The Marijuana Chronicles (12 page)

M
AGGIE
E
STEP
is the author of seven books. Her work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and frequently stolen from libraries. She lives in Hudson, New York.

zombie hookers of hudson

by maggie estep

O
ne morning, his head looked too small and I asked him to move out.

Why? He stared at me.

“It’s just not working,” I said. I didn’t mention that his head suddenly appeared small. You can’t say that to someone. It’s not right. “I’m not happy,” I said.

Martin’s eyes drooped and then he shrugged.

He’d only been living with me three weeks.

He packed up his stuff and, just like that, he was gone.

We’d started as strangers, we were ending that way.

Then it was just me and Alexander Vinokourov, my one-eared pit bull, Vino to his friends.

I sat on the floor with Alexander Vinokourov in my lap, his head wedged under my arm. His head is too large for his body, but I like that. Imperfections in dogs are beautiful; in humans they’re a fault line that you want to put a jackhammer in.

I sat like that, numb and quiet, for about thirty minutes. I was like a cow needing to be squeezed for reassurance before going into one of the
humane
slaughter chutes designed by the admirable Temple Grandin. Vino was my sixty-eight-pound squeezing machine. Except I wasn’t heading to slaughter. At least not that I was aware of.

I stared at the empty drawers where Martin’s stuff had been. I thought about his last words to me.

“I really liked you, Zoey.”

“I liked you too, Martin,” I had said. This was perfectly true. I did like him. I just didn’t like his head.

Eventually, I made Alexander Vinokourov get off my lap so I could stand up. I opened the drawer where I keep my socks and underwear. I pulled out the powder-blue plastic wallet with
Wyoming
emblazoned on its side.

There’d been a time when I thought Alexander Vinokourov and I might move to Wyoming. I’ve had ideas about moving to many places and have in fact moved to most of them. Lately, though, I just keep drifting around a hundred-mile radius of upstate New York. It’s pretty here and the people aren’t all morons. My rent is cheap and I can get by doing odd jobs.

I put the blue plastic wallet in the back pocket of my jeans, attached Vino’s leash to his collar, and out we went.

It was hot outside and, even though it was close to dusk, the sun was a burning gold coin.

Vino and I walked up to the top of State Street where crumbling buildings rested their crooked frames against newly renovated ones.

The guy with hooks for arms was sitting on his porch and called out: “Beautiful dog!”

I said, “Thank you,” like I had made Alexander Vinokourov myself.

We reached the periphery of the cemetery, where the sign reads,
Cemetery closed during hours of darkness
.

We walked in through the oldest section, where half the tombstones have toppled and time has rubbed off the dead people’s names. We crossed to the far side, past the war veteran’s area where there’d been a big kerfuffle when vandals had started stealing all the flags off the graves. Video surveillance had been set up to catch the perpetrators in the act and had caught … woodchucks. They were stealing the flags and taking them to their woodchuck holes. They liked the taste of the cured wood the flags were attached to.

Vino and I walked to our favorite spot, a wooded, quiet area lying between the cemetery and the new artificial sweetener factory, the building which had caused nearly as big a kerfuffle as the flag-stealing woodchucks.

But something was wrong. An excavator had been here and dug up a huge swath of earth, maybe half an acre, and there was now a gaping maw where Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been.

We went to stand at the edge of this big mouth in the earth. I saw pieces of broken-up wooden boxes strewn around in the dirt below.

I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the artificial sweetener factory, didn’t like that Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been dug up for reasons I wasn’t sure about—but probably had to do with the sweetener factory.

I didn’t like much of anything that day.

I took the Wyoming wallet out of my back pocket, sat at the edge of the hole in the ground, dangled my legs over, and, as Vino flopped down and started panting, I took my small stash of weed out of the wallet and rolled a joint. This was excellent weed. Had a tense, earthy smell, almost exactly like the big dirt hole I was staring at.

I lit the joint then coughed. Alexander Vinokourov’s head swiveled toward me, making sure I wasn’t dying. I’m never sure if his concern for my well being is entirely altruistic. If I die, he’ll have to go back to scavenging from garbage cans and escaping thugs trying to trap him and turn him into a fighting dog.

I took another hit and coughed again, but this time Vino merely flicked his ear, listening for sounds of serious distress before bothering to turn his entire head.

My own head was taking a beating from the inside out, the weed making me feel like I’d had an involuntary hemispherectomy, the two sides of my brain operating independently of each other which, I was pretty sure, would lead to something unusual and very possibly unpleasant.

Then, just as the letters of the word
unpleasant
drifted through my mind, something reached up from the pit in the earth and grabbed my ankle.

I screamed.

Alexander Vinokourov was next to me in an instant and we both looked down to see a horrible mud-covered woman with her hands around my ankle.

My heart hammered. Vino was trembling. Adrenalin coursed through me, but it was paralyzing rather than giving me superhuman strength. I stared at this creature with her fingers digging into the flesh of my ankle. I tried to shake my leg free before this freak pulled my ankle out of its socket.

I screamed for help but there wasn’t anyone to hear me.

Then, suddenly, the woman made a sound, like a cat coughing up a large hairball, and let go of my ankle.

I turned around and ran, slowing down only when I was about a hundred yards away. I looked back, expecting to find the muddy woman coming after me. She was not.

I stood there, my body flooded with fear chemicals, my mind burning with curiosity. Then I heard an unmistakable cry for help. The voice was reedy, small, pathetic.

“Please. Help,” she repeated.

I guess I was more stoned than I realized. I walked back over to the edge of that maw in the earth and peered down. The woman had dirt caked in her hair and was wearing what may have once been a dress but now looked like the Shroud of Turin.

Her eyes met mine. She looked very sad.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away and she was staring at something, maybe Vino, maybe something past me.

“May I have some, please?” she asked.

“Have some what?”

“Some tea,” she said, motioning toward the sky.

I looked up at the sky too. It was just past dusk, almost all dark up there, a lemon slice of moon starting to show itself.

“Tea?” I said looking back down at her.

“Tea,” the woman repeated, pointing, it seemed, at my hand.

I looked at my hand too. The joint. I was holding the half-smoked joint. I had some dim memory of pot being called
tea
. Like in the 1950s.

“You want a hit of
this?”

The muddy woman nodded.

Was this really happening? I relit the joint and passed it to her, reaching down just far enough so she could take it but couldn’t pull on any of my body parts.

She smiled. She had dirt between her teeth.

She took an enormous hit. She didn’t cough, but her blue eyes bulged. Eventually, she tried passing it back up to me but I declined. She might be contagious.

“Could you help me get out of here?” she asked, then.

She had a strange way of speaking, not an accent really, but a lilt. She was reaching up toward me like a little kid wanting to be lifted up onto a parent’s shoulders. I actually felt sorry for her.

I reached down and took the woman’s dirty wrists into my hands and pulled.

One of my odd jobs is as a dog handler at the local animal shelter. I routinely lift very large dogs up onto examination tables. This woman didn’t weigh much more than Henry, the mastiff who was endlessly scraping himself up.

She clambered up, her bare feet finding purchase in the wall of earth. Then, exhausted from this effort, she fell belly-first in the grass. She looked dead. Alexander Vinokourov went over to sniff the air around her. I was about to nudge her with my foot when she rolled over and sat up.

“Are you all right?” I asked, squinting at her.

There was mud caked in her eyelashes.

“No,” she said simply. Again, she tried passing the joint back to me.

I looked all around. The woman was, after all, at least half-naked and totally covered in mud and we were just a few feet away from Newman Road, the street that skirts one side of the cemetery and leads to the dump. Some guy in a pickup truck was bound to drive by at any moment, get turned on at the sight of my muddy friend, and come running over.

There was no one around though. The road was quiet and my lust for the joint outweighed any concern about contagion. I took another hit and felt a little calmer.

“Do you want me to walk you over to the hospital?” I asked. If I took her to the cops, they’d eventually pack her off to the psych ward anyway. It would be kinder to just take her there directly.

“But I’m not ill, I’m dead. Or was dead.” She said it with a straight face.

“Ah.”

“You don’t believe me. But it’s true. I was dead. Buried. Then, two days ago, I woke. There were sounds. Earth-moving machines. Digging us up, digging up the pine boxes that we were buried in. In 1924.”

I sighed. I looked at my dog. My dog looked at me. “I’m sorry. I can walk you to the hospital if you’d like, but that’s all I can do.”

“Noooo,” she shook her head. Her muddy hair moved.

“Then I can’t help you.” I turned my back, even as she called out to me.

“My name is Annabelle,” she said, trying to humanize herself, imprint herself on me.

I ignored her, though I could feel her eyes on my back as I retreated.

I got home, took Vino’s leash off, then immediately smoked another joint. I usually don’t smoke at home for fear of attracting neighbors wanting to bum weed off me. But after you’ve had an encounter with a woman who claims to be dead, it is sometimes necessary to smoke at home.

I was hungry. I walked into the kitchen with its bright yellow linoleum tiles, relentlessly cheerful, even at night. I opened the fridge. There was meat for Vino, but not much for me. A shrunken head of lettuce. A pear. A jar of almond butter. Maybe I’d walk over to the tortilla truck on Warren Street.

I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the full-length mirror. My black T-shirt and jeans were covered in mud and dog hair. My own hair, well past my shoulders, was in nests. I leaned over the big porcelain sink and threw water on my face. I ran my fingers through my hair. I put on lip gloss.

I was looking at myself in the mirror when suddenly Annabelle appeared there, standing right behind me.

I screamed, reached for the nearest object, and pointed it at her. It was a hairbrush.

“How did you get in here?” I shoved the hairbrush, bristles-first, into Annabelle’s stomach.

“Ouch!” She looked like I’d hurt her feelings more than her physical vessel. You left me there, left all of us there,” she said. Her eyebrows moved like muddy caterpillars as she motioned beyond the bathroom.

I craned my neck and saw two more muddy women behind her. I screamed again.

Vino barked.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” I attacked Annabelle with my hairbrush, backing her against the sink.

“Shhh, please, hush,” Annabelle said.

“I will not hush. You hush. And get out of my house.”

She didn’t move and the other two just stood there too, staring.

I felt nauseous. “What are you doing here?” I asked Annabelle. “You followed me?” I was having trouble breathing.

“We need help,” Annabelle said. “We’re hungry. Me and Birdie and Sophia.” She motioned at her compatriots. Birdie was tall and skinny, Sophia short and curvy. They were both covered in mud just like Annabelle. How they had walked through downtown Hudson without getting arrested or raped, I wasn’t sure. It’s a laissez-faire town, but not that laissez.

“And what, I look like a fucking soup kitchen?”

“Please help us.” This entreaty came from Sophia, the shortest of the women.

“Please get out of my house.”

Vino barked again but it’s not as if he did anything useful, like look menacing for example.

Now, Birdie, the tall one, started talking in an excited high voice telling me that all three of them had been murdered some ninety years earlier by a man named Giacomo.

“Giacomo?” I said numbly.