I sat through Algebra and Biology and History, thinking about cops puking, thinking about the missing boy’s body. I couldn’t stop thinking about those two things. I liked the idea of seeing one of those cops who set up speed traps behind bushes puking out his guts, holding his stomach. I wasn’t sure what I thought about Jamie’s dead body rotting beneath railroad ties. And what a piece of work, to have gone to all that trouble to hide the kid in such a place! It didn’t help that at the start of each class all the teachers said they understood if we were disturbed, or anxious, and that we should talk if needed, or else they could recommend a good psychologist to our parents.
I sat at my desk with my chin propped in my hands, chewing an eraser, imagining Jamie Marks under the rails staring at the undersides of trains as they rumbled over him. Those tracks weren’t used anymore, not since the big smash-up with a school bus back in the 1980s, but I imagined trains on them anyway. Jamie inhaled each time a glimpse of sky appeared between boxcars and exhaled when they covered him over. He dreamed when there were no trains rolling over him, when there was no metallic scream on the rails. When he dreamed, he dreamed of trains again, blue sparks flying off the iron railing, and he gasped for breath in his sleep. A ceiling of trains covered him. He almost suffocated, there were so many.
After school, my brother Andy said, “We’re going to the place, a bunch of us. Do you want to come?” Andy’s friends were all seniors and they harassed me a lot, so I shook my head and said no. “I have to see a friend and collect five dollars he owes me,” I said, even though I hadn’t loaned out money to anyone in weeks.
I went home and looked through school yearbooks and found Jamie Marks smiling from his square in row two. I cut his photo out with my father’s Exacto knife and stared at it for a while, then turned it over. On the other side was a picture of me. I swallowed and swallowed until my throat hurt. I didn’t like that picture of me anyway, I told myself. It was a bad picture. I had baby fat when it was taken, and looked more like a little kid. I flipped the photo over and over, like a coin, and wondered, If it had been me, would I have escaped? I decided it must have been too difficult to get away from them — I couldn’t help thinking there had to be more than one murderer — and probably I would have died just the same.
I took the picture outside and buried it in my mother’s garden between the rows of sticks that had, just weeks before, marked off the sections of vegetables, keeping carrots carrots and radishes radishes. I patted the dirt softly, inhaled its crisp dirt smell, and whispered, “Don’t you worry. Everything will be all right.”
When my mother started using a wheelchair, she was hopeful, even though the doctors had changed their minds and said she’d never walk again. She told us not to worry. She enjoyed not always having to be on her feet. She figured out how to pop wheelies, and would show off in front of guests. “What a burden legs can be!” she told us. Even so, I sometimes found her wheeled into dark corners, her head in her hands, saying, “No, no, no,” sobbing.
That woman, Lucy, kept calling and asking my mother to forgive her, but my mother told us to say she wasn’t home and that she was contacting lawyers and that they’d have Lucy so broke within seconds; they’d make her pay real good. I told Lucy, “She isn’t home,” and Lucy said, “My God, tell that poor woman I’m so sorry. Ask her to please forgive me.”
I told my mother that Lucy was sorry, and the next time Lucy called, my mother decided to hear her out. Their conversation sounded like when my mom talks to her sister, my Aunt Beth, who lives in California near the ocean, a place I’ve never visited. My mother kept shouting, “No way! You too?! I can’t believe it! Can you believe it?! Oh Lucy, this is too much.”
Two hours later, Lucy pulled into our driveway, blaring her horn. My mother wheeled herself outside, smiling and laughing. Lucy was tall and wore red lipstick, and her hair was permed real tight. She wore plastic bracelets and hoop earrings, and stretchy hot pink pants. She bent down and hugged my mother, then helped her into the car. They drove off together, laughing, and when they came home several hours later, I smelled smoke and whiskey on their breath.
“What’s most remarkable,” my mother kept slurring, “is that I was on my way to the bar, sober, and Lucy was driving home, drunk.” They’d both had arguments with their husbands that day; they’d both run out to make their husbands jealous. Learning all this, my mother and Lucy felt destiny had brought them together. “A virtual Big Bang,” said my mother.
Lucy said, “A collision of souls.”
The only thing to regret was that their meeting had been so painful. “But great things are born out of pain,” my mother told me, nodding in a knowing way. “If I had to be in an accident with someone,” she said, patting Lucy’s hand, which rested on one of my mother’s wheels, “I’m glad that someone was Lucy.”
After I buried Jamie’s and my photo, I walked around for a few days, bumping into things. Walls, lockers, people. It didn’t matter what, I walked into it. I hadn’t known Jamie all that well, even though we were in the same class. We had different friends. Jamie liked computers; I ran track. Not because I like competition, but because I’m a really good runner, and I like to run, even though my mom always freaks because I was born premature, with undersized lungs. But I remembered Jamie: a small kid with stringy, mouse-colored hair and pale skin. He wore very round glasses and kids sometimes called him Moony. He was supposed to be smart, but I didn’t know about that. I asked a few people at lunch, when the topic was still hot, “What kind of grades did he get? Was he an honors student?” But no one answered. All they did was stare like I’d stepped out of a spaceship.
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 was 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 1970s, who actually never used hatchets but a hunting knife.