Harder Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  She had Mel’s support, but Eudora was mainly her problem and while she didn’t have the flexibility of a stay-at-home mom, her job gave her flex time and split shifts and this helped. The plan? There was no plan. How did you counter a 180 in someone’s personality? Somebody you adored?

  Sitting at the kitchen table, cradling yet another cup of coffee, she got a cell phone call from Emil Grayle, the village constable. “Gamerov, you hearing anything about Goths?”

  “The barbarians or kids who dress weird?”

  “Very funny. Kids.”

  “Not a thing, Emil. Why would I?”

  “Street word.”

  “Street word in Vokal? We have seventy year-round residents, Emil. We’re not even a town. Legally we’re a hamlet. There are no traffic lights and there’s no street talk. What the hell is going on?” Vokal’s kids were in the Saint Lac consolidated school district; there were no schools within the boundaries of the hamlet.

  “Neveryoumind, word is the tree goths, grass goths and crows are gonna have a rumble at the boneyard Friday night.”

  “There’s a football game in St. Lac Friday night.”

  “Not for the goth crowd, there ain’t.”

  “We’ve got how many goth kids in Saint Lac, four, five? And you’re telling me they’re splintered into three factions?”

  “There’s four at the high school, more in the middle school, a couple in the elementaries, and your daughter is said to be the ringleader of the whole caboodle.”

  Gamerov closed her eyes. “What exactly does that mean, Emil, the ringleader?”

  “Ask your kid. There’s firearms involved. Don’t say you ain’t been told.”

  “Thanks, I guess. What is it you expect me to do?”

  “Ain’t it obvious?”

  “Not really.”

  The constable hung up without further comment. His call pissed her off, and worried her. Now what? The ball was clearly in her court.

  •••

  That night, dinner. “New with you?” Gamerov asked her daughter, whose hair was dyed black, her face white and sallow.

  “Same old,” Eudora said unenthusiastically.

  “Really, same old?” Mom asked.

  The girl looked up from her chicken breast. “Are you like in badge mode or Mom-mode?”

  “I’m not sure. Which do you think would be more appropriate?”

  “I have no interest whatsoever,” the girl said.

  “Tell me about tree goths, grass goths and crows.”

  Eudora looked warily at her mother. “It’s not stupid,” she said.

  “Did I say it was stupid?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Do not use that tone with me, Eudora.”

  “Get over it,” the girl mumbled.

  “You want to be treated like an adult? Okay, here’s how that works. Emil Grayle called me tonight to inform me that my daughter is and I quote here, “Ringleader,” end quote, of some sort of Goth confrontation planned for Friday night. Is that direct enough for you? No? Then add this to the calculation. Emil told me firearms are involved. Now, Ms. Goth ringleader, or who or whatever you are today, when you take high school students and throw in the word gun, you are headed for a high alarm for all cops.”

  The girl looked aghast at her mother. “Guns? Guns!”

  “Guns.”

  The girl flashed momentary panic, but steadied herself. “Do you believe everything you hear?”

  “You know very well that I don’t, which is why we’re talking, to which I would add now that I seem to have your attention, we’ve not done much of since you went Goth this past summer.”

  “This is not the time,” Eudora said.

  “When is the time?” her mother asked.

  “Guns?” the girl said in an extremely anguished tone, got up, and ran to her room, slamming the door behind her.

  Alex Gamerov poured more coffee for herself, waited a few minutes, went to her daughter’s bedroom door and knocked respectfully. “Can I come in?”

  She and Mel had always respected their daughter’s privacy and Alex did not want to step over that line now. “Honey?”

  “I have homework,” her daughter said through the door.

  Mom pushed open the door. The girl was sitting on the end of her bed scowling. “I have no rights, is that it?”

  “This is not about your rights, Eudora. There are serious allegations of the kind neither the constable nor I can ignore. We can’t.”

  “God, Mom, it’s me, Eudora. Do you really think I would have anything to do with guns in school?”

  “You’ve been taught to handle firearms, you hunt, you’re skilled.”

  “I’m also not crazy! Mom, this is what happens when a few people are different and others don’t like the difference.”

  Alex Gamerov took a deep breath. “Newtown.”

  Eudora rolled her eyes, but did not withdraw or retreat. “You think I’m that fucking lunatic Adam Lanza?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “But you’ve already assumed the gun rumor is true or you wouldn’t be in here interrogating me. Adam Lanza was a sick fuck, Mom. Crazy.” The girl made a sour face.

  “I never mentioned a name.”

  “You don’t have to. The media have pounded names into TV-heads, but Mom, most shooters in schools aren’t Goths. They’re sick kids. If you even put on a trench coat now, you’re automatically Goth. Back in the early sixties all college kids wore trench coats. It was in.”

  “Not any more,” Alex said.

  “No, not with the Baah-group. It’s in with some kids. Black is beautiful, or didn’t you get that memo? I mean, come on.”

  “Black is beautiful is about race.”

  “Not always and not now. The whole point of Goth is to look at yuck stuff and try to find beauty.”

  “Blood, vampires, death?”

  “Yes, Mom. All of that. We’re human beings. We’re all going to die. Whole religions try to teach their people to respect but not fear death, but if Goths do it, it’s wrong.”

  It struck Alex Gamerov that her withdrawn, often moody fourteen-year-old had been doing a lot of thinking. She was being entirely rational now, and convincing. “So, you started acting Goth to come to grips with dying?”

  “Mom, listen to me. One doesn’t become Goth. You are or you aren’t, and one day you realize it and you start to dress the way you think, the same way the Baahs dress to reflect what they think.”

  The conservation officer felt wired. “Stay with me, please. You are or are not Goth?”

  “Right. You think like most other people, or you don’t. You’re inside the box of the big group, or you’re outside that box. Like you, Mom. You’re a CO and you have to live and think outside boxes others build. You’re trained to not think like others.”

  Gamerov stared at her daughter.

  “Goths hate guns, mom. And all violence. Think about it. Americans love guns and violence. Look at movies, comics, TV, whatever. Goths are the opposite.”

  “You’re telling me there’s no guns involved this coming Friday?”

  “The constable’s son Trent started that rumor. He’s on the football team, heard some kids had plans and would not be at the game and it pissed him off. He decided to undercut us, using his old man.”

  “By alleging a gun?”

  Eudora nodded. “Nowadays you don’t need a gun to make your point. All you have to do is mention that word and that’s it. He said gun to his dad and after Newtown and all the crap afterwards, here we are talking about it, aren’t we? Trent’s no dummy. He played his old man like a banjo. The word ‘gun’ is the new way to get attention.”

  “What is Friday about?”

  “There’s a dude on the Internet with a blog called Goths in Trees and he puts
up really cool, really different photos of people trying to capture the Goth look. He criticizes their look in a constructive way and he asks people to send in photos.”

  “At night in a graveyard?”

  “Not in a cemetery. That’s bogus, like the gun. It’s at Elle McGhehey’s house. Her dad’s got floodlights and they have colossal oaks in their back forty.”

  “Crow goths?”

  “Brandon Lee, Edgar Allan Poe, Nevermore, they like to dress up like crows.”

  “Tree Goths?”

  “What we’re trying to become.”

  “Grass Goths?”

  “Us now, before Tree Gothdom.”

  “This is like some kind of upgrade, a change in status?”

  “Mom, are you thick? It’s a lark, it’s Goths making fun of Goths who show off their Gothnicity, you know Smithy Posers?”

  The conservation officer’s head hurt. “You and your friends want to make fun of other Goths?”

  “Right on, you are so mundane.”

  “I am?”

  “It means normal, Mom.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m Goth mundane, at least for now. Next year, who knows?”

  “I buy it,” Alex Gamerov said. “Not sure I understand any of this, but I think I buy it.”

  “Of course you do, Mom. You’re Goth.”

  •••

  Friday night at the McGhehey house, Constable Emil Grayle crashed the photo shoot at 10:30 p.m., Maglite in hand, pistol in the other. “Nobody move,” he yelled.

  “Put the gun away,” Alex Gamerov told the man.

  “Gamerov, you’re here and you ain’t got down on this?”

  “She realized she’s one of us,” Eudora Gamerov told the constable. She stood by her mother, both of them dressed in severe black, including knee-high patent leather boots with multiple silver buckles and platform soles and heels.

  “No guns here, Emil,” the conservation officer said.

  “Yah, well I maybe better take a look-see for myself. This is a big deal.”

  Gamerov said, “If it’s such a big deal, why did you wait until Trent’s game was over before you came out here? Football takes priority over a gun threat?”

  The constable walked out without further comment. Eudora’s friends all cheered and clapped and whistled at the game warden, who said, “You guys are so mundane.”

  They got home before Mel, who looked at his wife and whispered, “Grrrr, that outfit turns me on.”

  “You’re too tired,” she said.

  “How do you know?” he shot back.

  “That’s all you ever tell us.”

  “Yah, well step into my horizontal office and let’s discuss this,” he said, taking her hand.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  Heads, Tails, and Other Vague Body Parts

  “Good grief, there’s a plate of head in here,” Norval Churr bellowed as he slammed the fridge door.

  Norv, as other kids knew him, was the fifteen-year-old current attachment of Geriomo Smoon’s alluring and astonishing physically developed fifteen-year-old daughter Vachel Lindsay Smoon, second smartest child in the Creston-Vale school district, senior class valedictorian by rank, most of her peers two years behind her in school.

  Vachel went to the fridge, looked inside and made a growly snarly sound and said, “Mom, Stench is doing it again!”

  “Honey, I worked shiners until six this morning. Can I please sleep?”

  “It’s so . . . gross, and we like have a guest?”

  CO Smoon stumbled into the kitchen in her pink onesy. “I’m Geri,” she told the strange-looking boy with huge ears.

  “That’s Norval Churr, Ma. He likes me. Actually I think he likes some parts better than others but he doesn’t talk much so I have to pretty much guess.”

  “It’s good to be liked,” the mother said. “Doesn’t the future of the Earth depend on it?” Not that you would know. When was your last date? Two years? Gawd.

  “That’s so gross, Ma. Norv’s a boy, a sophomore, a pet. Look at him. He doesn’t know about birds or bees and all that euphemistic mumbo-jumbo cover-story lingo.”

  “I know there’s a plate of heads in the fridge,” Norv said. “Does that count?”

  She yelled up the stairs. “Yonder, get your darn butt down here and take care of your specimens.”

  The boy Yonder, aka Stench, thirteen, a freshman, already six-two with ranges of white-capped zits all over his face, wild hair, and with darty, dark eyes, the unmistakable countenance of a lab rat. Yonder came downstairs silently and looked at Norval like a bobcat might look at a fawn.

  “Norv, meet Yonder, my kid brother. We call him Stench.”

  Yonder sniffed. “No room in the freezer here or downstairs.”

  Geriomo joined her son, who towered above her. She opened the fridge. “Kittens and rabbits?”

  The boy sighed and shuffled his big feet. “Somebody dumped the kittens in the creek and I claimed salvage rights.” The boy made another sniffing sound. “See, not even a little ripe. The rabbits got run over when I was doing the lawn on the rider-mower. I didn’t see them until it was too late.”

  Geri eyed her son. “Too late? Likely story. Not paying attention, off in one of your fogs,” she said.

  “No biggie, Mom. All great scientists have collected specimens. It’s no different than the commercial food chain. People like pigs but do they know how pork gets into the Piggly Wiggly? I think not, and they don’t want to know. Scientists, however, we want to know, we must know, we have to know.”

  “You’re no scientist,” Vachel told her brother, “and if you’re moving that plate of heads downstairs, please go outside and around, not through the house. We don’t want to walk through a ribbon of fumes of the recently departed tickling our nostrils.”

  “Ever the bromidrosiphobic,” Stench said.

  “You are a very sick and deeply disturbed child,” Vachel told her brother.

  “No more child than your companion,” Yonder said, adding an exaggerated head nod.

  “Wait,” Geriomo said. “I have two fawns in the stand-up fridge, so there’s no room in there.” Smart tossed a key on a green lanyard to her son. “Blue evidence locker in my office.”

  “That’s full of steelhead and salmon,” Vachel told her mother.

  “No, I moved those fish to the district office yesterday afternoon. There should be lots of space on top the other stuff.”

  “Other stuff?” Norval interjected.

  “Cadavers for necropsy. Bodies, if you will. Want to see?”

  “I guess,” the boy said.

  “Vachel, do not tease that nice boy,” Geriomo said.

  “He wants to see, Ma. Donchu Norv? You want to show me your manly man side, look death in the eye, all that good stuff, right?”

  “I guess,” the boy said.

  “Vachel, leave that young man alone. Ti-pi.”

  “I know, mother, but it’s like frozen?”

  “Nak-ka,” Geriomo said sharply.

  “Eh-eh-eh,” the girl keened. “Miki-luk.”

  “Na-ka. King-oo-vi?”

  “I’m just having some fun with him.”

  “Mean is not fun, it’s bullying.”

  “Is that like Canadian you guys are speaking?” Norval asked.

  Geriomo looked hard at her daughter who said, “Okay?”

  “No.” The boy was clearly a driver in the slow lane, a poor reason to be picking on him. Geriomo tried to teach her children to talk in Inuit when they wanted to keep conversations private. She had grown up in Alaska, her folks both anthropologists. The family had lived with their subjects until Geriomo went outside to attend Michigan State and while she was gone, her parents had drowned in a hunting accident. Geriomo decided to remain in Michi
gan, got her degree in wildlife management, worked for the DNR as a biologist for a while, but found it boring and moved over into law enforcement. Thank God for her health. She had always made it a point to stay in shape. The physical tests of the DNR academy had been a nightmare, but she had made it through and had been a CO now for eight years, five of which she had been on her own in the county.

  Hubbard Kenty, her partner and former trooper, was known for his lead foot, which led him to a head-on with a massive bull moose, killing both of them more or less instantly. At least she liked to think so. Hub had been a good guy with a happy-go-lucky, off-the-wall view of life. As a trooper he’d given out popcorn balls on Halloween, and GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards during traffic stops on the Fourth of July. Geriomo missed him and so did her kids who called him “Uncle Hub.”

  “Go outside,” Vachel told Norv, who dutifully shuffled out onto the upper deck.

  “You cannot audition boyfriends,” her mother said.

  The girl made a face. “You don’t know that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Vachel, I raised you. I know what you think before you think it.”

  “Like one of your violets?”

  Violets, her word for violators. She wished at times that she could think like them, if thinking was the right word to describe what went on in such mixed-up heads, but most of the time she decided, she would rather stay ignorant of their innermost thinking.

  “That boy is not a game, Vachel. He’s human.”

  “Ma, he’s a sophomore. They’re never human!”

  “OK, why is he here?”

  “An experiment.”

  “You’re using him?”

  “I won’t hurt him. He’s like a dildo, hey?”

  “Vachel.”

  “Yes, I know what you keep in your dresser!”