Louis pushed the battered green wheelbarrow down the gravel path, his rough hands darting out to keep his tools from bumping onto the ground whenever the screeching wheel hit a rut or hump in the pitted and graveled lane.
Clicking through the catalog he kept in his head, he settled on Barber’s Adagio for Strings, hit the play button. The picture for it wasn’t a supplicant Sgt. Elias, but rather the archangel Michael, frozen in flaming mid strafe over an unrepentant cityscape. Louis had gone to Chicago Public Schools, where he graduated from eighth grade, and not much more. Those classrooms were nowhere for a Native to be, and music was his world anyway, even if they didn’t care too much about that at Sullivan High School up on the North Side. He took all the music classes they offered and dropped out after getting A’s in both, signed up for four in the military instead of three to five in Joliet. He stopped for a moment, set the wheelbarrow down gently. Dug through the inside pocket of his gray wool overcoat, pulled the last smoke from his pack, bent and wrinkled, lit it with a well-worn Zippo, delicious naphtha fumes lingering in the still and foggy air. He took a drag, blew it out, looked to the ground at his right. There had been flurries that morning. It was only the second snow of the year and it floated across the still-green grass like torn white lace.
This fog’ll take that out, he thought, putting the warm lighter in his pants pocket. Nothing like fog to tamp down snow. It’s what every old person ever had told him, anyway. They were probably right. Still, he thought rain, but why argue with elders? And the veil would thin everything tonight, anyway. All Hallows’ Eve the whites called it, a remnant from when they were tribal, too.
Even though he grew up in the city, Louis came from a long line of medicine people. If he moved out to the rez, he’d be busy with ceremony all the time. But here in the city it just made his life strange, and difficult. Not too many people knew what he was talking about, what he carried in his head, what it was like when the thunders came to talk, and fewer cared. That was okay, though. In the city, you needed all the friends you could get, even if no one else could see them, hear them, if only a couple of your buddies knew what you were even talking about. There weren’t too many Natives in his neighborhood since he’d moved out of Uptown farther north, and that made for a lonely life. Some days, it made him feel special, but those days weren’t enough to make it okay. That singular sense was enough to carry him through, to make him feel old-timey some days, like he was a real Indian or something special, anyway, but in the city, mostly, those extra senses were a drag, and manifested themselves in ways that tore at his spirit.
Arguing, heard or unheard but still raging, hurt his head on this job. He’d hang back by the nearest mausoleum, waiting to get to work, switch to whatever he wanted to play between his ears, drown out the harsh words and whispers and wonder if the people being lowered into the ground could hear them, thought jeeezus, is this how I’m going out, what my big sendoff is going to be? What if that’s my eternal accompaniment, my idiot relatives wondering who gets what, the kids just hungry, grammas needing to pee, moms and dads planning how to ditch the after-funeral feed early and enjoy a bit of a day away from work.
Louis thought, one day some dearly departed is gonna get sick of this.
He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, grabbed the handles, and shoved off down the path. The moldering leaves, wet and burntbrown, rotted in windswept piles, and the smell made him queasy. He used his tongue and lips to roll the cigarette to the other side of his mouth, grateful for the acrid smoke that masked the overwhelming decay, if even for only a few seconds.
Rain rushed in without warning, fog and snow both disappearing under its relentless fall. Take that, old people, he thought. He watched a drop hit his smoke, just behind the cherry. Took a big drag, listened to the wet paper sizzle, queued up Le quattro stagioni, seven Spanish angels in sepia held hands, St. Vitus gripping their pale feet.
Sure enough, even though he knew it was coming somewhere at this bend in the road, the wheel hit a dip and he had to lunge for his falling shovel, his shoulder hitting a rake handle as he reached out, the tangle of equipment in the wheelbarrow an interlocked mass whose wooden poles and angles grabbed up in his open topcoat, their combined resistance shoving him ass over teakettle into the mud at the side of the narrow path.
He sat there for a good five minutes, nowhere to be anyway, his client not going anywhere anytime soon. He managed to hang on to his smoke, though it only had a few drags left. He knocked the cherry off, stuck the butt in his back pocket. It’s rude to stamp out your smoke on the ground in this judgmental city of the dead. Six or seven chickadees came by, mocked him. Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, they laughed. He laughed back, put his hands out behind him, squeezed his fingers into the icy mud. He tilted his head up, peered into the thinning canopy of oak and maple, counted maybe a dozen leaves holding out, gold and proud, clinging to whatever trees thought summer was worth to them. An owl stared back down at him, ruffled her feathers and bobbed her head at him. He shuddered as the rain ticked down, fat and heavy, but sparse, in countable drops, so slow he made a point to catch three or four fat silver beads in his mouth.
He wiped his hands on his work pants, pine-green baggies so old they had sewn-in cuffs. He looked down at his boots, black waterproof Tims that had saved his feet a hundred times from trench foot. He reached in a coat pocket, pulled out his lunch: a Braunschweiger sandwich with yellow mustard on cheap white bread, his favorite. His other pocket held a glass bottle of Coke, thankfully unbroken, and he opened it by holding his index finger tight under the top of the neck, wedging the edge of his lighter in to pop the cap.
He ate and drank quickly, a holdover from being in the navy, where they gave you thirty seconds to eat in boot camp. That never bothered him, though, made sense, the business of getting the necessaries out of the way as soon as you could. For dessert he hit the flask in his other back pocket, two deep pulls of Connemara finished his midday repast. He didn’t make much money, but he never skimped on his liquor.
Louis and his well-worn tools made their way over to the fresh grave, now devoid of bickering mourners. He stared down into the freshly opened earth as a magpie landed on the brass rail edging the pit.
They must’ve been particularly quarrelsome—his eyes widened watching the ebony casket lid rattle and crack open.
Sonofabitch.
He grabbed a shovel, furiously turned the piles of dirt into the hole, the rain picking up.
Six ravens dropped in to watch the proceedings. They croaked to themselves, making and taking bets on the outcome. Ravens are inveterate gamblers. His new client struggled to free themself from the casket even as Louis was winning the burying battle; their interment was almost complete.
Almost, but not quite. The earth churned in one final heave as they reached out for the grave’s edge.
He smashed the clawing hands down with the business end of a rake, burying it in them deep enough that only the tops of the tines were visible above the shattered knuckles, white shards of bone shoved through the soup of mud and blood. Louis shot the ravens a look as the sharp edge of his digging spade cleaned the head off the neck. It rolled a few feet away. They laughed and exchanged rocks and brass tacks with each other, shiny black wingtips pushing bits of foil and lost single ruby-red earrings in piles between them. He switched to the ten-tined potato fork, scooping up the head with a well-practiced move that dropped his shoulders and came up under his prize. A snap of his wrists flicked the head into the hole. He wrenched the rake out of the pulsing fingers, then deftly moved to the short-handled shovel and filled and graded the hole in a matter of minutes. The owl silently settled on the rail, supervised the final strokes.
There was no arguing to be heard.
Balefully white-eyed and black tricorn-hatted, the Requiem in D Minor replied to the silence. 
Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s linked story collection about sort of growing up in Chicago, Sacred Smokes (University of New Mexico Press), won the 2019 Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing. His next work, Sacred City, will be published in fall 2021; he is also the editor of The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones. Van Alst is the creative editor for Transmotion (a journal of postmodern indigenous studies) and an active Horror Writers Association member. His fiction and photography have been published in The Raven Chronicles, Red Earth Review, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, Unnerving Magazine, The Rumpus, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others.
