The Voices in Our Heads Page 12

  And you never bother to notice me.

  The Grave Keeper

  November

  I’m telling you, Professor, I’m gonna catch the bastard red-handed and you ain’t about to go talking me out of it.

  No one’s talking you out of anything.

  Well, you don’t have to say it. I can feel it the way you’re sitting there staring out the windshield as if some ghost is floating there between the headstones.

  Jonathan, I’ll humor you with this nonsense because I feel that tonight we’ve become something like friends, but the ridicule isn’t necessary. It is no secret that this makes me uncomfortable.

  Why?

  Why do you think?

  Hmm. I think that up there in your classroom, in front of them first-year students gawking at you, especially the coed-types twirling their hair and popping their gum, it’s easy to talk about graveyards in stories and such, like that fella who always made the children into beggars and the streets into trash chutes full of soot and fog.

  You mean Charles Dickens.

  Yeah, Dickens. You think I didn’t know that? I went to school. I know Dickens and Shakespeare and Hemingway and all them English gentlemen. What I’m saying is that when you read about stuff it’s one thing.

  And when you do them you could go to prison.

  We ain’t breaking no law.

  But we could be easily blamed for the actions of the phantom you want to catch simply because we are on the premises.

  It’s my job to be on the premises, Professor.

  At two in the morning?

  Well, sure. What if Percy books four burials tomorrow instead of three? Sometimes you got to dig at night, break out the braces and struts and the gas-powered Ditch Witch, get dirty.

  Isn’t that kind of loud?

  Who’ll hear all the way out here?

  Don’t you get tired?

  I work best at night, I told you. Shit, you asked me all these questions when I first made to bring you out here. Is this some kind of teaching trick, like you want to test how set I am on catching this guy by making me repeat my reasons or something?

  No, Jonathan. I assure you that repetition is not something I favor. I’m just nervous, that’s all.

  For what?

  I don’t know.

  Sure you do. You just don’t want to admit that some wacko digging up graves and filling them back in scares the mess out of you.

  Would I be sitting here if I was really that frightened?

  I don’t know. Would you?

  Stop it.

  What? Being rhetorical?

  Yes.

  You didn’t think I knew that word, did ya?

  No, I didn’t.

  Learned it in church.

  Well, God bless.

  No need to be sarcastic, Professor.

  I wasn’t being sarcastic. I was being ironic.

  Shit! There he is!

  Where?

  There, by the flush memorials!

  I don’t see him.

  Don’t you have eyes? There now, crossing in front of those decorator boxwoods, the garden gate, now . . . shit, I lost him ’round the corner of the columbarium.

  I want to go back.

  C’mon, I was just kidding, Professor. Ain’t no ghosts out here, just a lot of grinning skeletons.

  What if he does show up tonight? What if he sees us?

  He won’t.

  How do you know?

  The lamp from the shed tosses a glow on the windows here. We see out, but he can’t see in. We’re safe. No one will know what we’re doing.

  What are we doing?

  Now who’s being sarcastic? We’re waiting to find out why this sick son of a bitch keeps digging up my handiwork. Why I have to have this shit job excavating trenches in the elements in the first place, rocks in my work boots, always checking for fretting along the top edge and tension cracks and support timbers showing signs of stress, and getting no credit for it while professors like you sit in your ivory towers making all the rules.

  Well, I do grade a lot of papers.

  That ain’t the point. And now you’re making me mad, sitting there hands folded in your lap all delicate, grinning that little grin like you know something I don’t. And then to top it all off, some lunatic comes through in the dead of night digging up what I packed in so nice and neat the day before. He’s mocking me. Making me look at what I done with my life and laughing at it.

  No one’s laughing, Jonathan.

  Well, it feels like they are.

  You mean it feels like he is.

  Yeah. Don’t go playing word games with me now, Professor, I ain’t in the mood.

  No problem. [Pause.] Jonathan?

  Hmm.

  How do you know someone is really doing this?

  Shovel marks on the backfill. I ain’t no pedestrian.

  Nice use of vocabulary.

  Thanks. But you know what time it is, don’t you?

  No.

  Professor . . .

  I don’t want to go back. I want to sit with you and play detective, where’s its safe out here in the truck.

  Game’s over. And if I don’t put you back in now, I’ll still be sitting in the backhoe when the sun breaks and we can’t have that, now can we?

  It’s dark down there and cramped and gritty.

  Now, now, just hold still. I’ll use the power tamper and pat you in snug as a bug.

  I’m afraid your pun doesn’t quite work, Jonathan. The bugs made their way through me a long time ago. It was quite offensive.

  Yeah, you smell offensive. Let’s go.

  Jonathan?

  Yes?

  Will you adorn my crest with shovel marks?

  Now, you know that’s the signal! I can’t go digging up the same grave over and again, ’cause it’ll wreck the integrity of the cavity. Tomorrow is Mrs. McGill’s turn over in the Covington Grove section. That’s the game. We’re family, all of us.

  Family.

  Right.

  Games.

  It’s all we have. Now, let’s say our goodbyes here where its comfy. You know I don’t like to have our voices lost out there in the wind. Goodnight, Professor.

  Oh, fine. Goodbye.

  Oh, no, yourself, Professor. I prefer ‘See you soon’ if you please.”

  The Soldier

  December

  The first snow of the year never lasts. It usually starts with a few flakes dancing on the air like campfire ash, then graduates to a heavier pattern. I like when it slants. I like when it straightens, when it thickens, makes the world into a snowglobe. I take the quilt from the bed and wrap it around myself, the pathetic old king with his robes trailing him across the floorboards. My breath makes mist on the window. When the display outside peters off, it will be bleak again, hard wind running through branches that bow in dumb servitude, the sky a defensive grayish blue, the clouds just bruises.

  If only it would keep.

  If only it would have intensified, swirled, buried the sidewalks, iced up the phone lines, blanketed all the side streets, cut visibility to the point that the mayor shut down all the major bridges and Penn DOT closed off sections of Route 95. If only that first December snow of 1978 could have been a storm instead of a tease.

  I’d have been the first up for sure, bounding to the window facing the back yard.

  Snow days meant extra cuddling time with Addy, two pots of coffee, watching the fuzzy RCA downstairs and getting the snow measurings at the airport, accident reports along the Schuylkill Expressway, all with the couch blankets pulled up to your chin and the dog with his snout across your lap. Safe and cozy. When you were a teacher, a snow day was a fun day, an “I don’t have to run” day, though the Bangles would preach it a few years later and trash what I had always thought a pure sort of paradigm for working Joes on the front lines, not shitty little rich girls air-guitaring what would have been best kept in Daddy’s living room.

  Snow days were times for watching stupid gam
e shows, sipping Swiss Miss hot chocolate made extra syrupy, fluffy eggs and bacon and pumpkin pancakes, grilled cheese on seeded rye for lunch, marathon showers, Heinekens before noon.

  Addy liked to screw on snow days. She was a short fireplug of a woman, strong thighs, awesome tits. When she let you do it from behind, she had a way of curving her back and turning you this wry look that drove you crazy with desire. She used to flip on Zeppelin 1, side 2, loud as shit when she knew you were going to bang her hard. She cried out those times, but not as loud as I did. She was a good girl. The kind that never bitched about money. Or laundry. Or the empty propane tank, or the bags of clothes you forgot to bring to Goodwill, or the old smelly rugs you rolled up and stuck in the garage because you never quite found time to make it to the dump. She looked good in a bathrobe, looked good cooking pepper steak in a wok. Made me want to drink at home. Love the world. Kiss the sky.

  Danny had moved down into the partly finished basement and swore it didn’t smell even a little bit moldy. His old room became my “office,” which Addy dolled up with an oak desk that had tons of drawers I didn’t use, a leather chair, and a cherry wood minibar with compartments that I most certainly did use. We put the eight-track in there, along with most of the pictures, some classic novels I swore I’d get around to reading some day, and all Danny’s trophies. Addy used to say that the kid moved down to the basement to exercise his independence, but I always thought it was the loud Zeppelin music.

  I still walked down two flights of stairs every morning to give him a kiss, even though he was fourteen. Kissed him to wake him up, right on that hot part of his forehead with the little tan birthmark on the right side just below the hairline. I was also guilty of making that cone with my lips, putting it to his cheek, and making “whub-whub” noises. Like Addy, he never bitched. I’d kiss him, give him the “whub-whub,” and he’d squint, crinkle up his nose, and mutter, “Hi Dad,” in that deep voice I was still getting used to.

  On the morning that ruined us, I walked down the stairs and forgot to move around the creaks that might wake Addy unnecessarily. Chipster, our cocker spaniel, flopped his tail in the basket by the fridge and clicked over to me across the linoleum, cute as a button with the exception of that doggie gunk gathered at the bottom of his eyes and those black lines underneath like the mascara of some weeping actress. I gave him a scratch behind the ears, opened the back door, and put him on his lead. The snow was letting up a bit. Probably a false alarm, but teaching shop in the inner city was far better than working the construction trades out in the elements. Still had vivid memories of that shit like it was yesterday. I shut the door and went into the bathroom adjacent to the galley area for my morning dump, because when I dropped a deuce in the morning it was like a runaway train, and even though I was inconsiderate enough to lumber down the creaky stairs, I still had enough common sense to shit in a central area that wouldn’t waft linger-stink into the bedrooms.

  Down in Danny’s “room,” things were a mess as usual. He had tried to make the place “his” with a black light, two lava lamps, and one of those spangly steel weeping willow desk lights from Spencer’s that looked like vegetation from Mars. I thought I smelled incense. Had to talk to him about that.

  “Time to wake up, dum-dum.” I’d given him his man-kiss, and I ruffled his hair. Still blondish, all Addy’s side, though it had darkened quite a bit since his baby years. “Dan. Danny!” I got a mumble this time, and a half roll away toward the wall. He’d put up new posters. Had them in the shadows so I hadn’t noticed right away. Gloria Gaynor, John Travolta, and The Commodores. We’d really have to talk now. His Leo Sayer, Rod Stewart, and Gary Wright phase had been strange enough. I mean, all our friends thought Addy and I were reckless in our seemingly endless hunger for new rock-and-roll, but I couldn’t bother myself with my own generation’s antiquated boardwalk, bee-bob, and show tunes slop. I loved music, loved it raw, and Addy was even worse with it. She’d gone to catholic school way back when, yeah, plaid skirt and knee socks, and when the Beatles changed everything she’d already tossed the tassel to the other side at Saint Joseph’s. She spent much of her adult life making up for what she’d missed.

  As for Danny, he sort of rolled his eyes at our fascination. I would say “ Z. Z. Top, Aerosmith, Kiss!” and he would come back with “Kris Kristofferson.” Said he liked the lyrics. Me and Addy teased him about that one, and I even tried to get serious with it, show him that the lyrics didn’t stack up to masters like Emerson, Whitman, or Poe, that music wasn’t about lyrics anyway. His undisputable, one word answer took care of both sides of the argument.

  “Girls.”

  Yeah. Disco sucked, but it was a tool for fourteen-year-old chick-magnets. One of those Catch-22s that would never be solved.

  “Danny. School.”

  “I don’t wanna.”

  “OK. Snuggle.”

  I lay down next to him, held him, said in his ear,

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK, breathe.”

  Both of us together then, in, out, then break, a ritual so ancient I didn’t even recall when we first laughed about it. He sat up and chewed a hangnail.

  He was really getting bigger. Even though his chest seemed narrow, it was developed, only in miniature, if you know what I mean. He was five foot five inches but hadn’t quite grown into that height yet, if that makes any sense. A true man-child.

  And gorgeous.

  He certainly didn’t get his looks from my side of the family, and sometimes we laughed and called him the postman’s child, simply because he didn’t quite favor Addy either except in the hair color category. He looked like a damned angel. His eyes were a bit almond-shaped, and his features were simply portrait-worthy. Straight nose, soft lips, high cheekbones, sharp eyebrows. Almost feminine, though I’d never have told him that to his face.

  The girls loved him, and in turn most of his friends were female, sort of rare for a young teenager. The phone was constantly ringing; in fact, the closest thing to an ongoing fight in the house was Addy’s constant frustration with the fact that the line was never free in case Barbara was giving a ring to go to the mall, or Gina was phoning over to change the time for their magazine and Tupperware club.

  “You didn’t hit off the tee last night.” I jerked my head back toward the netting I’d hung from the exposed pipes by the water boiler, his twenty-nine-ounce Louisville Slugger and the tennis balls lying around the black tee in the same places they’d been three nights running.

  “I will tonight.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  I paused so he’d look at me.

  “Your back elbow’s dropping.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “If you don’t fix it now, you’re—”

  “Gonna get burned by the high cheese, I got it, Dad.”

  We both laughed and he let me run my fingers through his hair for another muff-up. He wasn’t the brightest boy in school, all B’s and a few C’s like in Spanish, but I was the last one to blame him for not finding himself seated quite flush into the “school thing” like a perfect little o-ring in an engine. He was sharp as a tack when it came to people. He had insight, a way about him that got folks talking about themselves, I’d seen it. We’d go to a pool party, and without being familiar at all with the terrain, he’d entertain discussions with thirty-year-old women about dieting, gender equality, and spiritual healing. I’d get him from school on a day he stayed late for homework club, and he’d be at the edge of the pick-up rotary, buried deep in a three-way conversation with a girl that had flood pants, earth shoes, a relief map of forehead zits, and horn-rimmed glasses, right alongside a pretty little leggy cheerleader with bows in her hair. Damn straight. He singlehandedly made them dead equals, which they were, but most fourteen-year-olds didn’t see it that way is all that I’m saying. He had friends on the chess team and pals playing footbal
l, girlfriends who were shy and awkward and others wearing heavy foundation, big fake eyelashes, and pants so tight they could have been spraypainted. He was “Mr. Social,” a bit book-dumb and a natural charmer; ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States.

  “Dad,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I had already gotten up and turned to go.

  “I don’t think I’m gonna play ball this year. I’m tired of it.”

  “No, your not.”

  “Just kidding.”

  I turned to go again. This time I made it to the stairs, which needed carpeting or painting, I still hadn’t decided.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah, big boy?”

  He was staring at his hands.

  “What if Bobby Fitz starts something?”

  My neck went hot and I stalked back across the room.

  “If he so much as touches you, Danny, look at me. He lays one single finger on you, I want you to throw.” I looked over my shoulder as if Addy had snuck down for a listen. I leaned in and my shadow covered him for a second.

  “Now listen. That son of a bitch starts in, you finish it. You hit him square in the face and don’t stop until he’s down. You don’t take shit. From anyone. Start with that kind of noise, and it spreads around the school like brushfire. Next thing you know, you’re everybody’s pincushion, got it?”

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  I took a deep breath and stood straight.

  “You think he’s gonna start in?”

  He gave a short laugh.

  “Crazy if he does.”

  “Why, Danny?”

  “I’ll kick his ass.”

  “Good boy.”

  Of course, we didn’t tell Addy any of this, because she more believed in the fairytale answer to the shit that went on between boys, the go-to-the-principal-about-it answer that got the offender suspended and simultaneously cut a crack so deep in your street cred that you wouldn’t recover until you hit your third year of college. Not the textbook response for a teacher, I know, but I was all too familiar with the reality in the foxhole. Did I preach this to my students? No. Did I have a problem with this contradiction? Not in the slightest.