Whistling Past the Graveyard (34 page)

For five long minutes Crow and Val sat on their bikes, one foot each braced on the ground. Val looked at the cornfields in the distance and Crow looked at her. Then, without saying a word, Val got off her bike and walked it down the lane toward her house. Crow sat there for almost half an hour before he could work up the courage to go home.

None of them ever spoke about that day. They never mentioned the Croft house. They never asked what the others had seen.

Not once.

The only thing that ever came up was the Morgan silver dollar. One evening Crow and Terry looked it up in a coin collector’s book. In mint condition it was valued at forty-eight thousand dollars. In poor condition it was still worth twenty thousand.

That coin probably still lay on the Croft house living room floor.

Crow and Terry looked at each other for a long time. Crow knew that they were both thinking about that coin. Twenty thousand dollars, just lying there. Right there.

It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

Terry closed his coin book and set it aside. As far as Crow knew, Terry never collected coins after that summer. He also knew that neither of them would ever go back for that silver dollar. Not for ten thousand dollars. Not for ten million. Like everything else they’d seen there—the wallet, the pill bottle, the diaper, all of it—the coin belonged to the house. Like Terry’s pocket comb. Like Stick’s ball-cap. And Crow’s lucky stone.

And what belonged to the house would stay there.

The house kept its trophies.

Crow went to the library and looked through the back issues of newspapers, through obituaries, but try as he might he found no records at all of anyone ever having died there.

Somehow it didn’t surprise him.

There weren’t ghosts in the Croft house. It wasn’t that kind of thing.

He remembered what he’d thought when he first saw the old place.

The house is hungry.

-9-

Later, after Crow came home from Terry’s
house, he sat in his room long into the night, watching the moon and stars rise from behind the trees and carve their scars across the sky. He sat with his window open, arms wrapped around his shins, shivering despite a hot breeze.

It was ten days since they’d gone running from the house.

Ten days and ten nights. Crow was exhausted. He’d barely slept, and when he did there were nightmares. Never—not once in any of those dreams—was there a monster or a ghoul chasing him. They weren’t those kinds of dreams. Instead he saw the image that he’d seen in the mirror. The older him.

The drunk.

The fool.

Crow wept for that man.

For the man he knew that he was going to become.

He wept and he did not sleep. He tried, but even though his eyes burned with fatigue, sleep simply would not come. Crow knew that it wouldn’t come. Not tonight, and maybe not any night. Not as long as he could remember that house.

And he knew he could never forget it.

Around three in the morning, when his father’s snores banged off the walls and rattled his bedroom door, Crow got up and, silent as a ghost, went into the hall and downstairs. Down to the kitchen, to the cupboard. The bottles stood in a row. Canadian Club. Mogen-David 20-20. Thunderbird. And a bottle of vodka without a label. Cheap stuff, but a lot of it.

Crow stood staring at the bottles for a long time. Maybe half an hour.

“No,” he told himself.

No, agreed his inner voice.

No, screamed the drunken man in his memory.

No.

Crow reached up and took down the vodka bottle. He poured some into a Dixie cup.

“No,” he said.

And drank it.

Author’s Note on “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard”

This is the last of the four Pine Deep short stories in this collection, and the one that lends this book its name. It’s also a personal favorite because it introduces a pair of supporting characters—Near Danny and Far Danny—who have been lurking around in my head for quite a while waiting to come onstage. They will be returning in other stories (not yet written).

Like the first two Pine Deep stories, this one takes place after the events of the Trilogy.

This story takes place several years after the events described in the Pine Deep Trilogy, of which
Ghost Road Blues
is the first volume. You do not need to have read those books in order to read—and hopefully enjoy—this little tale set in rural Pennsylvania.

-1-

He had six different names.

It was Francisco Sponelli on his birth certificate, but even his parents never called him that. They called him Little Frankie most of his life. A kid's name that, once hung on him, made sure he'd never quite grow up. His father wasn't even Big Frankie. Dad was Vinnie. Big Frankie was an uncle back in Sicily but who wasn't called Big Frankie
in
Sicily; just when people talked about him. Big Frankie never set a goddamn foot on American soil.

In school—from about four minutes after he stepped onto the kindergarten playground—he was Spoons. It was better than Little Frankie in about the same way that a kick in the balls was better than catching the clap. Not a holiday either way.

In the old neighborhood in South Philly—he was Frankie Spoons for all of the six months he lived there. And that's a cool name. Made him sound like a Made Man, which he would never and could never be, but it sounded great when he walked into the taproom and someone called out, "Hey, Frankie Spoons, come on and have a beer with the grown-ups."

Actually, no one ever said exactly that, but it was in his head. It's what he heard every time he walked into the bar. Especially when he saw one of the Donatellas there, who were third or fourth cousins. It was the kind of thing they said to each other because they
were
made men. The Donatella cousins worked a protection racket their family had owned since the sixties. They all had great nicknames and they all said cool things to each other. Francisco just liked hanging out at that bar because it made him feel like a man, like a tough guy.

Then he knocked up a girl from the burbs and next thing he was living in a crappy little town called Pine Deep in the inbred Deliverance backwoods of Bucks County. Near
her
folks and family, way too far from Philly, and although it was right over the bridge from New Jersey it wasn't over the right bridge. Cross over the Delaware up there and you're in fucking Stockton or Lambertville or some other artsy-fartsy damn place where they put boursin cheese on a son of a bitching cheese-steak, which is like putting nipple rings on the Virgin Mary.

Out there in Pine Deep he was Spoonsie to the guys at the Scarecrow Tavern. Another stupid name that clung to him like cow shit on good shoes.

He longed to go back to Philly, but Debbie kept popping out kids like she had a t-shirt cannon in her hoo-hah. And any conversation involving 'sex' and 'condoms' became a long argument about a bunch of Bible shit that he was sure didn't really matter to God, Jesus, the Virgin, or anyone else. Four kids and counting. In this economy? On his pay? Seriously? God wants kids to grow up poor and stupid in a town like this?

As his Uncle Tony was so fond of saying, "Shee-eee-eee-ee-it."

But...

The nickname was only part of it. It was a splinter under the skin.

The kids? Well, fuck it. He did love them. Loved the process of making them, too, though he'd like to explore the option of stopping before he and Debbie turned their lives into one of those we-have-no-self-control-over-our-procreative-common-sense reality shows.

He suspected that she had some kind of mental damage. She seemed to enjoy being pregnant. Bloated ankles, hemorrhoids, mucus plugs, the whole deal. He was pretty sure that on some level Debbie was—to use the precise medical term—batshit crazy.

But she was also the most beautiful woman he'd ever talked to. Even now, four kids in and a bigger ass than she used to have, Debbie could look at him from out of the corners of her eyes and stop his heart.

Even now.

So...he stayed in Pine Deep.

And he worked in Pine Deep.

That was something by itself. A lot of people in town didn't have jobs. The town was still recovering from the Trouble, and the economy blew. Sure, a few of the stores had rebuilt and there was some out of town money to rebuild the infrastructure. Federal bucks. And after the town burned down, there was that big rock concert fundraiser bullshit. Willie Nelson, the Eagles, Coldplay, bunch of others including some rappers Francisco never even heard of. It was on TV with that stupid nickname: ANTI-terror. With terror crossed out. All those middle-aged rock stars, none of whom had ever even heard of Pine Deep before those militiamen torched everything, singing about unity and brotherhood. Blah, blah, blah. If any of the money they raised ever actually reached the town then it never made it into Francisco Sponelli's bank account.

All he got was an offer of free counseling for PTSD, which he didn't have, and a stack of literature about surviving domestic terrorism, which he didn't read, and a pissant break on his taxes for two years, which wasn't enough.

On the upside—which Francisco didn't think was really 'up' in any way—the Trouble had kind of passed him by. He and Debbie and the kid—only one back then—were down in Warrington watching a movie at the multiplex when it all went down. They heard it on the news driving back. The news guys said that a bunch of shit-for-brains white supremacists put drugs like LSD and other stuff into the town's drinking water and every single person went apeshit. What made it worse was that it was Halloween and the town was totally packed with tourists. All those thousands of people went out of their minds and started killing each other. Worst day of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. That much was a fact. Francisco took Debbie and the kid to her sister's in Doylestown for a week. By the time they came back Pine Deep looked like a war zone. Lot of people they knew were dead. Lot of the town was gone. Just freaking gone.

Lot of people out of work, too, because Pine Deep was built with tourist dollars.

One of the few businesses that didn't go under was the one he worked for. The one owned by Tom Gaines, Debbie's third cousin. Francisco's workload tripled, but he didn't get overtime. Gaines said he couldn't afford it because a lot of the customers couldn't afford to pay. Not right away. Some not at all.

But the job still had to be done.

And that was his life. Working for one of Debbie's family at shit for pay. Not exactly starvation wages, but it was a job with no future. Not really. Sure, he could have the job for as long as he wanted, but there was nowhere to go. There was no promotion possible. The whole company was the owner, Mr. Gaines, and him. And a couple of guys they hired by the hour to help with some heavy stuff. All of the rest of it was Francisco's to do.

Trimming all the hedges.

Pruning the trees.

Mowing the grass.

Digging the graves.

And...the other stuff.

The stuff he did at night.

So the graves wouldn't be messed with.

Mr. Gaines sometimes slipped him a couple extra bucks when things got bad. And he let Francisco drink as much as he wanted on the job.

He encouraged Francisco.

It was that kind of a job.

-2-

Before the Trouble the job wasn't really that bad. Dead people don't complain, they don't give you shit. They don't dime you out when you go into one of the crypts to smoke a joint. He could get to a level, get mellow, and that would carry him through even the longest shift.

The job was quiet except for occasionally chasing teenagers out of the crypts who’d gone there to drink or light up. Once in a while some prick vandal would use spray paint to tag a mausoleum or knock over a few headstones. But that happened in every cemetery, and everyone knew that, so Francisco adjusted to it as part of the job. The job was okay.

Even for a while after the Trouble it was tolerable. He worked mostly days, and Gaines didn't go out of his way to be a prick. The boss was cheap, but not a cheap fuck. The difference mattered.

Then things started changing.

It started with people talking. The Scarecrow was one of the few bars that wasn't burned down, and it was a good place for a plate of wings and a schooner of Yuengling at the end of a day. But the flavor of the conversation there changed as the weeks and months went on. It really started after the cops and fire inspectors sorted out the last of the bones. It had taken a lot of sweat and elbow grease to put together a list of all the dead. The official tally was eleven thousand six-hundred and forty-one. Two thirds of the whole town. Only the thing was that there weren't that many bodies. The count was short. Eighty-four short, and that's a lot of bodies to misplace.

They brought in teams of dogs to search the woods and the fields and under frigging haystacks. Still eighty-four missing.

The count stayed the same.

That’s when the vandals started hitting the cemetery. Knocked-over headstones, grave dirt churned up, his tool shed broken into, beer bottles everywhere. Couple of times he discovered that someone had pissed on a grave he’d just filled in. He mentioned all this to his cousins over a poker game. Near Danny was nodding before he finished describing the disturbances.

“Sure, sure, that makes sense,” said Near Danny.

“It does?” asked Francisco, confused.

“Yeah,” agreed Far Danny. “People are blowin’ off steam. With all that shit happening—”

“All those people dying,” added Near Danny.

“All that death and shit…”

“…they’re like obsessed with that death shit.”

“Morbid.”

“Morbid.”

Francisco looked back and forth between them. “Okay, but why trash the cemetery?”