A Small Gray Dot

I’d been prepared to use a shovel but was relieved when I learned I wouldn’t have to. They gave me a two-day crash course in the use of a backhoe and the day before, I’d gotten the job done and laid my folks and Zoni into their final resting places. I didn’t have enough for headstones but I planned on getting them as soon as I could.

The head of the grave digging company heard how well I handled the backhoe and how precisely I dug the graves, and asked to meet me. He said there was a huge demand for gravediggers and offered me a job. Having gotten no other offers, I took it. It would pay the rent, and for things like power and food, which were quickly getting damned expensive.

I lied to Will. “I’m doing deliveries. Pay is okay.” I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. When he got back would be soon enough for him to know.

“Great! Okay, I’ll call you when we get to Miami. Man! I sure wish I had your knack for getting people to like you right off. Heh, I know that’s how you got the job. Finding somebody who’ll let you use their phone is the pits! What we need now is all those phone booths the old folk say used to be everywhere.”

He had a point. Maybe the phone companies would eventually install some phone booths now that cellphone service was extinct though I doubted it. And he was right about folk tending to take a liking to me. The funeral home director had, and so did the man at the grave digging company who offered me the job. It was a family joke that I would never go hungry because somebody would always want to feed me.

He hung up and it was a week before I heard from him again. He probably didn’t call any sooner because he was afraid I’d nag him again to come home. Admittedly, my unease about him leaving had grown but I knew he wasn’t going to listen, so I didn’t waste my breath.

“We’re in Miami and we’re booked on a ship to Jamaica. It was hard getting tickets but we finally scored. We’ll be in Jamaica in a week. Boy, things are kinda messed up here. The National Guard is all over the place looking for a gang or something. We’re on our way to get something to eat. I’ll try to call you back before we sail but don’t get upset if you don’t hear from me. Finding a phone to use here is worse than it was in Georgia. If there’s no way to reach you from the ship, I’ll call you when we get to Jamaica.”

He didn’t call back. I could only hope he’d gotten aboard the ship and there was no way to make a call from there. But two weeks later when there still was no word from him, my boss allowed me to take a leave from digging graves, and I went looking for him.

He never made it to Jamaica.

I found him in a morgue in Miami. I looked down at my young cousin lying on that slab and I would’ve cried but I had no tears. He turned eighteen in April and had just graduated from high school. He was to have begun his college freshman year in the fall.

That crazed rage that hit me on the first day of the Event, rose in my chest again. If it hadn’t been for that… thing… he’d still be alive. I found that I was angry with him for leaving, but, most of all, I was angry with myself for not trying harder to get him to stay, or to have at least gone with him.

I trembled as I fought to control my fury. It would only serve to get me into trouble if I didn’t and I needed to know what happened to him. I also needed to find Tremaine.

The morgue gave me Will’s belongings, which included his identification, his car keys, and the money belt he’d been wearing which, surprisingly, still contained cash: five thousand dollars. I was astonished at the amount as I hadn’t known he had that much.

I got the story from the police. He was waiting to board the ship when one of those gangs for which the Guard was searching managed to slip past them. These were people that fell over the edge and stayed there and they used violence as a means of expression. They didn’t simply beat folk, either. They graduated from clubs and bats to assault rifles.

Will and Tremaine weren’t the only casualties from that day. The morgue was full of victims of that bunch. They mowed down a whole line of people waiting to board the ship. The Guard made sure that particular group wouldn’t be killing anybody else but it wouldn’t help my cousin.

Tremaine wasn’t in that morgue so I checked the others and his name wasn’t coming up anywhere. No one had a record of him but I kept looking. I checked every John Doe I could find at the morgues and when that didn’t pan out, I checked the hospitals.

It took two weeks but I found him in a hospital in West Miami. The reason it took so long to find him was that his passport was missing – the police said probably stolen – and he had no driver’s license so he didn’t have any identification on him and was in a coma when brought in. He came out of it after a week but was unable to remember his name or much of anything else.