Among the Dead and Dreaming Read online

  I sat in the Goat most evenings, smoking and watching the sun go down. Our mother came out one night with a can of beer she knew I wasn’t supposed to have and sat beside me in the dark. “There’s plenty of girls who’ll love a hardworking man,” she told me. “Plenty of girls who can forgive the past.” I got up the next morning and started circling job ads in the newspaper. That’s when the anger started rising, the Goat behind our mother’s house used up and the anger rising as the guiding hand found its use for me. Not that I could see it yet. Not that I could name it. But I could feel it a little, change coming like a cool wind, something shifting down in my guts guiding me toward a life I wanted to live, a sweet cool wind just beginning to blow.

  Cash

  Sometimes I hated her, sure, just like anyone, but mostly I loved her. I was just trying to take us back to before, and she was the one who always played that Billie Holiday song, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” the words I spit back in her face later—not that it did any good. I was fucked up is all, this pressure grinding me down like I was going to explode if she didn’t wake up and help take us back where we belonged. I had everything before she took it away. That ain’t right—to give somebody something and then yank it away. I gave her a bracelet once, turquoise and silver, and found it broken on the floor of her room at Duval after her and Melanie ran. That pissed me off more than anything—just how easy she could throw things away, like there was never a thing between us. But I forgave her. Even though I wanted to kill her sometimes, it was only in my mind, and I forgave her, me going to her like I did that night really just a part of my forgiveness.

  Nikki

  I woke not knowing or knowing it wrong, Cash in my bed, but thinking it’s Daryl. Then knowing it’s Cash, not Daryl. And if not Daryl, it’s not what I dreamed it was of us making love, but something else. And if something else—I started to thrash. He punched me hard, cutting me with his ring. He punched me again and I pretended surrender, this roar in my ears. Because it was not Daryl, because it was something else, he should have known I would never surrender. If he knew me at all, he should have known that much.

  I reached and pulled and finally grabbed the knife from my pants pocket on the floor by my bed, fumbling with it behind his back, all this hatred and fear running so hot inside me. I opened it and lifted it and brought it down hard, and after he jumped, howling, I jumped, too, ready to stab again if he should come at me, screaming at him from the top of my lungs to get out, get out! He scrambled away while I stood on my bed with the knife cocked, my heart beating through my whole body, and I never felt so powerful—until the adrenalin wore off and I didn’t want to live anymore if he was alive.

  But I didn’t drop down to my bed like I wanted to.

  I went looking for Daryl, looking for people to surround myself with. I couldn’t find the right people though, so I made my way to the big house on Duval, hating Cash as hard as I could, stoking my hatred to make myself strong. Because I thought it would be him or me. Because I knew he would get a gun or a knife or just use his hands, and he’d come back for me and do it again. And he’d kill me. I didn’t want to give up my life like that, but my hatred was running out, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to hurt him, to kill him. I didn’t think I could, even though I knew I had to.

  I found him sprawled on the basement couch at Duval, barely awake on liquor and pills. I stood over him, but I didn’t know what to do with myself, didn’t know how to get back to myself. I’d always been strong, but that part of me seemed gone. I ran upstairs looking for something until I found a bigger knife, and then I tied him with twine—he was unconscious. I chopped off the tip of his finger, his pinky, hardly knowing myself at all. I bandaged the stub and ran, not knowing he’d bleed to death from his earlier wound, the stabbing, not knowing I’d be the one to survive.

  I took his fingertip with me to Oregon, wrapped in a pink silk pouch. I still have it. I kept telling myself it doesn’t count as rape if you’ve slept with the guy before, not half believing it even then. But I had to tell myself something. I lived off my hatred and fear for months, hunkered down like an animal as Alina came to life inside me. I made myself strong for the baby, thinking of the Patti Smith lyric—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”—and how I didn’t owe anybody anything. I was all rage and impotence, impotence and rage. After Alina was born, I realized Cash had been right all those times he told me I didn’t know what love was. I learned what it was loving her.

  4

  Burke

  Cash was still in high school when I got busted, bringing in as much money as me, maybe more—the point being, we was in it together. But when the cops crashed in, drawing down on me at six in the morning, I didn’t know I was sitting on all that blow Cash had stashed to move the next day. One of the pigs brought it out from my closet, and I knew I was going to prison, thinking they’d planted it, before learning later it was Cash bringing us down. So I took the fall, same as he would have done for me, and then, maybe a year later, somebody murdered him before he could even pretend to turn himself around. That’s when I started doing hard time, awful time, rotting for nothing.

  I studied his murder once I got out, but that was fifteen years gone by, and nobody in Waco knew who he was running with in Austin. It was most likely wrong place, wrong time, somebody ripped off or somebody jacking him, guiding hand of fate or I didn’t know what. The missing finger made me think of a Mexican gang, some payback shit I didn’t know about.

  Let it go, our mother said when I asked about it time and again. Let him rest.

  I settled into a line cook’s job at Denny’s, settled into something with a girl named Connie. I don’t know if we just grew tired of one another or what, but once she went back to Dallas, I had time on my hands. When a stroke killed our mother, time was the only thing I had. I thought a lot about Cash then, wishing he was home with me to go through our mother’s belongings, to remember our lives together as kids, back before we could imagine everything would go to shit like it always does in the end.

  I didn’t know about Nikki until I found a box of Cash’s stuff in my mother’s closet. There was an address book in there with Nikki’s name scribbled across the pages, and lots of other words he wrote about her—how she was hot one day and cold the next, how she was the only one he’d ever love, a beautiful angel, a fucking bitch, his sweet, darling baby, a dirty little whore. There was a bundle of polaroids, too, pictures of this beautiful girl—Nikki, I guessed—some of her alone and half naked, and some of her with him near the end of his life, when he wore long sideburns and a sculpted leather cowboy hat. She must’ve been nineteen, twenty years old, Cash looking so proud in a picture of him and her by the river—you know he couldn’t half believe he got her.

  I flipped through them pictures, glad for Cash to have found such a piece of ass, but wondering too why it couldn’t be me that had her—right now, the living one—wondering if they killed her after they killed him, if they took her and did unspeakable things before dumping her across the border, or if they paid her off and let her go, if she betrayed him somehow, making it all the worse, because she was what he had and cared for. I wondered if they tied her down, like they tied Cash down. I wondered if she was true to him at the end, if she loved him then and forever, if she was still suffering for him to this day. I never had a girl tear at me the way she tore at him. I could tell from the pictures it was the kind of big bad love I’d only ever heard about in songs.

  I knew he lived with a band down on Duval Street, in the same house they killed him at. I drove down there and found the drummer, Bo, and asked about Cash’s girl, this Nikki he was so torn up over.

  “You’d never forget her,” Bo said, and I knew it was true, a fever starting to burn in me even then.

  I showed him one of the pictures, and he said it was her, said she worked at Stubbs back then, but disappeared maybe a month before they killed Cash.


  I thanked him and drove back to Waco. I sat in the Goat, night after night, looking at her pictures and wondering what had happened between the two of them. Connie wouldn’t return my calls from her high horse in Dallas, so I drove up there one night and banged on her door until she threatened to call the cops. But she wasn’t half as hot as that Nikki, the girl Cash had while I was rotting. It didn’t seem like I’d ever be so lucky as to find a girl as good as he found in her, a girl to love and get torn up over, a girl as beautiful as that. I could tell by the way she looked at him in the pictures how bad she had it for him, how bad they had it for each other. I wondered if she was still alive, torn up over Cash, still aching for something only a Chandler man could give her.

  5

  Alina

  I know something’s wrong by the tone of her voice, but even after she tells me Kyle’s dead, I don’t believe her.

  It’s a trick, I think. She must have learned he’s coming to Interlochen Wednesday to visit.

  “This is about next week,” I say, “isn’t it?”

  “Next week?”

  “You know.”

  But she doesn’t know.

  She tells me about the accident. Crying and everything.

  “Okay,” I say, still not believing, even though there’s electricity in my hands.

  “They’re going to scatter his ashes in the Sound Saturday,” she says.

  But he’s coming here Wednesday, I think.

  “This woman he died with,” she says. “It’s crazy.”

  And I’m like, “What woman?”

  “This girl he grew up with. Cynthia.”

  And I’m like, “What girl?”

  She doesn’t say anything then.

  I swear to god, she must be in shock.

  And then, for a second, it hits me. Kyle. But just as fast I don’t believe. Then I do, then I don’t, then I do. And I’m like, Kyle. Then nothing. My big heavy dorm phone against my face. Then Kyle. I’m crying hysterical so a part of me must know. But another part doesn’t. He’s coming here Wednesday to visit. Just him and me. He’s dead. One thing seems to have nothing to do with the other. He’s coming here Wednesday to visit.

  Nikki

  I walk the beach and boardwalk for hours, a faraway line of container ships shimmering through the waves of haze and humidity. When we first moved from Seattle, Alina wanted to live down here near the ocean, but my job selling ads for the Long Island Weekly barely covered our bills month to month. We kept looking for a place we could afford until we found our little cottage in Long Beach, and then it seemed like nothing could ever touch us again. The best part of Alina’s childhood has been here, the most stable part, and these last few months with Kyle have made her feel, I don’t know, fuller maybe, part of why I wanted to build something with him—because she loved him so much. And after so many years, it seemed like I was ready for something, too.

  A shopping cart sits on the beach, its tracks leading back to the water, as if somebody pushed it out of the ocean. I want to preserve her ignorance, buy her peace with my silence, but every second I wait to tell her feels like a betrayal.

  When I finally go home and call her, she makes me say it again and again—Baby, there’s been an accident. Kyle’s gone. Yes. An awful accident. No. Kyle’s dead. I’m sure, yes. Oh, honey. He’s gone. No, I’m positive—until she finally breaks, crying and crying, and I know I should have told her in person, of course I should have. What kind of mother gives her daughter such news on the phone? I couldn’t afford another ticket, though, and put off calling for far too long, hoping to never tell her, as though I could have kept her safe and away forever.

  She cries and cries, and I can’t touch her, can’t hold her. What kind of mother?

  Hours later, when I hear her sleeping across the miles, her breathing soft and even on the phone, I take Cash’s finger bone from its pouch, but the finger tells me nothing. Years after he died, I felt bad for Cash—sad and sorry—just because he was responsible for Alina. I’d look at that fingertip as it rotted and became nothing but a chip of bone, all that was left of him, and feel as though I’d taken something from her. I never forgave him for what he did, but I couldn’t forgive myself either. I couldn’t even tell what might be forgiven in me, exactly, and what pieces of my past would always be unforgivable.

  6

  Mark

  Cynthia’s answering machine blinked four messages, but I knew not to check them, because checking them would mean she was never coming back. I wandered her place, picking things up and putting them down, smelling everything, Any second, it seemed, she’d walk through the door. “You’re never going to believe what happened,” she’d say, and I’d make us breakfast while she told me. There was a picture of us on her bookshelf, slouched into her parents’ couch the night I met Kyle in his black leather pants, finally home from his years in Asia. They were old friends from country clubs and summer camp, Cynthia and Kyle, and I’d been changing the subject away from him for years.

  I went to her room and piled clothes on her bed, armfuls from her closet and dresser drawers, underwear, sweaters, dresses, skirts. I burrowed into all of it. Whether or not she’d been sleeping with him, or for how long, hardly mattered now. I turned off the light, wanting to see her more than I had in months, to touch her and taste the salt and sweetness of her skin. Things had been bad between us since spring, but to never see her again? We always came back to each other. I picked up a sweater, smelled it, and threw it on the floor. The cat people dropped something upstairs, what sounded like a sledge hammer. I unwound a ball of leather, thinking it would turn into her red leather pants, but the legs were too long for her red leather pants.

  I sat up and turned on the light. The pants were black—of course they were. I rifled the pockets, finding a box of Nat Sherman Classics, Kyle’s pretentious cigarettes. I could hardly breathe. The secret lovers were dead forever with their secret that wasn’t secret anymore. Or maybe it was more secret now. Or maybe his clothes in her room meant nothing at all. I grabbed his cigarettes and pants and ran out of there, expecting to see her every second—running up the stairs as I ran down, calling my name from across the street once I was outside, following me home from Brooklyn on the LIE. “You’re never going to believe what happened,” she’d say, and there would be comforting explanations for everything.

  Elizabeth

  It’s not that I didn’t like her, I hardly even knew her, had met her only twice, when Tom and I flew to Providence to visit Mark at school. She was attractive and polite, too polite, I might have said, and she was sick that second time, Mark’s senior year, so sick she could hardly drag herself out of bed. It all seemed a little showy to me, something about their obsessive, touchy behavior, their devotion to each other, that felt just a little uncouth. Tom and I had dated all kinds of people in college, discovering who we were and what we liked, but those two—attached at the hip from first semester on. And the jealousy! I was careful not to show disapproval, knowing I could push him deeper into her arms that way. I kept my own counsel, comforted myself knowing it wouldn’t last, couldn’t last, and when it was finally over between them, Mark came back to Chicago and started working in politics, but with good people and for real change. Those were happy years, before I got sick. He met a woman at work I thought he’d marry. Liz. She was bright and driven, a reader, a cook. She said she didn’t want children, but lots of women say that. When Mark left his job with the congressman, I didn’t understand why until I found out Cynthia was in New York. “What about Liz?” I asked. She was in Washington full time with the congressman then, while Mark ran the field office. Maybe the distance between them was too much. Maybe he didn’t like that she was his boss, though I hoped I’d raised him better than that. In the weeks before he left he’d visit the house and sit with me, read to me. He’d bring vanilla ice cream and I’d pretended to enjoy it, though nothing appealed to me
anymore. Everything tasted like metal. I couldn’t beg him to stay away from her. It wouldn’t do any good. I didn’t believe in God, but I prayed He would help my son find the right woman to love.

  Mark

  I was forgetting her smell, the exact feel of her hands. The second I got home, I called her machine to study her voice. Maybe if she’d known she was going to be dead, she would have put more thought into her recorded greeting, singing or leaving instruction for the living: “Don’t ride on motorcycles,” she could have said, or, “Run up enormous credit card debt.” Until I’d moved from the city a few months before, my aunt’s place had been empty almost a year, and it still held phantom odors—old people smells mostly and decades of cigarettes. I imagined Cynthia at the table, pulling Nat Shermans from the pack and filling the kitchen with smoke.

  “Now you’re buying them?” I would have said.

  “Kyle left them.”

  “His pants, too?”

  “I’m not doing this,” she would have said, and I would have said, “Of course you’re not,” and we would have kept working that seam until we exhausted it.

  I lit one of Kyle’s cigarettes and noticed a picture of my mother hung by the basement door. There were pictures of her all over the house. Sometime during the long months of her illness, a shrink had told me the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can’t inhabit or comprehend. We can hardly even visit. Or, if we do, we’re merely tourists who need to get away fast as a matter of self-preservation. I’d just moved to New York from Chicago when my mother died, and was back with Cynthia after all those years since college. For a little while, we were able to bring something soft out in each other, a tenderness I hadn’t known in years.