It’s gotten harder — it’s gotten a LOT harder, and I’ll tell you why. Well, okay, I guess I should say first that it’s a different world from when I started out. Back in the day, nobody thought hitchhiking was good clean hayride-with-the-Osmonds fun or anything, but it wasn’t automatically asking to get killed and dumped in the high weeds, not the way everyone thinks of it now. I mean, it could be unsafe, but people still did it. Then the sixties come along, and the whole America-loses-its-innocence thing is happening anyway with the sexual revolution and the war and whatnot, plus stories start going around about hippies pulling knives to get drug money and then you’ve got Walter Cronkite on the news every night telling Mr. and Mrs. America not to stop for anyone or Charles Manson’s crazy beard will eat their entrails, and on top of that, a lot of those girls trying to get out to northern California around that time would run into the “tell Daddy all about it, Sister Golden Hair” traveling-salesman creepazoids with guns in the glove compartment who would talk about their kids back home and then rape the girls fifteen minutes later…I guess that kind of shit always went on to some degree, but not as much. We didn’t hear about it as much, anyway, pre-Eisenhower. So anyway, basically, a few fuck-ups ruined it for everyone, and around that time you started to see that people wouldn’t stop as much.

But we girls could still get a pick-up, usually. It took longer, but if you looked appropriately feeble and non-threatening and you didn’t have a guy with you, no problem. I never carry a bag, I don’t have any pockets that look like I might be hiding a gun, and I look all waify and pathetic, because that’s my whole thing, you know — rain-bedraggled, biiiiig saaaaad eyes, oh woe is blah blah blah. So I didn’t have any trouble for a while, really, but now it’s a different thing. People don’t trust each other anymore? People got desensitized by horror movies? The internet? It’s not the same as before, not even close. A pick-up a week is a good week, these days, and if the moon’s not out, forget it. I might as well stay in and play poker with the Civil War guys. It beats clambering into an SUV in this dress, I’ll tell you that much. You ever try to get into one of those behemoths in formalwear?

But even that’s better than walking the shoulder for nine hours with nothing going on. I went six weeks without a pick-up once. Six weeks. That sucked. It was late fall of — ’83, maybe? I don’t remember the year exactly, but I know it was late fall, because the kind of guy that picks me up is the kind of guy that plays football and bites his nails and drinks a lot of milk, and he goes to the Harvest Dance with a second-string cheerleader or something, and he can’t talk to her the whole night because he’s paralyzed with fear, and basically, like, asking her to go with him in the first place was pretty much the extent of his ability to communicate with the opposite sex, so it’s incredibly awkward — he doesn’t say anything in the car, he doesn’t say anything at the dance, the cheerleader tries a few times to talk to him and then she’s like, fine, he doesn’t like me, I don’t know why he asked me to this stupid goddamn dance then for God’s sake but I can take a hint, okay, asshole, and she winds up out in the parking lot drinking crappy bourbon with her friends, and she goes off home with them while he’s inside talking about the game against Eastern with his friends on the team, and then when he finds out she ditched him, he has to pretend he either slept with her already or he doesn’t give a shit, or both, and off he goes home all muttering to himself that he’s an idiot, and that’s when he sees me. Nice guy, alone in the car, his mom would hit him with her shoe if she found out he didn’t stop to help a girl by herself — that’s how it’s done. That year, nothing. Nothing, nobody, for six weeks. Halloween, nobody, first frost, nobody — I actually went to the library to see if the papers had anything about every high school kid in the city getting grounded or something. That was a long six weeks.

And when there is work, it’s — well, it’s work. You know. I’m cold most of the time, and it’s dull, and I get blisters from the shoes. I had a rough time at first, too, kind of, because I didn’t really get what had happened, you know, right after. No broken bones or blood or anything — I felt fine, and I saw the totaled car and the guy who picked me up is all rocking himself in the back of the ambulance, but I just didn’t put it together for a while. Like, for years. I know, right? I’d keep trying to go home and winding up back in the same place, and God, my poor parents with these freaked-out guys ringing the doorbell at all hours of the night — I felt so bad about putting them through that, you know, once I did figure it out. Which…that was in ’39. Spring of ’39. I’d tried to get home again and I wound up back in the cemetery like always, and I was walking past the Bricker crypt by the entrance gates when I saw this girl I used to know in school, and she was there with some guy — her boyfriend, I guess — and I was like, weird, what’s she doing here, in a cemetery in the middle of the night, and then I was like, wait, now that I think about it, what am I doing here, in a cemetery in the middle of the night? And then it all sort of came over me, like, oh. Ohhh.

But then it got easier, because I knew the deal. When I didn’t know the deal, and I just really really desperately wanted to get back to the house and I couldn’t get there no matter what I did, it was really upsetting, but then, once I knew…don’t get me wrong, that’s not a moment I want to relive. As it were. Ha ha. But for most of us, you find out you died, you have the giant freak-out, and after that’s over, you just…get on with it. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. You just think to yourself, well, I died, I figured out I died, I cried hysterically about dying, crying hysterically didn’t really do anything because here I am, still dead — now what? What do I do next? How do I fill the time? Because you can follow what the stories say about finding peace at last, you know, once you know about what you are. You can let the world let go of you. I remember that night, after I figured it out finally, I walked around the cemetery until the sun came up, looking for…well, looking around. Everything seemed different, but everything seemed pretty much the same, too, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I just kind of wandered around and felt sorry for myself, and then when the sun came up, as it came up over the horizon that last little bit, it turned a huge burning white that flashed out everything else around, and I happened to turn around to face into it and I remember thinking, wow, what a cliché. Really. And I could have walked towards it and out of the world, but towards what? Into what? It’s not like I gave it that much thought, really, or had a whole, I don’t know, debate with myself, like, what if eternal rest is unimaginably wonderful, versus what if it’s really horribly boring and then I can’t leave — I just put my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun, and that was kind of that. Who knows. We all have our theories on how these things work, but I don’t know that much more about it than you do. Which is a rip-off, definitely, but anyway.

So, yeah. I guess you could say I decided to stay in the world. Not that I see that much of the world, really — I go out, I walk along the shoulder, I get picked up or I don’t, I wind up back at the cemetery. My parents died, both of them, back in ’65, so now the guys get routed straight to my gravestone instead of going to their house first, but other than that, the work itself, it’s the same. Although they’ve built up the area a lot since I first started, actually. Like, it used to be all woods on either side of the cemetery, and to get out to the road, I’d have to cut through the trees. The edge of the cemetery kind of trailed off into the woods back there, off the gravel path where all those typhus graves were that never got mowed, and I’d follow the path back past the caretaker’s cottage before wading into the tall grass, and man, with those old mossy stones and the low-hanging trees — on cloudy nights when I couldn’t see anything and I’d be barking my shins left and right, it used to creep me out like you wouldn’t believe back there. Seriously. I know. My own, like, existence is for the purpose of creeping other people out, and there I am stumbling around like a blind person, giving myself a little pep talk every time I hear a little rustle in the distance. Ridiculous. But, you know, one of the Dominski twins says she saw Black Shuck out by the typhus graves in ’48, which I don’t know if I believe, because it’s one of the Dominski twins, so, you know. The Dominski twins say a lot of things. And I don’t want to be rude or whatever, because the Dominski twins still haven’t figured it out, if you know what I mean, and it’s not like it’s not really sad to see them coming and going with that pathetic little picnic basket every night, because it is. I mean, they died in the fifties. The eighteen-fifties. And sure, we all have stories. I’ve seen a lot of things in those woods that nobody’s probably going to believe myself, like that time I saw that shoe on fire with nobody around — who’s going to believe that? I couldn’t believe that. Who sets a shoe on fire? Just one shoe? And then…hops off? What is that? That’s bizarre, right? But it’s not like I told the story five thousand times, either, like, “I saw Black Shuck back there, you know, back in ’48,” like, yes, Lizzie, we know, you’ve told us five thousand times. Go cut the crusts off a cucumber sandwich or something.

God. Okay, sorry — what was I saying?

Right. Well, we all have stories. Work stories, like anyone — things that happen, funny shit we saw — and there’s a lot of downtime, so you just sit around and shoot the shit about what went on last night, Hugh Hammersley’s latest run-in with those ladies from the church, that kind of thing. Or you walk around and check out the new stones, whatever. It’s not bad. It’s not lonely, at least — no lonelier than life, that’s for sure. I don’t think so, anyway. Now, the guys that pick me up? Lonely. And it’s the kind of lonely that you get from being around other people all the time that you essentially…like, you pretty much hate them, but these are your people, so you sort of don’t even realize that you hate them. It’s more that you feel like you’re all alone in the world when they’re around. It’s like — okay, I don’t hate the Dominski twins, they just kind of bug me because they seriously never shut up, but if I’d grown up surrounded by endless sets of Dominski twins…es? You know? And couldn’t really get away from them, because it would never occur to me to get away from them? That kind of lonely. And when these guys pick me up, and they ask me what happened, where’s my car, where should they drop me, and then they just start talking themselves, and they talk and talk, and there’s this relief in their voices, that their voices actually…work. And I just sit there and don’t really say anything, because that’s how it’s done, and they talk — just to talk, they don’t really talk about anything in particular — and then we pass the cemetery and I disappear, and I never know what happens to them after that. It’s harsh, actually, if you think about it. I mean, the things they tell me sometimes — I’ve had guys come out to me, things like that, and then I vanish on them, and I guess I’m just one more thing about them that nobody knows. And you have to wonder, how many other people go through their lives like that, just — invisible like that? I mean, the kind of people that don’t see me because they can’t for whatever reason. Women, for example. It’s a different time now, like I said before, but when I was growing up, women had to be — you had to have your own world in your head, that nobody ever knew except you, with only you in it. And at the same time you had to live in the world where everyone else lived. But after it’s over, it’s — the world is just the world. You have a routine, you come and go, and the worst thing that could happen, it already happened. You already died. You already disappeared.

I should get going, probably. It’s getting dark, and I don’t want to be here when those Goth kids show up. And that’s another thing that’s changed, by the way — excuse me, but since when is it a Goth thing to light a bunch of firecrackers? Isn’t part of their whole shtick that light is their enemy? So…what’s with the sparklers? No, for real. I know it’s kind of absurd to say you miss the old days when you basically are the old days, and it’s not like I was acquainted with Joy Division during my own lifetime, obviously, but excuse me. It’s a cemetery. You want to mope around and read Poe aloud to each other using inside voices, that’s fine, but I know it’s not a Goth thing to drink forties.

God, I sound like an old lady.

My name is Mary Charles McCormack, known as “Resurrection Mary.” I died in a car accident May 16, 1936.

April 21, 2003

Share!