“Mary Groan Bones”

by Josh Hancock

It was the kind of winter night that made you forget you were a teenager. As Travis sped through the canyon the dark unfolded before us like enormous bat wings. It was an invitation not of horror but of promise; we were young and stupid and thought we could live forever, and that night I suppose we did. For a time.

Earlier that day, my father, job classifieds spread open at his sandaled feet, asked me if I would clean out the shed. Pop wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict or a gambler; he wasn’t abusive or overly demanding or cruel. He was simply a middle-aged widower looking for a job in computer sales. When the old man asked me for a favor, usually with a sad-sack grin that made you feel a bit ashamed for being young, I did it.

It was a Saturday, and Travis and I spent the afternoon tossing old cooking magazines, newspapers and empty water jugs into the recycling bin. These were the final remnants of my mother, dead from cancer a year ago, a woman who hoarded everything but her intellect; a woman whose advice was never sought but always heeded; my mother, who saved every stick figure I drew as a child, every Christmas ornament, every spooky decoration since the day I donned my first makeshift Halloween costume. As Travis and I separated recyclables from non-recyclables, there it was, glued within the yellowed pages of a family scrapbook: a photograph, my first real Halloween, a seven-year-old Dracula with a cheap black cape, white plastic fangs and an imploded “blood” capsule smeared across his chin.

“Load it up,” my father said, indicating the boxes of tin stars, rubber bats, cotton spider webs, Christmas stockings, electric lights, and all the other holiday minutiae my mother had accumulated over the years. “Take it to the city dump.”

Travis, my best friend since grade school, held up a plastic skeleton about five feet tall, its blackened grin spotted with dead moss, long wisps of gray hair affixed to a yellowish, rotted skull. We had always called her “Mary Groan Bones,” a name my mother had conjured up from who knows where. A permanent fixture in our front yard every Halloween, Mary Groan Bones had adjustable fingers, hollow black sockets for eyes, and a ribcage marked with crisscrossed scars. She even had breasts—shriveled, nipple-free lumps of plastic covered by sheer white “ghost” cloth.

“What about old Mary?” Travis asked.

My father’s eyes shifted nervously. “Get rid of her,” he said before heading back inside the house.

“Make love to me, Eric,” Travis sang in an eerie, bird-like voice, lunging in my direction with skeleton arms and legs. “It’s been so long, and I’ve been so lonely.”

“Fuck off, perv.” I slapped him away, inadvertently popping the skeleton’s right arm out of its socket. As I picked up her arm and handed it to Travis, I felt a sudden surging underneath the cold plastic, like fluid rushing through veins.

“God, that thing is disgusting,” I said.

“Now you’ve done it. All I wanted was your bone, and I’ve gone and lost one of my own!”

We laughed the way teenagers do—limbs and jowls shaking spasmodically—and we kept laughing as we emptied the shed into the back of the family pickup. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the city dump, hauling and hurling garbage and memories and family history, all the while keeping the sleeves of our flannel shirts firmly planted against our noses. The dump reeked like no place on earth.

“What are we going to do with her?”

Los Angeles dusk. We were driving home, Travis eagerly behind the wheel because he could never afford a car of his own. I sat in the passenger seat, Mary Groan Bones propped up on my lap like some ghoulish stripper. A warm breeze caught my hair, but along with it came the promise of cold; it was December, a few days before Christmas, and I could taste the winter on my tongue.

“We could dump her at a bus stop,” I suggested.

“Or at church,” Travis said. “Right on the front steps for the nuns to find.”

“How about at that construction site on Newell? Where they’re building that new high rise? It will look like she’s rising from the grave in some sort of hippie protest.”

“I didn’t know Mary was a hippie,” Travis said.

“She’s not, but—”

Just then Mary’s cold fingers clasped around my arm.

“Hey, knock it off!” I shouted at Travis.

He burst out laughing. “I’m telling you, man. That crazy bitch has a crush on you.”

At the time I believed I kept Mary Groan Bones as nothing more than an opportunity to pull some kind of stupid prank. Travis and I would be graduating soon and leaving for college—if all went according to plan, he to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and me to UCLA—and I suppose I was feeling nostalgic for the laconic, irresponsible days of our childhood. Though I never admitted this to him, I was terrified that one day we would no longer be friends; not due to a betrayal or an act of jealousy or any of the other things that tear people apart, but simply to the passing of time.

But now I realize I was only half right. If I could explain what happened that night to Travis, or even to my father, then maybe I could learn to look out the window again. Or inside my closet. Or underneath the bed.

But among men, fear is a shared silence. I haven’t spoken to Travis since the morning he boarded a plane for Colorado, three years ago.

*    *    *

We spent the rest of the night driving around the city, watching the skyline change color, the she-boys strutting along Hollywood Boulevard, and the young men hatching from tattoo shops with freshly-inked shoulders and arms. We dangled Mary Groan Bones out the window of the pickup, frightening old ladies, pissing off old men, and making at least one little girl scream. At one point we stopped for burgers and Cokes. It was the kind of night in which the future seems incalculable and false; the present burns through your veins like electricity, and nothing matters except this moment. On the radio Springsteen sang about Billy and Diamond Jackie and I felt my youth fading, dying, like spun sugar in my hand.

And so, refusing to surrender, I put my head out the window and screamed like a banshee for all of Hollywood.

*     *     *

“Put her underneath those stones.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah, but keep her limbs sticking out so that it looks real.”

The construction site was dark. Giggling like children, we adjusted plastic joints and hips and fingers to emulate the living dead from our favorite horror movies. There was a musty, pungent odor emanating from Mary that had not been there before, but I attributed this to our trip to the city dump.

We covered half of her body with stones and gravel, making sure to keep her gaunt face, shattered pelvis and shrunken tits exposed. We twisted her hands into an upright position, then curled her fingers to mimic a digging motion. In the pale light of the full moon Mary looked like a real corpse, her teeth frozen in permanent grimace, the white “ghost” cloth rustling against the stones. I shuddered as I studied our handiwork and told myself it was only the cold.

“Why did you kill me, Eric?” Travis sang in that same creepy, bird-like voice. “All I wanted to do was love you and you killed me, you slashed my throat with your father’s razor—”

“You’re demented.”

“But I’ve come back for you, lover-boy. I’ve come back to take what’s mine!”

Some of the stones fell away then, exposing one of Mary’s shattered knees. From somewhere out in the dark a cat mewled and hissed.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Kiss your girlfriend goodbye first.”

He fell on me then and we began one of our customary punching matches, laughing hysterically and trying to bruise the hell out of each other. We laughed until our stomachs hurt, until our heads grew dizzy with laughter. Then we raced back to the car.

The drive home was more solemn than I expected. Travis drove without his usual fervor, stopping dutifully at yellow lights and obeying traffic signs. The radio played soft Todd Rundgren. I wasn’t sure why, but I began to tell Travis about the morning my mother died; not in a hospital but in the bedroom she shared with my father; not with a gasp of bloodied breath like in the movies, but in her sleep, the way we hoped she would go. I spoke of my guilt over having hurt her so many times with my careless words and actions, and of my inability to look my father in the eye, for fear that I might recognize myself. I told him I was scared to die, that sometimes when I was in bed alone at night I thought about my death and cried. I talked about a lot of things on the drive home that night, and Travis just listened, which made him my best friend all over again.

“I think I’ll walk home tonight,” Travis said as we neared my house.

“Are you sure? Old Mary could be out there somewhere, waiting for you.”

Travis smiled, but neither of us laughed. The car seemed to float silently along the street. For a moment I thought I heard the rustling of palm leaves from high above the canyons, but it was probably just the wind.

“When we go off to college,” Travis said as he turned onto my street, “do you think we’ll still have nights like tonight?”

“You mean with different people?”

“Yeah.”

“You fucking better not,” I said.

We stopped outside my house and exited the car. The night had grown colder, threatening rain, and the two of us hiked up the collars of our sweatshirts to warm our goose-pimpled throats.

“See you tomorrow,” I’m sure one of us said.

“Yep. See you.”

I watched Travis walk down through the canyons, hands buried deep in his pockets, his muscular frame sheathed in darkness. Then I bounded up the front steps of my house and hurried inside where it was warm.

*     *     *

My father was asleep on the couch in the living room. I removed the crinkled newspaper pages from around his feet and covered him with a blanket we kept draped over one of the armrests. And then I did something I could not remember doing for a long time. I kissed the old man goodnight.

In the bathroom I brushed my teeth and stripped down to my boxer shorts. I thought about college in the fall and decided that I might venture outside of Los Angeles. There were so many places that I had never been and things I had never seen. I was seventeen years old and that was good.

I walked into my room and felt my heart rise up in my throat.

Mary Groan Bones was sitting upright in my bed, her perverse grin stretched wide across her face. The white “ghost” cloth was ripped open, hideous breasts exposed, her gutted ribcage spilling over with stones and gravel. A maggot pulsed its way through one cavernous eye socket. The bed sheets, covered in moss and dirt, reeked of rotted earth.

 My scream was silent, frozen, like hands on a broken clock. When one emaciated finger began to lift in my direction, I fainted.

*     *     *

I’ve buried Mary seven times since that night. But she always comes back, each time more decomposed than the last.

My father has given up on me ever attending college—and I think I have, too. Just after Christmas that year, he landed a sales position at a large software company. I don’t see him much anymore. I miss him.

I still think about my death when I lay in bed at night, but I force myself not to cry.

Instead I wait, riding out the last of my youth, listening once again for her footsteps in the hall.