Plow the Bones (9 page)

§

The Cotton Lee in the bathroom mirror of the Faith Community Church men’s room was handsome. Cotton had never seen himself as handsome, had never thought about it one way or the other, but that image in the mirror, the man with the black tux (he had forgone his Navy formals, and now he was glad), the patent leather shoes, his hair just a little longer than he usually wore it, or ever would wear it again after this day, was exactly and perfectly… handsome.

The door opened a crack and he saw in the mirror Mr. Danvers, Audrey’s father, peek in. He smiled, the bristles of his beard moving with his face. “How you feeling, Cotton?”

“Anxious.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, yeah. I can honestly say I’ve never felt better. Not once in my entire life.”

“Okay. I gotta get back to Audrey. You ought to get ready, we’re about to start.”

Cotton nodded, brushed a perfect strand of hair from his forehead, and followed Mr. Danvers out of the bathroom. He crossed the lobby, felt the sun on his face through the windows, took his position at the back of his groomsmen. This was it, this feeling right here, that he wanted to freeze and keep, to be able to revisit on a whim every lonely moment, surrounded by his friends, moments away from marrying the most perfect human being anyone could possibly imagine.

Snicker–snack.

(No, damn it. Not yet. Not this one, not when he had just found it again. Cotton pushed against his body, clenched his fists around the tail of the memory. Those little monsters would have to chew off his fingers to get this one away.)

The doors to the sanctuary opened. The procession walked in. Cotton’s feet were so numb that moving felt alien, like he had learned a new way of doing it. He stopped at the front of the sanctuary, turned and looked out at all these faces, all of them looking at him because they saw, they knew what he had. This sort of insane joy. Like this professor he’d had once.

Cotton’s best man (his name, then his face, dissolved to ash, blew away) gripped his upper arm.

Cotton nodded.

Snicker–snack!

Oh, Christ. This really was it, wasn’t it? This was the period on the sentence. The spiteful, stupid, quiet finale. He felt himself in two places at once, two times, two different universes occupied by sense and by nonsense, by joy and by ruination, by potential and by running–out. Those faces in the pews, they were all turning to mummies now, dry and dead, their smiles drawing up over their gums. This was no way to die. Like a fish. Like a stupid fish with a six–second memory. This was no way for a man to die.

The organ stopped with a blunt churr. And even though the organ player was gone, the music started up again. They had sung lyrics to this tune when they were little kids, hadn’t they? Here comes the bride, all dressed in white. Where is the groom? He’s in the dressing room. Why is he there? He lost his underwear! And then they’d all laugh like mad. Underwear! Get it?

The memory of the song died.

But, oh, Jesus. Here was something. The church was turning to dust around them. Even his tux was beginning to curl like old paper and flake away. But this really was something, wasn’t it? With the song gone, he could hear her heels clack against the stone floor. She held Mr. Danvers’s arm… but… Mr. Danvers was not attached. Already in the bellies of the sucker–babies, maybe. She took another step forward and the arm burst away in a million tiny specks.

Oh, yes.

She was perfect.

In that simple white dress, her clavicle curving proudly above the neckline. She smiled at him with all of the love in the universe. She redefined love, and Cotton saw his whole life there. The children he would have with her, the grandchildren, the fights, the sex, the books they would read sitting side by side on the sofa, the medications they would remind each other to take, the smiles, the anniversaries, the whole universe of what they would build, and the end, the finality, the loss, and how wonderfully part of it all it was.

The church was gone. There was a profound nothing around them, a complete absence, a vacuum of any–ness, And in its center was Audrey, smiling, standing with her arms by her side, one foot in front of the other. Looking like an exclamation point.

WHEN THE VENTRILOQUIST DIED, HIS will dictated that all of his puppets be burned. And so they were. In the middle of the dusty wasteland behind his tent, well away from the other members of the shanty town, they were piled on top of one another, still in their fancy show clothes, with their molded hair falsely combed and parted, with their limbs thrown to strange configurations that limbs do not reach by natural means. Some of the women chewed the insides of their cheeks and lamented the loss, and could not help but think of how smart their little boys would look in that tiny tuxedo or that miniature sailor’s suit. Their limbs — or, let us say, the surrogate limbs they possessed in place of real ones — were not full of muscles and blood, were not anchored by bones, but stuffed with cotton and weighted with sawdust, and so they could be forced into whatever configuration. Wherever they fell, they did so according to their own nature. The pile of dolls did nothing that piles of dolls do not or cannot do.

However, the ventriloquist was a fine craftsman, much envied by those few peers with whom he had correspondence, and his puppets were masterfully made. This story is tempted to tell that they looked like real people, with flesh and blood and bones to anchor them, people who could walk and dance and manipulate the muscles of their faces so that their eyes narrowed and their mouths manufactured false grins, the same as other people, only crushed into tiny, awkward toddler bodies. But if this story told that, this would be a false story, and it has no desire to abuse the trust of the empty ether to which it’s told. So the truth is this: the dead man’s dolls did not look like living things, and so their closeness to living things is not the reason it frightened the funeral party to see their limbs kinked into terrible angles. The truth is that the dolls looked dead, the scattered shells of things that once lived, cruel things that had disguised themselves, however poorly, as human beings. They looked like things that, while attempting to build their human bodies, had confused children and adults and had therefore crammed youth and age into a single shape. The reason that the funeral party was frightened (before the night bloomed like an oil spill over the place where the sun used to be and the flames explored the puppets, layer by blistering layer) was that they had always been suspicious of the imposters that the ventriloquist harbored. But before, the puppets had sat on his lap, and their spines had seemed straight and strong, and their arms and legs had hung more or less where they were supposed to hang. Now, tangled up in themselves with their eyes staring at nothing and their mouths just barely open, it was as though all of the old suspicions were confirmed. Behold the monsters in abominable repose, laid out and laid open before you.

So, while the good people of the shantytown stood in a circle and sang funeral songs, the mound of dolls was doused in gasoline and immolated with, at its bottom, the body of the late and lamented ventriloquist.

Oh, goodness. This story has forgotten something in its own telling. It reverses, for the sake of its good listener, the mindless void. The mouths of the puppets, hanging open. People say that ventriloquists make puppets appear to speak. The educated and informed will tell you (or perhaps they will hold their secrets; the educated and informed often do) that it is easy to open a puppet’s mouth. Do nothing. Its jaw will fall open and its words will spill out soundlessly. A puppet’s words infect. They taint. They do this without ever sounding like a thing, without the listener realizing they have been spoken. A true ventriloquist, as those who are educated and informed may or may not choose to tell you, is adept in the art of keeping those mouths shut. And so, while the fire made itself a ladder and climbed itself into the ink–spilt sky, those unfortunates who stared into the burning pile of wooden faces and cotton limbs and glass eyes now filled and blinded with smoky cataracts, also saw the peeking teeth of the condemned, saw their painted tongues curl and burn, and because there was no hand inside their head to shut their mouths, almost heard the secrets they were trying to tell. Their sleep would thereafter be infrequent, and nightmares would take root behind their eyelids, never to be remembered in the daylight except for a clutching desperate feeling in their solar plexus, a rat trapped and starved between their ribs, which lingered for hours after they shot awake like cobras from a basket, tangled in their sweaty sheets.

A confession. This story began with a lie. This story wanted very much to end here. And so it spun a fabrication within its very second sentence. But this is not the end of this story, as ashamed as it may be to admit it. This is the rest of this story, told into the void as all stories are. Until their end. Whether they like it or not.

It is said that the ventriloquist was a very rich man, even if he did live in a shanty tent in a shantytown amongst shanty people. It is said that the ventriloquist was deathly afraid of nuclear war and that — with a mere token of his obscene fortune — he built a bomb shelter in a secret place beneath his tent, and he brought a mattress into it, and stocked it with brandy and cigars and newspapers and TV dinners, even though he did not own a TV. It is further said that there, in that reinforced concrete cell where the dead man slept and ate and drank and smoked and read decades–old obituaries, was kept the ventriloquist’s last doll, and his best.

This story ends with that doll, and the girl who climbed the rusty ladder into the shelter to ask it a question.

The girl was seventeen and curious. This is not uncommon. The educated and informed will tell you that a curious seventeen–year–old is as common as curdled milk, and only half as easy on the stomach (or perhaps, again, they won’t). She grew up with stories about the ventriloquist’s funeral, nursed on them as a baby and was never successfully weaned. She knew of the tangled arms and crooked legs of the man–child–monsters that burned that night, revealed for what they were. She knew that the people of the shantytown slept in fits, eaten from the inside by their starving rats. She knew that the puppets told a secret, and that nobody remembered what it was. All of that happened many years ago, and still the shantytown stood, tents and boxes, and still it was haunted by the decades–old pyre that once burned on its windy, dusty outskirts, and she wanted to know why.

So she found the place where the ventriloquist’s tent used to stand, and she found the heavy wooden door beneath the sand, and she pulled on the big brass ring set into its surface until her elbow joints popped and finally the door shuddered and the ground spat it out and the cold airlessness of the shelter gusted up and pushed her hair away from her face. Then she climbed the ladder down.

The doll was reading obituaries in the dark, and picking at a TV dinner. It was a doll made of flesh and anchored with bones — all of it real, no stuffing and sawdust for the ventriloquist’s masterpiece. It was as tall as a man, and it had glass eyes that rolled in their sockets like the wake–me–up, let–me–sleep baby dolly she had when she was very small, and a little plastic row of teeth behind its lips. Its skin was sallow, green, somehow preserved on the precipice of rot, and sewn together with mint–flavored dental floss (she could smell it, false freshness). She gasped when she saw it. It gasped when it saw her.

After a long moment, which the curious girl used to convince her lungs and heart that they ought to continue performing in the manner to which she’d become accustomed, she said, “You are the ventriloquist’s last puppet?”

The doll shifted its rump on the mattress and its eyes jiggled in its head. It said, “I am that.”

The girl took the few steps toward the doll. She took them quickly, with her hands clasped in front of her breasts and her spine straight. She said, “I am so pleased to meet you. I have wanted to see you for a long time. I’m a fan.”

The doll looked confused. It cocked its head at her and gnawed on its lip with its plastic teeth. It said, “You don’t say?”

“I do say,” said the girl, and smiled. The doll smelled sweet and moved like a newborn calf, shaky and wet and unsure. She felt close to it. She wanted very much to be its mother. She said, “I’m sure we can be friends. I want to talk to you about so many things!”

The doll said, “You are very strange.”

“Many people say that,” said the girl.

The doll set aside the newspaper and brushed the TV dinner off the mattress. It patted the space beside it, and the girl sat down and brushed her skirt over her knees. It said, “You want to talk to me about many things?”

“Well,” said the girl, and bit her lower lip, “one thing, actually. But I’m sure it will take forever to talk about, and it will lead to so many other things, and by the end of it, I’m sure we’ll have no trouble talking about anything we like. We’re friends now, you and I.”

“We are?” said the doll.

“We are,” said the girl.

“Well then,” said the doll, “What is the one thing you want to talk to me about?”

“I hope I don’t seem too brash,” said the girl. She leaned forward and propped her elbows on her knees. “After all, we’ve just met, and I respect that the answer to this question is very likely something you’ve never told anybody. But… come on, just say it, silly girl… okay… what was the secret that the puppets told the town while they burned?”

The doll sighed, and with one patchwork hand rubbed at its patchwork scalp. Where it rubbed, the loosening dental floss stitches stretched, and its flesh patches split apart, and when it stopped rubbing they slid back together. “Why do you want to know that old thing?” said the doll.

“Because,” said the girl, and tried to think of a reason. It had never occurred to her that she might be asked this. She couldn’t fill her lungs all the way down here, breathing air that wasn’t really air, sweating through her blouse even though the shelter was midnight cold. “Because… it’s the secret that makes the town what it is. It’s the secret that makes me what I am. It’s been around as long as I’ve been alive, and it shaped every step I’ve ever taken, and I deserve to at least know what it is, don’t I?”