Zombie Read online

  “Do bones float?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bones. Do bones float?”

  Dr. Fish stares at me & blinks once, twice. “What kind of bones?—human, or animal?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Well, there might be.” Dr. Fish shrugs & frowns backing off, I get the idea he’s stalling not knowing the answer. “It would depend, too, on whether the bones were heavy, or, you know, dried out—hollow & light. If so they would float, I’m sure.” There’s a pause & he adds, “You mean float in water?” & I nod sort of vague & he’s at the door, a little wave of his hand like a Thalidomide flipper, “Well, Quen-tin. See you next week?”

  It was already arranged that the bill would be sent to Mom. No need for me to stop at the front desk. The receptionist called out surprised asking did I wish to make an appointment? & I mumbled no, I’d call sometime. & out of there, & that smell, fast. & in the van able to breathe & driving back to Church Street it came to me Fuckface Fish didn’t know the first fucking thing about BONES. Dentists are not doctors. Nor scientists of any kind. Probably didn’t know any more than Q__ P__.

  A MEMENTO of the visit, though, in my pocket.

  25

  FUCKING SORRY to be missing so many classes at Dale Tech. I don’t know how it happens. Especially since I am determined to turn over a new leaf this time.

  Except in Intro to Engineering I fucked up the first quiz, got a score of 34 (“F”). & missed the second. & when I got to the computer lab to do my assignments I’m behind in, there was a weird suspicious smell like formaldehyde that might’ve been a trick. (For the part of BIG GUY I’d saved, two-three years ago, I’d needed at least a quart of formaldehyde & got some from a biology lab at Mt. Vernon pretending I was a student, in my stick-on goatee & heavy glasses & carrying a briefcase I can pass for a grad student anywhere.) & the instructor is a young guy who looks right through me like there’s a blank space where I am.

  Dad has paid my tuition & I have insisted I will pay him back out of my caretaker’s wages, as soon as things get settled. I still owe on my van & there are other expenses. Mom says I am careless with money spending on friends & making loans that will never be repaid, I’m like her with a generous heart she says & not many money-management skills. Since the trouble last year—the arrest & the hearing & the suspended sentence etc.—Dad looks at me differently I think, I’m not 100% sure because I am shy to raise my eyes to his but I think it’s like he is fearful of me as in the past he was impatient & always finding fault. Like Q__ his only son was a student failing a course of his. Yet I believe he is thinking we are all pretty lucky like my lawyer said. No matter the shame to the P__ family that Q__ is an “admitted” sex offender at least Q__ is not incarcerated at Jackson State Prison. At least his twelve-year-old “victim” was not injured. Or worse. Dad saying again & again Think of it as an investment in our joint future, son! You can pay me back when you’re able. His jaw like he’s got lockjaw but he’s smiling with that wrinkly little pink-asshole mouth & his professor eyes watery inside his glasses.

  Mom hugs me & stands on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. Her bones are like dried sticks I could break in my hands so I stand very straight & still not breathing to inhale her smell. What that smell is I do not know & do not name. Mom was a plump woman once with soft big breasts like balloons filled with warm liquid unless I am remembering her wrong. Dr. E__ says all mothers are big in memory because we were tiny infants nursing at the breast. Dr. E__ says there is the GOOD BREAST & the BAD BREAST. There is the GOOD MOTHER & the BAD MOTHER. You know we love you Quentin Mom says like a tape when a button is punched This time things will turn out well.

  I say, That’s right, Mom.

  I say, I’m sure going to see to that, Mom.

  These past ten months or so I’ve been driving out to Dale Springs & taking Mom & Grandma to church, & I’m missing some Sundays now but I intend to get back on schedule soon. Mom says This time things will turn out well. With God’s will. & Grandma says, This time things will turn out well. With God’s will Amen.

  26

  EXCEPT: the old dreams starting again in this new bed in this very house I’d visited so much as a little boy, Junie & me the grandchildren Grandma & Grandpa loved. They never knew Q__ P__ but they said they loved him. These old dreams now I’ve stopped taking my medication, I’m waking with a HARD-ON big as a ROCKET & sizzling-exploding going off LIKE A COMET’S TAIL. My cum is thick & clotted & gluey-hot wiped on the bedsheets, on the curtains, on the cardboard pizza box & napkins from Enzio’s I folded to an inch square & placed in Akhil’s bed (which was not that neatly made, not what you might expect) one afternoon when the house was empty.

  Waking up in my caretaker bed at the ground floor rear of 118 North Church Street & I’m shuddering-groaning as the ORGASM slams through me like a bolt of electricity. Dreaming I’m strapped in the dentist’s chair & lowered helpless & knives & picks in my mouth till I’m choking with my own blood. I’m feeling O.K. once I get up & turn the TV to “Good Morning America” & I boil some black coffee & take some uppers I pick up on the street when required. & I remember the computer class was the day before. Or I’m driving out to Dale Tech & it’s the wrong day, or the wrong time of the right day. Because Time is like a tapeworm jammed inside you in any direction. So I drive out anyway once the van is IN MOTION headed in that direction I’m superstitious about changing course just on impulse.

  & if there’s a hitch-hiker along the route, often just off the expressway I’ll probably stop & give him a ride & I will observe him detached as a scientist calculating what kind of ZOMBIE he might make. But I am never tempted so close to home. & out at Dale Tech which is this crappy fifth-rate place everybody at the University including Professor R__ P__ looks down their asses at I will park my van in lot C I have a sticker for & cross “campus” (just concrete & scrubby strips of grass & stick-trees half of them dead over the winter) thinking O.K.! I’ll visit my profs to explain there’s an illness in the family, my Mom in a struggle with cancer, or Dad with a bad heart but I can’t find their offices or if I find the office it’s in the wrong building or the wrong wing of the right building & by the time I get to the right office it’s shut, door’s locked, the cocksucker is gone for the day. Or say I get sidetracked trailing some young guys from my engineering class into the student union where I’ll have cups of black coffee till my eyeballs spin like pinwheels sitting seeing who’s around ANYBODY KNOW ME? ANYBODY WANT TO SIT WITH ME? squinting seeing if I recognize anybody, if it’s O.K. to sit with some of them, maybe they’re in my engineering class or maybe computer or I look enough like somebody they know so it’s O.K. I’m carrying some textbooks, it looks like, & my hair cut & not in a ponytail or straggling down my shoulders since the arrest though I am wearing RAISINEYES’ funky leather slouch-brim hat & BUNNYGLOVES’ soft-bunny-fur-lined leather gloves are in the pocket of my $300 sheepskin jacket & my aviator-style amber prescription lenses are in BIG GUY’s frames so I look pretty fucking cool I think for a shy white guy on the downside of thirty, weak chin & hairline receding. & it’s weird how friendly the Tech students are, & how trusting. Like if you are enrolled & a student you are one of them & no questions asked. All of them commuters like me living in Mt. Vernon or the county & most with part-time jobs or even full-time, like me. Even sometimes a girl will pull out a chair to sit at my table if she knows somebody with me. Hi! she’ll say like a high school cheerleader. Like the girls at Dale Springs High who looked through Q__ P__ those years like he didn’t exist. Are you in my computer class?—you look familiar.

  I should mention my handtooled kidskin boots just a little too big for me courtesy of Rooster. Last observed striding along the street in Greektown, Detroit, Thanksgiving weekend 1991.

  Never have selected any specimen except the black boy I don’t count, from the Roosevelt projects, from Mt. Vernon & vicinity. But it is a shrewd idea to keep in practice speaking with them. Though mainly I listen. To learn their words,
their slang. Like they say, cool they say, that’s cool! every few words. Gross, fucked-up, weird, wasted, retro, wild, far-out bummed—the words don’t change that much, & there are not many of them. It’s more the way they move their hands, mouths, eyes. Though shrinking from their eyes unless I’m wearing my dark plastic shades.

  Sometimes like Mom says I’m too generous paying for somebody’s lunch or beers or whatever. Or actually lending money. & driving one or two of them home sometimes if they’ve missed their bus going a few miles out of my way into suburbs not-known to me & No trouble! I say & in such instances Q__ P__’s kindness will be remembered, my face & the Ford van with the AMERICAN FLAG decal on the rear window. A big decal exactly fitting the rear window. If I needed a character witness (for instance at a trial) you would remember Q__ P__ from Dale Tech & the fact that I was kind.

  Once lent a skinny Chinese kid my sheepskin jacket on a freezing winter night, no questions asked. & he returned it, maybe two weeks later but he returned it. Engineering student named “Chou” or “Chin” with a ping! sound in it. & his eyes shining-black & he did not seem so young & so innocent as most of them but when he said Thanks, man all I said was a mumble Sure.

  27

  That last time in my place on Reardon St. I was taking a chance bringing NO-NAME home. Picked him up on 1-96, Grand Rapids exit ramp but he said he was from Toledo & traveling west. Fighting the drug eyes rolling sideways in his head like marbles. Hey man I guess I don’t want to do this O.K.?—lemme go man & I told him I wanted him to stay with me like we were friends, brothers, I told him I would pay him well & he wouldn’t be disappointed & he was sweating saying Man I’m cool won’t tell anybody I swear just lemme out of here man please?—O.K.? & I tightened the cord so his big eyes bulged & his skin was ashy-plum & the lips I could not take my eyes off were ashy & it was shooting through me like electricity HE KNOWS! NOW HE KNOWS! NO TURNING BACK! which is the point that must be reached. The threshold of the black hole that sucks you in. A fraction of a second before & you are still free but a fraction of a second later & you are sucked into the black hole & are lost. & my dick hard as a club. & big as a club. & the sparks of my eyes. & I did not stammer as when first he swung into the van this cool dude eyeing whitey & his easy smile like Here I am, man, what’re you going to do about it? In the back the old battered Elements of Geophysics textbook to provide a false clue, & my stick-on woolly moustache & hair parted weird-neat high on the left side of my head & in the tavern in Grand Rapids where we had a few beers he did the talking & I sat quiet just listening & if anybody saw us it was NO-NAME they saw & some white guy who never was there.

  Then home with me & the promise of a hot bath, home-cooked meal vodka & clean sheets etc. NO-NAME grinning thinking he’d be sucked off by whitey & paid for his trouble & maybe clear out whitey’s possessions but that was not how it came about & the panic in his eyes said this was so. I said, I am not a sadist, I am not a torturer, I think you are terrific, I ask you to cooperate & you will not be hurt. I was excited, I had to unzip. He saw, & he knew. You know even when you don’t. It was two barbiturates I gave him mashed & in vodka. But they were slow to take effect & he was struggling & I said how many times I will not hurt you I said if you lay still. But his struggling made things worse for him & he didn’t cooperate. He was crying, I saw he was just a kid. Maybe nineteen years old & he’d acted so much older, so cool! Jammed the kitchen sponge into his mouth seeing the flash of a gold tooth. He was near to choking so I had to be careful, I did not want to lose him. He was tied securely for his own safety, he was drugged & should have been anesthetized by now but it was taking too long. The way the doctors did lobotomies was to zap their patients first with electric shocks to render them unconscious but I didn’t have the nerve I feared I would electrocute NO-NAME & myself both. He was in the tub now naked & the water was running & that freaked him HE KNOWS! HE KNOWS! though he could not see the ice pick yet. Snaky-supple kid with that gold tooth—a real TURN-ON. Reddish-kinky hair & a deep red sheen to his skin. Like oxblood shoe polish, Dad’s shoe polish I remember from years ago at home. Good-looking in fact FABULOUS-LOOKING & they know it but it’s too late once Q__ P__ takes over. I secured his head in the clamp & now brought the ice pick (which I had sterilized on the hot-plate burner) to his right eye as indicated in Dr. Freeman’s diagram but when I inserted it through the “bony orbit” NO-NAME freaked out struggling & screaming through the sponge & there was a gush of blood & I came, I lost control & I came, so hard I kept COMING & COMING LIKE A CONVULSION I couldn’t stop nor even breathe I was groaning & gasping for air & when it was over & I was in control again I saw the damage done—fucking ice pick rammed up to the hilt in NO-NAME’s eye up into his brain & the black kid was dying, he was dead, blood gushing like from a giant nosebleed, another fuck-up & NO ZOMBIE.

  28

  & then the disposal of. The heavy weight of.

  SO HEAVY. Like they’re doing it on purpose, RESISTING.

  Wrapped naked in green garbage-pail liners & tied with rope & on the outside wrapped in canvas & tied with baling wire. Dragged by night by stealth & infinite care. Down the stairs & into the van, the rear of the van carefully prepared for its cargo. SO HEAVY! Q__ P__ sweating in even cold weather. Lifting weights & working out at a gym like I do from time to time & mean to do on a regular basis as every therapist I’ve ever had recommends hasn’t built up the muscles I would wish in the upper body & thighs.

  The disposal of, these FABULOUS-LOOKING guys, it’s a DOWNER.

  Leaves me depressed if I’m not careful, back on my regimen of medication. & the fucking medication has side-effects so they get you both ways.

  Q__ P__ always drives at the speed limit & obeys all traffic regulations. Whether there is contraband cargo aboard the van or not. Sometimes impatient drivers sound their horns at him moving slow & cautious (for instance in rainy weather, in snow) in the right-hand lane. But no response. No lowering the window & yelling out or waving the .38 pistol & firing into somebody’s surprised face LIKE THEY DO IN DETROIT, MAN!

  A landfill or dump is most strategic of course where the ground is already broken. & far from home base—seventy, one hundred, two hundred miles is Q__ P__’s rule. The extra effort is worth it like purchasing a new moustache, wig or whiskers every time. Vacant lots, wooded areas near parks—risky because kids play in them, & dogs. Dogs are your natural enemy if you don’t dig deep. But empty marsh land beyond the Interstate in some lonely place where nobody goes is a good bet & weighted down with a tire iron & baling wire dropped into deep water—NO-NAME was dropped into a river in Manistee National Forest east of Crystal Valley.

  & never a ripple, nor any word. Never a news item. No obituary. He did in fact have a name but it did not suit him.

  Only this single memento I have of him in my carekeeping: one of Q__ P__’s most prized good-luck charms.

  GOLD TOOTH (ACTUAL SIZE)

  How many times. I keep mementos but no records. My clock face has no hands & Q__ P__ has never been one to have hang-ups over personalities or the past, THE PAST IS PAST & you learn to move on. I could be a REBORN CHRISTIAN is what I sometimes think, & maybe I am waiting for that call.

  In the meantime I have the basement of my grandparents’ old house entrusted to me as CARETAKER.

  29

  A little sickness in the air from so much fragrance everywhere—

  somebody’s left-behind New Anthology of English Verse & I leafed through it in the student union, not at the tech college but at the University where sometimes I come by in the early evening & these words from a poem by “Gerald Manley Hopkins” leapt out at me & rang like the bell of the Music College.

  Because now it is spring, it is April & Q__ P__’s first year of probation is behind him.

  30

  Dad & Mom & the relatives were ashamed but THAT IS HOW IT PLAYS OUT as my lawyer, in fact he is Dad’s lawyer, in Dad’s hire, has said. THAT IS HOW IT PLAYS OUT.

  If your son had come up befo
re a black judge, or a woman judge—it might’ve been much, much worse.

  Q__ P__ was allowed after negotiation (in which Q__ P__ took no part) to plead guilty to sexual misdemeanor committed against a minor. My lawyer & the prosecution lawyer worked it out. & Judge L__ was understanding. People were saying where money changes hands & it is the word of an inexperienced white man, unmarried, thirty years old, against the charge of a black boy from the projects, & this black boy, twelve years old, from a “single-mother welfare” family, there is not much mystery guessing what probably occurred. Nor what kind of “justice” would be extracted.