Set back from the road, there’s this banged-up graveyard down the valley not too far from me. That’s where I will be buried when I die. It is neither here nor there, but it is along a small brook that could pass for a crick at times. Especially in the spring when the runoff comes down off the rolling hills. I paid for my little plot and the headstone to go along with it here with some money I squirrel away over time. It’s loot from cutting grass across long summer days and from selling my tchotchkes at the private night market that happens in September and October way back in the forest. I figured that it would be a good thing, using that side cash to help alleviate the problem of what to do with me when I’m dead. My people, there aren’t many of them, but they matter to me. And I’ll be damned if they don’t need that kind of aggravation that comes along with losing a loved one. It’s bad enough as it is let alone having to worry about what the hell happens next.
Her and the kids, they’ll have better things to do with their time when the dust settles and my carcass is laying there in the front room/ sunlight girders ramming down through the windows/ sunshine splattering all over my pancake makeup. Even if my head got blown off, I want to be out there on display. I need to leave the living with one last trauma. I want to have the last laugh. I am a firm believer in the dead having the last laugh.
It’s only fair. It’s only right.
Even it’s just bits of my shattered skull sprinkled across a $120 XXL H&M suit, I don’t mind. I want the makeup anyway. I want my protruding neck bone all lathered up with mascara and lipstick like some bad tourist attraction totem pole.
There’s a teenage kid who hangs out here among the old headstones. I’ve seen him a few times, longish hair flapping like a tattered flag in the chilly wind. I call him RTP. Rural Teenage Punk. Or Rat-P for short. He has stayed away from me until now. I mostly look around at the Civil War graves and Rat-P stays over by the rushing water, smoking cigarettes, hitting a one-hitter now and then.
Sometimes I can sense him watching me when I’m slow rolling, reading the faded inscriptions of the long dead. It’s a strange feeling, even downright creepy at times. Other days he isn’t around at all. And then some days I can tell he’s watching me but it feels alright, country satisfaction raining down on me. I don’t really understand it but who cares.
Time is a construct but death isn’t. I wrestle with that one. It occurred to me during the pandemic/ and then again this past winter when I was down with bronchitis/ that death is everywhere all the time. Everybody’s just way too scared to admit it. Most people have this whole act going on that allows them to walk around with invincible airs. To me, it’s unappealing. I’ve never been into confidence, really. Swagger and big dick energy make me throw up a little in my mouth. I prefer quieter people, people who are giving off a vibe that’s maybe a bit more removed from the crowd, a bit more emo or goth than all of this full-on bro glow I seem to have waded waist deep into once upon a time when I wasn’t paying attention.
That’s my problem. I waste a lot of time when I could be living different. Always looking at Facebook. Staring at the TV, my mouth half open. Eating and reading the local paper standing up at the kitchen island, ignoring the dogs as they shark me for crumbs, reading about state cops hammering drivers with weed up on the interstate. I pass so much time wasting even more time that it’s a wonder I get anything done.
But truth be told: what could I even do differently? Admitting I’m a bit on the common side of pissing away my days is one thing, but what about the alternative? Is there even one? Are there people out there really truly living their best lives?
And if so, what on earth does that even look like?
I wave at Rat-P one day when I catch a whiff of his weed. The smoke must hop a breeze from way over across the graves to where I’m standing. I’m looking at the stone of some local soldier who died at the Battle of South Mountain in September of 1862. He was 19 when he went off to war. Two months later he was gone. He died on the day of the battle so he must have died fast, either right away or within a few hours of his wounding.
I wave at Rat-P and he sees me wave because I see him see me. He flips his hair back like Judd Nelson in Breakfast Club when he sees me do it. He never has anyone with him. He also never appears to be on his cell phone either, which is unheard of for a kid his age.
This afternoon he’s just sitting there on the bent nook of his old willow, super stoned out of his country gourd for all I can tell.
Fuck it, I figure.
I’ll wave.
And I do.
And like I said, he pretends he didn’t see it even when I saw him see it.
We are talking now, me and Rat-P. I saw him see me wave at him and when he acted like he didn’t I kind of felt awkward. So I waited another couple minutes but it just became too much for me. There was this profound intensity building between us as I tried to concentrate on the graves over by my own plot. I couldn’t really focus though. Eventually I caught him looking at me and so I gave him the finger.
He smiled.
Now we are talking. He tells me things that are hard to comprehend. He explains that he’s the ghost of a kid who was killed in a car crash up the valley a few miles back. It happened in the 1970’s, he says. That’s why he doesn’t have a phone, he says.
I try to meet his eyes when he reveals the ghost thing to me. I can see that he has scars up and down his arms. Burn scars. He also has scattershot scars around his eyes and cheeks. He avoids my eyes mostly but he must sense me looking at his skin.
They’re from smashing through the windshield, he says.
It was a dynamite car, he says.
I ask him what kind of car but he ignores that question too. This is when I notice a couple little trout sipping blue wings off the creek surface.
You see those trout a lot? I ask, pointing at the fading rings on the water.
This time he considers my voice, turns to watch the flow, then turns back in my general direction. He closes his eyes and takes a deep drag off his cigarette, which I never saw him light. It was just there, it was just lit.
The moment hangs in a holding pattern. I’m starting to understand something too. Rat-P is not going to be answering any of my questions directly. His eyes are clenched closed.
Get me some beer, mister? he says without opening them.
Beer? I say.
How come you want beer?
He keeps his eyes closed. The late afternoon sun laces lit fingers through his curls. He doesn’t answer my question.
He doesn’t even hear me, I tell myself.
Weeks later, I’m at home with my family looking for a movie to watch when Rat-P comes out of the kitchen holding a burning candle. I brought him home with me a couple nights after I brought him a six pack of Buds. My wife took it in stride as far as those kinds of things go, but my kids were a little perplexed.
Understandable.
I tell them that this kid’s name is Walt.
I lie through my teeth about Rat-P.
I tell the kids he’s a distant cousin from out of state who needs to stay with us for a while.
I say he’s probably autistic when the kids started noticing that he’s more than distant to their questions. It’s as if he doesn’t even hear them. Or see them in front of him. If they ask him to hang out in the yard or whatever, he just flat-out ignores them. Kids don’t take so well to other kids waving them off like that, I guess.
My wife? I tell her what Rat-P told me, that he was the ghost of some car crash boy from a long time ago. She laughed when I said that, but after a while she came around to the possibilities. Listening to the young man blurt out his random words and all, she began to sense what I had sensed from that first conversation: that there was something other worldly about this kid. He was, I told her one night in bed, not something we were bound to understand through any kind of learning that we had ever been exposed to.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
