I shook my head. I was thinking no no no, but I couldn’t quite get that out.
Jesse hit his dad on the thigh hard as he could. It sounded like an overstuffed leather chair. It didn’t give at all. “Hell, I don’t know either. Maybe it’s the body fighting off being dead, even after you’re dead, you know? It gets all mad and stiff on you.” He laughed but it didn’t sound much like Jesse’s laugh. “I guess it don’t know it’s dead. It don’t know shit once the brain is dead. But if I was going to die I guess I’d fight real hard.” Jesse looked at his mom and dad and made a twisted face like he was smelling them for the first time. “Bunch of pussies…”
He grabbed the arm his dad had folded against his chest and tried to pull it away. His dad held on but then the arm bent a little. The fat shoulders shook when Jesse let go and his dad fell back. The head hit the pillow and left a greasy red smear.
“The old man here started loosening up top a few hours ago, in the same order he got stiff in.” Jesse reached over and pinched his dad’s left cheek.
“Christ, Jesse!” I ran back into the hall and fell on the floor. I could hardly breathe. Then I started crying, really bawling, and I could breathe again.
After awhile I could feel Jesse patting me on the back. “You never saw dead people before, huh, Johnny?”
I just shook my head. “I’m s-sorry, Jesse. I’m s-so sorry.”
“They were old,” he said. “It’s okay. Really.”
I looked up at him. I didn’t understand. It felt like he wasn’t even speaking English. But he just looked at me, then looked back into his parents’ bedroom, and didn’t say anything more. Finally, I knew I had to say something. “How did it happen?”
He looked at me like I was being the one hard to understand. “I told you. They were old.”
I thought about the red smear his dad’s head made on the pillow, but I couldn’t get myself to understand it. “But, Jesse… at the same time?”
He shook his head. “What’s wrong with you, John? My dad died first. I guess that made my mom so sad she died a few minutes later. You’ve heard of that. First one old person dies, then the person they’re married to dies just a short time after?”
“Yeah…”
“Their hearts just stopped beating.” I looked up at him. I could feel my own heart vibrating in my chest, so hard it hurt my ribs. “I put them together like that. They were my parents. I figured they’d like that.”
He had that right, I guess. After all, they were his parents. Maybe he didn’t always get along with them, but they were his parents. He could look at them after they were dead.
I made myself look at them. It was a lot easier the second time. A whole lot easier. I felt a little funny about that. Even without his dad’s blood on the pillow they were a lot different from sleeping people. There was just no movement at all, and hardly any color but the blue, and they both looked cool, but not a damp kind of cool because they looked so dry, and their eyelids weren’t shut all the way, and you could see a little sliver of white where the lids weren’t all the way closed. I made myself get as close to their eyes as I could, maybe to make sure one final time they weren’t pretending. The sliver of white was dull, like on a fish. Like something thick and milky had grown over their eyes. They looked like dummies some department store had thrown out in the garbage. There wasn’t anything alive about them at all.
“When did they die?”
Jesse was looking at them, too. Closely, like they were the strangest things anyone had ever seen. “It’s been at least a day, I guess. Almost two.”
Jesse said we shouldn’t call the police just yet. They were his parents, weren’t they? Didn’t he have the right to be with them for awhile? I couldn’t argue with that. I guessed Jesse had all kinds of rights when it was his parents. But it still felt weird, him being with their dead bodies almost two whole days. I helped him light some more candles when he said the air wasn’t sweet enough anymore. I felt a little better helping him do that, like we were having a funeral for them. All those sweet-smelling candles and incense felt real religious. Then I felt bad about thinking he was being weird earlier, like I was being prejudiced or something. But it was there just the same. I quit looking at his mom and dad, except when Jesse told me to. And after a couple of hours of me just standing out in the hallway, or fussing with the candles, trying not to look at them, Jesse started insisting.
“You gotta look at them, John.”
“I did. You saw me. I looked at them.”
“No, I mean really look at them. You haven’t seen everything there is to see.”
I looked at him instead. Real hard. I could hardly believe he was saying this. “Why? I’m sorry they’re dead. But why do I have to look at them?”
“Because I want you to.”
“Jesse…”
“… and besides, you should know about these things. Your mom and dad don’t want you to know about things like this but I guess it’s about the most important thing to know about there is. Everybody gets scared of dying, and just about everybody is scared of the dead. You remember that movie Zombie we rented? That’s what it was all about. Now we’ve got two dead bodies here. You’re my friend, and I want to help you out. I want to share something with you.”
“Christ, Jesse. They’re your parents.”
“What, you think I don’t know that? Who else should I learn about this stuff from anyway? If they were still alive, they’d be supposed to teach me. What’s wrong with it? And don’t just tell me because it’s ‘weird.’ People say something’s weird because it makes them nervous. Just because it bothers them they don’t want you to do it. So what do we care, anyway? Nobody else is gonna know about this.”
Jesse could argue better than anybody, and I never knew what to think about anything for sure. Before I knew it he had me back in the bedroom, leaning over the bodies. It was a little better—I guess I was getting used to them. At least I didn’t feel ready to throw up like I did a while ago. That surprised me. It surprised me even more when he took my hand and put it on his mom’s—his dead mom’s—arm, and I didn’t jerk it away.
“Jesus…” I guess I’d expected it to be still stiff, but it had gotten soft again, as soft as anything I’d ever felt, like I could just dig my fingers into her arm like butter. It was cool, but not what I expected. And dry.
“See the spots?” Jesse said behind me. “Like somebody’s been painting her. Like for one of those freak shows. Oh, she’d hate it if she knew. She’d think she looked like a whore!”
I saw them all right. Patches of blue-green low down on his dad’s belly. Before I could stop him he raised his mom’s skirt and showed me that the marks on her were worse: more of the blue-green and little patches of greenish red, all of it swimming together around her big white panties. I was embarrassed, but I kept staring. That’s the way I’d always imagined seeing my first panties on a woman: when she was asleep or—to tell the truth—when she was dead. I used to dream about dead women in their panties and bras, dead women naked with their parts hanging out, and I’d felt ashamed about it, but here it was happening for the real and for some reason I was having a hard time feeling too ashamed. I hadn’t done it; I hadn’t killed her.
“Look,” he said. I followed his hand as it moved up his mother’s belly. I tensed as he pulled her dress up further, back over her head so that I couldn’t see her mouth anymore, her mouth hanging open like she was screaming, but no sound coming out. “I know you always wanted to see one of these up close. Admit it, John.” His hand rested on the right cup of her bra. Now I felt real bad, and ashamed, like I had helped him kill her. Her white, loose skin spilled out of the top and bottom of the cup like big gobs of dough. With a jerk of his hand Jesse pulled his mother’s bra off. The skin was loose and it all had swollen so much it was beginning to tear. I knew it was going to break like an old fruit any second. “She’s gotten bigger since the thing happened,” he said. I started to choke. “Come on, John. You always wanted to see this stuff. You wanted to see it, and you wanted to see it dead.”