Dig Two Graves

by Kim Powers

  “Please, wake up,” Skip pleaded to her. “I can’t do this alone.”

  Wendy moaned, maybe trying to say something, but it was just . . . breath, caught in her throat. It wasn’t words, or at least anything Skip could understand. She had to get Wendy to wake up. Skip thought maybe if she just started talking, Wendy would hear, even if her eyes weren’t open. She’d hear how serious things were. Maybe some of her pain would even go away, if Skip just started talking and didn’t stop, like her father did to her that time in the hospital.

  She said the first thing that came into her head, anything but think about where they were now. “They let me take drama at the college, but that’s just because Daddy teaches there. They say I’m their mascot.”

  Skip was so scared she didn’t know what to say next, but she had to keep talking. To take her own pain away. As she talked, she tried to twist into position to wrap the man’s face mask around Wendy’s bleeding hand. Wendy moaned—it must have hurt—but she still wouldn’t wake up.

  “One of the teachers does improv, but I’m not so crazy about that. Making things up, as you go along, although I guess that’s what I’m doing now. The other teacher, the one I like more, he says, ‘Add an e to it and you’ve got improve. Improvements, not improvisations. Why risk anything to chance?’ Please, wake up . . . ”

  Skip’s hands were still taped at the wrist, but her fingers were free to move, so she could just reach to Wendy’s bleeding hand and get the cloth mask clamped down on top of it. It started soaking up blood. Wendy groaned and shifted.

  “The pain’ll go away. Just listen. I’m gonna keep talking. Mr. Jasperson—he’s the one I like the most—he does plays with words. Old plays. He’s old too. He’s always doing sad plays, and this one he put me in was the saddest. It’s about all these dead people who come back to life. Spoon River Anthology. That’s the name of the town, and the cemetery. Spoon River. All these people just wander around their tombstones, talking about how they died and who they were in real life and what they missed the most. They weren’t really in heaven or hell, they were just sort of floating around because they didn’t want to leave Earth. We did it outside, at the Canaan cemetery. ‘Site-specific,’ Mr. Jasperson called it. He set up lights on the graves and hung them from the trees, and we just stood by our tombstones and did our poems. There weren’t any chairs, so people could just walk around and go listen to whoever they wanted to. It wasn’t in any order, so it didn’t matter. There’s a little girl who’s dead in it, and I played her. I used this makeup that Mama had left behind and painted my face all white with it, because I thought that’s what a dead person would look like. I got some of her mascara and put that under my eyes too, to make me look like I was really tired, like I couldn’t sleep anymore. I bet that’s what I look like now, like I’m almost dead but not quite. Like I’m just sort of floating because I’m too afraid to go to sleep . . . ”

  Skip had made herself cry by telling that story, but she couldn’t move her hands up to her face to wipe away her tears. She couldn’t stop putting pressure on Wendy’s hand.

  “The fog was out at this one performance, and it really did look like we were ghosts, walking around in limbo. Daddy said, ‘You look like a raccoon,’ but what he really meant was, ‘You look dead. You look like Mama probably looks like in her coffin’ . . . Do you think she still looks like she did when she was alive? It would be great to see her. That part of being dead won’t be so bad. At least I’ll get to see her again.”

  Skip didn’t know what else to say. She had run out of words. She tilted her head over onto Wendy’s shoulder, but she wouldn’t close her eyes. She had to keep talking to Wendy.

  She had to keep talking for herself.

  “Who do you wanna see when you’re dead?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  The petting zoo. It was another page ripped from my life story, being written by someone who seemed to know it as well as I did. A tour of my life, from someone who’d been on the outside, looking in.

  “We made it there just once with Skip, before Patti died,” I said to Mizell, in the passenger’s seat beside me as we drove to the old children’s zoo, slicing the morning fog, the sun barely up. I clutched the steering wheel and pushed the gas, twisting my right wrist up to keep rechecking my watch, every ten seconds.

  Six A.M. Just over twenty hours left to go.

  “Think about it. It’s the only place the new rhyme could mean.” I ticked them off for Mizell. “The old stable where Patti had her art show. Arcadia, where we’d gone skiing. The same frat I’d been a part of in college. And now this kiddie farm my parents had taken me to. That I’d taken Patti to. And Skip.”

  “Could it be somebody who’s pissed off that you’re dating again? Somebody from Patti’s family?” Mizell had raised it once, but I’d dismissed it. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “Her family . . . we got along great. They told me at the funeral . . . they wanted the best for me. And Skip. I don’t know.”

  But now . . . a fucking petting zoo, grimly perfect for Wendy, a woman who loved animals.

  Grimly perfect for how it intersected with so many parts of my life. When Patti first got pregnant with Skip, before we even knew if it was a boy or girl, we went to it, about an hour away from Mt. Gresh. I wanted it to be a tradition for us: I remembered going to the same place when I was a kid, for some birthday. My fourth, fifth maybe? I was little; we’d just moved to Massachusetts, one of the many moves my parents were always making, and I didn’t have any new friends yet. There was no one to invite to a birthday party, so my parents took me there, saying all the animals could be my friends instead. It became a yearly thing for us until I got too embarrassed—too old—to be at a “kiddie zoo.”

  I told Patti I wanted the same for our child. Tradition. Things you could count on. But we’d gotten to take Skip there just once before it closed. Now, I was going to be the one to reopen it.

  Well, he was, if I was right.

  Mizell read the new rhyme aloud, her French tips clacking in time on the dashboard. Reminding me of something I could never forget.

  Skip’s fingernails.

  Hercules got rid of the Stymphalian Birds,

  Whose beaks could kill, just like my words.

  They guard the nests at the old petting zoo . . .

  A fun place to go . . .

  Before the horses became glue.

  Birds, a bull, mares, and cattle . . .

  Do them all, or hear the death rattle.

  “He’s throwing them all in at once. Four Labors, all out here,” I said, counting them off on my fingers while my hand was still on the steering wheel. “The Stymphalian Birds, the Cretan Bull, the Mares of Diomedes, the Cattle of Geryon. Six through ten, minus taking Wendy. That was nine. The Belt of Hippolyta. The Belt of Wendy.”

  An insane inventory, in what must have sounded like a foreign language.

  Mizell put her hand over mine. “You can do it. We can do it. We have to.”

  I coasted through the open gate in a split-log fence; the old billboard advertising the place leaning on poles that were barely upright now, the paint falling off it in giant, jagged strips. Whatever colors had once coated the place—and there had been a lot, if I remembered right; bright primary colors to grab the kids’ attention—were long gone. We parked next to a lake, the sound of our car doors opening enough to frighten all the geese away. They lifted off the lake as one, breaking through the fog. The flap of their wings, the honking . . .

  Mizell and I went silent. This was a place where you didn’t talk, you didn’t want to disturb. So peaceful. So perfect in its isolation, and desolation. So primed for us, just . . . waiting.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Mizell whispered. “I have my gun.”

  So do I, I thought, but didn’t tell her. It was tucked in the back of my pants, covered over by my jacket. She didn’t need to know that.

  “I don’t want you getting trapped like last time.”

 
It wouldn’t be by fire again, I knew that much. He’d already tried that. And the flood had been what the real Hercules had done, rerouting the river.

  So what other way did he have planned, to end my world?

  As we walked toward the main house, every sound was magnified: our footsteps over the dead grass, coated with the tiniest bit of hoarfrost that crunched; every little wave and rustle in the few leaves that were left on trees. A weather-beaten sign hung over a corral where there used to be a little rodeo; the sign dangled by a few links of rusty chain that creaked in the wind. Next to that, a barn, where the animals used to wait their turn in the ring. Sniffing deep, I could smell its history: empty stables that had never given up the smell of manure; milk gone sour and dried out in rusty metal cans, from cows that had last been milked years ago.

  Hadn’t my parents taken me inside there, to put my hand on a teat and give it a squeeze, until I squealed and ran back to them?

  Something squishy, the smell of hay on the floor, a farmer who laughed at me and joked with my parents . . . two hands on the teat, the farmer’s over mine? Cow flesh, my flesh, other flesh.

  That’s where the petting zoo had been. Inside, children on horses, petting lambs, playing with goats. Shetland ponies, with tangled manes of hair so thick you could hold that instead of reins.

  The memory faded away, as Mizell and I kept walking up toward the main house.

  Up on the porch, flies had batted themselves to death in the wire mesh of the front door screen, trying to get inside. Broken window glass littered the porch; rags that had once been lacy curtains whipped back and forth. I heard something—more than just the wind?—and turned around to look back out at the farm. The creak of that wheel and pulley, hanging high on one side of the barn? Or him, watching me?

  Inside the old house, the shadow of what used to be the owners’ home. The couple who ran the place, who had turned their living room into a gift shop. A stray chair with no seat; a table, tilted over and collapsed on three legs. Outlines where family portraits had once been, now just dark squares of peeling wallpaper. An empty display case, which used to house items for sale. Divinity and fudge. Rock candy. Taffy. Belts beaded with fake Indian mosaics.

  I remember that too—I’d begged my mother for one. It started unstitching the minute I wore it the first time, all those cheap little plastic beads falling off, scattering everywhere.

  In a corner of the room, windblown into a pile like dead leaves, were little photos with jagged edges, the kind that used to shoot out of an instamatic, their colors now dulled to an underwater green. I rifled through them, wondering if I’d find one of myself there.

  A color . . . colors coming to me, real colors, not what time has reduced them to.

  Blue . . . and black . . . white . . . the cowboy shirt I used to wear when I was a kid? My pride and joy. Silver snap buttons, white fringe on the cuffs.

  I can almost remember wearing it here, and my mother telling me to smile, just as a camera flashes. Mother’s putting me on top of a little swaybacked horse; I settle in the saddle, but something else is there too. It crowds me, and the horse bows lower, as more weight gets added behind me . . .

  Upstairs, now, a sound. The house still settling, after all these years? Wind?

  No, something more . . . alive. Cooing. Pigeons? Wings flapping, then settling down. Waiting for me.

  “I think that’s where you’re supposed to go next. It fits,” Mizell said, nodding upwards, then starting to read again, the poem now a treasure map that she was in charge of.

  To survive number six,

  You’ll have to take your licks.

  At the top of the stairs

  Start saying your prayers.

  I went up the stairs in front of Mizell; an attic door was open, waiting for me.

  At first, all I could see were the shapes: trunks and toys, junk, a family’s life, now left to the elements. A draft of air, a hole in the roof, a slick of bird droppings glossing the floor, calcified white and green, hardened and crusted and feathers, feathers everywhere . . . molting, and . . .

  Alive. Everywhere. Now.

  Starlings. Attacking me, hysterical at my intrusion, invading their haven.

  Man-eating birds. The Sixth Labor.

  My arms swung up in a crisscross over my face as they swarmed me with their beaks and talons. I knocked into a trunk and fell down, trying to wave them away, more of the poem ping-ponging in my head, even louder than the cacophony from the birds and the screams from Mizell, bringing up the rear.

  If you want the birds to rid . . .

  Just do what Hercules did.

  But what the hell did Hercules do? I couldn’t remember.

  I couldn’t remember anything—except to try to stay alive. And then it hit me. Hercules scared the birds away with a loud metal rattle; any similar sound would drive them away. I grabbed the pistol from the back of my belt and started shooting. Blindly. Anywhere. Everywhere.

  “What the hell . . . ” Mizell was as shocked by me pulling out a pistol as she was by the birds she was trying to beat away.

  I screamed, to add to the noise. I screamed at him, who was making me do all this.

  “GO AWAY! GO AWAY! GO. THE FUCK. AWAY!”

  With each outburst, more of the birds flew out of the hole in the ceiling.

  I kept shooting. All I wanted was them gone. Off me. Off Mizell. That sharp sound of bullets discharging was deafening in this tiny room, filling it gunpowder and burning smells, bird shit and bird flesh.

  And it was working.

  With each shot I took, more of them flew away, out of the hole in the ceiling. A final tornado of feathers, a funnel cloud of sleek black getting sucked back up, just as I reached the end of my bullets, my hand still vibrating from the kick of the pistol.

  Silence. Shock.

  And then they were gone. Just like that. A few of them still perched around the jagged rim of the hole at the roof, peering down, practically cooing, waiting to see what man did next.

  As carefully as I could, I began walking out of the room, motioning Mizell out before me.

  Slow. Steady.

  I was afraid that the smallest movement would set those few birds off again.

  We both were finally out the door, so I slammed it behind me. Those birds couldn’t get us anymore.

  And that’s when I came face to face with the next Labor: yet another piece of paper, tacked to the front side of the door, which had been open when we went in. That’s why we’d missed it before.

  But he hadn’t missed anything. A paper trail, literally—leaving his breadcrumbs for us.

  Before you cry uncle, your work’s not done.

  Head to the stable, and make it three for one.

  The Cretan Bull has horns in Labor number seven,

  Bring them down, or your girls go to heaven.

  I yanked it down and started reading it out loud, as Mizell and I flew down the steps and out the house, stumbling toward the barn.

  “Where the hell did you get that gun?” she was screaming as I ran across the lawn, slipping and sliding in the morning dew; that, or the gore on my shoes from the abattoir in the attic.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” I yelled back, ahead of her.

  I could almost remember running in the same direction with my mother all those years ago, after I’d bought my little mosaic belt inside with my allowance; pulling her by the hand and saying, “Hurry, it’s starting, come on,” as a tinny loudspeaker, hissing with reverb, announced that the rodeo was about to begin. Cowboys yelling and roping, hooves digging into the dirt, kicking up clods of earth into the stands . . . clowns scrambling to protect riders who’d been bucked off. Children laughing and clapping and screaming . . .

  The memory vanished as we got to the stable, for a different kind of rodeo.

  A stampede of animals, rushing out of the barn.

  The Cretan Bull. The Mares of Diomedes. The Cattle of Geryon.

  Three Labors—seven, eight, and t
en—all careening together for a perfect storm of animal flesh. No telling how many tons of it, crashing through the corral fence, bearing down.

  On me.

  Hercules—the real Hercules—was supposed to capture them in the Labors, but short of shooting them all, that wasn’t going to happen. This was madness in motion, a Tower of Babel of whinnies and moos and roars, hooves and horns, flying manes and choking, blinding dust.

  Horses pawing and snorting phlegm, bucking and raising high. Nostrils, gums, teeth, and metal bits.

  Mad cows, crazed, as if they had been kept in waiting in there, for all those years. Starved.

  A single bull with horns, pawing and snorting with all the fight it had stored up.

  It roared past me, scraping off layers of my skin and clothes, heading straight for Mizell.

  It was her or me, and there was no time to think. I’d gotten her in this mess, and I was going to get her out.

  I did my best long jump—arcing through the air, almost faster than the bull—and my legs hit Mizell first, knocking her flat into an open metal chute. I tucked myself in after her, on top of her, and the livestock continued barreling past, a mad dash divided down the middle by our chute, their slobber and skin grazing the open metal and us.

  The animal kingdom kept plowing through that rickety corral fence, the dried lumber cracking like brittle bones against the force of them. And they kept thundering away into the distance, finally free, the storm of dust they kicked up almost making them disappear into the horizon. For a minute, neither one of us moved.

  I didn’t know if we were as splintered as those fence rails.

  I pulled myself up, then pulled Mizell up after me from the face plant I’d knocked her into.

  “If you wanted to get on top of me, all you had to do was take me out for a drink,” Mizell said. And then she cried. “You saved me.”

  “Better check for broken bones before you say that,” I said, and then hugged her.