Before and Afterlives

  My brother Andy and his friends enjoyed a period of extreme popularity. After they went to where Jamie had been hidden, everyone thought they were crazy but somehow brave. Girls asked Andy to take them there, to be their protector, and he’d pick out the pretty ones who wore makeup and tight little skirts. “You should go, Adam,” Andy told me. “You could appreciate it.”

  “It’s too much of a spectacle,” I said, as if I were above all that.

  Andy narrowed his eyes. He spit at my feet. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that it wasn’t offensive at all, people were just curious, nothing sick or twisted. He asked if I was implying that his going to see the place was sick or twisted. “Cause if that’s what you’re implying, you are dead wrong.”

  “No,” I said, “that’s not what I’m implying. I’m not implying anything at all.”

  I didn’t stick around to listen to the story of his adventure. There were too many stories filling my head as it was. At any moment Andy would burst into a monologue of detail, one he’d been rehearsing since seeing the place where they’d hidden Jamie, so I turned to go to my room and—bam—walked right into a wall. I put my hand over my aching face and couldn’t stop blinking. Andy snorted and called me a freak. He pushed my shoulder and told me to watch where I’m going, or else one day I’d kill myself. I kept leaving, and Andy said, “Hey! Where are you going? I didn’t get to tell you what it was like.”

  Our town was big on ghost stories, and within weeks people started seeing Jamie Marks. He waited at the railroad crossing on Sodom-Hutchins road, pointing farther down the tracks, toward where he’d been hidden. He walked in tight circles outside of Gracie Highsmith’s house with his hands clasped behind his back and his head hanging low and serious. In these stories he was always a transparent figure. Things passed through him. Rain was one example; another was leaves falling off the trees, drifting through his body. Kids in school said, “I saw him!” the same eager way they did when they went out to Hatchet Man Road to see the ghost of that killer from the ’70s, who actually never used hatchets, but a hunting knife.

  Gracie Highsmith hadn’t returned to school yet, and everyone said she’d gone psycho, so no one could verify the story of Jamie’s ghost standing outside her house. The stories grew anyway, without her approval, which just seemed wrong. I thought if Jamie’s ghost was walking outside Gracie’s house, then no one should tell that story but Gracie. It was hers, and anyone else who told it was a thief.

  One day I finally went to the cemetery to visit him. I’d wanted to go to the funeral, just to stand in the back where no one would notice, but the newspaper said it was family only. If Iwas angry about anything at all, it was this. I mean, how could they just shut everyone out? The whole town had helped in the search parties, had taken over food to Jamie’s family during the time when he was missing. And then no one but family was allowed to be at the funeral? It just felt a little selfish.

  I hardly ever went to the cemetery. Only once or twice before, and that was when my Grandma died, and my dad and Andy and I had to be pall bearers. We went once after my mom came home in her wheelchair. She said she needed to talk to my grandma, so we drove her there on a surprisingly warm autumn day, when the leaves were still swinging on their branches. She sat in front of the headstone, and we backed off to give her some private time. She cried and sniffed, you could hear that. The sunlight reflected on the chrome of her wheelchair. When she was done we loaded her back into the van, and she said, “All right, who wants to rent some videos?”

  Now the cemetery looked desolate, as if ready to be filmed for some Halloween movie. Headstones leaned toward one another. Moss grew green over the walls of family mausoleums. I walked along the driveway, gravel crunching beneath my shoes, and looked from side to side at the stone angels and pillars and plain flat slabs decorating the dead, marking out their spaces. I knew a lot of names, or had heard of them, whether they’d been relatives or friends, or friends of relatives, or ancestral family enemies. When you live in a town where you can fit everyone into four churches—two Catholic, two Methodist—you know everyone. Even the dead.

  I searched the headstones until I found where Jamie Marks was buried. His grave was still freshly turned earth. No grass had had time to grow there. But people had left little trinkets, tokens or reminders, on the grave, pieces of themselves. A hand print. A piece of rose-colored glass. Two cigarettes standing up like fence posts. A baby rattle. Someone had scrawled a name across the bottom edge of the grave: Gracie Highsmith. A moment later I heard footsteps, and there she was in the flesh, coming toward me.

  I was perturbed, but not angry. Besides his family, I thought I’d be the only one to come visit. But here she was, this girl, who’d drawn her name in the dirt with her finger. Her letters looked soft; they curled into each other gently, with little flourishes for decoration. Did she think it mattered if she spelled her name pretty?

  I planted my hands on my hips as she approached and said, “Hey, what are you doing here?”

  Gracie blinked as if she’d never seen me before in her life. I could tell she wanted to say, “Excuse me? Who are you?” But what she did say was, “Visiting. I’m visiting. What areyou doing here?”

  The wind picked up and blew hair across her face. She tucked it back behind her ears real neatly. I dropped my hands from my hips and nudged the ground with my shoe, not knowing how to answer. Gracie turned back to Jamie’s tombstone.

  “Visiting,” I said finally, crossing my arms over my chest, annoyed I couldn’t come up with anything but the same answer she’d given.

  Gracie nodded without looking at me. She kept her eyes trained on Jamie’s grave, and I started to think maybe she was going to steal it. The headstone, that is. I mean, the girl collected rocks. A headstone would complete any collection. I wondered if I should call the police, tell them, Get yourselves to the cemetery, you’ve got a burglary in progress. I imagined them taking Gracie out in handcuffs, making her duck her head as they tucked her into the back seat of the patrol car. I pinched myself to stop daydreaming, and when I woke back up, I found Gracie sobbing over the grave.

  I didn’t know how long she’d been crying, but she was going full force. I mean, this girl didn’t care if anyone was around to hear her. She bawled and screamed. I didn’t know what to do, but I thought maybe I should say something to calm her. I finally shouted, “Hey! Don’t do that!”

  But Gracie kept crying. She beat her fist in the dirt near her name.

  “Hey!” I repeated. “Didn’t you hear me? I said, Don’t do that!”

  But she still didn’t listen.

  So I started to dance. It was the first idea that came to me.

  I kicked my heels in the air and did a two-step. I hummed a tune to keep time. I clasped my hands together behind my back and did a jig, or an imitation of one, and when still none of my clowning distracted her, I started to sing the Hokey Pokey.

  I belted it out and kept on dancing. I sung each line like it was poetry. “You put your left foot in/You take your left foot out/You put your left foot in/And you shake it all about/You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around/That’s what it’s all about! Yeehaw!”

  As I sang and danced, I moved toward a freshly dug grave just a few plots down from Jamie’s. The headstone was already up, but there hadn’t been a funeral yet. The grave was waiting for Lola Peterson to fill it, but instead, as I shouted out the next verse, I stumbled in.

  I fell in the grave singing, “You put your whole self in—” and about choked on my own tongue when I landed. Even though it was still light out, it was dark in the grave, and muddy. My shoes sunk, and when I tried to pull them out, they made sucking noises. The air smelled stiff and leafy. I started to worry that I’d be stuck in Lola Peterson’s grave all night, because the walls around me were muddy too; I couldn’t get my footing. Finally, though, Gracie’s head appeared over the lip of the grave.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Her
hair fell down toward me like coils of rope.

  Gracie helped me out by getting a ladder from the cemetery tool shed. She told me I was a fool, but she laughed when she said it. Her eyes were red from crying, and her cheeks looked wind-chapped. I thanked her for helping me out.

  I got her talking after that. She talked a little about Jamie and how she found him, but she didn’t say too much. Really, she only seemed to want to talk about rocks. “So you really do collect rocks?” I asked, and Gracie bobbed her head.

  “You should see them,” she told me. “Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow? My parents will be at marriage counseling. Come around five.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”

  Gracie dipped her head and looked up at me through brown bangs. She turned to go, then stopped a moment later and waved. I waved back.

  I waited for her to leave before me. I waited until I heard the squeal and clang of the wrought-iron front gates. Then I knelt down beside Jamie’s grave and wiped Gracie’s name out of the dirt. I wrote my name in place of it, etching into the dirt deeply.

  My letters were straight and fierce.

  I went home to find I’d missed dinner. My father was already in the living room, watching TV, the Weather Channel. He could watch the weather report for hours listening to the muzak play over and over. He watched it every night for a couple of hours before Andy and I would start groaning for a channel switch. He’d change the channel but never acknowledge us. Usually he never had much to say anyway.

  When I got home, though, he wanted to talk. It took him only a few minutes after I sat down with a plate of meatloaf before he changed the channel, and I about choked. There was a news brief on about the search for Jamie’s murderers. I wondered why the anchorman called them “Jamie’s murderers”, the same way you might say, “Jamie’s dogs” or “Jamie’s Boy Scout honors”. My dad stretched out on his reclining chair and started muttering about what he’d do with the killers if it had been his boy. His face was red and splotchy.

  I stopped eating, set my fork down on my plate.

  “What would you do?” I asked. “What would you do if it had been me?”

  My dad looked at me and said, “I’d tie a rope around those bastard’s armpits and lower them inch by inch into a vat of piranhas, slowly, to let the little suckers have at their flesh.”

  He looked back at the TV.

  “But what if the police got them first?” I said. “What would you do then?”

  Dad looked at me again and said, “I’d smuggle a gun into the courtroom, and when they had those bastards up there on the stand, I’d jump out of my seat and shoot their God-damned heads off.” He jumped out of his recliner and made his hands into a gun shape, pointing it at me. He pulled the fake trigger once, twice, a third time. Bam! Bam! Bam!

  I nodded with approval. I felt really loved, like I was my dad’s favorite. I ate up all this great attention and kept asking, “What if?” again and again, making up different situations. He was so cool, the best dad in the world. I wanted to buy him a hat: Best Dad in the World! printed on it. We were really close, I felt, for the first time in a long time.

  Gracie Highsmith’s house was nestled in a bend of the railroad tracks where she found Jamie. She’d been out walking the tracks looking for odd pieces of coal and nickel when she found him. All of this she told me in her bedroom, on the second floor of her house. She held out a fist-sized rock that was brown with black speckles embedded in it. The brown parts felt like sandpaper, but the black specks were smooth as glass. Gracie said she’d found it in the streambed at the bottom of Marrow’s Ravine. I said, “It’s something special all right,” and she beamed like someone’s mother.

  “That’s nothing,” she said. “Wait till you see the rest.”

  She showed me a chunk of clear quartz and a piece of hardened blue clay; a broken-open geode filled with pyramids of pink crystal; a seashell that she found, mysteriously, in the woods behind her house, nowhere near water; and a flat rock with a skeletal fish fossil imprinted on it. I was excited to see them all. I hadn’t realized how beautiful rocks could be. It made me want to collect rocks too, but it was already Gracie’s territory. I’d have to find something of my own.

  We sat on her bed and listened to music by some group from Cleveland that I’d never heard of, but who Gracie loved because she set the CD player to replay the same song over and over. It sounded real punk. They sang about growing up angry and how they would take over the world and make people pay for being stupid idiots. Gracie nodded and gritted her teeth as she listened.

  I liked being alone in the house with her, listening to music and looking at rocks. I felt eccentric and mature. I told Gracie this, and she knew what I meant. “They all think we’re children,” she said. “They don’t know a God-damned thing, do they?”

  We talked about growing old for a while, imagining ourselves in college, then in mid-life careers, then we were so old we couldn’t walk without a walker. Pretty soon we were so old we both clutched our chests like we were having heart attacks, fell back on the bed, and choked on our own laughter.

  “What sort of funeral will you have?” she wondered.

  “I don’t know, what about you? Aren’t they all the same?”

  “Funerals are all different,” she said. “For instance, Mexican cemeteries have all these bright, beautifully colored decorations for their dead; they’re not all serious like ours.” I asked her where she had learned that. She said, “Social Studies. Last year.”

  “Social Studies?” I asked. “Last year?” I repeated. “I don’t remember reading about funerals or cemeteries last year in Social Studies.” Last year I hadn’t cared about funerals. I was fourteen and watched TV and played video games a lot. What else had I missed while lost in the fog of sitcoms and fantasy adventures?

  I bet Mexicans never would have had a private funeral. Too bad Jamie wasn’t Mexican.

  “I see graves all the time now,” Gracie told me. She lay flat on her back, head on her pillow, and stared at the ceiling. “They’re everywhere,” Gracie said. “Ever since—”

  She stopped and sighed, as if it was some huge confession she’d just told me. I worried that she might expect something in return, a confession of my own. I murmured a little noise I hoped sounded supportive.

  “They’re everywhere,” she repeated. “The town cemetery, the Wilkinson family plot, that old place out by the ravine, where Fuck-You Francis is supposed to be buried. And now the railroad tracks. I mean, where does it end?”

  I said, “Beds are like graves, too,” and she turned to me with this puzzled look. “No,” I said, “really.” And I told her about the time when my grandmother came to live with us, after my grandfather’s death. And how, one morning my mother sent me into her room to wake her for breakfast—I remember, because I smelled bacon frying when I woke up—and so I went into my grandma’s room and told her to wake up. She didn’t, so I repeated myself. But she still didn’t wake up. Finally I shook her shoulders, and her head lolled on her neck. I grabbed one of her hands, and it was cold to the touch.

  “Oh,” said Gracie. “I see what you mean.” She stared at me hard, her eyes glistening. Gracie rolled on top of me, pinning her knees on both sides of my hips. Her hair fell around my face, and the room grew dimmer as her hair brushed over my eyes, shutting out the light.

  She kissed me on my lips, and she kissed me on my neck. She started rocking against my penis, so I rocked back. The coils in her bed creaked. “You’re so cold, Adam,” Gracie whispered, over and over. “You’re so cold, you’re so cold.” She smelled like clay and dust. As she rocked on me, she looked up at the ceiling and bared the hollow of her throat. After a while, she let out several little gasps, then collapsed on my chest. I kept rubbing against her, but stopped when I realized she wasn’t going to get back into it.

  Gracie slid off me. She knelt in front of her window, looking out at something.

  “Are you angry?” I aske
d.

  “No, Adam. I’m not angry. Why would I be angry?”

  “Just asking,” I said. “What are you doing now?” I said.

  “He’s down there again,” she whispered. I heard the tears in her voice already and went to her. I didn’t look out the window. I wrapped my arms around her, my hands meeting under her breasts, and hugged her. I didn’t look out the window.

  “Why won’t he go away?” she said. “I found him, yeah. So fucking what. He doesn’t need to fucking follow me around forever.”

  “Tell him to leave,” I told her.

  She didn’t respond.

  “Tell him you don’t want to see him anymore,” I told her.

  She moved my hands off her and turned her face to mine. She leaned in and kissed me, her tongue searching out mine. When she pulled back, she said, “I can’t. I hate him, but I love him, too. He seems to, I don’t know, understand me, maybe. We’re on the same wavelength, you know? As much as he annoys me, I love him. He should have been loved, you know. He never got that. Not how everyone deserves.”

  “Just give him up,” I said.

  Gracie wrinkled her nose. She stood and paced to her doorway, opened it, said, “I think you should go now. My parents will be home soon.”

  I craned my neck to glance out the window, but her voice cracked like a whip.