HAUNTINGS: Ten Teenagers

By Debra Jo Immergut

Poinsettias, jonquils, and gladioli are flowers that would never, in real life, bloom in the same place at the same time. But here at the carnage they do. In blaring color without rot or wilt. And this is also real life.

The carnage was, for the 104 years before now, just another bend in the state highway, echoing the course of a nearby brook. The garden of impossible flowers, the bed of plastic mistakes and little American flags, sprouted a few years ago in July. It occupies 20 yards of shoulder just across the road from the shut motel. The Tip Top, the motel was called, and still is, because its splintered sign is still there, nailed on a cross by the side of the road.

Crosses dot the carnage too, by the way. Smallish ones made by hand, from strips of white plastic lattice.

The only other item of interest on this bend in Route 10 is a farmhouse, plain-faced, almost shame-faced, with its stingy windows and blank concrete stoop. No porch for sitting, a front door missing its knob. But whoever troubles with a front door in New England? Nobody. The only door you’d use is in back, and you’d never use it at this particular house, because Jorman Majewski, its owner, is an old man seldom seen in town, and when he is seen, no one is particularly pleased about it.

So it’s just a bend in a state road between towns. Tourists drive there, heading from the Notch into the Whisper Mountains, those tourists who are looking for that sort of thing.

The last few summers, it was mostly touring bikers, rolling through in clusters, their combusted thunder causing our windows’ caulk to craze, and now the bikers seem to have disappeared as well. After the carnage.

But this story begins only three nights after. Too soon then to tell. And Evie Jannings pointed out that night that fewer road-trippers is better for the planet, burning their fossil fuels as they powered up the mountains.  She said this while sipping a grape slurry purchased at the slurry booth. The carnival was in town, same as every summer, and we all of us in the age group 15 to 21 or so were spending every night wandering around in the blinking yellow and red glow of the bulbs, buying a bottomless bucket of kettle corn, a cherry-ade, a canoe of nachos with cheese elastic. If you are over 21 in this town, you are either at Mooney’s Tavern drinking or you’re home married with a baby and maybe some internet porn. Or, if you’re Evie Janning’s sister Emily, you’re doing summer term at Dartmouth but she was always annoying that way, humblebragging with her free hoodies sent from all the schools chasing her because she won some big science prize and played a horn even though she was born with half an arm. A cornet.

Lucas Dobuck doesn’t even know what a cornet is. To be fair, most of us don’t. Most of us if they hear the word might guess it’s a type of donut. But Lucas Dobuck says to Evie Jannings, climate warming is a libtard hoax. And Evie flung what was left of her slurry at him, but missed, and the splash pattern hit the foot of a carny guy, the one from the balloon darts, who was having a smoke, just a skinny outline and a tiny dot of cool blue e-cig light. In the past two nights we’ve learned that his name is Johnny V. That V is not a Roman numeral by the way, it’s just a V.  We all are well-educated in Roman numerals in this town because the sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Horgan, is a history buff.

Johnny V turned to Evie and said he ought to wail on her ass. We all stared at him, not sure what this meant, and fascinated by his spiral face tattoos and the way his beard twisted into a point that ended in a little wooden bead. Evie, usually over-confident, said nothing and just kind of shrank toward the other kids sitting beside her on a trailer hitch, letting her massive empty cup hide her face.

Lucas Dobuck, maybe as kind of a peace offering, says hey man If you want to score I know where you can. Johnny V laughed. Just because I work the fair you think I’m a drug abuser. I could be an undercover cop, asshole.

So could I, said Lucas. We were impressed by this comeback.

The blue dot wiggled in the dark as Johnny V dragged. His exhaled smoke floated slowly toward the moon, a slice to the northwest.

What’s on offer, he said.

Pretty much whatever, said Riley Ware, who is the drug dealer’s little brother, and should know.

The carnival started to shut down at around 10:45 and by 11 it was deserted. The pack of us, four girls, six boys, and the carny Johnny V, walked down through the wavering dark to where Prospect turns into Depot Street. In towns like ours, streets just change names without warning, have you noticed? Halfway down Depot, set back behind a half-ruined garage, there’s a little shack of a house, the porch floor smashed in the middle like God punched it with his giant fist. We stood in the front yard, moonbeams catching on chrome bits littering the weeds. Riley and Lucas and Johnny V. went inside. The rest of us passed around a vape pen that belonged to Evie, she had driven down with some older kids to Mass and spent some of her Burger King pay on it.

We were standing out there for a long time. Down the black street we saw a clump of something moving, a dark cloud billowing toward us, in and out of the scraps of leafy shadows. As the cloud got closer, we saw it was a group of people. The bikers, we counted seven, which is exactly how many there were, in the carnage. 

Their leather pants squeaked.

They didn’t look at us but we gaped at them. Beards, black eye sockets, thick slow-moving limbs. They dissolved into the murk at the street’s end.

Did you see that, we said to each other. What the hell?

Johnny V came out first and Evie said, we just saw seven bikers go by.

He was shaking a fistfull of pills in his hand like dice he was about to roll. I didn’t hear bikes, he said.

They were walking, she said.

It was messed up, we all agreed, and then Lucas and Riley came out, and we told them, and then Johnny V said, they were zombies, maybe. Looking for young flesh to eat.

Lucas said, you guys are so high.

Not zombies, said Evie. Uneasy spirits. Out for payback.

You guys, Riley said. My brother doesn’t want us hanging in his yard.

Lucas said, let’s go see Bonbon. Past midnight, if you waited for the last drunk drivers to weave out of Mooney’s, you can catch Bonbon taking out the recyclables and she will sell you a bottle of something out the back door. She is the bartender, French Canadian, hence her name, which is really Candi, but some local joker started calling her Bonbon. Her nose is shaped like a butternut squash, her smile is glassy and broken as windows on an empty old mill. When drunk, she’ll tell you about her hooker days in Quebec City, working the convention center for thousands of dollars (Canadian) per week. She bought the bar from cancer-cursed Bill Mooney with her hooker savings to be near her sister, who married a man from the Notch.

On this night we walked Elm where it turns to Bridge, dead quiet and weird in the speckled darkness, down to Mooney’s. Johnny V peels off without saying goodbye. We got the sense that he was just sick of hanging out with ten teenagers as we watched him stroll down the center of the street, then leap out of the way as one of the drunk drivers, exiting the bar, squealed past him. It looked to be Mayor Scott Priddy, swerving his way back to his townhouse behind the supermarket. Wouldn’t that be everything if the mayor flattened a carny, said Evie. Just for a little extra carnage on top of the carnage.

Carny carnage, I said.

This might be a good moment to explain that Evie is hot and has been since we were in third grade. She outlines her pine-green eyes with black eyeliner. She wears lip gloss that smells like raspberries. Top that with dark bangs and ice-white skin, and she looks like a person from another place. She is even smarter than her one-armed sister at Dartmouth. Her online following is big for a girl from a small-ass town in the New England nowhere.

Also when we were in eight grade she told the school cop that Lucas Dobuck had raped her in the parking lot. Then she changed her mind and said what she meant was that he was staring at her.

So Bonbon came out with a trash bag bulging, kicking it ahead of herself with each step. She saw us there, six boys, four girls, and she said, You monsters hoist this bag up and then we’ll talk. A few of us stepped forward and sent the bag tumbling up into the dumpster, spewing dirty liquid all over us. We were way beyond caring. The church tower just chimed the half hour, so it was 12:30 am. It was almost August. The air stuck to you like soggy tissue paper.  And now we all smelled like a stew of sweat, cigarette ash, fry grease and booze. Yeah, disgusting.

Bonbon ended up selling us three dusty bottles of bottom-shelf tequila. This is a town that hasn’t adopted Mexican things. We might be the last place in the USA where ketchup still outsells salsa.

Evie said we should find somewhere special to drink it.

Riley said I know where.

And that is how we ended up among the flowers. They stabbed our butts when we sprawled out on top of them, passing the bottles around. I feel violated by this gladiola, says Evie. She yanked it out of its little plastic ring holder and threw it into the dark woods.

Did your brother really sell that shit to the flatbed guy? Lucas asked Riley.

The flatbed guy lived in Darlington, two towns over. He was high on oxy driving a flatbed truck, empty after delivering a backhoe to a quarry. Why did he happen to swerve, just as a pack of thirteen bikers where headed toward him, southbound? How did the flatbed jack-knife, swiping seven of them off the road like mowerblade cutting grass? Like the side of a hand swiping flies?

Two of the bikers were cut in two. The rest, just fatally tossed or squished.

The carnage. We talked about it as we let the tequila burn our gullets and make our stomachs churn. Ellis Bottenham puked quietly behind several flags.

Maddy Arnold’s father was a state trooper and saw it all. He said there was a severed head on Jorman Majewski’s lawn. He said that Jorman yelled at the cops to get the head off his lawn, but they had to photograph it, staring up at the sky with its eyes open, glaring at the sun unblinking for an entire afternoon. We could all just imagine it.

The carnage happened at 11 in the morning. The bikers had been headed for a picnic site at the Basin, a dingle of puny waterfalls that’s part of the state park. We used to go there for outings toward the end of the school year when kids could no longer sit still and the teachers had to get us out of dodge.

Maddy’s father told her there were intestines on the road, and feet, and just a human ooze that looked like butterscotch pudding.

When she said this, the puking became a bit of an epidemic. Five or six of us combat-crawled through the plastic undergrowth to find a private place to lose our lunches.

Riley never did say if his brother sold the shit to the loser trucker from Darlington. The guy was 22, the papers said, and he had a ridiculous lopsided fuckboy haircut that might have been cool like eight years ago.

The bikers were vets, the paper said, it was a reunion trip of some kind and they had all fought together in Iraq. They survived Iraq but not the flatbed on their vacation in the Whisper Mountains.

Lucas said let’s book. It stinks like vomit here and I have an idea.

The carnival at 2 am was still half-lit, like someone forgot to finish the job. Yellow bulbs, in strings, floated like electric bees over the grass field. The snack bars were locked tight, which was a shame because after all the puking and another vape pass-around, we would’ve eaten anything, even those candy apples that are like biting into a sugar-coated ball of wet sand.

Evie said I’m gonna go sleep in the ferris wheel and it sounded like an idea of pure genius. The wheel loomed over the east end of the field, where the grass petered away, and beyond it the ridge rose, the ridge that borders the east edge of the town like a wall, preventing us from seeing the sunrise, keeping our town in shadow until noon. That wall is one reason the town has never grown, and instead stayed nowhere. Shut off to the east, we face backwards, that’s what Mr. Horgan said once, that we face backwards across America, and it sticks with you, when you hear something like that.

The ferris wheel was called the Wagon Wheel and each carriage was painted with a pioneer person and a gold number.

Evie climbed into carriage number 19 and lay on the dirty floor. Lucas climbed up after her. After the rape accusation they seemed to have an on-again off-again thing but who the hell knows. It was probably love. The other carriages were too high up for any of us to reach. Maddy and Ellis made a half hearted attempt to climb into one, her on his shoulders, waggling her arms toward it, but she only caught air and then toppled to the ground and started to cry.  We ran to her, are you ok, as she wailed that she thought her wrist might be broken and Jesse Coffey had taken a junior EMT course so he started trying to tend to her but she was screaming DON”T TOUCH ME and while we were all gathered around this, we hardly noticed that above us the wheel jerked back, the clank of gears grinding.

HEY, cried Evie, what the fuck, as she and Lucas looked down, sailing up into the inky black sky where so many stars watched frigidly. The wheel’s workings screeched, and maybe in the hazy night of summer some trick was being played by the air, but we all swore later that this sound of the rusty gears was drowned out by another enormous one, a great ear-punishing roar echoing off the ridge, like many Harleys being gunned.

Evie and Lucas and the wheel were all moving too fast, and then they were way up at the top. Then a metallic scream cut the night and the wheel jolted to a sudden stop. The cars swung wildly, hinges grating. A few of them turned full circle, upside down, including carriage number 19. It flipped right over.

Evie dangled. Lucas dropped. His shape slipped through the stars. Then his head whacked against one of the wheel’s struts and then he landed at our feet. Yellow and red light reflected in the wetness at his neck, where the broken end of his spine stuck out, pale and jagged as a splintered branch.

We stared at this. Later Maddy said that under the quiet she heard certain soft squeakings. Could have been rats in the carnival trash, could have been the uneasy dressed in their leathers. Jesse swore he saw shadows drifting away through the field, dark smudges against the ridge. We don’t know.

Because for the rest of us there was nothing but Lucas. A sight we will never forget no matter how long we live or how the world changes, if we end up living Mad Max style in a wasteland or being controlled by Russians. If there is a mind-erasing technology I’m sure we will all try to use it to erase that mangled pile of Lucas.

You guys are so fucked, someone said, and then we turned to see Johnny V. crashing out of a nearby Winnebago in boxer shorts and bare feet, his entire chest covered by a tattooed picture of the Madonna.

He looked up at Evie as he stumbled toward the wheel. He reached his hands toward the big rusted levers. He yanked one and the giant wheel began to putter and slowly turn.

He looked at Riley. You do this?

Riley held up his hands. I didn’t touch a thing. He looked scared.

Four kids back in Bangor and this is my job lost right here, you little shits. Johnny V. shook his head, turned his face away from all of us and didn’t say another word.

Evie was sobbing and moaning, clinging to a rail in the upturned car as it wafted down. When it was about eight feet off the ground she let go and dropped into the grass, rolled up in a ball, like a little caterpillar just dropped from a leaf.

And he was right. That carnival has never come to town since. The bikers steer to the far side of the ridge or just stay south. Where Elm changes to Main, the town set up a bench named for Lucas Dobuck, and it’s the only Dobuck around now, because the rest of them moved away. Evie went to Dartmouth, full ride. She is a junior this year and never comes back, not even for Thanksgiving. Riley’s brother still sells out of the shack behind the old garage and we go there a lot, because how else do you expect us to deal. We don’t know anything. Except that the garden lives and lives, rain, shine, and all winter long, blooming stupidly under however many feet of snow.

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Debra Jo Immergut is the author of the novel You Again, published by Ecco/HarperCollins in July 2020, and The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist for Best Debut Novel by an American Author, published in the US by Ecco and in over a dozen other countries. She has also published a collection of short fiction, Private Property (Random House). Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, and The New York Times, among others. She is a recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships and lives in western Massachusetts. debrajoimmergut.com