My letters were straight and fierce.
I went home to find that I’d missed dinner. My father was already in the living room, watching TV, the Weather Channel. He could watch the weather report for hours, listening to the muzak play over and over. He watched it every night for a couple of hours before Andy and I would start groaning for a channel switch. He’d change the channel but never acknowledge us. Usually he never had much to say anyway.
When I got home, though, he wanted to talk. It took him only a few minutes after I sat down with a plate of meatloaf before he changed the channel, and I about choked. There was a news brief on about the search for Jamie’s murderers. I wondered why the anchorman called them “Jamie’s murderers”, the same way you might say, “Jamie’s dogs” or “Jamie’s Boy Scout honors”. My dad stretched out on his reclining chair and started muttering about what he’d do with the killers if it had been his boy. His face was red and splotchy.
I stopped eating, set my fork down on my plate.
“What would you do?” I asked. “What would you do if it had been me?”
My dad looked at me and said, “I’d tie a rope around those bastard’s armpits and lower them inch by inch into a vat of piranhas, slowly, to let the little suckers have at their flesh.”
He looked back at the TV.
“But what if the police got them first?” I said. “What would you do then?”
Dad looked at me again and said, “I’d smuggle a gun into the courtroom, and when they had those bastards up there on the stand, I’d jump out of my seat and shoot their God-damned heads off.” He jumped out of his recliner and made his hands into a gun shape, pointing it at me. He pulled the fake trigger once, twice, a third time. Bam! Bam! Bam!
I nodded with approval. I felt really loved, like I was my dad’s favorite. I ate up all this great attention and kept asking, “What if?” again and again, making up different situations. He was so cool, the best dad in the world. I wanted to buy him a hat: Best Dad in the World! printed on it. We were really close, I felt, for the first time in a long time.
Gracie Highsmith’s house was nestled in a bend of the railroad tracks where she found Jamie. She’d been out walking the tracks looking for odd pieces of coal and nickel, when she found him. All of this she told me in her bedroom, on the second floor of her house. She held out a fist-sized rock that was brown with black speckles embedded in it. The brown parts felt like sandpaper, but the black specks were smooth as glass. Gracie said she’d found it in the streambed at the bottom of Marrow’s Ravine. I said, “It’s something special all right,” and she beamed like someone’s mother.
“That’s nothing,” she said. “Wait till you see the rest.” She showed me a chunk of clear quartz and a piece of hardened blue clay; a broken-open geode filled with pyramids of pink crystal; a seashell that she’d found, mysteriously, in the woods behind her house, nowhere near water; and a flat rock with a skeletal fish fossil imprinted on it. I was excited to see them all, I hadn’t realized how beautiful rocks could be. It made me want to collect rocks too, but it was already Gracie’s territory. I’d have to find something of my own.
We sat on her bed and listened to music by some group from Cleveland that I’d never heard of, but who Gracie obviously loved because she set the CD player to replay the same song over and over. It sounded real punk. They sang about growing up angry and how they would take over the world and make people pay for being stupid idiots. Gracie nodded and gritted her teeth as she listened.
I liked being alone in the house with her, listening to music and looking at rocks. I felt eccentric and mature. I told Gracie this, and she knew what I meant. “They all think we’re children,” she said. “They don’t know a God-damned thing, do they?”
We talked about growing old for a while, imagining ourselves in college, then in mid-life careers, then when we were so old that we couldn’t walk without a walker. Pretty soon we were so old we both clutched our chests like we were having heart attacks, fell back on the bed, and choked on our own laughter.
“What sort of funeral will you have?” she wondered.
“I don’t know, what about you? Aren’t they all the same?”
“Funerals are all different,” she said. “For instance, Mexican cemeteries have all these bright, beautifully colored decorations for their dead; they’re not all serious like ours.” I asked her where she had learned that. She said, “Social Studies. Last year.”
“Social Studies?” I asked. “Last year?” I repeated. “I don’t remember reading about funerals or cemeteries last year in Social Studies.” Last year I hadn’t cared about funerals. I was fourteen and watched TV and played video games a lot. What else had I missed while lost in the fog of sitcoms and fantasy adventures?
I bet Mexicans never would have had a private funeral. Too bad Jamie wasn’t Mexican.
“I see graves all the time now,” Gracie told me. She lay flat on her back, head on her pillow, and stared at the ceiling. “They’re everywhere,” Gracie said. “Ever since-”
She stopped and sighed, as if it was some huge confession she’d just told me. I worried that she might expect something in return, a confession of my own. I murmured a little noise I hoped sounded supportive.
“They’re everywhere,” she repeated. “The town cemetery, the Wilkinson family plot, that old place out by the ravine, where Fuck-You Francis is supposed to be buried. And now the railroad tracks. I mean, where does it end?”
I said, “Beds are like graves, too,” and she turned to me with this puzzled look. “No,” I said, “really.” And I told her about the time when my grandmother came to live with us, after my grandfather’s death. And how, one morning my mother sent me into her room to wake her for breakfast — I remember, because I smelled bacon frying when I woke up — and so I went into my grandma’s room and told her to wake up. She didn’t, so I repeated myself. But she still didn’t wake up. Finally I shook her shoulders, and her head lolled on her neck. I grabbed one of her hands, and it was cold to touch.
“Oh,” said Gracie. “I see what you mean.” She stared at me hard, her eyes glistening. Gracie rolled on top of me, pinning her knees on both sides of my hips. Her hair fell around my face, and the room grew dimmer as her hair brushed over my eyes, shutting out the light.
She kissed me on my lips, and she kissed me on my neck. She started rocking against my penis, so I rocked back. The coils in her bed creaked. “You’re so cold, Adam,” Gracie whispered, over and over. “You’re so cold, you’re so cold.” She smelled like clay and dust. As she rocked on me, she looked up at the ceiling and bared the hollow of her throat. After a while, she let out several little gasps, then collapsed on my chest. I kept rubbing against her, but stopped when I realized she wasn’t going to get back into it.
Gracie slid off me. She knelt in front of her window, looking out at something.
“Are you angry?” I asked.
“No, Adam. I’m not angry. Why would I be angry?”
“Just asking,” I said. “What are you doing now?” I said.
“He’s down there again,” she whispered. I heard the tears in her voice already and went to her. I didn’t look out the window. I wrapped my arms around her, my hands meeting under her breasts, and hugged her. I didn’t look out the window.
“Why won’t he go away?” she said. “I found him, yeah. So fucking what? He doesn’t need to fucking follow me around forever.”
“Tell him to leave,” I told her.
She didn’t respond.
“Tell him you don’t want to see him anymore,” I told her.