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American Dead

  PW Cooper

  Copyright 2012 PW Cooper

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  Part I: Beneath the Screen

  High Gorge Park - Spring

  He had been proud to be an American. Living in the Land of Opportunity. A hopeful world. He had been hopeful. He had believed in America.

  He had waited so long.

  His body was in the gorge on the edge of town, out there past the shaggy old screen of the abandoned drive-in, out past the trailer park where the old homes were sunk like tombstones in the mud. They still hadn't found him. They were not looking for him. All the children, his friends, had gone to their distant lives in the cities of America. There was no one left now to search out the dead. How long until they came home again? How long until they found him?

  The trailer lot where he had lived was once a drive-in movie theater, though he'd never known it as such. The theater had gone out of business long before his time. A man named Charles Conner bought the lot in 1987. He built a house up on the hill over the empty lot and the broken screen and he waited there for the town to die. People gradually migrated to the trailer park when they could no longer afford to keep their houses.

  And now the house on the hill was quiet, all the lights dark. A limp cloth flag hung in one frosted window. The door was the color of old blood. The town was called Verden.

  The movie screen at the border between the park and the wood had always looked to him like a ruin of some long-vanished age. In the quarter-century since the theater had shut down nobody had ever bothered to tear it down. He'd wondered if maybe they were afraid of it. Large sections had decayed, slabs of flesh left to rot on the bone, and the pines beyond pushed their ruffled limbs into the gaps like thieves reaching for the lock through a broken window. The wilderness was growing over the world, and the people of Verden no longer possessed the strength to cut it back. The only other remnant of the drive-in was the re-purposed marquee by the roadside. The signboard which had once declared coming attractions to both lanes of traffic now read on each face: High Gorge Park: American Homes.

  Deeper through the pines was the trailer park's namesake, a ravine torn in the earth like a broken seam. Gnarled roots curled lazy along its edge, furtively grinding their wizened fingers at the stone. His body was deep below, invisible in the shadow.

  It was not the first time that somebody had died there. People still talked about Tad Harris, who'd been found there in 1972. The story was that he took his girlfriend to a midnight showing of Dracula so they could fool around without their parents bothering them. She – made uneasy, perhaps, beneath the bloodshot gaze of the Count – refused his advances. He pleaded and demanded and finally bashed her skull against the window of his father's truck. She opened the door, staggered out, vomited and was gone. When he could no longer bear to watch her blood running in the radial crack he too left the truck and wandered towards the screen, towards Christopher Lee's colorless face and scarlet lips, onward into the mouth of the woods where the deathless pines stirred. They found Tad's girlfriend the next day, gazing wide-eyed up at the empty screen with eighteen hairline fractures in her skull. She remembered nothing of herself except for her own name. She never quite recovered. He'd met her once years ago, seen her wandering the frozen foods aisle of the grocery store. She'd looked old to him, had a blankness in her face and a slackness to her mouth that had made him think there was a strand of drool there about to slide out.

  Two more days passed before they found Tad, his neck broken in the gorge half a hundred yards north of the drive-in, completely barefoot. His socks and shoes were never found. The police decided that it had been an accident. Most of the town considered justice to have been done, either by some dour judgmental god or by the twinge, perhaps, of a primeval karmic instinct. A few people thought that he had been murdered by his girlfriend's older brothers – and some others that he had been cut down by some dark spirit of the woods – but most accepted the explanation that he had simply slipped in the dark. They put up a guard chain along the edge of the gorge and were satisfied. Nobody, as far as he'd heard, had ever considered the possibility that Tad could have thrown himself into the gorge, fulling expecting to die when he landed. He just wasn't the type, they said.

  They knew suicide there. Such acts were common in that place. The Finger Lakes gouged into the crust of the world like the marks of some great cosmic hand. The cracked earth and the maze of gorges, all those dizzying tumbles into cold water rushing over black rocks. Those ravines had all seen their fair share of dead. He'd read about so many suicides that they lost their sting, lost their excitement. Just another body, not a person, only a vessel broken on the stones.

  High Gorge had lain dormant in the years since Tad's demise, the river running quietly through the deep woods on the extreme edge of Verden. Waiting and eating at the earth, its teeth watery and slow.

  His was a twilight village, the population of less than two thousand people dwindling steadily. After the aluminum plant closed in the late seventies it had all started to fade away, piece by piece until there was nothing left but a meager few farms and shops, most of them trending towards the red side of solvency. Nobody had any delusions: Verden would be dead soon, and all of its as yet unwritten history surely concerned a slow and quiet demise. He'd seen it even in his own lifetime, watched it happen and recognized it when he was a child. Every year the town looked a little shabbier, a little poorer. Death had a familiar stench.

  It was now two years into the new millennium and February snow fell like scraps of wet paper torn from the gray sky. Twenty-seven trailers were scattered on the lot like abandoned toys. His corpse waited in the gorge, blue ice creeping across gray skin. He had waited so long. He waited for America to find him.

  The trailer park was sleeping.

  Edward Smith

  Edward threaded the flimsy plastic tray into its slot atop the projector. He stroked the uniform heads of the slides, his finger like a nightstick across prison bars. He switched on the machine. Angry sparks of electricity ate through the coils of intestinal wiring. Light flooded out against the dirty white sheet he'd thumb-tacked to the wall; the sudden glare of it stung his eyes, accustomed as they were more to gloom than to light.

  Photography had been the first great love of his life. He'd worn ragged the corners of his father's National Geographic collection, dreaming of the sights captured on those glossy pages. His camera hung now on the wall from an iron hook, black plastic lens cap tightly in place. The odor of mildew and rot permeated the old trailer; he had long since ceased to notice such smells.

  The controller for the slide projector sat beside the machine, wire coiled so tightly that the thin black cord looked like a scribbled circle penciled over many times. He unwound it and dug his fingernail into the rubber button. The projector advanced the first slide into position, making a sound as though it were chewing, flat machined teeth crunching plastic into splinters. The first image splashed up against the wall, not a picture but these few words neatly printed in his own cramped hand: High Gorge Park, 2001

  He pushed the button again.

  January 4, 2001. A distressingly out-of-focus shot of his own trailer. The road-salt which Mr. Conner had so haphazardly spread shone brilliantly where the cut edges of the crushed stone caught the hard glare of the sun. A potted plant – hydrangeas – stood in the open window of the trailer
, squat and unambitious, reaching out its thin leaves like flat fingers unfurling. It had died months ago. He pressed the button.

  February 8, 2001: A portrait of the house on the hill. Michael Conner was sitting on the porch of his adoptive parent's home. There were holes worn in the elbows and knees of his clothes and a Yankee's cap perched over his sandy blond hair. He squinted at the camera, a vaguely ill expression on his face. Charles Conner stood in the doorway of the house, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his slacks, his face buried in shadow. Michael had moved away only a few weeks after the picture was taken. It was strangely disconcerting to see the house now, knowing that Mike was no longer there. Time ran on so fast, children grew up in a blink, the world emptying and filling like a human lung.

  Edward pushed the button.

  February 22, 2001: A picture of Nathan Riley brushing snow off the windshield of his station wagon. The old wood paneled doors were lacy with frost. The headlights glowed yellow in the pale dawn light.

  He pushed the button.

  March 3, 2001: Two women, Kimberly Burke and Adelaide Anderson, sitting together on the steps of Adelaide's trailer, cigarettes in their pale fingers. Their breath was a thin fog in the chill. Kimberly seemed to be laughing at something the older woman had said. Her curly red hair was swept messily about her face. Their noses and cheeks were flushed.

  He pushed the button, and left them behind.

  August 28, 1964: A picture, older than and immediately distinct from those which had preceded it. The color was washed out, the image grainy. This slide, this outlier, showed a young woman at the drive-in. She sat in the passenger seat of a car with pale leather seats, stripy popcorn carton in her left hand. Her blond curls were gathered up and held back with a pair of red hair-clips. She was blushing at the attention of the photographer. Her lips were very red, her face round and soft, her fair skin silver in the wan glow of the screen.

  Edward pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He looked at the picture for a long time. How long since he'd last seen her face, her true face? So many years had passed and all that was left was the photographs. They were the only proof of anything – memory eroding and ebbed. The theater where he had worked as a projectionist after all his attempts to find work as a photographer proved fruitless no longer existed. He supposed that he was no more than a few dozen yards from where the picture had been taken. The screen remained, slowly collapsing, but everything else had changed. The whole world in motion. The world in the photo was altogether unfamiliar. It was not supposed to be here.

  He turned off the projector and removed the offending slide from the tray. It looked just like all the others, maybe a little more worn. He parted the curtains and held the slide up to the light of the pale gold morning. There were stacks of boxes in the closet, all meticulously labeled. Three of those boxes bore the simple label: Samantha. How had this one slide found its way out? Perhaps he was going senile in his elder years. That thought which had once been so terrifying filled him now only with a sense of resignation.

  He returned the slide to its proper place in the closet and went back to his projector. He sat in his chair and took up the control.

  The order had been interrupted by his fiddling, a picture from somewhere in the middle of the set was projected against the wall.

  September 17, 2001: Another picture of the park. The trees across the street were resplendent in their autumn dress, leaves turned vibrant red and gold. An American flag hung in every window, like mourners at a military funeral, all the rusted trailers adorned in the full blush of patriotism.

  Edward remembered that day, remembered wondering and wondered still why it was that so many of the flags were made of plastic rather than cloth. Disposable plastic flags that stretched, warped in the heat as though melting. All the color ran out of them.

  He pressed the button to go to the previous slide. Then again and again. He took the long trek back towards the beginning of the collection, towards the beginning of the year. The last snow on the ground outside was fading in the sunshine.

  High Gorge Park, 2001

  Adelaide Anderson

  She held the empty cigarette carton between her thumb and forefinger. She read the Surgeon General's warning, printed along the side of the box in small black letters like the dense wriggling trail left by the feet of an ink-dipped bug. The thin paper and plastic lining crumpled like cling-film in her fist. She dropped it with a clatter into the empty metal garbage can.

  Adelaide sat in front of the dead-static television with a clay ashtray in her lap. Her husband had brought her the ashtray – though she'd not smoked at the time – from the gift-shop of a Native American museum in California. A tawdry remnant of a vanishing people, of an distant American past, it was painted a glossy enamel blue with off-white buffalo skulls ringing the edge. The inside was the burnt red color of western clay, stained dark from years of snubbed ash. A box of wooden matches sat inside the bowl.

  The match snapped angrily when she lit it. The flame sputtered a moment before going contently silent, trembling.

  She lit the cigarette and shook out the match until it left behind an arc of smoke. The match was shriveled and black and hot. She smoked without thinking, drawing the foul heat down into her lungs. The tip of the cigarette glowed in the darkness, she held it away a moment and looked at it.

  This was the last time. She was done after this. Smoking had been his vice, not hers. Never hers. The curls of habitual smoke rose like sun-stroked dust from between her fingers. Every Friday for more years than she could remember she went to the corner store, a half-hour walk both ways, and she bought her husband three packs of cigarettes. Always the same brand; the packaging and of course the price had changed, but the brand endured. An American lineage. The brand was here before us and it will be here after we are gone. The brand is the soul of America, enduring.

  Joe had been a smoker to the last, to the very day of his death. He'd used to joke about it: my coffin nails, he would say, a note of sarcasm in his strained voice. She remembered the way he would held them, almost timidly between his thumb and forefinger, and watch her through the dense gray haze.

  She so missed the sound of his voice, would have done anything to hear him again. So much of what he'd said to her had been cruel. His spite pouring from his worn throat. His rough tongue, her mother would have said, tongue rough as sandpaper to wear your heart smooth.

  Those details were all slipping away. The venom lingering in his eyes, the way his smoke used to make her throat tighten and her eyes water when he came home and to stare mindlessly into the television screen with a cigarette between his lips. She had forgotten all those things. His identity sloughed from him like a crust, eroding with time until what was left seemed almost to shine. The name, Joe Anderson, it didn't really mean anything anymore, just an arrangement of sounds she no longer had any reason to speak.

  Fragments of him lingered in her mind, relentless as the cancer which had eaten through his body. She knew his smell better than her own body, could still hear the echo of his voice in her head. All those days spent waiting for him to come home from work, all those nights spent limp beneath his plunging body, emotion swelling inside her. And always the disappointment when he came, when he came home.

  She remembered the wedding, remembered that hope-filled child wrapped in white who seemed now to be another person entirely. She remembered their first house, remembered abandoning it for this place not long after, the both of them hoping to leave behind the red-marked notices and the seemingly endless stream of bills. Joe hated the trailer park almost as much as she'd liked it. The days hadn't seemed nearly so long or so lonely when there were so many people around her, so many friends to be made. Of course her friends were all gone now, gone or dead. And then her husband left as well; the sickness and the hospital and the slow wasting removal of Joe Anderson from the world like he'd sprung a leak and hissed down to an empty pile of skin draped over suddenly frail bones. She remembered sitti
ng at his bedside and looking down into his eyes, those gray eyes staring silently and hopelessly from a shrunken skull. She remembered finding the pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his pants, hung up for good in corner of the hospital room, remembered going outside and lighting one, trying to forget that hollow look in a haze of brand-stamped smoke.

  And when she could bear to remember no longer, she switched on the television. Coils of acrid gray smoke rose about her as she listened to the burbling voices of the newsreaders, to their voices only and not their words. She had no interest in what they had to say.

  The world they spoke of was strange and unfamiliar. A world of terror and fear. It meant nothing to her.

  Nathan Riley

  His fingers were twisted together behind his back, wrists chaffing against the rope. She pressed him against herself. His tongue against her folded pink sex, moaning into her scent. Her eyes closing, her fingers winding through his thinning hair, her lips opening to draw a strand of saliva across her wet mouth. She wrapped her thighs around his head, dug her heels in just below the shoulder blades and held him there while he kissed at her.

  His lips pressed against the grape-vine tattoo winding round her thigh. He knew her better than he knew himself, could touch his fingers to each violet cluster in the absolute dark.

  “You want this don't you?” she asked him, tearing at his scalp with her sharp hands. Her voice was breathlessly light, clenched in her throat. One strand of her toxic-white hair was down across her face. She stared at the ceiling, eyes open and glassy with tears. She cried only when she was happy, never otherwise.

  He kissed her harder, hard enough to make her groan and clutch her thighs about him.

  The curtain was open a crack. There was a cardinal in the frost-whitened feeder outside the window. Nathan heard the sound of its chirping over the growl of the cars on the highway. The wind pushed relentlessly against the side of the trailer. Was the bird an omen? The red bird, blood and despair and terrible beauty.