Elephant Graveyard: By Tasha Hickman

Elephant Graveyard

            “It’s coming isn’t it?” Grey asked.

            “It’s coming.” Toliver whispered. “It’s the old adage to a more literal term.” He continued as Grey turned to face him.

            “Meaning what?”

            “Let the dead bury the dead.” Toliver spat a wad of dry saliva from his crusting, peeling lips. It was a thick sludge, tinged a burnt-orange. Grey began scratching his arm as he casually watched Tolivers freshly spat slime crawl itself down the slope, stretching thinner as it went. Grey flinched as he accidentally popped one of his sores with his nail. It spewed a small ooze of brown.

“Damn it. I didn’t have these last week.”

            “They say the more of those you rupture, the faster you kick the bucket, dumb ass. You probably got it from someone else here at the Elephant Graveyard.”

Yes thought Grey. This designated camp for diseased, this place of the undesirable living: a place to send those who are a canker to the world and must be cut out. Grey rubbed off the puss and continued to stare into the distance with Toliver.

Then he saw it, coming just around the corner of the mountain as it did before when they first arrived. It was a beastly looking vehicle with red stripes down the side. The metal around the wheel roared and echoed up the mountainside toward them in the distance. It had finally come: a bus full of more infected, more of those who are about to pass away and by law must be disposed of in a safe manner. After all of the posters, the voice spots, and the television inspirational announcements, no cure was found. It was determined by some that this new disease was act of God and therefore would not have a cure. The one God for every member of the encampment was the bus trailing its dust toward the Elephant Graveyard: augural, and full of vengeance.

“How many do you think?” Grey said aloud. Toliver spat again at the ground. “It was a civil war when our bus got here. We had a big group then, full bus. Remember? You think those guys on that there bus even understand? I know I didn’t.”

Toliver blinked and then looked at the ground, wringing his hands in compulsion then placing them to his side. Grey glanced down the hillside behind him to the main camp. A large cement platform covered by an open metal roof sat lamely over the red rocks.  North of it were the remnants of an enclosed brick and mortar building with a long chimney prodding at the sky.

“I said do you remem--.”

“Yeah I heard you. It’s a sick joke it is.” Toliver winced at the memory.

“I’d never seen anything like it. It’s funny, you hear about murders on the news all the time, but you’ll never see a dead body unless it’s in a mortuary laid down with respect. I can’t believe I didn’t get hurt or worse. If you hadn’t have killed that kid who’d come at me from behind I would have been firewood in the chimney building long ago. What’s odd is that building reminds me of an abandoned factory I’d drive by on my way to Indianapolis.”

Toliver stayed quiet. His brow creased into a stern look. Grey brushed off Toliver, ignoring him and continued.

“Back home in Indiana, my little girl and I loved to go visit the city. Her favorite place to eat was always this terrible diner with the fattiest burgers you’d ever eat on the East Coast: “Stake and Shake.”

 The chili cheese fries had a pool of grease that I swore would be eating through the cardboard container to the table by the time we finished them. Then right after we’d finished, I’d walk off the heartburn by the White River that flowed through the center of town. The best was at night in the summers, around this time of year actually. She and I would sit on the porch tasting the humid air, listening to the creaking of the swing. Her feet would dangle over the edge of the seat, and I’d rock us forward and backward. Fireflies would drift off in the distance of the fields and she’d call them ‘the special summer snow’ because I guess it reminded her of glowing blinking snowflakes. Who really can explain the logic of a kid huh? I sure do miss her.”

Toliver sat for a second, then reared his head back laughing, his lips chopped and spiked from dried cracked skin on them. Grey was surprised by his reaction, but even he had to admit what he just said sounded pretty absurd and personal.

“Tasting the humid air…” Toliver said in a mocking deep voice to mimic Grey’s. Grey felt sheepish and picked up a rock half the size of his palm and began to rub the smooth surface with his thumb and forefinger. Toliver inhaled a lasting breath, letting it go.

“Shut up.” Grey said forcefully.

“You’re thinking of home? This is home now. Fifty, that’s the magic number. That’s as many beds as we got, how much rations per day, and there’s no sharing. You’d kill me if you’d thought I was better off dead before that bus gets here and starts blood bath part deux.

Although,  I could kill you first. I’d finally get that bunk farther from the open side so I’d avoid all that desert rain.” Toliver gave a dark sarcastic smile. “I know that I’m too far along in this disease to really put up much of a fight. The bus will come and I’ll take up room in the incinerator this time around. Hell, I think it’s time I just put myself first in line.” Toliver coughed.

Grey was not amused by this speech and remained focused on the stone in his palm. Toliver continued to speak picking up hurried contempt in his voice.

“You know what we are to the rest of the world now? Walking dead is too cliché a phrase to use, but in this instance admit it, it’s a perfect fit. Your daughter, you really think she’ll take you back and still love you for the diseased misery that you are right now?”

Toliver’s smile was eerie and full of gloom. He looked toward the direction of the dirt road and the small metal bus that was slowly and subtly growing bigger.

“You don’t ever think about home?”

“No Grey. I can’t think about home.” Toliver said with curt finality, looking to his hands and rubbing them in a nervous rhythm looking away from the road to the sky. Moments passed.

“I’m someone who can’t let go of the past. I still somehow feel like I’ve got a future ahead of me. You seem to approach this Elephant Graveyard like it is duty, destiny, or set path you are doomed to go down so you do it with dignity. I admire you for it. You’ve always been the strong one. Even when our bus got here I couldn’t kill for my life, so you killed for the both of us.” Grey said in reverie.

“Some good it did us!” Toliver burst out yelling throwing a fist full of sand in front of him. Grey’s expression turned into alarm as he scooted a few inches away from Toliver.

“I’m flattered Grey, but I don’t know what’s so dignified to you. I hate myself.” Toliver turned his haggard body and dry cracked lips toward Grey revealing hardship, and exhaustion in his eyes. Toliver turned away again wrapping his arms around his torso tightly, slowly rocking himself. His voice was no longer strong and decisive but that of feeble dismay. “I have never done anything like that before. Every part of my human heart told me to let go of his neck. He squirmed and scratched at me and I held fast pressing him into the dust.” Toliver took a shuddered breath. “The worst was when he’d tried calling out.” Toliver stopped rocking. Taking out his hands once more, he stared at his filthy skin, studying it, rubbing his fingers together rigorously as if he wanted to scrub the feeling out of them. “I could sense his Adam’s apple gurgling and shifting under my palms. When he finally went limp, the knuckles on my hands were white. Blood squeezed out of my fists ringed around his larynx. I remember how cold my fingers felt until I let him go, then all the blood circulated back to them. I never forgot that feeling.”

Grey’s hand had enclosed around his rock, the curves digging into his skin as he listened intently to Toliver’s confession. Never had he seen Tolivers confidence as decayed, and weak as he now seemed. And for the first time, Grey stared at Tolivers hands too.

“Really take a long look at this broken man you’ve clung to in this place. Describe to me what you see?” Toliver’s voice was soft and pleading, his head bent in shame.

Grey looked Toliver over. His skin was tan, but lacked a healthy brown look, it was thin and peeled in spots, balding him down to almost raw-meat-red from the sun and open sores. His clothes were the same ones he wore when he and Grey first arrived here on the bus together, all of which no longer resembled the colors they once were. His face was sunken and gaunt with shadows from the noonday sun above them. Toliver shook his head and placed his hands over his eyes, his body shaking. As he stifled his tears with audible sniffing, he spat once more, brownish-orange sludge dripping to the ground.

“Alone, sick, and killer. It’s all that I am now until I die. So I welcome death.”

Grey craned his neck to see where the bus was on its path, it was closer now. So much so he began to see the outline of passengers through the window. Grey felt beads of sweat lightly resting on his sallow skin, he wiped them away looking up to the sky. Digging his heels into the sand, Gray pushed himself up off the ground. Looking down into his hand, he rubbed the stone one more time with his thumb before he cocked his arm back and threw the stone as far as it would fly into the distance.

“We’re tired and we’re sick, but I won’t let you die alone. I understand the end comes for both of us as soon as that bus gets here,” Grey turned around walking up to Toliver, crouching eye level with him. “Maybe it will be quick, maybe it will hurt, maybe we’ll find heaven, and maybe we’ll just disappear. The point is we won’t be here anymore.” He grabbed both of Tolivers shoulders, shaking him into attention to look him in the eye. Toliver had a glassed washed look ready for tears to spill over his jutting cheekbones caked in dirt.

 “I love my daughter, but a thought just occurred to me: she remembers me the way I was. Same as I remember her, not who I am now, and that’s everything to me.” Grey’s voice was beginning to crack in sadness. Toliver nodded his head and started to take heaving breaths as free tears flowed from the corner of his eyes. Grey began to quietly cry with him. Toliver grabbed Grey’s shirt collar pulling him in, wrapping his arms around Grey’s neck and back beginning to sob aloud as he embraced him.

“They’ll remember us the way we were. Not now. Not now.” Toliver panted in reverence.

“No.” Grey’s response muffled into the shoulder of Tolivers shirt.

“They won’t see me as a murderer, a leper when I’m gone?” He whimpered.

“No. They will remember you as a father, husband, son, and brother.”

“Will I be forgiven?” Toliver whispered.

They let go of one another wiping their noses and regaining their composure. The desert wind cascaded around them from the sandy mountainside whistling in their ears.

“You’re a good man Grey.” Toliver spoke quietly.

“You too.”

They held hands bowing their heads in prayer. The metal bus growled as it pulled up to the gate below the two men sitting on the hill. The gate creaked and shuddered open into life as the bus rolled in.