Dead Boy Found
By Christopher Barzak
* * * *
Christopher Barzak has published stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Nerve, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, The Vestal Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Descant and Trampoline. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio. Recently Barzak completed a novel, One for Sorrow, which continues the narrative begun in “Dead Boy Found”.
“I wrote this story during the summer I turned twenty-five,” recalls the author. “At the time several friends had either died suddenly or had some life-damaging event happen to them, and quickly the world became a scary, uncomfortable place for me to live in. I couldn’t help wondering what horrible thing would happen next, and if I would survive it.
“The only other time in my life that I’d felt that way was when I was a kid and a young boy who lived in the next town over was brutally tortured and murdered by two men whom he’d stumbled upon in the woods while walking home from his Boy Scout meeting. His death sent ripples through the surrounding area, and for months I was obsessed with what had happened. I couldn’t comprehend how such a thing could occur. I kept imagining the scene, trying to give his murder some sort of rational coherence, but I always utterly failed.
“When death came crashing too close for comfort once more, I began thinking about that boy again, and what had happened to him. And again I started to try and make sense of these losses we all face.
“I don’t think I ended up making any sense out of the death of that boy from my childhood. Nor do I think I made any sense out of the death and damage that struck my circle of friends when I was twenty-five. The only thing I managed to do was to make this story out of that failure to comprehend their sudden absences.”
All this started when my father told my mother she was a waste. He said, “You are such a waste, Linda,” and she said, “Oh, yeah? You think so? We’ll see about that.” Then she got into her car and pulled out of our driveway, throwing gravel in every direction. She was going to Abel’s, or so she said, where she could have a beer and find herself a real man.
Halfway there, though, she was in a head-on collision with a drunk woman named Lucy, who was on her way home, it happened, from Abel’s. They were both driving around that blind curve on Highway 88, Lucy swerving a little, my mother smoking cigarette after cigarette, not even caring where the ashes fell. When they leaned their cars into the curve, Lucy crossed into my mother’s lane. Bam! Just like that. My mother’s car rolled three times into the ditch and Lucy’s car careened into a guardrail. It was Lucy who called the ambulance on her cellular phone, saying, over and over, “My God, I’ve killed Linda McCormick, I’ve killed that poor girl.”
At that same moment, Gracie Highsmith was becoming famous. While out searching for new additions to her rock collection, she had found the missing boy’s body buried beneath the defunct railroad tracks just a couple of miles from my house. The missing boy had been missing for two weeks. He disappeared on his way home from a Boy Scout meeting. He and Gracie were both in my class. I never really talked to either of them much, but they were all right. You know, quiet types. Weird, some might say. But I’m not the judgmental sort. I keep my own counsel. I go my own way. If Gracie Highsmith wanted to collect rocks and if the missing boy wanted to be a Boy Scout, more power to them.
We waited several hours at the hospital before they let us see my mother. Me, my brother Andy, and my father sat in the lobby, reading magazines and drinking coffee. A nurse finally came and got us. She took us up to the seventh floor. She pointed to room number 727 and said we could go on in.
My mother lay in the hospital bed with tubes coming out of her nose. One of her eyes had swelled shut and was already black and shining. She breathed with her mouth open, a wheezing noise like snoring. There were bloodstains on her teeth. Also several of her teeth were missing. When she woke, blinking her good eye rapidly, she saw me and said, “Baby, come here and give me a hug.”
I wasn’t a baby, I was fifteen, but I didn’t correct her. I figured she’d been through enough already. A doctor came in and asked my mother how she was feeling. She said she couldn’t feel her legs. He said that he thought that might be a problem, but that it would probably work itself out over time. There was swelling around her spinal cord. “It should be fine after a few weeks,” he told us.
My father started talking right away, saying things like, “We all have to pull together. We’ll get through this. Don’t worry.” Eventually his fast talking added up to mean something. When we brought my mother home, he put her in my bed so she could rest properly, and I had to bunk with Andy. For the next few weeks, he kept saying things like, “Don’t you worry, honey. It’s time for the men to take over.” I started doing the dishes and Andy vacuumed. My father took out the trash on Tuesdays. He brought home pizza or cold cuts for dinner.
I wasn’t angry about anything. I want to make that clear right off. I mean, stupid stuff like this just happens. It happens all the time. One day you’re just an average fifteen-year-old with stupid parents and a brother who takes out his aggressions on you because he’s idiotic and his friends think it’s cool to see him belittle you in public, and suddenly something happens to make things worse. Believe me, morbidity is not my specialty. Bad things just happen all at once. My grandma said bad things come in threes. Two bad things had happened: My mother was paralyzed and Gracie Highsmith found the missing boy’s body. If my grandma was still alive, she’d be trying to guess what would happen next.
I mentioned this to my mother while I spooned soup up to her trembling lips. She could feed herself all right, but she seemed to like the attention. “Bad things come in threes,” I said. “Remember Grandma always said that?”
She said, “Your grandma was uneducated.”
I said, “What is that supposed to mean?”
She said, “She didn’t even get past eighth grade, Adam.”
I said, “I knew that already.”
“Well, I’m just reminding you.”
“Okay,” I said, and she took another spoonful of chicken broth.
At school everyone talked about the missing boy. “Did you hear about Jamie Marks?” they all said. “Did you hear about Gracie Highsmith?”
I pretended like I hadn’t, even though I’d watched the news all weekend and considered myself an informed viewer. I wanted to hear what other people would say. A lot of rumors were circulating already. Our school being so small made that easy. Seventh through twelfth grade all crammed into the same building, elbow to elbow, breathing each other’s breath.
They said Gracie saw one of his fingers poking out of the gravel, like a zombie trying to crawl out of its grave. They said that after she removed a few stones, one of his blue eyes stared back at her, and that she screamed and threw the gravel back at his eye and ran home. They said, sure enough, when the police came later, they found the railroad ties loose, with the bolts broken off of them. So they removed them, dug up the gravel, shoveling for several minutes, and found Jamie Marks. Someone said a cop walked away to puke.
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...
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