I knew from all the awful horror movies Chauncey had dragged me to that zombies did not return to the world singing. They came back for revenge. The low moaning notes rumbled through his voice as he ascended the hill, grappling for breath. Remy Slesinger spooked when an ash branch tapped his head. Balancing on the limb, a squirrel settled its glassy eyes on every one of us before it leapt to the ground and darted off down the slope, veering out of Chauncey’s path.

’Twas a haunting between/Did smash up our dream/We’d now only glean/ In the jagged-edged gleam/Of shards

, he chanted from a face obscured in shadows. I imagined phantom arms reaching out of the ground to drag him under. One blink and he was gone. I rubbed my eyes and he was back. Shaking my head at Anthony Giacombossi I said,

I’m seeing things

.

I’d be pushing up dandelions by now if I hadn’t buried the habit!

Lucky yelled to Maureen through the door that separated the garage and the kitchen.

But I won’t become one of those people who preaches.

Maureen exhaled over her crossword puzzle. She smoked alone after he quit. His forsaken Winstons had become her brand, and she lit one after another while he worked on his motorcycle. Maureen listened to him talking to the girls through the shut door and pictured him on his knees beside the engine, pointing a screwdriver into the air. She heard him ask,

Who wants a job? Lucky needs a beer.

When the door flung open, Maureen did not turn around to see the clumsy bodies scrambling to the refrigerator before hurrying back to him, each bringing a can. With her back to the closing door, she stared at the clue under her pen (DOWN 7: Person or thing past saving) then the empty boxes waiting to be filled. 5 letters. The word was on the tip of her tongue when she heard Lucky pop the tab of a beer, and imagined him drinking from the can. She closed her eyes on the blurring newspaper and saw Lucky watching thick flakes fall past the high windows lining the garage door; he licked foam from his blonde mustache, and she tasted snow.

Through the woods came a blast of wind to our backs. We braced ourselves. Fallen leaves brushed past, chased by a white plastic bag that took flight down the hill, flying over Chauncey’s approaching figure. Clouds crept in, extinguishing the moon. In his natural range—the middle register—he sang now about goblins and saints, witches and angels, the specters of this world and the next who deliver prophecy. No wonder the spine of that music book hadn’t been cracked in so long. Who wanted to hear songs like this? Chauncey crooned, snapping his neck as he threw back his head.

The work Lucky did all winter geared up for spring, when he could return to his night rides. On

those

evenings Maureen missed the deep freeze, the blizzards, the haled backstreets and iced traffic lights that kept everyone indoors. But once the weather shifted, Lucky opened the garage door to the driveway, corralling the girls into lawn chairs at the threshold as he wheeled out his Triumph.

Calendars full of X’s—we’ve flipped through them, trying to pinpoint when everything went wrong. By the fifth month Chauncey had become someone who smashed windows with a fist. The seventh month he couldn’t pass a fire alarm without pulling it. During the tenth month he assembled a bomb in the park out of a tin can, broken glass, and gunpowder, which exploded before he could finish building it. He walked home, bleeding, his face and arms black, into the kitchen where Maureen finished wiping one of the clients’ mouths with a paper towel, turning to him, unshocked.

What the devil happened to you?

she said. He poured himself a glass of water, blood on his hands, in the sink, a bright red streak across the glass he was about to drink from.

I blew up,

he said. Weeknights of the eleventh month he went out to the tracks alone, where he could throw Molotov cocktails at passing trains. On the twelfth month he would hold up a convenience store with a toy gun, two days before his 17th birthday. On this Sunday night the place looked empty. A security camera recorded the entire episode:

When Chauncey forgot to take out the trash a second week in a row, Lucky ripped open the basement door and shouted from the top of the stairs,

You make a mess, you live with it!

A black bag landed at the bottom step with a thud. Then another came rolling down, leaking a trail of grease. The four of us stood, our red eyes widening. Chauncey kept guard at the sheet that was his bedroom door. Lucky called,

A loser—that’s you. LOSER!

before the door slammed, shaking the walls. The only light came from a lava lamp Anthony Giacombossi found on a curb during Big Trash Night. He had carried the lava lamp down the basement stairs cradled in his doughy arms, plugging it in on his hands and knees.

Sorry,

he’d said.

This may take a few minutes to warm up. Sorry.

From a pocket he pulled loose a Twizzler whip and devoured it with his eyes closed. Remy Slesinger, embracing the boom box to his chest, pressed STOP then REWIND as he said,

You don’t have to apologize for every—

Somewhere in the haze of those fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh months of trouble, we sat in the school cafeteria above our gray lumps of food on neon orange trays, drinking soda from paper cups without straws or lids. Chauncey’s hair hung to his shoulders. A fake diamond earring pierced his left lobe. Holding the cup, his hands were sheathed in gun-metal-gray, fingerless gloves. He sucked up ice and spit it back into the cup, one cube flying from his lips towards the face of Steve Fretano, a hulking presence passing by, heading for a table near the windows where other football players in Polo shirts laughed with blonde girls wearing push-up bras and Jordache jeans. The ice cube whizzed by Fretano’s profile, just missing his nose. His eyes opened wide, one hand leaving his own cafeteria tray to point a finger at Chauncey.

Go bang your mother, Malone

, he said. Chauncey’s leap across the cafeteria table looked anything but graceful. Like a doomed superhero, he punched Fretano in the lips with a fist still clutching the paper cup. Ice cubes spilled to the floor. Fretano, although twice Chauncey’s size, looked terrified. Because you never know what somebody who gets called a lunatic might do in the name of his mom’s honor, like grasping your ears and rolling you across tables with him as kids finishing last minute math homework gasp and foods go flying, Chauncey still turning with you, off the table, where you land on your back, smack against the cold floor, and spinning on, the way as a kid you descended those long hills until the world turned too fast, but Chauncey with you now, above then below and on top again as you roll past the feet of the five girls from Maureen’s attic who sit at an end table, girls who stand, dragging untied shoelaces with them, swooning when they recognize Malone. He pulls you to your feet, taking you in his arms as though about to dance, and slams you both into the concrete wall. It all lasts until two gym teachers enter the cafeteria blowing whistles to pull him off you, Chauncey still spitting in your face.

Burial grounds turn a different place in the daylight, when there’s nowhere to hide. I strolled the aisles of headstones—

Saracci, O’Cullen, Valagopolous, Mazza, Daniels, Zarokovsky, Garmo, Erikson, Shambelon

—until I came to an empty hole. At its side stood a mountain of dirt with an abandoned shovel jabbed in. Over the edge? Only blackness. Lowering myself beside the rim, I smoked half the joint I’d rolled to celebrate Chauncey’s release and, angry at him two hours later for never showing up, I finished the rest and spat into the grave, looking over both shoulders as I pedalled off.

Another time, during a party at his house when Maureen and Lucky were away, Chauncey picked the lock to the gun cabinet. In the kitchen we sat drinking whiskey on the rocks, betting cigarettes on our game of blackjack. Beside a pyramid of Camels, Remy Slesinger fanned the cards one-handed and said,

You’re in or you’re out. Last chances.

Smoke curtained the air while the stereo blared a Van Halen LP in the living room. Don’t ask me where the clients were that night. I don’t remember. I’ll never forget Chauncey’s stepsister Ashley showing up. Ashley at twenty-two years old, an age we couldn’t even imagine; Ashley who sold grass grown somewhere upstate with her prison guard boyfriend; Ashley who always wore miniskirts, even in winter, when she accessorized with leg warmers; Ashley chain-smoking Parliaments in Maureen’s bedroom; plastic bags lined with fresh green across the baby-blue pillowcases. A secret knock got you inside the room to Ashley crossing her legs on the edge of the bed, her tight black sweater crushing all our lungs. We emptied our wallets with haste to feel her fingertips brushing our own as she passed over the bags, taking our cash and tucking it away inside her bra. We lingered there, hands in pockets. We could not stand to watch her waving goodbye as she pulled a purse strap over her shoulder and walked out the front door to her rusted emerald Camaro. We wanted to yell,

Wait! Take us with you!

But she was already gone. I still wished she wasn’t, hoping she’d let me ride shotgun as Chauncey handed me a pistol at the kitchen table. Kids poured in the front door—faces from the halls. In a town our size, a party didn’t mean you waited for an invitation; you heard about one and you went. Beside me, Warren Chlebek said,

David Lee Roth is such a fag

as he folded his cards. The music rose from the living room until the kitchen table vibrated the half-empty cups, rolling papers, plastic motel ashtrays, stolen lighters, a bag of Doritos, a National Enquirer. I was not in the kitchen hearing Alex Van Halen’s double-kick drums thunder through the house but listening to the same song from the cassette deck of Ashley’s Camaro. I saw her twisting the volume knob all the way up as she shifted into fifth gear, cut the headlights, and we were gone when I raised my hand and pointed the gun at Jessica Rosenthal.

The foundations of our houses had sunk in the deep valley. I could see this from the graveyard when the cloud cover rolled off and the moon reappeared in slivers. Then the streets caught the glare and shimmered, snaking our direction until the rust of the cemetery gates looked as clear as the cracked-up path that led into the tall grass, where all up the line the glowing headstones had become the color of polished bone. Shouldering free of his bathrobe, Chauncey’s ragged clothes swung loose over his chiselled frame. His face rose to the moon’s spotlight, illuminated. A buzzed skull. Those sunken eyes. Like a real maniac now, he held that look of the departed, the fallen, the missing, the already gone. When his voice went falsetto the song cracked but continued in broken notes forming a soundtrack for the earth to spit coffins into the sky, a scene fit only for Chauncey Malone, the star of what this had become: the worst horror movie ever—a musical!

No one sang in the freezing morgue of our town’s Shop Rite. Ruined men with scarves noosed around their throats ran the butcher counter, sighing as they ripped wax paper from huge spools. They never made eye contact, too busy watching the big clock at the wall, not time seeming to pass between the fish and the pork chops and the ground beef and the cold cuts. The women stocking the aisles wore fake lashes over black eyes. They lived out by the tracks and already looked ten years older than they could have been. Bluelipped from the temperature nobody could figure out how to control, they cocooned themselves under layers of snowflake sweaters. Their favorite thing to do was huddle in the employee lounge upstairs—an airless room boxed in with wood panelling—and chain smoke. They would do this until a manager wearing a ski mask came and found them, demanding they all get back to work.

Undertakers must go on vacation come October, because the weeds grew as high as the wild blades in the cemetery. Knotted vines climbed out of the soil to strangle the headstones. Maintaining his lead, Chauncey trudged uphill, keening now,

Darkest light/Unholy night/ Tangled frights/And no flight of sleep/Exhumed in the deep,

as the automatic sprinkler system came to life, arcing jets over the graves he crossed.

It had already happened by the time I knew it was over. Biking the long way home from the graveyard no-handed, I kept to the backstreets lined in piles of dead leaves, tearing into one heap after another, feet in the air, leaving a mess in my wake. Somewhere a fireplace blazed; its chimney smoke curled into my nostrils, releasing the after-burn image of Chauncey as he had climbed the final slant of the cemetery’s hill, his lips in a jagged smile that made me look away. I took a left onto Main Street to glide through the only traffic light, past the already-closed pizza place, the Five and Dime, the Italian deli, the bakery, the magic shop, the single screen movie theater I’d been fired from for refusing to cut my hair. His singing hushed when I turned my back on him, and it wasn’t until riding off on the dirt path into the woods, never looking back, that I heard the voices calling after me, his loudest of all. The spokes of my bike tires rattled over the train tracks, where the No Name Bar’s window held the shadows of arms wrestling under wreaths of smoke. In my fogged head, I fast-forwarded myself home, where I would enter through the kitchen and climb the stairs to my room. Behind me I would close the door that always screeched from its unoiled hinge. This sound would jerk my father awake downstairs in front of the television, where he would reach for the remote control, pressing buttons. My mother, an insomniac, propped up in bed with a scotch in one hand and a book in the other, would hear the noise and spill her drink over the sheets, then pick up the empty glass, holding it to an ear. The wind was all I could hear now and the only thing left to feel as it flailed my hair into a whirlwind of strands whipping my chin and cheekbones. I pedalled the home stretch to my driveway and ascended to the side of the house, dumping the bike on top of the coiled garden hose.