She nodded, and looked away from Joey. Not because she was embarrassed by her secret feelings, but because, at this moment, she wanted to see all of them. She looked to Michael, strong Mike, one of his hands resting on her left shoulder. And to Jeff, who could be a real turd sometimes, but right now was looking her over with concern, and using his one good hand to brush the muck from the knees of her jeans. And to Bryce, who was there all the same, kneeling next to her, though his eyes were fixed on the narrow trail ahead. On the way they still had to go. PJ let her gaze move over them once more, ending on Joey, then she mustered something she’d never managed before, though she’d felt this way for a very long time, and said, “Guys...”
They all looked to her.
“I’m really glad you’re my friends.”
Their eyes bugged just that extra bit, then returned to normal, glances bouncing from one to another. Maybe it was a weird thing to say. But right now it didn’t seem that way. It seemed very right, and each one of them knew that they felt the same thing PJ did. Maybe it was just easier for her to say it because she was a girl, and had all that emotion stuff inside. None of them would say that to her, though, unless they wanted a sock in the jaw. They simply let the moment be what it was, and soon Michael was smiling at her. Then Joey. Then Jeff. And finally Bryce, though it seemed hardest for him, the expression coming as if anchored hard somewhere inside. But it did come.
“Come on,” Joey said, and they helped PJ up.
She finished dusting herself off. “I’m ready.”
Joey nodded and started walking again, leading off through Bigfoot Woods. They followed him, staying close together now. Closer than a few minutes before, but not because they were afraid.
They reached the cemetery just after noon.
Mountain View Cemetery had been built— if a place where holes are occasionally dug could be called ‘built’ —at the turn of the century, when the townsfolk of Bartlett realized that the people still coming west were starting to require more than a place to live. Then it had been just a few acres set aside behind an apple farm owned by John Patrick Bartlett, the son of the founder of the town. Now it was almost thirty acres and had, by the end of World War Two, eaten up all that was left of the Bartlett family’s farm. It was a pretty place, with Cougar Mountain a sight in the near distance, so pretty that the bereaved from counties north and south, east and west, would bring their dear departed here for eternal rest.
Joey emerged first from the woods, stopping where the muddy loam turned to winter rye, browning early from the snow. He looked off over the countless fingers of stone pointing toward the cloud-flecked sky as his friends gathered around him.
“There’s a lot of graves,” Michael observed. His gaze traced the irregular lines of headstones marching down the gentle slope toward Bricker Road.
“Does anyone know where it is?” Jeff asked. Everyone but Joey answered with a shake of the head.
“It’s got to be down there,” Joey said, pointing toward two minor bumps rising side by side in the cemetery’s descending landscape, one slightly larger than its almost-twin. His hand then gestured toward the closer markers. “This is the old part of the cemetery. There’re people here that were buried like a hundred years ago. It’s pretty much filled up.”
“He’s right,” Michael agreed, nodding. “One of the guys who worked at my dad’s shop died in July, and we all came to the funeral. They buried him over there.” He was pointing at the sibling bumps. “It’s gotta be the only place left.”
Joey looked back at his friends, but they were looking at him. They were waiting for him to make the decision, and for the first time since he’d found that he liked being in charge of things, that he liked the responsibility that came with leadership, Joey flashed back to the not so distant past when he probably would have been in the back ranks waiting for another to make the decision. They really trusted him. He felt a little frightened at that thought now.
“Let’s go see,” Joey said, and he led off through the field of stones that looked vaguely like the teeth of some great, buried monster.
They all eyed the tombstones nervously as they passed each one, each meandering row, scanning the etched stone tablets to catch a glimpse that would tell them just who they were treading over. To a person they were names that none of them recognized. No grandparents of any friends, or anyone like that. No relatives. The closest anything came were the epitaphs. ‘Loving mother.’ ‘Beloved husband.’ ‘Cherished brother.’ They could all relate to those kind words. And, oddly, each one without knowing it was thinking the exact same thought as they neared the bumps on the hill: What was written on Guy’s tombstone? What lie had someone cooked up to make him sound beloved?
They would soon know.
They crested the smaller rise and stopped. They all saw it at the same time, a very strange sight for a cemetery they would all agree if anyone were to pose it. But it was there. It was real. Never mind that there was no music but that which Mother Nature herself provided, just the wind and its low whine, and maybe a jay or two whistling. Never mind that. Someone was seeing it fit to dance. To dance in the cemetery. And if their eyes weren’t fooling them, whoever it was was dancing on a grave.
As they watched in silence, Michael stepped forward, next to Joey, and said, “That’s Bundy.”
Joey thought for a second. “The bum?”
Michael nodded and they were all listening now, though none would look away from the wild high stepping and hooting going on in the near distance. “He used to hang around down on Roman a lot. Sometimes he’d pick through the garbage for food.”
“I remember him,” Jeff said, the memory that wasn’t faint becoming whole again. “He got sent away to a hospital over the summer. I heard it from someone at school.”
“Who?” Bryce asked.
Jeff flashed him an annoyed look. “Who cares. He’s the one that set himself on fire trying to keep warm, remember? It was on the TV news, remember?”
“A transient was burned last night,” PJ recalled verbatim, her tone cold and doubting. It had been a pretty warm summer. Even the nights.
“Yeah,” Jeff said. “That was it.”
“So what’s he doing here?” Joey asked.
“I don’t know,” Michael said, shrugging. “But he’s not dangerous. My dad said he wasn’t, at least. He said he was in the Vietnam War and got messed up in the head.”
“Vietnam,” Joey repeated. “That was a long time ago.”
“My dad said he mostly just picks through trash for food and talks to himself.”
They watched him for a few more seconds, then Joey said, “Well, we’ve got to go that way. Guy’s grave has to be over there somewhere. Just keep walking and ignore him.”
“But what if he does something?” Bryce wondered worriedly.
“Just keep walking,” Joey repeated, and said no more to Bryce as he started down the bump.
They kept their eyes on Bundy, who was kicking his knees high as he danced a circle over someone’s final resting place, his head tilted back, a broad, yellowed smile burning at the cuts of deep blue behind the broken clouds. As they drew closer, they could hear that he was mumbling something. Or was he...singing? Singing low, his words muddled?
“Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, they hit you on the head...”
He was singing. Could he be singing about...
“And now you hucking little hrick—YOU’RE DEAD!”
“Joey, is he...” PJ started to ask, but her question dissolved as Bundy ceased his dance, stopped his song, and spun sharply, facing them.
They sucked frightened breaths as he bounced toward them, bounding over one headstone as if playing leapfrog. His quickness added to the fear of having a raggedy looking bum race at them, but as he neared their fright edged more toward wonder, and when he finally stopped just behind the nearest slab of granite they were hardly afraid at all. They were simply aghast at what they saw.
A tattered fence of sallow teeth beamed
at them, but they could hardly tell if it was a smile. The...man had no lips. Just a surreal circle of skin was there, one that looked plastic and smooth at the edges. And the tip of his nose was gone. Plain gone, leaving something that approximated a nose, two dark holes where he could breathe, but the truncated orifice looked more like a pig snout than its human equivalent. He did have eyelids. Thank God he had eyelids, PJ thought, otherwise she might have screamed and run. But even his eyelids looked fake and too smooth, like part of a Halloween mask, and under his eyes there were big dollops of liquid. Like tears, only they weren’t rolling down his plastic cheeks.
He looked at each of them, and his lips peeled back even more, showing the back teeth that were gray and fissured by rot. Bryce pressed his legs hard together.
“He’s gone,” Bundy said, his voice raspy and low. “The little hrick.” The strips of burned skin that had been his lips tried to come together but couldn’t, and thus his ‘p’, as well as the ‘p’ in his earlier song, came out as barely different h’s.
“Who?” Jeff asked, before he had a chance to think whether talking to Bundy the bum was a good idea or not.
Bundy stabbed a slightly scarred finger at the place he’d been dancing. “The little hrick. Oher there.” And then he darted back to the spot and fell to his knees before the headstone, the ragged knees of his pants dug into the muddy sod. The lines where it had been temporarily cut away for the hole were still discernable. This grave was fresh.
After a moment, Joey walked toward Bundy. The rest followed almost instantly. They reached the spot together and stood behind the scarred, kneeling transient.
Bundy pulled his knit cap off and held it bunched in one hand. “The little hrick hurned hne.” He keened through the hole in his face, a tearless wail at the headstone. “Eheryun thought I hurned hnyselh. Nohody heliehed hne. Nohody.”
Their ears were tuned to Bundy’s garbled cry, but their eyes were focused on the same thing: the flat shield of stone with the name Guy Daniel Edmond carved into it.
“He hut gas on hne,” Bundy went on, his whimper rough like fine gravel under foot. “Gas hrom a can. And lit a hirecracker.” He peeked back over his shoulder at them, the hole in his face edged by the rotting teeth that carved a permanent, jagged smile. A smile where there should be none. Forced to wear that smile forever. That smile and that mask. “Then he threw it at hne.”
Son of a bitch, Joey thought as Bundy looked back at the headstone. Guy did this? The bat had been too good for him.
Bundy dragged the dirty sleeve of his old field coat across his face. It came away with a thick shine caked to it. “His harents said he hus hohne hith thehn hhen it hahhened.” Something like a sniffle came from Bundy’s face, but it was deep and wet and sounded like some animal was drowning behind the forever mask he now wore. Then he added, the sad wondering evident even in his unnatural husk of a voice, “They lied. They lied.”
Bryce looked past the weeping bum and read what it said below the requisite dates carved into the stone. ‘Our Little Boy’. It was probably the only truth they could possibly say about their son without making him sound like a monster. Had they had an attack of reality? Or were they so far from it that what was written was just one of dozens of choices they’d considered?
Man, Bryce thought to himself, his stomach all twisted and rumbling now. How did everything come to this? Why didn’t someone stop Guy sooner? Before all...this?
Heat built in his eyes, but he squelched it, biting hard on his lower lip. Hard.
Guy deserved it, Bryce told himself. It was easy to see that now. Easier than ever.
He bit harder.
He deserved it bad.
Harder.
He deserved it.
HARDER.
The return of Bundy’s laughing centered all attention once again. The ragged transient bolted up and turned quick to face them, his teeth bared fully, his pink tongue wagging in the hole. “Hut, the little hrick is dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.” He spun back and high-stepped the few feet to the headstone. “And I’hn not! I’hn not!”
Then, as they watched from behind, William Lyle Bunderman, Sergeant, United States Army (Ret), who’d fought the Viet Cong in the Central Highlands and in his dreams every night since that lone rocket-propelled grenade hit just that much too close to his helmeted head back in ‘68, reached for his fly, popped the buttons, and relieved himself on Guy Edmond’s headstone in a long, joyous stream.
PJ winced and turned away.
When Bundy was good and done he gave it an extra shake, buttoned up his fly, and flashed his ghoulish face at the kids once more before spinning joyfully twice around and bolting off toward Bricker Road.
“He’s gone,” Joey said after a moment, and PJ turned back around. She was surprised to find Joey staring hard at Guy’s headstone. He looked almost disappointed. “He’s really gone.”
“You’re talking about Guy,” PJ said, realizing it now.
Joey nodded weakly. “I don’t know what I expected to see.” They were all looking at him now. At their leader, who seemed suddenly lost in a place he knew. “Maybe I was hoping there’d be a hole here. That everything was just a put on. That Guy was messing with us again.”
“He’s dead, Joey,” PJ said softly.
“I know.” He looked at her, then at all of them together. “And if he is dead, then someone is screwing with us.”
Michael nodded soberly. “Someone else knows, then.”
“Who?” Jeff asked for the sake of asking. “No one was there but us. No one else saw it.”
“Maybe we didn’t see them,” Joey proposed. That seemed the most likely, and the least desirable of the possibilities.
“So what do we do?” Michael asked. He looked to each of his friends individually, last to Joey. “What are we gonna do?”
Joey thought for a moment, then fixed his gaze on Jeff. On his secretary. “We’re going to watch the suggestion box every second. Every single second. Whoever is doing this is probably going to send another note. I’ll bet on it.”
“Maybe they’re going to blackmail us,” PJ suggested. That term had such an evil ring to it, especially to someone who had nothing of value to offer a blackmailer.
“I don’t know,” Joey said, his expression going from wan and withered to focused and forceful. “But we’re going to find out who it is and what they want.”
“And stop them,” Jeff added. Sharp eyes turned on him, defying the finality of his remark. “What?”
“We’ll deal with it,” Joey said. “We’ll deal with it. Come on.”
Joey started back toward Bigfoot Woods, PJ and Jeff right behind. Michael started to follow, too, but stopped when he realized that Bryce wasn’t with him. He trotted back to his best friend.
“Bryce?”
“Yeah?” he answered, unable yet to pull his stare from the headstone. From those three words: ‘Our Little Boy.’
Little Boy. Someone really thought of Guy that way. He really was someone’s ‘Little Boy.’
Their Little Boy.
“Are you coming?” Michael prodded him.
Bryce finally nodded and turned from the grave. But he could not walk away. Michael, his eyes narrowed with wonder and worry, had a hand on his friend’s chest, holding him there. He was staring at Bryce’s face. At something low on his face.
“Your mouth’s bleeding,” Michael said. The thin red trickle was just cresting his friend’s lower lip and looked like it had the flow to make it to the chin.
Bryce reached up and blotted the spot with the tips of his fingers. He pulled his hand away and looked at the red stain.
Just like the stain on the bat.
Guy’s blood.
My blood.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked.
Bryce gave no answer one way or another. He gently shifted his best friend’s hand from his chest and moved past him, heading slowly, steadily for Bigfoot Woods.
* * *
Mandy Fine sat cross-
legged on her bed, leaning so far forward over her drawing tablet that, in the flower print dress she wore, she looked like a folded bolt of spring. One hand held a crayon and guided it repeatedly through the same lazy arc she’d drawn on the textured paper, an arc like the other two, waxy thick ribs of red and yellow curving from a child’s eye ocean, gentle rolls of pure blue, toward a bright orange pot on the brown shore. Mandy worked green into the last ribbon of color, her tongue wriggling sideways from her mouth as she concentrated hard, wanting this picture to be just right, wanting the rainbow to look like a real rainbow, and the pot of gold like a real pot of gold. Wanting it to be perfect because this drawing was not like the ones she did for herself. This one was going to be a present. For a very special person.
When the final ribbon in the rainbow was green and only green, with no white from the paper showing through, Mandy sat up, her back perfectly straight, and considered what she’d created looking down past her nose. For a long, silent moment she inspected it, the only sound an occasional gasp from the eaves over her bedroom window as the wind picked its way through the soffit vents. After she’d looked at it straight on she turned her head a bit to the right and checked it from that angle, and a minute later with her head cocked left, her eyes stern like an old schoolmarm’s, hording praise as if it was the gold in the pot at the end of the rainbow she’d drawn.
Yes, stern like that, but not unfair.
The stern eyes brightened and Mandy’s head moved into a pleased nod. “I believe that is one of the best pictures I’ve ever drawn.” Her eyes came up from the tablet. “Don’t you agree, Charlie?”
Charlie stood at the foot of Mandy’s bed, his face passionless, lacking even a hint of a smile. The kind of expression one might expect when looking down into an open coffin at a young boy’s funeral, except that Charlie’s eyes were most definitely open. Open round like big green quarters. Sometimes it seemed like Charlie didn’t know how to smile. Or maybe even what a smile really was.
“Well?” Mandy pressed her best friend, lifting the tablet in both hands and holding the picture straight out to her front like a message board. “What do you think?”
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