Going Underground (3 page)

I Hate Peeing in Cups

(“Keep on Tryin' ”—Poco. Mellow music is good, especially when I'm not feeling mellow.)

Fate chooses to smile on us, and Cherie's not waiting at the graveyard when Marvin and I get there. I don't have to worry about her or pissing off her gigantor brother, at least not this afternoon. All I have to do is stand in the sunlight under a cloudless sky next to Marvin, trying to dig a good grave. To make him happy, I leave the iPod off and I try not to hum stuff and drive him nuts.

In front of me, hanging from a shade tree branch in her travel cage, Fred fluffs out her feathers, yawns obnoxiously loud (no, parrots don't really yawn like that, it's one of her sounds), then sighs and smacks her beak together.

“Quit complaining.” I jam my shovel into the ground and flip a load of dirt onto the tarp on the right side of the grave, careful not to hit the neatly stacked squares of grass I cut out before I started digging. I'm about a foot down, with my perfect rectangle already forming. “It's not that cold yet. Wait until winter. I'll have to put a heater under your cage.”

“Fred,” she says, in a tone that means,
Yeah, right, are you finished yet, and where's my damned apple?

“It creeps me out when you talk to that bird like she's human.” Marvin's sitting on top of the first foot of dirt I piled on the tarp, holding Gertrude the fat drooling cat and eating a burrito. He's wearing some of the burrito, too, smeared across the crinkled KISS logo on his shirt.

“Fred talks better than a lot of humans I know.” I dig. I need to get at least two graves done before Saturday, because we have three burials on Sunday, all before noon. I've got a lot of work to do to get everything ready, and Harper's already halfway sloshed. He won't be much help, but Marvin will pitch in after he finishes his bag of burritos.

“It's still creepy,” Marvin says. “Why does she have to talk in your voice?”

“Fred,” Fred says to Marvin in my voice, then makes a perfectly pitched fart noise and laughs about it.

Marvin shakes his head. “That's just messed up.”

“Fred,” Fred says in Marvin's voice, because she can talk like him and Dad and Mom, too, if she wants. She doesn't blink at Marvin like Dr. Mote would, because parrots don't really exactly blink, at least not as much as people, even though they can close their eyes.

When Marvin doesn't say anything, Fred burps like she's sucked down a case of ginger ale.

Parrots don't really burp, either. It's just a sound she makes, like the yawning and sighing and farting. I guess she learned most of them from me, which I suppose doesn't say much for my personal habits. At least I usually don't wear burrito juice. Just fresh grave dirt, and I wash that off as soon as I get home.

Marvin burps back at Fred, shifts the cat in his lap, and digs in his greasy white paper sack for another burrito. He feeds the first bite to Gertrude, who is supposed to belong to my mother. Mom rescued her after her owner died, and Gertrude's got a chewed ear and cataracts. I've mentioned she's kind of fat, and she's a little clumsy. She's also gray like Fred, and she hangs out in my room whenever Marvin's around, and usually follows us the mile and a half down my rural road to Rock Hill. I think she likes Marvin better than me or Mom and Dad, who are attending a fund-raiser at the next county's animal shelter tonight.

All the animals at my house got rescued from one big disaster or another. There's some cats other than Gertrude—six right now, I think. I lose count of those, since they come and go after they get better and adoptable. We've got three dogs confiscated from drug dealers, and I've got Fred, who blew into some guy's garage during a storm four years ago, then ended up at the hoarder's house where Mom found her, and Dad's working on a chicken. It's a rooster with one eye that got used for fighting, and most of the time, the Humane Society just “humanely euthanizes” fighting roosters, but Dad's gotten to be some kind of rooster whisperer or something. He keeps the one-eyed rooster in a way-fancy coop in the backyard, and it crows every morning and every evening, so Fred's learning to crow.

As if she's reading my mind, she crows for Marvin a few times, then barks for good measure.

Marvin hugs Gertrude a little closer, like maybe she'll protect him. He might need protection from Fred. When she's out of her cage, Fred likes to attack Marvin's shoes and bite big hunks out of the soles.

“That bird is possessed by the devil, Del. Really. Seriously.”

I keep digging.

Maybe Marvin counts as a rescue, since he started being my best friend in fifth grade after his dad ditched him and he and his mom had no place to live. They stayed with us for a while, but now they have their own place over on Backdrop Road, which isn't out in the sticks like our house. We kind of have to live in the sticks, since my parents can't stop rescuing things.

I wonder if Marvin thinks I'm a rescue. That would fit, probably for lots of reasons. He didn't ditch me like everybody else did when all the shit came down three years ago. There wasn't any big fight or huge divorce from my old friends or anything. We were all just about to start high school, so we were going in lots of directions—me trying out for baseball, and Raulston, Tom, and Randall looking at freshman football, and Jason and Dutch had joined ROTC. Jenna and Lisa were going out for softball, and Cory wanted to sing in the chorus. She really did have a beautiful voice.

She still has a beautiful voice, I guess, but I don't know. She doesn't live here anymore. None of them do. Jason, Tom, and Randall went to Chicago. Their families figured they'd stick out less in a bigger city. Raulston's family took him back to California. Jenna and Lisa and Dutch all went west, too, but not as far—Arizona and Colorado and New Mexico. Some big towns, some little towns. Anywhere but Duke's Ridge and the prying, interfering eyes of District Attorney William Kaison.

My folks figured we'd be better off here, where people knew me and knew our family, since my charges were more serious than everybody else's. Plus, they would have had to get permission from the court for us to move, and go through a lot of hassle, and we've had enough hassle for a while.

When it was all said and done, Marvin wasn't charged, but other than him, Cory was the only one Kaison didn't tear to pieces. I'm glad for that at least. I'm not sure where she went, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to ask, but I'd really like to know how she's doing. She's e-mailed me a few times to ask about how I'm getting along, always from anonymous untraceable addresses, but I delete the e-mails. I'm too chickenshit to answer her. Digging graves for a job is one thing. Digging graves for myself to fall into in real life—thanks, that's okay. Been there, done that, put my face in the dictionary next to the definition. Kaison's out of office now, but who the hell knows about the woman who replaced him? She could be just as bad, or maybe even worse. I'm not taking any chances.

About an hour later, Marvin's still churning burrito farts, but we're through with the first grave. He pitches his shovel out and hoists himself back to level ground. “I still think it's weird we don't have to dig six feet down.”

“Eighteen inches.” I get out behind him and rub dirt off my lips. “Weird, how some stuff doesn't have to go as deep as you think, right? But the plague was a long time ago, and nobody much robs graves anymore. Eighteen inches of dirt on top of what you're burying, that's the law here, but Harper says most states don't even have laws about it anymore. He thinks four feet is plenty, as long as the casket's normal size—and in the winter, four feet will be hard enough.”

Marvin stretches out the kinks from digging, ignores Fred's rendition of bombs whistling down and exploding on impact, and asks, “What's the difference between a casket and a coffin?”

“No idea.” I put down my shovel and stretch, too. Too bad Marvin ate all those burritos. It's probably getting close to noon and I'm hungry now, but I'm betting Harper ate the rest of his peanut butter and bread yesterday. Probably no point in going to the small one-bedroom house he has at the back corner of the cemetery. Maybe later today, Marvin will make a grocery run for Harper.

“If Harper sold caskets or coffins or whatever, he'd make a lot of money,” Marvin says.

“Hello, bird,” Fred adds, just to get me to look at her, which I do, and I blow her a quick kiss.

“The funeral homes do all the sales stuff and handle the funerals,” I say. “Harper's job is Rock Hill, and I think it's a lot more complicated. Mowing, digging, pruning, trimming, cleaning, polishing, chasing off weirdos, helping all the sad people—he stays busy.”

“
You
stay busy, Del. Harper mostly stays passed out. The whole funeral thing, that's a racket, man. Cremation's the best way for the planet.”

“Harper says that until World War II, people mostly handled their dead at home, themselves. They'd clean them up, keep them around for a couple of days while the pine box got made by family members, then bring them to his father to be buried here, or just plant them in the backyard. Then the whole funeral industry started and everything changed. Maybe death made more sense before that, or felt more real.”

Marvin's face is totally straight when he says, “Or a lot more gross and creepy. Two more to dig?”

“Yeah. I got the turf cut off over there, third from the road. The tarp for the dirt's already down.” I climb out of the grave and catch myself staring at the section of the cemetery where Fairy Girl usually visits.

Stop
.

I look back at Marvin and try to sound casual when I ask, “You still following your dating rules?”

“Of course. No dating. I don't date.” He sounds smug, like he's got it all under control, like his body never bothers to react to girls like mine does. I use music and digging to block it all out, make it go away—but Marvin doesn't seem to have that problem.

The way Marvin figures it, if he's eighteen, and he cards the girl (and probably makes a copy of her ID) and she's eighteen, nobody can say anything to them about doing anything. If he waits until he's an adult and his life is nobody's business, he won't have any trouble like we had before.

I'm not sure that logic works, but it's a big deal to him, and with Marvin, it's better not to mess with his big deals.

Marvin's smug expression fades, and I realize he's starting to stare at me. “Why'd you ask about dating?”

I shrug. It's what I do best. “No reason.”

The lines of Marvin's body get tense. I can tell he's thinking about standing and facing me. Maybe even getting in my face. “You interested in somebody?”

Dangerous ground. Definitely entering Marvin-thinks-this-is-a-big-deal territory. “No.”

He does stand, but he doesn't get in my face. “You wouldn't lie to me, right? Not about something like that.”

“I'm not lying to you about anything.” My calm tone usually works with Marvin. He blinks at me like he's weighing the words, maybe measuring my tone.

“Fred,” Fred says.

And Marvin says, “Okay.”

He's easy like that. It's why he's still my best friend. Anybody hard would have ditched me a long time ago.

Marvin glances at the sky as he sits down again. “What if it rains tonight? Will the graves fill up?”

“Nah, I'd use a gazebo tent to cover them—we've got ten of those—but it's not supposed to rain until Wednesday.” After we finish digging, I'll need to cover the dirt and turf with more tarps, and before Sunday, I have to mow, then put up gazebo tents and arrange foldout chairs under them for the first services. The funeral home will cover the chairs with their velvet drapes, to make the mourners more comfortable and to make sure everybody sees their logo. That's it. Rain's no big deal.

“Fall's usually dry,” Marvin mumbles, as much to himself as me.

See? Talking about the weather. He's easy. We move on to the next grave.

I start digging. After the graves get filled and covered, I won't have to hurry putting the turf back in place, then moving the extra dirt to the back of the fifty acres Harper tends. The ten acres farthest to the west hasn't been divided into plots and sold because the land is still too rough. We're using the fill dirt and Harper's ancient red Ford tractor with its barely functioning spreader to smooth out the ground. Eventually, Harper will be able to lay turf and make a profit off those acres, too.

“Harper should get a backhoe,” Marvin says as he digs up a shovelful from the bare patch third from the road while I stop long enough to move Fred's cage to a shady spot on the branch of a maple tree.

“Even if he could afford a piece of machinery like that, he'd blow it off.” I give Fred's beak a quick stroke through the cage bars, then head toward Marvin and grab my shovel again. “He says it's disrespectful, and his father and grandfather who started this place would haunt him.”

“Maybe his family wouldn't haunt him if he drank less skanky beer.”

“None of my business.” I start digging near Marvin, but I have to nudge Gertrude with the shovel so she'll move enough to let me drop my first load on the tarp. Harper leaves us alone to do our work. He knows his drinking is a problem, so it's up to him to fix it, or not. He pays me to do the crap he blows off and he never shorts me a dime.

Fred amuses herself by singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” off-key, mostly in Mom's voice.

“Well, when it's my turn to get planted,” Marvin says without even looking in Fred's direction, “I'm putting in my will that I want a lot more than eighteen inches of dirt over me if I don't get cremated.” Then, “Hope you gotta piss, because Branson's here.”

I dig out another chunk before I glance at the road. Branson's black Jeep is slowing to a stop at the top of the small hill on the way to the entrance, and a few seconds later, he gets out. He's got silver hair cut close to his dark skin, he's wearing jeans and a University of Indiana sweatshirt, and he's carrying a shoulder bag in one hand and a white sample bag in the other. Branson's dedicated. Ex-military, now a retired cop who does juvenile probation. He makes random checks on me to do drug tests, but never at school. He's good about keeping the humiliation to a minimum.