Shaking out the Dead (33 page)

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Tatum and Vincent shared a platonic hug and parted paths outside the restaurant. From her car, Tatum watched him cross the street, heading back to his motel. She considered killing the engine and following him to his door. It beat going home to the unblinking light of her answering machine. Lee had told her he'd call by last week. Tatum had asked him if Rachael could visit before school started. There was another call Tatum hoped for too. A silent message and the soft click.

Stick to stalking Vincent, she told herself, as he slipped into his room. Sleeping with Vincent was the option she held in reserve. Her cyanide capsule.

She pulled out of the lot and drove home. Back at the duplex, she turned her key, and the click of the lock echoed. The whole place seemed hollow. It had been like this since Ralph's funeral. For a guy who never lived there, he sure seemed to clear the place out when he died. She dropped Vincent's next three chapters on the coffee table beside the small pile she'd assembled of odds and ends left behind by Rachael. Try as she might, she could dream up nothing from which to rescue Rachael, not one good reason to kidnap her and head for Mexico. Rachael was taking swimming lessons. Lee had gotten her a tutor so she wouldn't be behind in school come fall. Hard to justify taking a kid out on the lam for that.

Her eyes shot to the answering machine. No blink.

Good thing it didn't matter.

Okay, Tatum thought. Time to take some action. Pack Rachael's things. Ship them. Signal to her own subconscious that it was time to let go. She reached down and gathered up the pile left behind in the abrupt departure: Clothes from the hamper, now laundered and folded. Barrettes and books. The photo albums at which Tatum had never peeked. The glitch that had kept Tatum from shipping had been that such a thing required a box, and since getting rejected at the diner, the basement had been off-limits. The last thing she needed was to return to the scene of the crime and moon over the deserted mattress.

But it doesn't matter, she reminded herself. Not anymore. Tra-la-la-la-la-blah.

She carried Rachael's stuff to the kitchen counter and miscalculated putting it down.

“Crap,” she said as the pile hit the floor. One of the albums fell open, face down, crumpling the pages on impact.

Paper dolls cut out from photographs littered the floor beneath it. They hadn't been pasted down. Tatum crouched down and shook the book to loosen whatever more of them there might be and then gathered them up onto the counter. There were two of Paris. Five Margarets. Four Genevas. Three Lees. Five Rachaels. Five Tatums. She pulled one of each from the pile and lined them up. Not one was still in her life.

Only Vincent was left.

Only Vincent was missing from the line of paper dolls. He was in Tatum's nightstand drawer.

She opened the photo album that the pictures had fallen from. How to put them back? She stared at the blank page. Could she fix it?

“Huh,” Tatum said as a memory snuck up on her, one of staring at the blank space in another book asking the same question:
Can I fix it? Can I fix the Book of Rachaels?

An idea was forming in her as to how to fix both.

At the top of the basement stairs, she threw the switch and began her descent. The empty boxes were in the far right-hand corner. She could pass the mattress without looking at it. Don't look at ghosts, and they won't see you. Isn't that how it works?

Just a corner of the mattress reached her peripheral vision as she passed. She located a sturdy, right-sized box for what she wanted. Then, she turned. She looked. Just real fast. As far as mattresses went, it was a sorry one.

“Go away,” she said to the encroaching memories.

Vincent. Vincent. Sleep with Vincent, she thought heading for her stored belongings. Let go. Move on. She retrieved the Book she meant to defile. She meant to defile a lot of things. Then maybe she'd pack her own bags and put some miles between herself and the past.

She climbed the stairs back up to her apartment two at a time. This was her plan: Sleep with Vincent to get past Paris. Send Rachael her things and get past expecting her back. Then, turn her attention to moving. How far? She wasn't sure. But away. Away from Geneva. Outta here. Gone.

Tatum dropped the box and the green leather book beside the paper dolls. She retrieved Vincent from her nightstand and placed him in line with the others. Her plan was to paste the paper dolls where her entry in the Book of Rachael belonged. She'd paste in Margaret, herself, and Rachael. Lee, Paris, Vincent, and Geneva. She would write nothing. This would be her contribution to the legacy. The unfolding history of Rachaels would strike her like she was crystal, and she would scatter the ray.

She flipped through the pages determined and ready to execute her plan. But what she saw where she expected the blank space beneath her name stopped her.

Black ink. Her scar sucked into itself like fingernails pressing into one's palm. Her breast was silent, the scar of what was louder than the soft curve of present flesh. Tatum looked at the face and then looked away. It was complete. It was unnerving.

She reached to the page with a flat hand and crumpled it in her palm, tearing it from the spine as she did so. She dropped it on the counter. Paris had not turned away. He drew her eyes, and it was her. It was the lie of her. Or the truth of her. She didn't know which.

Paris drew her beautiful, and good.

Paris was gone, and he took that woman with him.

All the friggin' paper dolls were gone.

Except Vincent.

A body slamming into hers making her forget — that was what she needed.

Tatum grabbed her keys.



Paris emerged from the basement and into the kitchen of the diner. By tomorrow night, all the pots and pans would be sold, the kitchen equipment and the booths too. The place would be ransacked by secondhand buyers. He crossed the kitchen and pushed through the swinging door that led to the dining room. Jerry was behind the counter, folding a small wad of bills and easing them into his front pocket.

“Cash bonus,” he said to Paris. “Guess this one's off the books.” He jerked his head toward the casino. “Blair's got it when you want it.”

Paris looked toward the casino. Pocketing the bonus would put a thousand bucks in his pants. He was already carrying, as he did every night, the five hundred he promised himself he'd give to Linda.

“What's next?” Jerry said, tucking a cigarette between his lips.

“Don't know,” Paris said. “You?”

“Got a job at the Circle K.”

Convenience store clerk. Paris could see it.

“Smoke bad out there?” Jerry said. He took the cigarette from his lips and tucked it behind his ear.

“I came up from the basement.”

“Right.”

It was a lot of conversation. It was a way of saying good-bye.

Jerry took a last look around and then raised a hand. He turned and took the walk out of the diner into the casino and through the orange-green flash of keno machines into sunlit haze.

Inside, Paris reassembled the newspaper on the counter. He helped himself to a bowl of clam chowder and ate it, scanning the empty dining room while he strategized over the evening's tasks.

The night would be slow. The clientele had dropped off as items disappeared from the menu, eighty-sixed with a black Magic Marker. There'd been minimum restocking. Paris finished his soup, drinking straight from the bowl. Back in the kitchen, he pulled his apron off of a nail. He did a final inventory of the cooler. Hamburger. Eggs. A bin of dry onions and a bin of soggy tomatoes. He knew there were french fries in the freezer. The bread was day old.

It was the end of a line.

“Good,” Paris said, pulling the bin of tomatoes from the shelf. He soon would be back to having nothing to lose. There was penance to be paid for wanting more, and there was no more. Tatum had been right all along. Wanting more is really wanting something else.

Paris dumped the bin and watched the tomatoes slip into the garbage can. He would forget. He would forget all of it. The good as well as the bad. He knew how. There was work to do, and it was enough. There was hamburger, eggs, and day-old bread. It was enough too. He would make meatloaf.

Six p.m. turned to ten p.m. without a single customer. No one would know it, though, watching Paris's industry. Meatloaf and french fries, plates of it moved out from the kitchen and into the casino for Blair and every drunk and gambler who hovered or lurked. Paris kept an eye to the supply, though. He wanted to make sure the women got theirs.

When there was no one to feed, Paris worked on the cooler. He wiped down the metal shelves and then headed for the janitor's closet for the mop. He opened the door to the scene of his crime. It had been that next morning that he had gone to Tatum's, and she had shown him the scar. Look where it all had led. It made him glad that Linda hadn't returned. It was another sign that it was over.

Paris reached for the mop's handle and became unsteady. He thought he was panicking. The mop handle seemed to vibrate. Paris, himself, was trembling. A flash of wet heat came up behind his face. He reached for the wall.

Paris blamed himself for the loss of balance because he trusted that the ground beneath him was solid. That, at the least, was a thing he could count on.

But there is no “at the least.” At the least, there is always nothing.

Paris was not shaking. It was the very earth.

Then, it stopped. Paris heard laughter and exclamations from the casino up front. Then, applause. The electricity in the air seemed elevated, the outpouring of adrenaline mingling with the tension shrugged off by the planet. The foundation upon which Paris stood was no longer the same. New cracks formed. Old channels sealed.

Before and after. Equilibrium returns, but we are not the same.



The fans oscillated, sending welcome breezes across John and Geneva's bodies as they rolled in the bed, one on top and then the other. It was not athletic but steady and peaceful, information exchanged with smiles, sighs, and backward rolling eyes. Afterward, they ate bread, cheese, and sliced pears. They opened the door to the west. Burning forests made for spectacular sunsets. Three different purples, orange, and blood red lay like ribbons across the sky. Geneva drove home glowing. She had come to love this stretch of highway regardless of the direction in which she drove. Her Doors cassette was cranked up. Love was calling her.

Love, she thought. It seeks a host. It wants us as much as we want it. At worst, we are parasites to each other, we and love, each destroying the other. At best, she thought, we seek each other out for mutual benefit. We co-evolve. Our relationships to one another are one thing, she thought. Our relationship to love quite another.

She arrived home and came in through the yard. Inside, she snapped her fingers as she settled in as though keeping beat with something slick and lounge-y. She wandered to her wall of albums, hips swaying before the selection. What was it her hips were hearing? Ray Charles? Tina Turner? She pulled a silver sleeve from the shelf. Drummers. Lots of them. Assembled by Mickey Hart.

“This will do,” she said, going a different way. She slipped
Diga
onto the turntable. It had a percussion-driven instrumental of “Fire on the Mountain.” Very apropos. But apropos, shmapropos. She went with the B-side instead. It was the better jam.

Geneva's hips rocked. Her eyes closed, and a smile played on her lips. The music was native all the way. Primitive. Speaking to the body, not the mind. She held up her hands, palms turned outward, and she led a parade of one through her living room. Her head bobbed. Her shoulders grabbed a shimmy then slid down her back. She turned her arms into snakes. Her body felt delicious, alive in the groove, grinding and stretching, working out the glitches, and shaking out the dead.

If this was love she was feeling, she thought, love was movement. Motion. Flow. Responsibility had clotted her love. The heart and the hearth are not the same. The Romans knew and kept their goddesses separate. Duty calls us. Love draws us. Duty tests our perseverance. Love tests our courage. You can value one. Or the other. You can value both. But they are not the same.

Geneva knew it would not be long now before the stars were right and the moment upon them, both her and Ralph, to let go of. . .

Geneva halted the parade and split paths with the music.

“Oops,” she said.

Ralph. She had forgotten Ralph.

She made a sound that could pass for a single laugh, but her face was screwed up, her brows drawn together. She forgot Ralph. It was both a problem and a victory.

Could she leave him overnight tucked safely against the shack in the dust and smoke? Should she call John and ask him to bring Ralph inside?

It was 10 p.m. Late, but not too late. Geneva lifted the needle from the record and grabbed her keys. She would try to be quiet but suspected she would not go undetected. She headed out for the gravel road.

She turned off the asphalt highway and away from street lamps. Beyond her passenger window the mountains were dark whale backs surfacing above the earth. The forgetting was the sign, she knew. It was time. The letting go was here. She thought of what she had asked John earlier that day:
Do you need to know what you're holding on to in order to let it go?
The question now seemed irrelevant. John had been right. You just open your hand. What made it tricky, Geneva realized, was that when you opened your hand, you didn't get to decide what did and did not fall. To let go of anything, it seemed, you needed to be willing to let go of everything. On the bright side, there was nothing to fear since anything authentically yours can't go anywhere. Open your hand and your fingers don't fall off.

Geneva's heart blazed. Her vision seemed oddly clear. She felt fully attuned to the cosmic groove, otherwise known as the Tao. The flow. God. She drove through the night so in sync that, even on the bumpy road, she felt the car was gliding. The farther from the city and lights she drove, the deeper the stillness around her should have been. Yet, Geneva sensed a vague stirring, a definite fluctuation in the frequency. She feared she was losing the cosmic thread. Something was wrong, unsettled. She glanced down at the car's controls, looking for red lights and warnings. She pressed the brakes and looked beyond her windshield. Everything started to shake.

Geneva threw the car into park and dove from it. It was a reflex. She stumbled into the road. She was disoriented for a moment in the wide darkness. There was nothing to hold onto. Nothing stood still.

And then, it was over.

In the middle of the road, Geneva stood with her adrenaline pumping. A single remaining stripe of indigo glowed above the mountain's curve. The stillness returned but had changed in quality.

It was an earthquake, she thought. Right? It wasn't personal. Was it?

She looked across the prairie. The mountains settled back in. Her headlights illuminated rocks and grass. Her car door hung open, and the motor ran. Geneva climbed back in and put the car in gear.

Somewhere, pressure had been released. Something, somewhere, let go. “God is Pressure.” Geneva had read it once. And forgotten it. But the words had returned true. God is Pressure, the push of light. So you better let it flow. If God was indeed Pressure, it seemed to Geneva, holding on, holding on to anything, was to resist God.

Good luck with that, she thought.

She reached John's property and pulled toward the ditch outside the barbed wire fence. She stepped up his driveway, trying to keep her feet quiet on the gravel. At his door, she reached to the ground for the black lacquer box. Beside it, leaning against the shack, was a shovel she hadn't noticed there before.

Just then, the door opened. John squinted down at her.

“I forgot my husband,” Geneva said.

“That's good,” John said.

Geneva stood with the box.

“I know,” she said. “I thought so too. There was just an earthquake, right?”

“A five-pointer plus, I'd guess,” he said. “Rattled the dishes.”

John raised his hand then, and Geneva saw he was holding an industrial-sized flashlight.

“Ready?” he said.

Geneva nodded. John grabbed the shovel.

“I know a good place,” he said.

“Scattering him never felt right,” Geneva said. “Burying him — that's better.”

They set out from the shack, past the fire pit, following the flashlight's pool of light. They walked for ten minutes in the sooty air through a grove of aspen and into the open space beyond it. John stopped and put down the flashlight.

“How's this?” he said.

Geneva looked around. In the darkness, she couldn't tell it from any other spot.

“Good,” she said, trusting him.

John jabbed the shovel into the ground. Geneva held the box while he dug.

“Wish we'd get some rain,” she said. “Wash out the valley.”

“These fires are here 'til the snow flies,” John said.

Soon John had dug a small trench. He stepped back and leaned into a hip. His hands and chin rested on top of the long wooden handle. Geneva stepped forward. She undid the latch. She paused to see if there were words. But she was done with words. That's what made it time. She shook out the contents along the length of the trench, not a scattering to the wind but a laying to rest under a sky that held the transforming elements, earth turned to fire turned to air.

“You know,” Geneva said, “I always figured if there were a heaven, hell, and all those zones in between, that they were part of the big bang too, and they'll get sucked back into nothing exactly when we do.”

“Makes sense,” John said.

Geneva thought they were the kindest of words.

“He said he loved me,” Geneva said.

“What more could you ask for?” John said.

“For it to be real,” Geneva said. She half-laughed, then sighed. “Whether I was asking a lot, or a little, I have no idea.”

John held his opinion.

“Think you'd ever sell this land?”

“No,” John said. “I promise. He'll be okay here until he's not here anymore.”

“I wonder how long it takes.”

“To disappear completely?” John asked.

“To become something else so completely that what you were is gone.”

John pushed the shovel into the pile of dirt he had dug out to make the trench. He spread the dirt over Ralph's ashes.

“I want to become new,” Geneva said. “But I get the feeling it entails forgetting who you've been. Do you think it's possible?”

“It's the Holy Grail,” John said.

Geneva looked down into her hands. She laughed.

“Now I have to figure out what to do with this box.”