American Dead Read online

  The line was dead. Jeffrey was gone too.

  Dan would be here soon. She had to get rid of Kevin before Dan arrived. She hadn't had many boyfriends, not really. Most of those she had she'd met when she was working. Anyway, she didn't do that anymore, she had a job now. A real job. Last night had just been... nothing. It had been nothing.

  Kim went back into the bedroom, looking for the man.

  There were folded bills on her dresser wrapped around a little clear-plastic baggie, still half full of a dirty-white powder. Just something to take the edge off. A parting gift. No, not a gift. A payment. She sat down on the edge of the bed and she looked around the room. The silence was heavy, voices in her head crowding about like chattering ghosts arrayed: her children, her boyfriend, her boss, her parents, her friends. She thought about her children. She did not know how long she sat there.

  She heard the front door open, heard Dan's raggedly warm voice calling to her.

  The pictures were gone from the garbage can. Her picture was gone. Kevin must have taken them with him when he left. She took a quick hit of the stuff in the baggie and grabbed the folded money off the dresser and crammed it into her pocket, fighting back a yawn and rubbing her nose.

  It was going to be a long day.

  Jeffrey Burke

  Jeffrey's head rocked against the window of the Greyhound bus as it rattled down the old highway. He stared out at the shoulder of the road. The pavement was crumbling, the edge running ragged – no more than a haphazard blur as the vehicle sped along the twisted road.

  It felt like he had been traveling for days. The rumble of airplane engines still echoed in his ears, all those planes drawn down to the tarmac like circling carrion birds. It was in his nostrils still, the sterilized reek of the airport terminal: a smell like a toilet stall that had just been cleaned, sickness of the body drowned in the odorous choke of sanitary chemicals.

  Jeffrey had seen the trailer park from the air. It had looked unreal from such a height, the array of homes like matchboxes scattered in a muddy sandbox. He'd felt very small looking down at it. Sitting there in the cramped airplane seat, trying to ignore the wet snores of the man beside him, he had looked down and seen the nation through scraps of cloud, spread out like a vast collection of decrepit dollhouses, all arrayed with haphazard pride on the barren earth.

  He was coming home. He'd expected to feel something. A pang of regret, maybe. Disappointment. Shame, perhaps. The first in his family to go to college, and he was coming home. Giving up not even a full year in, everything he had worked for turned to chalk in his hands. It should have destroyed him, but he felt nothing. Felt curiously empty.

  He stared out the window of the Greyhound. The trees drooped under the weight of season's final snowfall. Beyond were the rolling brown hills, damp and hunched, their sunless northern faces pale with frost.

  Nothing had changed.

  Jeffrey looked at his hands. Cream-in-coffee brown, a white scar across one palm. He remembered the cut. He'd got it climbing the old screen, years ago when he was still young. His big sister had dared him, and of course he'd done it. Jeffrey had never learned how to say no to Alice. He was halfway up the blank white face when he grabbed onto a folded bit of sheet-metal, curled inward through one of the gaps and black with corrosion. He hadn't made a sound, hadn't let go. Alice was staring up at him, both hands shading her eyes against the harsh summer sun. Without a word, he started climbing back down. Blood ran down the white screen where he put his hand against it, shocking red palm-prints like a series of crimson finger-paintings. He had to use both hands to climb, tearing open his palm every time he gripped for a blood-slick handhold.

  Mom yelled at them both the whole way to the emergency room. Alice cried when they gave Jeffrey a tetanus shot. She'd always been afraid of needles. On the way back from the emergency room she put her hand on his knee and told him that she had never seen anything so brave. That had made it all worth it. He'd smiled at her. The pain meant nothing, not if she thought he was good.

  Jeffrey Burke was one of five children, though Alice was the only one of his siblings he knew well. As far as he knew, none of them shared the same father. Certainly none of them shared his. Once he had asked his mother, his lily-skinned red-haired mother, why no one else in their family was the same color as he. She kissed him on the cheek and said that he was a child of the earth and told him not to mention it again. For months after that, he spent his nights lying awake wondering what she had meant, feeling as though there were something terribly and fundamentally wrong with his very existence and sick with fear at the thought.

  When he was in middle school a black couple moved into the park. They were the first dark-skinned people he'd ever actually seen in Verden, people like him. He couldn't remember their names, only their faces shining as though illuminated by some inner light. They left the park after only a few months, moved to Utica, he'd heard. He still thought about them sometimes, about what his life might have been like if he could only have been their child.

  It was the thought of them which got him through high school, got him to drag his grades up just high enough to get into a decent college, got him to work like a dog for five years until he'd actually raised enough money, with scholarships and loans, to send himself to college in San Diego for a degree in architectural engineering.

  And now he was coming home and he didn't know what he was going to do. There was nowhere else for him to go.

  He caught sight of his reflection in the smeared window of the bus. There were shadows beneath his eyes – those big brown eyes that he'd always felt were a bit too wide, always looked surprised about something. His curly hair was bleached blond, the dark roots just starting to show. He didn't know why he'd dyed it, couldn't think of an explanation. He didn't much like the way he looked, he supposed.

  They passed the sign. Verden New York: Population 1,970. His sun-tanned California classmates wouldn't have even believed that towns that small existed.

  He was close now.

  The bus rumbled to a halt at the familiar stop. A crooked sign on the edge of a shaggy wood. The door yawned open. He was tempted to stay on the bus. He could be happy here, he thought, just drifting in the stream for the rest of his life, never leaving, never arriving, only traveling. At least then there was always hope, always the chance that what waited beyond the next hill would be better than what he had known. A ragged woman climbed up the stairs, black plastic bags crinkling in her bony hands.

  Jeffrey got off the bus. He set his bags down on the damp earth beside the highway and watched the bus pull away, turn back to the road. It left him him standing in a memory. The forest, the trailers, the old movie screen, it was all just as it had always been. There was a letter missing from the old matinee sign. High G rge Park, it read. Broken English.

  His mother's trailer was right there across the road, still that raw amber shade of rotten fruit. Cobweb clotheslines laced across the space between trailers, like veins or wires connecting each home to the next. Now that he saw it right in front of him him like this, so real, he knew that he couldn't go back. Not right away.

  There was a bar just down the road from the trailer park. A stand of dark-barked old sycamores spread their naked shrouds between the two, as though in an attempt to shield them from one another. He picked up his bags and started towards the slouching dark building, his shoes squelching in the cold mud.

  The bar didn't have a name, not a proper one anyway. In a former life it had been the Pastoral Diner. That place had closed down not long after the movie theater. Now it was just Harry's, called so after its owner and proprietor. Harry was a man with little imagination and even fewer scruples. He served to anybody who would pay, regardless of age or ID. The police didn't seem to care, possibly because they drank for free, possibly because they simply couldn't be bothered to concern themselves.

  Jeffrey went inside. The paint on the door was peeling off in long strips. Harry's was the sort of place which was only b
earable in dim light, and so it was kept, foul in the murk. The walls looked like they were made of cardboard, though much of their surface was hidden by glossy posters of airbrushed women draped over chrome motorcycles, their figures endowed to the point of obvious surgical enhancement, their skin all white and their hair all silk-smooth platinum blond. A glass-mouthed country song was slithering from static-heavy speakers. There weren't many radio stations with clear reception in Verden, clutched as it was at the foot of the low looming Upstate hills. You had to take whatever you could get.

  Jeffrey bought a beer and retreated with his bags and bottle to one of the shabby booths along the wall. He drank, swallowing the watery alcohol down with a grimace. The bottle shone with condensation. He wiped the glass clear with his thumb.

  He'd started drinking in high school, mostly just because everyone else was doing it. Scott and Michael and Andrew and Molly and the rest. There hadn't been much else to do. Even after Jeffrey started working there was still time to be killed, so much time he was sick with it. They took turns sneaking cold bottles out of their parent's trailers, smuggling them to those dark secret places where they could suck together at the round glass holes in peace. They drank with superior smiles tugging at their lips, knowing that they had tricked their parents, tricked the world. They had passed the test, gained admittance into something beyond adolescence. They smashed the empty bottles against the walls of abandoned buildings, against the wide mouths of concrete culverts lapped in dirty drain-water, smashed them just to watch the green and brown glass shatter and rain down shards onto the smooth wet rocks.

  In high school it had been an adventure. In college it was a requirement, it was survival.

  Jeffrey drank, staring blindly at the bare wall as the light through the drawn curtains grew dim.

  He was spinning his third empty bottle listlessly on the table surface when the door opened. A splash of light fell the scuffed wood floor and the little bell above the door chimed.

  The man who entered had short brown hair and a narrow chin-strap beard. He wore a brown uniform shirt and slacks. His features were rounded, youthful despite their owner's best intentions. Jeffrey knew him.

  “Andy!” he called across the room, and gave a lazy wave when the other man looked at him.

  A smile spread across Andrew Follis' wide face. “Is that you?” he asked.

  Jeffrey just grinned and shrugged.

  “Goddamn, man. Been a while. What's up?”

  Jeffrey nodded to the bar. “Get a drink, I'll tell you about it.”

  Andy slouched into the booth, eying Jeffrey across the table with a tall glass cupped in his hands. He looked down into his beer, like he was searching for a message in the foamy surface. Andrew hadn't changed a bit in the year since Jeffrey had last seen him. That was odd. It seemed to Jeff that a great deal of time had passed since he'd left Verden. Only nineteen years old, he felt ancient sometimes. Weary of life.

  “You're working.” Jeff nodded at his friend's monochrome uniform.

  Andy shrugged, pulling a face. “Eh. It's a job.”

  They talked, and it seemed to Jeffrey that there was a great distance between them which had not been there before. It was like he was shouting across a void, trying to remember how it had once been. They had been children once, not so long ago.

  He didn't say any of that, of course.

  They talked about high school, mostly. Their last common point of reference. The last time Jeffrey's life had made sense. There had been eight of them once, the children of High Gorge Park. Jeffrey asked where they all were, the friends he had neither seen nor heard from in the past year.

  “Huh,” Andy frowned, licking the foam from his lip. “Molly and Trevor are in college, same as you. Not back for a few weeks though, I think. You just here for the weekend?”

  Jeff shrugged uncomfortably. “Nah. Got out early.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  He forced a grin. “Well... you know... California.” It was easy to say that. California. The other. Anywhere but here. Americans were all the same, on that coast just like this one. So afraid of what was outside.

  Andrew laughed. He seemed unconvinced, but not especially concerned.

  “What about Scott? He still around?”

  Andrew shook his head. “Deployed.”

  “Deployed? Christ.” Jeff chewed at his lower lip, peeling bits of skin away with his teeth. It was a nervous habit of which he was fully aware, but unable to stop.

  “Yeah. Middle East.” A muscle in Andy's cheek twitched.

  “No shit?” Jeffrey gave the empty bottle another spin. “What about Molly's cousin, she still in school? About to graduate, right?”

  “Far as I know.” Andy finished his beer with a slurp, wiping a bit of foam off his mustache. “Hey, what about your sister? You heard from her?”

  “Not since the wedding.”

  Andy's expression soured. “The wedding. Yeah.”

  “I hear she's coming back, though. Any day now, actually.”

  “Divorced?” Andy asked, unable to disguise his glee at the thought.

  Jeffrey just shook his head. They'd all been desperate to escape, all of Jeff's friends from the park. None more so than his sister Alice. For her it was everything. To stay would have been death for her. She married an old friend of Mom's the day after her eighteenth birthday. Jeffrey hadn't seen her since. Two years ago now. None of them had been happy to see her leave like that, their mother least of all.

  There was a moment of awkward silence in the bar, the space filled with a wealth of unspoken recrimination. Jeffrey tried to break the silence, “And Mike? What the fuck is that guy getting up to these days?”

  Andy looked into his cup, as though hoping that it had spontaneously refilled itself. He scratched the back of his neck. “Eh... I don't know. I mean... He's fine. I'm sure Mike's fine.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Andy shook his head. “I don't wanna get into it... Mike is... he's not exactly... Well, we don't keep in touch.”

  Jeff sat back, “Jesus. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Things just change, is all. You know how it is. I mean, you remember what was like after he dropped out.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Jeffrey spun the bottle again.

  They talked for almost an hour before Andy rose from the booth, saying that it was time for him to be getting back. Back to where, he didn't say. Then, at the last minute, added almost as an afterthought: “You can crash at my place, if you need to.”

  “Yeah? Where's that?”

  "Shitty apartment out in the city.”

  “In Ithaca?”

  “You need a place or not?”

  Jeff nodded. Anything was better than going back to the trailer. “I guess I do. Thanks.” Only for the few nights, he said, than he'd find his own place.

  Andrew turned back expectantly at the door, waiting for Jeffrey to get up and to follow. Jeffrey knew that he should leave, should follow, should go out the door. But he couldn't rise; he sat as though frozen, staring across the dimly lit bar, unable to move. It was like he was still on the plane, still on the bus. Still moving.

  The bottle on the table was spinning, green glass whirling, twisting the light into terrible shapes on the table. He knew that he needed to go.

  Gena Riley

  Gena was smoking behind the high school. She was surrounded by rusted dumpsters, overfull hulks spilled fast-food wrappers and crumpled notebook paper on the salted asphalt. The heavy steel door beside her was locked, strictly for janitorial use. She'd come around from the front entrance. Nobody had seen her leave. Nobody had cared.

  There were two boys fighting in the parking lot, brawling like dogs with their tongues lashing and their fists clenched. She watched them idly, like she might watch a nature documentary on TV. She stood with her bag held in front of her like a flimsy polyester shield; it made her feel invisible, and safe. She stood up and crossed her legs, wobbling on her heels, unsure
if she should keep waiting or just go back inside. Molly had said that she would come by...

  Gena turned the cigarette in her fingers. Dirty smoke streamed lazily from her mouth. She could feel it rising across her face like the caress of ghostly hands.

  One of the boys across the parking lot pushed the other with a snarl, knocking him against Mr. Fredrick's station wagon. The math teacher's car-alarm began to shrill and the lights to blink. The boys scrambled away, startled into a momentary cease-fire.

  She flicked her cigarette to the ground and twisted out the smoldering butt under her shoe. She looked around. The world was gray. Nothing but gray within the high school's borders. The Verden high school building was the color of a chalk board which had never been wiped clean. The raw dirt which surrounded the high school building made it look as though it was rising up through the earth's crust, forcing its way towards the sun. She lit another cigarette.

  Three cigarettes later a pale blue convertible turned into the lot. Gena couldn't help but grin. The car pulled up right in front of her. Trevor Allocco rolled down his window and leaned out, smirking cheekily. “Hey girl,” he drummed his fingers on the outside of the car, “what's up?”

  Gena's cousin Molly leaned over from the driver's seat, “Jesus,” she giggled, peering over her sunglasses. “Sweetie, what are you wearing?”

  Gena looked down at herself. Tight black jeans with white flower patterns sewn into the back pockets. Pale blue barrettes in her black hair. Gray jacket over red t-shirt. “I don't know. What should I be wearing?”

  Trevor sighed dramatically. His curly dark hair fell over his eyes. “Ignore fashionzilla, you look great.”

  Molly punched his shoulder. “I didn't mean it like that!”

  “Ow! Shit, that hurt!”

  Molly gasped. “Shut up, you bitch! It did not! Don't listen to him, Gena, he wants you to hate me.”