Raising Stony Mayhall (47 page)

Ruby says, “We’re not giving anything to Delia.”

“Come on, what did she promise you? She had to offer you something.”

“I told her I wanted a memorial. For where he was found.”

“And what else?”

“Nothing else!” Ruby says. “We’re not giving her the body.”

“Then why are you doing this? Why don’t you just let him lie?”

“Because he deserves a decent burial,” Ruby says. It’s the reason she keeps handy to whip out whenever anyone asks. It’s all she had to say to her grandmother to get her to go along with the idea. “And because he
is
an icon. If we don’t bury him, if we just leave him out there in that ash pile, then his followers will try to dig him up themselves. They’ll run off with pieces of him like he’s a, what do you call it—a relic. One of those finger bones of the saints.”

Alice narrows her eyes, as if Ruby is the one with the religious ideas. And perhaps she is.

“We’ll have the funeral immediately,” Alice says.

“What?”

“Before Delia can make her move. You don’t understand these people. I’ll set up the chapel for Thursday.”

“That’s the day after tomorrow!” Ruby says. “That’s way too soon. Maybe—”

“We have enough bones.”

“Yeah, but not all of them. If we keep looking …”

Alice sets down the tiny bone she’s trying to place—an ankle or wrist bone, only Alice knows—and takes off one of
her work gloves. “Thursday, or no funeral at all. I’ll hide the bones myself.”

Ruby is angry, but she knows better than to argue with Alice when she’s like this. “Anything else, General?”

“I’ll ask Mom if she wants to speak at the service. I assume you’re going to say something?”

“Uh, sure, aren’t you?”

“The last time Stony and I saw each other it was an argument, which I won. No sense ruining my streak.”

This is completely wrong, of course. Alice did not win that argument. Not completely. Besides, this is obviously an example of Alice using her gruff exterior to hide her true feelings.

“I’m going to bed,” she says, and Ruby says she’s going to keep going for a while. “Take your best guess on them,” Alice says, meaning the bones. “I’ll straighten them out in the morning. Then we’ll get him into a coffin before Mom accidentally sees him.”

After several minutes of fiddling with a few bits that look like chips off the old skull, Ruby goes to the cardboard box in the corner. Inside is the package from Delia, as well as a red Etch A Sketch she found in an abandoned house. She unwraps the package, revealing a shiny white ghost—one of Calhoun’s Integrity Suits.

Oh, Ruby.

It’s a full-body model, from head to individual toe pockets. It is padded and reinforced to support a body—specifically, Calhoun’s ideal body. There are foam inserts to add superhero definition to the abs, and structural wiring to keep feet and spine and shoulders in alignment. It raises serious issues about what kind of shape Calhoun’s body was in
without
the suit. It’s quite possible that all Delia had to do to kill the man was unzip him.

Ruby pushes the two long tables next to each other. On one table lies the disjointed skeleton, and on the other the unzipped I-Suit. One by one, she transfers the bones into this Halloween costume. A laborious process. She’s trying to be so careful, fitting each tarsal and scapula into its assigned slot, but isn’t it doomed to failure? The bones are not wired together, or even glued. As soon as she tries to lift the suit, the whole agglomeration will jumble to the bottom. Bag o’ bones indeed. The plan is ridiculous.

She keeps at it for hours. She gets sweaty and cranky, swearing at Stony for the condition of his bones, which hardly seems fair. Sometime late in the night she picks up the final piece. She slips the skull under the mask-like hood and zips the suit up to its bony chin. Then she lifts one of the suit’s hands and places it atop the Etch A Sketch.

“I know you’re in there, Uncle Stony.” She is addressing the mannequin on the table. “Time to get up.”

Ah. This is sad. The girl is so distraught with grief, she’s delusional.

“I know you can hear me, motherfucker.”

Hey now.

“Just move your hand, then. I couldn’t find a fucking Ouija board, so this will have to do.”

The suit does not move, the fingers do not twitch. Of course not. Stony is no more in this bag of bones than he is in the empty water bottle she keeps beside the table, or in her left tennis shoe.

“Okay, fine,” she says. “You want to play hardball?” She goes upstairs to her bedroom, trying to keep quiet so as not to wake her aunt and grandmother, then quickly returns to the basement. She’s holding a large stack of paper bound in a thick rubber band. And a box of matches.

“Yeah, I bet I’ve got your attention now, don’t I?”

The manuscript isn’t Stony’s memoir—that’s in the binder, and it’s a lot thicker. Besides, even Ruby knows that there may be some historical value to that. But this—this is nothing. Stony’s amateurish attempt at fiction.

She lifts the cover page into the light. “Christmas for the Dead,” she intones. “A Jack Gore, Deadtown Detective Novel.” She strikes a match.

A stray breeze from a corner of the basement ripples the flame, and the match goes out.

“Shit,” she says. She looks around the basement. Studies the deflated suit on the table. Then she crouches, guarding the matches with her body, and lights another. The breeze whips up, to no avail. When she stands up, the cover page is aflame.

Damn it.

It’s no easy thing to animate a collection of ossified odds and ends, even pieces that used to belong to me, even ones so lovingly arranged by my deranged niece. Maybe with time and effort I could persuade myself to own it. Settle into this loosely wrapped junk shop. Convince myself that I am
here
and no place else. Inside this second skin, not soaked into the soil of my hometown like rainwater.

My problem last year—my whole unnatural life, really—was learning how to forget myself. The brain eaters were coming. People were dying. All I had to do was let go of the particular arrangement of bones and skin that I’d grown up in and take on a new, larger body. I thought I could do it. I’d learned so much in Deadtown about defining my body on my own terms. What was the difference, really, in moving
around a dead stick, and becoming the ground it was stuck in? Purely psychological. A mental backflip. Yet I couldn’t make it happen. I couldn’t let go of this body, until Officer Tines burned it down like an old house.

It was an accident.

Suddenly I was kicked out like a stubborn teenager and forced to find a new home. And once I was out … well, I adjusted. Now it’s difficult to remember what I saw in the old place.

The page she’s holding transforms from a thing on fire to fire itself, and Ruby drops it to the floor. She stamps on it—a little vigorously, I think. She’s crying now, but angry tears. Is she mad at me, or herself?

I really don’t want her to be angry with herself.

She sits down against the cinder-block walls of the basement, her forehead on her arms. Eventually she hears a faint sound, a scratchy squeak, and looks up. The hand of the suit isn’t moving, but the white knobs of the Etch A Sketch are turning. Then they stop.

She lifts the arm of the suit and picks up the red tablet. On the gray screen is a wobbly message: PLEASE STOP

Ruby, despite the fact that she was expecting this (or only pretending to expect it? Breathers are complicated), squeals in what could be fright or surprise.

“Uncle Stony?” she says.

I think, Who the hell else?

Now she’s crying in a different way. The good kind of tears? You’d think that after growing up with breathers, and spending this past year doing nothing but watching them, I’d be a little better at interpreting this kind of thing. But it does seem to me that her face is a pleasant mix of shock and happiness and pride. Oh, yes, she’s proud of herself.

Stubborn girl.

* * *

I’ve been present at every funeral and memorial service in Easterly, and we’ve had a lot of them, especially in the first few months after the outbreak. Ruby and Wanda Mayhall sit up front. Ruby’s holding the Etch A Sketch, twiddling with the knobs to cover the fact that they sometimes turn on their own. She’s gotten into the habit of carrying it around at all times. Mom frowns but doesn’t say anything: proof, if we needed any, that Ruby’s status as only begotten granddaughter exempts her from behavior that would have earned a wrist slap for any of her own kids.

Alice gives the eulogy. She tells the story about finding me in the snow, and how they carried me home and baptized me in the kitchen sink. It’s very well written. Alice was always the best writer.

My bones are in the casket behind her. I convinced Ruby that I didn’t need them. I wouldn’t know what to do with them if we kept them: walk around like a skeleton from
Jason and the Argonauts
? I’ve freaked out enough people in my life, thank you. I also convinced her that my persistence in the material world—or rather, my failure to leave it—needed to remain our little secret. What good would it do for people to know that their town is haunted by a ghost? So of course Ruby immediately told Alice. And then Alice and I had to have a fight about why I didn’t tell her earlier. (I think I made a convincing argument, despite—or maybe because of—being able to write only a line at a time.) We agreed, however, that it would be a bad idea to tell Mom. At least for now. No one wants to be responsible for a heart attack.

Near the end of the service, the middle Stanhoultz girl stands up to sing the song Mom requested. Lizzie is fourteen, and her entire family, mom and dad and five other siblings,
made it to the elementary school the night of the outbreak. Mrs. Cho swears that Mrs. Stanhoultz is pregnant again. Lizzie sings “I Will Meet You in the Morning” like a born Baptist. She has a clear, bell-like voice, and Mom is crying by the first chorus. Let me tell you, you haven’t known guilt until you’ve fooled your mother into watching your own funeral.

I still think about leaving for good. Checking out of this accidental afterlife I’ve found myself in. The door opens a crack. But I hesitate. I linger. It’s not that I’m afraid of oblivion, or hell, or the absence of a promised land. Oh, I’ll admit that sometimes I entertain fantasies about a very Iowa kind of heaven, a place with a big kitchen and a large table and an infinite pot of coffee, where Junie and Crystal and I can argue about nothing while the snow blows outside the windows. Some nights I open that door and gaze into the black tunnel and think about stepping through.

And then I hear Ruby waking up, bitching about the humidity, or Mom laughing dryly with Mrs. Cho over some fresh news, or Kwang firing up his tractor. And I think, not yet. Maybe stick around for a little while longer. Until Kwang has babies. Until the enclave is safe. Until Ruby finds someone to love.

Someday I’ll step into the dark. But not yet. Not yet.

Read on for an excerpt from

Published by Del Rey Books

Pax knew he was almost to Switchcreek when he saw his first argo.

The gray-skinned man was hunched over the engine of a decrepit, roofless pickup truck stalled hood-up at the side of the road. He straightened as Pax’s car approached, unfolding like an extension ladder. Ten or eleven feet tall, angular as a dead tree, skin the mottled gray of weathered concrete. No shirt, just overalls that came down to his bony knees. He squinted at Pax’s windshield.

Jesus, Pax thought. He’d forgotten how big they were.

He didn’t recognize the argo, but that didn’t mean much, for a lot of reasons. He might even be a cousin. The neighborly thing would be to pull over and ask the man if he needed help. But Pax was running late, so late. He fixed his eyes on the road outside his windshield, pretending not to see the man, and blew past without touching his brakes. The old Ford Tempo shuddered beneath him as he took the next curve.

The two-lane highway snaked through dense walls of green, the trees leaning into the road. He’d been gone for
eleven years, almost twelve. After so long in the north everything seemed too lush, too overgrown. Subtropical. Turn your back and the plants and insects would overrun everything.

His stomach burned from too much coffee, too little food, and the queasy certainty that he was making a mistake. The call had come three days ago, Deke’s rumbling voice on his cellphone’s voicemail: Jo Lynn was dead. The funeral was on Saturday morning. Just thought you’d want to know.

Pax deleted the message but spent the rest of the week listening to it replay in his head. Dreading a follow-up call. Then 2 a.m. Saturday morning, when it was too late to make the service—too late unless he drove nonstop and the Ford’s engine refrained from throwing a rod—he tossed some clothes into a suitcase and drove south out of Chicago at 85 mph.

His father used to yell at him, Paxton Abel Martin, you’d be late for your own funeral! It was Jo who told him not to worry about it, that everybody was late for their own funeral. Pax didn’t get the joke until she explained it to him. Jo was the clever one, the verbal one.