Whistling Past the Graveyard (37 page)

“We…we can’t let this happen again.”

“I—”

“I’m not blaming you,” said Gaines in a way that left some doubt about that. “But we need someone there.”

Francisco didn’t want to mention that he was actually there when this shit happened. He said he’d stay late.

The image of Lou and little Kaitlin O’Leary went walking across the fragile ice in the front of his mind.

“Bullshit,” he said out loud.

That usually worked.

It didn’t do shit today.

He got back in his car, drove home, went into his bedroom and got his gun. Debbie was out, the older kids were in daycare or school, and the house was empty. He sat on the edge of the bed and loaded cartridges into the magazine of a Glock nine that Far Danny had given him once.

“Hey, Frankie Spoons, this here’s a good piece,” said Far Danny. “Totally legal and shit. Not on any watch list.”

“Good for keeping your kids safe,” added Near Danny. “Long as you’re living out in the fucking boonies you got to be careful.”

At the time Francisco hadn’t wanted a gun, but even though they were family you simply didn’t argue with the Dannys.

Now he was glad they’d given him a gift like this.

Then a pang of mingled pain and fear stabbed through him.

Lou Tremons had taught him how to load and shoot the gun.

Feeling strange in more ways than he could describe, Francisco got back in his car and drove to work. There was a storm coming and the day was so overcast that it looked like twilight and it was only nine-thirty in the morning.

Francisco parked by the shed and began the slow, sad walk back to the grave. But halfway there he veered to his left into a different section. To where Lou was buried.

After a grave was filled in and the dirt had a chance to settle, Francisco brought in some rolls of sod and filled in the open dirt with green grass. It took a while for the sod to set, for the roots to anchor it to the ground beneath. It had been weeks since Lou was buried and the grass roots had long since taken.

But as Francisco slowed to a stop by the grave he could see that there was something wrong.

The sod was wrinkled. There was a distinct bump in the middle.

He squatted down and stared at it, studied it.

He licked his lips, afraid to do what he was about to do.

Then he reached out a hand and pulled at the sod.

It came away like a heavy comforter. The roots were all torn, and below the layer of sod the grave dirt was wrong. It was loose, churned.

“No,” said Francisco.

He fell backward and clawed the gun out of his jacket pocket, dropped it, picked it up again, and
bang!

His finger had slipped inside the trigger guard and the gun went off by accident. The bang was so loud that he recoiled from it, the gun bucked so hard that it fell from his hand, the bullet hit the granite headstone and whipped backward past Francisco’s ear. The sound scared a hundred crows from the trees.

Francisco sat there, his ass on the wet grass, feet wide, eyes wider, heart hammering, mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Above and around him the world ticked on into the next minute, and the next.

Then something happened.

Something awful.

The sod moved.

It rippled. Twitched.

Francisco absolutely could not move. All he could do was sit and stare.

The grass cover bulged and trembled.

The Glock lay on the edge of the grave, but Francisco could only stare as it rose up and thumped down as something
moved
beneath the sod.

Then a pale worm wriggled out from under the edge of the grass cover. Thick, gray, deformed.

And another.

And another.

Five worms in all, moving through the damp earth.

Only they weren’t worms and Francisco knew it. His mind screamed inside his head that this wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t true. But he knew.

Not worms.

Worms don’t have knuckles.

Worms don’t have fingernails.

Worms aren’t attached to a hand.

A word boiled up inside Francisco’s throat and burned his mouth. He spat it out.

“L—Lou…?”

The fingers stopped for a moment as if
they’d
heard him.

There was a sound from under the sod, under the dirt, muffled and indistinct. Like a voice heard through a closed door.

Like a voice.

Like a name.

Spoonsie.

Then Francisco was up and running as fast as he could.

He didn’t remember picking up the gun, but he became aware of it pressed to his chest with both hands. Hiding it because of his mistake? Or clutching it like a talisman? There was no time, no thought, no breath to answer those questions.

His car tires kicked showers of mud and gravel and torn grass as he drove the hell out of there.

-7-

Francisco spent the whole day at the Scarecrow.

The whole day.

Joey the bartender tried to get him to talk about it, probably thinking it had to do with the big thing last night. And it did, Francisco was sure of it, but he couldn’t talk about it. Not now. Maybe not ever.

The pistol was a cold weight between belt and belly flesh.

Joey must have made some calls because Lucky Harris showed up. Then Mike and Scotty. They clustered around him. Nobody said a word. For hours.

Joey put the TV on and they watched the news. Watched Family Feud. Watched The View. Watched the day get older. Outside it started to rain. There was a low snicker of thunder.

It was late afternoon inside the bar; outside it looked like the middle of the night.

Scotty was the first one to talk, to try and pry him open.

“Hey, Spoonsie, you okay…?”

Francisco felt his nose tingle and then his eyes and then before he could get away from the guys and go hide in a toilet stall, he was crying. Really crying. Sobs, shoulders twitching, tears and snot running down his face.

Any other time the guys might have fucked with him. Made fun, handled it like dicks because that’s what guys do when emotions get real for anything except the Super Bowl. But not after last night.

Scotty—the closest their group had to a hard-ass--reached out and took Francisco’s hand, gave it a squeeze, but didn’t let it go.

“We’re here, brother,” he said softly.

Without wiping his face, without looking up, Francisco said, “I saw that little girl.”

And he told them what he’d seen on the road.

Lou Tremons.

Kaitlin O’Leary.

Walking hand-in-hand.

Smiling at him.

With all those long, white teeth.

Saying his name.

And then…the five white worms under the dirt. And that voice down there in the dirt. Saying his name again.

Mike pressed a wad of paper napkins into his hand. Francisco stared at them for a moment unable to comprehend what they were or what they were for. Then he wiped his face and his nose. Mike patted him on the back.

Joey poured some shots and they all had one.

No one told him he was crazy. No one asked him if he was sure. Maybe if this was another town. Maybe if the Trouble had never happened. Now, though…no one tried to tell him that he was wrong or suggest that he’d imagined it.

It was Lucky who asked, “What are you going to do?”

It was unfortunately phrased. What are
you
going to do.

Not
we.

There’s a line. If you stand on one side of it and let a statement like that go uncorrected, then the line becomes a wall. The moment stretched and everyone at the bar knew that Francisco was suddenly on one side of the wall, and they were on the other.

Lucky tried to fix it without fixing it. “Spoonsie…you should just say fuck it. You should call Gaines and tell him to shove his job up his ass.”

Francisco shook his head. “I can’t.”

No one had to ask why. This was Pine Deep, and this was America, and if the economy blew in the rest of the country then it was going deep throat in Pine Deep. There were no other jobs.

“I got Debbie and the kids,” Francisco said.

It was a stupid thing to say. Crazy. Impossible because the town had become impossible. The job was impossible.

But there were no other doors marked ‘exit.’

For better or worse, this was his town.

His
family
lived here.

And he had nowhere else to go, nowhere else he could go.

The gun in his belt weighed a thousand pounds.

His heart weighed more.

-8-

When he was drunk enough so that his legs could carry him and his terror, he staggered into the bathroom, locked himself into a stall, turned and leaned heavily against the door. It took nearly four full minutes to convince himself not to put the barrel of the gun into his mouth and blow his troubles all over the walls.

Inside his head, some maniac had started a slide show, flashing high-res images onto the walls of his brain.

A pink coffin resting on the canvas straps, ready to go into the ground.

The same pink coffin open. Tufted silk. An eviscerated teddy bear.

Cold dirt on white teeth.

White fingers grubbing through the soil.

Lou Tremons calling his name. On the road, under the ground.

Monsters.

In his town.

“God…help me.”

And as if in answer to his prayers he heard the bing-bong alert of a new incoming text message.

How’s it going?

It was from Far Danny.

Francisco almost laughed.

How’s it going?

Well, fuck me, cuz, I think I’m growing a crop of vampires, that’s how it’s going. How the hell are things with you? How’s the leg-breaking business? Any goddamn vampires in the protection racket?

Those thoughts tumbled through his head and a laugh bubbled at the edge of his control. He had to fight it back because it was the wrong kind of laugh. The kind you don’t ever want to let get started because there’s no way you can stop it. That kind of laugh can break something you know can’t be fixed.

He stared at the stupid message.

How’s it going.

So, instead of laughing, instead of going totally apeshit out his mind, Francisco did something else equally crazy.

He called Far Danny and told him exactly how things were going.

Every goddam bit of it.

-9-

Far Danny took it pretty well.

After a bit.

At first he got a little mad and asked Francisco if he was fucking with him.

Then he asked him if he was drunk.

And he asked if he was crazy.

Francisco said no to the first question, yes to the others, but he didn’t take back anything he said. He couldn’t. It was out there. He wasn’t even afraid of pissing off the Dannys. Things had changed and getting his ass kicked by his goombah cousins didn’t seem so scary anymore.

Far Danny said, “Debbie and the kids? They okay?”

Francisco stiffened. It was already dark outside. He’d been here in the bar all day.

“Oh, god…”

-10-

Francisco ran out of the bathroom with the Glock in one hand and his car keys in the other. Lucky and Scotty and the others yelled and started to make a grab for him, misunderstanding what he was doing, but Francisco blundered past them and headed out into the rain.

He drove badly and way too fast.

He sideswiped a mailbox and tore some expensive stuff off the side of his car, and he didn’t give a cold shit about it. The storm was pounding down on the hood and windshield and Francisco fast as he could all the way out of town, along the wet black tongue of Route A32, into his development, up to his front door, skidding to a sloppy stop and splattering mud ten feet high on the front of his house. Left the car door open, ran onto the porch, banged the door open.

Scared the hell out of Debbie, who was putting supper on the table.

The kids started yelling. The baby started screaming.

Debbie saw the gun in his hand and the look in his eyes and she started screaming, too.

It took a long time to calm everyone down.

He had to calm down a lot to manage it.

He put the gun on top of the fridge, out of any kid’s reach.

He closed and locked the front door. Checked the whole house. Locked and pinned the windows. Took the cross down off the bedroom wall, the one Debbie’s grandmother had given them for their wedding. Heavy, with a silver Jesus nailed to it.

Francisco had to lie to make Debbie calm down.

He told her there was an escaped criminal in town. A madman.

She looked at the cross in his hand and then at the top of the fridge, and deep lines cut into her pretty face.

“Frankie,” she said very softly—too quiet for the kids to hear, “is this about…the Trouble?”

He stared at her, floored.

“What…? How do you…?”

She shrugged. “At the beauty parlor. The girls. We…talk.”

Outside the rain hammered the door and the thunder beat on the walls.

An hour later Lou Tremons kicked open the front door.

-11-

Francisco and Debbie screamed.

So did the kids. Even the baby, who didn’t know what was going on.

Lou smiled. He seemed to like the screams.

He was dressed in mud and rain water and his funeral clothes. He had Kaitlin O’Leary with him. And three other people. People Francisco had buried in closed coffins because they were supposed to have been too badly mangled in car wrecks or burned in fires. But they looked whole now.

They were smiling, too.

Wet lips, long white teeth. Red eyes.

Debbie screamed again and broke away from Francisco’s side, throwing herself between the vampires and her children. Francisco raised the cross, holding it up like a torch against the darkness.