when Nik was a boy, made the mistake of selling off the logging rights of a sacred forest which the local Cheyenne elders called Ta’ovo’omeno, or Pissed-Off Mountain The clear-cut trees were sold to a mill which supplied a variety of companies throughout the region. That Autumn, while writing a paper on Christopher Columbus, Nik’s pencil, which had been made from Ta’ovo’omeno wood, came back to life and wrote a report of its own called “My Human Teacher is an Imperialist Butthead.” Nik’s teacher did not believe the boy’s story about his pencil, though not for long. Undead paper products soon began to terrorize the town. Zombie books made from Ta’ovo’omeno paper would slam shut at the most suspenseful parts. Wooden chairs scooted away when someone tried to sit in them. Soon, the plague spread to anything made of wood: grocery sacks split, to-do lists wandered off, whole wood-frame houses began to creak and sway, ready to fall. One afternoon, Nik found a Post-It note (made from YOU-KNOW-WHAT) stuck to the fridge which read “Gone to find a better son, please die before we return.” Nik and his family left town that very night. Recently, Mr. Houser tried to return to the town, only to discover that the covered bridge which lead to it had collapsed. There was no sign of the town beyond. Too many trees blocked the way. Please visit www.nikhouser.com
Story Notes
Other than special thanks to Kit Reed who pointed me in the right direction to find Mr. Houser’s story . . . really, what more can I say? Except, maybe, that if they do get that Zombie Channel going, I think this would make a keen basis for a series: Gravestone High School.
Zora and the Zombie
Andy Duncan
“What is the truth?” the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings, and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo’s thighs.
Zora’s pencil point snapped. Ah, shit
. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti—the one that rightfully should have been Zora’s—not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, but for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent god Damballa—the heifer!
Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. “He is mounted!” the people cried. “A loa has made him his horse.” The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed. Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson, too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. “Somethin’ got after me in mah sleep, Janie,” she had written. “Tried tuh choke me tuh death.”
Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.
“Miss Hurston,” a woman whispered, her heavy necklace clanking into Zora’s shoulder. “Miss Hurston. Have they shared with you what was found a month ago? Walking by daylight in the Ennery road?”
Dr. Legros, chief of staff at the hospital at Gonaives, was a good-looking mulatto of middle years with pomaded hair and a thin mustache. His three-piece suit was all sharp creases and jutting angles, like that of a paper doll, and his handshake left Zora’s palm powder dry. He poured her a belt of raw white clairin, minus the nutmeg and peppers that would make it palatable to Guede, the prancing black-clad loa of derision, but breathtaking nonetheless, and as they took dutiful medicinal sips his small talk was all big, all politics: whether Mr. Roosevelt would be true to his word that the Marines would never be back; whether Haiti’s good friend Senator King of Utah had larger ambitions; whether America would support President Vincent if the grateful Haitians were to seek to extend his second term beyond the arbitrary date technically mandated by the Constitution. But his eyes—to Zora, who was older than she looked and much older than she claimed—posed an entirely different set of questions. He seemed to view Zora as a sort of plenipotentiary from Washington and only reluctantly allowed her to steer the conversation to the delicate subject of his unusual patient.
