by JJ Strong
“Fuck!”
I paced a lap around the mound. Inspected the emergency bell, giving the string a gentle pull. Everything in working order.
“Come on, Ray!”
I smashed the shovel into a sticky, sap-oozing tree over and over again, even as a penetrating ache exploded through my hands. “Coooooome oooooon!”
A cold wind blew across the pond. Pine trees rustled. Ash floated up from the coals of the snuffed-out fire.
“What a stupid thing, Cullen,” I announced. “One more stupid, stupid plan.”
I was so disappointed I wanted to cry. I expected so much more from Ray.
I raced to the generator, flipped on the lamps, skidded back across loose, ashy sand, and dug.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Hammer slung in my belt loop, trying not to step where the coffin was, imagining a gory B-horror-movie situation where the wood gave way and I stomped a boot right through Ray’s lungs, which, in their weakened state, would pop and turn to mush like two moldy peaches, I dug and dug and dug.
There were only four nails, each one hammered halfway. The rest of the hammering had been done only for Ray’s benefit. In my panic, I yanked out the one nearest his head and tried to pry the lid up to give him some relief, but it was a no-go. I scrambled across the lid, sweeping away dirt that was still warm from the thawing fires, feeling for the other nails. When I’d released the two middle ones, I crawled to the foot of the box, fingernails stuffed with dirt, and hauled the lid up to my chest, peering around the side to see Ray. The work lamps lit him up and colored him like a painting. Some classic from the old masters or something. Eyes closed. Waxy face. Unconscious. No breathing. Dead fingers interwoven on his chest.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
I wrestled with the stupidly, awkwardly shaped lid, prying it from the hold of the final nail, and tossed it out of the hole.
“You stupid asshole, Ray, you fucking stupid idiot, Jesus Christ.”
There was no way to give him CPR without sitting on his chest. I flipped him, limp and heavy, in a fireman’s carry over my shoulder, and then, as I was trying to lift him out of the hole, one of his heavy arms swooping down and smacking me in the face, his whole body, once an impossible-to-lift bag of potatoes, seized up at the middle, and I heard a grunt.
I paused.
Another grunt. Stomach muscles trying and failing to relax against the pressure of my shoulder.
I shifted the body to the ground, balancing him on his feet, my hands on his shoulders, and he looked at me. Eyes open. Very much alive. Lips twisting, against all efforts otherwise, into a smile. The beginnings of a laugh.
I let go of the shoulders. He did not fall.
“The fuck?” I said.
He laughed, for real this time, and it sparked an angry fuse within me, and I hit him. Right hook to his left cheek.
“Asshole!” I shouted.
He came for me. A fist slapped my ear. Knee in my groin. Blistering-hot anger rippled through me, and I grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off the ground, and slammed him into the box. He squirmed beneath me, but I pinned a knee into his gut and tightened the grip on his throat.
“You think that was funny?”
I held the grip until his face looked like a zit about to pop pus and blood all over the place. When I released him, he coughed and sucked in huge gulps of oxygen, and I sat on my haunches, and I must have blinked or glanced up at the blinding lamps or closed my eyes to the horrible red mark my grip had produced on his neck, because I didn’t see him snatch my hair. I felt the tug and then looked, too late, as he yanked my head down and swiftly smashed his forehead into my nose.
“Aww.” I tilted back, seeing red—dark, oozing, boiling shots of red—and tasting rusty metal. “Awwww.”
Finding the edge of the box, clawing at the side of the hole, thinking Ray was still coming for me, thinking if I were him I’d sure as hell be coming for the guy that just choked me, but then letting my head tilt back against the dirt, understanding it was over, I curled up in whatever corner of the hole I’d found and brought a sleeve to the torrent of blood gushing from my shattered nose.
“Head-butt,” I said, shaking my head. “Holy shit, Ray.”
His wheezing was quiet against the buzzing generator, but I could hear enough to know he wasn’t ready to talk. At some point I managed to open my eyes against the tears and blood to see Ray propped up, like I was, at the opposite end of the casket. We sat for a long time. The generator and the lights and Ray’s breathing and my sniffling of blood. Intermittently, my eyes would close and my head would drop before I’d catch myself and wake up. Minutes passed. Twenty. Maybe thirty.
“Feel like you made your point?” I said finally.
He nodded, head loose on his neck like a jack-in-the-box.
For a while longer we sat in silence. I titled my head back against the lip of the ditch and watched the trees above: Ray’s view before I’d brought the darkness down on him. The pine trees were fuzzy against the sky—wooly bear caterpillars crawling over my eyes.
Sweet Jesus Christ, did my nose hurt.
Ray
I DOZED FOR MOST OF THE DRIVE HOME, waking to see that Cullen had pulled the truck up to his own house. I yawned and stretched. Outside, wind gusts pushed against the car.
“Cop car was pulling away from your house when I got there.”
I tried to nod casually, but he could see I was nervous.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Go through the woods. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Is my neck . . . ?”
He clicked on the cabin light and inspected my throat. His nose looked awful—swollen and crooked, with dried blood at the edges.
“Not too bad,” he said. “Redness went down.”
“Is your nose okay?”
“Hurts like hell.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s not about that.”
I opened the door and dropped one leg to the ground. The wind was so strong it blew the door shut against my thigh.
“Oh, wait.” Cullen dug into his back pocket. “I have some things for you.”
He pulled out a crumpled pile of cash and shoved it into my hand.
“What’s this?”
“I never wanted the money. Tried to tell you that.”
“Cullen—”
“Take it,” he said. “This is what you would have stolen from the store anyway. Take this too.”
He handed me the Caravaggio print he’d stolen from my locker. It was crinkled from being in his pocket. One deep crease cut vertically through Peter’s torso and another horizontally through his face. I always thought he looked so hard and poised, prepared to endure his honorable fate. But tonight, in the low glow of the cabin light, in Roman’s beat-up truck with its weak, rattling heat system and its cracked, cold leather seats, St. Peter looked terrified. He seemed to be looking off to some approaching horror that was even more hideous than crucifixion. Like maybe a pack of rabid dogs was coming to tear his face apart while he hung upside down. He looked tired. Weak. Defeated.
I handed the picture back to Cullen.
“You don’t want it?”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t need it.”
“What is it, anyway?”
“St. Peter. His crucifixion.”
“Oh yeah? The pearly gates guy?”
I cocked my head. “Huh?”
“St. Peter. Dude’s like the Santa Claus of Heaven, right? Decides who’s naughty and nice.”
“Oh.” I put a hand to my neck, thinking.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I laughed, leaning over to look at the painting once more, blinking against the glare of the dome light. I hadn’t thought about that.
I don’t know why, but it was so funny to me that this St. Peter was the same one you see in cartoons about people trying to get into Heaven, the ones where St. Peter always has some great punch line. As though getting into Heaven—the possibility of living forever, the eternal stakes of having faith in God and honoring God and loving God, whether or not our lives actually have any purpose at all—like these things were all just a big joke. And meanwhile here was Caravaggio’s St. Peter.
“Sure you don’t want it?” Cullen asked.
“You keep it. Or toss it, I don’t care.” I rubbed my eyes and stepped out of the car, looking over Cullen’s yard, which had never been put back together after Bri’s accident.
“Anyway,” I said. “I guess you’ll be over to see Bri or whatever.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said, but he didn’t exactly sound convinced this would happen. “Hey, Ray. What would you have done? If I didn’t dig you out when I did?”
“You did dig me out.”
“I know, but I’m saying . . . if I didn’t?”
“But you did,” I said.
“Okay, but . . . that’s a hell of a gamble hoping someone will save you like that.”
“It wasn’t just someone, though, was it? It was the almighty Cullen Hickson.” I smiled at him in what I hoped was a not-too-corny way. “You did exactly what I knew you would.”
* * *
I moved through the dark woods from Cullen’s house to mine, shoulders drawn in tight against the wind. I walked slowly and thought about my life and all the things I wanted to tell Amir. I wanted to tell him about the Infinite Space, about building the casket, what it felt like to be buried alive, that it was even scarier than the subway tunnel, that my favorite moments with him weren’t when we were doing all those stupid, crazy stunts but were instead the quiet moments, the still moments, the real moments. That I wished he were here with me right now, in these woods.
I wanted to tell him that I finally understood the thing I’d been searching for all along wasn’t something you found at all. It was something you built.
The wind seemed to shake the whole forest. Saplings bent almost to the ground. Leaves whipped at my ankles. I stopped walking and looked up to where the bare branches rattled against each other in a loud, shadowy tangle. A few scattered stars were visible.
I shouted into the trees. Shrieked as loudly as I could until my throat felt shredded. I screamed and screamed, but the wind kept taking it away.
It was hard to understand that he wasn’t coming back. Ever. I wondered if that feeling would ever go away. Or if I even wanted it to go away.
At our yard, I stepped over the fence. The ground floor of the house was lit, the blinds drawn up.
She’s in there, I thought. You can talk to her.
I stepped onto the deck and peered through the sliding glass door into the living room. Bri lay on the couch. She clutched a blanket to her chest. The TV blinked shades of blue and yellow across her face, but she wasn’t watching it anymore. Her eyes, I could see when I cupped my palms around my face to limit the glare, were closed. I watched her for a long moment to be sure she was sleeping, drawing my collar up against the wind. She didn’t move. I could hear the TV from outside. The volume was cranked, probably to help her stay awake. She must have waited a long time
I walked to the other end of the house, where, at the kitchen table, Dad waited. When I approached the window just beside the door, he turned to look at me, as though he’d been expecting me at just that very moment. His eyes were red and puffy, and he leaned on his elbows with heavy, rounded shoulders. His hands were folded near his chin, like he’d been—and maybe still was, even as he was looking right at me—praying.
I hadn’t looked in a mirror all day. There was no telling what I looked like, but it couldn’t have been pretty. No one comes back from the dead fully healed. Dad didn’t offer much of a reaction, though, and I had the thought that maybe it was so dark out here he couldn’t even see me. I shivered and kicked dirt off my shoes. My legs wouldn’t stop shaking. I put one hand in my jacket pocket, wrapped the other around the doorknob, and pulled. The wind still beating and clamoring outside, I stepped into the light and shut the door.
Acknowledgments
TO BE A WRITER is to walk a foolish, occasionally reckless path that requires a lot of faith and more than a few allies. The following list is a hasty, incomplete attempt to express gratitude to the many true believers I’ve encountered along the way. Everyone here has helped keep my creative wheels turning in one way or another—in many cases by offering a candid opinion when it mattered most, but in other instances, and just as important, by withholding one.
My Family: Via (my love and secret coauthor), Finn (my biggest joy and best buddy), Mom and Dad (who only gave me everything), Erin and Colleen Strong, MMM&K, the Allmans, Chuck Osgood, Zac Osgood, and Carol Bobrow.
My Book People: Peter Steinberg, Ben Schrank, Marissa Grossman (Dream Makers Three), and everyone at Foundry and Razorbill.
My Teachers: Mrs. Pehowic (Central Ave. School); Martin Berman, Harry Dawson, and Richard Binkowski (Seton Hall Prep); Norma Tilden and Steve Wurtzler (Georgetown); and Gina Nahai, Janet Fitch, Lee Wochner, and Coleman Hough (USC).
My Readers: Via Osgood Strong, Andrew DeSilva, Yance Wyatt, Neelanjana Banerjee, Yvonne Puig, Mitra Parineh, Andy Bailey, Christopher Varley, and Gregory Spatz.
My Day Job Employers: Patty Kiley, Jack Blum, and John Holland.
My Riffraff: Russo, Fanning, Quick, the 1400 Club, Doug MacLeod, the A.W.S.O.M.E., the MPW gang, Kevin Long, 2256, Fort StrongFort, the Words that Speak crew, everyone at Moving Arts Theater in Los Angeles, Andrew Tonkovich at the Santa Monica Review, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and—by way of fulfilling a promise to my eighteen-year-old self—Jack Kerouac.
