38 The Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway was renamed the Ontario Northland Railway on April 5, 1946. The history of rail service in Northern Ontario has been wonderfully captured in Robert Surtees’ The Northern Connection: Ontario Northland Since 1902 (Toronto: Captus Press, 1992).
39 Dr. Prescott located the bar of bullion in a concealed compartment built into the Roundhouse Chamber’s roll-top desk. In what has to be one of the more bizarre elements of an already strange story, two weeks prior to our meeting Dr. Prescott had received a letter in the mail with no return address. Inside was a detailed drawing of the desk. It was through the drawing (evidently done on a computer) Prescott was able to find, one lonely night in Doric Lodge, the hidden compartment (a false-bottomed drawer). Attached to the drawing was a single sentence centered on an otherwise blank sheet of paper: “Courtesy the E.R.I.S. Society of North Bay.” As of this date there has been no other information forthcoming, and who or what the E.R.I.S. Society is remains an unknown.
LUGAR DE LA PAZ, by B.N. Clark
The day was another good one for melting things: skin cells, deodorant, work ethic, ambition—not to mention, bagged up pizza, which Dodd Tanner had allowed to bask in the sunwaves all morning. It was another of those fry an egg on the sidewalk days, temperatures in the city having reached record highs all month long. Mercifully, the sun had disappeared behind a thick sea of cloud around 10:30, where it had stayed, making the Volunteers’ half hour lunchbreak more tolerable, though the God-awful south Texas humidity was something that wasn’t going any place until late October or November.
The kid was sitting on a five gallon bucket flipped upside down, the loose cloth of his beige Dickies pants drooping like lazy man hands over the sides. “They’re in there, you know,” he said. He was staring out past the three rusted John Deere riding mowers, a large dinosaur of a skidloader, and the pile of rakes, shovels, hoes, out at the slowly ascending plain, all green and lush and full of gray concrete headstones and big marble monuments.
Tanner was facing the same way. He was seated on the ground five feet from the kid, his back pressed against the moldy red bricks of the Administration Building, the neatly cut ends of silver hair touching down to his shoulders. His bare knees were up, elbows resting on them. With the underside of his forearm he brushed the latest coat of perspiration from his pockholed face. He moved the remainder of warm pepperoni and black olive slice toward his mouth, stopping just shy, a mutilated pizza-ship frozen in mid-flight: “What’d you say, kid? What’s in where?”
The kid took a massive gulp from his Coke can. “Out there,” he said, still staring ahead. “In the graves. The dead people.”
Tanner cast an odd look at him. The kid, Rody Passo, was actually a young black man (probably twenty one or two, Tanner guessed; at fifty, anyone under forty was still just a kid). He was a good looking kid of a thin, lean build; his hair was trimmed tightly to his head in clean small curls, his skin, the color of coffee overloaded with creamer; there was something about him—maybe the way he spoke, so calmly and softly—that lent him something like an air of wisdom, Tanner thought, if at least for his age. Or maybe it was the eyes. The eyes were very black, always seeming to dwell under a furrowed brow, as if just behind them lay a deep reservoir of thought, wherein only the severest of concerns were allowed.
Tanner’s eyes played across the kid’s long arms. Yes. And perhaps it was the tattoos: all the way down to the wrists, Passo’s well-toned arms were covered in various permanent inkings—death skulls, clownish faces of horrified expression, gang affiliation, illegible personal mantra, numbers and symbols of strange design; he looked like a typical hooligan, no doubt, yet carried himself as a young man who had made mistakes, but learned from them.
“Well duh? No shit, kid,” Tanner said, clawing his fingers at a tiny itch behind his gray goatee. “Maybe you didn’t read the sign over the arches when the van brought us in.” The dark eyes twisted to glare sideways at Tanner while he drained out the rest of the Coke. “It said Looger Cemetery. And they’d better be out there. Otherwise, we’re doing all this mindless shitwork for nothing.”
The kid crushed the can in his hand, lowered it down to the gravel. “I know what the sign says.” His gaze travelled away from Tanner, back out beyond the Maintenance parking lot, out to the imperfectly lined rows and rows of the dead. “Lugar De La Paz,” he said softly, almost with reminisce; his pronunciation was flawless.
“Lugar De La What?”
“Lugar De La Paz.” Eyes still fixed on the plain. “It means Place of Peace.”
“Wow. How’d they ever think of that one?”
“It came easily to them. They didn’t know any better.”
Plucking the last pepperoni from off the pizza and balancing it on his fingertip, he eyeballed the kid, one ashy eyebrow raised. “Who didn’t know any better?”
“Place of Peace,” the kid said, “is a lie. There’s hardly any peace out there. I know. There’s only torment. And darkness and maggots and rotting flesh and heat.”
After a moment Tanner shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. I guess that’s a way to look at it.” He poked the red meat into his mouth and tossed the rest of the slice up over the tall edge of an industrial trashbin to his left. He shifted his legs in front of him. “So how you know Spanish?”
“My mom’s from El Salvador…They lived deep in the jungle. There was a civil war there when she was younger. She left with my uncles before it started. They came here. Well, to Chicago. Met my dad at a poultry farm.”
“Didn’t know they had chickens in the Windy City.”
“That was a long time ago.”
Tanner grunted a low yawn, stretching his arms out in front of him, feeling his elbows pop. He sounded off a belch.
“It must be awful in there,” the kid said.
“Where’s that, kid?”
“Down in those deep black holes.”
Tanner laughed out loud. “You shittin me, kid? Or are you some kind of freaky man?”
The dark eyes studied him for a time, then the brow above them smoothed out; the kid smiled broadly, baring a set of straight white teeth. Tanner shook his head, laughing. He hauled himself to his feet. “You’re crazy, kid. You almost had me, you know?” He yawned, arching his back. “You about ready? Cowboy told us to meet him at 12:30.” He glanced at his wristwatch, eyes squinted. “It’s about that time.” The kid nodded.
Tanner walked out across the dusty parking lot toward Lugar De La Paz’s Section G, where Rick Helmsley would soon be waiting for them in his big white plastic Go-Buggy. Passo left the empty Coke can where it lay and reached down and pulled another from out of his insulated lunch sack. “You coming, kid?” Tanner yelled back.
“Yeah, just a sec.” He shoved the can down deep into the spacious maw of a leg pocket, frumpled the fabric around its shape. He followed Tanner out into the big boneyard.
* * * *
The Volunteers weren’t really volunteers, of course. But that’s what they called them, and that’s what was painted on the sides of the white vans that shuttled them all over the city twice a week to sweat and toil and pay off their supposed debts to society. CITY PARKS & RECREATION VOLUNTEER TRANSPORTATION: it was better, so devised the Powers That Be, to slap that on the vehicle than to come right out and advertise that these largely motley looking groups were composed of law breaking probationers, quite in-voluntarily working off their loads of community service hours; some little old widow bringing flowers to her dead husband’s graveside might well get offended if she knew what caliber of the living were weed-whacking around his shriveled body.
Today only two other Volunteers had accompanied Tanner and Passo in the van: one was a mid-aged Hispanic man with a thick black mustache named Juan, whose knowledge of the English language apparently dead-ended at the words yes and no; the other was a scrawny old unshaven fellow named Phil, who wore a dirty yellow T-shirt Tanner had smelled toxically emanating from the back of the van on the ride over, an
d whose hands trembled when he lit his crooked cigarettes, as if he’d gotten up and left the dumpster that morning without having his fifth of Scotch pick-me-up. The other two dozen or so Volunteers who’d shown up at 9 AM at the main branch downtown had been deposited at different locations throughout the city, some to other municipal cemeteries, but most, to pick up beer and soda cans, deflated children’s birthday party balloons, rotted uneaten leftovers and other debris at the public parks; who and how many went where, depended on the number that reported for duty, and where the Public Slaves (Tanner privately regarded any city employee as such) needed them the most.
The day dragged by.
At three o’clock Tanner stabbed his shovel into the remaining mound of black dirt; he cupped the handle, leaning against it. “Whoo-wee.” Grimacing, he snatched the red bandanna from atop his head to sop at the river of sweat on his face like gravy with a biscuit; satisfied, he tucked it into his rear pocket behind his wallet, letting the red end dangle down like a woman’s hair. He said, “I’ll be damn glad when my body burying days are over. I still can’t believe this shit.”
When “Cowboy” Rick Helmsley had first handed them shovels and told them what they’d be required to do for the next several hours, Tanner had thought the man was joking. It was soon conveyed that no, he was not joking, and yes, he was quite aware it was an unusual request—one either man could freely refuse if he wanted, on religious or any other grounds—and that normally it was the old skidloader that plowed the soil back over the pits after funerals. However, Rick explained, in the cemetery’s upwardly sloping G-11 section, where the trees grew more closely together and large boulders had been left in place (for sake of serene scenery, ideal for a hillside funeral), the big machine could not easily maneuver, and God forbid if the thousand metallic pounds of boom and dipper were to go knocking over a tall headstone or monument.
Holding his oblong hat in one hand, Rick had facetiously shown them the brighter side of things, saying, “Consider yourselves two lucky pilgrims. Think about it this way: Ain’t just anyone can say they’ve buried a body, now.”
“Yeah,” Tanner had replied. “It seems like luck just can’t get enough of my sorry ass.” Then Cowboy Rick had had himself a hearty old laugh.
Now Tanner turned and looked down the long slope they were up near the highest part of, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand—just after lunch that loyal old Texas sun had come right out again, in full blazing fury, and had gone away to hide no more. He wondered just what menial task Mexico Juan and Phil The Wino had been assigned. He thought they were probably on the far eastern side of the sprawling cemetery—that’s the direction Raul Jantillan had zoomed them off to in the facility’s second Go-Buggy—either picking up trash or twiddling idle thumbs. Whatever piece of work Cowboy and Raul had them doing, Tanner was sure it was something a hell of alot easier than shoveling nap-dirt over corpses and coffins in the ass-squelching heat.
The kid laid the handle of his shovel down beside the dirt pile. “Hot isn’t, Mr. Tanner?”
Tanner turned back around, digging in his pocket for Pall Malls. “Sure as hell is, kid.” He lit a cigarette with his Zippo, offering the pack to the kid, but he shook his head. “What’s this Mr. Tanner crap, anyway? I look that old? Just call me Dodd, why don’t you.”
“Okay. Dodd…Never heard that name before. Rhymes with God.”
Tanner chuckled. “Rhymes with not-quite-God, too. Yeah, I know. I never heard it before, either. Just me and my father, is all. He was Old Dodd Number One. I’m Old Dodd Number Two. The Junior.”
The kid didn’t say anything. Up thirty yards or so, near the top of the hill, there was a wide bald cypress tree that looked as if it had been growing there since Genesis. There was an abundance of good dark shade beneath its great spanning canopy. Tanner gestured at it. “I think I can hear my brains sizzling. Let’s get out of this heat for a minute, uh? Get some of that water Cowboy left us.”
“All right.”
He opened the small ice cooler Rick Helmsley had left them, took two bottles and started wearily up toward the tree. He passed through two rows of graves before he said, “I tell you, I’m glad I make my living behind my desk in the cool AC.” He paused in the narrow berth between two faded concrete crosses to lean down and swat a husband and wife mosquito couple that had been on a clandestine honeymoon at his shin flesh. He straightened up. “I’m sure as hell too old for this kind of sh—” The kid was not beside him. He turned around.
Twenty yards downhill Rody Passo was down on his knees in the grass. He was hunched over the side of the grave they’d been shovelling dirt into. He was holding the Coke can he’d brought with him from lunch, pouring it into the half-filled hole. “What the hell?” Tanner heard himself whisper. He watched the kid pour the Coke until it trickled to nothing. Some odd way, he thought, to get rid of a hot soda water.
Still on his knees, the kid surveyed the landscape, as if he were some covert operator determining whether or not he was being spied upon by an unseen enemy. Apparently satisfied he was not, he got quickly up to his feet, buried the empty can in his pocket and trotted up the grassy ascension to where Tanner waited.
“What the hell was that all about?”
“You’re thirsty, right, Dodd?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“Well. Just imagine how thirsty they get…Come on.” The kid flashed a grin, then went running up the rest of the way to the big cypress. Standing there like a sun-baked graveyard statue, Dodd Tanner was suddenly quite certain the heat was playing tricks on his thin skull, if not outright cooking its contents. He shook his head and walked slowly up the hill, thinking what a very peculiar sense of humor young Rody Passo had.
* * * *
They sat in the shadows beneath the lush green foliage, chugging, then sipping from the water bottles. Tanner puffed at his cigarette. After several minutes of relative quiet he said, “That’s a trip. I can’t believe they actually have us burying bodies. And for free. Talk about government raping the people. I get my second lousy DUI, and here I am fucking with up-and-coming zombies. Our taxes pay these fuckers’ wages, and they can’t even bury the godamm dead?”
The kid was sitting on a pile of leaves, Indian-style, his hands resting on his thighs. “Why does it bother you so much?”
Tanner looked at him. “I don’t know, kid. I just don’t like burying dead people. Especially not here.”
“Here?”
“Yeah. At Looger.”
School was out, and now wrinkled old Uncle Forehead had let the dark eyes come back out to play. “Why is that, Dodd?”
Tanner swallowed, his throat dipping and rising back up. “Because…Probably because Old Dodd’s down there somewhere. Old Dodd Number One.”
The kid’s face lit up. “He is? Why didn’t you say so?”
“Why would I?” Tanner said. “Thousands of people are buried out here.”
“Yeah, but only one of them is your dad. Maybe you can go and visit him. I bet Cowboy wouldn’t mind.”
Tanner sighed out. He looked away from Passo’s optimistic gaze. “I don’t even know where he is, kid. I never visited him before.”
An incredulous look came over the kid. Then a frown. “Never? Why?”
Tanner looked down at his old veiny hand, which was making a fist, opening, making a fist. He stilled it. “Because. It’s a long story.” He stared at the brown leaves between his shoes. “Old Senior and I didn’t exactly get along. He was a damn drunk. And not the kind that goes around bear-hugging every person he sees when he’s full of the stuff. He could get real nasty…Twice a year my mom’ll still come out here and visit him, even though he used to kick her ass. She was a saint to stay with him. Or a fool. But she loved him. Still does, I guess. She used to ask my brother and I to go with her…She quit asking years ago.”
The kid remained quiet, the dark eyes watchful.
Tanner sat there thinking for a long while, smoking his Pall Mall down to the butt,
eyes fixed on a bright yellow sunbeam that had somehow managed to penetrate the above mass tangle of leaves and branches. Without any prodding he said, “You know…I used to hate him. Old Dodd, The Bastard. I always thought he loved that godamm Jim Beam more than he did any of us. I thought if he loved us, he’d be able to just put it down. But he never could. I hated that I’d been named after him.” He smiled. A quiet laugh escaped him, dry as sandpaper. “I never did call him Dad. Not since I was nine or ten years old. Only Dodd…Our dad Old Dodd is dead. That’s what I always told my little brother Steve. It sounded pretty funny.”
“When did he die?”
Tanner glanced at him quickly, as if for a few moments he’d forgotten somebody else was sitting there with him, listening to him verbalize his thoughts. He went to raise the cigarette up, then saw it was dead and smoldering. He flicked it away. He clasped his hands together, interlocking his fingers. “Over fifteen years ago,” he sighed. “Liver went bad. He was gone less than a month after he went to see the doctor, said he had severe stomach cramps. I never went to see him. I thought he’d come right out, go back to his bottle and his job at the post office. But naw. Didn’t happen that way. Not that I even cared. I cared about my mother, that was about it. But I was bad to her too. I didn’t even go to the funeral. Steve went. I told him he was a fool to. I told him Old Dodd The Bastard had been dead since we were kids, so why go and cry over him now? Told Steve he was full of shit. Besides, I wanted to stay home that day. Get drunk myself. Like every day. That was my way to mourn back then. Or my way to avoid it. It’s funny, but I turned out just like him. I did. Just another old drunk. Just another Old Dodd The Bastard. Only my wife didn’t stand by me through it all like Mom did for him. Guess she was smarter than Mom.”
“What would you tell him, Dodd?”
The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories Page 41
