Grant Farley - Bones of a Saint

Copyright 2020 by Grant Farley

All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Casey Jones. Words by Robert Hunter. Music by Jerry Garcia.

Copyright 1970 Ice Nine Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright renewed.

All rights administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved.

Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

Excerpt from Fly Like an Eagle. Words and music by Steve Miller.

Copyright 1976 by Sailor Music. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved.

Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

This is a work of f iction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used f ictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States by Soho Teen

an imprint of Soho Press, Inc.

227 W 17th Street

New York, NY 10011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farley, Grant, 1951- author.

Bones of a saint / Grant Farley.

ISBN 978-1-64129-117-0

eISBN 978-1-64129-118-7

1. Coming of ageFiction. 2. GangsFiction. 3. BrothersFiction. 4. People with disabilitiesFiction. 5. SecretsFiction. 6. California, NorthernHistory
20th centuryFiction. I. Title

PZ7.1.F3674 Bon 2020 | DDC [Fic]dc23 2019041731

Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Tobey

&

Caitlin, Erin, and David

Trouble ahead, trouble behind,

And you know that notion just crossed my mind.

Casey Jones, The Grateful Dead

They made the devils sacrifice

Within the devils temple, wicked wise...

The Pardoners Tale, Chaucer

We ask... to be transformed into children so that we may one
day enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Veneration prayer to St. Jerome Emiliani

PROLOGUE

Denial

The priest climbed the trail into the foothills as the mission bell tolled matins. Lupine brushed his leg. The path disappeared beneath wild mustard, but he followed from memory. He passed a mound covered in poppies. Purgatory. He was close now. He hiked along the ridge, stopping at the base of the great oak stump, its charred limb poking at the sky. He shrugged off the backpack, pulled out the spade, knelt, and drove the blade into the mud between the roots. Seventeen years. He dug deeper. Why had he waited so long? He had lived as though in a trance. He dug deeper still. Denial, perhaps.

This wooden handle, the dirt beneath it, the charred stump, these felt real even as the images of his own life slipped away. Something tugged at the shovel and his chest tightened. He pulled back on the handle. The blade ripped free, rising above him trailing a shred of blood-encrusted canvas. Again, he thrust the blade into the soil. It clunked metal. He tossed the shovel aside and dug his hands into the earth and grasped the smooth surface. He tried to pray.

Finally, he stood and brushed off his knees, massaged his lower back, and stared down into the valley as it emerged into the soft light.

No hurry now.

He studied the foothills across the valley, their shadows unfolding. The trees rose along the riverbed. He could not see the farmhouse. But he recognized the hill that sheltered it. The children had grown up in that home, but then had left the valley. Had children of their own now. All but him.

As the priest knelt again and reached into the earth, the tale of that summer slid into an eternal present, like a boys train forever looping upon itself on a figure-eight track.

And always, that voice.

Arcangel V alley, California

1978

CHAPTER ONE

Cant e bury

Im watching their faces shimmer under the neon blue of the canterbury trailer park sign that really only hums cant e bury with the e sort of wiggling on and off. Mr. Sanders would be POed at me for letting the sign go like that, but I dont got the heart to mess with it.

Only three guys are playing over-the-lineBuns Bernie, Ed the Head, and Michael James Bartholomew the Third, who is only MJB to us. Theyre seventeen and dont want to be bothered with a sawed-off fifteen, but Im too slick to ditch, so theyre sending me to deep, deep center. Under the streetlights, guys can play all night. Buns steps into the batters box chalked on the asphalt.

The first raindrops hit my face, dripping a low-tide funk. No such thing as a rainout, so I grab my glove. The sign crackles and hums, raindrops waving like fishing line through cante bury .

I see her first. Roxannes hair is blacker than the twenty-coat paint job on Chacos Impala. She parts it down the middle and it hangs straight down around her shoulders. In that light, its an oil-slick blue, and the way the drops bead like a slick wax job, she dont even need a hat. She stares at me with her eyelids drooping.

Hey, RJ. She says it like Im some kind of curse. She wont let go that hate between our moms. She slinks up to the older guys, who are froze like Carew checking up on ball four. The chalk lines are bleeding down the gutter, but they sure dont see it.

Whaturyaguys doing? Roxanne says in that low voice she thinks is a turn-on. She snaps her gum.

Playing with our bats, I say. What does it look like were doing, Foxy Roxy?

Dont be gross.

She turns to the other guys and it dont take a genius to see that where shes taking them she wont let me tag along, not even in deep, deep center.

The rain has slowed to a drizzle.

She trades tongues with them for a while, but theyre getting kind of tired of it. Roxanne finally pushes away from MJB, hands him his wireframes she was holding for him, and stands back like she knows she better get past first base or theyll go back to their old game.

Lets go out to the old Miller place, she whispers.

Thats a Blackjack hangout, Buns says.

No ones lived there in years, Roxanne says. I dont see no Blackjack sign on it.

Im hypnotized by these water drops hanging on the ends of her fake lashes.

The Blackjacks dont need no sign, Buns says. Everyone just knows it.

Yeah, Ed the Head mumbles. Theres nothing funkier than that soggy pot stench from his shirt. No one messes with them. No one.

Precisely. MJB nods.

Maybe you boys aint ready. Maybe you boys just aint up for a mans game.

I know what kind of game it is shes talking about, but I cant figure why theyre turned on by Roxanne.

I stash our gear and tag along as they follow her like three puppy dogs toward the old Miller place. Its supposed to be haunted, if a guy is lame enough to believe any of that stuff. The Millers lost their farm sometime way before I was born, and most of the land has been sold off, so no one is busting butt to buy a house in the middle of nowhere. Rumors are that some city dude bought it, but its been a couple weeks now and no ones showed. Anyway, no one ever moves to this valley, they only leave. If theyre lucky.

It takes most of an hour, but finally the guys are crouching out in the drizzle on a hill and staring down at the shadow of that house. Roxanne and me sit under an oak uphill from them.

Ill go on reconnaissance. MJB means hell go make sure no guys from the Blackjacks got dibs on the place tonight. He slides down the hill and we wait.

Finally, we hear his stupid all-clear whistle.

They creep down the hill and in through a broken window and I crawl in right after them. Roxanne Bic-lights a couple candles waxed to the floor. In that glow I see a curved banister torn from the stairs, beer bottles and wrappers scattered across the hardwood, and graffiti scrawled across the walls. There are worse hauntings than plain old ghosts.