Whistling Past the Graveyard (25 page)

Donny laughed aloud at his own joke and wished Jim was here. Jim usually came up with clever shit like that. Jim would have liked that joke, would have appreciated it. Would have patted him on the back, fist-bumped him, and then stolen the joke for his own repertoire. Which was okay. Jokes are free and everyone should take as many as they could, that’s how Donny saw it.

Smiling, Donny walked along the rail fence. Up ahead he saw an old guy on a ladder wiring a scarecrow to a post. The scarecrow was dressed in jeans and a fatigue jacket, work gloves for hands, and a pillowcase for a head. Straw and shredded rag dripped from the sleeves and pants cuffs. Shoes were mismatched, a Converse high-top sneaker and a dress shoe with no laces. Donny slowed to watch the man work. The man and the scarecrow were almost silhouetted by the sun. The image would have looked great on a Halloween calendar. A perfect snapshot of harvest time in the American farm country.

He liked it, and smiled.

“Looks great,” he said when he was close enough.

The old guy only half-turned. All Donny could see was grizzled white hair and wind-burned skin above pale eyes. He nodded at Donny’s fatigue jacket.

“Afghanistan?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Donny.

“You left the war,” said the old man.

“No, sir...I reckon the war left me. It’s over. They’re cycling most of us home.”

The old man studied him for a few long seconds. “You really think the war’s over?”

Donny didn’t want to get into a political debate with some old fool.

“I guess that’s not for me to decide. They sent me home.”

“Did they?” The man shook his head in clear disapproval and said, “The war’s not over. No sirree-bob, it’s not over by a long stretch.”

Donny didn’t know how to respond to that, so he began edging further up the road.

“Son,” said the old man, “some folks join the army to fight and some join to serve. What did you join for?”

“To protect my home and my family, sir.” It sounded like a bullshit platitude, even as he said it, but in truth it really was why Donny enlisted. Ever since 9/11, he was afraid of what might happen here at home, on American soil. Donny knew that he wasn’t particularly smart and he was far from being politically astute, but he knew that he wanted to do whatever he could to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. In school, it had been Jim at his back, who kicked the asses of bigger kids picking on the geeks and dweebs. Donny hated a bully. As far as he saw it, terrorists were just bullies of a different wattage.

“Gonna be dark soon,” said the old guy, apropos of nothing.

Donny glanced at the angle of the sun.

“Yeah. In a while, I s’pose.”

“We all got to do what we can.”

With those words, the old man nodded to himself then turned back to his work. After half a minute Donny realized that there was nowhere to go with that conversation.

Gonna be dark soon.

Yeah, well, sure. Happens a lot around nighttime.

Crazy old fuck.

Donny walked on.

When he was just at the end of the Guthrie fence he heard a sound and turned to see a man riding a small tractor. Far, far away, though. Way on the other side of a harvested field. The tractor looked like one of those really old kind, the ones that looked a little like a 1950s hotrod. It chugged along, puffing smoke but not really making much noise. At least not much of it reached Donny. Only an echo of an echo.

He cupped his hands around his eyes to try and see who was riding it. But all he could see was a man in coveralls with hair that could have been white or blond.

Even so, Donny lifted his hand and waved.

The man on the tractor waved back.

Maybe another old guy, but not an old fuck.

It was a simple conversation between strangers a mile apart. Donny wondered if it was a stranger, though. Might have been another of the Guthries. Or it might have been someone working for them. Or, hell, maybe it was whoever bought the farm if the surviving Guthries sold it after the Trouble. Didn’t much matter. It was just nice to see someone.

Anyone.

The Guthrie farm ended at Dark Hollow Road, and Donny lingered at the crossroads for a moment, staring down the twisted side road. Not that he could see much, certainly not all the way to the Passion Pit where everyone went to get high or get laid, but it was down there. That’s where he and Donny went with those two girls. Last place he went in town before he climbed onto a bus to go learn how to be a soldier.

That last good night and day. All those laughs, the snuggling, cuddling sex in the tent with Judy, while Jim and Cindy screwed each other’s brains out in a sleeping bag by their campfire. A great night.

But then he thought about Judy. She hadn’t written to him, not once in all the time he was away. He never heard from her after that night.

That was strange. It felt bad. For a long time it made him wonder if he was lousy in the sack, but over time he realized that probably wasn’t it. Judy had gone to college and that was a different world than a war half a world away. Maybe the sex and the pot they’d smoked was some kind of close-one-door-open-another thing. Like he and Jim were doing with their last blast weekend before going to war.

Maybe.

He’d written to her, though.

Four letters with no replies before he got the idea that she wasn’t ever going to write back.

In some way he supposed she was as dead to him as his folks and town. And Jim.

“Jesus, you’re a gloomy fuck, too,” he told himself. He turned away from Dark Hollow Road and the dead memories, disgusted with himself for thoughts like that.

On the road, the traffic was still a no-show, so he drifted into the center of the two-lane, liking the sound his heels made on the blacktop. A soft but solid
tok-tok-tok
. The echo of it bounced off the walls of trees that divided one farm from another.

At the top of a hill he looked down a long sweep and the beauty of his town nearly pulled more tears from him. The farms were not the geometrically perfect squares of some of the agricultural areas he’d seen. Some were angled this way, others turned that, with hedgerows and fences and rows of oaks to create borders. Cornfields swayed gently like waves on a slow ocean. Pumpkins dotted green fields with dots of orange. Autumn wheat blew like marsh grass in the soft breeze.

High above, a crow cried out with a call that was so plaintive, so desperately sad that the smile bled away from Donny’s features. With the distortion of distance and wind, it sounded like the scream of a baby. Or the banshee wail of a woman kneeling over the body of a dead child.

Donny had seen that image, heard that sound too many times. In Iraq, in Afghanistan.

He touched his shirt over the scars, remembering pain. Remembering all the dying that went on over there.

But it went on here, too.

While he was gone, his town died, too.

Except for the one car that crossed the bridge, there hadn’t been a single vehicle on the road. A tractor in a field hardly counted. And only two old sonsabitches at the Guthrie place. All of the other fields and the whole length of Route A32 were empty. It was Halloween. The road should have been packed with cars. Jeez...had the Trouble totally killed the town’s tourism economy? That would seriously blow. Just about every family in town had their income either tied to farming stuff like Indian corn and pumpkins or to attractions like the Haunted Hayride, the Haunted House, the Dead-end Drive-in, and other seasonal things. Had the Halloween Festival been revived? Could he have been wrong about the town starting to come back from the Trouble?

It was weird.

Donny felt suddenly scared. Where
was
everyone else?

Had the town died for real?

Had he come home—come all these miles—to a ghost town?

High above the far row of mountains he saw a white cloud float between him and the sun. Its vast purple shadow covered most of the horizon line and as it sailed across the sky toward him, it dragged its dark shadow below, sweeping the land, brushing away details with a broom of darkness.

The belly of the cloud thickened, turned bruised and was suddenly veined with red lightning.

A storm was coming.

He hadn’t noticed it building, but at the rate it was growing it was going to catch him out here on the road.

He suddenly wondered if that’s what the old guy on the ladder was trying to say.

Gonna be dark soon.

He looked over his shoulder at the road he’d walked. It was a black ribbon fading out of sight as the shadows covered it. Up ahead was eight miles of hills between him and a bar or a Motel 6. He chewed his lip as he debated his options. The breeze was stiffening and it was wet. It was going to rain hard and cold. And soon.

Maybe he could go back and ask one of the guys at the Guthrie place for a ride into town. Or a dry spot on a porch to wait it all out.

He could have done that.

Didn’t.

Instead he let his gaze drift over to the thick wall of oaks and pines beyond the closest field. He could haul ass over there and stay dry under the thick canopy of leaves. Yeah, sure, you weren’t supposed to stand under trees in a lightning storm, but you weren’t supposed to stand out in a cold rain and catch pneumonia either.

Thunder snarled at him to make up his mind. The first big raindrops splatted on the blacktop.

He cut and ran for the trees.

-4-

As he ran he thought he saw the car again. The Jeep Grand Cherokee that looked like Jim’s. It bumped along the rutted length of Dark Hollow Road, a dozen yards to his right, beyond the shrubs and wind-bent pines.

The car was heading the same way he was. Going away from the main road, following an unpaved lane that only went to one spot. The Passion Pit that had long ago been carved out of the woods by generations of hot-blooded teenagers so they could try and solve the mysteries that burned under their skin. Donny had lost his cherry there. So did most of the guys and girls he grew up with. Getting popped at the Pit was a thing, one of those rite of passage things. It was cool. It was part of being from this town. It was what people did.

That car, though, why was it heading here right now? Wrong time of day for anything but a quickie. Wrong weather for anything at all. No tree cover over the Pit. Rain would sound like forty monkeys with hammers on the roof of an SUV like that.

The car kept on the road, going slow like it was keeping pace with him.

Eventually it would reach the Passion Pit, and so would he.

How would that play out?

If it was a couple looking for privacy, they weren’t going to be happy to see him. But, Donny thought, if it was someone who took a wrong turn in a heavy rain, then maybe he could leverage a ride in exchange for directions.

Worth a shot.

But the car pulled out ahead of him, bouncing and flouncing over the ruts, splashing mud high enough to paint its own windows brown. Donny watched it go.

“Nowhere to go, brother,” he told the unseen driver.

Donny angled toward the road, thinking that if the car was going to turn around at the Pit then he wanted to be where he’d be seen.

He jogged through the woods, staying under the thickest part of the leafy canopy, sometimes having to feel his way through rain-black shadows.

When he got to the edge of the clearing he jerked to a stop.

The car was there.

Except that it wasn’t.

It was the wrong car.

Same make, same model. Same color. The muddy tire tracks curved off the road and ended right there. Those ruts were only just now filling with rainwater.

But it had to be the wrong car.

Had to be.

“What the fuck...?” Donny said aloud.

The car sat there at the edge of the Pit.

Maybe not “sat.” Hunched. Lay. Something like that. Donny stared at it with a face as slack as if he’d been slapped silly.

The car was old. Rusted.

Dead.

The tires were nothing but rags, the rims flecked with red rust. There were dents and deep gouges in the faded paintwork. Spider-web cracks clouded the windshield. The side windows were busted out; leaving only jagged teeth in black mouths. Creeper vines snaked along the length of the SUV and coiled around the bars of the roof rack.

The car was dead.

Dead.

Cold and rusted and motherfucking dead.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to think about something like this. His mind kept lunging at shreds of plausibility and reason, but they were too thin and slippery to grab. This made no sense.

No goddamn sense.

He stood just inside the wall of the forest. It was thinner here and rain popped down on him. Hitting his shoulders and chest and forehead like a big wet finger jabbing him every time he tried to concoct an explanation for it.

He turned and looked at the curving tire tracks. No chance at all that they belonged to any other car than this. He looked at the car. No way it had driven past him. He looked at the road. There was nowhere else to go. The Pit was the only destination on that road. The Pit was the only place wide enough to turn around and go back, and besides, Donny had been close enough to the road to have definitely seen something go past him.

It made no sense.

No sense.

No sense.

Donny didn’t realize that he was crying until the tears curled past his lips and he tasted salt.

“Oh, man,” he said as he sagged down into a squat, buttocks on heels, palms over his face, shoulders twitching with tears that wanted to break like a tide from his chest. His voice sounded thin, like it was made out of cracked glass. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”

“Yeah,” said a voice behind him. “It’s all total shit.”

Donny almost jumped out of his skin. He whirled, rose to his feet, fists balled, heart hammering, ready to yell or fight or run.

Instead he froze right there, half up, bent over, mouth open, heart nearly jerking to a halt in his chest.

A figure stood fifteen feet away. He’d managed to come this close without making a sound. Tall, thin, dressed in a Pine Deep Scarecrows football shirt. The shirt was torn, with ragged cloth drooping down to expose pale skin beneath; the material darkened as if by oil or chocolate, or...