Which I’m not, not of a dead body, anyway, but it’s Bragg’s dead body. I straighten up. “If you think we can get in, let’s go.”
The mortuary is across the street, next to the White Spot Café. Nothing like a little formaldehyde to make your food taste good, I figure. Mike leads the five of us through the mortuary’s double doors. The foyer is warm and bright compared to the overcast. Our coats smell of wet street and soggy leaves. A receptionist sitting at a desk by the door says, “Can you boys sign the bereaved book?”
A minute later I’m standing behind Mike and the gang as they file past Bragg’s coffin. His hands are across his stomach. Mike looks back at me, then at the corpse. Everyone is so quiet. I’m thinking that I can turn around right then, walk down the little hallway and out of the mortuary. There’s no reason to see him; I didn’t like him when he was alive. The flower smell coats my throat. If I put my finger in my mouth, I figure I could swab it out.
“Come on,” Mike whispers. Without deciding to, I take a step forward. Bragg’s nose and cheeks come into view. He’s facing straight up. It’s unnatural how square his shoulders are, how perfectly aligned his head is. Whenever I see someone sleeping, their head tilts a little to one side or the other, but Bragg’s head is locked into a perfect line with his neck. Then I’m beside the coffin, my hand brushing the polished wood. Bragg’s face is smooth, his cheeks flush, and I realize he’s wearing makeup.
I bump into Mike, who isn’t moving. “Looks like a mask,” he says.
Bragg is only a foot away. His red painted lips don’t look human at all. I’m thinking about the reading I’d been doing, the Irish reading, so I could counter Bragg. It’s not just leprechauns, you know. Nasties filled Bragg’s world: banshees, trolls, devil dogs, Fomorians, and the bad half of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the gods of old Ireland. I’d been watching Bragg’s backyard from my bedroom window for a year. I watched him dig his own sidhe, a fairy mound to hide in, and he’d built a henge out of sawed-off sections of telephone poles he’d cemented upright into holes and six-inch beams to top them that formed a circle fifteen feet across, and then, last Halloween, when I first started getting really scared, I watched him slaughter Mrs. Wisnewski’s Pekinese. The moon had been full, and my binoculars saw it alclass="underline" his naked pale chest, the hunting knife, the little yippy dog he’d tied to a picnic table bench.
The knife plunged, and out of the wound flowed the green fog. It had a shape, it did, for a second, a head and eyes, and it towered over him. Then it turned and looked at me, straight through my binoculars. I whimpered, but kept watching. Bragg chanted. From a hundred yards away, I could hear him. The green shape bent. It surrounded him. Became him. Weeks of reading later, I decided Bragg must be a Druid warlock, if there ever was such a thing. There was the Irish accent he picked up after that, for one thing, and the oaks he planted around Scrap Wood Henge that grew so fast, and the interesting curses. Bragg moved in a different reality.
Mike leans over the coffin. I almost reach out to hold him back, but my hands quiver in paralysis behind me. Mike whispers, “Do you think they plugged it?” I half expect Bragg to sit up, to seize Mike by the throat.
“What?” I say. The buzz of our voices is too loud in the room.
“Do you think they plugged it, or... you know... left it?”
Bragg’s jacket is taut across his chest. I figure they didn’t put makeup under his clothes. What did they do with the bullet hole?
I giggle.
Mike gasps. The boys behind me whisper for a second.
“What?” he says to me.
“The suit,” I say. “Doesn’t Bragg look silly in a suit?”
When we get back to the paper shack, the route manager, Mr. Banion, tells me how sad he is that Bragg’s dead, seeing as he and I were neighbors and practically brothers in his way of understanding things, but that the papers have to be delivered anyway, and that I’d be taking Bragg’s route until Banion could hire another paperboy. The thing is, though, he says, is that Bragg’s subscription list is at his house, and I need to go get it. Bragg’s mom, god bless her sorrowing soul, he says, has the list, so I have to pick it up.
She takes forever to answer after I knock. I turn to go down the steps when the door opens, and she’s standing there with a hankie in one hand and the subscription list in another. She’s younger than my mom, skinnier, and she has a Harley Davidson tatoo on her forearm, but I’m not really looking. What I want is to get off her porch fast. She weaves a little, then braces herself against the door.
“He was a good boy,” she says from behind the handkerchief. “You were one of his friends, weren’t you?”
I’m not sure how to answer. In my memory I see Mrs. Wisnewski’s dog in the moonlight before the air turned green, but I also see Bragg’s mom, and she’s just a regular person, despite the tattoo, and I think that what she wants is a hug, or something.
“We weren’t very close,” I say.
She looks past me to the street, her lips parted, her eyes fixed and blank. Maybe she pictures him in her mind’s eye, riding his bike, or coming up the street in his awful Buick. Finally she says, “He was so looking forward to Samhain.”
My skin goes cold. “That’s the same as Halloween, isn’t it?” I offer, because the silence unnerves me.
She is still holding the subscription list and staring over my head. The bottoms of her eyes are red rimmed. “Better than Halloween, he told me. End of the warm season. Doors open, he said.”
She doesn’t look at me, even when I pluck the list from her hand. When I get to the street, I glance back, and she still stands on the porch, her hankie dangling.
Bragg’s route winds through blocks and blocks of single story ranch-style houses. I ride slowly, one hand holding the handlebars and the subscription list, while the other dips into the bags that hang on both sides of the bike’s front wheel. A rubber-banded paper isn’t aero-dynamic, but with the proper flip, it turns into a propellor, flying its curved path to a porch. I take aim with the next one, cock my wrist, let it go. A long curve. Whap! It hits the step below the door, beyond the wet sidewalk, a perfect throw.
I hurl another paper, miss the porch, but hit dry ground beneath a tree. Close enough, I figure. The skin on my back prickles. Yesterday Bragg delivered this route. He threw a paper at the same house, and now I’m riding my bike in the same space he occupied. Except for the time difference, we’re together. Did his paper go farther? What was he thinking when he tossed it? I glance behind me, sure for a second that his Buick, with its big, rounded bumpers is right there, its engine rumbling, and the tires mashing the pavement as he rolls toward me, one arm hanging out the window, a cigarette dangling. But the road is empty. As I wind up and down the streets, the sun drops out of sight, and on the corner, a street light buzzes before flickering into life.
I sling the last paper. It slides to a stop against the house under an overhang. End of the month. I have to collect everyone’s subscriptions. Four and a half bucks to have the paper delivered to your door every day. Mr. Banion had given me Bragg’s billing book. I walk up to the first door, a stranger’s door, and ring the bell. An old man on a walker answers the door. He squints at me after he hands me a check. “Wait a second, son,” he says, bracing his hip against the walker while he digs into his wallet. He drops four quarters into my hand. “You done real good this month.”
I keep my mouth shut. I didn’t do anything, but I drop the weight of payment for a dead paperboy in my pocket.
At the sidewalk I hold up Bragg’s billing book to the streetlight. Already it’s gone dark and the wind shakes the branches in the trees along the street. Dinner smells mix with wet leaves. I think I might collect the first half of Bragg’s route, then save the rest of it until Saturday. Misty shapes swirl from the wet asphalt under the streetlight. It’ll be foggy later. For a second I forget about Halloween on Friday and Samhain, which is where the holiday came from, and watch the moist air made visible by the wind and light and cold. It’s ghostly and creepy, a little melancholy and beautiful. I even forget that Bragg said, “I know your house,” but a creaking sound comes toward me from the unlit end of the street. It’s a bike, a paperboy’s bike by the sound. The chain strains against the gears and the tires grind against the ground. There’s a slap as a paper hits cement. Someone’s delivering papers in the dark. Maybe Mr. Banion forgot he’d sent me to do the route, I think, but my heart races in my chest. None of the houses on this street have lit addresses. You can’t deliver in the dark if you don’t know the subscribers, but the bike continues on. Another paper whirls through the air to flop onto a porch. My mouth has no spit in it.