Epitaph Road (6 page)

I recalled last semester's history class. Female political leaders, lawmakers, and social workers reestablished Social Security in 2073, when they wrote the constitution for the new country of North America.

I pictured the morning's lesson — San Francisco shedding its skin, the mushroom cloud rising above the city like a gloating grim reaper, surveying his handiwork.

I shut down my computer and pushed back from my desk. I was having a hard time coaxing the air out of my lungs, as if I'd just crashed into a wall chest-first.

Where was the world headed before Elisha?

I exhaled finally.

To hell,
I decided.

I'd had enough of being alone. I walked down the hall and banged on Sunday and Tia's door. No answer. I went downstairs and found them still in the kitchen, still locked in on junkyarddog on a wall display linked to Tia's e-spond.

“I thought you almost-fifth-levels already had this stuff,” I said.

“Not all of it,” Tia said. “Not in this context. You never know what they'll throw at you in your trials.”

“Being nearly fifth-levels doesn't guarantee us anything,” Sunday said, continuing to scribble notes in her journal.

She was right. The Worldwide Scholastic Boards administered elective achievement tests, which were nothing more than benchmarks to tell you how you were doing in preparation for your trials and eventually college. So far my best score was just above level four, but that didn't mean I couldn't do better with a new retake. Or ace my trials.

I shook my head. “You two ever do anything besides study?”

Tia smiled. Her eyes were still on the screen. “Sure.”

“We like to dance,” Sunday said. “How about you? You ever dance with a girl?”

“Everything I've
ever done
was with a girl,” I said. “I can dance. But I don't like it much.”

“Baseball?” Tia said. “You like that? We used to play on a team in Nebraska.”

“Catcher,” I said. “I wanted to pitch, but the league won't let guys pitch.”

“We could hit you,” Sunday said. “We can hit any boy's pitching.”

“Let's see,” I said, remembering that they'd barely been around boys. How good could their competition have been anyway? I headed for the basement as Tia darkened the display, giving it one last look. The girls followed me. I switched on the light at the bottom of the steps and grabbed three mitts, two bats, and a bag of balls off a shelf. We went back up. There was no sign of Mom or Rebecca Mack.

On the way out we passed a couple of women — more housemates — coming home after work. We now had a total of thirteen living here, counting Sunday, Tia, and their moms. A houseful.

I was the lone guy.

Luckily, everyone cooked and cleaned up after themselves, mostly. Two women did the major housework a couple of times a month and cooked dinners three nights a week for reduced rent, and I helped with housekeeping — my specialty was windows — and did most of the outside stuff — mowing, weeding, watering — for spending money. For a while I helped with the group cooking, too, but complaints surfaced about my other specialty — oyster pizza — so I was transferred out of the kitchen.

I glanced at the lawn on our way to our bikes. Still thriving on Sunday's rainfall, it needed a haircut. I'd better get to it soon or Mom would forget how glad she was to see me.

And speaking of Mom, as we passed the half-open parlor window, I heard her voice. It was raised, but another voice rose to meet it. Aunt Paige's. She'd come home early. A physician, she usually worked long hours in a downtown clinic. She almost always found me to say hello, but not this time.

“How did you find out?” Mom said.

I didn't get on my bike. I stopped at the edge of the driveway. Like twin shadows, Sunday and Tia stopped next to me.

“Never mind,” Aunt Paige said. “It's dangerous. You're overstepping —”

She paused in mid-sentence. I looked up at the window. Mom was staring out. Her face looked flushed. She saw the three of us, slid the window shut, and disappeared. Rude. No way to treat an accidental eavesdropper. I gave a bat and mitt to each of the girls, hung the bag of balls from my handlebars, and pretended to monkey around with the placement of my mitt. But my tactics got me nowhere. The closed window was doing its job. Or maybe Mom and Aunt Paige had continued their discussion at a lower volume elsewhere.

We got on our bikes and headed down the bike path. “What was that about?” Tia said.

“I don't know,” I said.

“That was your aunt's voice, right?” Sunday asked.

“Right.”

“She's your mom's sister?” she said.

“My dad's.”

“She and your mom don't get along?” Tia asked.

“They usually do,” I said. I held two fingers in the air, no space between them. “They're close.” I pedaled harder. I wasn't much for conflict. I wanted to leave this one — whatever it was — behind me. But it stuck to me like the sweat that was materializing between my shoulder blades. What
had
they been talking about?
What
was dangerous?
What
was Mom overstepping? Was it the mysterious thing that had been weighing on her? Did it involve me?

The park was huge, stretching from Sand Point Way to the western edge of Lake Washington and north and south along the shoreline for two miles or more. We turned in at the entrance road — Northeast 74th, officially, but because of where it led and what it bordered, everyone called it Epitaph Road.

Next to me Tia and Sunday slowed. I followed them to the curb, where they stopped, straddling their bikes. What stretched out in front of us must have been impressive to the girls from small-town Nebraska: a wide expanse of grassy fields and playgrounds and trees and gardens, and to the left of all that another vast span of green, this one scattered with tall white crosses and punctuated by a soaring black monolith.

“What is this place?” Sunday asked.

I tried not to smile. At last I knew something they didn't. This bit of local history wouldn't have been covered in their test prep. “I had to do some research on it once,” I said, “but it
ain't
going to be included in your trials. I don't think so anyway.”

“You're
Kellen
me, professor,” Sunday said. I ignored her.

“We don't care if it's included,” Tia said. “We want to know.”

“I can talk and ride at the same time,” I said, and pushed off, coasting down the slight hill. The girls moved up next to me.

“This was a military base during World War Two,” I said. “Then it was converted to a combination government facility and park toward the end of the last century. After Elisha, a big part of it was converted again, into the site for a graveyard.”

“The crosses,” Sunday said.

“Yeah, but they're not just markers,” I said. “I'll start at the beginning, though.”

I felt their eyes on me. Even Sunday was quiet. All I could hear was an occasional chirp of a bird and the distant soft noise of gas-fed flames, real or imagined. “A giant hole, ten stories deep and as big as three soccer stadiums, was bulldozed out. For days, dump trucks and garbage trucks, draped in black, arrived at the gravesite, weaving through crowds of mourners, dumping tens of thousands of bodies, some cremated but most not, into the hole. Cremation took too long.”

“What about the crosses?” Sunday said.

“Did she take her pill today?” I asked Tia.

“You're getting under my skin, Kellen,” Sunday said.

“Go on with the story,” Tia, the adult in the group, said.

“Other trucks had other destinations,” I said, taking my time. The field of crosses and the monolith were growing closer. “Barges at the waterfront, desolate areas in eastern Washington and neighboring states where holes had been dug, freight trains heading east, north, south.”

“We had burial sites in Nebraska,” Sunday said. “Outside Lincoln there's a huge one where a cornfield used to be.”

“Maybe some Seattle dead ended up there,” I said, trying to be civil and adultlike, before going on.

“After nearly a week, this grave was almost filled. I've seen photos showing a lake of bodies. The workers — almost all women — stopped with ten feet to go and topped off the hole with dirt. More dirt was added over the years as the bodies decomposed and settled.”

I glanced at Sunday, giving her a clue:
Here comes the part you're so interested in.
“Work crews sank white metal pipes deep below the surface to collect and burn the methane gas from the decaying. If you stand near the pipes, you can see that they extend above the grass fifteen feet or so.”

“But they look like crosses,” Tia said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Somewhere along the way, someone got the idea to attach a horizontal bar to each of them. So now we've got flaming grave markers.”

We reached the monolith. It stood at the closest edge of the field, next to a walkway into the graveyard. Now I could hear the gas burning for sure. I stopped to give the girls a better look. “It's a monument,” I said. “Thirty feet tall. Carved from black granite, smooth on all five surfaces. Weatherproof displays are imbedded in the stone at eye level, one on each side.”

“Displays?” Sunday said.

“The monolith is the one tombstone for the whole gravesite,” I said. “Touch the screen and you can get to the entire list, the names of every person identified before the trucks started rolling — men, boys, infants, a few women.”

Many of the names were followed by words of remembrance — epitaphs — written by loved ones. My grandfather's name — Joshua Winters — was on the list. I'd found it many times. After it my grandmother and her children — Dad and Aunt Paige — wrote:

We watched for you, every breath a prayer,

while days became shorter and nights became colder

and hope became heartbreak.

But only the bear came.

Dad had told me the story of this bear — the huge tracks through their campsite, the stare-down — or smell-down — across the water, the gift of fish. I sometimes wondered if that same bear was still alive and wandering the hills of the Olympic Peninsula. But I never looked up any facts on bears. I'd rather not know their life expectancy; I'd rather imagine the bear, gray-muzzled now, maybe, cruising the shoreline of that lake for berries, searching along the water's edge for another free and easy meal.