Стивен Кинг - Later

I came out of school that day in March with my backpack slung over just one shoulder (which was how the cool sixth-grade boys did it) and Liz was waiting for me at the curb in her Honda Civic. On the yellow part of the curb, as a matter of fact, which was for handicapped people, but she had her little POLICE OFFICER ON CALL sign for that… which, you could argue, should have told me something about her character even at the tender age of eleven.

I got in, trying not to wrinkle my nose at the smell of stale cigarette smoke that not even the little pine tree air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror could hide. By then, thanks to The Secret of Roanoke , we had our own apartment and didn’t have to live in the agency anymore, so I was expecting a ride home, but Liz turned toward downtown instead.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Little field trip, Champ,” she said. “You’ll see.”

The field trip was to Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, final resting place of Duke Ellington, Herman Melville, and Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson, among others. I know about them because I looked it up, and later wrote a report about Woodlawn for school. Liz drove in from Webster Avenue and then just started cruising up and down the lanes. It was nice, but it was also a little scary.

“Do you know how many people are planted here?” she asked, and when I shook my head: “Three hundred thousand. Less than the population of Tampa, but not by much. I checked it out on Wikipedia.”

“Why are we here? Because it’s interesting, but I’ve got homework.” This wasn’t a lie, but I only had, like, a half-hour’s worth. It was a bright sunshiny day and she seemed normal enough—just Liz, my mom’s friend—but still, this was sort of a freaky field trip.

She totally ignored the homework gambit. “People are being buried here all the time. Look to your left.” She pointed and slowed from twenty-five or so to a bare creep. Where she was pointing, people were standing around a coffin placed over an open grave. Some kind of minister was standing at the head of the grave with an open book in his hand. I knew he wasn’t a rabbi, because he wasn’t wearing a beanie.

Liz stopped the car. Nobody at the service paid any attention. They were absorbed in whatever the minister was saying.

“You see dead people,” she said. “I accept that now. Hard not to, after what happened at Thomas’s place. Do you see any here?”

“No,” I said, more uneasy than ever. Not because of Liz, but because I’d just gotten the news that we were currently surrounded by 300,000 dead bodies. Even though I knew the dead went away after a few days—a week at most—I almost expected to see them standing beside their graves or right on top of them. Then maybe converging on us, like in a fucking zombie movie.

“Are you sure?”

I looked at the funeral (or graveside service, or whatever you call it). The minister must have started a prayer, because all the mourners had bowed their heads. All except one, that was. He was just standing there and looking unconcernedly up at the sky.

“That guy in the blue suit,” I said finally. “The one who’s not wearing a tie. He might be dead, but I can’t be sure. If there’s nothing wrong with them when they die, nothing that shows , they look pretty much like anyone else.”

“I don’t see a man without a tie,” she said.

“Well okay then, he’s dead.”

“Do they always come to their burials?” Liz asked.

“How should I know? This is my first graveyard, Liz. I saw Mrs. Burkett at her funeral, but I don’t know about the graveyard, because me and Mom didn’t go to that part. We just went home.”

“But you see him .” She was staring at the funeral party like she was in a trance. “You could go over there and talk to him, the way you talked to Regis Thomas that day.”

“I’m not going over there!” I don’t like to say I squawked this, but I pretty much did. “In front of all his friends? In front of his wife and kids? You can’t make me!”

“Mellow out, Champ,” she said, and ruffled my hair. “I’m just trying to get it straight in my mind. How did he get here, do you think? Because he sure didn’t take an Uber.”

“I don’t know. I want to go home.”

“Pretty soon,” she said, and we continued our cruise of the cemetery, passing tombs and monuments and about a billion regular gravestones. We passed three more graveside ceremonies in progress, two small like the first one, where the star of the show was attending sight unseen, and one humungous one, where about two hundred people were gathered on a hillside and the guy in charge (beanie, check—plus a cool-looking shawl) was using a microphone. Each time Liz asked me if I could see the dead person and each time I told her I didn’t have a clue.

“You probably wouldn’t tell me if you did,” she said. “I can tell you’re in a pissy mood.”

“I’m not in a pissy mood.”

“You are, though, and if you tell Tee I brought you out here, we’ll probably have a fight. I don’t suppose you could tell her we went for ice cream, could you?”

We were almost back to Webster Avenue by then and I was feeling a little better. Telling myself Liz had a right to be curious, that anyone would be. “Maybe if you actually bought me one.”

“Bribery! That’s a Class B felony!” She laughed, gave my hair a ruffle, and we were pretty much all right again.

We left the cemetery and I saw a young woman in a black dress sitting on a bench and waiting for her bus. A little girl in a white dress and shiny black shoes was sitting beside her. The girl had golden hair and rosy cheeks and a hole in her throat. I waved to her. Liz didn’t see me do it; she was waiting for a break in traffic so she could make her turn. I didn’t tell her what I saw. That night Liz left after dinner to either go to work or go back to her own place, and I almost told my mother. In the end I didn’t. In the end I kept the little girl with the golden hair to myself. Later I would think that the hole in her throat was from the little girl choking on food and they cut into her throat so she could breathe but it was too late. She was sitting there beside her mother and her mother didn’t know. But I knew. I saw. When I waved to her, she waved back.

While we were eating our ice cream at Lickety Split (Liz phoned my mother to tell her where we were and what we were up to), Liz said, “It must be so strange, what you can do. So weird . Doesn’t it freak you out?”

I thought of asking her if it freaked her out to look up at night and see the stars and know they go on forever and ever, but didn’t bother. I just said no. You get used to marvelous things. You take them for granted. You can try not to, but you do. There’s too much wonder, that’s all. It’s everywhere.

I’ll tell you about the other time Liz picked me up from school very soon, but first I have to tell you about the day they broke up. That was a scary morning, believe me.

I woke up that day even before my alarm clock went off, because Mom was yelling. I’d heard her mad before, but never that mad.

“You brought it into the apartment? Where I live with my son ?”

Liz answered something, but it was little more than a mumble and I couldn’t hear.

“Do you think that matters to me?” Mom shouted. “On the cop shows that’s what they call serious weight ! I could go to jail as an accessory!”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Liz said. Louder now. “There was never any chance of—”

“That doesn’t matter!” Mom yelled. “It was here! It still is here! On the fucking table beside the fucking sugar bowl! You brought drugs into my house! Serious weight!”