“I’m perfectly happy with my degree of insertion.”
In the ninety-odd minutes of their whirlwind shopping circuit (in which there was virtually no shopping) Violet had said approximately five words, and all five of them were hi. The people of Annie’s tribe knew her exactly well enough to understand that Vi was meant to be ignored, and that she preferred it that way.
“I know you are, but it’s not healthy!”
“I’m perfectly healthy as well.”
“But I can’t be your only lifeline to the world, what if something happens to me?”
“What’s going to happen to you?”
“I don’t know, but something could! And if it did and I wasn’t around any more, your meager social skills would just wither away. A decade from now you’ll be like Nell, grunting in a cabin in the woods.”
“I already live in a cabin in the woods.”
“That’s my point.”
Violet sighed grandly.
“All right, I will try. But seriously, the banality is difficult to stomach.”
“You are so full of it.”
“Me? How so?”
“Nobody is actually this pretentious. People have to work at it.”
“I think I’m offended.”
“See, that’s what I mean, you can’t actually even be offended, you have to announce that it’s a possibility you may at some point develop a feeling, and that feeling if, when felt, might develop into a sensation akin to a quality reminiscent of offense.”
“Well I would never say that, but that was impressive. You should write it down.”
Annie threw a balled-up straw wrapper at Vi, and then Rodney sat down.
“Hey, did you hear?” he said.
Rodney Delindo was either nineteen or twenty, which put him squarely outside of the tribal demographic of Annie’s sociology study. He still had a spot inside her circle of friends, though, perhaps an even more important spot than most everyone aside from Vi. Rodney was, for a short while not too terribly long ago, quite possibly Annie’s very best friend.
They hardly spoke any more, because they both got older and things changed. Rodney’s graduation from high school was one of those things. He was a manager at the bowling alley now, while he considered his higher education options. This meant, in less polite terms, his grades were not fantastic and his ability to pay college tuition suspect. At the same time, the job still had to be considered temporary because nobody goes through life planning to be a shift manager at a bowling alley. Especially not one without a candlestick lane.
He was Annie’s first crush. She never said so, but he probably knew it.
When he sat down, he flipped the chair over so the back was facing the table, and then straddled it cowboy-style. It was a modestly stud-worthy maneuver.
“Hey, Rod. What were we supposed to have heard?”
“Yes, there’s so much,” Violet said. Annie shot her a look, and got back a, you wanted me to engage, so… shrug.
Rodney more or less pretended Vi wasn’t there. It wasn’t even impolite; it was just what one did.
“About Rick.”
“I heard he saw a vampire. But this is Rick we’re talking about.”
Rodney laughed.
“No, no, it wasn’t a vampire.”
“Of course it wasn’t. That’s my point. Rick is Rick.”
Rick Horton was a year above Annie, which made him seventeen and still four years away from the legal drinking age, when he could officially fulfill the role he’d been training for his entire life, that of the town drunk.
Wildly insensitive, Annie the sociologist wrote in her notebook.
Rick was the first local kid roughly Annie’s age that had a self-evident drinking problem. It didn’t seem possible for someone so young to exhibit alcoholic tendencies, but by most accounts, Rick had his first beer when he was twelve and hadn’t stopped drinking since.
The last two or three times Annie spoke to Rick, it became clear he was also auditioning for town crackpot. He was working on a number of fascinatingly disturbing theories about the spaceship and the army that was a complicated synthesis of everything the trailer people had to say combined with the wild theories from the protestors. Just add alcohol and stir.
Literally anything could follow did you hear about Rick? She expected one day it would be he died, but not yet.
Vampires were right in his wheelhouse.
“No, I mean it wasn’t a vampire, it was something else.”
“Go on,” Violet said. Rodney looked her way, confused momentarily; wearing an expression along the lines of I did not know it spoke.
“So you remember Mr. Granger?”
“From seventh grade? Sure.”
“And do you know…” he looked a little uncomfortable, because the next part of the sentence was…that he died, and it just occurred to him if she did not know this, the way he was breaking the news was probably a tiny bit insensitive.
“Yeah, so sad,” Annie said. “He was young, too.” To Violet, she said, “He taught English in middle school. He was really cool.”
“He died?”
“Couple weeks ago. It was really sudden. Heart attack?”
“I think so,” Rodney said.
“I think he was only maybe fifty. Used to jog, too.”
“Yeah, we’d pass him in the morning, remember?”
“I do.”
Rodney’s family lived up the road from Annie. She used to hitch rides in the winter.
“So what about Mr. Granger?” Annie asked.
“Rick said he saw him.”
Annie laughed.
“Was Mr. Granger the vampire??”
“Not a vampire. What Rick said was, he saw the undead. People filled that in.”
“So, wait, okay, Mr. Granger is a zombie?”
“Where did he see him?” Violet asked.
“Uhm…” Rodney was still perplexed regarding the existence of Violet.
“He was drinking in the cemetery, wasn’t he?” Annie asked. She thought this was hysterical, and couldn’t really understand why nobody else did. “That’s priceless.”
“No, no it was… well, he didn’t say exactly.”
“You got this from him?”
“Yes, he told me himself. He was really spooked.”
“So where?” Violet repeated.
“Okay, so the whole story, Rick said he was hanging with Ellard. You know Ellard?”
“I know him by sight. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him.”
“He and Rick… they hang out.”
“Ellard can buy alcohol.”
Ellard Baron was twenty-two, and the kind of person young girls were told to steer clear of.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s a factor. So he and Ellard were going tipping…”
“Oh, good Lord.”
“What’s tipping?” Violet asked.
“Cow-tipping,” Annie said. “Could they be more stereotypical? Did they also have moonshine in jugs? Jesus. I’m embarrassed on their behalf right now.”
“So Rick and Ellard headed up Cedar in Ellard’s pickup, looking for a cow. But you know how the farms are up there, not much to see from the road, especially at night. I guess they pulled off at some point and started wandering on foot.”
Annie sighed. “I can see where this is going.”
“I can’t,” Vi said.
“Once you leave Cedar, you’re pretty much just hopping stone fences one after the other. It’s really easy to get lost up there, isn’t it, Rod?”
“It is. Story is, they settled down, edge of one pasture or another, and started drinking. Never found a cow. Then Ellard passed out. Sometime around who knows when, Rick heard somebody walking around in the trees. He was thinking farmer, shotgun, that sort of thing, so he ducked down behind the fence. That’s when he swears Mr. Granger walked on past.”