What happens instead is that the truck gets left behind, and a landlord wants the place to look clean, so he scoops a hole in the ground with a tractor, then nudges that truck over in the hole, such that only one tire is sticking up, like the last hand of a drowning person. Give the sun and snow a couple years at that tire, though, and it’s down to steel belts, then nothing. Just a rusted old rim some stupid kid can bark his shin against one day and then remember later, once the dead start walking.
I dug for the whole afternoon, and what I had convinced myself was an axle housing spearing out from that rusted wheel, it turned out to be a pipe welded to it, with a single chainlink tacked to the top of the pipe buried twelve feet behind me. I’d seen a link of chain tacked to a pipe like that before, at my old school. This was someone’s old tetherball pole.
I stood it up. It rocked back and forth, settled, like waiting for what was next.
I had no idea what was next.
I looked to the house, to make sure Dino wasn’t sneaking off the porch, and the curtain in the window was just falling back into place.
I went cold inside.
Mom was at work.
I took a single step backward, just instinct, and then I was running for the porch and then up the front of the porch, not the steps, and through the door, into the darkness inside.
Dino was seizing in front of his favorite cartoon, and—I remember this as clear as anything in my life—getting across the living room to him, even though it was only ten feet, it was all slow motion, it was like the carpet was tall or I was small, and I was having to wade through, fight my way over, reach ahead because this was all taking so long.
There was spittle frothed all on Dino’s lips and his eyes were mostly back to the whites, and his fingers were going past double-jointed, his elbows pulling in, his pants hot with pee.
I forced my finger between his teeth, gave him that to bite on, and held him until the shaking stopped.
He came back in stages, like usual. By the end of it he was watching the next cartoon, hadn’t even realized yet that his pants were wet, I don’t think.
“Hey, man,” I said. “You see what I found out there?”
He looked over to me like just realizing I was there.
“Out where?” he said.
I tilted my head out front.
He looked back to his cartoon, like being sure this was a moment in the story he could walk away from, and then he stood with his bag of chips, and—this was what I was testing—he didn’t go to the window to look out front. He went to the front door, hauled it open, studied the pasture through the storm door.
“It’s a flagpole,” I told him.
By the time Mom made it home, we had a home-drawn pirate flag up there in the wind, more or less. Because we didn’t have enough black marker to make the pale yellow towel from the bathroom look scary, we’d used one of Mom’s last two black dish towels. The face and bones were masking tape.
I thought we were going to get swatted, but instead, we ate sloppy joes on the porch and watched the pirate flag whip in the wind and finally break free of its knot, lift into the sky, come down on the wrong side of the neighbor’s chainlink.
The dogs were on it right when it touched down. It probably tasted like a hundred and fifty dinners all at once.
“Hated that towel anyways,” Mom said, and leaned back in her chair, blew smoke up into the dusk for a long time, and for the first time, I think, I was happy to be living right where we were.
The feeling didn’t last.
That night—I want to say it was a dream, but I’ve never remembered my dreams. Or maybe I walk through them.
Nothing happened. That I knew of.
I just slept even though I hadn’t meant to, and woke in my bed, my feet not dirty or anything.
If Dino seizured in the night, he didn’t bite his tongue or hurt himself.
Everything was so good, really, that I figured it kind of compelled me to keep my end of a deal I was only just now suspecting.
“Dad’s back,” I said over cereal, through the hustle and bustle and cussing of a weekday before school.
Mom was walking through the kitchen, on the way to the utility room, for Dino’s other pair of pants. She took maybe three more steps and then she stopped, like re-listening in her head, and then she looked back to me.
“Say what?” she said.
“Dad,” I said over my next, intentionally big, slurping bite. No eye contact.
Mom looked into the living room, like to be sure Dino had cartoons tuned in, not us.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Juney,” she said.
I hated her calling me that.
I plunged my spoon into the bowl again.
“I saw him the other night,” I said, shrugging like this was no big. “He’s different now. Better.”
“You saw him where?” Mom said, giving me her full attention now.
What she was thinking, I know, was the neighbors just had someone get processed out of lockup, and now they were standing out at the fence, watching the little boys who had moved in next door.
“Right here,” I said, nodding to the kitchen. “He was going back to the utility room.”
Mom just stared at me some more.
“Your father never did laundry,” she finally said. “I don’t think he would come back from the afterlife to run a load of whites.”
In the living room the cartoon swelled and crashed, and we both listened underneath it for the heel of a foot spasming into the carpet.
Dino was okay, though. Sucking on a yogurt.
“He’s a fancydancer now,” I said. “You should see him.”
Mom, even though there was never time for this in the morning, sat down across from me, skated both her hands across to hold the one of mine that was there.
“That’s why you were asking about him,” she said.
“He’s my dad,” I told her.
“You look like him,” she said back. “I never tell you because I don’t want to make you sad. But I remember him from elementary. If we were back home, everybody would be saying it.”
This made my eyes hot. I looked away, took my hand back.
“He’s coming back to help make Dino better,” I said.
Mom wouldn’t look away from my face.
“How would he find us, all the way down here?” she said, her voice like she was letting me down soft, here.
“We’re his family,” I said.
Mom nodded, looked past me, into the living room, and I realized then that she didn’t miss him like I did.
It was why he’d shown himself to me, not her. It was why that bead had hidden itself in the ducts under the house, not stuck around for her to—
And then, all at once, like crashing over me, it hit me: I’d scoured every inch of every room of the house, sure. I’d even drawn our floor plan out, reducing the inches to millimeters on my ruler as best I could, to make sure there weren’t any hidden rooms, any closets that had been boarded over by some past renter.
It was all there in my science notebook.
And, while I’d looked out in the pasture for evidence—only finding a ceremonially buried tetherball pole and the other usual trash of people having lived here once—I hadn’t taken into account the most likely place a person who was dead might want to live, to be close to his family: under the house.
We were up on cinderblock pylon things, not settled onto a concrete foundation. It was why the landlord had come over our first winter: to crawl down there, rewrap the pipes that had no other insulation. He said the varmints would chew it off again in a year or two, but we’d be good for the cold. And we had been, mostly.