American Dead

by PW Cooper

  Edward's teeth had chattered. He'd nodded, because he knew that he was supposed to. The dog brushed wetly up against him, mouth open in an brainless smile.

  “Remember, Edward, you've got to fight for what's yours. They don't care about you, none of them. That's why you've gotta fight. Not for them, but for this,” he gave the dirt an emphatic thump with the butt of his rifle, “for this place.”

  It was the most Edward could remember his father ever telling him at one time. There had been a sort of desperation in his eyes, an overwhelming need to be understood, to share something which was beyond the grasp of his agrarian elocution.

  Edward had been so sure that his father would die, was so convinced by his fear that he eventually accepted it as fact, as having already happened. But his father didn't die. He came back from the war, back from those scattered pacific islands with names that Edward couldn't even pronounce, and they never went hunting again, never went back to that swampy killing field which had been his father's whole reason for fighting, as far as Edward could tell.

  And now children were raised by computer pornography and Japanese video-games while their parents slaved their lives away in grim office buildings. There was a new war now, though there didn't seem to be a proper enemy. Edward could not remember a time in his life when there hadn't been a war, American men off in some meager little country, dying in their droves while he watched it on the television.

  They'll try and take this from us.

  Edward watched the ducks floating gracefully on the black surface of the water, and as he watched he felt the world shrink around him, blotting out everything but the lake and the mist, the trees and the birds, the soft dark dirt under his feet. He closed his eyes, and he thought he might forget that anything else existed in the whole of the universe.

  * * *

  He cleared his throat into the microphone.

  “Adelaide was...” Edward licked his lips, “a special woman. She meant a lot to all of us. She meant a lot to me. She was... a good person.”

  A hot August wind cut through the graveyard. The world was still in bloom. That seemed wrong. Edward through of the withered tree on the side of the road where she had died. There were five other people gathered around the grave. The priest, a nephew and his wife, Patricia Conner. Isabelle Wernick was there too, stuck in a wheelchair and neck brace, sobbing gently into a pale white hanky.

  The Verden graveyard was a miserable place, sprawling inordinately large along a fenced-in hillside. The wind cut across the dell, and lush grass swayed against the gravestones, shimmered like a green ocean washing up on gray-black islands.

  They had asked him to say a few words, and of course he couldn't think of any now. What could he say? It wasn't as though her death had meant anything. It had just been an accident. Blind chance. It didn't mean anything. He hadn't said any words when they buried Samantha. They had all been worried then, his family, her family, their friends, they kept telling to him to open up, to let it all out. They'd all wanted him to bare his soul, when he'd scarcely been able to bear it. He hadn't wanted to open up, couldn't risk giving the grief a chance to escape. Grief was the only part of her he had left. He couldn't just let it go. And now there was another dead, and he felt the grief for Samantha even more keenly.

  “I... I loved Adelaide,” he said. The late summer heat beat down on the lonely graveyard. “She was a good friend.”

  * * *

  Edward looked up at the imaged projected up on the wall. It was a grainy picture of a ruined canal tunnel. There was a narrow dirt pathway leading through. A thin sludge of water ran still in the bottom of the canal, down into the darkness of the wide mouth. Vegetation hung from the stone, long strands of draped ivy hanging over the gateway. The picture was washed out, tinged faintly a dirty amber. The date written beneath it was July, 1971.

  He stared into the mouth of the tunnel. It seemed to go on forever into the blackness.

  Edward clicked the button, turning to the next slide, an image of a vast wooden gate in the canal, grown over and rotted out until the abandoned lock seemed more a part of nature than a machine. A woman stood above the lock, grinning at the camera. Samantha. She was in the next picture too, her eyes lit up, her soft blond hair shining in the sunlight.

  Edward looked up at the picture, staring into the glow. He felt an emptiness yawning up inside him. She had been gone for so long.

  He turned swiftly to the next frame, racing ahead past those images of her face which he could not bear to look on. Eventually, it got to be too much for him, he shut off the projector and went digging in the boxes in the closet, yanking out the stack of tattered letters which she'd sent him, all those years ago when she'd been traveling across the country. They were all addressed to him, return addresses scattered haphazardly across the US.

  Samantha Greer, her name printed in neat dark ink.

  Edward picked up the letter on top, extracting the folded paper from its well-worn envelope. He unfolded the yellowed page, his fingers moving restlessly across the rough paper. There was an old coffee stain on the bottom of the page, hers not his. Postmark Los Angeles.

  Dear Eddie,

  I went surfing! You would have laughed, I made a complete goof of myself! Daphne and me had the whole beach in stitches. Every time I tried to stand up she'd panic and grab hold of my board. She must have dumped me in the ocean half-a-dozen times!

  Someone saw a shark in the water yesterday, so we've been keeping to the beach since. I think we both prefer to have a bit of soild solid ground under our feet. You'll go crazy when you see me. I'm so tan, you probably won't hardly recognize me.

  I hope you're getting all my letters. I can just imagine coming home and finding out you haven't got a single one. Fingers crossed! Anyway, I know you'd write back if we weren't moving around so much. Why don't you write something and just hold onto it? I'll read it when You can read it to me when I get back.

  It's been such an amazing trip. This really is an incredible country, Edward. I hope you'll come with us next time, I don't think I could stand to be away from you for a whole three weeks again. Maybe next year?

  Yikes! I'm already running out of paper, and I've only just started. This is the last of my paper, so I guess I'll just have to wrap this up. I've got dozens hundreds of stories to tell you. Guess I'll have to do it in person.

  Daphne says hi! I'll both be back in New York before you can snap your fingers, so just hold on a little longer.

  Love, love, love, love,

  Sam

  Edward folded the letter again by the familiar lines and returned it to the envelope. I'll be back soon. He had been waiting so long.

  Rough, Lovely

  Jeffrey lay on the artificial beach and watched his family floating like corpses in the dark pools below. There was gritty sand between his toes and in his hair. The blond in his hair had mostly grown out. Eventually, the person you really were would always show itself.

  He had decided to leave New York. Sitting alone in the dark of Michael's apartment, he had worked it all out: where to go, how to pay for it, when to leave, everything. He should have left weeks ago. Somehow though, he just couldn't get up the momentum.

  Alice rolled over onto her back. Her bare toes dug in the warm sand. She sighed softly, her eyes shut and turned towards the light. “I hate this time of year.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know. It's the end of summer. I don't like the cold.”

  “It's not so bad.”

  “Tell me about California. It must have been so beautiful there.” Alice tilted her face upwards, like a flower turning unconsciously towards the sun, hungry for it.

  “I don't know. It was hot.”

  “Oh come on. It couldn't have been that bad.”

  Jeffrey shrugged.

  She grunted incredulously. “Did you see any famous people at least?”

  “Nope.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think I sa
w someone famous last year.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “I don't know their name. I only recognized the face.”

  “Do they really count as famous, then? If you don't know their name?”

  “It still counts.”

  “Okay.”

  “I always wanted to be famous.”

  “What for?"

  She sighed again. "Doesn't everybody want to be famous?"

  “That's not what I mean. What did you want to be famous for doing?”

  “Oh. Well... I don't really know.”

  Jeffrey looked out across the man-made beach. Treman Park. The air there was clean and the damp rocks shone dappled in the filtered light. Pools of shade stretched out across the glassy black water, its mirror surface broken by pale white bodies splashing aimlessly below. They leapt one by one into the water, limbs flailing as they fell. He couldn't stop watching. Every time one of them went laughing and shrieking into the air, every single time they jumped he thought that he saw in their faces a glimpse of Michael Conner. Then they hit the surface, vanished, broke through again from beneath as though resurrected from the depths.

  Robert Summers was down there, moving slowly through the dark water with Sally clinging to his shoulders. He grinned wide as a shark, blowing bubbles low in the water. Jeffrey couldn't understand why he wouldn't leave them alone. What could he want from them? It just didn't make sense.

  It had been Robert's idea to come to the park. Like most of Robert's ideas, it was more an order than a suggestion. He took Jeffrey first, turning up without warning at the apartment. Jeffrey couldn't say how Robert had known where he was living. His first thought when he'd open the door to find his brother-in-law standing in the hall was that Robert had come to kill him. The idea hadn't been so alarming as he'd thought it might be. But the older man hadn't said anything, only given him a stern look and said that Alice was waiting for him in the car and that he'd better bring along a bathing suit.

  They went to the trailer park, and Robert disappeared into Kim's home. A few minutes later he came back out with Sally in his arms. Garrett and Walker were right behind, and Kimberly at the rear, brushing her damp cheeks and looking rather chastised. Robert ignored all questions as to their destination. They had all done as he asked without argument; it seemed natural somehow to do what he told them. When they arrived at the State Park and he told them to “have fun,” they did their best to follow that order too.

  Kim was sitting on a rock in the shallows, watching through her sunglasses with no apparent emotion as her three youngest children paddled in the cold and seemingly bottomless water. Something was going on between Robert and she, Jeffrey could tell. He couldn't help but be curious, though he knew that he was probably better off not knowing. Alice seemed to know something about it: she wouldn't even look at Kim anymore, and she'd not said two words to Robert.

  Jeffrey shut his eyes. The Burke family. It was like a sick joke: five children by different fathers, the daughter's husband almost old enough to be her parent and probably fucking the mother. He felt like an alien among them, though he knew that he belonged there. That's why he hadn't put up a fight when Robert came to collect him. It had felt like going home.

  We're trash. We're the object lesson.

  Jeffrey tried not to cry. He hated crying. Alice was watching him, he could feel her gaze prickling his back. He turned his face away from her. He couldn't let her see him like this.

  “Want to take a walk up around the falls?” she asked, standing up without waiting for an answer. “Do you remember when we used to do that?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you coming?”

  “You go ahead.”

  “Please, Jeff.”

  He rubbed his eyes and sighed. “Alright. Should we tell them where we're going?”

  Alice shook her head. “They'll figure it out.”

  Jeffrey looked back. His siblings seemed like they were in another world almost, down in the maw of some primordial crater poised to swallow.

  Alice was already walking. He hurried after, tugging on his t-shirt. The sand burned beneath his bare feet. It gave way after a few paces to loose black soil. Gnarled tree roots twisted through the dirt, clawing at the beach like the fingers of the earth, feeling at the foreign ground as though clutching for understanding.

  Alice cut across the dirt, clambering up a sheer slope and slipping under the raw wood fence. He scrabbled after her, feeling vaguely infantile as he climbed. He was embarrassed at how much he liked it, the freedom, the simple childish pleasure of pulling himself up the soft dirt slope, his fingers sinking into the giving earth. Nostalgia was like quicksand: venture too far out and it would pull you under. He could almost taste the memories rising, tinted gold and bright as the sunrise. Living in the past was a false joy, no more true than a drug high.

  Alice was breathing hard, her hands on her hips. “Come on!” She laughed. She seemed to be coming alive. It was like the girl he remembered had been sleeping and had now finally woken up: his big sister.

  It was an illusion, he knew. Robert would be waiting for her when they came back down. The world would be waiting to swallow them both. He hurried after her, upwards and away, far far away.

  * * *

  The last six weeks had melted into nothing. He went to work when he woke up and he fell asleep practically as soon as he came back to the apartment. His few spare moments had been frittered away reading Michael's guilty-pleasure thrillers and watching shitty TV. Most of what he ate came out of boxes and cans; he hardly ever went out. He'd given up hope of finding anything more out about Michael. There didn't seem to any avenues left to follow. If the police had discovered anything, they weren't sharing.

  He'd talked to most of the other tenants in the apartment building. Hardly any of them had even known Michael, and those that did were less than forthcoming. There was one guy, an older man maybe in his fifties, who said that he knew Michael “in a professional capacity,” but had refused to elaborate. Jeffrey didn't push. He spent a lot of time looking at the Polaroid photograph of Michael. None of what he'd found out had helped him understand why. Why would anybody do that? It probably accounted for Alice's old books showing up in Mike's apartment. Maybe they'd known each other through Robert.

  No matter how he put his mind to it, however, he couldn't connect the Michael he'd found to the boy he'd grown up with. What could change a person like that?

  He thought about the pictures in Robert's suitcase. Presumably, some of the people in the photographs would know Mike, might even know something about what had happened last year. The trouble was that he hadn't recognized any of them, nor did he have even the first clue of how he might go about locating them. The only one he could talk to was his mother, and he was nowhere near ready for that.

  He might have actually gotten up the courage to do it, given enough time and frustration. But then he met Gloria White.

  She had knocked on his door at half-past-eight on a Tuesday night. He opened it and there she was, standing in the gloomy hall, beaming like a flower in her butter-yellow sundress. “I heard that you've been asking people about Eddie,” she said. She had a soft, earnest sort of voice.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he replied, twisting the doorknob nervously. Eddie, that was the name Mike had used.

  “Why haven't you asked me?” She had soft brown eyes, and the curly dark sort of hair which seemed seemed to be up in ribbons, even when it wasn't. She looked like she was about his age.

  “I don't know. Who are you?”

  She extended one hand. “Gloria White. My daddy owns the place.”

  He shook her hand. She had a firm grip. “Yeah? I didn't know you lived here.”

  “I live with my mother,” she said, cocking her head in a direction vaguely indicating a place other than the one they were standing in.

  “Did you know him? Eddie Conner?”

  “Why are you asking about him?”

  “Because I want to know what ha
ppened to him.”

  “He died.” She had bright and darting eyes.

  Jeffrey clung awkwardly to the open door. “Do you want to come in?”

  She nodded, and stepped past him into the room, going straight for the couch and sitting down. She stared at him expectantly. The depth in her eyes seemed in the harsh light of the apartment to be empty, bottomless.

  “Why do you think something happened to Eddie?” she asked.

  “What do you mean? Something did happen. You said it yourself: he died.”

  “Where you a friend of his?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?” she parroted back, “Does that mean that you payed him to sleep with you?”

  “No! I wouldn't do...” Jeffrey shut the door. “I guess you know what he did then.”

  “Michael did what people told him to.”

  “I thought his name was Eddie?”

  “We both know it wasn't.”

  “Do you know how it started?”

  She shook her head. “He didn't like to talk about it. Not to me anyway. And not that we were all that close. He wasn't much good at the whole double life thing though, couldn't tell a lie to save his life.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. Just saying that it wasn't that big a secret.”

  “His parents didn't know. Still don't.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  He was taken aback by that. “Well, uh... They don't.”

  She smiled. “You're probably right. I don't think they would have wanted to notice something like that. I noticed the very first moment I saw him. He had the strangest aura, like he was slipping away right there in front of me. It didn't happen as soon as I'd expected, but it did happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn't it obvious? He didn't want to be alive.”

  “You think he killed himself?”

  “Goodness, I couldn't tell you something like that! How should I know?”

  “Did you ever meet the man Michael worked for? Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

  She shook her head. “I don't know why you're trying to make a mystery of this, Jeffrey. Michael's dead. Just let him be dead.” With that, she stood, smoothed her dress, and walked back out the door.

  After she left, he decided to stop asking about Michael. Somehow, it just didn't seem important anymore.