The back door of the Lemans was pushed open. Weed climbed in and protectively set the knapsack and bag of paints in his lap as he stared at the back of Smoke’s head. Divinity was in the front seat, against Smoke’s shoulder.
‘I guess the others aren’t coming,’ Weed said, doing his best to keep his voice steady.
‘Don’t need ’em,’ Smoke said.
‘How come you’re not driving your own car?’ Weed asked as his terror swelled like a wave about to crash.
‘Because I don’t want my own car parked out where someone might find it,’ Smoke said.
‘Dog don’t care if someone sees his car?” Weed asked.
‘Don’t matter if he cares,’ Smoke said coldly. ‘And you can shut the fuck up, retard. When it comes to questions, I do the asking. You got that straight?’
Divinity laughed and stuck her tongue in Smoke’s ear.
‘Yes,’ Weed barely said as tears flooded his eyes and he wiped them away so fast they didn’t have time to go anywhere.
He said not another word as Smoke headed downtown and through the row houses of Oregon Hills where they left the car in a small park on the river. The cemetery fence was thick with ivy and about ten feet high. Weed saw no easy way to climb it, but Smoke did. Weed had never heard of a business advertising on a cemetery fence, but apparently Victory Rug Cleaning thought the idea was a good one. Its large metal sign was fastened to the fence at the intersection of South Cherry and Spring Street.
Smoke showed Weed and Divinity how simple it was to grip the edges of the sign and boost themselves up far enough to grab the thick overhanging branch of an ancient oak tree on the other side of the fence. In no time, the three of them had dropped to the ground and were inside the dark, silent cemetery. To Weed it was a ghost city with narrow lanes winding everywhere and headstones and spooky monuments as far as he could see. It suddenly occurred to him that Smoke and Divinity might think it was funny to leave him here.
Maybe that was their real plan. It caused shivers right up his bones and through his teeth. Weed had heard stories of pimps punishing hookers by tying them to trees inside graveyards and leaving them overnight. Some of the ladies lost their minds. Some died when their hearts attacked and beat themselves to death, trying to get out. One hooker chewed her hand off to escape while another committed suicide by holding her breath. Weed willed his teeth not to chatter. He knew he could not show fear.
‘Cool,’ he said, looking around. ‘Man, I could paint in here for weeks.’
He and Divinity were following Smoke, who seemed to know where he was going.
‘You know, all these gravestones, like clean canvases and sketching paper. Ummm um. I could paint my ass off in here,’ Weed went on. ‘After the statue, can I do a few more?’
‘Shut up,’ Smoke told him.
Weed got quiet. It felt like little bugs were crawling on him, and he was sweating and cold at the same time. He wondered how many dead people were in here. More than he could count, that was for sure, especially since Weed usually got an F in math. It amazed him how many of them were PAXes. No one in his school was a PAX, although there were quite a few Paxtons, and one Paxinos who had moved down from New York and thought he was the only one who knew how to talk.
But it was the dead rich people who bothered Weed most, all of them inside little marble houses with all kinds of carvings and names chiseled above huge heavy metal doors. There were windows, too, and the thought of looking through them raised every hair on Weed’s body. Images jumped in his mind and started messing with him bad. A moldy face with sunken eyes and green rotting hands held a white Bible and any minute was going to turn to a page with a curse on it saying Weed was going to hell. A grinning skeleton in a long satin dress, bony hands folded around a dried-up rose, was about to sit up and fly after him, rattling and rustling.