Bones of a Saint

  Copyright © 2020 by Grant Farley

  All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “Casey Jones.” Words by Robert Hunter. Music by Jerry Garcia.

  Copyright © 1970 Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright renewed.

  All rights administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved.

  Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  Excerpt from “Fly Like an Eagle.” Words and music by Steve Miller.

  Copyright © 1976 by Sailor Music. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved.

  Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  This is a work of f iction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used f ictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States by Soho Teen

  an imprint of Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Farley, Grant, 1951- author.

  Bones of a saint / Grant Farley.

  ISBN 978-1-64129-117-0

  eISBN 978-1-64129-118-7

  1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Gangs—Fiction. 3. Brothers—Fiction. 4. People with disabilities—Fiction. 5. Secrets—Fiction. 6. California, Northern—History—

  20th century—Fiction. I. Title

  PZ7.1.F3674 Bon 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 2019041731

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Tobey

  &

  Caitlin, Erin, and David

  Trouble ahead, trouble behind,

  And you know that notion just crossed my mind.

  —“Casey Jones,” The Grateful Dead

  They made the devil’s sacrifice

  Within the devil’s temple, wicked wise . . .

  —“The Pardoner’s Tale,” Chaucer

  We ask . . . to be transformed into children so that we may one

  day enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

  —Veneration prayer to St. Jerome Emiliani

  PROLOGUE

  Denial

  The priest climbed the trail into the foothills as the mission bell tolled matins. Lupine brushed his leg. The path disappeared beneath wild mustard, but he followed from memory. He passed a mound covered in poppies. Purgatory. He was close now. He hiked along the ridge, stopping at the base of the great oak stump, its charred limb poking at the sky. He shrugged off the backpack, pulled out the spade, knelt, and drove the blade into the mud between the roots. Seventeen years. He dug deeper. Why had he waited so long? He had lived as though in a trance. He dug deeper still. Denial, perhaps.

  This wooden handle, the dirt beneath it, the charred stump, these felt real even as the images of his own life slipped away. Something tugged at the shovel and his chest tightened. He pulled back on the handle. The blade ripped free, rising above him trailing a shred of blood-encrusted canvas. Again, he thrust the blade into the soil. It clunked metal. He tossed the shovel aside and dug his hands into the earth and grasped the smooth surface. He tried to pray.

  Finally, he stood and brushed off his knees, massaged his lower back, and stared down into the valley as it emerged into the soft light.

  No hurry now.

  He studied the foothills across the valley, their shadows unfolding. The trees rose along the riverbed. He could not see the farmhouse. But he recognized the hill that sheltered it. The children had grown up in that home, but then had left the valley. Had children of their own now. All but him.

  As the priest knelt again and reached into the earth, the tale of that summer slid into an eternal present, like a boy’s train forever looping upon itself on a figure-eight track.

  And always, that voice.

  Arcangel Valley, California

  1978

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cante bury

  I’m watching their faces shimmer under the neon blue of the canterbury trailer park sign that really only hums cante bury with the e sort of wiggling on and off. Mr. Sanders would be POed at me for letting the sign go like that, but I don’t got the heart to mess with it.

  Only three guys are playing over-the-line—Buns Bernie, Ed the Head, and Michael James Bartholomew the Third, who is only MJB to us. They’re seventeen and don’t want to be bothered with a sawed-off fifteen, but I’m too slick to ditch, so they’re sending me to deep, deep center. Under the streetlights, guys can play all night. Buns steps into the batter’s box chalked on the asphalt.

  The first raindrops hit my face, dripping a low-tide funk. No such thing as a rainout, so I grab my glove. The sign crackles and hums, raindrops waving like fishing line through cante bury.

  I see her first. Roxanne’s hair is blacker than the twenty-coat paint job on Chaco’s Impala. She parts it down the middle and it hangs straight down around her shoulders. In that light, it’s an oil-slick blue, and the way the drops bead like a slick wax job, she don’t even need a hat. She stares at me with her eyelids drooping.

  “Hey, RJ.” She says it like I’m some kind of curse. She won’t let go that hate between our moms. She slinks up to the older guys, who are froze like Carew checking up on ball four. The chalk lines are bleeding down the gutter, but they sure don’t see it.

  “Whaturyaguys doing?” Roxanne says in that low voice she thinks is a turn-on. She snaps her gum.

  “Playing with our bats,” I say. “What does it look like we’re doing, Foxy Roxy?”

  “Don’t be gross.”

  She turns to the other guys and it don’t take a genius to see that where she’s taking them she won’t let me tag along, not even in deep, deep center.

  The rain has slowed to a drizzle.

  She trades tongues with them for a while, but they’re getting kind of tired of it. Roxanne finally pushes away from MJB, hands him his wireframes she was holding for him, and stands back like she knows she better get past first base or they’ll go back to their old game.

  “Let’s go out to the old Miller place,” she whispers.

  “That’s a Blackjack hangout,” Buns says.

  “No one’s lived there in years,” Roxanne says. “I don’t see no Blackjack sign on it.”

  I’m hypnotized by these water drops hanging on the ends of her fake lashes.

  “The Blackjacks don’t need no sign,” Buns says. “Everyone just knows it.”

  “Yeah,” Ed the Head mumbles. There’s nothing funkier than that soggy pot stench from his shirt. “No one messes with them. No one.”

  “Precisely.” MJB nods.

  “Maybe you boys ain’t ready. Maybe you boys just ain’t up for a man’s game.”

  I know what kind of game it is she’s talking about, but I can’t figure why they’re turned on by Roxanne.

  I stash our gear and tag along as they follow her like three puppy dogs toward the old Miller place. It’s supposed to be haunted, if a guy is lame enough to believe any of that stuff. The Millers lost their farm sometime way before I was born, and most of the land has been sold off, so no one is busting butt to buy a house in the middle of nowhere. Rumors are that some city dude bought it, but it’s been a couple weeks now and no one’s showed. Anyway, no one ever moves to this valley, they only leave. If they’re lucky.

  It takes most of an hour, but finally the guys are crouching out in the drizzle on a hill and staring d
own at the shadow of that house. Roxanne and me sit under an oak uphill from them.

  “I’ll go on reconnaissance.” MJB means he’ll go make sure no guys from the Blackjacks got dibs on the place tonight. He slides down the hill and we wait.

  Finally, we hear his stupid all-clear whistle.

  They creep down the hill and in through a broken window and I crawl in right after them. Roxanne Bic-lights a couple candles waxed to the floor. In that glow I see a curved banister torn from the stairs, beer bottles and wrappers scattered across the hardwood, and graffiti scrawled across the walls. There are worse hauntings than plain old ghosts.

  “Find us some wood,” Roxanne says. “We’ll make us a fire.” She does this disco spin. “It’ll be sooo dee-vine.”

  The other guys tear around the house. I watch as she squats by the candles with her chin resting on her knees, her feet soaked through her rainbow-colored surfer sandals. She takes a bottle of nail polish out of the back pocket of her tight jeans and the bottle click-clicks as she shakes it. She wipes her toes and smears another coat of that weird red-purple across her toenails. It’s like her own color, Foxy Roxy purple. Her head bobs to a soundtrack only she can hear. She spreads her toes and wiggles them like a sea anemone.

  The guys stumble back lugging ripped-up baseboards that they toss onto the grate. They stand staring at it. The closest they’ve ever come to lighting a fireplace is plugging in MJB’s red crackling cellophane heater. Roxanne pushes them away and lights it.

  I’m standing away from them and don’t bother to point out what that smoke might lure, even at night. Especially at night.

  The guys step back and watch her. She closes her eyes and stands with her back to the fire, wet hair hanging down. She’s wearing flared jeans like us, except hers are hip-huggers, and she’s wearing a T-shirt like the rest of us, too. But the fire is crackling behind her and the way she looks under that wet T-shirt, well, that’s not like the rest of us. At all. Except maybe Buns on account of he’s fat, but that don’t count.

  Her soundtrack comes moaning out of her now. Something about staying alive. She spins and moans. On the radio the song sounds like a bunch of stoned chipmunks, but drifting from her it’s more like a sad, all-alone girl. Her disco spin slows and slows . . .

  She sees me and stops.

  “I ain’t putting on no show for him. It’s degrading.”

  “Man,” I say. “You’re just POed ’cause Buns got bigger tits than you.”

  Buns’s face turns all purple red, Foxy Roxy purple, but the others don’t dare laugh. Buns knows he can’t catch me—I’m too slick. They’d spend half the night chasing me around that old house. “Look,” MJB says with that fake accent, “there’s no need for everyone to get perturbed. Why don’t we simply play a little game of Murder with RJ here, then we can get down to it.”

  Murder is really only hide-and-seek for guys who don’t want to look dorky playing a little kid game.

  “Oh?” Ed the Head asks. “Ooooh. Got ya.”

  “You must think I’m a total dork,” I say. “You’re gonna have me hide, and then it’ll be, like, tomorrow before one of you bothers to come looking for me.”

  It’s a standoff.

  “The boys wouldn’t do that,” Roxanne says to me like I’m one of the other guys. “Honey, you and me can hide together, and the others can try and find us.”

  Well, I figure as long as I got her, they won’t be far off. “Okay,” I say, “but don’t try and rape me or nothing.”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” she says.

  So the guys start counting to a hundred and I creep for the stairs.

  “No, this way,” she whispers. She leads me outside. “I know just the place.”

  “Just the place is upstairs out of the rain,” I say.

  “That’s the first place they’ll look.”

  Right. So I follow her. I know that’s dumb, but there’s nothing better than playing Murder around an almost-haunted house in the rain. She sneaks around the side.

  There’s this stone shed that looks like it sunk in the mud clear to the roof. It’s even got this little pipe sticking out that could be a chimney, except it’s just an air vent. A root cellar.

  “Help me with this.” She tries to lift the door, which comes out of the ground at an angle. It’s like she’s been here before.

  We lift the door with this ka-blang that if the guys don’t hear they got to be deaf. The blackness and the cold slither up the stone steps and there’s no way, Jose, that I’m going down there.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asks from halfway down the stairs.

  “Probably a big, juicy black widow down there.”

  Then she’s standing at the bottom just out of the rain, lighting a cigarette. She almost looks like some starlet the way she’s letting out that smoke real slow and leaning on one hip in that wet T-shirt. There’s this sweet smell seeping up from her. No bottle smell, this is all her.

  The Bic light flickers in that little stone room and it looks just like a place where they bury people in horror movies, only the people are zombies or vampires or something and they come out at night and suck people’s necks or eat them—that kind of thing. She flicks an ash. “I didn’t know you were chick-en.”

  There’s a log next to the door. A plan slaps into my head. Slam that door shut on her and roll that log over on top of the door and just leave her there. It’d serve her right for all the mean things she done to me over the years. But I don’t pay attention to that plan, ’cause when it comes right down to it I wouldn’t lock my worst enemy down there. The guys are calling to each other from the house.

  Roxanne turns and stares at one of the walls, her eyebrows going up, and she just whispers, “Oh, wow!”

  “What is it?”

  She’s just staring at that wall. “Far freaking out.”

  “What?”

  My feet take me right down the stairs to check it out. Whoever built that room made a big deal about it. Even the floor is solid stone. I look at that wall, but there’s only rock and some spiderwebs that probably are from black widows. There’s a creak and then ka-BLANG and then blackness. I can’t believe I fell for that.

  I turn and feel for the door through the cobwebs, pounding and shouting, “Let me ouuut!”

  Her whispers bounce all around the stones. I turn. Some of the night seeps in through the air vent. I hear her scuffle right on the roof next to it. She’s there. Crouched. Waiting to hear me.

  “Let me out and I’ll just go home.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Nothing else to say.

  “Look,” she says, “as soon as I’m done with those guys, we’ll come back and let you out.”

  I yell some more, but she’s gone. Then it hits me. She planned for this to happen. I sit in the middle of the floor trying not to think of Father Speckler and the way he used to lock me in that coat closet at Our Lady’s. A six-footer could reach out his arms and touch both walls, but my arms are wrapped around me. The room is so still and cold that I can’t even shiver. Hail Mary, full of grace. I know that some fat black widow is right over my head, dropping into my hair like a loogie. The Lord is with thee. I’m rocking back and forth, back and forth, just doing the Hail Marys and listening to the rain against the metal vent and smelling the old stone. Blessed art thou among women.

  I don’t know how long I’m here, my body as light as a dried-up leaf swirling above that stone floor. The walls spreading out . . . and out . . . and out . . . to blackness like forever and I know I’m dying and that if someone don’t open this freaking door real soon and reach down and lift me out of this black place, then I will be dead. Forever and ever.

  Then I hover in that blackness, listening like I’m an outsider with my ear pressed up against the world. Like lying on that coat closet floor listening to Father Speckler d
oing one of his we’re all God’s children numbers on the class.

  Rain brushes the trees. Roxanne giggles and then sings about that staying alive . . . A tree claws the side of the outbuildings. Car tires crunch on gravel.

  Blackjacks?

  The car door slams. Heavy boots slide on the porch. Roxanne screams from inside the house. The guys yell. Then this weird, twisted kind of shout that’s got to be a man from the car. Doors slam. Then lots of running, first on wood and then on mud and grass. Someone runs right by the cellar. I suck that big breath, ready to let loose a scream, but a voice in my head whispers, Shut the hell up. The only sound now is the faraway gong of the mission bell blown by the wind.

  Then silence. Not a soul. I might be trapped here forever.

  Then shuffling footsteps near the cellar. Circling the cellar. One foot dragging behind the other across the wet grass and mud. Not a Blackjack. It stops near the air vent. All kinds of weird thoughts slap through me, like What if it’s my father’s ghost? Then I’m not floating. I’m just huddled on that stone floor with the cold pressing all around me. Pressing. Pressing! And it just squeezes out of me. “Let me out! Please let me out!”

  “Someone down there?” Instead of shouting, it’s a hoarse wheeze. “Someone down there?”

  My breath slides around the stones.

  The foot drags along to the door. The sound of the log plopping over on the wet grass. The door lifts, a peek of night slipping in, and then slams back. More heavy breathing. The door lifts again and crashes open and the night floods in.

  A worn black boot clumps on the first stair.

  I’m holding my breath.

  The flashlight beam blinds me. Beyond the light is something red, shriveled . . . a hand reaching down at me . . . It’s so old, like a skeleton’s maybe.

  Like a claw.

  I push up out of that cellar, brushing past this . . . this old man . . . a stench of something sweetly sick . . . out into the rain . . . running . . . slipping in the mud . . . up and running.