by Vicki Grove
“Got my license for a quarter when I was fourteen years old and never had a bit of trouble on the highway,” he called to me. “Learned at home on my dad’s old pickup truck, back when they knew how to make a truck. Just turning the steering wheel of that big black Ford gave you automatic muscles.”
“Hey, Bud,” I greeted him.
“That truck and me was one unit, indivisible. Nobody could stop me drivin’ if I was still in that 1936 Ford truck.”
“Yeah, I know they wouldn’t, Bud,” I solemnly agreed. My throat felt husky. “You remember Trey, don’t you? He felt exactly like that about his car.”
You gotta see her, Graysten! Oh, dude, you have just gotta see her! I mean, she’s rusting under a few other classic carcasses there at Handerley’s Salvage, but you gotta imagine her with about a dozen coats of cherry red paint and a classic speaker system. I was born to restore this ’67 Stang! It’s my calling in life, you know?
“He was one of the boys in that crash, right?” I nodded and Bud nodded along. Then we both were quiet for a minute. “Well. I believe she made lemon pie for dinner,” he told me. It was his favorite. I appreciated him trying to cheer me up.
“I think I forgot to bring in vegetables this morning. Later, Bud.”
I went around to the backyard. When I ducked through the plastic flap of the hoop house, chilly condensation wet the back of my jeans, easing my legs a little. The light was milky as it often is inside the hoop house in late fall. The temperature was a good ten degrees warmer than outside, in the real world. I sat down cross-legged at the edge of the radishes, where for some reason the grass is always long and lush.
“Where are you, Trey?” I whispered, then I went quiet, listening.
The wind was rising and it sucked at the plastic. A grasshopper jettisoned himself from the arugula. It reminded me of Zero, the way it defied gravity with such ease. How could something so dynamic just suddenly go . . . still?
I lay back with my hands under my head. The thick, clear plastic had weathered now and was slightly yellowed. Through it I watched the invisible wind have its way with the limbs of the big cottonwood tree, making the wood groan, making the longest branches thrash and tangle like moody, irritable skeleton arms. Small twigs kept falling against the top of the hoop house in a rhythmic way, like a cadence, like . . .
Hey down there, Tucker Graysten, you innocent wonder, you!
I scrambled to my feet. Trey? I shot out of the hoop house and turned to scope the yard, but all I saw was evidence of the wind at work—leaves skittering, limbs groaning, little sticks falling on the hoop house like drumbeats.
At the edge of sleep I’d dreamed that I’d heard Trey call me, that’s all it was. But something gray and sickening began gnawing its way into my mind. It had to do with Trey’s tone of voice. He’d called me an innocent wonder three or four times a week for the last couple of months.
So why had he sounded so sarcastic when I’d dreamed of him saying it just now?
I slapped leaf clutter off me and went back toward the house, forgetting the vegetables a second time. I was partway through the kitchen door when I noticed Janet at the counter, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt.
Her hair was down at her shoulders, but it had a dent halfway up from her work ponytail. She had the big plastic box she uses for tools open on the counter and was throwing stuff out and scolding it. “Why can’t I ever find anything in you?”
I took a step backward, but then I noticed something that stopped me from sneaking the rest of the way back outside. My mother’s picture, on the kitchen table.
Janet whirled around. “Tucker, where’d you come from?” She pushed her hair from her eyes with her wrist and looked at me looking at the picture. “Now don’t go giving me a hard time, Tucker, because I’ve had about enough of a hard time today, as I’m sure you have as well. I just got back from work and I’m in charge of the funeral dinner the restaurant is providing for the families tomorrow, so I’ve gotta be making calls to get contributions of pies and things for that. And so before I started my calls, I had five minutes to spare and I decided to re-hang your mother, more where you can look at her when you go into the living room. I mean, she’s been down at your eight-yearold level for far too long, you need to be able to see her eye to eye. But when I so much as barely touched it, the wire she’s been hanging on all these years broke, then of course the frame would just have to come apart, too.”
She sighed and dropped into a chair at the table. “I don’t know why I think anything’ll be a five-minute job when everything in this house is just held together with spit and bubble gum.” She put her hands on her forehead and pushed back her hair as she looked down at the picture. “I’m so sorry, Cynthia Anne,” she said quietly.
Her face had that pink and blotchy look of someone who’s been crying off and on for a long time. It hit me then that everyone who came into the restaurant today or yesterday had probably asked her about the bonfire and the whole rest of the thing.
I focused on the red pain and walked across to the sink, then edged sideways a step and peered into her box of tangled tools. “What’d you want out of here?” I stirred it.
“Oh, glue,” she said in a dull, hopeless voice. “But don’t think it’ll be so easy. I’ve got ten kinds of glue in there. Mucilage, monkey glue, rubber cement, Elmer’s Wood Glue, Elmer’s School Glue, at least three bottles of that from different times I bought it for you in Cub Scouts, though it’s probably dried up. I’ve got superglue and amazing superglue and tacky glue. And besides that I’m gonna need the right kind of little vise grips to hold this until it sets, and I’ve got six or seven kinds of those.”
I closed my eyes while my back was still to her and gritted my teeth to contain the pain in my legs enough to turn around and walk casually out of the kitchen without her commenting on it.
“Tucker, what do you think is so easy about taking care of you and Bud?” she suddenly said sharply. “One so pigheaded and the other so silent?”
This came out of nowhere. I stirred the tools around again to look busy. The loud clock there on the wall clicked off every second.
“Oh, just go back out and get me some broccoli,” she finally said. “And don’t worry, I’ll go work on my call list for the dinner in the other room so you won’t have to try not to walk like you’re walking.” She stomped out.
I got the broccoli and some radishes and chard, rinsed them in the kitchen, then found some glue in Janet’s box, fixed the picture frame, and clamped it. I went upstairs then to work on algebra until dinner, but I ended up pulling my desk chair over to the window instead so I could just slump in it and stare at Trey’s rock. Hey down there, Tucker Graysten, you innocent wonder, you . . . I grimaced. Why had Trey sounded so . . . unfriendly? Why had I dreamed him like that unless wherever he was, he . . . was?
We ate dinner, then I hurried back to my room and took Trey’s green Bic from my pocket. It was dark by then, but I didn’t turn on the light. I could see the whiteness of the outside window ledge and the scrap of shadow on it that was the pebble.
I sat in the chair and held the Bic out in front of me, close to the window.
“Trey, I’m only going to do this once,” I whispered. “If you’re mad at me or . . . or blame me or something, your lighter will light on the fourth click.” My hand was shaking, so I gripped my wrist with my other hand—click, click, click, click, click, click, fwoom! Seven times.
“Okay, Trey, I’m only going to do this once. Your lighter will light on the sixth click if you are not mad at me.” I opened the lighter—click, click, click, fwoom!
I saw a flicker of movement in the window glass. My blood went icy, but when I turned to look closely, I saw it was just Bud’s reflection. He’d come upstairs and was standing planted in the hallway between our rooms, looking in at me.
I turned my head. “G’night, Bud,” I murmured, trying to steady my heartbeat.
“Yeah.” He raised an arm and dropped it. “Listen
, there’ll always be questions in your mind, I remember that from Korea, how it tears your gut not to know this and that. You wanta ask them, but you don’t have a way. Anyhow, why should the dead know so much about it, huh? If my Mary knew answers, she woulda told me by now why she left ahead of me.” He raised an arm again and this time turned and went into his room.
I closed my door, then went back and slumped in the chair again, staring out.
Hey down there, you innocent wonder, you . . . The cold and sarcastic tone of his voice, how his eyes had to be hooded and hard. Trey was accusing me of something.
Not many people came to school the next morning. They took the early out we’d been given for permission to skip all day, which I’d thought about doing myself. But you have to do something even on the morning they’re digging graves for your three best friends. Clevesdale High School, with its bright, humming fluorescent lights and shiny silver-flecked blue floor tiles and general air of safety and boredom, would be so much better than my room, where that rock of Trey’s still balanced on my windowsill, teetering mysteriously several times a night with or without there being wind.
And so I spent my first-period study hall in the library, flipping through sports magazines and not really seeing what I was looking at. Then I accidentally picked up an American Life and it slipped through my fingers to the floor, falling open to a picture of the airliner that crashed in that Ohio field last month. There was the doomed plane just before the crash, shiny against an innocent blue sky, tilted in a weird way as though it was the pencil in the hand of some crazy god. You could even make out a tiny row of windows running zipper-like right above its burning wing. If I had Bud’s magnifying glass, the one he kept beside the TV book, I could even possibly make out the faces of some of the passengers. Then I might be able to figure out what they were thinking, those people in that shiny tube, looking out those thick round windows at a future that was no future at all.
My hands began to shake as I shoved that magazine into my backpack, then grabbed a second newsmagazine, a Time, where I found a full-page black-and-white photo of an AIDS victim hooked to machines. The man in that narrow bed was very young and as thin as Zero, and he looked straight out of the picture with hollow, accusing eyes. What did he know that no one knew who wasn’t in his shoes?
Next, in a Newsweek, I found a picture of a bridge collapse that sent six cars plunging like stones to the bottom of a river. Four of the cars were visible in the picture, three caught in the act of sinking and one teetering on the tongue-like edge of a jagged splinter of asphalt. A blurry face stared from the backseat window of that teetering car.
The fourth picture was of a soldier in some recent war. He was defying the law of gravity, helped along by some sort of explosion behind him that, the caption said, took his life. But in the picture he was very much alive, flying like everyone dreamed of doing, like Zero thought he could do if he leaped from that chat pile, and thinking . . . what?
A National Geographic I grabbed had a double-page spread of a cage of monkeys on their way to receive lethal injections because they had some kind of weird tropical virus. The thing about that picture was the way one of the monkeys was sucking on a piece of banana with his eyes slightly closed. Unlike the guy trapped by tubes to his narrow bed or the people in those teetering or sinking cars, or probably even the flying soldier, that monkey had no inkling of what was about to happen to him.
That monkey looked as simply and perfectly happy as Trey always looked. Don’t you dare puke in my car, Graysten! Trey, cheerful even as he peeled away from me, sailing down that dark bluff road for the very last time. Trey, grinning, easy with life, with his last two minutes of it, of life.
I didn’t worry about whether Mr. Mayes, the librarian, noticed me stuffing my backpack with those magazines. That actually wasn’t likely, since he’s always on the Internet. But I didn’t even worry about whether I was overstaying study hall. I had to follow this where it led, had to get that magnifying glass of Bud’s to see these amazing pictures better so I could feel my way into that place where . . .
“Tucker?” My heart took a lurch and I reluctantly raised my eyes to see Ms. Jazzmeyer’s orange and black fingernails resting on my left shoulder like some bizarre tropical spider.
“Come with me, Tucker, okay?” It wasn’t really a question, since I had no choice. She let me go and turned to lead the way to her office, and I slipped that fifth magazine into my pack, wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans, and followed her.
She sat down behind her desk and gestured for me to drop into one of her two huge turquoise chairs. “I’m afraid the grief counselors from Tulsa were a bit delayed, Tucker,” she explained in a sorrowful voice. “No worries, they’ll be here tomorrow. Still, we shouldn’t wait that long to get you started working on your feelings.”
I swallowed and tried to resist touching my lips with my fingers to see if I was managing to work my face into an acceptable expression. “I can wait, no problem.”
She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes.
“Tuck, your teachers and classmates are terribly worried about you. You look like you haven’t eaten or slept since it happened, but you won’t confide in anyone. A couple of young women have reported to me that you even hung up on their calls of concern. You need to talk about this, Tuck. Now nothing you say will shock me, and I promise our conversation won’t go beyond this office. Just open up and tell me how you feel.”
It took me a while to come up with something. “I feel . . . surprised?”
She leaned forward, looking interested, which was the last thing I wanted. I desperately needed out of that suffocating turquoise chair, a chair that belonged in someone’s living room, not in a high school office. But I was trapped by its bloated plastic arms in this room of ferny plants and Ms. Jazzmeyer’s extensive glass bear collection. Also, it looked like the walls were slowly coming together to crush me.
I should have been with them! Should I start howling that I’d let my three best friends go on without me and that I’d had no business staying behind? I might have done something, stopped them somehow, warned Trey to slow for that curve, jumped up and leaned far over the white leather back of the driver’s seat in time to give the wheel a hard yank left? I’d always been their guard, their lookout. That’s what a lookout did, he looked out for his people! Did she want me to start screeching all that like a person being turned inside out? I was supposed to be with them, I should have been with them, I was always with them, did she want me to start crying real tears about that and the related fact that I was now and would always be soul-tattooed, not to mention haunted by a small rock I didn’t dare brush off the outside sill of my bedroom window? Why didn’t I just get on the office intercom and explain all that so the whole school could hear it at once and whip out their phones to text me their concern?
And now this new thing, this dream thing, Trey unfriendly to me like I’d never once seen him, Trey’s sarcastic voice squeezing in like a rat to gnaw at my aching brain. Tucker Graysten, you innocent wonder, you . . . Was Trey’s postmortem sarcasm what she and her interested gallery of little glass bears wanted me to chat about?
“Ms. Jazzmeyer?” I whispered. “Let’s say you’re in an airliner falling from the sky. For those last few seconds, would you think of yourself as still alive, as a thinking person with a head full of plans, or if not, what would be in your head?”
She let me go soon after that. When I got to my locker, I dug out my protractor from the clutter at the bottom. I dropped my backpack onto the floor, took out the first magazine, and flipped it open to that jetliner. I measured the angle of its descent at fifty-two degrees, then I packed up and went home to change shirts for the funeral. Funerals.
VII
I had been inside McElderry’s Funeral Home only once before, when my mom died. I couldn’t see anything then, the heads all around me were too tall. Somebody gave me my first ever Tootsie Roll Pop, either from sympathy or to keep me quiet.
&
nbsp; And now here I was climbing the very same stone steps her casket had been carried down eleven years ago. The very same steps.
“Oh, Tucker, good, there you are!” Aimee was just inside the big oak doorway, standing there in the dimness holding a white rose in each black-gloved hand. She held one of the roses out to me. “Here, take this. We saved you a seat. We’re right near the front, right behind the section reserved for the families.”
I took the rose and she put her arm through mine and maneuvered us over the thick lobby carpeting and into the large room with all the church-like pews and the dozens of overpoweringly ugly flower arrangements.
She walked us slowly, showing me off like I was a catch, like I was Josh Hinstrom, for instance, the basketball team captain who’d been junior high homecoming king when Aimee was junior high homecoming queen back when we were all in eighth grade. I’m not Josh Hinstrom, not anyone she’d normally walk with, so I knew she was appointing me captain of this particular event, sole survivor, chief witness of the carnage, interesting for today, just like Zero had been interesting to her for a week or so until she figured out that he wasn’t going to be tamed into anyone normal enough for her.
People turned to watch us go by, and Aimee touched a white cloth handkerchief to her eyes, reaching beneath the black veil attached to the front of her vintage hat.
I began to notice that there was no smell whatsoever in the room. The place smelled more like nothing than anyplace I’d ever been. The hundreds of flowers smelled especially like nothing, as if their smells had been drawn out of them with a long syringe.
For a panicked few seconds, I couldn’t breathe. I made a gasping sound before I realized I was confusing lack of smell with lack of air. Aimee squeezed my arm hard as she shot me a don’t-you-dare-embarrass-me look from behind that black veil of hers.
The organ kept playing long, sad chords that didn’t seem to go anywhere. I strained to hear some sort of resolution, or even some sort of beauty, but it never came.
