Gravestone

by Travis Thrasher

  What are you doing, man?

  I don’t know.

  I really don’t know.

  I wanted to go to church to get some answers, and I only scampered out with more questions.

  If you had a little more guts maybe you would’ve stuck around.

  But the guts thing hasn’t been working so far, has it? I got a gun and tried to do what I was supposed to do—warn away the gang of hooded weirdos in the middle of the countryside. I tried to stop them. I tried to get to her.

  I tried. I really tried.

  I feel tears on the edges of my cheeks and claw at them to get them off my face. I’m tired of tears. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of this moping, this sad sadness.

  After walking for twenty minutes or so, as the paved road becomes a dirt lane, I have a feeling of déjà vu. I don’t know why. But this looks and feels familiar.

  I soon reach the dead end of the road at the edge of the forest. For some reason, even though it’s sunny out today, the woods in front of me appear darker and denser. I’m half tempted to head into them to see where they take me, but I have no idea if they’ll ever end. I can see myself getting lost and wandering around for days.

  Doubt many people around here would mind.

  It feels colder where I’m standing, the wind a little stronger. I shiver and look into the shade of the trees in front of me.

  I wonder if someone is in there, watching me.

  Someone or something.

  I turn to head back down Heartland Trail.

  Maybe by the time I make it back to church, the service will be over and I can still catch my ride home with Ray.

  Something itches at me to turn around one last time before the road veers around the corner.

  As I do, I suddenly recognize where I’ve seen this before.

  The magazine clipping from Jocelyn’s locker. The one that turned up in mine with the handwritten quote on it.

  The line from the Robert Frost poem.

  I looked it up. Should’ve recognized it. If it had been a song lyric, maybe I would have.

  This is the image. The only difference is the time of year the photo was taken.

  Why did someone take a photo of this place? And more importantly, why was it in my locker?

  So many questions, I think, as I see the church nearing.

  So many questions and so few answers.

  20. Below

  The cabin feels quarantined. Midnight is there on the couch, but Mom is nowhere to be found. It takes a while to find the note.

  Hey Chris.

  Will be home late. Helping out at work.

  Mom

  I look at the note for a while, find a pen and doodle little happy faces all over it. It soon resembles a crowd of people laughing. I can’t tell if they’re laughing at me or at my mom.

  I find some lunch and eat it while I watch television. But I don’t really pay attention. I’m staring at moving pictures and hearing noise and voices, but I’m really somewhere far away.

  My eyes move to the windows. I can see the sky and the mountains in the distance. I scan the room, feel the hard couch, move the cushion to get more comfortable, flip through forty channels.

  I wonder about this restlessness. The way I feel. Trapped. Wounded. Hurt. Imprisoned.

  God wouldn’t do this to someone, Jocelyn. He couldn’t.

  If this were a postcard sent to heaven, I’d add a third rhyming line.

  He shouldn’t.

  But I don’t know anything. I look at the walls and wonder if somehow my life is getting smaller, duller. Most definitely sadder.

  I close my eyes and picture Jocelyn.

  Love doesn’t go away. It’s always there, like the sun and the moon and the stars. It’s always there even if it’s cloudy or if it’s daytime or if you’re inside and you can’t look up to the heavens. It’s always there, hovering and beaming and brilliant.

  It’s there, and it won’t go away.

  The pounding wakes me up.

  At first I think I’m back home, hearing my father in the garage working on something. But my father never worked on stuff in the garage. Not when he was a lawyer and worked on so many other things that made him stay away from the family. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a hammer in my father’s hand. Even after becoming born again and quitting his job to go into “ministry.”

  In the darkness I think and worry about Mom. I can’t see my clock, but I know it’s gotta be twelve or later. I realize that the noise is coming from above me, on the roof. Hail.

  But part of me doesn’t believe it—can’t, in fact—because it sounds so loud and so violent. I’ve been in a few hailstorms back home, but never have any of them sounded so …

  Dangerous.

  I leave Midnight tucked in the corner of my bed and go downstairs. I see the opened door to Mom’s bedroom and know she isn’t there, though I still call out her name and turn on the light. Or try to turn on her light.

  No power. Once again.

  I look outside the front window and can see the blurry motion outside. I open the front door, but when I do, the hail tries to force its way inside. I hear things cracking, the icy bits flailing against tree limbs and anything else they can find. I cringe as I hear the sound of the cracks on my deck, like baseballs being ripped against the wood and the railing and the rooftop.

  I wonder how Mom is going to get home.

  I shut the door and really, truly feel imprisoned now.

  The wind howls as if it knows, as if it can feel my tension inside. The hail mocks and surges into an avalanche of racket and wreck.

  I move to the middle of the room and then I drop to the floor.

  The pelting continues. Pounding, banging, beating away.

  I start to shake, putting my hands over my ears.

  The whole house seems to be rumbling. I wonder if there’s a chance that it could slide off the mountain like those houses in California mudslides.

  That’s crazy stop it Chris.

  But my imagination is the only thing to occupy my thoughts and hold my hand. The lawyer-turned-quasi-pastor is gone. The mother-turned-quasi-barfly is gone. The girl-turned-quasi-love-of-my-life is gone. Everybody is gone.

  With my hands now holding my head, not my ears, but my head as if some part of it is cut and bleeding and leaking, I hear it.

  Laughter.

  It’s loud—it’s gotta be loud—because I can hear it amidst the blaring storm outside.

  Then I realize something.

  It’s not from outside.

  I hold my breath and move my hands and listen. It’s not from upstairs or from somewhere in this room. It’s beneath me.

  I look at the dark carpet underneath me, so worn it no longer feels like anything resembling carpet, and I try and think what’s under it. What’s beneath this floor.

  There’s nothing but dirt there, and that laughter is all in your mind.

  But I think of the house on the sloping hill.

  I suddenly realize something fascinating and terrifying.

  This house does in fact have a basement.

  The laughter I’m hearing is coming from it.

  And suddenly I get up and sprint upstairs, biffing it on the third step and landing hard on my chest and arms, then getting up in stride and moving and getting in my room and locking the door.

  Then waiting.

  Waiting for the storm to go away and the sun to come back.

  Waiting for the noise to let me be.

  Waiting for silence.

  21. At Your Doorstep

  Four men surround me by the table. It’s a sparse room, very white with dull and cold lights above us. The table is bare and basic; the chair I’m sitting on hard and cheap. I look around and know what they’re saying, but I wonder why they’re saying it to me.

  “What are you doing here?” one of the men asks.

  It’s like four detectives on one of those old cop shows I used to watch. But why four? There never used to be four
. Only one, two at the most.

  “Where am I?”

  “You do not belong here,” another says.

  “Where is ‘here’?” I ask.

  “No,” says a guy with a beard, probably the oldest. “Not now, not like this. Not here.”

  I feel like I’m in trouble, but I don’t know why. I look around me for someone I recognize—my mother, maybe Sheriff Wells, somebody else from Solitary that I know.

  “How did you get here?” the man in the beard asks me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have nothing else on you?”

  “Like what?”

  “Any papers or documentation?”

  I shake my head and then reach into my pocket. Maybe I’ll find a silver passport or a golden ticket or my school ID or something. I don’t find anything but lint.

  There’s a knock, and then the door opens. A woman stands in the doorway and glares at the men, as if they’re wanted, as if they’re in trouble. They all turn, and without saying anything they file out one by one. The bearded man glances back at me and pauses.

  “Stay here, right there in that chair. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  When they’re gone, I wait for a few minutes.

  I’m sure I’m being watched, though there is no one-way mirror that I can detect.

  I get up and try the door handle.

  It turns, and I open the door and step through.

  I told the guy yes when he asked, “Can you do that for me?”

  And I could physically do that, if I wanted to. But what I need to do is get out of here and find out where I am.

  As I step outside the small white room, the lights go out like a fuse box bursting. I step ahead to find a wall or something to guide myself with, and instead I find myself falling backward, doing somersaults as I’m dropping, the wind whipping my face and my hair, and my stomach lost a hundred stories above me as I suddenly and completely find myself back in my bed.

  I don’t wake up with a gasp. It’s more like I brace myself for impact.

  I wake up to the sound of cracking life outside of me. I look out a fogged-over window that I wipe down only to reveal a distorted crystal spiderweb covering the outside. The world outside is one big icicle.

  I open my bedroom door and holler out for my mom. Nothing.

  That answers the school question. No Mom, no school. I seriously doubt the bus is going to be out on a morning like this, but even if it is, I’m staying here. If Mom is playing hooky, so am I.

  Hopefully she’ll call soon to let me know she’s alive. Which is always a nice thing to know.

  I think about last night—the hailstorm and the strange sounds and the even stranger dream—then I randomly pick out an album to crank.

  Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill does the trick.

  I blast it away and cause Midnight to look up from the nest she made in the corner of the bed.

  This is what it feels like to be single.

  This is what it feels like to be on my own.

  And I gotta say … I like it.

  That all changes in an hour when I hear a knock on the door.

  About time she showed up.

  I have a mouth full of ancient Cheerios that taste like soft mush after being drowned in milk. I glance at the door and wonder why it’s not opening, then get up and reach for the handle.

  Before I open it up, I can see him in the window.

  The ugly round face, troll-like and irritated as usual.

  “Come on, open up.”

  For a second I consider not opening it, but my male pride lets me down. I swing the door open and finish swallowing my cereal.

  Gus glances at me with disinterest. I didn’t see him at all the first week of school. Maybe he just got back from vacation or from the cave he sleeps upside down in.

  “Nice little storm, huh?”

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  His hands are free, which is good. I look down and see a black Humvee waiting at the bottom of the hill.

  “I always knew I’d be knocking on your door one day.”

  “Where are your boys? And your baseball bat?”

  Gus laughs. He seriously couldn’t seem to care less about the way he looks, the oiliness of his skin, the just-got-out-of-bed hair.

  How can someone look that oily in the middle of winter? Especially after an ice storm.

  “This isn’t my idea, you know. My father figured this would be the ideal opportunity to meet you.”

  “Uh, no thanks.”

  “No, Chris. If you’re smart, you will walk down the hill with me and get in the car.”

  “So, what? School is open?”

  Gus nods. “They don’t have many snow days, and they’ve already used a couple. Half the school won’t show up.”

  “Good to see how dedicated you are.”

  “I was in Florida all last week. That’s my dedication.”

  “Where’s your tan?”

  “What are you talking about?” Gus says. “I’m a vampire. We don’t like the sun.” He laughs and then tells me to get my stuff together. Fast.

  In a weird way, I get the feeling that he knows I’m by myself.

  I recall the voice laughing underneath me in the middle of the night.

  Maybe it was him.

  22. Ichor Staunch??

  I brace myself for this meeting with a man I know I’ve seen before. Yet when I look inside the Hummer, I wonder if my eyes are playing tricks the way everything else seems to be.

  “Hello, Chris.”

  I know that voice I’ve heard that voice in the darkness.

  Bold, bright eyes look at me in a way that Gus can’t and will never be able to. He kind of looks like Gus, though.

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” the driver says as he pats the empty seat next to him. The SUV smells new.

  This is Ichor Staunch?

  The guy is wearing a blue dress shirt and a black sports coat. He doesn’t have fangs and a Count Dracula cape.

  “Come on, I’m freezing,” he says.

  I do what I’m told. I shut the door and figure that I couldn’t run away from him if I tried. I buckle my seat belt in case we tragically veer off the side of the road after I grab the wheel in a brave act of stupidity.

  Stop it, Chris.

  The guy behind the wheel is not Gus’s father. No way possible. Even though he sorta looks like him, there’s no way. I saw Ichor Staunch that day I walked downstream, the day I spied on the lawn of their house.

  You weren’t sure that was his father. That could’ve been anybody.

  “Late night last night?” the man says.

  He’s got graying brown hair that’s still thick and combed to one side. He doesn’t look like some evil businessman or dark Sith Lord or the Boogeyman. He looks like just another grown-up on his way to work.

  “Gus, does this boy talk?”

  The Southern accent is strong but seems to be held at bay, as if it could go off when necessary.

  “Oh, he talks all right. Talks way too much if you ask me.”

  “It’s impolite to not reply to people, Chris.”

  That voice belongs to the one I heard in the hole when I was abducted and shoved in the middle of the cabin. And it belongs to the voice that warned me about Jocelyn, the one that threatened me and my family after they took her.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Ah, you can speak. That’s good. I’d like to hear what you have to say.”

  I nod.

  “So I’ve heard from Gus that you’ve had a difficult time adjusting to Harrington High.”

  “No.”

  “No, sir,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, sir.”

  I repeat his words. His order.

  “I wanted to make sure that you realize that Gus is harmless. And Gus, you are harmless, right?”

  “Right.”

  Gus sounds timid, like a little puppy. I glance b
ack and see him sitting there in complete and utter obedience.

  “Here’s the thing about being me,” Mr. Staunch says. “I’ve earned the right to bully people. Bullying doesn’t have to stop when you become an adult. You know? But as for my son, he doesn’t quite understand the logic and etiquette of bullying. You are the new student, so he sees you as fresh meat and thus decides to terrorize you. Most students would have backed off, but I get this feeling that you’re not a ‘back off’ sort of guy.”

  “No. Sir.” I emphasize sir in a way that I might spit out tobacco. My fear is settling in and turning over into something else.

  It’s the same man I heard that night of Jocelyn’s death. I’m certain.

  “Gus doesn’t realize that you don’t mess around with desperation. You can’t. Eyes are watching him, and so far, he’s been quite stupid, haven’t you, boy?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gus says.

  There.

  The way he said boy.

  That’s it.

  My skin itches with bumps, and I feel the back of my neck. It’s wet with sweat.

  “I still have a reputation to keep up. If Gus is out of line then that means I’m out of line, and I can’t have that. But you, Chris, Christopher, whatever and whoever you claim to be—you need to understand that you can’t wave a red flag at a bull. Do you understand?”

  I glance at him and shake my head.

  “My son—my wonderful if sometimes extremely arrogant and ignorant only son—is a bull. God bless him. I love that about him. He is so much his mother, though he will never know because she’s no longer alive. But she was a bull, and he takes after her. And what do you not do with bulls?”

  “Wave red flags at them?” I say.

  “You don’t taunt them in any way. You stay away from them.”

  “That’s always been my plan.”

  “Keep it your plan, Chris. And you’ll just make it to the end of the school year.”

  We’re not far away from school. The roads are a little better closer to downtown Solitary, but not much.