The Hour I First Believed
Page 63
“Yeah, we know that,” he said. “But farming would be cool. I was thinking about that the other day.”
“Really? What would you cultivate? Pot? Poppies?”
I had said it to piss him off, but he smiled at me instead. “Been clean and sober for 597 days now. But who’s counting, right?”
I kept my face expressionless. Said nothing. If he was looking for a high five or a congratulatory pat on the back, he was going to have a long wait on his hands. He was going to have to fucking wait forever.
“The thing is,” he said. “That morning? Just before she hit him? I was busting his stones. Scaring him, okay? I’d just found out some shit about him, and I was threatening to tell my mom and everyone else who thought he was perfect. Which was basically everybody. But then he bolted, and bam…. So, in a way, I’m responsible, too. And I’ve had to live with that, okay? That, and a whole bunch of other crap I did. Because if someone had to get killed that day, it should have been me, not Morgan. That’s what my mother thinks, I guess. She still won’t speak to me, have anything to do with me, and she probably never will. And if I could’ve changed places with him, I would have done that for her. But I couldn’t. The only thing I could do was deal with my shit and clean up my act. Get straight and stay that way. Work the steps…. Which is why farming would be kind of cool, you know? Something positive. Grow stuff, produce stuff. Have you ever, by any chance, been to Epcot?”
“Epcot?” I was still trying to negotiate his remorse. Why were we suddenly going to Disney World?
“They got this building there called The Land. And you go downstairs and there’s this ride, okay? You get in these little boats and they take you past these farms of the future. You know what hydroponics are? Because I was thinking that might be cool: hydroponic farming.”
Two hundred acres of farmland, and he wanted to grow things in water?
“Or herbs, maybe,” he said. “Not, you know, herb. Herbs like parsley and paprika and shit. You ever watch the Food Channel?”
I reminded him that I was busy.
“Yeah, okay. Thanks again, man.” He walked over to his bike. “Or llamas, maybe. A llama farm would be cool. But hey, you never know. Maybe we won’t win and you’ll be able to stay put. I’d be cool with that, too.” He straddled his bike. It roared to life. “Thanks again, man! See you soon!” he yelled. He lurched forward, helmetless, down the rutted dirt driveway and onto Bride Lake Road.
ULYSSES AND I LIFTED THE trunk and carried it from the back stoop to the kitchen. I got an old sheet and spread it so that the floor wouldn’t get crapped up with dirt and whatever else was in there. “Mind if I have a drink to steady my nerves?” Ulysses asked. His hand was already on the vodka bottle that I’d forgotten to put away the night before.
“Not now, U,” I said. “Let’s get this done.”
I knelt before the footlocker. The left-side clasp opened no problem, but the right one was bent beyond cooperating. “There’s a screwdriver in that drawer beneath the microwave,” I said. “You want to grab it for me?”
“Funny you just called me U,” he said. “That’s what your dad always called me.” He held out the screwdriver, sharp end out, and the damn thing was dancing so crazily in his trembling hand that I had to steady his wrist so I wouldn’t get jabbed. “Take it easy,” I told him. “We found it. We dug it up. It’s all good, right?”
He shook his head. “Just so you know, I had no idea what was in there the day we buried it,” he said. “I asked him, but he said I was better off not knowing. He didn’t tell me till later. Years later, it was. He was cocked and I wasn’t, and he says, ‘Hey, U, remember that day you and me buried that trunk out past the orchard?’ And that’s when he come out with it.”
“Uh-huh.”
I got the clasp pried apart and raised the lid. The smell of dead air and dry rot hit my nostrils. It was no wonder the thing had had some heft to it.
I unpacked the contents one by one, lining things up like Russian nesting dolls. Jammed inside the trunk was one of our old wooden apple crates, its label “Bride Lake Farms” still vivid with color. Inside the crate was something that had clearly been my mother’s: some kind of zippered suitcase from her modeling days—oval shaped, light blue, vinyl covered. The name she’d gone by ran diagonally across the front of it, professionally lettered in darker blue with gold trim and punctuated with an exclamation point: “Jinx Dixon!”
This was different than the other stuff I’d recovered—the magazine ad and newspaper clippings, the cassette of my interview with Peppy Schissel. Here was something my mother had used and carried. I lifted it out of the crate and placed it in front of me. Sat back on the floor with my legs bracketing it. I took hold of the zipper’s metal tab and pulled, slowly, hesitantly. It stuck a little in one spot where the teeth had rusted, but when I pulled a little harder, it gave. I lifted the lid.
Inside the suitcase was a small cast-iron chest—an antique, could have been, from the looks of it, though I was no expert on that kind of thing. Its lid was shut tight with spring-held clamps. I loosened the tension and removed the cover. For a second or two, I didn’t know what I was looking at. Then, Jesus Christ Almighty, I did know. Lying side by side on a bed of fine-grained white sand were the remains of two human infants.
Palms against the floor, I crab-walked away from them, only half-aware of my own mantra: What the fuck?…What the fuck?…
Ulysses was saying something, but his words weren’t quite registering. He was crying. He had hold of the vodka. I stood up, reeling a little, and snatched the bottle away from him. Grabbed a glass, poured him an inch or so, and poured the rest down the sink. “Here!” I said, shoving his drink at him. “Drink up! And as soon as I come back here, I want some answers!”
“Why? Where you going?”
I wasn’t so much going someplace as getting away. I hurried, stumbling, from the back of the house to the front, knocking into things as I went. Banged open the front door and broke into a run, down the porch stairs, down the driveway. Crossing Bride Lake Road, I barely noticed the screech of brakes, the rebuke of some faceless driver. “Asshole!” I ran alongside the road, weaving in and out, muttering to myself. They hadn’t fucked me up enough already with all their lies and secrets? Now this?…
I ran past the prison and into our fallow cornfields. Ran to where the maze had been—the place where they’d come out of hiding to take their stolen food, the table scraps of decent people’s lives. I screamed it over and over as if, with enough repetition, it might travel back in time so that they’d get the message: I hate you. I love you. I hate you. I love you….
I don’t know how long I was out there, but by the time I was limping back up the driveway, the sun was halfway across the sky and my throat was raw, my foot throbbing from having kicked something out there, I didn’t recall what. The front door gaped open. I went back in the house.
In the foyer, I stopped before the framed photo hanging at the bottom of the staircase, the one that pilot who’d had to emergency-land on our property had flown back later and taken as a gift to my grandfather: “Bride Lake Farm, Aerial View, August 1948”…. My eyes moved left to right—from the neat and orderly rows of corn to the prison compound with its ant-sized inmates, its brick buildings and sparkling lake—the lake where the legendary largemouth bass, Big Wilma, had swum, uncaptured and uncapturable, and where my mother had drowned herself…. Near the photo’s right border was the apple orchard and the open field beyond it. No apple house. It hadn’t been built yet, and so those babies out in the kitchen hadn’t yet been buried under it. I stood there in front of that old picture, rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet, dreading what I had to do. I started back toward the kitchen.
Ulysses was gone. I walked slowly up to the iron chest and stood there, peering down at them, willing myself not to look away…. They weren’t twins—they couldn’t have been. They didn’t look like they’d come from the same planet, let alone the same mother.
The other, smaller one was an unclothed skeleton. Its legs were drawn up toward its chest. Its fists, no larger than walnuts, were clenched in front of its face as though it had died in pain. Had my mother given birth to it? And what was its connection to its bizarre companion? Why had they been put together in that chest?…I kept looking away from them, then looking back. My gaze returning, over and over, to the smaller of the two—the one frozen in suffering.
When I glanced back at the empty blue suitcase, I saw, on the bottom, something I hadn’t noticed when I’d lifted out the chest: a letter or note, torn into small pieces. I gathered them up and carried them open-palm to the counter, then pieced it together like a jigsaw puzzle. It was printed, not written: capital letters, fountain pen ink from the looks of it—a man’s forward-leaning, no-nonsense script on stationery from some Chicago hotel. I figured some of the pieces might be missing, but it was all there. The letter was undated.
DEAR JINX,
I GAVE YOU 50 IN OCTOBER TO GET IT DONE AND ITS YOUR PROBLEM NOT MINE IF YOU DIDN’T. HERE’S ANOTHER HUNDRED FOR YOUR TROUBLES, BUT THIS IS ALL YOUR GETTING FROM ME SO CHASE THOSE DOLLAR SIGNS OUT OF YOUR EYES. I DON’T WANT TO MAKE TROUBLE FOR YOU, BUT YOU NEED TO KNOW OUR ORGANIZATION HAS PEOPLE WHO PROTECT US WHEN SITUATIONS LIKE THIS COME UP AND SOME OF THESE GUYS ARE ROUGH CUSTOMERS. DON’T CALL OR WRITE ME AGAIN (IF YOUR SMART) AND I HOPE FOR YOUR SAKE THAT WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT CONTACTING MY WIFE WAS AN EMPTY THREAT BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO THINK OF THE TROUBLE YOU’LL BRING DOWN ON YOURSELF IF YOU DO SOMETHING THAT STUPID. LIKE THEY SAY, IT TAKES 2 TO TANGO, JINX. WE HAD FUN BUT ITS OVER.
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF,
CAL
Cal. Calvin Sparks. The ballplayer.
So now I knew that much at least: when Peppy Schissel had driven her back from New York that day, it was Sparks’s baby she was carrying, not the company nephew’s. Why else would he have paid her money to “get it done”? Not out of altruism, from the tone of his letter. But shit, if one of the babies in that chest was hers and Sparks’s—and I was pretty sure it had to be the smaller one, not the Ripley’s Believe It or Not oddity lying beside it—then where did my father fit into all this? Why had he been the one to bury those babies? The only person who might be able to answer that one had taken a powder.
Yet rather than going out and looking for him, I pulled up a kitchen chair and sat there with the babies. Kept a kind of vigil, I guess. They’d been lying out there under the cold ground, alone with only each other for company, for longer than I’d been alive. Now that, for better or worse, they’d been brought back into the light of day, I was reluctant to leave them.
I must have sat there for an hour or more, the way you’d sit at a wake—contemplating their too-brief lives, wondering about the people who’d brought them into existence. As usual, I had so many questions, so few answers…. Somewhere during that hour, I felt the need to reach in and touch them. Comfort them in some small, belated way. But my hand inside the chest was as big and clumsy as a catcher’s mitt, and when my knuckles grazed the dress of the mummified one, I flinched. Drew my hand back.
I tried again. Touched the smaller one—the one whose mother, I felt pretty sure, had been my mother, too. I cupped my hand around its skull, the curve of its tiny shoulder. Touched its femur, its foot. Had it been a little girl? A boy? There was no way to tell….
The skin on the other one’s face had looked sturdy as leather, but it wasn’t. When I touched it lightly at the temple, the skin and bone beneath it crumbled and caved in. Its fragility both frightened and repulsed me, and when I pulled my hand back, I saw that my fingertips were covered with a powdery residue of long-dead skin cells. I brushed my hand against my pant leg, but some of the residue had settled into the whorls of my fingertips. I looked across the room to the sink, the faucet I could have used to wash away its traces. But for some reason, I didn’t, or couldn’t, do it.
I stood, opened the back door, and called out to him. “Ulysses!”
If he had wandered back to the field where we’d dug up the trunk, and then had wandered into the woods behind, he might have been oblivious to the sharp drop-off. I thought about Zinnia, the Bride Lake prisoner who had worked for us when I was a boy—who had hugged me so tightly and later had fallen from that sheer drop-off to her death…. So I left the babies and went outside—walked the path to the orchard, the field. Walked past the hole I’d dug a few innocent hours earlier and into the back woods. “Ulysses! You out here, U?…Hey, Ulysses!” A couple of times, I thought I heard his footsteps, then saw it was only the squirrels running over dead leaves. Standing at the edge of the drop-off, I looked down, looked from side to side. I called his name again and again, but the only answer I got was my own echo.
Approaching the house again, I looked at the empty places where the Micks’ cars were usually parked. I was grateful that they were both away for the weekend. Velvet, too. The way she was drawn to freaky stuff, she’d have probably thought my grisly discovery was “fuckin’ rad!” or something, and her enthusiasm for the macabre was about the last thing I needed…. What I did need was to talk to Maureen—lean on her a little and get her opinion about what I should do as I tried to wrestle with this…this what? Could you call the discovery of two dead babies on your propery a crisis? I wasn’t sure, but crisis or not, it wasn’t like I could pick up the phone and call her. It didn’t work that way. Under DOC rules, she could only call me. This is the operator. I have a State of Connecticut prisoner on the line. Do you wish to accept the charges for a call from Maureen Quirk? There was no telling what Mo’s reaction was going to be—to the babies, to the news about Kareem Kendricks’s rampage. She’d been in a pretty good place lately, pretty stable, and I didn’t want anything to set her back. Still, I’d have to tell her when I visited the next day. If the scuttlebutt about a coming lockdown was wrong, which it probably wasn’t. The jailhouse grapevine was pretty reliable, Mo said, given the liaisons between COs and inmates. A heads-up about what was being planned was power, and power could be bargained for. If they did go into lockdown, she’d be unreachable for the better part of a week….
And Alphonse was away; I couldn’t call him either. Not that the Mustang King would’ve been much help. Al had always been a little creeped out by death. Dead babies, one of them mummified? Forget it….
I had Jerry Martineau’s home number, but I hesitated for a while, weighing the pros and cons. But Jesus Christ, I needed to talk to somebody. When his wife answered, I told her it was “semi-urgent.” And when Jerry called back a few minutes later, I was vague. I told him I needed some advice about something I’d found on my property.
“What kind of ‘something’ we talking about?” he asked.
“Something kind of strange. Can you come out here as a friend, rather than as a cop?” He said he could come over in that capacity, but depending on what it was I was going to show him, he wasn’t necessarily going to able to leave as such. He said he needed to hit CVS on the way over, but that he’d probably be by inside of an hour.
“YOU KNOW, I REMEMBER MISS Rheingold,” he said. “Cardboard box with their pictures on it, a pad of ballots, little pencil on a string. Every summer, my sister and I would walk down to my Aunt Dot’s package store, pick who we wanted, and stuff the ballot box.” He kept rubbing his cheek and looking back and forth between the old New Yorker ad he was holding—“It’s time to elect Miss Rheingold 1950! Your vote may decide!”—and the two small corpses at his feet. “My old man drank Rheingold,” he said
. “Had a can every night with his supper.”
“One can?” I said. “Well, there’s the difference between your old man and mine.”
“Hey, they may have taken different routes, but neither one of them saw their fortieth birthday,” Jerry noted.
“And scrawny little Ulysses outlived them both by over forty years. Man, he better be okay, because I’ve got some questions for his ass.”
Jerry nodded. “So do I.”
“Officially, you mean? Why? What’s the point?”
“The point is, what we’ve got here, I’m guessing, is two deaths that were covered up and never accounted for. Which means I’m going to have to call in the coroner, see if she can determine whether or not these two died of natural causes. Because if they didn’t, that hole you dug out there is a crime scene.” He peered in again at the remains, and I watched a shiver pass through him. “I tell you, Caelum, I’ve seen a lot of bodies over the years, investigated a lot of screwy domestic situations. But this one may just take the cake.”
“Look,” I said. “If a crime was committed, it happened over fifty years ago. By people who’ve been dead for decades.”
“Except for one of them maybe. If he helped your dad cover up a homicide—or two of them; I’m not ruling anything out at this stage of the game—then that makes him an accessory.”
I shook my head. “He’s dying, Jer. Why put him through that kind of an ordeal at this point?
“Because he picked up a sledgehammer and started busting up that concrete. And because you two opened Pandora’s box here. You called me. Remember? What do you expect me to do? Look the other way again?”
Again: fair enough. Jerry had looked the other way after Maureen had been caught “doctor-shopping,” and down the line, a seventeen-year-old kid had ended up dead in the road. I flashed on Jesse Seaberry, the way he’d looked as he’d spoken of his own culpability in his brother’s death.