Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 (19 page)

I told about the land of the dead to the man that lived in the empty shed in our backyard. He listened to me patiently.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“You guess?” said the man. “You’re either a Christian or you’re not. Do you believe in Christ?”

“My Mom did. We had her funeral in a cathedral. My dad’s a scientist. He wants to live forever.”

“Are you a scientist?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

He pulled out a cigarette. “I was a pagan, for a long time,” he said. He put the cigarette in his mouth. He lit a match. He pulled in the smoke.

“Pagans are a wild bunch. Christians are just as bad. Buddhists are better.”

“You think I should be a Buddhist?”

He shrugged. He held his cigarette up to me. I took it from him. I looked at the glowing tip of it, as if it were a living thing in my hand.

“Go on,” he said, “try it.”

Gingerly, I tried to breathe in the smoke. It hurt. I coughed.

The man laughed. “You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “Just taste the smoke in your mouth. Don’t inhale it, yet. You ain’t ready for that. Pull the smoke into your mouth. Then, push it out. It’s like squirting water.”

I tried again. It tasted awful. I liked it. I asked the man if he could remember his name.

He snorted at me. “If I could remember, I’d have told you. Be sure to brush your teeth and change your shirt before your dad smells you stinking of cigarettes.”

“He won’t notice,” I said.

The man smiled. “Maybe he won’t say anything, but he’ll notice.”

I didn’t like it when the man smiled. He didn’t have all of his teeth. The ones he did have were bent at strange angles, and smeared in sickly colors. One of them was pink. One of them was black. One of them was mottled and covered in green moss like a stone.

The man closed his eyes and leaned back against the shed wall. “Those girls still giving you trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Usually means they like you.”

“They don’t.”

“Whatever, kid,” he said. Then, when I was almost done with my cigarette, he spoke again. “You’ve thought a lot about the land of the dead?”

“Yeah. I never found my mother, though.”

He smoked down his cigarette. I waited.

He looked up at me. He chuckled. “The way the dead forget, they fall into a mind decay with nothing to replace their lost senses. The way the living forget, the senses are so full of stimuli that lost things crowd away the dead. You’re a boy in a new school, in a new house. You close your eyes and dream of all the trees in the yard, and all the things those girls do to you, and school, and your dad, and all that stuff. Every survivor will eventually lose touch with their forgetful beloved dead.”

I grimaced.

“It means that you never found your mother because you forgot her. It also means that she never found you because she forgot you,” he said. He lit another cigarette. “You were looking for each other.”

He closed his eyes. He was asleep as soon as his eyelids touched. He didn’t snore. He didn’t seem to breathe.

7

When my mother died, my father tore his own heart out. He replaced it with a steam engine powered by boiled blood. He had designed it himself, but his design was too late for my mother.

Sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he belched out steam like purple cigarette smoke.

In his office upstairs, he designed new organs out of steam engines and old alchemy manuals. He used to be a history professor of ancient medicines. When my mother got sick, he abandoned his books for biology. He invented organs for her that didn’t work. He invented machines that sometimes made things worse.

I remember covering my ears when I knew he was going to be operating on her again. She never screamed, but I expected her to scream, and I had covered my ears.

Then she died.

Then I dreamt of the land of the dead. I wandered the numb country of the darkness, calling out her name.

8

I told the man in the shed about my father’s heart. He listened. He didn’t say anything at all about my father. He asked after my mother instead.

“Did she like what he was doing to her?” he asked.

“Of course not, but she had been sick a long time, and nobody else could help her.”

The man nodded. “Do you remember what she looked like?”

“Not really. I have pictures of her, but they’re not the same.”

“Never are. Pictures are like flash cards. They aren’t real. They just remind you of the person.”

“I think I get it,” I said. Then, I said, “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he said. “Do you think you’d know your mother if you saw her again?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” He pulled out a joint. It wasn’t marijuana, and it wasn’t tobacco. “You think you can handle this?”

I took it from him. It felt like it was alive.

“What is it?”

“It’s one of my teeth,” he said. He opened his mouth and pointed at a new gap in his gums. The mossy green one was gone.

“I’m not smoking that,” I said. I handed the joint with the tooth back to him.

He gestured for me to come closer. When I did, he slipped the wrapped tooth into my lapel pocket. “Those girls still giving you trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“Dad won’t do shit, huh?”

“No, he won’t do shit.”

“I’ll help you if you want.”

“How can you help?”

He smiled, and I stared into his mouth. I stared at the gap of the tooth he had handed me. I felt so alone, right then. I felt like I was the only boy in the world, and nothing in my life made sense and nobody cared about me—not even me. I felt like I wanted to die.

I shrugged. “If they catch you here, they’ll tell on you and police will come and run you off.”

He stopped smiling. “I’ll be fine,” he said. He stood up. He shook motion back into his bony legs. He stretched his arms over his head. “Bring one of them here.”

“Which one do you want?”

“The uglier one.”

“They’re both ugly.”

“One of them has to be uglier. If you can’t pick, just bring either one here. Only one.”

“Are you going to hurt her?”

“I will.”

“Good,” I said. “Don’t kill her, though.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t, okay?”

He handed me a box of cigarettes and matches. I pulled out a cigarette, inspected it for teeth, and then lit up. I pulled the smoke into my mouth. I tasted it. I let it go. I liked it.

9

I went to the neighbor’s house, where they lived. The neighborhood was huge, but most of the houses were empty now. Whole blocks were full of wild house cats and coyotes and ravens. I wasn’t allowed to go those ways.

The houses in our cul-de-sac had people in them. A few couples lived across the street. They had terrifying, gigantic dogs, and walked them every morning. They all waved and said hello in French if they saw me. Electric cars quietly zipped in and out of the garages. People might have been waving through the tinted glass.

10

When I knocked on the door, I expected one of the twins to answer. Their mother answered. I blinked and tried to smile like a kid should.

“Why, hello!” she said. She had a fake way of talking to kids. She smiled too big. She always had these big hand gestures, when she talked to kids. “You must be here to play with the girls!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I’ll go get them,” she said. She gave me a big thumbs up. Then, she waggled her finger at me. “Wait right here, big fella.” She disappeared into the house. I had never been inside.

I sniffed at my clothes for cigarette stink while I waited.

One of the twins came to the door. She had chocolate cake crumbs in her teeth when she sneered at me. She was the larger one, with the heavier fists. “I thought I heard the doorbell,” she said. She punched me on the arm. “I bet you have a crush on my sister. You want to kiss her, don’t you?”

“Shut up and listen,” I said. “Death lives in my shed and he wants to meet one of you girls. He wants to show us something cool.”

“Who?”

“Death,” I said. “He lives in my shed. He wants to meet one of you. Come on.”

“I’m not going into your stupid shed.”

I pulled out a cigarette carton from my pocket. I stuck it in my mouth like a rebel. I lit a match and pulled a drag off the cigarette. I blew the smoke towards her face.

Her eyes widened like headlights. I had her attention now. “How do you know he’s really Death?” she asked.

“It’s the kind of thing you just know,” I said. I blew smoke towards her face again, right in her eyes. She coughed at that. I heard the cheerful sound of heeled shoes on marble tiles. I threw the cigarette into the grass. “Death followed me back from when I was crossing over after my mother had died. We got to get moving,” I said. “He only wants to see one of you.” I grabbed her hand. I pulled her.

She let me.

We ran to the shed.

I didn’t watch. I opened the door for her. She looked inside, at the smoky, dusty darkness.

“Go on,” I said.

She saw him. “Are you… Death?”

He didn’t say anything. He must have gestured to her. I wasn’t watching him.

She walked inside like it was just any old dusty shed, and he was just any old man there, in the shed. I closed the door behind her. I waited outside. I listened to her muffled scream. I heard the sound of a body crumpling. Death came out of the shed. He had the girl’s body in his arms. “Take her to your dad,” he said. “She won’t be dead when he’s done with her.

I did. I dragged her to the basement. She was horribly heavy and limp and it took a long time to get her down there. I could barely hold her up. I shouted for my father to help me with her.

He checked her pulse with one hand. There was no pulse. He threw her onto the train tracks. The robots of the hills walked over her cool, pale flesh. The trains stopped and robots and people came out to watch. Some of the smaller robots crawled down her throat. An aluminum zeppelin emptied the passengers onto her white forehead. A robot cut the fishing line that held the airship on its path. Tiny robots worked in teams to bend the aluminum zeppelin into the shape of a heart.

“She’s going to be fine,” said my father. “Don’t worry.”

The aluminum heart went down her throat.

My father had his laser out, and he used it to burn through her clothes, into her chest, through her skin, and into the bones. He pulled out the other heart with one hand—it was black from Death and from the burning of the laser. I peered inside her open, bleeding chest. Her cracked ribs looked like a spider uncurling from a bloody egg.

The robots pulled everything back together. Women from the trains sewed her skin shut, then her clothes.

11

The other twin beat me up for a while. She wanted to know how come her sister was like that, now. I just waited out her anger like the man in the shed had told me to do, and then she’d be lonely.

Her sister spent more time with my father now, building small, glowing planetoids. She hung them with white Christmas lights around the basement.

I never went back to the shed. I never told anyone else what I had called there, when I was just a boy and screaming for my mother and her screaming for me, and neither one of us finding the other.

12

When the skinnier, ganglier twin was done beating me up, she became my friend. She was sad all the time, like me. We split what was left of my cigarettes above the houses, hiding in the mountain trees. We plotted ways to acquire more cigarettes. She sneaked beer and whiskey from her mother’s locked cabinets. We broke into the vacant houses and rummaged through cabinets for old bottles of booze.

I asked her if she had ever smoked a joint.

“Marijuana?” she said. She perked up. “Do you have some?”

I pulled out Death’s tooth still in the rolling paper. I didn’t tell her what it really was. We smoked it up above the treeline, near the top of the mountain.