Raising Stony Mayhall (6 page)

Useless.

He began to think that his mother and sisters were deliberately hiding the truth from him. What he needed was free rein at a library, a few hours in the stacks without his family looking over his shoulder. Since that wasn’t possible, he went to his next-best option.

“Here are the topics and keywords I’m interested in,” Stony said, and handed Kwang the sheet of notebook paper. He’d waited at the Cho house until Kwang came home, and made sure to pass him the list when Mrs. Cho wasn’t in the room. “Next month is the tenth anniversary of the outbreak, so there should be
something
. Check out everything you can find in the catalog. Whatever’s not on the shelves, write down the title and Dewey decimal number.”

“How do you know about Dewey decimal numbers?”

“I’m not an idiot. How many books will they let you check out?”

“I don’t know, five? I really don’t have time for this tonight. Me and the guys—”

“What guys? The
team
?”

“Yeah, they’re on the team. What does that have to do with it?”

“Nothing. I just didn’t know that hanging out with them six hours a day wasn’t enough for you.”

“All we’re doing is going to Brett’s house for a bonfire.”

“Bonfire. Are you kidding me?
Bonfire
?”

“What’s the matter with you? You’re acting all weird.”

“Forget it. I’ll find some other way. Have fun with your Nazi friends.”

“What?”
Kwang put up his hands. “Never mind. I’ll get you the books, okay? But it’ll have to be tomorrow after practice.”

Stony stomped back across the field through the high grass, thinking dark thoughts. He’d just passed the property line where their old fort stood when he noticed a white van stopped on the highway.

He froze, suddenly sure that he was about to be captured. They’d grab him, shoot him, and burn him.

He crouched, then ducked behind a sapling, watching, and tried to calm down. Stupid, so stupid. When he was younger and shorter, he couldn’t have seen the highway from any point on the path. The track of dirt ran parallel to the road but was set back several hundred yards; a slight roll in the land provided a bunker that had before this year kept him hidden from sight the entire way. Now that he was taller, he’d have to be more careful.

He could see just the top of the van and the driver’s-side
window. He couldn’t make out a face behind the glass. The vehicle sat there thirty seconds, a minute, and Stony paged through one nightmare scenario after another. Would they shoot first, or try to capture him “alive”? Would they come at him with nets like in
Planet of the Apes
?

Finally the van moved. He watched it roll slowly away, and when it was out of sight he sat down. He was shaking. Why was he shaking? He wasn’t some dog in a thunderstorm, some frightened baby. He was the Unstoppable. He stared at his hand and in a few seconds the trembling subsided. There. He didn’t need fear, he needed anger. After several minutes he stood up. Take that, coppers! Then he crouched again and ran toward home.

He’d reached the back door when heard Chelsea inside the house, screaming
“You don’t even try to understand me!”

Another fight then. It seemed like there was one every couple of days since Chelsea had turned sixteen.

Against his better judgment, he walked inside. His mother and Chelsea stood face-to-face in the middle of the kitchen, with Junie hunched against the refrigerator, watching them. Mom’s face had gone rigid—never a good sign—and while tears welled in her eyes, she seemed determined to keep them from falling. Chelsea was raw and outraged, awash in tears. Junie was the worst. She wept silently, like a great-grandmother remembering a childhood tragedy.

Three women, three different ways of crying, Stony thought. He’d lived among them his entire life, and it seemed like he’d spent most of that time in a state of bafflement. “Is this about Alton?” he asked.

Chelsea screamed at him to shut up. His mother screamed at Chelsea to stop screaming. Stony put up his hands, turned slowly, and walked back outside.

He went around to the side of the house and pulled open
the cellar door. Junie came running out after him and threw her arms around him, sobbing. He didn’t try to move. He’d learned years ago that when Junie seized him like this, there was nothing to do but stand there until she released him. She could go from bawling to screaming at him in seconds flat. He fought with Junie much more than he ever fought with Chelsea or Alice. Partly this was because they were together more often, so fights were bound to happen, in the same way that most car accidents occur within seven miles of home. Partly this was because, as he’d tried to explain to her, Junie was an erratic personality. And partly this was because, as Junie explained to him, he was a jerk who used phrases like “erratic personality” and thought he was smarter than everybody else.

So he let her hang on him and waited for the tears to subside. She was so much shorter than he was. She took after the women on her father’s side, Mom said: short and curvy, which in Mom Code meant that Junie would get fat if she didn’t watch it. Alice and Chelsea were tall, lithe, and dark; their fair-haired, fireplug sister looked to be more of an adoption case than Stony. Stony had the same dark hair as his older sisters, the same thin frame. His skin tone just happened to be grayer.

A few minutes later she said into his shoulder, “Chelsea wants to spend the weekend in Chicago with Alton. There’s an Allman Brothers concert or something.”

“Is she crazy?” Stony said. “Mom’s never going to go for that.”

“She told me she’s going to run away,” Junie said.

“Mom or Chelsea?”

“Stop it. She says she’s going with Alton out west.” She let him go, then patted the damp spot she’d made on his shirt. “She’s changing her name to Amethyst or something, and they’re going to follow the Grateful Dead around.”

There was a joke there, but he let it pass. “That’s never
going to happen, Junie. Besides, nobody gets to run away before I do.”

Junie yelped. “Don’t even
say
that!’

He ducked into the cellar door. He’d laid down reinforced plywood ramps over the cement stairs, then had kept extending the ramps as he dug deeper under the house. Junie followed him down. “I feel like everything’s falling apart,” she said. “Mom’s all alone, you’re angry all the time—”

“What? I’m not angry.” But what he was thinking was, Mom’s all alone? But of course she was. Kids didn’t count. But she couldn’t get married again, not with a dead boy hiding at home. How could she even date—he’d have to hide in the barn while she made him dinner. He was ruining her life.

“Oh, you’re angry all right,” Junie said. She pulled on the chain to turn on the single lightbulb. “Just look at this place.” The ceiling was eight feet high—or rather, the floor was eight feet low—and the new walls extended far into the dark.

He said, “What does the basement have to do with anything?”

“You’re down here by yourself, digging at all hours. You’ve got to be mad at somebody.” She walked over to a stepladder, picked up the hacksaw that was lying on top of it. Sawdust covered the ground. “What are you cutting?”

“Old barn wood. For the ramps. Don’t tell Mom.”

She shook her head and put down the saw. She walked around the perimeter of the room. He’d decorated a little, and furnished the place with found furniture: an old couch Kwang had rescued from the side of the road, a couple of rusting lawn chairs. But it still looked like, well, a hole in the ground.

She stopped at the north wall, where he’d tacked up an unfolded refrigerator box. Taped to the cardboard was the huge Kiss Alive poster that Chelsea had given him for his
birthday two years ago. “I’m worried about you, Brother John. It’s like you’re digging your own grave.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s more of a mausoleum.”

She walked back to him and gripped his hand. Her skin was hot. “I’m serious, Stony. Have you thought about what we talked about?”

“A little bit.” He’d thought about salvation a lot, actually. Eternal life, his immortal soul, how Jesus had died for his sins. Though why some sacrifice was necessary was never explained.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son
. It seemed to Stony that there was no need for God to send his own son off to be tortured and killed, just so God could bring him back to life and
prove
that he was his son. Why not just forgive their sins himself? He was
God
. Was he so petty that he needed some kind of payment, or else he’d burn all of humanity in hell? Jehovah, he’d decided, was kind of a dick.

He liked Jesus, though, and not just because he rose from the dead himself. It was because after he resurrected Lazarus, he wept. He knew it was a bum deal. You were already in heaven, Laz, but your sisters wanted you back. Sorry, man. Jesus also resurrected the widow’s son, then the twelve-year-old daughter of a guy who ran the synagogue. If Jesus wept for them the Bible didn’t mention it. Maybe because they were kids, their whole (version two) lives ahead of them.

“You’re not listening to me,”
Junie said. She’d been talking earnestly at him for several minutes.

“I was, I was. I was thinking about resurrections. You know there are eight of them in the Bible? Elijah had one, and Elisha had two, if you count the guy who was tossed into his grave when the Moabites came through—”

“The what?”

“They were trying to bury a guy, and the marauding
bands from Moab attacked, so they tossed the body into Elisha’s grave, and as soon as he touched his bones, bang, he was alive again.”

“Stop it stop it stop it. You always do that, start talking about the crazy stuff you read.”

“This is from the Bible, Junie.”

“I’m talking about
you
, Stony. God has a plan for you. He brought you back and put you in Mom’s arms. That
means
something. You just have to accept what he’s offering you. I can pray with you if you want. Right now, you can ask Jesus into your heart.”

He thought about saying, I don’t have a heart, but that would have started her crying again.

“Junie, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but—”

“No you don’t.”

But he did. She sincerely thought that he was going to hell without her intervention. If she loved him, how could she not try to save him?

“You keep praying,” he said. “And I’ll keep thinking.”

He came home one day in late October to find a shoe box on his bed, with a note inside from Chelsea. She said she’d taken all the dollars from his coin bank ($42), but she was leaving him her Sony Walkman and ten cassettes, including two albums that she knew he coveted,
Boston
and Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
. She signed the note “Crystal Rain.”

Mom went down to the police station in Easterly to report that her daughter had run away; if she called the cops, she said, they might come out to the house, and she couldn’t risk that. Just in case they came back with her to investigate, he went down to the cellar. He wasn’t worried about Chelsea. She’d be back as soon as the money ran out or she figured out
what an a-hole Alton was. He put on the headphones and blasted “More than a Feeling” while he looked through the latest selection of books Kwang had found for him.

The Easterly Public Library’s meager collection had grown thin. After the initial bonanza of anniversary books, Kwang was down to the dregs: a medical book with a few pages about symptoms of the disease; a book on cemeteries, which really had nothing to do with the living dead at all; and one thin paperback. He turned it over.
The Head Case: A Deadtown Detective Adventure
. The cover art featured a gray, bony hand holding a .45 automatic.

A thrill ran through him.
Deadtown
?

He skimmed the first page, expecting the worst. And then he realized that it wasn’t about killing the walking dead—the
hero
was dead. He read the first chapter, and the second.

He didn’t look up from the book until the door slammed upstairs. He’d forgotten to turn over the cassette an hour ago. He pulled the earphones from his ears and ran up the ramp, then into the house.

Mom was furious, madder than he’d seen her since last Halloween. Junie sat at the kitchen table, bearing the brunt of it again. “All they wanted to talk about was if Chelsea was on drugs!” Mom said. She banged down a mixing bowl and started clearing the sink. “They said they wouldn’t even arrest her if they
found
her—or him!”