Graverobbed

Author's Note: I think that there a few moments in which I accomplished what I wanted to using imagery for characterization and grasping the interiority of the narrator in the language.  Structure was something that I spent a lot of time on for this story.  I tried hard to utilize the suggestions that we discussed in class in regards to plot development and action, pace and narrative disclosure.  The problem is that none of that comes through, I think, because of the problems that I encountered with the language of the narration.  I feel that the prose is uneven and occasionally awkward to the point of distraction.  This can be seen at the figurative and even the grammatical level.  It was a real problem for me to attempt a consistency of vernacular and continuity of character throughout the length of the story, in regards to the method of description of setting and action, as well as some of the more “telling” asides.  I feel that I never found the voice of my character completely.  This, in a weird way, would fit with what I hope is the clear arc of the story, which is a man attempting to substantiate or edify some notion of self that ultimately is figured hollow rather than simply elusive.  I was intentional about only relating details that are relevant to character, but it is possible that even my mechanism of relevancy is faulty.  The tension between “telling” and “showing” continues to present difficulty, and I think that the ending is just lame.

Graverobbed

            My father contracted liver disease when I was twenty-four years old.  I caught a flight from St. Louis to Alabama because my mother told me that I should be there for his last days, even though I was sure that he would not want to talk.  Mostly I did it for my mother, spent those three weeks in the frozen still flatness of Ashford, Alabama.  After one week, life at the house had become a lot of sitting and waiting.  We would watch marathons of M*A*S*H and I would read on the porch and my mother would cry in two minute installments.  It rained in sharp, sideways sheets for five days, and I would take drives around the county roads to get out of the house.   

            The day that the sun appeared, I drove my father’s truck into downtown Ashford and parked in the diagonal spaces in front of the pharmacy.  I stepped up onto the high sidewalk and opened the pharmacy door.  It had these tin bells that rang loudly as I entered the narrow room.  The place was empty.  I sat in a red vinyl stool at the lunch counter and rang a bell like the ones they have at hotel desks.  Slick green and silver streaks turned and twisted on the countertop.  The opposite wall was a giant mirror, and I frowned at the mediocre face looking back at me.  Nothing noteworthy—a nose that was a little sharp, slightly thicker than average eyebrows—but all else was common.  I liked the way that the convex mirror distorted my neck and hairline a little.  The room was silent except for the faint singing of Joni Mitchell that hung in the air like loose blades of grass, before disappearing in the sunlight that crawled in through great panes of glass that faced the street.

            “What’ll you have?”

            A woman was suddenly in front of me with hands on her hips.  I stared at her coarse red hair and creased skin for a moment before answering.

            “A medium bubblegum slushie.”

            This had been my order as a child coming here after school on the hottest days.  Sometimes, we would go by the small public library and my mother and I would both check out a book.  I often thought about my old routines.  They were useful, like anchors.  The woman behind the counter wore thick, round eyeglasses that threatened to fall off her face.  I thought that maybe she hated to sew, and that she lived in some small place in the flat fields past Highway 55.  Maybe she had a big dog.  I thought that she might have no interest in politics.  I hoped that she was the one playing Joni Mitchell. 

            I walked across the street with my cup of pink ice.  It was early afternoon and the Broadway Café was almost empty.  This huge man in overalls looked like he was asleep.  He probably worked a twelve hour shift through the night, but wanted to take his son out to lunch.  Maybe they rarely saw each other.  The child sitting across the table stared at his phone.  I saw a waitress looking at me and realized that I was peering through the door, my hands flat against the glass.

            Embarrassed, I jogged away, past the masonic lodge and the police station to a giant wooden building painted dirty green.  The ancient train depot stretched its shadow toward me over a white gravel lot.  I turned my head east to west, tracing the perfectly flat railroad that ran off forever in both directions.  There were a few low clouds on the western horizon and I tried to see things in them.  I found textures—of hair, and ice cream, and feathers—but no shapes, so I turned my head on its side and felt a pinching pain but kept turning.  My head was almost upside down.  Maybe I could be the guy that twists his head around next to the railroad tracks.  Or work nights at the gas station and sell teenagers cigarettes.  The sun emerged with white warmth and I felt nauseous and suspended.  It was like seasickness.

            I sat in the rocks leaning against the depot, doing my best to blend into the green planks of wood and searching my mind for anything worth saying or doing.  Straight ahead of me, maybe fifty yards, between the Oriental Express and an abandoned storefront, a garage door rose noisily, pulled open from the inside.  Three people stumbled out.  Two of them kicked glass bottles toward Broadway Street with glee and anger.  The third started to berate them in a restless soprano.

            “You stupid fucks, always breaking shit in front of the fucking police station.”

            Her voice had the emphatic rhythm of poetry.  The two men stalked off, shoulders shaking in laughter, and she followed them away from downtown.  Once they hit 3^rd Avenue, they walked like conquistadors, gracing the asphalt with dramatic strides and professing ownership through the conceit of their posture.  Without thinking, I stood up and walked toward them.

            “Hey!”

            They turned around and I jogged up behind them and introduced myself.  Without slowing his walk, one of the men grabbed my shoulder and pulled me even with him on the road.  They all started repeating my name in different accents and recalling people they knew with the same one and singing songs with the lyrics changed to include my name.  I was not asked any questions.  We marched down 3^rd Avenue, stepping over potholes and the lengthening pine shadows.  I thought of my mother at home, watching M*A*S*H, crying in her closet.  The soprano pointed something out about every house.

            “That one’s fucking ugly.”

            “That’s where Dustin used to live.”

            “That one’s been there forever, I heard.”

            “That’s old Gayle Buntin’s place.”

            We kept walking into blocks of town that I had never seen before.

            Back in St. Louis, I worked as a temp at a publishing company and substituted for high school teachers.  Two years worth of vacation days were taken for this stay in Ashford.  On the morning that the sun arrived, my mother asked how long I was planning on living in Missouri.

            “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

            “Well, I think you might need to settle down somewhere.”

            “I already am settled down,” I said.  “Why don’t I have a middle name?”

            “Your father’s middle name is Cassius…”

            I stared at the pile of paperbacks and used tissues that covered the white coffee table in our living room.  A middle name would be nice.  I thought I saw my body collecting dust in large, speckled sheets clinging to my clothes and skin.  My mother was silent.  I turned to the front door.

            The house at the end of Church Street was abandoned.  White siding cracked under growths of prickly vine.  A pile of bricks—the collapsed chimney—loafed around the side and the roof looked like cardboard.  I sat on the floor.  Jordie, the soprano, was lying almost prone, smoking two cigarettes and humming an old folk song.  Her filthy hair reminded me of a tough grunge singer.  Sitz was in deep concentration, arranging and rearranging sculptures of conjoined aluminum pipes and placing beer bottles on the open ends.  His red hair touched the ceiling and the last shafts of sunlight lit up his pale arms.  Rett was his fraternal twin brother.  He paced across the creaking floor, talking about a car that he wanted, accentuating every point with wide gestures.  A gold watch on his wrist caught the light a few times.  The hands on it did not move.

            “…Edelbrock intake, a Holley double pumper.  Rare—a limited slip deferential positrack—pop-up pistons, not to mention three quarters cams, and three hundred and twenty horsepower…”

            I found a pocketknife, but I could not think of anything to carve in the wall.  After some time, I decided that I would try a simple face.  I cut two circles for eyes and wondered what kinds of places these people live in, and what they do all day.  Surely, they have jobs.  Two thick lines for eyebrows.  Sitz seemed full of dreams, even if I could not appreciate his sculptures.  A sharp angle for the nose.  Jordie’s voice had already begun to bother me, but she had some trailer gypsy air that could be appealing.  A frowning mouth.  Maybe Rett had done well in school at some point, but could never find his life there.  I tried to twist my own face to fit this other one entrenched in ancient wood. 

            “Dustin wanted to burn shit tonight,” said Rett.  “We could ride out with him later.”

            “I’d rather stay around here and do something,” said Jordie.

            “Well, there ain’t nothing to do.”

            “I was going to beat the tar out of that boy that works at Bob’s, the one that fucked up my bike,” said Sitz.

            “I could watch that,” said Jordie.

            I stared out of the window at a trembling oak that was scattering the last sunlight across the room.

            “There ain’t a reason for that,” said Rett.

            “Who said shit about reason?”

            “Jordie, dumb bitch, I said something about reason.  Sitz is going to go ahead and get his ass in jeopardy for no goddam reason.”

            “Beat your ass, too, Rett,” said his twin.  “Jeopardy.”

            Part of me wanted to leave, but I thought that if we could agree on plans, the possibility of violence would disperse.  Something about the way that Rett handled his friends seemed diabolical to me.

            “Where in town could we just hang out?” I asked.

            “Anywhere,” said Jordie.

            “I suggest,” Rett said, “that we go do some digging out by Westside Baptist.”  Sitz and Jordie nodded in consideration.  They seemed willing to do whatever it was that Rett had meant.

            “The shovels are at my place,” Sitz said.  I remembered that the Ashford City Cemetery was connected to Westside Baptist Church.

            “Rett, you aren’t talking about digging up people’s graves, are you?”

            “I am.”

            “What are you expecting to find?” I said.

            “Not much,” said Sitz.

            “It is Ashford, so we try not to expect too much,” Rett said. “But sometimes there are surprises.”  He raised his left arm.  All of the sunlight was gone but I could make out in the dark the outline of the broken gold watch around his wrist.

            After waiting for hours, we crept through shadows around to the far side of the cemetery carrying two shovels.  These graves were some of the oldest.  Rett led us to the most decrepit tombstone.  A third of it had crumbled and none of the engraving was legible.  I ran my hand along the back side and my skin caught on the uneven cracks and swellings.

            “How many times have you guys done this before?”

            Silence.

            “Who are you?” I asked.

            “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Rett.  The moon lit up his freckled face.  “Do you want me to dig?”

            “No,” I said.  “I will.”

            Sitz and I began.  A fog descended on the high school baseball field and started to spread outward.  The half moon rose high behind the clouds, and there were not any stars.  I thought about twisting my head around next to the railroad tracks, and about staring into the pharmacy mirror, washed in refracted daylight.  The ground pushed back against my rhythmic lurches and I quickened the pace of my thrusting and heaving.  I pictured myself at the bottom of the hole with a rag tied under my chin to keep my mouth shut.  No one spoke.

            The coffin was pine, with dresser handles and cheap lace around the edges, and maybe I saw a face carved into the top.  It was too dark to tell.  I grabbed the crowbar from Rett and positioned myself to pry it open.  The fog above glowed blue for a moment, and then red.  I heard a shovel fall to the ground and then frantic running.  Jordie whispered in panic.

            “The cops are here.”

            “Just a second,” I said.

            With one great motion, the lid flew off.  I looked inside the coffin, turned around and pulled myself out of the pit.  Jordie and I ran after Sitz and Rett, into the brush, behind a daycare, through backyards and all the way downtown, emerging onto Broadway Street across from the pharmacy.

            I followed them up a flight of stairs and through a screen door into an apartment above a garage only twenty yards from the road.

            “Close one,” said Sitz.  “Some fucker called, I bet.”

            “We could be quicker next time,” said Rett.

            “It’s quite a rush,” said Jordie.

            They all sat down on a leather couch, and I took the deep armchair in the corner.  It swallowed my small frame immediately.  I noticed an older woman standing in the corner, facing a tall shelf of trinkets.  The room was dim and pleasantly warm and I drifted off for some time.

            When I awoke, the woman and I were the only people in the room.  She sat on the couch doing what looked like a crossword puzzle.  I counted five ashtrays in the room.  The air was rich with cigarette smoke and vanilla candle scent.  Everything in the room was some shade of brown, even the walls.  Willie Nelson’s voice snuck out of a woodpanel stereo, youthful and earnest.  As every fairy tale comes real, I’ve looked at love that way.  It sounded both reverent and debonair.  The soft guitar filled up the room.

            It felt like staring at people in the Broadway Café, imagining their hearts and what they see in the clouds, when I see nothing myself, and walk with no remarkable posture.  Willie Nelson was a real conquistador, entrenched in ancient sound.  I would have to keep looking for something to call myself.  This room downtown had no giant mirror, and so I thought that I could stay there forever, settle down there.  But it was the wrong warm darkness.

            I sat collecting dust for some time, until the voice of the woman shook me.

            “What is your name?”

            The room was almost completely dark.  I strained to turn toward the source of the voice.

            “Clay Still.”  I asked a question of my own.

            “Why are there empty coffins in the ground?”

            My father died a week later.  Things were quiet around the house, and my mother stopped crying.  I prepared to return to St. Louis and be a substitute teacher and a publishing temp.  On my last day in Ashford, I drove my father’s truck into downtown and parked in the diagonal spaces in front of the antique store.  A few people hovered around the pharmacy and the hardware store, talking loud enough for me to hear.  I listened for a shrill soprano voice.

            Standing alone on the broken sidewalk, I watched the studio apartment for a while, feeling vacated, without proper footing.  The old woman stood in the window frame.  It looked like she had lived there for decades.  Maybe she had been single her entire life.  I imagined the woman living off of weekly poker winnings.  Had she ever written a novel?  What did she see in the clouds?