Blue Heaven
The year the winter was snowless, I spent every school night at Blue Heaven Funeral Home & Cemetery, where my mom worked as a funeral director. My dad wasn’t around anymore, so when I accrued charges of truancy, larceny, and vandalism, the only punishment Mom could afford to supervise was to keep me exiled from civilization at her workplace. I must have done something irredeemable that gray January. I have vague memories of a burning nativity scene, or maybe that was when I left high-dose pot brownies on the hermit veteran’s doorstep. In either case—an accident or a gift—I believed I did nothing to deserve a month of isolation, a blurred string of early-dark evenings.
Every other sophomore was out getting their driver’s license, and those lucky enough to have their own car became completely estranged from their homes. Jalen Porter did—apparently he was seeing a senior girl over in Oneida on and off—but he wrapped his car around a tree a few days after we got back from winter break.
Jalen and I weren’t friends, but we often crossed paths in the administration offices at Hopewell High. One time, he brought a bottle of military-grade malodorant to an assembly and dumped the whole thing under the bleachers. It smelled like nuclear fallout. Somehow I was falsely accused—despite having two (admittedly-unreliable) skaters as alibis. I took the fall for it. Jalen was popular and congenial, so it was endearing when he committed the same transgressions for which I was called a freak.
My mom saw a resemblance in Jalen and I’s reckless tendencies. After his wreck, her reluctance to release me from Blue Heaven compounded with the fear that I too would end up dead in a ditch.
The Monday after Jalen died, I hid behind the condenser unit on the side of the funeral home, squatting over fractures in the gray dirt. I used a quarter to unscrew the nameplate on the condenser, revealing a cavity with a stash of cigarettes. I double-barreled stale Newports to tide me over until my next liaison with nicotine. Time always seemed like a luxury when I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. I looked out over the rolling valley of gray tombs and headstones, crosses and angels. I thought about how fucked up it was for that to be the place where I hung out, for them and for me.
I brushed the ash into the dead grass and resealed my stash just before I heard Mom calling around the front. I crouched like a soldier toward a side door that I left propped open with an empty Sprite can. I slipped into the dusty storage garage and sprayed Ozium on my chest like cologne to kill the cigarette smell. They kept empty caskets awaiting client approval back there. That time, a rosewood casket with white silk lining sat atop a steel bier in the center of the floor. I liked to nap in the caskets from time to time.
Mom finally found me on the floral couch in the lobby, translating Spanish vocab—el polvo, la puerta, el sabueso, la lluvia—and fluttering my eyelashes innocently. Her periorbital circles were raccoon-dark and the sallow undertones of her skin bloomed under the fluorescent light. She didn’t scold me like I expected, she just stared a hole through me. It unsettled me in a way that I thought I was immune to.
“I have algebra homework but I forgot my calculator,” I said. My cheeks felt hot. I already knew I was blowing it. “I can walk home and finish my work there.”
“I’ll bring you one from my desk,” she said, then went back to staring.
“Why do you even have to work this late?” I asked. “Everyone else is gone.”
“Some families can’t afford to say no to money,” Mom said, speaking in the same tone she used with my infant cousin. “We can’t, neither can the families that work nine-to-five and have to pay for their loved ones’ funeral arrangements on top of the bills they already struggle to pay. That’s why I visit with those families in the evening.”
“I’m not an idiot,” I said.
“Evan,” she said. “Please listen to me. The Porters are coming. They will be here at 4:30. They are bringing their youngest boy. His name is Darnell. I need you to spend time with Darnell while I speak with his parents about Jalen’s funeral.”
I’m not a fucking babysitter, I thought. “Fine,” I said.
“I mean it, Evan,” she said. “I need you to be kind to Darnell. Please.”
Nobody knew Darnell before his brother’s accident. Jalen died at two in the morning on Saturday and the town of Hopewell had organized a vigil by sunset. A news crew from the city came out to shoot a segment on the vigil and they asked Darnell to talk about his brother, but instead he went on a diatribe of bug facts, like how the tail of a luna moth can disrupt the echolocation of bats. Jalen’s basketball teammates carried Darnell around on their shoulders like a little prince and all the cheerleaders hugged him, then everyone released white balloons into the sky and none of it seemed to mean a thing to Darnell.
~~
The Porters arrived when they said they would. Jalen’s parents looked like politicians, all debonair with lintless clothes and sharp hairstyles. Back then, I never realized that I could have counted the number of black families in Hopewell on two hands. I didn’t fathom the scrutiny they must have endured. To me, they were another family that lived in a big house in a new neighborhood, not renting an old house with walls they weren’t allowed to paint like we were.
Darnell entered the lobby with his chin affixed to his sternum, staring down at a platinum Game Boy with a flip screen. The cowlick on the crown of his head looked like the eye of a hurricane. From what I recalled of meeting Jalen in detention, Darnell hardly resembled his older brother. Mom introduced me to the Porters and they smiled with their mouths, but not with their sunken eyes.
“Darnell,” Mrs. Porter sang in the melody with which one calls a wandering dog to the porch.
“Say hi to Evan. You two are going to play for a little bit, okay?”
“Hi Evan,” Darnell recited, then he looked down at his game again.
Mr. Porter took the handheld and dropped it into the pocket of his tan trenchcoat. “That screen will burn your eyes,” he warned. “You’ll see those little mushroom guys inside your eyelids.”
I must have been visibly annoyed and Mom gave me a stern look, reminding me of my promise. I noticed that she had applied a layer of claylike foundation to hide the darkness around her eyes. The Porters asked my mom questions about her work. They never said the word “funeral.” They supplanted it with “celebration of life.”
I took the quarter out of my pocket and showed it to Darnell. He squinted and tilted his head at me. I motioned for him to follow me, then led him to the staff break room. I ripped a thick thread out of the seam of my shirtsleeve and tied the strand around the quarter. I dropped the quarter into the coin slot of a soda vending machine, fished it out, then repeated the process.
“Go ahead,” I said. I nodded at the keypad.
Darnell stared at the selection for a few minutes then pressed E6. The metal coil spun and a can of Dr. Pepper dropped into the dispenser basket. I used the quarter trick on the snack machine and Darnell picked out a bag of Skittles. I reached behind the fridge and withdrew a worn copy of East of Eden. I had hidden it there because I didn’t want Mom to know I tolerated reading and also because I had stolen it from one of the cubicles in the office. We sat down and I flipped to the dog-eared page.
Darnell spilled the Skittles onto the table and started grouping them by color. “This is made from bugs,” he said, pointing at the red ones.
“What?” I asked.
“Red is made from bugs,” Darnell said. He nodded proudly. “They’re called ‘cochineal.’ They produce an acid that can mix with other stuff to make red dye. It’s called carmine, but it’s actually bugs. My dad tells us that sometimes things aren’t what they seem like.”
“There’s a dude named Carmine on the baseball team,” I said. “Is he a bug?”
“No, he’s probably Italian,” Darnell suggested. He finished sorting then sighed and laid his chin on his folded arms. “I’m bored. Let’s go somewhere else.”
I shared his sentiment, but we didn’t have any other options. “There’s nowhere else to go,” I said.
“We could go outside,” he said.
“I don’t think your parents want you wandering around,” I said, to which he gave a pitiful pout. Masquerading as a figure of authority made me feel like a pig working at a butcher shop. “If we go outside, you have to do what I tell you, okay? Do you know what a ‘squire’ is?”
“Isn’t a squire just a young knight?” Darnell asked.
“No, they’re not a knight,” I said. “They’re a squire. Nothing is certain. They might be a knight eventually, but until then they do the dirty work and they never question their mentor.”
“I understand,” he said. His leg bounced wildly as he stared at the door.
“Alright,” I said, “come on, squire.”
~~
On our way out of the funeral home, I snuck to Mom’s cubicle in the back office to swipe ten dollars from her purse. We avoided the conference room where the adults were. Darnell and I walked over to the west side of the property which bordered Ardale road.
“Stay close,” I said. I grabbed Darnell’s arm.
Darnell cackled breathlessly as we sprinted across the four-lane road. The streetlights clicked on as we paused in the grass median. Darnell smiled up at me, the electric orange and the red dusk dueling on the halves of his face. Four long shadows stretched away from our bodies in each cardinal direction. We crossed over to the other side.
I brought Darnell to El Caballo Gris, a Mexican restaurant situated between a florist and a bondsman. I ordered us two hard-shell tacos each and we sat in a booth. The shells and the parchment paper were translucent with beef grease. Darnell ate his taco sideways and used a fork when it inevitably fell apart, then did the same for the second taco.
“My mom has taken me here since I was little,” I said. “All I would eat back then were the french fries. This place has been around since she was a kid. Have you ever been here, squire?”
“No, my parents always take us to Saltillo,” he said. “That place is cleaner.”
During the ensuing silence, I thought about the word “us.”
“How close were you and your brother?” I asked.
Darnell stared down at the maroon tiles. “I dunno,” he said. “Do they have ice cream here?”
“How do you not know?” I asked.
“What?” he asked.
I stared at him as he pressed his palms between his knees. He knew what I meant.
“Everyone’s been really nice to you lately, huh?” I asked. I chewed the flesh in my cheek.
“Yeah, it’s whatever,” he mumbled. “I think they have ice cream. Do we have money left?”
I handed Darnell the spare change and watched him shuffle to the counter. He stared at the three flavors—vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate—for what must have been five minutes.
“Do we have money left?” he had said, like the world was his charity. “It’s whatever,” he had said, like he was entitled to the sympathy that seemed arbitrary to him.
Who raised me on their shoulders after my dad died?
What vigil was held for the father that left a wife and ten-year-old son behind?
Where were my white balloons?
Sooner or later, Darnell had to wake up and realize something that even babies know; the world is bleak beyond the cradle. There will not always be someone to carry you around.
“Come on,” I said as Darnell finished his strawberry ice cream. “I have something to show you.”
I led Darnell back to Blue Heaven. He ran to keep up with me in the darkness. He shivered in the cold. We passed through the break room, then the back office. I stepped down into the garage and flipped the light switch. The fluorescent bulbs hummed like a chorus of insects.
“Look,” I said, pointing at the closed coffin in the center of the room.
“What is that?” he asked. He laughed nervously, hugging the door frame.
“Your brother is in there,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
Darnell stumbled down the steps. I brought him closer. “Jalen is in there.”
The coffin was empty, they always were, but Darnell didn’t know that. If he believed he was really seeing his brother—his brother’s stillness—then he would finally start to come to terms with reality.
“Stop,” Darnell said. His eyelids crawled inward. “Let him out!”
“He’s dead!” I shouted.
“Let him out!” he screamed.
Darnell pushed past me and knocked me to the ground. I ran after him and bearhugged him as he reached to open the lid of the coffin. I wrestled him away as he swung his elbows around wildly. He wriggled free and started punching my chest, cautiously at first, then hard when I didn’t swing back. His parents and my mom entered the room to find Darnell striking me.
“Darnell!” Mr. Porter shouted. His voice ricocheted off all the metal.
Mom stared at me, paralyzed by shame.
“I’m so sorry!” Mrs. Porter said to my mom as Mr. Porter dragged Darnell away by the wrist. “Please forgive my son, he’s not like this.”
“I understand,” Mom said. She stared at me as she spoke to Mrs. Porter. “It’s not his fault.”
The Porters left, having expressed their embarrassment the whole way out. Mom locked up the building and a cloud of silence followed us to her old Grand Cherokee. She muted the radio and drove toward our neighborhood. We passed Libations, the liquor store with barred windows that doesn’t question fake IDs, and a grassless baseball field where two boys were playing catch in the glow of a floodlight.
I figured Mom would have already condemned me if she was certain that I had provoked Darnell’s outburst, so I manufactured an excuse. “I don’t know what happened,” I said innocently. “I went to the bathroom and he snuck off. When I found him in the garage, he just freaked out on me. I dunno…”
Mom nodded slowly. The gesture did not indicate agreement. I believed it was her way of saying, “The words have reached me and I have nothing to say.”
Why did I do that to Darnell? I really believed it would have helped him move on if he confronted his brother’s death. And though I believed that, I could have realized my trick would only hurt him. Maybe I didn’t stop myself because I was jealous of how people pitied him. Or maybe I felt I deserved to see proof of the grief that he should have been feeling.
As we neared our neighborhood, Mom passed the old West Court mall, a hollow shell awaiting demolition. Every single time we drove past it, Mom would ask me, “Do you remember your first Halloween?” Of course I never did, I was four months old at the time, but she would always ask, as if my answer might have changed.
“It was pouring rain, so people came to the mall to trick-or-treat,” she always said. “I dressed you up in a little Winnie-the-Pooh costume and wheeled you around. The rain on the metal roof sounded like an ocean. I held you up to see the hot air balloons above the fountain. You loved them so much. Your hair was so blond. Your eyes were so green.”
Mom didn’t ask me about the memory as we passed the mall that time, but she looked over at me. She looked at my brown hair, my brown-hazel eyes. Her jaw pulsed in her cheek and she couldn’t keep herself from crying.
“I wish I could make it easier for you,” she said. “I’m trying…” She seemed to want to say more, but her voice gave out.
I nodded slowly to say, “I have nothing to say.”
~~
Mom brought me to Jalen’s funeral the following Sunday and made me promise to stay away from Darnell, threatening that—if I caused trouble of any sort—I would be sent to harvest hay on my aunt’s farm in Mexico, Missouri over the summer, a punishment to which death was preferable. The “celebration of life” was being held at the chapel on the other side of the property from the funeral home. A wooded creek obscured the view of the cemetery from the front of the chapel. The procession was endless, so Mom enlisted me to be a greeter. I felt like a homunculus, handing out programs to my classmates while wearing a two-year-old suit that no longer reached my wrists or my waist.
At multiple points during the visitation, Darnell wandered out to the lobby before being retrieved by a family member. He threw his jacket around, plunked the grand piano in the corner, dumped water bottles into a vase of lilies until it overflowed. Everyone else in the room pretended not to see Darnell.
After the service, everyone idled around the chapel and the vestibule, waiting to be led to the graveside committal. I stood out front and noticed Darnell sneaking off toward the creek. I figured
someone had to notice him and collect him before he got too far, but nobody did.
“Fuck me,” I mumbled to myself.
My skin scorched at the thought of the July sun in Mexico, Missouri. My skin itched at the thought of the ticks feasting on me in the hayfield. And then there was the moral oppression of that soul-sucking evangelical backwoods. My aunt covered every inch of every shelf in her cabin with Precious Moments figurines, black-eyed doll children—all-seeing and innocent—whose shark eyes spoke a constant warning: “I know what you’ve done.”
Darnell disappeared into the woods. I couldn’t let him be out there alone. I owed him that much for my cruelness. I figured I could be back before Mom knew I was gone. I went after Darnell and eventually found him crouched beside a hollow log, staring at a frozen cobweb that looked like shattered glass.
“Go away,” he said as I approached.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” I said quietly. I stuttered as I pronounced “sorry,” having been years since I said it aloud. I felt around my pockets for a quarter or something, but I had nothing to offer. “That was a messed up thing to do.”
Darnell’s pupils darted around distrustfully. “I don’t want to go back there,” he said.
“I won’t make you go back,” I promised.
“Why won’t they all just leave me alone?” Darnell asked. He crawled over to the stump of the fallen tree and leaned against it.
I could tell from Darnell’s side-eye glances that he was looking for consolation, but I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea how it felt to be overwhelmed by sympathy. “They just want to help you,” I said. I sat beside him and tore blades of grass across the seam.
“They don’t know how I feel,” he mumbled.
I almost asked, “Nobody else has lost someone?” I swallowed it. I could have told him about my dad, but I figured he only wanted pity, not commiseration.
“You want to see something?” I asked instead.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What is it?”
I rolled up my left pant leg and pulled down my sock to reveal a maroon cluster of ink.
“What is that?” he asked.
“It’s supposed to be the Tasmanian Devil,” I said. “I gave it to myself. A girl once told me it looks like burnt funnel cake.”
Darnell laughed and I did too. “It looks like a ball of yarn with teeth,” he said.
I didn’t tell him that my dad had that tattoo and I had failed to recreate it on myself from memory. We fell silent.
Darnell pointed at the frozen spiderweb. “In the winter, spiders go into a phase called ‘diapause,’” he explained. “To protect themselves, they suspend their development almost completely.”
“How do they know when to stop?” I asked.
“A few ways, like how they can feel the daylight coming back,” Darnell said. He stared at the stream for a while, then sighed. “Can we go somewhere else?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think you should wander too far. Your parents will come looking for you.”
“You said you wouldn’t take me back there!” Darnell shouted.
“Alright!” I said. “Keep your voice down. Let’s go.”
~~
I brought Darnell to the funeral home and retrieved a backpack of my belongings from a burrow in the flowerbed on the east side of the building. The contents of the backpack would have implicated me in numerous unsolved misdemeanors around Hopewell, so I was certain there would be some source of entertainment for the boy within it. I took out an old quilt and laid it on the grass behind the building, then I parsed through the other contents.
“I have spray paint,” I noted. “There’s cardboard in the garage we could paint on.”
Darnell considered it then shook his head decisively. “No,” he said.
“Let’s see… I have some bobby pins,” I said. “I can show you how to pick a lock.”
“Nah,” Darnell said. He peered in and pointed at a blue ball with a green stem. “What’s that?”
“A smoke bomb,” I said. I pushed his hand away. “We shouldn’t light that, somebody will see the smoke.”
“Please,” Darnell begged. I shook my head then he frowned. “If you don’t let me have it, I’ll tell your mom you have bombs in your backpack.”
“You’re a bastard,” I said. I handed him the bomb and a lighter. “Don’t throw it too far. We should be okay as long as the smoke stays behind the building.”
Darnell giggled as he stared at the bomb. He cupped it in both palms like water. He inspected the lighter curiously and flicked at it with his pointer finger. I showed him how to spark the light with his thumb. I passed the flame to Darnell and he held it preciously, bringing the green fuse up to the light. He flinched as the spark took, then panicked and hurled it out into the field.
“It went too far!” he cried as he bounced to his feet.
“Leave it!” I said. I chased Darnell and carried him away as the smoke bomb hissed and sputtered blue miasma. “You would have ruined your clothes, squire.”
“Ope,” Darnell blurted, but the consequence didn’t seem to register.
We sat down on the quilt and watched the cloud of blue smoke. Darnell smiled at me, but his eyes glistened with self-doubt. I recognized that look.
On the Saturday that I was wrongfully imprisoned in detention after the stink bomb incident, Jalen happened to be serving time too, having gotten caught in the computer lab showing a pornographic website to his friends.
I had wanted to hate Jalen and his unbuttoned polos, his flower-print bandanas that he tied around his bicep, his new jeans that he sawed holes in with his car key, his old pearl-white ‘79 Corvette with the vented hood that he would sit on in the morning, looking down his Blues-Brother sunglasses at everyone that passed him by. I wanted vengeance for getting blamed for the stink bomb. But when he walked into the library and we looked at each other, both of us knowing how he had wronged me, my anger evaporated. In that glance I saw a brand of shame—a mark, a sigil, though also a category—that was familiar to me. I experienced that exact shame in those moments where my desire to detonate my own life caused shrapnel to rain on someone else. Something had stolen our normal lives from us and all we thought to do was rebel against normalcy, that which did not belong to us, so nobody would think that we had allowed ourselves to forget our loss.
I never figured out what it was that Jalen had lost and we never spoke about the stink bomb incident. He just sat across the row from me in the library and offered me a stick of Doublemint. He pointed at my ankle.
“I like your tattoo,” Jalen said.
“You like that?” I asked. “Or do you just like that I have one?”
“I like it,” he said. He slid the arm bandana down to his elbow and revealed a tattoo of a cherub with a Tommy gun shooting holes in a heart with a lightning-bolt rift down the middle.
Jalen and I talked that afternoon as if we had been friends for a long time. After that day, we would nod in recognition whenever we saw each other, but we never spoke again. I never forgot that pained look in his eyes and, as we sat on the quilt, I noticed for the first time that Darnell’s eyes were identical to Jalen’s. And I could also tell that the blue smoke brought Darnell no joy. He didn’t enjoy breaking the rules. He didn’t even know how. He was just imitating the kinds of things that Jalen must have done without him.
Darnell must have believed that I could show him how to be more like his brother. A sour pang of guilt struck me as I imagined Darnell becoming like Jalen, a boy who lost control. I decided he should know about my father.
“My dad died when I was your age,” I told Darnell. “He was driving home late and hit a truck head-on. The driver was a father from Springfield. They were both wasted, and there was no telling which one of them crossed the yellow line. Nobody wanted to bring it up, not even to say sorry that I lost him. He was a bad guy at the end. It’s in my blood too. It made me want to—fade away. It took me a long time to realize that the world is willing to let me. But you and I, we can’t go that way, squire.”
Darnell’s tears fell heavily, dropping like beads. “Does it ever get better?” he asked.
“It’ll pass,” I said, not knowing if it would.
Darnell wrapped his arms around me and I threw an arm around him. I held my chin above his hurricane cowlick so he wouldn’t see me cry.
A dot of light bloomed within the smoke cloud.
“What’s that?” Darnell asked, pointing at the light.
“Fuck,” I said.
Darnell stared at me until he realized too. “Fuck,” he repeated.
I unraveled a hose from the flowerbed and stretched it out toward the flame, but it didn’t even reach halfway to the field. At least the engulfed patch of land was completely partitioned by an asphalt walking trail that ran parallel to the roadside, but there was nothing I could have done to quell the spreading inferno. That little patch of land was going to burn, and there would be smoke. I dropped the hose and put my hands on my head.
“What do we do?” Darnell asked.
On the horizon, the procession started on the downhill path toward Jalen’s gravesite. I knew they would see the fire as they approached, then the mourners would run to help. I knew they would search for a culprit. Off the south side of the funeral home, an evergreen American holly loomed over a fenced-in meadow.
“Listen to me, go hide in there,” I said, pointing at the holly. “There’s nowhere else to go. Hide under that tree and—when the coast is clear—slip into the crowd and act like you belong there.”
“What are you going to do?” Darnell asked.
“I’ll think of something,” I said.
I knew there had to be someone to blame or else Darnell’s absence and his mischief in the chapel would have been drawn into question. I thought about the hayfield and my heat-death destiny.
“I want to stay with you,” he said. “This is my fault.”
I grabbed his shoulders and leaned close enough to see myself in his pupils. “This isn’t you,” I said. “Go on, squire.”
Darnell wept, but he obeyed and backed away. He disappeared under the canopy of the holly. The procession must have noticed the fire as scattered envoys ran down the winding trail ahead of the group. Smoke swelled over the flames that marched along the trench of dry grass beside the roadway.
I lay down on the quilt and watched the pale sky. White pinholes appeared within the black current of smoke. I held out my palm to the first snow of the winter.