Crow stood staring at the bottles for a long time. Maybe half an hour.
“No,” he told himself.
No, agreed his inner voice.
No, screamed the drunken man in his memory.
No.
Crow reached up and took down the vodka bottle. He poured some into a Dixie cup.
“No,” he said.
And drank it.
Author’s Note on “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard”
This is the last of the four Pine Deep short stories in this collection, and the one that lends this book its name. It’s also a personal favorite because it introduces a pair of supporting characters—Near Danny and Far Danny—who have been lurking around in my head for quite a while waiting to come onstage. They will be returning in other stories (not yet written).
Like the first two Pine Deep stories, this one takes place after the events of the Trilogy.
Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard
This story takes place several years after the events described in the Pine Deep Trilogy, of which Ghost Road Blues is the first volume. You do not need to have read those books in order to read—and hopefully enjoy—this little tale set in rural Pennsylvania.
-1-
He had six different names.
It was Francisco Sponelli on his birth certificate, but even his parents never called him that. They called him Little Frankie most of his life. A kid's name that, once hung on him, made sure he'd never quite grow up. His father wasn't even Big Frankie. Dad was Vinnie. Big Frankie was an uncle back in Sicily but who wasn't called Big Frankie in Sicily; just when people talked about him. Big Frankie never set a goddamn foot on American soil.
In school—from about four minutes after he stepped onto the kindergarten playground—he was Spoons. It was better than Little Frankie in about the same way that a kick in the balls was better than catching the clap. Not a holiday either way.
In the old neighborhood in South Philly—he was Frankie Spoons for all of the six months he lived there. And that's a cool name. Made him sound like a Made Man, which he would never and could never be, but it sounded great when he walked into the taproom and someone called out, "Hey, Frankie Spoons, come on and have a beer with the grown-ups."
Actually, no one ever said exactly that, but it was in his head. It's what he heard every time he walked into the bar. Especially when he saw one of the Donatellas there, who were third or fourth cousins. It was the kind of thing they said to each other because they were made men. The Donatella cousins worked a protection racket their family had owned since the sixties. They all had great nicknames and they all said cool things to each other. Francisco just liked hanging out at that bar because it made him feel like a man, like a tough guy.
Then he knocked up a girl from the burbs and next thing he was living in a crappy little town called Pine Deep in the inbred Deliverance backwoods of Bucks County. Near her folks and family, way too far from Philly, and although it was right over the bridge from New Jersey it wasn't over the right bridge. Cross over the Delaware up there and you're in fucking Stockton or Lambertville or some other artsy-fartsy damn place where they put boursin cheese on a son of a bitching cheese-steak, which is like putting nipple rings on the Virgin Mary.
Out there in Pine Deep he was Spoonsie to the guys at the Scarecrow Tavern. Another stupid name that clung to him like cow shit on good shoes.
He longed to go back to Philly, but Debbie kept popping out kids like she had a t-shirt cannon in her hoo-hah. And any conversation involving 'sex' and 'condoms' became a long argument about a bunch of Bible shit that he was sure didn't really matter to God, Jesus, the Virgin, or anyone else. Four kids and counting. In this economy? On his pay? Seriously? God wants kids to grow up poor and stupid in a town like this?
As his Uncle Tony was so fond of saying, "Shee-eee-eee-ee-it."
But...
The nickname was only part of it. It was a splinter under the skin.
The kids? Well, fuck it. He did love them. Loved the process of making them, too, though he'd like to explore the option of stopping before he and Debbie turned their lives into one of those we-have-no-self-control-over-our-procreative-common-sense reality shows.
He suspected that she had some kind of mental damage. She seemed to enjoy being pregnant. Bloated ankles, hemorrhoids, mucus plugs, the whole deal. He was pretty sure that on some level Debbie was—to use the precise medical term—batshit crazy.
But she was also the most beautiful woman he'd ever talked to. Even now, four kids in and a bigger ass than she used to have, Debbie could look at him from out of the corners of her eyes and stop his heart.
Even now.
So...he stayed in Pine Deep.
And he worked in Pine Deep.
That was something by itself. A lot of people in town didn't have jobs. The town was still recovering from the Trouble, and the economy blew. Sure, a few of the stores had rebuilt and there was some out of town money to rebuild the infrastructure. Federal bucks. And after the town burned down, there was that big rock concert fundraiser bullshit. Willie Nelson, the Eagles, Coldplay, bunch of others including some rappers Francisco never even heard of. It was on TV with that stupid nickname: ANTI-terror. With terror crossed out. All those middle-aged rock stars, none of whom had ever even heard of Pine Deep before those militiamen torched everything, singing about unity and brotherhood. Blah, blah, blah. If any of the money they raised ever actually reached the town then it never made it into Francisco Sponelli's bank account.
All he got was an offer of free counseling for PTSD, which he didn't have, and a stack of literature about surviving domestic terrorism, which he didn't read, and a pissant break on his taxes for two years, which wasn't enough.
On the upside—which Francisco didn't think was really 'up' in any way—the Trouble had kind of passed him by. He and Debbie and the kid—only one back then—were down in Warrington watching a movie at the multiplex when it all went down. They heard it on the news driving back. The news guys said that a bunch of shit-for-brains white supremacists put drugs like LSD and other stuff into the town's drinking water and every single person went apeshit. What made it worse was that it was Halloween and the town was totally packed with tourists. All those thousands of people went out of their minds and started killing each other. Worst day of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. That much was a fact. Francisco took Debbie and the kid to her sister's in Doylestown for a week. By the time they came back Pine Deep looked like a war zone. Lot of people they knew were dead. Lot of the town was gone. Just freaking gone.
Lot of people out of work, too, because Pine Deep was built with tourist dollars.
One of the few businesses that didn't go under was the one he worked for. The one owned by Tom Gaines, Debbie's third cousin. Francisco's workload tripled, but he didn't get overtime. Gaines said he couldn't afford it because a lot of the customers couldn't afford to pay. Not right away. Some not at all.
But the job still had to be done.
And that was his life. Working for one of Debbie's family at shit for pay. Not exactly starvation wages, but it was a job with no future. Not really. Sure, he could have the job for as long as he wanted, but there was nowhere to go. There was no promotion possible. The whole company was the owner, Mr. Gaines, and him. And a couple of guys they hired by the hour to help with some heavy stuff. All of the rest of it was Francisco's to do.
Trimming all the hedges.
Pruning the trees.
Mowing the grass.
Digging the graves.
And...the other stuff.
The stuff he did at night.
So the graves wouldn't be messed with.
Mr. Gaines sometimes slipped him a couple extra bucks when things got bad. And he let Francisco drink as much as he wanted on the job.
He encouraged Francisco.
It was that kind of a job.
-2-
Before the Trouble the job wasn't really that bad. Dead people don't complain, the
y don't give you shit. They don't dime you out when you go into one of the crypts to smoke a joint. He could get to a level, get mellow, and that would carry him through even the longest shift.
The job was quiet except for occasionally chasing teenagers out of the crypts who’d gone there to drink or light up. Once in a while some prick vandal would use spray paint to tag a mausoleum or knock over a few headstones. But that happened in every cemetery, and everyone knew that, so Francisco adjusted to it as part of the job. The job was okay.
Even for a while after the Trouble it was tolerable. He worked mostly days, and Gaines didn't go out of his way to be a prick. The boss was cheap, but not a cheap fuck. The difference mattered.
Then things started changing.
It started with people talking. The Scarecrow was one of the few bars that wasn't burned down, and it was a good place for a plate of wings and a schooner of Yuengling at the end of a day. But the flavor of the conversation there changed as the weeks and months went on. It really started after the cops and fire inspectors sorted out the last of the bones. It had taken a lot of sweat and elbow grease to put together a list of all the dead. The official tally was eleven thousand six-hundred and forty-one. Two thirds of the whole town. Only the thing was that there weren't that many bodies. The count was short. Eighty-four short, and that's a lot of bodies to misplace.
They brought in teams of dogs to search the woods and the fields and under frigging haystacks. Still eighty-four missing.
The count stayed the same.
That’s when the vandals started hitting the cemetery. Knocked-over headstones, grave dirt churned up, his tool shed broken into, beer bottles everywhere. Couple of times he discovered that someone had pissed on a grave he’d just filled in. He mentioned all this to his cousins over a poker game. Near Danny was nodding before he finished describing the disturbances.
“Sure, sure, that makes sense,” said Near Danny.
“It does?” asked Francisco, confused.
“Yeah,” agreed Far Danny. “People are blowin’ off steam. With all that shit happening—”
“All those people dying,” added Near Danny.
“All that death and shit…”
“…they’re like obsessed with that death shit.”
“Morbid.”
“Morbid.”
Francisco looked back and forth between them. “Okay, but why trash the cemetery?”
Near Danny and Far Danny said it at the same time. “Power.”
Francisco said, “Huh?”
“Death came to that little fucking town and made everybody its bitch,” said Far Danny.
Near Danny nodded. “And that boneyard—hell, that…what word am I looking for?”
“’Symbolizes,’” supplied Far Danny.
“Yeah, that boneyard symbolizes death. So…of course someone who lost everything’s going to go take a piss on it.”
“Show death that he’s alive, that he’s nobody’s bitch.”
The two Dannys nodded.
“Wow,” said Francisco.
Then Far Danny leaned across the card table and stabbed a finger at him. “But if any of these mamluke bastards fucks with you, then that’s different.”
“It is?”
Near Danny grunted and gave him a hard sneer. “You’re family.”
“Nobody fucks with the family,” said Far Danny. “No fucking body, you hear me, Frankie Spoons?”
“Any shit comes down you can’t handle, you pick up the phone.”
They sat there grinning at him like extras from a bad gangster film. Chest hair and gold chains, big gold rings, perpetual five o’clock shadow on lantern jaws. But they were the real deal. South Philly muscle who were tough on a level that Francisco could understand only from a distance. It was the kind of feeling you get looking at the big cats in the zoo.
Then the conversation turned to sports, as it always does. Could the Eagles do anything about their passing game, ‘cause right now it was like watching the Special Olympics.
More weeks passed and that's when people in town started talking.
Whispering, really. Real quiet, nothing out loud. Nothing in front of anyone. The whispers started over beers. At first it was late at night, before closing, guys talking the way guys do. Talking shit. Throwing theories out there because that was the time of night for that kind of thing.
Even then people talked around it. They didn't so much say it as ask questions. Putting it out there.
Like Scotty Sharp who asked, "Do you think they really put drugs in the water?"
People said sure, of course they did. The Fed tested the water, they did blood tests on the people.
That's when Mike DeMarco said, "Yeah, well my sister Gertie's oldest daughter goes out with that kid, you know the one. He's an EMT up to Crestville. And he said that only about one in four people tested positive for drugs."
Then some guy would say that was bullshit and there'd be an argument. It would quiet things down. Until the next time it came back up.
Lucky Harris—and Francisco thought Lucky was a kickass nickname—asked, "Did you guys see that thing on the History Channel?"
They all did. A special about Pine Deep. Two thirds of it was the same bullshit you could get out of any tourist brochure, but then there was section near the end when they interviewed a few survivors—and Francisco wondered if they deliberately picked the ones who looked like they were either half in the bag or half out of their minds. These 'witnesses' insisted that the Trouble wasn't what the news was saying it was, that the white supremacist thing was a cover up for what was really happening. And this is where the host of the show changed his voice to sound mysterious right as he asked what the real truth was about the Pine Deep Massacre.
"It was monsters," said the witness. An old duffer with white around his eyes.
"What kind of monsters?" asked the host.
"All kinds. Vampires and werewolves and demons and such. That’s always been the problem with Pine Deep…we got monsters and that night? Yeah, the monsters came to get us."
The host then condensed the eyewitness reports into a speculation that the white supremacists were really servants of a vampire king—like Renfield was to Dracula—and that the drugs in the water and all of the explosions were distractions, subterfuge.
Then there was a montage of jump shots that lasted only long enough for a dozen other witnesses to say the word 'vampire.' The segment ended with the kind of dumbass tell-nothing questions those shows always have, accompanied by stock footage of old Dracula flicks and shots of Pine Deep taken with cameras tilted to weird angles. "Was Pine Deep the site of an attack by vampires? Do the dead really walk the earth? Have creatures out of legend begun a war against the world of the living? And what about the missing eighty-four? Authorities continue to search for their bodies, but there are some who believe that these people aren't missing at all and are instead hiding...and perhaps hunting during the long nights in this troubled little town. Government sources deny these claims. Local law enforcement refuse to comment. But there are some...who believe."
The guys at the Scarecrow had all seen that special. Just as they had all seen the headlines of the National Enquirer which had supposed photos of vampires on the front page at least once a month.
Everybody knew about the stories. The conspiracy theories. As soon as the main shock of the tragedy died down, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert went ass-wild on the subject. They did bits about small town vampires. Conan started a running segment with a vampire dressed in farmer's coveralls; at the end of each segment the vampire would get killed in some funny way. He'd go out to harvest, forgetting he'd planted his fields with garlic. He'd trip over a chicken and fall on a convenient sharp piece of wood. The vanes of a windmill would cast a shadow of a cross on him. Shit like that. Making a joke out of it because it was stupid.
Vampires.
It was all bullshit.
Except that as the first year crumbled into the dirt and the next
year grew up dark and strange, it got harder and harder to call it bullshit.
Especially after people started dying.
There was a rash of car accidents in town. Accidents weren't all that rare with all the twists and turns on A32, but before the Trouble it was mostly tourists who wrapped their SUVs or Toyotas around an oak tree they didn't see, or college kids driving too drunk and too fast with too much faith in underdeveloped decision-making capabilities.
But there was no tourism in Pine Deep right now. Maybe in another couple of years. Maybe if some outside group rebuilt the Haunted Hayride and the other attractions. Right now, State Alternate Route A32 was mostly empty except for farm workers coming and going to day jobs or farmer’s wives heading into town to work shifts at the hospital or at one of the craft shops.
So, it was locals who started dying.
Linda Carmichael went first. Her six-year-old Hyundai went off the road, rolled and hit a parked hay bailer that was sitting at the edge of a field. The papers said that she was so badly mangled that her husband had to confirm her I.D. by looking at a mole on what was left of her torso. Francisco didn't know if he believed that part, but when he drove past the accident spot on the way to work the next day, the car looked like a piece of aluminum foil somebody'd crinkled up.
It was a matter of discussion at the Scarecrow, but the Carmichael's weren't part of their circle, so the conversation moved on to sports.
The second accident was a bus full of Puerto Rican day workers. Nine dead because the bus skidded off the road and hit a panel truck. Both drivers were dead, too. There were no witnesses, but it must have been a hell of an impact to mangle everyone that badly.