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Photos by Gerald Slota
Sometimes hearing them makes me want to bawl. Sometimes it just pisses me off. Why they can’t say five fucking words without dragging God into it.
Like goddamn fucking God gives a shit about what happened to me, or gives a shit about what happened to any of them, which they will discover for themselves. Jesus, I have to laugh, or bawl. Look at those girls’ faces.
The first thing you see from the road is the goddamn cross.
Three-foot-high, homemade cross painted Day-Glo white.
And on this cross in red letters where the paint kind of drips down like smeared lipstick:
R
E
S
T
KEVIN ORR
December 4, 1991–May 30, 2009
I
N
P
A
E
C
E
(Once you’re a deceased person all kinds of embarrassing shit can be said about you. You can’t defend yourself.)
At the foot of the cross are (laminated) photos, mostly iPhone pictures Chloe took of me, and pictures of Chloe and me, and me and the guys, and my mum and me, etc. There’s pots of flowers – real flowers – that have got to be watered or they will wither and die. And hanging from the cross is one of my sneakers – size 12, Nike.
Mum told them to take whatever they wanted from my room. Whatever they needed for the shrine out on Forked River Road. By this time, she was totally out of it on Xanax or OxyContin or whatever the hell it is the goddamn shithead doctor prescribes for her she’s not supposed to take when she’s drinking, or not supposed to be drinking when she takes it, but for sure Mum does.
As soon as the news came of “Kevie Orr, dead at Lenape Point,” they got together, at my house. Hugging one another, crying and wailing. Some of them were hysterical, and fainting like Chloe would do, and my mum looking stunned like she’d been hit over the head with a mallet. No matter she’d been pissed as hell at me, and Chloe wasn’t so fucking happy with me, nor any of the relatives in Mum’s family – once it was known that I was dead, they’d want to remember me in a better way.
Jesus, I wish I had not been there for that.
***
“Kevie – we love you.”
“Kev-ie? D’you hear us? Can you – see us?”
“It’s Chloe and Jill and Alexa and –”
Oh shit, they’re bringing more crap for the shrine. Plastic lilies. Plastic roses, tulips. Plastic daffodils. Little stumpy candles, what’re they called? Votive candles.
The little cross by the road is getting crowded so they’ve started putting things on a tree trunk a few feet away. This is the beech tree the SUV scraped, rolling over downhill. The tree trunk tore off the left front fender like you’d tear a wishbone in two, and it is scratched like a crazed tiger clawed it.
Josh is with them on crutches. His face is banged up and part of his head is shaved, but the motherfucker is alive, and there’s Casey, and Fred, bringing Michelob beer, Red Bull, and Cokes to position at the base of the tree. Seeing the guys so serious is kind of a bummer – what you want from your buddies is laughs. Assholes try to say something serious, it’s fucking embarrassing.
There’s my kid brother, Teddy, with them. He looks like he hasn’t slept since the accident, and what’s he got to put by the tree – my old hockey stick? And my Resident Evil and Walking Dead games we’d played together.
Teddy’s 13 but looks younger. It looks like his face has been squeezed in a vise, it’s so skinny and gray skinned.
Each time they drive out here to Lenape Point, they bring more pictures for the shrine. There’s me with my friends, and with my Mum and Teddy (no Dad). Me with some of the guys on the team, and with Coach, iPhone pictures of Chloe squeezed against me, both of us laughing, Chloe’s eyes look wet with tears, my eyes are shiny red like a demon’s squinting into the flash. Jesus, I wish I could remember when that was – wish I could slip back in time, to that time.
It’s like I am losing it – who I was. Whoever Kevie Orr was.
***
What happened was, some kind of hot-white blinding explosion – then out.
It was like getting tripped playing hockey, that time in ninth grade – “concussed,” they said it was. One minute I was running and OK and the next, I was being dragged on my knees, and my safety helmet was yanked off, and there was dirt in my mouth, and I was – out.
And this time when I woke it was quieter – a smell of something sweet and familiar – lilac?
The tow truck had taken the wreck away in pieces. The body was gone and buried. All that was finished. All that was just material stuff.
Just me left – me. And so lonely, my friends were gone… I lifted my hand to see how bad it was, if my arm was broken or twisted, which is how it felt, and I could see – nothing there.
Later, I looked and saw some kind of an arm, a grown guy’s arm, a left arm, I think it had to be Dad’s.
This arm was attached to me, where my own arm was gone. And it was a muscular arm, and there was Dad’s spider tattoo, with the red eyes, that was a consolation.
I said, “Dad? Hey, Dad, it’s Kev – Kevie... Dad, c’n you help me, please?”
“Dad, I am so fucking scared. And cold, and – I guess kind of blind…”
It wasn’t Dad, but kids from school. They were tramping in the grass taking pictures on their cell phones. The big-toothed girl Barbara Frazier, president of the senior class, was tying ribbons around the beech tree, with knots and bows. In Forked River High School colours – gold and crimson. Weird, Barbara Frazier with tears shining on her face – one of the prissy good girls, she’d never looked like she approved of me. Some of the girls are known to me – Alexa, Kit – varsity cheerleaders – but most of the girls are, like, strangers – their faces known to me but not their names, shit! Girls that weren’t anybody I’d gone out with, or had the slightest interest in, now Kevie Orr is dead, so anybody can make a pilgrimage to the shrine and leave flowers and notes and all kinds of personal crap that’s embarrassing to me but can’t be stopped.
Once you are dead, anybody can claim you.
“Kevin, I love you so, I miss you so. Kevin, I will meet you again in the Life to Come.”
Jesus! Some girl named Amanda, skinny and ferret-faced, looks like ninth grade, not even a face I know.
Girls in school sweatshirts and jeans kneeling to hide their faces in their hands are praying in the churned-up grass and rubble where the Jaws of Life tore open the SUV to pry me out of the wreck too fucking late, the body pinned under the dashboard all broken bones and the cracked skull had bled out.
Blood mixed with oil, gasoline. The stink of gasoline.
In Walking Dead, you’d blast the “walkers” away with AK-47s and M16s, and still they kept coming, no end to the zombies stalking you to eat you, but none of it hurt. In the game, death doesn’t smell.
The girls are tying balloons to the tree.
Shining-eyed girls are tying balloons to the tree where photos of Kevin Orr are tacked. This is so weird you’d want to laugh except –
“Go away, Christ’s sake! I don’t want fucking kiddie balloons, what the fuck are you thinking?”
(These are hard-plastic balloons, more like pillows than balloons. They don’t leak air like regular helium balloons. And in ugly bright colors so you can see them from the road, like fucking gonads or something, inner-body organs some asshole might think were Kevie Orr’s insides strung up on a tree.)
Also there’s a starfish (actual or plastic, I don’t know), one of those fluffy-haired angels you see on Christmas trees, a crucifix made of shiny wood, a Black Sabbath CD, a picture of Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns and holding his bleeding heart in his hand – shit! You’d think that Kevie Orr was Catholic, which is not true.
A two-foot-high American flag stuck in the ground, my grandpa Joe-Joe who’d been in the Korean War brought that out.
Grandpa Joe-Joe leaning on his prissy old wife’s arm (Grandpa’s “new” wife, after Grandma died) so he could put the flag in the ground between the cross and the tree.
“The poor kid. Threw it all away. Jesus!”
“Eighteen years old. Fuckin’ life should’ve been all ahead.”
***
If somebody asked them, “Why make this shrine here, why, when Kevin Orr’s body isn’t here but buried in the cemetery in town?” They’d have to think for a few seconds, so you could (almost) see the thoughts rising in their heads like bubbles and then they’d say, “Yes, but Kevie’s spirit is here. For here is where Kevie died.”
***
What is meant by died, I am not sure.
There was the body that bled out.
There was the body pinned beneath the dashboard of the SUV.
There was the body broken, shattered, gutted, wasted.
There was the body like a sack of skin, leaking from a thousand wounds.
There was the body that had been Kevie Orr, trapped in the wreck.
***
We were racing on Forked River Road. The guys in the Dodge Ram fell behind. Pressing the gas pedal to the floor, a crazy sensation like wildfire rushed over me. It was such a terrific feeling. I’m thinking it’s about time – usually I’m kind of pissed, shitty feeling, angry, resentful – the crystal meth we’d been smoking makes your heart pound really hard and that’s a good feeling too – like gusts of wind lifting you, like you’re a kite made of some crappy heavy material like wet canvas, and it lifts you – Jesus!
We’d scored in the field behind the high school. We’d had a few hits and some beers, and the idea was to see who could get out to Lenape Point fastest and onto the beach.
The night sky was riddled with clouds. The moon was behind the clouds very bright. So you could see light through chinks in the clouds like torn cloth. It was a weird, excited feeling that seemed to come down from the sky. From the moon like an eye, weird!
The Jersey Shore at Lenape Point. The beach is pebbly and littered and the tide there leaves all kinds of crap behind. The Jersey Shore you mostly don’t think is the Atlantic Ocean. Seeing the ocean on a map you’re – whoa! – that is fucking large.
I was racing to Lenape Point in the SUV. Mum said, “You can use it if you don’t waste gas.” “OK, Mum,” I told her, “that’s cool.” I’m a good son to her basically, I know this. I’m protective of my mum, like Mum has any clue of any fucking thing. Seems like I’m always trying to argue this. After I died people would criticise Mum for letting me drive the SUV and paying for gas, but the fact is, Mum was afraid to piss me off. Mum was afraid I’d go across town to live with my father, and Teddy would want to come along, too – she’d be left alone, and always she was saying, “I can’t make it alone. I can’t.”
At school as far back as I can remember, and definitely these past two or three years, there’s always people looking at me – Kevie Orr. Younger kids, but also kids in my class at Forked River High, following me with their eyes – me and Josh Feiler and Casey Murchison in our varsity jackets – like they’d give anything to be us. And the girls. The best-looking goddamn girls. And this, our last goddamn year at Forked River. And our team came in a close second – Lenape County Hockey Championship. And now, graduation in three weeks. And it wasn’t clear what we’d be doing this summer, let alone next year or the rest of our lives, at least not what I’d be doing. Maybe a job at the stone quarry, if my uncle Luke could still get me in. There’d been some kind of fuck-up about me calling the foreman. Maybe more likely me and the guys would enlist in the US Army, where they train you for a job. The war in Afghanistan – where (probably) we’d be sent – is supposed to be ending. That’s what people say. And we’re saying, “There’ll be another war maybe – Iran? There’ll always be a war.” We were high, laughing how the “armed services” is a way of seeing the fucking world. There’s no future in fucking Forked River, New Jersey, for goddamn sure.
When you’re high, there’s a lot to laugh at. It’s like being airlifted in, like, a game – you can aim your weapon down at the enemy, or throw grenades or bombs at the enemy, and they can’t get you.
Should’ve braked more, going into the turn at (I guess) 70 miles an hour, where the road is posted for 40, then goes down to 25 – should’ve remembered that Forked River Road turns sharp here, up onto the narrow ramp of the Lenape Point Bridge (one of those goddamn old single-lane plank-floored bridges of Lenape County you think is going to collapse beneath your vehicle, and this is when you are driving slow and cautious). Beyond the bridge is an entrance to Lenape State Park, and a half mile inside the park, the Jersey Shore at Lenape Point.
You start smelling the ocean at about this point. In summer, it’s a rot smell from dead fish and jellyfish, but on a windy day, it’s OK.
Black Sabbath was pounding hard. I’d be pissed that Josh (in the passenger seat) and Casey and Flynn (in back) were so fucking high they didn’t warn me, or say a goddamn thing to me, coming into the turn. Jesus, we’d been driving out to Lenape Point all our lives, far back as we could remember, young kids in such vehicles as the SUV driven by our fathers or older brothers or older guys, but now we’re seniors at Forked River High, we’re the older guys ourselves, and the weird thing is, this stretch of Forked River Road didn’t seem so familiar. There was a mist rising out of the grasses at the edge of the road, and unless you knew better, you’d never guess there was a river close by – not a big river like the Delaware, more like a creek – and at the edge of the river there’s a big stretch of boulders and rocks and pebbles and driftwood and crap so it looks like a dry bed, where the water is just puddles. By this time the Dodge Ram headlights behind us that had been scary close and blinding in the rearview mirror were falling back. The SUV was pulling away from the pickup Jimmy Eaton was driving, that belonged to his old man. (The Dodge Ram wouldn’t crash. Jimmy would brake it to a stop this side of the bridge. The guys’ cell phones saved Josh and Casey, the guys called 911.)
Even at this time, when the gas pedal was essentially pressed to the floor, I was kind of distracted by some fucking thing on the dashboard. Chloe was always nagging me to keep my hand off the AC or the radio dial or the fan or whatever the fuck it was, lowering a window, raising a window, while I’m driving. She says it makes her nervous I’m going to cross over the yellow line and have a head-on collision, but there’s so many things to coordinate, plus the CD volume, and so approaching the curve when I should’ve been braking the vehicle I failed to brake it, going into the curve there came the sick sliding sensation that’s unmistakable, you know you’ve fucked up big-time, the SUV is moving too fast for the road, veering off the road, 2003 GMC that’s registered in my mother’s name, that’s like $9,000 from being paid off, so at the back of my brain just before the SUV struck the guard rail there came the shame of knowing – it will never be paid off now.
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***
The Lenape legend of the Death Song dreamed in the womb.
The Lenape Dream Festival. Ceremony of the Great Riddle.
Lenape Indians of all ages came forward to tell their dreams. The tradition was, women as well as men. Young as well as elders. A Jesuit recorded in 1689 that the Lenapes were pagans, they had no god but the Dream. “The Lenapes follow the Dream in all things blindly. Whatever the Dream bids them, they must do.”
In ninth grade New Jersey state history we learned. So much we forgot, of what we’d learned. Like wind whistling through our empty heads like wind stirring the tall grasses of the cemetery behind the redbrick Forked River Church of Christ. But I remembered the Death Song. Don’t know why, when I forgot so much, I remembered the Lenape Death Song.
How before the Indian baby was born the Death Song came to it in the womb and each song was different from the others. When the baby was born, the Death Song was forgotten. You open your eyes, you suck in your first deep breath of air – the Death Song
is forgotten.
The young Lenapes would fast, hunt until they were exhausted, the young boys beaten with sticks by the older braves, their own male relatives. Dancing by firelight, torture by fire, starving so their bones showed through their skin, sweating – these are ways of bringing back the Dream. But these are incomplete ways. The Death Song is the song to be sung at death, your special revelation, which is your Death Song. No one will know this Death Song except you.
No one knows this except you. And you – you are obliterated now. You are gone.
***
Fuck, they were lucky, sure I’m glad for them, they didn’t die in the wreck with me. At first it was like – Fuckers! Betrayed me – but that’s a stupid way of thinking.
In the game, your friends are your only allies. Your only allies are your friends – “survivors.” Sometimes, an ally turns into a walker – a zombie. A friend is zombiefied – that’s to say, “reanimated.”
Josh on his crutches, like he’s back from the dead. Staring at the shrine scared-looking and (maybe) guilty-looking, he was lucky, and Kevie was not.
None of us was wearing a seat belt so maybe that makes us assholes but maybe – anyway – in such a crash, seat belts might’ve made things worse.
Goddamned airbags sure went off. Crazy exploding airbags, and like acid in my face, in my mouth, but so confused with the crash, you’d think the airbags were the wreck, that they could kill you like a detonation. SUV slammed through the guard rail that was already dented and rusted, overturned, rolled over, and again over, like an exploded vehicle in a game, except you are in this game, crashing down the (15-foot) decline to the dry-bed edge of the Forked River, crashing against trees, shearing bark from trees, dragging bushes and debris with it overturning in the dry bed and tires spinning, steam lifting from the radiator. And the guys lived. Fucking lived! Josh, Casey, Flynn – crawled out of the wreck. Must’ve been broken and bleeding like snakes that’d been stomped by somebody’s boot (you can stomp a snake so you’d swear the thing was broke, all the vertebrae broke, and the insides mashed so it’s like a flattened piece of hose, but a snake can fool you, a copperhead can fool you, even the little brain inside the bonehead you can stomp beneath your foot, but the fucking thing is not dead and it can leap at you and sink its poison fangs into your leg like it knows not to attack your boot but your leg) – and when the ambulance came they were rushed to the ER (30 miles north, Atlantic City) fast enough to save them but not the driver who’d been mangled by the steering wheel, trapped beneath the crumpled dashboard and how many bones shattered in his body, how badly his skull cracked like a melon, and his blood rushing out from a thousand wounds with such eagerness, you could wonder what the purpose of this creation could have been, a sack of flesh filled to bursting with blood, which then bursts.
***
And my mum is bawling, saying it’s nasty and cruel for people to be blaming me, like it wasn’t terrible enough how I died, bled to death trapped inside the upside-down SUV that she was nowhere near paying off and behind on insurance payments also. “Blaming the victim is what it is,” Mum is saying and her sisters, Stace and Claire, my aunts, are trying to comfort her. And I’m, like, “Jesus. Enough of this.” You can tell they’ve been drinking on their way out here, maybe stopped for lunch at that old inn, what’s it called? – Crescent Inn – and had beers, or wine, or hard liquour – Christ!
These women hugging my mum, who’s demanding to know, “How dare they judge us, what are they thinking?” Her sisters and her friends have been telling her what people in town are saying. People who’ve pretended to be Mum’s friends, sending her flowers and sympathy cards, and asking what they can do to help, and she’d never judged them, the bastards – “How dare they judge my son, how dare they say anybody deserves such a thing to happen to them, and Kevie such a sweet kid and only 18, and took such good care of me after his father abandoned us. Kevie did not drink and he DID NOT DO DRUGS – not hard drugs! Nothing Kevie might’ve done was anything all the kids were not doing including in middle school, in Forked River – that’s a fact. The last thing my son deserved was being left to bleed to death, to die out in the dark because the Atlantic City firemen came too late to rescue him.”
***
Wet wind off the Atlantic, pelting-down rain. Days of rain.
Parts of the shrine are sodden, ruined. Some of the photos are blown away in the grass. The Christmas-tree angel is gone. The geraniums survive, barely. The plastic vines and flowers have survived. The lone sneaker has survived, fallen onto the ground, soaked and leaden. Grandpa Joe-Joe’s flag has toppled over in the grass.
It’s cold for June. Hard to know what year this is.
In a place like this, there’s no year.
But there’s sunshine, suddenly – blinding.
Sound of car doors slamming. Excited voices.
“D’you think Kevie can hear us? Like, his spirit is here?”
When their voices quiet, it’s the wind you hear. In the distance, that dull, pounding sound – the surf.
Walking in the beach sand wears you out quick. I remember that.
Trying to run along the beach, that’s such a crappy “beach” – your feet sink in the sand, a kind of wet marshy smelly sand. Big trees had fallen over in some hurricane, years ago. Must’ve been ninth grade. We’d been drinking beers, smoking joints at the shore. And the day was hot-windy, the ocean waves were high, tall, and white-frothed like some kind of video-game threat walking on its hind legs you’d have to waste with a submachine gun – quick before they got you.
Red-hot sun slip-sliding down behind the Lenape State Park pine forest.
A shrine like this requires maintenance – that’s the problem.
Five or six weeks after the crash, the shrine is looking kind of run-down. Mum is kneeling in the grass repairing some of the damage and Teddy stands back looking anxious.
“Hey, Ted! Hey, dude! It’s me.”
He’d hated me, I guess. His asshole big brother always teasing, poking him. “Why’d you do that, Kevin? That hurts.”
“Because you’re shit for brains, that’s why.”
But really, I don’t know why. I guess I never knew why.
Teddy is helping Mum position new, laminated copies of some of the damaged photos. Teddy ties my sneaker back up onto the cross.
Somebody stole Resident Evil and left Walking Dead behind. Somebody smashed the flower pots out of pure meanness and tore up the “sacred heart” of Jesus.
After Mum is kneeling in the grass for a while she can’t get up, too weak to get up. Teddy has to help her. She says in a bitter, hoarse voice what she always says, “My son did not deserve to die! My son was left to bleed to death. They took the other boys away and saved them but not my son. Goddamn them to hell, leaving my son to bleed to death in the wreck like a dog.”
And sometimes Mum says, “Kevie, can you hear me? Kevie – are you here? I love you, Kevie – I forgive you – Kev-ie, don’t leave me,”and she’s so excited and crying so hard, poor Teddy has to drag her away to the car.
What a relief when they leave – Jesus! Wish I never had to see any of them again.
If I came back from where I am, I’d take better care of my mum. But I wouldn’t live in that house! Never again.
“OK, Mum. I am sorrier than hell, what I did. Things I did, you don’t even know about. OK, Mum? It was my fucking fault. I’m fucking sorry, OK? Let it go.”
***
Maybe it was a mistake that I was born. Maybe my mother didn’t want me, that was Mum’s secret. And my father’s.
For sure, they didn’t want me. They had no knowledge of me.
The Death Song, before you are born. It’s the first thing you hear. It will be the last thing you hear.
On crystal meth these visions come so fast you can’t deal with them. You can’t process them. Like driving really fast, all the windows in the car lowered so your hair is whipping in your face, you’re oily skinned and sweaty and there’s a burning sensation in your eyes like you’ve been staring into the sun. Your brain is fucked and fried, but it’s OK. It’s good!!! Too much!!! Flying at you like crazed comets like at the end of that movie – 2001.
Flying into the gravitational field of Jupiter. Wild like your heart might burst.
***
Days pass, no one comes to the shrine.
They’re all graduated now, I guess. Class of 2012, Forked River High.
Then, there’s a station wagon. Younger girls, not known to me. Not their names. At school, I’d see them – plain girls, you didn’t look twice at. Girls with cell phones to take pictures of themselves at Kevie Orr’s shrine off the Forked River Road, Lenape Point.
One of them is Janey Bishop. Always I’d felt kind of ashamed, what happened between Janey Bishop and me, and the guys knowing about it, or mostly.
I never knew if Janey knew. How much
the guys knew.
Janey kneels in the grass like she’s praying. Janey feels the thoughts coming off me and looks up like she’s been kicked.
“Kevin? Kevin are you – here?”
And I’m, “Where the fuck do you think I am, here is where my brains splattered in the SUV and drained out into riverbed. Oil, gas, blood, brains, and guts. The medics had to scrape me together and shovel me onto the fucking stretcher, maybe nobody told you that?”
The girls are uneasy, shivering, saying, “Kevin doesn’t seem so nice now. It’s like he has – changed...”
“He has crossed over to some other place. He can see us and hear us, but we can’t see or hear him.”
“I can feel his thoughts! I think his thoughts
are hostile.”
“Why’d Kevin Orr be hostile to us? – we’re here to say how we love him, and how we miss him.”
***
Nobody knows, not even our mother – but Teddy comes here, sometimes.
Bicycling alone on his bicycle to Lenape Point, seven miles.
In actual life it would be awkward as hell, if me and Teddy had to meet together like this. If we had to look at each other, and talk.
Teddy is wearing one of my old Forked River High baseball caps pulled halfway down his forehead. And one of my old Matrix T-shirts, which hangs on him like a sack. He’s not an ugly kid but an ordinary-looking kid riding his bike that’s the kind of bike nobody would look twice at, still less steal. You see these scrawny kids hanging out at the 7-Eleven or in back of the school by the bleachers. The kind of kid who isn’t on any sports team and doesn’t have any friends except losers like himself – glue sniffers. It makes me sad to think that Teddy might turn out like that – like it’s my fault.
Why I treated my kid brother so bad, I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t aware of it at the time. It was something to do. Once, when he was five or six, and I was maybe ten, I pushed him into fresh tar in somebody’s driveway. Once, I pushed him into a nasty ditch, and when he tried to crawl out, I kicked him back down. Made fun of him in front of my friends. He’d say kind of pathetic like a kicked puppy, “Why do you hate me, Kev?” And I said, “I don’t hate you, fuck’s sake! Just get out of my face.”
Long as I can remember, Teddy was always hanging on to me, following me around. Video games, computer, TV. The kind of games I was into playing, I didn’t want the kid to see, not wanting him to tell Mum, even if he promised he would not. When Dad moved out and was living in Toms River, he’d come to pick me and Teddy up to take us out every Friday, it was an OK time for me but not for Teddy who was always whining, “When are you gonna come back home, Daddy?”
Dad can be kind of quiet when he’s in a mood of not wanting to talk or even to listen to other people talk but he would try to be friendly when he saw us. He would try to be OK with us, and with the changed circumstances. When he has a few beers Dad likes to laugh. He likes people around him laughing not bellyaching or pulling a long face, as Dad says.
Dad would ask us about our mum and get us to laugh at her – stupid female, dumb mutt, bitch, cunt. It was pretty shocking for Teddy to hear these words, but I was cool with it, sipping Dad’s beer and laughing. Me and Dad could connect with sports – sometimes. Other times, like a game where a star player hadn’t seemed to play like he gave a damn, though making like 50 million a year, Dad would be seriously pissed. In construction like Dad is, you get to see houses built by people with money like at the Jersey Shore – you figure what the score is. Other people, like most people in Forked River, never have a clue.
What hurt was how sometimes, if Dad was in one of his moods, it didn’t make any difference what you said to him, or what was going on in your life. He never got to my games – OK, I was cool with that – nobody’s dads mostly got to our games, even Friday-evening games – but if I scored a goal – two goals – and I told him, it was like Dad didn’t register. When Forked River almost won the county hockey championship this year, Dad just shrugged, saying, “A miss is a mile” – some bullshit like that, that if you examined it, you couldn’t figure what the fuck it meant.
Mum said, “Your father can’t help his nature, Kevie. One day he’ll wake up and realise.”
And I chilled her out, saying, “One day we’ll all wake up dead. No big deal.”
For a while – I was 15, 16 – I was jealous of my brother, hard as it is to comprehend. Skinny Teddy, snot-nosed Teddy whining and whimpering, and because I didn’t cry, no fucking way I was going to cry, or beg Dad to come back and live with us, Dad got it into his head that I didn’t care about him so much – not like Teddy did. So, the quieter I got, the more Dad thought this. Some of the times, Dad got shit-faced drunk and spent half the time with us on his cell phone talking to (who? some female?) or he’d be sneering at me and Teddy, he’d make us sit on one side of the table, in the booth, and him on the other side so we could see him looking bored as shit. And I thought, I hate you, why don’t you die? But he never did.
It was a few weeks ago, Teddy was sniffling and hanging out in my room like he wanted to ask me something. I could smell the misery coming off him like BO. I was high from smoking dope with the guys but I was coming down now, and I told Teddy he should take caution, the side of his face was going to get slammed in the door. The kid just blinked at me like it was some kind of joke and didn’t move fast enough, and that’s exactly what happened – his face got more or less slammed inside the door when I pushed it shut – Teddy screamed like he was being killed, and I opened the door and, Christ, don’t know why, I pushed it shut again, harder – Teddy was screaming, blood running down his face, and Mom was downstairs and called up to us. I grabbed him and said, “You little cunt, come off it, that doesn’t hurt, you cocksucker little cunt, I’ll break your face into more pieces, you don’t shut up.” Why I was so angry, I don’t know. I pushed them both out of my room – Teddy and Mum. I slammed the door and screamed at them I’d kill them if they didn’t get out of my face.
It’s like a hot flame running through my veins. My hair on fire. Girls were scared of me, these moods that were like my dad’s, except I didn’t need to be drunk or high. Chloe said it kind of turned her on, but she was scared, too. “Jesus, Kevie, you should see yourself!”
I never did, though. I guess not.
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***
The Indian dream chant, you smoke jimson weed and dance. You dance until your heart bursts. You wear special charms to stimulate special dreams. The smell in the night. Heat lightning that pierces your eyelids if you’re asleep. The song you sing when you are in battle facing death. Your secret song, your Death Song.
At the time of the crash in the SUV it was Black Sabbath playing. When the SUV went into the skid, hit the guard rail and overturned, and the guys screaming, and I was screaming, like Teddy screaming for help like God reached down and snatched up the SUV and rolled it over, and over, and over down the hill to crash onto the rocks upside down. Asshole kids, see how you like this. My justice and my mercy, see how you like this.
***
How many weeks after the crash, I don’t know.
Each morning is a new morning. Each morning is singular but has no meaning. In grade school I asked the teacher if you added up 100 zeros, why would you get zero, if you added up 200 zeros and got zero? Or two zeros? A thousand times zero – shouldn’t that be 1,000? If zero plus zero is zero, why wouldn’t 1,000 times more than that be – more?
The teacher laughed at me. Like I was trying to be funny.
Shit, I hated arithmetic. Then math. Something in my head feels like it’s going to burst, when numerals are involved.
The fact is, the fact I don’t want to face: I want Dad to come here, but Dad will not come here, ever. In Dad’s eyes, I am his shithead son, he’s washed his hands of me, he’d said. Before the accident this was. He’d tried to get me a summer job at the quarry through his brother Luke, and it was a misunderstanding, I hadn’t understood that I was supposed to drive out and meet the foreman. I guess I fucked up, and Dad said he’d had it with me. “Fuck you, Kevin,” he said, and I thought, Fuck you, too, you goddamn bastard. Pushing Mum around like you did, and making her cry. It’s easy to make a female cry but then you have to hear them and you want to strangle them. Like I give a shit, if I work at the quarry. Even if the pay is pretty good for Lenape County. Like I give a shit for anything you could do for me. I’d wanted to tell him, but I didn’t tell him. He’d cracked my face with the back of his hand once, I’d been five or six years old. You don’t make that mistake twice.
Anyway – I wanted Dad to like me better. Maybe love me, I don’t know. It’s what you can’t have, you want. Want so bad you can taste it. My mum and my grandma – they love me, but I don’t care so much about them. Your mum always loves you, big deal! It’s like reaching in your pocket and there’s a tissue you can blow your nose in – you do it, and you don’t think about it. And you don’t think, Hey, I’m lucky for this tissue, else I’d have to blow my nose in my goddamn fingers.
The thing is, my dad is ashamed of me. He knows about the shrine, he’s seen photos in the papers and on TV. Forked River Maintains Roadside Shrine for Teen Driver Killed in Crash. Forked River High Teens Maintain Shrine for Fellow Student Class of ’12.
Dad looks away, Dad doesn’t want to see. Dad didn’t come to the funeral and (he says) doesn’t know where his son’s body is buried. Dad would never drive out to the shrine for Dad would be disgusted by such a display. Spilling your guts (Dad says) is what assholes do. Dad is disgusted by what he calls making too much of things, like most people do. “The Star-Spangled Banner” played at a ball game in Trenton he’d taken me and Teddy to, he’d gotten disgusted, saying, “Making too much of bullshit.” Any kind of female emotions makes him angry. Any kind of children’s bawling or fears. And so, Dad would never risk visiting the shrine, as he would be fearful what might happen to him there. If he believed that his son was here, in some way. He would not risk that.
When I was alive, Dad didn’t want to talk to me. Now I am dead, Dad doesn’t want to talk to me. He sees his own death coming in me. I think that’s it. He would never admit that, though. He gets drunk and says, “That stupid kid. Didn’t wear a seat belt either, he’s seriously fucked now.” Sometimes Dad laughs, his mouth twitches like he’s in pain. But he would never admit pain.
There’s a wrongness in it, Dad perceives. A son should not die before a father. Why Dad gets drunk seven nights a week. The wrongness of a son going first. This is a violation of nature.
“He was going to enlist in the army, that’d shaken him up some, that’d mature him, unless it killed him. But he killed himself first.”
***
He never came to see me. But his arm is attached to my body, the left side of my body where my own arm was.
My dad’s arm that is tattooed the way I remember it. My dad’s arm that is more muscular than my own arm was, and so it is stronger than my right arm.
Dad never came to see me, or to the funeral, but Dad left me his arm.
***
This morning it’s one of my teachers at the shrine.
Mr. Groppel, social studies. He’s a photographer too.
Mr. Groppel takes pictures of the shrine with a heavy camera. He examines the homemade cross. The weatherworn photos, the girls’ compact mirrors in the shape of a heart, satin red hearts faded from the rain and sun, bleached almost white. The flag Grandpa Joe-Joe had brought out has been righted again and looks OK. And there are more sappy pictures of Jesus Christ, and letters girls have been writing to Kevie Orr, tied with ribbons and fastened to the tree. Lipstick kisses on some of these you can see from ten feet away.
Mr. Groppel takes pictures till the light fades. Mr. Groppel has a tripod he positions in the rocky soil, that steadies his fancy camera. Mr. Groppel even smokes a joint – this is a surprise! But Mr. Groppel hasn’t brought anything to add to the shrine like most people do. And Mr. Groppel never talks to Kevin Orr, not once.
***
“Kevie? Are you here? Hey, Kevie.”
“Hey, we miss you, Kevie. We miss you and love you a lot.”
These are girls stumbling in the grasses, giggly and stoned. Their boyfriends are up on the road. Faces I know, but not names.
“Kev-ie! You are the only person I can talk to…”
This girl bursts into tears. The other girls surround her, cooing.
***
(Maybe that girl. Or maybe another. Left what the media would describe as a “love-letter suicide note” to [deceased] Kevin Orr tacked to the cross at the shrine, went home and swallowed 30 Tylenols but didn’t succeed in killing herself, age 16.)
(And there were parents concerned about “suicide pacts” at Forked River High. Girls whose texting had to do with “wanting to join” Kevin Orr, who they’d scarcely known. School authorities warned against students “making pilgrimages to the shrine” and alerting parents to be aware of what their children were doing, where they were going. What they were texting. And what they were planning.)
***
There’s them, and there’s me.
The one category is living and wants to throw it all away like you’d switch off some boring TV program thinking in some half-assed way you can switch it back on when you want to. Except you can’t.
The other category is not living. And stuck in this place wishing like hell you could come back. Except you can’t.
***
Never did much thinking when I was alive. Mostly my brain was buzzing, and when it wasn’t, a kind of hot wind blew through it like one of those air vents that goes off from a thermostat, off and on, following its own logic. But now, thinking is what I am.
There’s a theory that my life is the sum total of the fuck-ups I’d made. Like adding up zeros.
Why I am here. Why the guys left me behind, crawled out of the wreck and rushed to the ER.
What’s happening at the shrine is that there’s litter accumulating here. Like, people have left pizza boxes, bottles and cans and Styrofoam, debris blown by the wind and caught against tree limbs and bushes. You’d think it was a picnic place, by the side of the road, where trash isn’t hauled away, only just accumulates.
To be fair, some of the visitors do try to clean here. My mum, I guess. And some others.
Storms over the Atlantic, clouds like twisted metal. Clouds blown across the sky like a TV scroll that you never come to the end of.
I’m thinking – Is this it?
Keep hearing the skid, the tires on the blacktop, somebody screaming. (Maybe me?) Black Sabbath turned up high, pounding. That music that gets into your gut. Into your brain.
I was bleeding, in my brain. Wasn’t able to draw breath to cry, “God, help me. God, I didn’t mean this, I never meant anything like this. God, help me.” I wasn’t able to beg, or to sob. I wasn’t able to speak, my mouth was filled with dirt and blood and broken teeth.
***
Kevin would’ve been a soldier. Might’ve died for his country.
Sacrificed himself for his country. Might’ve been a hero like his grandpa Joe-Joe, awarded a Purple Heart.
***
It’s a windy, sunny-cold day. Not so many people come to the shrine now that summer is ending.
Chloe and her friends, and other girls – girls who bring girls who didn’t even know Kevin Orr, except by name. Or until they saw pictures of the shrine in the papers and on TV. And there’s my mum, and there’s Teddy. Not many guys any more. (I don’t blame them: I wouldn’t come out here, either.) I wonder how the guys are – Josh, Casey, Flynn. Where they’ve got to. Where their lives will take them. I wonder how Josh is – if his broken legs ever healed. If his hair has grown back hiding the razor scar up the side of his head. If his brain was damaged like people worried it was. If he thinks of me, and, if he does, what he thinks. Like, were he and Kevin Orr close as brothers, once? And what does that mean, close as brothers? If Josh remembers, it was his idea, to drive out to Lenape Point and wade into the ocean. To race with Jimmy Eaton and his friends. Josh’s idea, and Kevie’s SUV.
That is, Kevie’s mum’s SUV. That never got paid for.
Grandpa Joe-Joe is too sick now to make the drive, though it’s only seven miles. In his head, Grandpa is thinking that his grandson Kevin died in the Afghanistan war, or maybe the Iraq war, which nobody understood why it was being fought, which was how they’d felt about the Korean War too.
In church they pray for me – it’s something for them to pray for.
But strangers come to the shrine, too. Strangers driving on Forked River Road, and they see the shrine – the homemade cross and the rest of it – and stop on this side of the bridge, and come to look. Sometimes a stranger will bring an item to add to the shrine: tinfoil heart, children’s balloon, stuffed animal. Like it’s something they had in their car, and found a use for. People take pictures of one another with their smartphones, in front of the shrine. In October, somebody will leave a perfectly shaped, symmetrically ridged bright orange pumpkin at the foot of the cross. People feel good, seeing things like this. People feel – Rest in peace, Kevin Orr. God be with you, we love you. Lifting their faces toward the highest branches of the tree and beyond the sky that’s a blank soft grey like something melting.
There’s white, watery bird crap on the shrine some of the visitors take care to wipe away. Hard rains keep it mostly clean. People are happy here, seeing their best selves here. Kids who’ve driven out to vandalise the shrine change their minds seeing the photos, one of which is Kevin Orr’s yearbook picture. It makes them sad seeing he’s a kid like they are – or they’d like to be. The ruin of a sneaker, the hockey stick – they consider stealing these, but don’t.
The Michelob, the Red Bull, the Coke – these have been missing for a long time, but most everything else is left where it was.
I’m proud of that, I guess. That people come here with bad intentions, then change their minds.
***
My crappy kid’s life. It was mostly a loser’s life. I guess, it was adding up to that, like adding a column of zeros, but I didn’t know at the time, you never know at the time. Guys my dad’s age are sour and cynical, they’ve figured out the score, but Kevie Orr never did. A crappy kid’s life, but I miss it.
I’d spend more time with my dad, if I could. Friday nights at his place watching TV, Saturday afternoons and Sunday watching the games, and having pizza with him and Teddy, that’s all I would want. Why’d I want more than that from him, that was a mistake. And I needed to be nicer to my mum. And Teddy – why’d I have to treat the kid like shit, actually I kind of liked him, maybe loved him – he’ll walk kind of crooked all his life, off balance, the orthopedic doctor said the way the boy’s knee was twisted, and he fell with his weight on it, that has damaged the knee permanently. (There was my weight on it, too – I’d been pushing down on Teddy’s back.)
(Not sure when this was. Maybe when I was in seventh grade.)
In any kind of relationship like in a family or with a girl there’s always the one who goes more out of it than the other – like there is always a “hunter” and “prey.” The one who doesn’t give a shit essentially is the one who comes out on top, you could say he’s using the other. I was usually that kid, which was why girls liked me, I guess – each girl thought she’d be the one to make Kevin Orr get serious. I feel that I am “serious” now – I am growing up now.
I feel that I am growing up now I am “gone.” I know that’s weird as hell but I feel that my spirit is being refined like the shrine is being weather-beaten, but it’s still OK – it’s kind of beautiful (I think). Like in the quarry, the marble is removed from the coarse rock surrounding it. In the church cemetery, my broken bones are returning to dust. My skull, which will have holes for eyes, and a goofy Halloween mouth. Not where I am, which is here.
This is what you learn: Your body is not where you are, after you are gone. Your special place is where you died – “passed over.” Your special song is your Death Song, you heard first in the womb in utter ignorance of what it was, that would follow you through your life.
It’s sad to me to think that my kid brother is a worse loser than I was. He’ll never get over his big brother dying – so fast. Like he never got over our father moving out – so fast. (You could tell that a lot was wrong between our parents, it didn’t take a genius to figure it out, but a young kid is not a genius, poor Teddy hadn’t a clue. His wheezing started then, some kind of sinus or asthma, he’d choke up lying down in bed. Dad thought it was to make him feel guilty, which made Dad really pissed, because yes, sure, Dad does feel guilty, but he hates to be made to think that he should feel guilty.) I want to think that Teddy forgives me. He’s sniffing glue, smokes joints, hangs out with loser kids his own age, he’s set on a track – high school, maybe he’ll graduate and maybe not, and beyond that, I don’t want to think. (Maybe he’ll enlist in the US Army?) You wonder – does a loser kid have his own Death Song? His song? Hard to believe, but maybe, yes.
***
This morning there’s nobody at the shrine. Nobody at the shrine for – how long?
Days, weeks.
Deer browse here. In the early dusk, they approach the shrine. You wonder if they’re curious, what the hell this is, but the deer show no curiosity, nothing special in their beautiful eyes and the way their white tails flick, a doe and two fawns, and some other, older does, and a young buck with velvety antlers, a fawn from last year. Calmly some of the deer seem to see me. Not all, but some. The large female that seems to be the leader of the little group. They flick their tails to drive away flies. They are not frightened of me because I am so still, I am transparent as vapour, I have no smell any longer, I am not their enemy. Without fear they approach me. Their sensitive noses move along the ground. There is a kind of happiness in this. Just a year ago I’d have wanted to shoot them, the young buck particularly; when my dad was closer with his brother Luke, they’d take me hunting with them in the Pine Barrens, I’d shot at a few deer but never hit anything, but now, I think that now I would not want to kill any one of these deer that are my friends in this lonely place. Now, I feel peace with them. In my life I was never able to sit still for long, I was restless, itchy, and squirmy, when I began driving any vehicle I had to gun the motor, like to see if the motor was alive – needing to know that, if I wanted to, I could move fast.
OK, now I am in one place. And I am happy now, I think.
I love and bless you all.
© 2013 by the Ontario Review Inc.
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