Marvin Shackelford
Playing
Rose and Jonathon are playing hide-and-seek with their friends in the twilit cemetery across the road from the church. The adults are still praying on a Wednesday night, and the youth pastor and his wife have turned the children loose among the gravestones. Rose is hiding; Jonathon is seeking. She twists and turns through rows of dead men and their dead wives and sometimes dead children and squeezes through the bars around a mausoleum with HALIFAX etched across its busted door. Everyone knows about this place—they’re just not supposed to go inside. She sits on the slab at its center, father Francis and mother Pearl, right at their feet. It’s the perfect hiding place. Out in the growing darkness Jonathon has finished counting, and there’s the yipping and chatter of his finding their friends. Jonathon is quick and clever. Rose sits still and hears him pass, but it’s not until after another game or two, when their parents have been freed from their service, that they realize she’s been missed. Jonathon calls Rose’s name, his voice slender and clear, and then the youth pastor and his wife with their voices pitched for Sunday specials and Christmas programs, and then her parents and Jonathon’s parents and others, the smokers and coughers and the backsliders and repentant. They’re all looking. She lets them search, knowing she’ll have to give up soon, go out from the grave and greet them, go home. Rose waits as long as she can, grows warm as their voices hoarsen. She falls asleep, or pretends to fall asleep, and then she wakes up, or pretends to wake up.
Rose and Jonathon are playing Chutes and Ladders. They spin their way around the board, stumble up ladders and slide back down chutes, never seem to arrive where they’re trying to go. Jonathon’s brother has told him the game used to be Snakes and Ladders, it came from India with its deadly king cobras, elephants and jungles, and it was snakes that dragged you down the board and put you behind when you thought you were close to winning. He traces the sloping curve of a slide and imagines it pricking his finger, a fang. Ow. He dies. He flops on the floor and pops back up, impatient, but Rose works the spinner and moves her token along with seemingly endless patience. She’s happy to wait. This is where Jonathon feels certain he has her beat—he flicks the spinner as hard as he can, pounds his piece square by square, hurries. He will get there, and he’ll be there first. He is a conqueror, and if not for sheer bad luck he’d already have arrived. They race toward the top of the board, the hundredth square, and arrive together within reach of the end. One last chute to miss. Rose spins and Jonathon leans forward and hisses, a snake. He hisses at her and she giggles, flicks the spinner one more time.
Rose and Jonathon are playing red rover on the playground. Their teacher promised the class a free period if they finished their history projects early, posters about the Civil War. The boys call each other over and run toward the meatiest part of the line with abandon, chasing the excitement of powering through, claiming a captive. They rush like bulls, snort and paw and bellow. The girls call one another more cautiously, or occasionally the boy they find the cutest, and screech in terror as their opponent approaches. They grip hands as tightly as they can, but yield to such little force. Eventually they call Rose’s name, and she steps forward, full of butterflies. She looks along their line, the girls thin and nervous, the boys full of teeth. Jonathon waits at the center, smiling and confident. He’s been across a couple times, bowled through their line and claimed hostages, and never been broken. She runs straight toward him. She flies like an arrow, darts into his arm where he holds on to another boy, and they bend and wave back. She’s certain they won’t break. But then at the last moment their hands fling apart and Rose falls through, victorious. Her team stamps and shouts with joy, but she knows Jonathon let her through. She pulls him back across to her side. Rose slips her hand into his, slides over his palm so they can lock wrists. He holds so tightly it leaves an ache. She knows he’ll let no one through, nothing between them. He’ll only let go if it suits him.
Rose and Jonathon are playing Twister in the basement of a friend’s house. Upstairs a couple of cheerleaders have jimmied the lock on their parents’ liquor cabinet, and they down tequila from tiny paper cups. Jonathon knows where he wants his hands and feet to go, what they want to do, but he keeps landing a little off. He can’t quite feel his face, but he can feel all of Rose. She’s flushed and laughing, trying to hold onto a cup full of gin and 7 Up, nearly falling backwards to place her left hand on blue. Their legs are tangled somewhere between red and yellow, socked feet slipping, sliding on the mat. One more spin could do them in. Jonathon reaches around form blue, twists, and buries his face in Rose’s neck. You’re just all up in my business, aren’t you, she says, breath hot against his cheek, and she licks his ear. That ought to be illegal, he thinks, that can’t be in the rules, and then they collapse, falling in a heap of laughter and hard muscles and loose limbs, a surprise to each other, unsure who’s won.
Rose and Jonathon are playing at a game like Life. They motor around the track and learn the rules as they go. They take on jobs cooking fast-food burgers or working at the local pharmacy or delivering pizzas, pull down a paycheck and find themselves pregnant. They buy a house and take on loans. Jonathon gets on with the county works department, has an uncle who went to school with the commissioner and puts him on the inside track, and Rose stays home with the kids. She plants a garden, learns to prepare dishes with vegetables no one ever fed her as a child—spaghetti squash, zucchini, great phallic gourds that she scoops out and dices and bakes. There’s always something popping up, slowing them down: Jonathon has a fender bender and the other driver has no insurance. Their oldest needs braces from that precious little thumb they couldn’t convince him to quit sucking. The business they tried starting on the side, selling cookware to friends and family and neighbors, shapes up horribly pyramidal, and they’re lucky to escape its dusty weight at all. Around them, high-school buddies begin raking it in and moving on, growing up and blowing up to bigger, better things. Rose’s brother gets a scholarship to play football, and her sister marries rich. Rose and Jonathon keep their heads down, keep on through the sights and scenes toward that prize vaguely on the horizon.
Rose and Jonathon are playing Call of Duty. The kids are pissed, complaining at either end of the couch while their parents barrel through the Middle East and mow each other down. It’s their Xbox, and, school night notwithstanding, they should be the ones playing. Tough titty, Jonathon pronounces. Rose is growing annoyed. It’s a school night for her as well. She has an online class in half an hour, will have her nursing certificate in another six months, and she’s tired of serving as target practice. Time after time Jonathon appears from nowhere, lines her up, and kills her again. She stops to watch his half of the screen, recognizes the bombed-out buildings and fired cars, finally sees herself in his sights, but still can’t get out of the way. Rose tosses her controller on the floor, doesn’t argue when her son snatches it up. They play on, father no more merciful with his son than his wife. Jonathon’s become hard to track in the simplest and realest ways. He comes home late from work, always a little overtime or a quick drink with the boys, and when they go out on Friday or Saturday night for a drink or a bite to eat Rose finds herself surrounded by people she doesn’t recognize. He becomes a phantom in his family’s lives. Rose watches them play, the kids trading off and each taking a turn to die, Jonathon squaring the whole family up in the crosshairs, squeezing, laughing.
Rose and Jonathon are playing cards with one set of in-laws or the other. Canasta, four decks, men versus women around the kitchen table. Rose insists he’s cheating, passing signals. Jonathon just laughs. I’m not smart enough for that, he says. They eat snack mix and toss cards in a pile, Mother and Father asking all about school, work, life, what lies ahead. They remember those heady days, the struggle and reward. It’s so hard to get there, where you want to be. Mother serves coffee in fine white cups that rattle in their saucers. Father worked two jobs for years and years, and she ran a daycare out of the house. Never time to be unhappy or to get in trouble. Rose and Jonathon agree, there’s so much to do. Rose is having second thoughts about nursing school, is thinking about a four-year degree. English, writing, maybe history. It’s quite a swing from bedpans to Baudelaire, she joked with a woman in her comp class, but she doesn’t know how to say it to anyone at home. They stay up playing late, melding and counting tricks to 1,500. Jonathon is unreadable and antsy, aggressive every hand. He waits for the discard pile to grow and then picks it up. He does it even when he has no chance, even if it means losing points on the hand. Rose tries to go out in a hurry if she thinks she can stick him with the 3s, waits until she thinks he’s ready to sweep up the pile again and snatches it ahead of him. They make a mess of the scoring altogether, play sloppy until the other adults in the room finally call it a night. On the drive home, headed toward the kids and babysitter, Rose reaches across the dark car and wraps her fingers through Jonathon’s. He squeezes so hard she nearly shouts, and then he eases. He squeezes again, not so tightly this time, and then he goes limp.
* * *
Rose and Jonathon are playing hide-and-seek. They pick up the kids after school, grab a pizza, and drive to the park. They sit by the tiny waterfall and eat together. It’s just too pretty a day to waste, they say. The kids play at the edge of the creek, stepping on the smooth stones where the water thins. They’ll get wet, but they’ll dry. As the sun begins to sink and the air to grow chilly they wander along the trail upstream, the water carving its way farther and forever downhill. The kids are wound up. They want to play. They want to hide and be found, to race out into the shadows and pretend to vanish from the earth. They launch into the trees, flash between the large trunks and falling leaves, shrieking and then going silent, trying to step softly. Jonathon runs across their path, shouting and taunting. Come get me, come get me. He flickers in and out of Rose’s sight, the long strides and carefree spirit. She keeps along the trail and lets her family disappear around her. She stops and listens. No one is seeking, no one counting. Darkness is swallowing them up and they’re all hiding, waiting to see who will come. She walks on, hunkers down in herself, and lets it play out.