Damned if You Float
by Meg O’Connor
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Fifteen-year-old Jason Hutwanger—Hut—stumbled through the darkness to catch up with his friends approaching the obelisk at the top of the cemetery hill. Sweat soaked through Hut’s Def Leppard tee, an attempt to blend in with his classmates. The soupy Pensacola air enveloped him, and his heart pounded.
Hut reached into the back pocket of his Wranglers and removed a flask he’d pilfered off his dad. He took several large swigs of bourbon, the liquor burning his throat.
“Hurry up, Hut,” Mark shouted from the obelisk, looking fly in his acid-washed jeans. Hut forced himself to look away. He was still rocking the shiner from getting jumped in the hallway just yesterday by the Dead on Arrival Gang. Did he really want to risk being caught staring at another dude’s ass again, even by his friends?
“I’ve got the camera ready,” Mark continued. “We’re about to capture technicolor evidence you’re not a goddamn pansy.” Mark’s voice wavered even though he said he didn’t believe the grave was haunted. “At least those guys didn’t force you to break into Ma Lorey’s house like they did Sammy Dawson.”
Hut grimaced. Ma Lorey, the post-polio recluse in the peeling Victorian by the port, was scarier to them than the ghost.
Hut stepped towards the obelisk, stomach churning. He told himself this urban legend was bullshit. The town’s turn-of-the-century gay ghost, Dan Merrick, supposedly killed the straight kids who taunted him and spared the gay ones. Instead of murdering them, he carved his initials into the queers. Damned if you float, damned if you sink.
But refusing would sell him out; he’d have to say the rhyme. He eyed a piece of crumbled limestone that lay at the base of the monument, then glanced from Mark to Eric to Wes. Mark held his Polaroid camera at the ready.
Hut forced a smile, staring at the eroded name plaque that read DANIEL AMOS MERRICK. The waning gibbous moon produced just enough light to cast a giant, elongated shadow that appeared to spear Hut through the chest. He cleared his throat.
“If I’m straight, time will tell. And if I am gay, I’ll burn in hell,” he mumbled as the bourbon he’d chugged on the hill started to catch up to him. Following the directions as they’d been passed down through oral history, Hut pantomimed wrapping a rope around his own neck, representing this gay ghost’s lynching back in 1920. As he held up the invisible noose, Mark started snapping photos, and the photos printed with a whir in real time. Eric and Wes joined in the pantomime, surrounding Hut and Daniel’s obelisk. Hut’s head spun. “A filthy queer, I swear I’m not. If I was there, I’d tie the knot.”
He yanked the invisible rope around his neck, and his friends did the same thing in unison, their heads all jutting out at cockeyed angles.
There was a pause. Only ten feet away, a nearby tree branch snapped loudly and crashed to the cemetery ground. “Fuck, we’re too straight for this shit. He’s coming!” Wes shouted. They sprinted down the hill, Hut staggering after them, legs buckling. Eventually, gravity won out, and Hut hit the dirt path, tumbling downhill. He couldn’t move for a moment. Was he about to be murdered by a ghost?
He rolled his eyes. Nope. His fate would be even worse. The ghost didn’t murder the gay kids.
The sky and tree branches spun above him. He squeezed his eyes shut as he heard his friends’ footsteps disappearing into the distance at a run.
When he opened them, he was surrounded by flames, and Daniel Merrick stood over him. “Do you even deserve to be marked as mine?” Dan whispered, reaching out to Hut with a butcher’s knife, dripping with blood, clutched in his hand. His initials. Hut grabbed his forearm protectively.
The blood from the knife became rain, drizzling over both of them, dripping viscously down Daniel’s cheeks. Buzzing erupted overhead as a swarm of hummingbirds emerged from a nearby magnolia, little pearls of blood dripping from their beaks. “Repent.” Daniel crouched. “Leave something behind. At the grave. Then I am yours, you pretty thing.” The hummingbirds flew into the distance, specks of blood cascading off their tail feathers, towards the military section of the graveyard.
Hut’s eyes shot open again. His hand still clutched his forearm, his own nails digging into his skin. He rolled over. Vomited. In the distance, waves broke like thunder against the sea bluffs.
He looked around for his friends, but he realized with creeping dread that he was alone. Those cowards had left him unconscious on the ground. The Polaroid photos lay scattered around him. He picked one up, the moonlight glinting off the glossy photo of him mimicking Merrick’s lynching. Hut felt increasingly ill, and he wasn’t sure it was just the whiskey.
Repent. Merrick’s word floated back to him. Hut wasn’t sure what scared him more: the possibility of a real ghost or the chance that deep down, he really was the piece of shit he’d always suspected. Regardless, he couldn’t shake the deep compulsion to pay his respects how “Merrick” seemed to want him to. The hummingbirds had flown to the military graves. Where Merrick’s supposed lover, the soldier, was buried.
The least Hut could do after mocking a lynching was go visit the person Merrick had been lynched over, where he’d left flowers every week for five years under the nosy townspeople’s watchful gaze until they’d finally snapped.
Dragging himself to his feet, knees aching from the fall, Hut followed the path the hummingbirds had taken until he found the infamous white marble headstone in the WWI area belonging to Henry Cole. Exhausted, he sank down before the grave, then he leaned in. There was something scratched into its face.
Hut squinted, tracing the etching with his finger. It was a hummingbird. His stomach twisted, and he glanced over both shoulders as if Daniel Merrick might be standing there. He wasn’t. Neither, incidentally, were Hut’s “friends.” They’d really deserted him.
His mind raced. The hummingbird was so gentle, so small, so delicate. So… feminine. It wasn’t what he’d expect to see carved into a man’s grave, even a gay one. A surge of hope he hadn’t felt for a while rose in Hut’s chest. He knew women had impersonated men to go fight in the American Revolution. It wasn’t a wild leap to think it still happened in World War I.
And that would make Daniel Merrick her husband. Hut’s chest lightened. He had the chance to set the record straight on Dan’s legacy. He could give Merrick what he himself would want after his death. A final end to the mockery.
He pulled himself to his feet. It was almost midnight, and his mother would be waiting awake in the den to punt his curfew-breaking ass all the way to the Alabama line.
Hut awoke in his own bed, staring off at the shark on his Jaws poster like he always did. He rubbed his temples. Holy shit. Who needed ghost vengeance when the consequences of your own decisions felt like this?
Thirty minutes later, he’d chained his bike to the rack outside the library and walked up to the reference desk. Miss Adler looked alarmed. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”
Hut smiled nervously. “I need new glasses, Ma’am. They’re giving me a real zinger of a headache.”
He followed her to a section overflowing with records. Once alone, Hut started digging, but he couldn’t find any record that proved Merrick’s special soldier, “Henry,” ever existed or any marriage certificate between Henry and his wife, Alice.
Then Hut found it: last month’s army pension check, passed down from the widowed Alice to an eligible disabled dependent who was still alive.
Ma Lorey.
The dreadful thought of knocking on her door was quickly replaced by a fluttering in his ribcage. If Ma Lorey could confirm his hypothesis that “Henry” was a woman, Hut could publicly debunk the whole gay ghost myth. He would never have to hear that stupid rhyme ever again.
The door to the mansion on the bluffs creaked open as Ma Lorey gestured Hut inside with her arm crutches. The house—despite its overgrown lawn and cracked stepstones—was tidy inside. A pot of tea screeched as Ma shooed the cocker spaniel with three legs away.
“So you’re a descendant of Alice Cole?” Hut hesitated and took a sip of his Earl Gray. “Or Henry Cole?”
Ma leaned back in the slightly musty loveseat and raised her eyebrows at him. “Both? That’s what parents are, hon.”
Hut summoned his courage. After all, this woman wasn’t as scary as the rumors suggested. She just had a limp. And this was his one chance to learn the truth.
“Henry Cole was a woman. She wasn’t your father.” He hedged his bets, saying it with confidence.
Ma Lorey tipped her head back. “I don’t see how this is any of your business. Or why you’d care, for that matter.”
What was he supposed to say? A ghost I spurned sent me spectral mockingbirds? “I want to know the truth about Merrick. So either you tell me, or I’ll go asking everyone else.”
Ma smirked at Hut. “I see what’s going on here.” Then the knowingness left her face as she seemed to weigh her options. “Fine, kid. Henrietta was my mother’s sister. Daniel Merrick’s wife.”
Hut’s eyes grew wide. He knew it.
“If Merrick blabbed, he’d sell Henrietta out for posing as a man, and the government wouldn’t send the pension checks if they knew. So he worked out a plan with my mother, and they split the checks until Merrick… died.”
Repent. A flicker of unease shot down Hut’s spine.
Ma paused, then she looked directly at Hut. “You understand what will happen to me if you tell anyone I’m not Henry’s daughter, don’t you? These checks keep me afloat.” She glanced down at her leg.
Hut closed his eyes, nausea brimming again. He thought of Merrick, lynched for keeping a secret. And mocked ever since. He wanted it to stop.
Hut’s voice cracked. “Merrick could have lived if he’d just told people the truth about himself.”
Ma Lorey’s face contorted with a brief flash of anger, then softened. “There’s no winning, honey. Everyone’s playing a part around here. It’s just some people do it for themselves, and some people do it for others. Or sometimes both.” She sighed. “Henrietta played a part so she could see the world and serve her country.” Ma paused. “And then she got shot by a cannon.”
Hut ran through the cemetery, breathing rapidly, but he’d made up his mind. Leave something behind. Then I am yours.
He dropped Mark’s Polaroids, the only proof he had guts, at the base of Henrietta’s grave. Then he lit them on fire.
There were other ways to handle bullies. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. He ran his finger down the metal.
Hut stepped into the high school to find his aggressors waiting by his locker like he knew they would. Eric grabbed Hut’s shoulder as he strolled past him down the hall. “Dude. The Polaroids. Show them before-”
The Dead on Arrival Gang formed a line in front of Hut. “Time’s up, fairy.” Les Freeman spat on his shoes.
“He can prove he’s not,” Mark shouted suddenly from near the water fountain. “He did the thing at Merrick’s grave! We ran for our lives!”
Hut glared at Mark. “No, you ran for your life. You have no idea what happened to me.” He pivoted to the DOA and shot them a wicked smile. His fingers found the handle of the switchblade in his pocket.
Les looked confused, but he threw a punch anyway. Hut took it. It wasn’t the worst pain he’d faced that day. Then Les ran at Hut and threw him against the locker, pinning both arms above his head. Les’s class ring snagged on Hut’s sleeve, yanking it up. Revealing the jagged, blood-red letters he’d carved into his arm after burning the Polaroids.
DAM.
He’d left something behind.
| SPECIAL EXHIBIT THREE: Return to “Tell It Again“ | Continue in Gallery Two: Modern Twists with “The December Booth“ |