Debbie and the kids were staying with Far Danny’s mother in South Philly. Just for a little while. Until things calmed down. Until things got straightened out.
Scotty was gone. After that night at the bar, after what Francisco told them about Lou’s grave, he’d driven to a motel of town, then came back the next morning and put his house up for sale. Mike and the other guys were still here, though. But the nights at the Scarecrow were long and mostly silent. No one wanted to talk about what was going on in town.
The Dannys went back to Philadelphia for a few hours then came back with suitcases. They moved into Francisco’s house. Near Danny slept on the couch. Far Danny slept in the La-Z-Boy. They’d brought more guns and other stuff.
The bodies of Lou Tremons and the others were back in the ground. Francisco had done that quietly, when no one was looking. The cemetery was a big place and these days not even the college kids went there to hang out.
Only Kaitlin’s body was above ground. It was in the morgue. It had been ‘found’ by a motorist on the highway. No one could explain how she managed to get a big piece of sharpened wood buried in her chest. Some kind of post-mortem mutilation by the madman who dug her up. That’s what the papers said.
Sheriff Crow came and asked Francisco some questions, but not as many as he expected. And the sheriff had a strange, knowing look in his eyes. He gave Francisco a smile and a pat on the shoulder and that was the end of it.
Of that part of it.
Now it was ten days after the Dannys had come to Francisco’s house.
Ten days after a slaughter that would probably keep his kids in therapy for the rest of their lives. Something to deal with. Something else to deal with.
The three of them sat on beach chairs. There was an open plastic cooler between Francisco and Far Danny.
“Beer me,” said Far Danny, and Francisco dug into the ice, pulled out a longneck bottle of Stella, popped the top and handed it to his cousin. He opened a fresh one for himself.
They drank.
Sitting in a row. Three thirty-something guys. Cousins. Drinking beer in a graveyard as the sun tumbled over the autumn trees and down behind the mountain.
The grave in front of them was a new one.
A construction worker named Hollis who’d died when scaffolding collapsed on him. Or so the story went. Lots of injuries, not enough blood at the scene.
“Smart the way they do that,” said Near Danny.
“Fucking up the body so you can’t tell,” agreed Far Danny.
Francisco sipped his beer.
They watched the bare patch of dirt that Francisco has filled in and patted down three hours ago.
They’d brought a wheelbarrow with them. The handles of two shotguns stuck out the back, flanking the plastic grip of the Black and Decker chainsaw. There were other things in the wheelbarrow, too. Practical things. Holy water from St. Anne’s. The priest there was a fourth cousin. A Donatella. Bottles of garlic oil and Ziploc bags of garlic powder. From Aldo’s Pizza on Two Street. Stuff like that.
There wasn’t a lot of conversation.
Francisco had said his thanks. He’d wept his thanks, clinging to Debbie and the kids while looking up at the blood-splattered Dannys. It had all been said. And it was all understood. This was family.
You do not fuck with family.
Not even if you’re an undead blood-sucking soulless fiend. No sir.
To have kept thanking the cousins would have been weak. And even though he was not a strong man, Francisco knew that.
The sun fell away and the purple shadows flowed over the cemetery.
Near Danny lit a Coleman camp lantern.
They had another beer.
Far Danny lit a joint and they passed it back and forth.
The dirt trembled.
The joint paused in mid-handoff, Far Danny to Francisco.
The dirt shivered and danced as something beneath it moved.
Near Danny sighed, bent forward, grabbed the handle of the chainsaw and sat back with it. Watching the dirt.
Francisco took the doobie and had a nice, long hit. Blew blue smoke out over the grave.
The dirt bulged as something pushed upward. Rising. Coming out.
Near Danny handed the chainsaw to Francisco.
“Yo, Frankie Spoons,” he said. “You’re up.”
Francisco took the chainsaw.
But it was Frankie Spoons who stood up with it, jerked the ripcord, and stood wide-legged, waiting for the dead to rise.
Author’s Note on “Cooked”
This is a standalone horror story that isn’t part of any other world and not attached to my other novels. Just a weird, strange, sad little tale about justice, love, friendship, revenge, and voodoo.
Cooked
-1-
Billy Sparrow was high.
Almost high.
The ‘almost’ part was a bitch. It was a heartbreak.
He needed to get high enough to fly away, like Cooter promised they could do.
But he wasn’t high enough for that.
For Billy the high used to start before he even clicked his lighter to smoke the ice. Meth was always like that, you even think about it you get a tingle in the balls and a flutter behind the eyes. High before you’re high, that’s what Cooter used to say.
Cooter used say a lot of stuff.
Cooter was pretty funny. He had Billy laughing the first time they smoked meth. Called it methandfriendofmine. That was funny.
He and Cooter would smoke so much they’d get pipe-drunk and then everything was funny. Peeling wallpaper was funny. A cockroach swimming in his cereal bowl was funny. Even watching Carla, that scratchity-ann crank hoe, pick at her blisters was funny.
That was a long time ago.
The anticipation wasn’t the same.
The high wasn’t the high anymore.
Now, when Billy popped a lighter under the quartz all he felt was bad stuff. His stomach was full of bees and there were thorns in his head. Even when he sucked in that first lungful and the world fell off its hinges. That used to be epic. That used to be the fucking it.
Now it was like opening a door into a haunted house.
Cooter was in that haunted house, too.
Sitting there, grinning at him with crooked teeth surrounded by charred skin, staring with eyeballs that had been boiled white in the fire.
If Billy smoked too long he could see Cooter die all over again. It was like a big DVR playing the scene over and over again in his head. Surround-sound and everything. No amount of smoke could bury that, and the deeper into the high Billy went to hide from it, the clearer the picture got.
-2-
They’d come in a couple of Escalades. Farelli and his posse of six wiseguy wannabes from Newark, rolling up to Cooter’s little place on DeFrane Street. White boys dressed like they thought the Sopranos was on the Fashion Channel. Pointy shoes and tight pants and shirts open to show Neanderthal hair on their chests. Acting tough, hoping to be noticed by guys who are tough. Talking trash.
Carrying baseball bats and gas in red plastic cans.
Billy was in the attic, huddled over the last fumes in a pipe. He heard the shouts, but at first that didn’t mean shit to him. You get high, you hear stuff. Some highs are good, some highs blow. People steal shit from each other. There are fights. It’s no big deal.
But then the shouts turned to screams.
Screams weren’t part of it. Meth doesn’t take you down that avenue. Billy staggered to his feet and looked down the attic stairs. There were no doors anywhere. Billy remembered he and Cooter taking them off, but he couldn’t remember what that had been about.
The screams were loud enough to poke holes in the envelope of his high.
He crept down to the second floor and leaned over the bannister.
There they were.
The dickheads from Seventh Avenue. Farelli’s thugs were like a pack of dogs. Billy lost count of the number of times they beat him up. Rubbed
his face in dogshit. Kicked him in the balls. Always laughing about it. Always grabbing their own nuts and yelling ‘Eat me!’ every time they saw Cooter. Always calling Cooter faggot or nigger or other shit.
Worse than a pack of dogs, Billy thought. Dogs won’t fuck with you for no reason.Billy Sparrow didn’t hate very many things, but he hated Farelli and his crew.
Farelli lived in the house with all those statues of the Virgin Mary on their lawn. The virgin and a bunch of dumb-ass plastic pink flamingos.
Billy had a vague memory of him and Cooter stealing some of them the other night. Or was it last night? What the fuck did they do with them?
They stole all sorts of shit. Flamingos, those goofy little lawn gnomes, a statue of a black guy dressed like a jockey. That one really pissed Cooter off. Billy didn’t know why. Sure, Cooter was black but he wasn’t a jockey. But it pissed Cooter off, and when Cooter gets pissed he gets funny.
Billy remembered what they’d done with the stuff they stole. The gnomes and flamingos were all on the front lawn here, with the Virgin Mary and the lawn jockey snuggled down in the crab grass together. Cooter couldn’t take their clothes off—they were statues, after all—but the way he laid them down said it all. With the gnomes and pink birds watching. It was fucking hilarious.
Afterward, when they were about to get high, Cooter said that he’d have to move that shit before his uncle saw it. Uncle Conch Boukman was a hard-headed, short-tempered old man who moved to New Jersey after his village in Haiti was destroyed in that earthquake. Cooter was his only relative, but to Billy they were so different that it was hard to tell that there was any connection.
But Uncle Conch brought a little money with him, and he paid the mortgage off on Cooter’s pad.
The screams from downstairs punched Billy in the head and it shook him out of the memories of last night.
Farelli and his goon squad were all there. So were a whole mess of Cooter’s friends. Couple of kids Billy knew, too. Maybe ten people, hanging out, getting high. One guy—the uptown kid who brought some quality ice with him—with the shorts down around his knees so Carla could give him a courtesy BJ. But Carla wasn’t blowing him. Or anybody. Billy looked at her and saw her face burst apart as a baseball bat hit her.
She screamed and then the bat hit her and she couldn’t scream anymore. Carla fell back and she fell weird, like she had no bones in her neck.
That’s when it all went crazy.
That’s when Farelli’s thugs went apeshit. Bats and chains.
Farelli stood in the center of the living room and even from upstairs Billy could see that there was a bulge in Farelli’s pants. He was rock-hard watching this shit. Billy knew about that. His old man had been like that sometimes. Getting serious wood because using a belt on Billy and his sisters felt that good. Made him feel that jazzed.
That’s when Billy heard Cooter come crashing into the room, swinging a mop handle and catching Farelli’s cousin, Tony, right across the forehead.
There was a moment when Billy thought it would all be over right there and then. Everyone and everything froze solid. Even the screaming stopped for just a second.
Billy wanted to scream a warning. He wanted to shout at Cooter and everyone else. Tell them to run, tell them to get the fuck out.
While there was still a chance.
-3-
But there was no chance.
Cooter knew it when he came charging out of the kitchen with the mop.
Farelli and his goons knew it before they loaded into their Escalades. They knew it when they stopped at the Lukoil to fill up their red gas cans.
Even the zoned-out stoners knew it. Carla probably knew it, too, right up until the bat knocked her head loose on her neck.
Billy knew it. Billy knew that all of them—greaser or meth-head—were born into this. Into this moment, like they were all bowling balls thrown down polished wood alleys but all the alleys were designed to converge into one spot. No pins. Just a bunch of bats and gas cans and a mop handle.
The moment became unstuck when Farelli laughed.
The right kind of laugh will do that.
Cooter looked at him and Farelli looked back.
Billy screamed then.
Nobody heard him, because everyone was screaming. The bats went up and down and around and around, and somebody kept painting all of the drowsy, doped-up, screaming faces with red.
Cooter tried to run.
They splashed him with gas.
Farelli flicked a cigarette at him.
Cooter made it all the way to the second floor. Billy tried to help him. Swatting at the flames that were wreathed around Cooter’s face. Billy shoved him into the bathroom, knocked him down with burned hands into the tub. Turned on the water.
But by then there were flames coming up through the floor.
The water filled the tub, but fire reached up with long yellow fingers between the floor boards and drove Billy back. From the bathroom doorway he watched the inferno heat boil the water in the tub. Where Cooter was.
When Billy dove through the second floor window, he saw three things.
The Escalades driving away, laughter tumbling out of the open windows.
The faces of pink flamingos and lawn gnomes and the mother of Jesus staring up at him with plastic eyes.
And then the hedges reaching up at him with a thousand green fingers.
-4-
Billy got out of the hospital the day they buried Cooter.
He was the only one at the graveside. Billy and the priest, who didn’t even look at him. And a brass urn full of ashes.
Billy’s hands were burned. He had bandages around his face and under his clothes. Billy felt the fire still burning in his skin and the screams still burning in his head. They would have kept him in the hospital but despite everything they say about providing medical coverage if you don’t have money, they will kick a meth head out after a couple of days. He didn’t have any money, so he walked home. Back to Cooter’s.
The house was a blackened shell. The fire department had been able to save the front steps. The rest was cinder.
Billy sat down on the top step, rested his elbows on his knees, hung his head, and cried until there was no moisture left in his body. The urn sat next to him. No one had claimed it, so they’d given it to him, and he carried it all the way back.
He stayed there all day, talking to Cooter in his head.
Cooter didn’t say shit, though.
Two days later Billy bought some rock. Smoked it. Saw Cooter. They slopped on the couch and played video games. They talked about living and dying. They hung out.
When the rock was gone and the high broke apart into little pieces of reality, Cooter went back to sleeping in his urn. Billy went back to the burned-out house, sat down on the step next to the ashes. And cried.
That was life.
That was every day.
On the sixth day after the funeral, on the long downslope of a high, Billy sat on the step with his head in his hands. He heard a car pull up and stop, but he didn’t look up.
“You that white boy,” said a voice.
Billy looked up slowly. Moving fast hurt. It broke blisters. So, Billy moved like he was old. Uncle Conch stood on the soot-covered little bit of pavement that ran between the two halves of the front lawn. He wore a black suit and a shirt the color of snow. His hat hid most of his face so that only his chin and mouth were in the light. He had dark lips and cigarette-yellow teeth.
“You that white boy,” he repeated, his thick Haitian accent making everything sound like a song. “You was friends with Cooter.”
“I guess,” said Billy. He realized that his nose was running and he sniffed. Tasted some tears, so he wiped his eyes.
Uncle Conch looked down at the urn. “That my Cooter?”
Billy nodded. “You weren’t at the funeral, so they said I could have his ashes.”
“Yeah,” said the old man, “I’m too close to the grave my ownself for me to
want to visit a boneyard.”
That made sense to Billy, and he nodded.
After a while, Uncle Conch said, “You and Cooter always doing the drug.”
He never said ‘doing drugs’ or ‘smoking meth.’ Doing the drug.
“I guess.”
Uncle Conch stepped a little closer. He had bad legs and leaned heavily on a cane that was carved with snakes and skulls.
“Why you do the drug?”
“What?”
“The drug. Why you and my Cooter always do the drug? Where it take you?”
Billy thought about that. “Away, I s’pose.”
“You suppose? You don’t know?”
“Away.”
Billy stared down at the lawn. The heat had withered the grass to brown strings, and the fire hoses had turned that to clingy seaweed. The tendrils were wrapped around the legs of half-melted flamingos and the throats of charred gnomes.
Another shuffling step closer. “Tell me,” he said.
Billy squinted up. “Why do you want to know about that stuff?”
Uncle Conch lowered himself down to the step. It took a long, painful time for the old man to do it. Billy tried to help, but he was too badly burned. When he was down, Uncle Conch took a minute to catch his breath and he produced a spotless white handkerchief and mopped his brow. Billy was pretty sure he’d never seen anyone use a handkerchief before, not outside of a movie.
“Tell me, boy,” wheezed Uncle Conch, “why you and my Cooter always want to go away? What you want to get away from?”
Billy looked past him to the street, but what he was seeing was the open mouth of the grave before they lowered the box. The mound of dirt was a brown heap that they didn’t bother to cover with one of those green AstroTurf mats. Nobody gave enough of a shit even for that.
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me, boy. I got to know.”
Billy looked at him. “Why? What does it matter now?”
“It matters to me. Cooter may not be a saint, but he all the family I had left. Tell me what he wanted to do. Let me carry that for what time I got left. Give me that much so I don’t bury his dream, too.”