by Brian Hodge
"See?" she said. "You don't want me to crumble away, fragile old fossil that I am. You care, too, tough guy. And I think you'll meet someone who will appreciate what you have."
True to form, she paused a beat before delivering her zinger: "And then maybe I'll get to be a Grandma."
"Motherrrr…"
She laughed then, and it was the way she used to laugh all the time, over unwrapped birthday gifts or after patching sibling spats. Her laugh could give you the strength to go on.
"Mom, I–"
She shushed him. "I need you to do something for me. I need you to turn around, and not look at me, and keep your eyes on that stone for a few moments while I leave. No good-byes at this late date."
He tried to add things then, extend this visitation. Win another sixty seconds. She was too smart for him.
"Forget all that. This is what is important: Hear me when I say you're still my son, and I still love you, and nothing changes that. Ever. Now take your love and make something of it. Promise me."
"I love you, Mom. I'll try. I promise." As he spoke he felt a loosening in his chest. Another burden lifting, even as her touch abandoned his arm and he did as he was told, reading the TROWBRIDGE stone to himself, over and over.
Funny thing, him standing there all by himself saying I love you repeatedly until it became I will love. I will try.
By then Russell Pitt's mother had disappeared. Wind stirred dead leaves.
10.
He had to lock down a breather minute. The iron bench offered rest and concealment and he turned back to it.
It was occupied, and the guy sitting there scooted over to cut space for Russell as he neared. The stranger moved in an awkward, uncoordinated way, a puppet with strings the wrong length.
Russell immediately found himself back in urban fortress mode: Terrific; now I have to listen to this jerk drone on about his birth defects and why he's here and all that rot …
"I never forgot what you told me once about people," the man said. Russell froze before he rounded the bench. He had one hand on it. He clamped his eyes shut, then covered them with his other hand.
This was not Ricky. It could not be Ricky, sitting on the bench and waiting for him, just as it could not have been Simone or Mom or Grandpa or the black-broiled, oozing thing that would be his father after the fatal freeway wreck, the seventh anniversary of which had just come and gone.
"Man, I can still hear your voice; that tone." He scared up a fair mimic of Mister R. Pitt, bossman of Aloft Limited, waxing lectorial, speechmaking, an address for success. "'Know what I wish, Ricky?' you said. 'I wish people died when you were done with 'em.' And I asked you what that meant and you told me you weren't sure but it sounded right."
"Messy. Is what I said." He still wasn't looking.
Ricky and Russell had attended Mom's funeral together. And Ricky would be moving crookedly because of his legs…
"If people die when you're done with them, then you never have to worry about explaining yourself. You don't have to watch your friends age. Or your enemies prosper. Or lovers fall in love with someone who's not you. You don't have to watch your ex-girlfriend amble into a restaurant on the arm of a great-looking guy while you're sitting there, eating alone. And I guess you would no longer have to put up with your mom's nagging about grandkids. Am I warm?"
Very funny, Russell thought. Ricky was still a smartass.
Family cliché had it that Russell was the brainy one, the introvert, the schemer, while Ricky had been the track star, the sun-tanner, the popular one. You saw Ricky on every spa billboard in LA.
Ricky had gone parasailing on his 25th birthday, he and his cronies toasting his survival of a quarter-century with beer stems of Piper Heidsieck. When Ricky was aloft the boat pilot accidentally rammed a buoy. Ricky's chute folded up while the pilot freaked, flipped the boat, and lived. Ricky had paid out too much line and flown too high. Striking the water from his altitude was like hitting plywood. Both his legs were smashed. Then he drowned.
"You didn't do so bad with Mom. You've changed, bro."
"Only within the last twelve hours or so."
"Come on, Russ-man. Say hi. I look okay. Still handsome. Nothing like Dad. Poor sumbitch."
"How come all those goddamn cops that nailed me this morning haven't seen any of you, if you all just brushed off grave dirt and went strolling?"
"Give me a break, big guy. We didn't drop by for the badge dudes. We came back for you. You came to see us every year so I guess it's time for us to return the social favor. You'll notice it's just us–no great aunts, or, like, ancient, ancestors. Just us."
Russell stared at his own hands, picturing Ricky as he had been eleven years removed. Robust, alert and ready to party. With his voice right there, it was simple to form the picture.
"Just us?"
"Get with the program, ace. You know: Immediate family. Back to ole Grandpa, our big moby patriarch." Ricky had never been jounced on Great Grandpa Frits' kneebone. "Sorta like a group-rate funeral in reverse, huh? Totally weird."
On the crest of the hill the nameless flock of black suits was still congregated, enduring eulogies. From here Russell could not discern the guy who had been Simone's living dead quickie. He could hear the clockwork of the casket rack lowering its burden into the soil.
None of his family had stayed beneath this ground. Maybe he should warn those mourners. Or sue somebody.
1979. Ricky had died the same year as Mom. She had been a February, he an April. Russell thought of this double tragedy in the same fatalistic way he acknowledged that there were always three trues in a row on a true-false quiz. Never fool yourself into believing there is a roof on how much bad news will fit into the fiscal year. Don't try to fool Mister D.
White shirt, sober borrowed tie, no jacket. That was how Ricky had been dressed for Mom's funeral. He did not own a suit, let alone a suit colored for an occasion. He had hung next to Russ, his face punched in by loss, his cheer dammed, his voice stilled. A boy who had just lost his mother to mad biology; a boy who had no idea how soon he would play a return gig at this same boneyard, this time, properly attired. A perfect fit in a burial suit, because no one would see the slits and laces. Or the tissue-building gel injected into his eyelids with a syringe to prevent his eyes from appearing sunken. Or the orange dye flushed into his arterial freeway to lend him color. Ricky had never been big on cosmetics. In his open casket he'd looked like a rouged mannequin to Russell. Ricky had been so alive that this stand-in dummy couldn't possibly …
Only the top half of the casket had been open for display. No need for mourners to puzzle his pulverized legs in their neat sleeves of cerement. "I was checking them out, y'know, the lady mourners?"
For one shocked moment Russell thought Ricky meant the attendees at his own long-ago funeral. He tried to remember whether he had done anything embarrassing or emotional.
"Some wicked assemblies up there. Man, I just love spikes and black stockings."
"Yeah. Simone plucked one of the boy mourners already."
Ricky cackled. "Fuckin Simone! Super Nympho. She was always a felony while we barely scraped misdemeanor. And you left most of the hell up to me. Biiig responsibility, brother Russ."
Russell looked, and was not too surprised. Ricky was as exact as the picture of memory could make him…yet faded and vague, in the way color snapshots can bleed to sepia over the years.
Russell sat down heavily. "Know what confounds me, even now?"
"Why your beatin-off hand is always opposite in the mirror? Sorry."
"That time we got together right after Hallowe'en, right before Thanksgiving. Remember?"
"Seventy-seven. I was twenty-three. And we didn't do a family gathering because that woulda been too gross, with so much of the family six feet under."
"You brought that girl you thought you wanted to marry."
"Adela, yes sir. And you brought Elise. She had dynamite legs. I looked at her legs and thought, hoo-eee, those legs mak
e the rabbit-ear shape for my brother?"
"And we talked about nothing. After a year apart, we all sat in that bloody restaurant and neither of us had a damned thing to say to the other."
"Wasn't normal family vibes. Wasn't a normal family, Russ. You shouldn't sweat that."
"I think about that afternoon a lot. Sorry I didn't say anything more meaningful. I mean, if I'd known how soon you were going to–"
"Forget it. Everybody pulls that shit. Somebody cries and somebody else gets all hysterical-and everybody talks about what they shoulda said sooner. Belated good intentions, and they don't tote up to piss, bro. Because if they did, they'd make you feel better for voicing them. But you know nothing makes you feel better. That stuff about time healing wounds is bullshit; time just cauterizes the scars, man, and the scars stay. Till you croak. After, even. You and I hatched some grand plots together. Two brothers makin' trouble. Later we drifted. We got different, okay? It was natural, nobody's fault. We did our bit."
"I guess I expected more."
"Everybody always wants more. It's the one constant."
"It just feels funny to say I miss you when we never talked, those last few years you were alive. We never talked much as adults."
"Fuck adult; who needs it?"
Russell realized he had just said while you were alive as casually as saying pardon me on a subway.
"Say it, Russ."
"Say what?"
"What you just said you'd feel funny saying. Out loud. Whispers don't count."
His throat tightened and tried to close. Ricky egged him on.
"You cry and I'll fuckin' pound you, man."
Russell swallowed, glump, like trying to deep-throat a golf ball. "I miss you, Ricky. I really do. Even though we seemed to lose whatever we had in common."
"I miss you too, Russ-man. Ditto. I do."
Up on the hill the ceremonies ceased and birds began to announce dusk.
"See? Simple. No sweatballs. Now I got a dare for you, big brother."
"A dare?" This abrupt reversion to boyhood, eleven versus six, helped clear the emotions clouding Russell's eyes and blocking his throat. "How dare you dare me?"
"I dare you to walk up that hill and look down into that open grave, where those mourners are leaving right now. Look into your future." Russell gave Ricky the finger. "You can gnosh my hose."
"I'd need an eyedropper. Come on. Don't be a pansy."
"Ooh, your pecs thrill me," Russell returned, just fey enough. "Double dare."
Russell nailed Ricky, dead serious. "Then you owe me a Coke."
"Done."
11.
En route to Valley View's freshest grave Russell flashed on every tawdry horror story he had ever seen or read involving the Dead That Walked.
… revivified corpses, stumping forth, dropping moist clods of maggoty tissue, lust for the living a viridescent, unholy glow in their hollow eye sockets …
Mom had been gone for over a decade, more than enough time for her to meld with the soil as undifferentiated chaff. Ditto Ricky.
And Simone had died before Mom, already in mid-decay even as she ceased breathing. Simone had been in too much of a hurry. For everything.
These were not reanimated bodies. They were too close to the romanticizations Russell had imposed on his family from the moment Grandpa had said–
(from the moment that senile basket case who CLAIMED to be Grandpa had said)
–that the family had taken a time-out from being dead. Ricky had said they'd risen especially for Russell. To escort him to his own comfy grave, perhaps? Make the family score ten-for-ten?
Maybe it was the shimmering arrogance of the living, but Russell wasn't ready to get supine with the other former Pitts and spend the next century wondering whether Mister Mort had to take a dump.
Not yet. No. Thanks for asking.
The last of the departing mourners evil-eyed Russell, scowling and bleating easy disapproval. He knew he looked disheveled at best. He was sweated through, his shirt damp and rank. Dirt streaked him as though he'd been pawing about in some attic.
Up ahead at the gravesite, a lone woman hitched her skirt to kneel and pluck a flower from the lid of the lowered casket. As Russell crested the rise the sun enveloped her in a blinding corona of red, diminishing her to a stick figure.
"Daddy had to leave," she said.
He stopped at the grave's edge. The marker was just a label taped to a peg, so far. It read FARNHAM.
"Daddy left because he didn't want you to see him the way he died. All horrible. He didn't want you to remember him this way."
Russell watched Darianne smell the carnation she had appropriated. Her lucent, pale skin had come from Mom; her blue eyes from Grandpa's familial branch.
"He's just as stubborn as you. That's how Ricky and I always knew you were his son. Stubborn."
Whenever Russell thought of his late father, the image that predominated was of a mangled, blackened mass. How automotive technology could rearrange meat and bone. Of course his father would not want to be remembered this way, but the image persisted. Stubbornly.
Darianne twirled her flower by its stem. "Russ? I'm cold. You're sweating and I'm freezing to death."
He placed his hands on her bare arms from behind. Darianne's height, exactly. Darianne's hair. She was as heatless as morgue marble. No goose bumps.
"Do you remember the time we made up epitaphs for ourselves? Yours was NOT DEAD - JUST RESTING MY EYES. Remember what mine was?"
Her voice stole in to squeeze his heart. Tears tried to skid down his face again. No sobbing. Just tears.
"I can't." He didn't even know what was carved on her real tombstone.
"Mine was HERE LIES DARIANNE - PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS."
It hadn't been funny then and it wasn't funny now. It summed up her meek and suppressed nature in a single line architectured to be unobtrusive, unimaginative, bland, safe.
"What words should we give Mister Farnham, here? Help me think of something."
"I can't."
"You already said that."
"I can't think of anything. I'm thinking about you." It seemed such a long reach.
She turned and faced him, remaining safely in his grasp. "Funny. I can't think of anything, either. A whole graveyard full of names, and each one has a story. Like our story. And we can't come up with anything to say for Mister Farnham. His relatives sure sold him short. A good husband. A fine father. A hard worker. He went into the dirt with hardly a ripple. Then all the mourners go home to eat and watch TV By nighttime, he's all alone. With no words."
Twilight was inching up. Russell pulled back.
"No, Russ. Hold me. Please? I'm still cold, and it might seem childish to you…but you always gave the best hugs."
"You're an ice cube. Snuggle in."
Sundown was thieving what pitiful heat she almost retained.
Darianne had gone with a thermometer in her mouth, in a dim and cheerless room. Her doctors–the four musketeers of specialized medicine–agreed that her leukemia was most likely congenital. Inherited. Probably. Their bills were much more precise. Darianne had checked out enwrapped in blankets, fighting to keep warm, leopard-spotted by her own poisoned blood, done before she had even started, at twenty-one years.
At her funeral, nameless people tried to soothe Russell by noting how unfair Darianne's death had been. But for the best. Probably. He wanted to make all their faces cave in. He wanted to trade all their glad-handing sympathy and bogus concern for five minutes during which he could actually have helped Darianne, done for her. Made some difference he could perceive in retrospect.
Now she was free of fevers at last. He held her and she was as vibrant as kindling. Encroaching darkness helped mask the blotches marring her fine, pale skin.
"Take me down there, Russ."
Mister Mort stood waiting for them.
The caretakers will be locking up now, thought Russell. They'll nab me and I'll get shit-canned twice in one day.
Grandpa won't have any more doubloons–or whatever he used to spring my poor white ass.
Darianne was far too recent. Eight years back. The cuts of memory were still fresh and wet. He remembered escorting her on walks, near flowers, when she could no longer bear the dark room and demanded sunlight. There were flowers aplenty at Valley View. She held his hand tightly, her carnation, gently.
Mister Mort dwarfed them. His shadow was imposing. His placement was intentionally outspoken. Big Pitt bucks had paid handsomely for all this cemetery drama.
Dad's grave was full, tamped, pristine. So was Mom's, alongside. Ricky and Simone were back where they had begun the day. The police tape was broken away in many places; it flapped with that sound plastic flags make at used car lots.
Three plots lay open and waiting. Russell blinked and rubbed his face. No, only two: One for Darianne, one for Leaver Millard Mortimer Pitt, alias the wily Grandpa. Russell knew well the spot assigned as his own future resting place. It was blank, stoneless, unexcavated. The ebbing daylight had forced his eyes to fancy a hole there, warm earth beckoning. A final pit for the final Pitt.
They stood holding hands at the lip of Darianne's grave.
"You have to do it."
Horror vaulted up from his stomach. He released her unliving grasp. "No. Not me. I'm not ready–"
She cocked a brow as though he was loony. In that instant she was alive for him again, no blotches, wondering what trick her goofy big brother was trying this time.
"Not you," she said. "You're not dead. Me." Daintily, she stepped down into the hole. Dirt crumbled atop her shoes. "It's got to be you, Russ. Please? For me?"
He wondered if the scatter of fill dirt would be enough, even including Darianne. There were no shovels or tools. He would have to use his hands.
She kissed him on the cheek, then blended down into darkness. She would not permit him the sight of soil slowly engulfing her. No such ugliness for Darianne. If Russell saw this, he'd remember it, being every bit as stubborn as his Dad.
Her plot was a rectangle of iron gray against evening black.
Ricky's dare had been to fake Russell into her proximity. Darianne had forever been the shyest. Now he could physically lay her to rest with his own hands, along with his guilt over his inability to save her.
