Zombies: The Recent Dead (36 page)

A dry chuckle sounded in Ms. Needlemeyer’s throat, the sound of drumsticks on a pelvic snare drum.

“What?” I asked.

“You, young man, are the only person that can honestly say that to yourself. That’s what growing up is, hon.” She held the cigarette between her bare teeth, let the smoke float up into her eye cavities in a dead French inhale. “Becoming that person.”

Mercifully, across the churchyard and over the last hill, the final whistle of the game blew. We turned and watched the sky tear open behind the school. The angels flew home quickly, whooping and hollering and cheering like a parade.

“Everybody always wants to be somewhere else,” Needlemeyer noted. “Always making plans to be somewhere they’d rather be. I don’t imagine it’s any different in Heaven. I’d just like to know where they’d rather be.”

I looked at the painted bag of bones, at the dirt caked on my shoes.

I had to keep my distance from Ginger at the Homecoming Dance. No one but our inner circle of friends knew how serious things had gotten between us and no one else
could
know, or there would be hell to pay. Literally. So I stood against the wall with Art while Roland danced on Missy’s outstretched palm and Ginger boogied beside them. After a few songs he came back to catch his breath. Missy went to the bathroom with Ginger.

“What the dilly, son?” Roland asked. He sounded like a winded rubber squeaker toy. “You upset about the game? Don’t let it get to you, bro. We
always
lose Homecoming.”

“Huh?” I looked up from my feet. “Oh. Nah, I don’t care about that shit.”

“Then what’s up?” Art asked.

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You love her?” Roland asked.

On the dance floor, Misty and Twisty and everybody else danced. Everyone danced differently. I wondered what it had been like, years ago, when nobody danced alone. You found a partner or you waited for one, looking for someone to ask.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“That means
no
, son. When it comes to love, anything but
yes
means
no
.”

I watched Ginger and Missy come out of the bathroom. Ginger looked for me across the dance floor, found me. I met her gaze, held it as I walked out to the dance floor and took her hand for a slow song.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I made no response. We fit our bodies together and started to move.

“I think I love you,” Ginger said after the first refrain.

She said it the way everybody says it the first time, when what they really mean is
I think I want to tell you I love you.
She looked at me, wanting me to say it back. I wanted to say it back, but I couldn’t speak. All the blood in my body reversed its flow. I felt like I did in the cemetery, when Art, Roland, and Missy had played the prank on me, convincing me that I’d been dead the whole time.

“Aren’t you gonna say it too?”

There was a pause between songs, long enough for someone to bet it all and lose; long enough for a plane to make an emergency landing; long enough for the next song to load, and begin.

“I, I—”

“I mean, if this isn’t love, what is?” she asked, needing me to have the answer.

Again I found no words. I couldn’t speak to her. Couldn’t look at her.

“What are you thinking about?” she pleaded softly. She pressed her head against my chest, let the familiar cold of her tears soak through my shirt.

“Nothing,” I replied, the old conversational parachute that worked more like an anvil tied to a ripcord.

“Please tell me.”

I looked down at her, and for the first and probably last time, spoke with absolute honesty to a woman who I cared about:

I’d been thinking about my mother, about a certain Christmas morning when I was seven years old. It was our hardest holiday together. My father had been laid off before the previous semester had begun and it had plunged him into a crisis of being from which it seemed he might never emerge. He slept most of the day and haunted our house at night while we slept. Once, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d gone down for a drink of water and found the old man standing in front of the open refrigerator, talking to the appliance’s innards like a door-to-door salesman might present his product on some anonymous stoop, trying his damnedest to get his foot in the door. He’d sold vacuums door-to-door one summer when he was nineteen to save for the down payment on a car. He was brushing up the old pitch. I didn’t know this at the time.

Months later, when Christmas came, my mother picked out my presents, spent hours poring over the discount bins at Toys “R” Us and JCPenney’s looking for toys I might like that wouldn’t break the bank. When the morning of December twenty-fifth finally came around, I found her asleep on the couch. She’d waited until late to bring out the toys and had fallen asleep wrapping them. When I saw what Santa had brought, I cried. I said they were stupid. I said they were awful.

Like everyone, I’ve done some shitty things in my life. I’ve hurt good people, most of the time without meaning to. And I’ve forgiven myself for those misdeeds, because like everyone, I convince myself that the things I do, I do because I must. But I’ve never forgiven myself for what I said that morning.

My mother had tried to explain, rapidly wiping tears from her eyes before I could see them. She said that there must have been a mix-up. Santa, she explained, had confused our house with someone else’s. She said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often. But all I could do was cry and whine and complain about how good I’d been all year.

“I know, sweetie,” she sniffed, comforting me, hugging me. “You’ve been so good. We’ll write Santa a letter. We’ll write him a letter and he’ll clear everything up. You just have to give it a little time to get there.”

By the following Christmas, I didn’t believe in Santa Claus. Yet to this day, my mom still writes “From Santa” on a couple of presents every year.

“I don’t get it,” Ginger replied when I finished telling the story.

“That’s what I think love is.”

“But it’s such a sad story,” she explained. “What does that have to do with me?”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

The second slow song ended. The DJ came on to announce that the next song would be the final slow number of the evening. I’d reason, years later, that neither of us really
loved
each other then. I’d also figure that it didn’t really matter.

“I love this song,” she said. It was a song about dreams, about having a nightmare that the singer’s true love had died. “You know, I’ve never had a nightmare since I’ve been here. I don’t think I’ve had a single dream.”

I looked down at her, at the people staring at us with attraction and disgust.

“I love you,” I said again, to the whiskers on her head.

“I love you too,” she said as I pulled away, turned around, and began to run.

I found Paul in the gymnasium, trying to dribble a basketball and failing. As I approached, I watched him pick up a ball with both hands and drop it. He swatted at the bouncing thing and missed, waited for it to settle at his feet, then picked it up again. I looked at the floor around him, at the equipment he’d dragged from storage: dodge balls, footballs, soccer balls and nets, tennis rackets, swim caps, and racing hurdles. He was wearing a gym uniform. The shirt was inside-out. I picked up a metal baseball bat, felt the weight. I watched him pick up the basketball again. Outside, moonlight streamed in through the high windows. I held the bat over my shoulder, stood like a major leaguer. I thought about Ginger. I thought about Art’s blood in his mom’s ice cube trays. I thought about Christmas, and swung the bat.

They were asleep when I got home. The TV was on and the color bars watched over them silently. My father sat at the end of the couch with my mother sprawled out on the adjoining cushions, her head on Pop’s lap. The old man’s brow was creased, his throat moving and sounding, talking to someone in his dreams. His head ticked to the left and he spoke again, in his throat. His mouth opened suddenly, breathing in.

“Hey,” I said quietly. I put a bloody hand on his twitching shoulder. “I’m home.”

About the Author

Nik Houser
was born in a small town which, when Nik was a boy, made the mistake of selling off the logging rights of a sacred forest which the local Cheyenne elders called Ta’ovo’omeno, or Pissed-Off Mountain The clear-cut trees were sold to a mill which supplied a variety of companies throughout the region. That Autumn, while writing a paper on Christopher Columbus, Nik’s pencil, which had been made from Ta’ovo’omeno wood, came back to life and wrote a report of its own called “My Human Teacher is an Imperialist Butthead.” Nik’s teacher did not believe the boy’s story about his pencil, though not for long. Undead paper products soon began to terrorize the town. Zombie books made from Ta’ovo’omeno paper would slam shut at the most suspenseful parts. Wooden chairs scooted away when someone tried to sit in them. Soon, the plague spread to anything made of wood: grocery sacks split, to-do lists wandered off, whole wood-frame houses began to creak and sway, ready to fall. One afternoon, Nik found a Post-It note (made from YOU-KNOW-WHAT) stuck to the fridge which read “Gone to find a better son, please die before we return.” Nik and his family left town that very night. Recently, Mr. Houser tried to return to the town, only to discover that the covered bridge which lead to it had collapsed. There was no sign of the town beyond. Too many trees blocked the way. Please visit www.nikhouser.com

Story Notes

Other than special thanks to Kit Reed who pointed me in the right direction to find Mr. Houser’s story . . . really, what more can I say? Except, maybe, that if they do get that Zombie Channel going, I think this would make a keen basis for a series:
Gravestone High School.

Andy Duncan

“What is the truth?” the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings, and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo’s thighs.

Zora’s pencil point snapped. Ah, shit. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti—the one that rightfully should have been Zora’s—not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, but for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent god Damballa—the heifer!

Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. “He is mounted!” the people cried. “A loa has made him his horse.” The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed. Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson, too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. “Somethin’ got after me in mah sleep, Janie,” she had written. “Tried tuh choke me tuh death.”

Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.