Driving With Dead People (14 page)

“Fight.” (High jump with kick.) “Fight.” (Same.) “Fight.” (Straight down into the splits.)

She did it! My row erupted in applause and whistles. Becky smiled and ran off.

Twenty minutes later I saw her in the hallway with Donna Frazee and said, “You looked good,” but she kept walking. Maybe cheerleading wouldn’t help us after all.

The next day during homeroom, Mr. Martin came on the loudspeaker and announced the cheerleaders for what would be Becky’s senior year. Becky was not one of them. After all we’d been through, what would it have hurt for her to win? She had done a great job, and now she was going to be even more miserable.

That night I was in my room studying and heard her crying. I stood in the hallway, not knowing how to approach her. Becky and I had had our share of arguments, but I had taken on the “Peterson mentality”—that we could hurt one another, but no one else could.

I walked into her room and saw her sitting on the bed sobbing into her cupped hands. When she realized I was standing there, she turned and snapped, “What are you doing in here? My door was closed!”

“Looking for a pair of gray kneesocks,” I lied. I would have given anything to say something helpful, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Quit wearing my stuff,” she yelled, wiping away tears. “Get out of my room and leave me alone.”

“You almost won,” I told her without knowing for sure.

“Who cares anyway?” she said, getting up and grabbing a brush off her desk. “Get outta here.” She turned away from me and began pulling the brush through her long, thick hair.

I closed her door behind me, leaving her alone. I wanted to make her feel better, I just didn’t know how.

Having given up on Mom and Dad, I now looked for attention, meals, and stimulation in the outside world. I ran for class vice president and won. I won speech tournaments, and even the ones I lost were fun because all my friends were there. I spent the night at other people’s houses; I was a counselor for the summer arts and drama workshops for the elementary students.

Becky became shyer and even angrier.

I fell and broke my ankle, and Mrs. Bates, who taught AV at the high school, took me to get my cast put on.

One afternoon I heard there was a rumor going around school that I’d faked my broken foot to get attention. No one would tell me who was saying it, but Julie and I asked around, and Becky’s good friend, Alice Johnson, said, “Becky started it. She hates you.”

I had never been handed such undiluted truth.

Besides Becky, I had another problem. Mr. Selman was no longer being coy. He actively pursued me, kissing me on the mouth while I tried to shove him off me, and leaving love notes on my locker, signed “S.” Mom and Jim, lost in their love bubble, weren’t any help.

I thought of talking to Mr. Martin. I was sure he would help me, but I couldn’t imagine creating a huge scandal. Plus, I liked Selman when he wasn’t hitting on me. I was embarrassed, grossed out, and more than a little pleased to be getting some attention. I flirted with him, even while I cringed at the thought of him touching me.

I decided to deal with Selman in my own way.

One night I broke into Selman’s apartment with Julie, who knew he’d been pursuing me. It was one of the craziest things we ever did, but we hauled all his furniture out onto the lawn and set up his living room outside.

He left us a note the next morning written in red ink and taped to Julie’s mailbox: “REVENGE WILL BE MINE.”

We shrieked and ran around in circles. We were excited and horrified by all the possibilities.

“What’s he going to do?” Julie wondered.

“God only knows,” I said. “Probably slobber on us.”

When we got to school, he’d covered the outside of our lockers with shaving cream.

Julie and I turned up the intensity of our attacks, breaking into his car, releasing the emergency brake, and rolling it down the small hill beside his house. I pushed, and Julie steered it right into an alley. The next morning he was disheveled and late to class.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Someone stole my car,” he panted, shoving his briefcase under his desk.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“It’s not where I parked it last night, so I’m pretty sure,” he said.

“What if it accidentally rolled down the hill?” I asked. Selman turned to look at me with his good eye. He was starting to smile.

“Is that what happened?” he asked.

“I’m just saying it could happen. Maybe the brake wasn’t on,” I said.

“Peterson, if you took my car, I’m gonna kill you,” he said.

“I can’t really say for sure,” I said.

“I’ll expect my car to be in front of my house by four thirty p.m. today or I’m calling the police,” he said. “You’re lucky. If I hadn’t gotten up late this morning, I’d have called them already.”

Maybe he was harmless after all. He was a great distraction and was funny as hell. I wasn’t attracted to him, but at least someone was watching me closely.

He had admitted he loved me. Told me that after I graduated, we could date. I didn’t know how to tell him that was never going to happen.

But I loved him as a friend, and if he was inappropriate with me, I was doubly inappropriate. I shattered a window at his house while Julie and I were breaking in to change the outgoing message on his answering machine and steal all his silverware, I stuck extralong maxi pads all over his front door when I knew he’d be bringing home an attractive date, and I mooned him out the back window of a bus, my bare ass pressed firmly against the glass. Clearly, I was begging for his attention.

JoAnn was the only one who took it for what it really was. She threatened to drive to Elk Grove and kick his ass. Every time we talked on the phone, she was sure to ask about him.

“Is Selman still messing with you?”

“Not too much,” I’d say.

“Damn it. I’m going to kill that man. He’d better keep his hands off you.” JoAnn called often and sometimes came up and got me so I could spend a weekend at Ohio State with her.

When I was still fifteen, Julie rushed into my bedroom one sunny Saturday morning. Her eyes were red and swollen and she was talking fast.

“Wendy’s dead,” she said.

I wasn’t even awake yet. “What?”

“Wendy’s dead. She shot herself after the ball game last night.”

I sat up. “Shot herself where?”

“In the chest,” Julie said.

“And she’s dead?” I asked.

“Dad picked her up around midnight.”

Julie started crying again. I couldn’t move. All of a sudden my cozy pink room felt cold and spooky. All I could think of was Wendy holding those baby rabbits.

The phone rang. Our friends were starting to call. We decided to meet at Pizza Palace at eleven thirty. None of us were hungry.

Wendy didn’t get her picture in the
Elk Grove Courier
. Only an obituary that read:

At school Monday, I unlocked one of the glass showcases lining the hallways. As class vice president and a friend of Wendy’s, I felt I should do something to memorialize her. I put in a vase of red roses I’d picked up that morning and pictures Julie had brought me from Mrs. Johnson. Just as I was finishing the showcase, Mr. Martin walked up behind me.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“It’s for Wendy,” I answered. Mr. Martin put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

“Take it down,” he said.

“What?”

“Take it down,” he repeated. “We do not honor little girls who kill themselves. I don’t want an epidemic on my hands.” He turned and walked away.

What did he mean, “an epidemic”?

I took it down quickly, just as Mr. Martin had asked. I looked at the empty showcase, and thought,
Wendy is courageous, and I’m a coward
.

Just as Sarah Keeler had taught me that children die, Wendy taught me that you don’t have to wade through the insanity; you can get off the bus. This scared me so much that a sweaty panic swept over me. From that moment on I knew it was possible (and easy, with all the guns in my house) to end my own life.

The fall I turned sixteen, I spent Saturday afternoons in the high school cafeteria watching films of violent car accidents far more grisly than the ones Dad had filmed. For Mr. Meese, my driver’s ed teacher, this was his favorite part. Nothing pleased him more than one of us passing out cold on the cafeteria linoleum after seeing some teenager’s head lying on the side of a country road, his torso still in the driver’s seat. An eerie voice-over explained that he’d been drunk, driving more than one hundred miles an hour, when a deer stepped in front of the car. The impact hurled the deer through the windshield, decapitating the kid.

One day a boy ran out of the room to puke after seeing a film of an EMT opening the door of a compact car and revealing a blood-covered teenager shoved halfway through the windshield, her butt off the seat, and her arms, mangled and bloody, dangling at her sides. The camera panned to the front of the car where the top of her head had been sliced into sections from the shattered windshield, the skin on her face hanging in shreds.

Each film had running commentary on the dangers of not wearing your seat belt, driving while intoxicated, or speeding.

After the gruesome films, Mr. Meese would sit in the passenger seat, with me behind the wheel of the white driver’s ed car. I’d steer us toward the pharmacy to practice my parallel parking. After a few weeks and several harrowing attempts to enter the line of traffic on Interstate 75 around Cincinnati, I earned my driver’s license.

Before I was allowed to drive alone, I practiced in Mom’s car on weekends. The tricky part wasn’t negotiating the road, it was that every time I stopped, her loaded handgun slid out from under the driver’s seat and lodged itself under the brake pedal. She called it the “pea shooter.”

“This gun keeps getting stuck under here,” I finally told her.

“Kick it back under the seat,” she said, so I did—over and over again.

Like JoAnn, Becky decided to attend Ohio State University that fall. JoAnn didn’t exactly welcome Becky to college. She had been struggling with depression so severe, she was finding it difficult to get to her classes. She wasn’t sure what was so debilitating, but she didn’t want Becky (or any of us) to know.

Mom made Becky leave her old red Mustang. (There wasn’t parking available to freshmen anyway.) I’d finally have mobility and could leave the school bus, and my anxiety about catching a ride to Galesburg, behind.

I never thought I’d miss Becky, but I did. At least when she was home, the lights were on and someone was there. Now all the rooms were empty but mine. She was hateful, but she was home. Now I was all alone.

We had our licenses, so Dave told Julie and me that we could drive the Kilner and Sons hearse. He would pay us five bucks an hour to drive to the Cincinnati airport and pick up bodies that had been flown in from out of state. We’d drive a fully loaded gold Cadillac (they had traded in the black one) with an excellent stereo system, make money, and spend all our time together. It was the perfect job.

Julie and I felt mature getting to drive the hearse, and it was true that we’d finally lost the ugly awkwardness of puberty. She was busty with beautiful dark eyes and straight white teeth, and I was tan and lanky—not the types that usually showed up in a hearse at the cargo hold of the airport.

On the day of our initiation, Dave tossed Julie the keys and we drove over to the coin-operated car wash on Eighth Street, plugged in four quarters, hit the switch, took out the metal wand, and sprayed the hearse top to bottom.

“Are there towels in the back?” I asked Julie.

“I don’t think so,” she said, swinging the back door open. “No towels,” she reported.

“Now we’re gonna have water spots.” I was aggravated.

“Let’s get in and drive like hell so the water blows off,” Julie suggested.

We climbed in and sped out onto Highway 50 toward Cincinnati, water droplets vanishing behind us.

We stopped in Jennings Falls about ten miles west of Elk Grove to buy a pack of Virginia Slims and two Pepsis at the Sinclair station. We never smoked without Pepsis. A cigarette tasted nasty without the sweetness of a Pepsi chaser; plus, if I didn’t have something to drink, I coughed the entire time I smoked.

We weren’t technically allowed to smoke but, luckily, several of the other hearse drivers were heavy smokers and the cab already smelled like an ashtray before we even lit up.

Julie put in a Dire Straits tape and fast-forwarded to “Sultans of Swing.” With our windows down, our Virginia Slims lit, and our Pepsis cold, we were feeling pretty smooth. It didn’t bother us that people on the highway looked at us suspiciously as if maybe we had stolen the hearse.

The only glitch for me was arriving at the Cincinnati airport to actually do our job. I felt a rush of apprehension as we followed signs to the cargo area.

Grabbing the clipboard lying between the seats, I looked to see whom we were picking up: “Everette Linville. Eighty-two years old. Coral Gables, Florida.”

I was glad he was old. “It was his time to go,” as Granda would say.

Once we arrived, Julie enjoyed whipping the hearse around and speeding in reverse toward the loading dock, causing everyone to scatter. She kicked her door open.

“We’re here from Kilner and Sons Mortuary,” she announced in a deep, authoritative voice. “You have a body for us?”

The guy working the loading dock wore navy coveralls with
RAYMOND
stitched in white across the top of his pocket.

“Shouldn’t you guys be wearing dresses or something? Most guys picking up bodies at least wear suits,” Raymond said.

“I didn’t know there was a dress code, did you?” Julie asked, turning to me, in my denim cutoffs and peasant blouse.

“Didn’t know,” I said.

“She didn’t know. Next time we’ll be in our Sunday best. Where is this guy?” she asked, handing him the clipboard.

Julie took on a whole new personality at work. She was “don’t fuck with me” brilliant. Authority brought out what I thought was the “Julie of the future.” I could easily see her running her own company or becoming principal of a high school someday.

Raymond spoke into his walkie-talkie, and two men rolled out a cardboard box shaped like a coffin, lying on a gurney. Julie and I jumped onto the dock while the men unclipped the four black belts wrapped around the box and sliced open the clear packing tape running down the center.

“Expensive casket.” Julie nodded, looking inside. Raymond was opening the coffin.

Regardless of how many bodies we would eventually pick up, I’d never get used to the popping sound the casket made when it was unsealed, or the lid opening to reveal a human lying there. Mr. Linville wore a brown suit and a gold tie and had thick white cotton covering his face.

“What’s the cotton for?” I asked Julie.

“It holds their features in place while being jostled around on the plane. It also keeps the makeup from smearing and absorbs liquid that might seep out of the nose or mouth.”

Liquid seeping out of the nose or mouth? Disgusting.

We looked at the body. Julie pulled off the cotton, and Mr. Linville looked really good. No liquid.

“Shitty makeup job,” Julie commented. I looked at him again. He still looked pretty good to me. We checked his hands and clothing, making sure his shoes, jacket, tie, wedding ring—all the items listed on the manifest—were there. They were. Raymond placed the ten-by-ten piece of cotton back on Mr. Linville’s face, and I wanted to yell,
He can’t breathe!
and snatch the cotton away. But I was working, so I just stood there.

Raymond sealed the casket again and rolled it to the edge of the loading dock. Julie backed the hearse closer, and an iron lift attached to the dock lowered Mr. Linville down. We all grabbed the handles on the sides of the casket and shoved him into the back of the hearse. Dead people were heavy. Julie slammed the door.

“Well done,” Julie said. She turned to Raymond. “Later, Tater,” she said, changing back into her casual self as we hopped in and drove away.

On the way back to Elk Grove, we always stopped at the Hardee’s drive-through, where Julie asked for fries, “for the guy in the back.” This killed us laughing, even though the girl with the vacant eyes working the window never reacted.

Our new job suited us, but there weren’t enough people dying out of state to make it lucrative. We picked up a body only once a month, and sometimes not even that often. The real problem was that people needed to be picked up during the week when we were in school. Neither one of us could handle a full-time job with all the studying and extracurricular activities we had going, so we took whatever Dave could give us on the weekends.

When money became hopelessly tight, I called Mom in Dayton. “How am I supposed to pay for my books and gas and everything?”

“Ask your dad,” she said, as if it were obvious.

Mom didn’t give me money, even though she finally had a small income from Wright State, where she was now doing some teaching. She’d also received a good amount of money in the divorce settlement. But I was off her radar.

Whenever I needed money, I waited until the last possible minute when my gas gauge was approaching empty or I couldn’t afford lunch that day, and only then did I drive to Dad’s store, my gut soured from worry.

When he saw me pull in, he knew why I was there. By the time I got inside, the divorce papers were spread out on the counter, immediately putting me on the defensive.

His customers (who hated Mom and us for throwing poor Dad out on his ass) were sitting at the counter.

“What is it this time?” he asked. His customers chuckled, their fat asses hanging off the backs of the stools, their overalls covered in dirt.

“I need money to attend the Ohio State Speech Finals in Cincinnati,” I said, shoving my hands into the back pockets of my Levi’s. “We’re spending the night. I won both Sectionals and Regionals and have a shot at going to Nationals now.”

“Well, let’s see if that’s something I have to pay for.” He took his time running his thick finger up and down the clauses and sub-clauses while I stood awkwardly on the other side of the counter.

Finally he declared in a loud, pleased voice, “I don’t have to pay that. That’s your mom. Good-bye.” He waved his fat hand, shooing me away, my face burning red.

“Forget it. I should have known.” I turned to leave.

“Cry to your mom,” he scoffed.

“Mom doesn’t care, Dad. I won’t go to the state finals even though I have a chance to win a trip to Texas…. This is bullshit.”

“Your mother walked out on me. I didn’t make this happen.”

“You didn’t make this happen? You made everything happen. Why are you taking it out on me? I’m the one still standing here.”

“With your hand out,” he screamed. “I’m tired of beggars!” Dad tossed the divorce papers back under the counter and stormed off to the back of the store.

I reached over the counter, pounded the cash register with my fist, and took all the twenty-dollar bills.

One of the assholes on the stools yelled, “Glen, I think you better get out here.”

By the time Dad made it back up front, I was in my car with the doors locked.

I could’ve killed someone. I was a great student, a conscientious person who never drank or got in trouble. I succeeded in everything I set out to accomplish, and they didn’t give a shit.

I rolled down my window just as Dad stuck his head out the front door.

“I’m going to find a way to compete at the state competition, and I’m gonna win,” I yelled.

I turned on the car and saw Dad laughing through the large front windows of his store.

I threw the car into reverse, backed right up to his front steps, put it in drive, and floored it. I struggled to keep control of the wheel as the car skidded in the gravel. I heard a satisfying spray of tiny rocks peppering the front window and saw him bolting for the front door.

“I HATE YOUR GUTS! I HATE YOUR GUTS!” I screamed as I sped away, tears streaming down my face and onto the front of my shirt.

Twenty-dollar bills scattered all over the floor on the passenger side. Meaningless. Everything was meaningless. Especially me.

I drove around crying until the sun went down. There was nowhere to go. I finally went home to a dark, empty house.

Two weeks later, I felt a painful, pressing feeling in my lower back. I had chills and there was blood when I peed. Mom had driven down from Dayton to pick up some clothes, and when I saw her headlights pull in, I was relieved. She might be obsessed with Jim, but she usually came through when we were sick.

“I think something’s wrong,” I told her when she walked in. Julie and I were sitting on the stairs leading up to my room. “I feel terrible, light-headed and hot. There’s blood when I pee.”

“You’re probably catching the flu. You need to get rest. I can’t stay. I’m just getting a couple of things,” she said, walking into her bedroom.

Julie and I looked at each other in shock. I rubbed my forehead with the palms of my hands.

“I might need to see a doctor tonight,” I said in a loud voice so she could hear me from her room. She came storming out.