American Dead Read online

  His mind emptied itself, all pouring out into her.

  Her lips curved, her body arched and tight. Her face glowing and eyes shut as if she were laying in the sun, caressed by heat and verging on unconsciousness, standing warmed like a basking reptile on the edge of a childhood dream. The ice hanging over windowsill was melting clear tears down the glass.

  He filled his eyes with her body, her taut pale belly, her breasts drawn gently down to her armpits, heavy flesh pulled flat by inexorably gentle gravity. Her sharp chin and her curved mouth.

  “You're nothing to me, Nathan, nothing at all.”

  “I know. Nothing.” He kissed her softly between each word.

  He had no understanding of life without her. How many years now had they been married? Ever day with her seemed a lifetime. She was forty-two years old, and he was only a few months away from forty. Did that mean they'd grown up? He didn't feel forty. He felt young still, felt like a child still.

  He'd entertained the idea of suicide throughout much of his youth. When he was a boy he'd been convinced that he would kill himself before his twentieth birthday. It had seemed inevitable. That age came and went, and then he met her, and then he gave himself to her. It was a kind of death, and it agreed with him. He drank life from his wife's slick cunt, and all the while the pain of her hand twisting tighter and tighter through his hair.

  Nathan thought of his daughter. His little Gena. God, she'd grown up so fast. She was old enough now to figure things out for herself. How much did she know? He had hidden himself for so long, it had become a kind of skin. Cut through and it stings and bleeds. He could feel his embarrassment like a sickness inside of him.

  She'd been babysitting for one of the neighbors yesterday, had come home wringing her hands with a solemn faced little girl, bare knees raw and cut. The blood was shockingly red on her pale legs, dark with embedded gravel. The little girl's lower lip trembled and her cheeks were damp with tears. “I only left her alone for a minute.” Gena had said, sounding like she was on the verge of tears herself.

  Jessica had cleaned the girl's cuts in the bathroom. Brackish water was running from the corroded faucet, and Gena sank down against the wall, her hands shaking. He hadn't known what to say. He hadn't know how to talk to her. Who are you who came from me?

  Jessica and he had stood by the door and watched them go, shoes scuffing, back out into the park. “She's so young.” he had said.

  “Sally?”

  “Gena.”

  “She'll be grown up soon.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  Jessica had pushed him aside and shut the door.

  * * *

  He touched the lighter's eager little flame to the tip of joint. She breathed in. Exhaled. Pale smoke flowed from her mouth. It disappeared into the colored light which bleed in through the drawn curtain. Nathan pulled it back and look out at the dark sky, at the hazy gold disk of the sun suspended in black cotton clouds.

  He lifted himself onto his side and looked at Jessica. Her skin shone, slick with perspiration. Her hair was tangled. She closed her eyes, blowing smoke out her nostrils. “Where are you, Nathan?” she mumbled the words around the cigarette.

  He stared at the ceiling for a long while before he spoke. “I was fired yesterday... well... 'let go' is how he put it, but... you know.”

  She laughed a little. “Jesus Christ, Nate, you wait until now to tell me this?”

  “I'll find another job.”

  “No you won't,” she said, and rose above him. She grasped his jaw and forced open his mouth. Casually, she stabbed the tip of the joint down onto the wet surface of his tongue. He twisted in her grip, wincing as she extinguished the hot point. Involuntary tears ran down his face. She stared down at him, her expression inscrutable.

  The pain swam through him, lifted him. “I will,” he wanted to say, but he could not speak. Smoke rose between his teeth.

  She shrugged on the lacy white robe that he'd bought her for their tenth anniversary and she left him laying there on the bed, naked in the dusky half-light with the taste of ashes in his mouth.

  Nathan stared at the ceiling, transfixed and elated by the unexpected pain, the communing heat of it. His tongue seemed still to burn, like there was a coal sitting there and working its slow way through. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

  He shut his eyes, and he thought he could feel the little house moving beneath him. He sometimes dreamed that the trailer was rolling away, was moving slowly down into some vast green valley, wheels floating just over the ground. He let his feet hang out so that the soft grass lashed at his heels.

  Whenever he woke from that dream, in that upended moment between consciousness and sleep, it was always the lack of motion which surprised him most. But of course none of the trailers moved anymore. They were all up on cinder blocks now, settling into the soft mud. He'd been living here with Jessica for longer than their daughter had been alive. They'd promised each other that it was only temporary, that they wouldn't be here long. That had been nearly twenty years ago. Gena had never known anything else and he had long since forgotten.

  None of them were going anywhere.

  Kimberly Burke

  The alarm clock blinked at her: 12:00 12:00 12:00

  She sat up with a start. Had she slept that late? She couldn't have! Twelve. The power must have gone out again? God damn it!

  She groaned and lay back down on the bed. It took her a moment to remember where she was. The dirty-copper taste of old blood ran between her teeth. It was as though she hadn't slept, she was still so tired. She was always tired. She wiped her lips and turned to look at the man laying beside her.

  He resided in a deep and easy sleep, that uniquely male sleep which held no fear of violation. There was no worry on his dreaming face. One leg tangled in the bed-sheet and the other hanging off the edge of the mattress like a marionette's twisted limb. The black hair on his chest was thick and his beard trimmed to a scrupulously narrow strip down the chin. His dick was limp on his belly and, for an instant, she wanted to bite it, bite right though.

  Kimberly looked at his face. “Hello?” she said, and the word came guttural from her dry mouth. She reached between her teeth and felt at her tongue. It seemed too big, swollen and tender. She could taste him there, and fought the urge to force her finger down her throat, to vomit up his seed from within her.

  There were half-moon marks on her breasts, angry pink bites bound to no memory in her power to recall. She yawned and got out of bed. There was a moment of dizziness when she got to her feet. She put one hand against the wall and took a slow breath in through her nose. She pushed the heels of her palms against her eye sockets. Her pillow was smeared with makeup, like a chalk drawing of her face.

  Kim sank down and felt about the floor for her clothing. This was her trailer, she knew, though it felt alien and unfamiliar to her. She gathered the underwear knotted just under the bed. It was the last day of her period. She peeled off the soiled pantyliner before she slid her thickish legs into the lace-bound holes. The bra-strap itched at her shoulder blades. She felt so ugly. So very old.

  How long had she slept? She went to the window and parted the blinds. Sunrise red light crested beyond the pines, spilling down on the park.

  The man in the bed seemed vaguely familiar. She crawled to the corner and felt at his crumpled jeans. His wallet was buffed black leather so smooth and artificial that she could hardly believe it had once been an animal's skin. She rubbed her thumbs on it and thought of cows chewing stupidly in a green field, of young farm-boys running their clutching hands over the cow's tough hide.

  His name was Kevin Peterson, his address somewhere across town. A younger version of his face stared from the license photo, eyes oddly wide, as though he was stretching his lids to their maximum tolerance. His hair, so neatly arranged now, had once been wild and long, all the way down to the shoulders.

  A Polaroid photo fell from the wallet when she opened it. Kim reached down and picked it
up.

  Kimberly Burke 4/7/02 stared blankly up at the camera. Her mouth slightly open, red-rimmed with smeared lipstick, her eyes black with mascara. Her breasts were held up in her hands, blue veins showing through pale skin, the flesh gone soft with age – she had to support them so they didn't droop so much. Her bones seemed to have turned to jelly, all that remained was the loose flesh, seized up and proffered. She sat like a child on the floor, her legs bent at the knees and tucked beneath her body so that her thighs looked much wider than they really were. Her dark red hair was tied behind her head in a loose pony-tail, held back with an pale green band.

  She looked at the picture for a long time, and wondered why Keven had taken it, dated the night before.

  She knew why, of course. She'd had her picture taken like this before. But that was over. She remembered now who the man in the bed was, someone out of her past, someone she'd not expected to see again. She had Dan now; Dan was a regular boyfriend, and he would be coming for her soon. She couldn't let Dan see her like this.

  She and Dan had met at one of the substance abuse meetings she'd been compelled to attend by that judge. He'd been clean now for six months, showed no signs of backsliding. She still used, but not so much that she couldn't hide it from him. She didn't need it like some people did. Giving it up would be easy if she ever decided to do so.

  The camera was on the floor beside Kevin. She picked it up and found it surprisingly heavy. She pointed it down at the sleeping man and took his picture.

  There was a flare of colorless light and the picture printed itself into her hand. There was nothing at first, a blank space waiting for Kevin to fade into focus. The flash-illuminated bedroom seemed gaudy and unnatural in the sudden burst of captured light. The faux-wood paneling and the plaid bed-sheet made the picture look like something out of its time.

  She compared the two photos. Somehow he wasn't so vulnerable as she. What was it about women that turned them so weak in pictures? She hated to see her face, hated to be captured like that, bent to the will of the viewer. And yet she could not bend Kevin. He slumbered on, undisturbed.

  She returned the camera to its place on the floor. There were wet tissues and a crinkled licorice wrapper in the little garbage bin by the door. She tossed both Polaroids in.

  She dressed quietly.

  The man groaned in his sleep and turned onto his side. He brought his fingers to his mouth, and she thought for a moment that he looked like a child. His face was blank with the thoughtlessness of sleep.

  She reached down and gave his foot a shake. “Kevin? You have to go now, Kevin. Come on.” The man in her bed groaned, one eye flicking open, gummy and watering. “Come on,” she said, “You've got to go. Tell him that I'm not interested. Tell him to leave me alone.”

  Kimberly left him fumbling for his clothes; she knew better than to stay within reach of a waking man. The trailer was eerily quiet. The kids must still have been sleeping. The sink was filled with crusty dishes. There was food rotting on the counter, flies buzzing at the scraps. She stood there looked down into the drain, pushing her fingers idly through her long tangles of hair. Her head felt as though it were splitting open, like a cracked egg broken and poured out.

  Her arm itched. She scratched at the little marks there, pink marks like bug-bites along the vein. Outside the kitchen window the April sun was spilling gray fire.

  This was it: the end of the world. She had been waiting so long.

  Everything changed when she first got pregnant. Her father had just about killed her. “Only fourteen years old!” he said, rage in his eyes, hatred for her and for all women. Glared at mother as though it was her fault as well.

  “Did he force you?” her mother had asked later, cheeks wet with tears, her eyes empty and bovine. “It's all right if he forced you, Kimberly. It wouldn't be your fault then. Is that it?”

  And that was when Kimberly truly began to hate her mother. She had seethed, had convinced herself that it wouldn't be long until He rescued her from this thing, this family-thing which had grown up around her like lattice-work. A beautiful prison behind the white picket fence and phony smiles.

  That night her dad beat her, worse than ever before. Mom had to take her to the hospital. She told all the people there that Kimberly had been raped by a strange man. What could she say? She'd had to go along with it. A woman from Planned Parenthood came to talk to her but Mom wouldn't allow it. They wouldn't stand for an abortion. That just wouldn't have been Christian.

  The months crawled by, and she'd sat there in her bedroom, clutching little baby Alice to her breast and waiting for Him, but of course He never came. What man would? Twice betrayed, and her life began.

  He was dead now for all Kim knew. Anyway, she found someone new soon enough, someone to take her away from that place, from those people. He put his baby in her and he put heroin in her and he left her. She used on and off during the pregnancy, whenever she could afford to. Anything to take away the sting: she had been abandoned again, betrayed again. Junk was the river and the sunlight. She could live without it, but there was no motion, no color. Living sober was like building a house in a desert, and just over the ridge an oasis.

  She named the baby Jeffrey, and discovered soon after that she could trade sex for money, for heroin directly sometimes. At least Jeffrey's father had left her the trailer when he left, left it in her name even. Bastard. Trapped her in this place of his, left her there to rot in his memory. Even those times when she gave up using for a week or a month, there was still never enough money for anything, and two kids to feed! Those had been bad years. Hard years.

  She'd had three more kids since, none of them deformed, thank god. She'd seen that happen with the children of other users, they came out all messed up, had to be destroyed sometimes. She'd tried not to use when she was pregnant, had tried hard. She only slipped up a couple of times, though nothing bad came of it, thank god. Pregnancy, she'd found, the whole process of childbirth, it was its own kind of high, the ultimate cure for loneliness. She felt so empty when she didn't have a baby growing inside, didn't have a baby suckling from her body. It just wasn't the same once they started to grow up.

  She walked the length of the trailer. Her children were sleeping behind closed doors. She put her ear to the wall and listened to them breathe. She opened the door a crack: Garret and Sally down on the floor, wrapped in blankets, Walker sleeping with his face to the wall. Sally's corn-silk hair drawn across her face.

  Kimberly left them. She found herself in the bathroom mirror.

  She saw the face from the photograph there in the glass: her copper hair tangled, mascara bleeding darkly from under her eyes. Her lips red and soft as overripe fruit. The eyes, abyss deep and muddied green. Face of the dead. There was something beautiful about a dead woman, she thought.

  The phone rang, sharp and dissonant and urgent. She jumped. Hurried across the trailer to answer it. “Hm, hello?” she bit off the words through the chattering of her clenched teeth. The telephone frightened her. The last time she'd spoken to her father had been by phone, the last time she'd spoken to HIM, the last time she'd spoken to the man who left her the trailer. Phone calls meant someone was leaving you. Her father, dead five years ago and she hadn't even gone to the funeral. Why should she have gone? What had he ever done to earn it? Bastard!

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “J-Jeff?” She bit down on her tongue, tears welling in her eyes. Oh god, not her son. Not today.

  He sighed heavily, the sound of it twisted and mechanical through the telephone line. “It's me.”

  He was tired of her, he despised her. She knew that, she could hear it in his voice. She didn't care, she didn't need love from her children. Children were to be loved, nothing in return. They were a part of her, what did she care what they thought? What did she care if they hated her? She was used to being hated.

  She drove her fingers deep into her hair. “I'm sorry... it's... I'm not really awake yet. Are you alright?”

&n
bsp; Jeffrey was her second, her beautiful child. Eighteen or nineteen years old now; she couldn't remember exactly. He'd been away almost a year, away at school. College! She was so proud of him, missed him so terribly. Even before he left, those years of semi-residence. He'd spent so much time working she barely saw him! But it had all paid off. A child of hers, going to college! God, she was so proud of him.

  For a moment there was only the hissing of silence over the phone line, and then: “I'm fine, I guess.”

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Not really. I just wanted to let you know that I'm coming home.”

  “Home?” Kim blinked, confused. She didn't understand. Wasn't he at school? Hadn't he gone away? Was it Jeffrey on the phone or was it his father, that man who had left her the trailer in her own name and vanished with no more than a phone call? Jeffrey sounded so much like his father, she couldn't bear to hear the voice, to be reminded that he was not wholly hers, that he belonged also to that man.

  “Yeah.” His voice flat, revealing nothing.

  “Are you... staying long?” She gnawed a strand of her hair.

  “I don't know,” his voice sounded strange, flattened out. “A while, probably.”

  Kim clutched the phone. Her head was throbbing. “When are you coming?”

  Kevin stirred in the next room. The faucet in the bathroom came on; she heard splashing water. She hoped that Jeffrey couldn't hear it. He'd always hated it when she had men over.

  Jeffrey didn't bother to answer her question. “You haven't talked to Alice, have you?”

  “Not recently.” Kim felt a dull ache along her spine. The pain of bearing a child never really went away, not completely. And then they left like a limb tearing itself off, left phantom pain in the womb. Poor Alice, poor lost child.

  “Is she doing alright?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “I heard she was coming back.”

  What time was it? Kim wondered. Didn't she have to be somewhere? Wasn't somebody waiting for her? “Is that why you're coming back? Just to see her?”

  “I'll see you too, Mom.” His voice so brittle and sarcastic, so terse. His father had never been terse, he'd said everything on his mind without evocation or evasion no matter how good or bad it might be. Even that last time, over the phone when he called to tell her that he was leaving her and leaving her the trailer. He spoke calmly and beautifully across her tears. Sixteen year old with two beautiful babies, left twice. She still didn't know how she'd survived it all.