The Marbury Lens (12 page)

In the foothills, we rode through a forest of crucifixions.

At first, in the washed-out haze of the distance, I’d thought they actually were trees. Trees would be nice. Maybe we’d see some up in the mountains, I thought.

But they weren’t trees. They were the broken-off fragments of utility poles and other structures, lashed together with impotent black cables like childhood jacks, X’s with prop-braces, the skeleton frames of squat, naked tepees, tumbled and strewn among the rocks and ravines where it appeared there once had been a small community of houses, a stream. And every one of them was decorated with three or more bodies.

This happened a week ago
.

Maybe just a few days.

There are others somewhere.

We can’t be the only ones left.

We rode in single file, Ben at the lead. I followed Griffin, watched as the horses swayed before me, weighed down by the bulging packs we’d invented from the belongings of dead people. Somehow, Griffin had managed to make a seat between his saddlebags, stuffed and rounded with the filthy blanket I’d used as a poncho. He looked back at me one time as the horses took us up through that savage maze.

Harvesters still moved among the sunken and hollowed remains of the bodies, in and out of sleeves and collars, waist bands, the bulges of their thick shells occasionally animating a trouser leg or crotch from the underside, constant as the sound of their feast.

There had been women here. We didn’t say anything, didn’t need to. Each of us knew what the others thought about.

Most of the bodies hung upside down, those with heads arched their necks backward, chins petulantly angled like hell-trained magnets at the ground. Men and children, adorned, every one of them, with stained stakes or arrow shafts. Every one of them had been stripped of their clothing, rendered hairless and neutered, bellies laid open, the red-black domes of their naked skulls congealing in the dry heat. One of the structures held the remains of two boys and the carcass of a dog that had been skinned from ears to paw.

We rode.

“There might be something we could maybe use here,” Griffin said.

Griffin nodded at a sloping shelter fashioned out of the rubble and shards of a liquor store.

“We don’t need anything that bad,” I said.

There was an old paved road that carried other movement through the community at one time. The horses walked easily on it where it rose level and dark from the ashy ground. It led away from the graveyard of stilts and climbed, line straight, up to the blackness of the craggy mountains north of us.

“Who knows what’s up there?” Ben said. He stopped his horse and turned around to face us. “Anyone want to guess?”

Griffin played along. “A miracle.”

Ben squinted. He saw something behind us, I could tell from the look on his face.

I turned around. A spotted white and black dog came following our horses from out of the ruin we’d left behind, hunching low as though it somehow made him invisible.

The dog came up, stopped ten feet behind us, and sat in the road, ears down, head lowered. He was a small thing, shin-high, maybe. He shivered, but not from any cold he could ever have known. Not here.

Griffin got down from his horse, pulled his pants away from his butt. When he moved closer to the dog, he curled up and slunk away down the road, nervously glancing back at the boy.

“We don’t need a stupid dog hanging around us,” Ben said.

Griffin’s face showed his disappointment. “I never had a dog, I don’t think.”

He got back up onto his horse and we started off toward the mountains again. Griffin looked back and smiled. The dog followed along.

“I’m going to name him Spot,” Griffin said.

Ben turned back and shook his head disapprovingly. “How’re you feeling back there, Jack?”

“Okay,” I said. “The little guy makes me feel good. It really works.”

Ben said, “I don’t know what we need with a dog and a ghost both, tagging along.”

“I wasn’t talking about the ghost.” I grinned. “I was talking about Griffin.”

“Shut up.” Griffin laughed. Then he turned back and held his fingers out and said in a high and songlike voice, “Come on, boy.”

“Stupid dog,” Ben said.

“I wasn’t talking to the dog, I was talking to Jack.”

We laughed about that, all of us.

In the evening, seated high on our horses at the first ridge of mountains, we could see the flat of the desert clearly. But it was still impossible to tell who, if anyone, was following the trail we’d left.

Things grew here. It was cooler. The horses poked their sagging, leathery faces into the brush and ate. We hobbled them before nightfall when we found a small circle of clearing inside a rounded blind of something that looked like manzanita, and here we spread out our belongings and our weapons.

We sat facing one another. Ben and I took our boots off, moaning quietly. Griffin was barefoot, as usual. He’d been like that all day. Ben passed a water bottle around and began sorting out bits of the food we’d salvaged: a small can of sausages and a bag of peanuts. The dog hid behind Griffin, and every time the boy would go to pet him, the dog would expertly dodge his touch and move a few feet away, waiting.

Ben watched this, and just shook his head.

“I’ll give him some of my food,” Griffin said.

“You don’t have to do that,” Ben said. “I vote that we all feed the dog.”

Then Ben looked at me.

I raised my hand. “Passed. We feed the dog.”

I took my shirt off and folded it on the ground between my legs. I pressed a palm down over the bandage on my chest. It ached, but not just from the bite. I still couldn’t get over the image of Conner, how he looked here in Marbury.

“Do you want me to change the medicine on that?” Griffin said.

“In the morning.”

Ben gave a sausage to Griffin. “Here. See if he’ll take it from you.”

The dog wouldn’t come close enough to take any food from Griffin. Eventually, Griffin left the scrap of meat on the ground next to his hand and said, “Good boy, Spot,” when the dog finally came for it.

“At least
that thing
doesn’t eat,” Ben said.

I didn’t realize Seth had been sitting beside me. He faded away into the brambles at Ben’s dismissive words.

“He has helped me, you know,” I said. “A few times.”

“We helped him, too,” Ben said. “We got him out of that cave. You ever seen what harvesters do to ghosts?”

I thought, tried to remember if I had or not. It was there, I knew it. Somewhere.

“I’ve been having a hard time remembering some things since I took that arrow.”

I tried picturing Conner, the way I knew him. But I kept seeing the image of the devils that tried to kill me earlier that morning when I stood with the horses outside the train.

It couldn’t be Conner.

“He told us you’d forget stuff. Henry did,” Griffin said. “You think we don’t know what’s going on, Jack? You think he didn’t tell us this would happen?”

Shaking in the brush. One of the amber-colored nuts fell from the spiny branches and rolled across the ground, coming to rest against my foot. Then it rolled back into the darkness, pushed along by an invisible hand.

Tap.

“Quit it, Seth,” I said. “What did Henry tell you two?”

“He said you’d be different.” Ben leaned forward where he sat, looking across at me. “He said he knew you from somewhere else, and he said that things were going to change about you.”

“Is there any more food?” Griffin asked.

Ben fumbled around in one of his bags. “Hang on. There’s candy.”

“Candy?”

“Well?” I said. “Am I different?”

Twigs snapped in the brush. Three small sticks dropped onto my foot.

“Shhhhh…,” I said.

“What’s he want?” Griffin said.

I shifted, tried to look for Seth in the dimness around us. “I don’t know. Am I different?”

Ben tore open a small blue sack of candy. Skittles. “Here,” he said, “hold out your hands.”

And he poured the little colorful beads into our palms.

Griffin closed his eyes. “These are the best things I’ve ever tasted in my life.”

I tapped his shoulder. “Have mine.” And I put my candy into our little doctor’s hand.

“See?” Ben said. “It’s like that. You wouldn’t have done that a week ago, Jack.”

“Are there girls?” Griffin said.

I looked at him, didn’t understand.

“Are there girls in the other place?”

“Yes.”

“Are Ben and me there?”

“I don’t know. I really hope you are. Henry told me you would be.”

“Is it a nice place?”

I looked from Griffin to Ben. “No. It’s the same as here.”

“Can you tell us about it?” Ben asked.

I thought about Conner. Nickie. Freddie Horvath.

“I don’t think I can, Ben. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Seth,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up, goddamned ghost,” Ben said.

More snapping of twigs. Then bits of stems fell from the sky, scattered onto my legs.

“I can tell you about him. The ghost,” I said. I could see Seth’s face, watching me from inside the brush behind Ben.

“Here,” Ben said. He poured some more candy into Griffin’s hand. “That’s the last of it.”

The dog inched in and sat beside Griffin. The boy gave him a little red piece of candy and stroked his hand one time along the dog’s spine. I could see the little thing tensing up.

“Tell us about him,” Griffin said.

“Okay,” I said. “This is the first thing I learned about him. When I was in the cave. But it’s not the beginning of his story, it’s the middle. Somehow, it seems like it’s the part he wants me to tell you.”

“How do you know?” Ben asked.

I thought about Ben’s question, but I wasn’t certain I could explain the answer. There was something deep that connected me to Seth, but I couldn’t quite understand it, or see the entire picture yet. And it wasn’t how I imagined that being haunted by a ghost would be, like I’d seen in movies or read about in scary stories. To me, there was nothing scary about it at all, not in the way I was haunted by the echoes of what Freddie Horvath did.

And the first really vivid image I saw of Seth’s life was of him and his father carrying a dead man’s body out into a field. It was the turning point for Seth, the one that set his course along a path he could not escape.

Like me, putting on the glasses Henry had left behind that night at The Prince of Wales.

“It’s…,” I began, and I had to think about it, how it felt. “When he helped me those times, it was like I could see everything about him. It’s almost like I
am
him. There’s no difference, and I can talk for him.”

SETH’S STORY [1]

I helped Pa drag Uncle Teddy’s body down from the floor of our wagon, the buckboard we used to haul firewood, and sometimes animals, in. He was really heavy, but I never had to carry a dead man before. I never even saw a dead person before Uncle Teddy. He hardly moved, too, he had stiffened up so much in the cool before morning; and half his blood must have been pooled out there all over the splintered wagon bed that just couldn’t absorb it all.

Pa smoked a cigarette. It was impressive to me how he could smoke with no hands while we got Uncle Teddy over the side of the small ditch that ran along the road.

Uncle Teddy’s shoe came off in my hand, and I just threw it down and tried my hardest to drag him by the cuffs on his jeans. I didn’t want Pa to think I was weak.

Pa and I tried to get him into a culvert after Pa peeled back the wire grate that covered its end, but we found out that pushing a dead body was impossible, so we had to leave him with just the top of his head inside the pipe. Pa went back to the wagon to fetch the stuff he’d use to burn him.

Uncle Teddy wasn’t my uncle. He wasn’t related to either one of us at all, we just called him that ever since I knew him. But Pa wasn’t my father, either. He’s just the man who found me nine summers before, when I was seven years old and sleeping in the dirt along the side of the road one morning. So Pa took me home to live with him and Ma, and Davey and Hannah, who were like brother and sister to me, only a lot different, too. Especially Hannah.

“Are we going to be in trouble for this, Pa?”

“No, Seth. The only people who ever get in trouble have to get caught, first. And we ain’t getting caught.”

It was beginning to get light. I tried to stand where the smoke wouldn’t blow on me, but it seemed like every way I went, that smoke would just circle around and get in my face like Uncle Teddy was trying to follow me.

Pa threw stove wood on top.

And Pa was wrong about things.

We did get caught.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I stopped telling the story.

Griffin was asleep on his back, barefoot, his shirt pulled up out of his pants and twisted around him so it made him look just that much smaller. His dog was stretched out right alongside the boy’s leg, but he kept his eyes open, watching me, watching Ben.

“What did they do to him?” Ben asked.

“The boy? Seth?” I said. “He got hanged.”

“Oh.” Ben had a softened look in his eyes. Maybe what I said meant something to him.

Then the bushes behind Ben shook violently, and we heard a kind of pained cry that made the dog sit up and growl.

“I won’t say anymore,” I said. Seth’s dim ghost appeared, standing in the middle of the twisted branches, staring at me, his narrow hands, just faint breaths of fog, twisted around the spiny antlers of brush. “It’s okay. I said enough.”

Ben stretched his legs out. “Do you think we should take turns sleeping?”

“I think that would be a good idea,” I said. “You go ahead, Ben. I’ll be okay.”

He didn’t argue with that, put his head down on one of his bags, and rolled onto his side so he was facing toward Griffin.

It was easy enough to see them coming at night, anyway.

I got up from the ground. Seth was standing right next to me, so close I could feel a kind of warmth coming from him. I went to the edge of the clearing and looked out across the desert floor.