Plow the Bones (3 page)

There is noise. There is so very much noise! Just looking at him, standing there and pretending not to know that they have intruded into this place, her world is filled with sound, crashing sound, crunching sound, metal on metal on glass on dirt on flesh crash crunch scream she should scream she can’t scream because she does not have a voice has never had a voice sound!

She is on her knees with the heels of her hands pressed to her ears before she knows she has fallen. And still her father will not lower his chin and crane his neck to see her. Behind her, the Girls lick their lips and hiss like snake–harlots, and all that noise still presses down on her, paralyzes her.

Her father says, “So good to see you, baby girl. You look splendid.” And the noise breaks. Silence fills the cracks, shuttles the sound away.

So Isabelle stands. With shaky knees, with her pretty dress tangling around her bare ankles. She steps forward. And she sees the fireplace beyond her poor awful daddy.

Oh, no, no, no.

All of the faces are gone. The faces of Christ and the faces of a thousand nameless under–bit gargoyles and goblins. All sucked in and away. And in their place now, staring out with sadness set in chiseled eyes, her daddy’s face stares back a thousand times. She thinks,
Don’t turn around now, Daddy. God, please, don’t turn around
. She does not want to know what her handsome daddy has become, does not want to see the swirling vertigo where Sunrise has stolen her daddy’s face.

He stays put. His hands remain clasped. The faces in the fireplace close their eyes and grit their teeth. “I didn’t mean a thing but love, Izza. You know that.”

And she does. Because the only way to keep something forever is to lose it for good. But it hurts. And she’s too tired to fight the tears.

The Girls slide up on either side of her and she winces at the smell of breath from lungs that no longer breathe. They say, “The key?”

And she nods.

Her daddy’s sad stone faces, they all curl up on themselves like the faces of crying men, and they say, “Baby girl, I am so sorry.”

His body reaches into his front vest pocket, where he always kept his beautiful Meerschaum pipe, and he pulls out the thing that she wants. The key. Oh, the key!

She reaches over his shoulder and snatches it, and close up like this, she sees the place where his face should be. Just a glance. Just a glimmer in her periphery. But, oh it is awful. And she begins to cry so hard that she almost makes a noise.

The Girls push her forward, past the faceless thing shaped like her father, out of the front hall and into the sitting room. Toward the fireplace, that wall of faces that used to be stolen and are now all her father’s. Those stones once carved with their birthplaces, each to a one now reads SUNRISE.

And there is the door. The tiny tin door with the keyhole in its center.

Her father’s faces say, “There’s nothing behind that door. But you know that, baby girl. This never ends.”

“The key!” whisper the Girls. And they drown her poor daddy into silence.

She unlocks the door. And she opens it. And now, oh yes, now she…

§

She runs. Oh, yes, she runs. Her bare feet slap like hands against the rough loose–packed dirt of her father’s carriage trail. Tiny rocks stick to her heels, gnawing little divots into them, little pink craters like bite marks, and why yes, that does seem just about right, doesn’t it? Because Sunrise Mansion does have teeth. Sunrise Mansion devours.

She can hear the shrill, severe laughter of the Girls, and she feels like she has missed the set–up and punch line of a particularly cruel joke.

DURING THE FIRST ERA, THEY observe him. They watch him burn. It is a slow fire, a terribly slow fire which burns him in stages that last a thousand years. A millennium’s worth of reddening skin, progressing toward blisters that form in the time it takes for generations to be born and to die. They observe as the flames climb him like leeches, blackening him, curling his skin like old paper, revealing (with a flourish, a magician’s handkerchief yanked away) the strings and highways of his musculature. They watch, and take notes, as his organs boil and burst and their contents spill down the grate at his feet, sluicing down and down and down the sheer walls of the forever–long pit below him. They watch his eyeballs liquefy, they watch him as he becomes unable to watch them. They watch his larynx tumble out, then watch the chords behind it stretch and pop. They watch the layers of his penis curl backward one by one, until there is nothing but a burnt bundle of tissue at his crotch shaped like a rose. They watch his teeth fall, note their velocity and the rhythm of their
tic–tic–tic
staccato down the drain, jot down the exact moment at which the sound becomes too faint to hear.

They watch all of this, and they brainstorm. And when it is all over, they do it all over again in reverse, and see if his pain is any less bearable when played backwards. And then they compare notes.

— Allow the sensory organs to last longer, or not be destroyed at all. Allow him to see, hear, taste, and feel all of it.

— Leave his penis. I want to see what happens when we leave his penis.

— He does not scream enough. Hotter fire? Slower?

§

During the second era, they pry apart his mind and climb inside. They want to see who he is, and why he is here. They become like tiny mosquitoes and bleed him of his memories and emotions.

For a few decades, there is only fear. The terrible (delicious, oh so delicious for them, and oh so fascinating; these things always are) sensation of awakening to a lie you’ve been told, one around which you’ve constructed your entire life. No, no, no, this can’t be real, I can’t be here, I don’t believe in this! It is amazing to them how long it takes for the shock to wear off. The damned can never accept that they are damned. They can never grasp that they have simply chosen incorrectly. What was it that the God–boy had said? About being THE way? THE truth? THE light?

They relish his fear. They do not become bored of it. Not once in the never–beginning history of their kind have they ever.

And when they have gorged themselves on his emotions, they dig past them and excavate his life. They find that this man’s name is Gordon Dratch. Gordon Dratch was twenty–eight years old when he fell off a ladder outside of his home and cracked open his skull on his concrete driveway.

— What a wonderfully comical way to die.

— They laugh at him, I’m sure. His obituary is it’s own punch line.

— What else? What else?

They dig, and they find.

§

Witness Gordon Dratch as a child. Thirteen, and angry. He opens the closet door slowly, careful of the creak in the hinges and the scrape against the rough carpet. He ducks inside, holds his breath. The closet smells like peppermint and Old Spice and sweat and that dry, aged stench of all those creepy old people at church. Bald buzzard–headed men and fat mean–eyed women, whose toothless mouths can’t seem to shape the words of the hymns, and therefore just sing off–key animal noises. He hates them. But he’s not concerned with them just now. It’s in here somewhere, his prize, his reward for being quiet and cunning and thirteen. He finds it in an old shoebox that used to hold his dad’s dress shoes. A forty–ounce bottle of pale–brown booze, the label torn off so that the only markings on the glass are the torn white leavings of the paper and the sticky label–glue that held it on. His dad’s stash, the secret stuff.

He used to find it all over the place. Beneath the seat of Daddy’s car. Down in the basement behind the dryer. Even after Daddy’s Big Breakthrough, the day he and Mommy sat Gordon and Annie down in the living room and Mommy said, “Guys. Daddy’s got a problem with alcohol. We’ve got to give Daddy some space and some extra love, okay? He needs us to help him get better.” So, yeah, Gordon knows what booze is, and he knows that his dad was a drunk. Is a drunk. Whatever.

He hides the bottle beneath his coat, hard up inside his armpit, and he reaches inside his dad’s jacket and steals a few cigarettes too. Then he slips out, closes the door behind him with the same slow care he took in opening it. And he leaves the house.

Outside, Mark Milligan is waiting for him with his hands shoved in his pockets, his eyes darting from Gordon’s front door to the street and back again, checking for the hidden cameras, the signs of the trap. He says, “D’ja get it?”

Gordon nods. They cut across the street and through somebody’s back yard. An Irish setter growls at them, and they spit at it and flip it the bird. They vault the fence and sit beneath the bushes by the railroad tracks, trading swigs of the forty and smoking Winstons. Mark says, “My dad says your dad is gonna start giving sermons sometimes. Like, as practice.”

Gordon says, “Yup.”

Mark says, “Is he any good?”

Gordon cocks an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean?”

“Like, does he want to be a pastor or something?”

“I guess. I dunno.”

They sit in silence for a while, smoking and taking little sips, too young and too scared to drink enough to get drunk. Then Gordon says, “I don’t believe in God, anyway.” They spend the rest of the afternoon like that, silent, pretending to drink, pretending to smoke, until the sun starts going down and they both have to sneak away home and brush their teeth so no one smells the smoke on their breath.

§

They like this memory. It is typical, vintage human behavior. Delicious in its predictability. They’ve tasted it before, and they note its flavor, write a few lines on the similarities it holds to other memories like it.

— Poor baby was an angry teenager. We weep for you, Gordon.

— Is he an atheist? He doesn’t burn like an atheist.

— More! There must be more!

After the fear, the thing that was Gordon Dratch feels intense, awful, cold regret. He feels it freeze inside him, even through the slow fire that burns and bursts him over and over again. They observe the change with joy, watching a favorite play, coming to a well–remembered and well–beloved scene. He weeps until his eyes are gone, and then weeps some more once they are rewound back into his head. They watch the realization work its way across his soul, spreading through his veins like a blood–sickness. He made the wrong decision. Faced with a million spiritual doors, he opened the wrong one. There was such a thing as a wrong door! All of those red–faced old men with their fists bound up into tight, sausage–fingered slabs on the pulpit, those men who had raged against the follies of a Godless world, those men had been RIGHT! Oh, God. Oh, God, forgive me now.

They applaud. Their favorite line. No man enters the kingdom, and all that.

And then they dig deeper. So much to learn about this perfect, typical number of the damned. So many beautiful, repetitive layers to wonder at.

§

Witness Gordon Dratch in fast–motion, the high school years, filled to bursting with parking lot fights, stolen liquor, three–day suspensions, detentions, Saturday schools, cigarettes, CDs from Scandinavian metal bands with face–paint and leather gauntlets who wore upside–down crosses and sang songs about the devil. Witness the first few years of college whiz by, time–lapse photography of Gordon becoming a sullen young man, the kid whose every relationship would ultimately be scuttled by daddy issues and a latent anger toward a God he claims he does not believe in. All so fast that you can see the bones in his face shift, change shape. A series of patchy beards grown and then shaved off, a dozen pairs of glasses becoming scratched or broken at the bow and then replaced, a thousand T–shirts and a thousand pairs of jeans, recycled over and over again. Spend a single second watching Gordon shout black–metal lyrics in the face of the street–preacher on the quad, both of them red–faced, both of them with veins standing up in their necks.

Now stop.

Did you miss it? The moment of his awakening? It is easy to do when you fly through a life. But look at him now, sitting at a desk with his notebook in front of him, scribbling with intense concentration. He loves this class. It is very possibly the only class he has ever taken that he has ever enjoyed. He is twenty–one years old. The heading he has scrawled at the top of the perforated standard–rule page says, ZEN NOTES. Behind it are fifteen pages with the same heading, filled with simple, perfect discoveries excavated from a history he never knew existed, quotes from men who became historical footnotes thousands of years before Gordon Dratch was born, revelations of a life that could be lived without anger or fear.

Gordon Dratch is joyful.

Speed forward again, just a few months, and Gordon Dratch is standing at a bar with a beer in his hand, smiling and talking to a stranger in a T–shirt that says, “Jesus died for his own sins, not mine.” He is saying, “Zen and atheism are totally compatible philosophies.” He takes a drink, feels the alcohol going to work on him, making him feel smiley and fuzzy. “Or at least,” he says, “that’s a good place to start.” The words sound funny to him, like they don’t make quite enough sense, and he decides he’s done drinking for the night. He’s proud of himself, sort of. His dad could have never done that. Then he says, “Let me tell you a story.”

The story he tells is a story the Buddha told when asked to explain what happens to a man after he dies. Gordon says, “There is a war. During that war, a man is shot in the arm with an arrow, and is taken to a medic. The medic takes the man aside and attempts to remove the arrow, but the man is agitated. He won’t sit still, he’s freaking the fuck out, right? He keeps saying, who shot me? Was it someone on the other side or was it one of my own kinsmen, mistaking me for the enemy? Where was the archer when he shot me? I want to know about the trajectory of the arrow. What type of bow was used? What type of wood is the arrow made out of? What will happen now to the archer? What was he thinking when he shot me?”

The stranger laughs, and Gordon knows he’s doing this right, acting out all the right parts, holding his shoulder and glancing around wide–eyed, selling the comedy. “The medic stops him, calms him down. Then he says, ‘the answers to those questions will not remove the arrow from your arm.’ ”