Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon
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leather cowboy hat. She must’ve been nineteen, twenty years old, Cash looking so proud in a picture of him and her by the river—you know he couldn’t half believe he got her.
I flipped through them pictures, glad for Cash to have found such a piece of ass, but wondering too why it couldn’t be me that had her—right now, the living one—wondering if they killed her after they killed him, if they took her and did unspeakable things before dumping her across the border, or if they paid her off and let her go, if she betrayed him somehow, making it all the worse, because she was what he had and cared for. I wondered if they tied her down, like they tied Cash down. I wondered if she was true to him at the end, if she loved him then and forever, if she was still suffering for him to this day. I never had a girl tear at me the way she tore at him. I could tell from the pictures it was the kind of big bad love I’d only ever heard about in songs.
I knew he lived with a band down on Duval Street, in the same house they killed him at. I drove down there and found the drummer, Bo, and asked about Cash’s girl, this Nikki he was so torn up over.
“You’d never forget her,” Bo said, and I knew it was true, a fever starting to burn in me even then.
I showed him one of the pictures, and he said it was her, said she worked at Stubbs back then, but disappeared maybe a month before they killed Cash.
I thanked him and drove back to Waco. I sat in the Goat, night after night, looking at her pictures and wondering what had happened between the two of them. Connie wouldn’t return my calls from her high horse in Dallas, so I drove up there one night and banged on her door until she threatened to call the cops. But she wasn’t half as hot as that Nikki, the girl Cash had while I was rotting. It didn’t seem like I’d ever be so lucky as to find a girl as good as he found in her, a girl to love and get torn up over, a girl as beautiful as that. I could tell by the way she looked at him in the pictures how bad she had it for him, how bad they had it for each other. I wondered if she was still alive, torn up over Cash, still aching for something only a Chandler man could give her.
5
Alina
I know something’s wrong by the tone of her voice, but even after she tells me Kyle’s dead, I don’t believe her.
It’s a trick, I think. She must have learned he’s coming to Interlochen Wednesday to visit.
“This is about next week,” I say, “isn’t it?”
“Next week?”
“You know.”
But she doesn’t know.
She tells me about the accident. Crying and everything.
“Okay,” I say, still not believing, even though there’s electricity in my hands.
“They’re going to scatter his ashes in the Sound Saturday,” she says.
But he’s coming here Wednesday, I think.
“This woman he died with,” she says. “It’s crazy.”
And I’m like, “What woman?”
“This girl he grew up with. Cynthia.”
And I’m like, “What girl?”
She doesn’t say anything then.
I swear to god, she must be in shock.
And then, for a second, it hits me. Kyle. But just as fast I don’t believe. Then I do, then I don’t, then I do. And I’m like, Kyle. Then nothing. My big heavy dorm phone against my face. Then Kyle. I’m crying hysterical so a part of me must know. But another part doesn’t. He’s coming here Wednesday to visit. Just him and me. He’s dead. One thing seems to have nothing to do with the other. He’s coming here Wednesday to visit.
Nikki
I walk the beach and boardwalk for hours, a faraway line of container ships shimmering through the waves of haze and humidity. When we first moved from Seattle, Alina wanted to live down here near the ocean, but my job selling ads for the Long Island Weekly barely covered our bills month to month. We kept looking for a place we could afford until we found our little cottage in Long Beach, and then it seemed like nothing could ever touch us again. The best part of Alina’s childhood has been here, the most stable part, and these last few months with Kyle have made her feel, I don’t know, fuller maybe, part of why I wanted to build something with him—because she loved him so much. And after so many years, it seemed like I was ready for something, too.
A shopping cart sits on the beach, its tracks leading back to the water, as if somebody pushed it out of the ocean. I want to preserve her ignorance, buy her peace with my silence, but every second I wait to tell her feels like a betrayal.
When I finally go home and call her, she makes me say it again and again—Baby, there’s been an accident. Kyle’s gone. Yes. An awful accident. No. Kyle’s dead. I’m sure, yes. Oh, honey. He’s gone. No, I’m positive—until she finally breaks, crying and crying, and I know I should have told her in person, of course I should have. What kind of mother gives her daughter such news on the phone? I couldn’t afford another ticket, though, and put off calling for far too long, hoping to never tell her, as though I could have kept her safe and away forever.
She cries and cries, and I can’t touch her, can’t hold her. What kind of mother?
Hours later, when I hear her sleeping across the miles, her breathing soft and even on the phone, I take Cash’s finger bone from its pouch, but the finger tells me nothing. Years after he died, I felt bad for Cash—sad and sorry—just because he was responsible for Alina. I’d look at that fingertip as it rotted and became nothing but a chip of bone, all that was left of him, and feel as though I’d taken something from her. I never forgave him for what he did, but I couldn’t forgive myself either. I couldn’t even tell what might be forgiven in me, exactly, and what pieces of my past would always be unforgivable.
6
Mark
Cynthia’s answering machine blinked four messages, but I knew not to check them, because checking them would mean she was never coming back. I wandered her place, picking things up and putting them down, smelling everything, Any second, it seemed, she’d walk through the door. “You’re never going to believe what happened,” she’d say, and I’d make us breakfast while she told me. There was a picture of us on her bookshelf, slouched into her parents’ couch the night I met Kyle in his black leather pants, finally home from his years in Asia. They were old friends from country clubs and summer camp, Cynthia and Kyle, and I’d been changing the subject away from him for years.
I went to her room and piled clothes on her bed, armfuls from her closet and dresser drawers, underwear, sweaters, dresses, skirts. I burrowed into all of it. Whether or not she’d been sleeping with him, or for how long, hardly mattered now. I turned off the light, wanting to see her more than I had in months, to touch her and taste the salt and sweetness of her skin. Things had been bad between us since spring, but to never see her again? We always came back to each other. I picked up a sweater, smelled it, and threw it on the floor. The cat people dropped something upstairs, what sounded like a sledge hammer. I unwound a ball of leather, thinking it would turn into her red leather pants, but the legs were too long for her red leather pants.
I sat up and turned on the light. The pants were black—of course they were. I rifled the pockets, finding a box of Nat Sherman Classics, Kyle’s pretentious cigarettes. I could hardly breathe. The secret lovers were dead forever with their secret that wasn’t secret anymore. Or maybe it was more secret now. Or maybe his clothes in her room meant nothing at all. I grabbed his cigarettes and pants and ran out of there, expecting to see her every second—running up the stairs as I ran down, calling my name from across the street once I was outside, following me home from Brooklyn on the LIE. “You’re never going to believe what happened,” she’d say, and there would be comforting explanations for everything.
Elizabeth
It’s