Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  If it’s a hot day, Kim likes to pick one of the ones that look like Greek temples, where she can sit in the shade with her back against the cool stones and have lunch and smoke in peace. But since today the sun will feel good, she picks a brown mottled obelisk that supervises a mess of little individual markers. The obelisk’s got Kiernan cut in the base in letters big enough for a highway road sign, and Kim’s leaning up against it, drinking her oj straight from the bottle when someone coughs. Kim jumps so quick she slops juice down her top. “Christ!” she says, and a few other things, because her new tank top is white and the stain’ll be a bitch.

  “Excuse me,” says this voice. “You’re standing on my grave.”

  * * * *

  When work’s offered, Chris is cautious. He’s reckless and wild with every other thing, but he approaches work like it’s a rabid cat. He wants to know exactly what Stu said and how he said it, and when Kim says, “Why don’t you ask him yourself, he’s still there,” Chris gets all mad and unreasonable. He smacks her one and sulks through dinner, though he does make a call after Kim goes outside with the garbage. Coming back, standing on the step with one hand on the screen door, she hears him saying, “Yeah, we’ll see about it, man. Longs you’re talking serious money.”

  Of course, he tells Kim nothing, though she goes as far as to ask if Stu Gleb has a job for him. She risks that much. Chris says it’s none of her business and his eyes get mean, so Kim shuts her mouth and figures she’ll find out soon enough.

  * * * *

  Dull day, mist so heavy it feels like rain or rain so light it feels like mist. Kim goes across to the cemetery, anyway; she never misses a day now, though she always says she has an errand to run at the supermarket, that she’s got to stop by the pharmacy, whatever. Through the parking lot, dodging cars, carts, delivery trucks, across the street, three lanes, always jammed, then into the cemetery, into what she thinks of as real life, but Kim isn’t into irony. She’s fallen for happiness.

  First, they visit the grave, which is in Maureen’s family’s plot. Her name was once Maureen Kiernan, which has a nice ring to it, not like Gleb, which sounds to Kim like something nasty. The Kiernan plot is a generous square of lawn with the obelisk at the back and granite blocks on each corner. There are a lot of dead Kiernans under the grass, including the real money man, Joseph Patrick Kiernan, who founded the textile mill that’s now a high tech fish farm.

  The Kiernan plot is impressive but high maintenance. There’s always something to be done, especially around Joey’s grave, which has to be kept weedless and perfect, with every dead flower and faded plant removed, with each of the little boxwood shrubs perfectly pruned.

  “Did he like flowers?” Kim asks once.

  “He liked basketball,” Eileen says, “but you can’t plant basketballs.”

  Which makes sense to Kim.

  After tending the grave, they walk around the cemetery. Maureen always brings a picnic: nice deli sandwiches, cheese pies or slices of meat bits in jelly with fancy French names; pretty cookies and little square cakes with icing all over; grapes or peaches or strawberries big as ping pong balls. There’s a thermos of coffee if it’s cool; a half bottle of wine or cider if it’s warm. Kim and Maureen sit on the porch of one of the Greek temples, which are properly called mausoleums, Kim learns, and talk. They talk about Joey and the grave, first, and then about themselves and their situations, and finally about their need for different lives, for freedom, for escape.

  * * * *

  This one night, lights sweep across the trailer windows, the neighbor’s coon dogs go wild, and, surprise of surprises, Stu’s white Cadillac bounces over the ruts in the yard. Stu hops out, his heavy face sweaty. He’s got a cigar in his hand and a big charge of nervous energy on his back.

  “Hey, Kimmie,” he says. Stu never calls her ‘Kimmie’ at work, and she takes this to mean he’s trying to be chummy and friendly. She assumes he wants something. “Your man at home?”

  Kim looks over her shoulder. Chris is sitting in front of the tv in the crowded main room. He’s got a NASCAR show on and the racing motors produce a steady, whining drone that seems to mellow him out much as anything can. When she nods her head, Stu squeezes past her into the trailer.

  “So Chris,” he says, and something about the way Chris lifts his head, all alert and interested, tells Kim this is trouble.

  “Take a walk,” he says.

  “In the dark?”

  “Go sit in the Caddy,” Stu says, tossing her the keys. “Play with the stereo. Check out those dynamite graphic equalizers.”

  The Caddie has leather seats the color of caramel and nearly as soft, a fancy wood faced dash, and a stereo with enough lights and dials for four, five ordinary boom boxes. Kim finds copies of Penthouse and Convenience Store Decisions under the front seat, along with a few old newspapers and an empty bag from the donut shop. The glove compartment has maps, a flashlight, aspirin, Tums, an inhaler, and an envelop of photos, mostly showing a boy of ten or eleven, a chubby, round faced little kid.

  In several, he’s smiling in a red and white basketball uniform with shorts that come down below his knees and a baseball cap on his head. In others, he’s all Sunday dressed in shirt and slacks and bare headed, so she can see the dark wavy hair. The boy waves to the camera from the white Cadillac, kneels on the grass to play with a beagle, cocks his arm to throw a football. Kim can see Stu in the fat cheeks and stocky form, but the child’s eyes are blue, startlingly blue. Kim flips through the rest of the snaps, quick and not really paying attention, until the final picture, a family grouping, stops her cold. She’s looking at the child, the dog, and a tall, blonde woman with the boy’s blue eyes. Kim looks at the picture and hears a voice saying, “You’re standing on my grave.”

  * * * *

  “I shouldn’t be here,” Kim says the next day. Just after one P.M., break time, a cloudy day with fall in the air. They’re eating these really nice ham and cheese sandwiches with fine crunchy green pickles.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m working for your husband.”

  “I knew that.” Unconcerned. That’s one of the things that fascinates Kim about Maureen, that unconcern, that lack of fear. “I think these should have more onion. I like red onion on a sandwich. Don’t you think these need more onion?”

  “I never guessed,” says Kim, who doesn’t have unconcern but would like to acquire it. “What if he shows up? What if he comes to visit Joey’s grave?”

  Maureen’s face changes then and her eyes get dark and hard as if all the grief and anger within are set to come flooding out. “He never comes to the grave. Never, the bastard. He wanted cremation. He wanted to forget.” There’s a pause. “Stu believes in moving on, in getting on with his life.” The words are dipped in acid, coated in bile as thick as chocolate. Kim imagines each syllable being lowered into some internal vat and coming up dripping. “He thinks I’m crazy,” Maureen says. “Crazy in general, crazy because of Joey, crazy about the grave.”

  Kim protests Maureen isn’t crazy. Though she is unusual in a wonderful way.

  “He’d like to see me in therapy, which would give him leverage, you see, leverage for the divorce. Or, maybe, if I’m in therapy, he’ll fight the divorce and try to get me into treatment. That’s what Stu would really like. He’d like me in a little clinic somewhere and then he’d have his hands on the business, on everything. He’s always sniffing around and saving ammunition for the divorce.”

  Maureen always talks about the divorce as a kind of object, as a real thing, though it doesn’t exist yet; no papers have been filed. But Maureen sees life as a series of separate events and things: the accident, the divorce, the meeting, the grave. She’s not like Kim, for whom life slides from one thing to another, so that working for Stu Gleb somehow leads to this thing with his wife.

  “I could maybe be something for the divorce,” remarks Kim.

  Maureen puts her arm around her. “So you could,” she says. “But he neve
r comes here. Never, ever. He couldn’t face Joey’s death and he thinks I’m crazy because I can’t forget. He thinks he can spend his way back to happiness; he thinks he can gamble and forget. Well, not with my money, he can’t. I can’t forget, and I’ll see that he won’t, either.”

  Kim is uncomfortable with all this talk about Maureen’s husband, especially since he’s Stu Gleb and someone she knows. She’s just as glad when Maureen asks, “How did you find out?” Her voice is casual but there’s interest underneath.

  Kim explains about Stu’s visit, about the snaps in the car. “He wants Chris to do a job for him.”

  Maureen’s eyes register the fact of the snaps, a kind of visual snarl, then, “What kind of job?”

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t come back again.”

  “Best find out,” says Maureen.

  * * * *

  But Kim doesn’t worry about the job. She thinks some hot merchandise that Stu wants Chris to haul for him like cigarettes up from the south where there’s less tax. Or else a little damage to one of the lower volume convenience stores for the insurance money. Maybe just to hang around looking ferocious and unpredictable when Stu expects bad company. Those are the sorts of things Chris is good at, so she’s surprised when he comes into the kitchenette one night and starts to clean a gun. Not a shotgun or a rifle, like what everyone has in their neighborhood, but a stubby black thing with a textured grip.

  “Get your eyes back in your head,” he says.

  Kim shrugs. Since meeting Maureen, she doesn’t get all nervous and upset about Chris anymore. Kim’s figuring to stay out of his way until she manages to be rid of him, so she doesn’t ask nosey questions any more; she doesn’t bother him when he’s drinking or when he’s picked up some good stuff. She puts her check on the table and fixes dinner, which makes her, far as Chris is concerned, a together chick. He’s starting to tell her so, to let her know that this is for keeps, that she shouldn’t think of leaving him.

  He twirls the cylinder and takes out a roll of hundred dollar bills to impress her. “I’ve got a job worth doing,” he says. “And I’ll need you to drive the truck.”

  Kim looks at the money and then at him. “What do we have to do, kill somebody?”

  She’s joking, but Chris kinda nods his head. “We’re going to kidnap somebody and hold him for ransom.” He says this like guns and kidnapping and ransom’s all part of their normal routine. Then he laughs. “And the best part is he’s going to cooperate with us all the way.”

  “Who is?”

  Chris doesn’t tell her that. He pretends he’s said enough already, but Kim can guess and when she tells Maureen the next day, Maureen can, too.

  “That dumb bastard,” she says.

  * * * *

  Kim’s main thought is to clear the area, and she thinks Maureen may agree, given her own past history. “Chris is crazy,” Kim tells her. “He’ll be crazier with a gun.” Kim sees Florida, or maybe even California, somewhere warm with sand and palms and big hotels looking glassy eyed at white beaches. But, of course, they can’t do that. Kim knows without asking that they can’t leave the grave, Joey, remembrance.

  “You could dump Chris,” Maureen says. This is the other alternative, their other fantasy. “You could get an apartment. I’d help you. You could get a really nice apartment.”

  “He’d come after me,” Kim says. “And there’s the divorce.”

  “Yes,” says Maureen with this funny smile. “There’s the divorce.”

  * * * *

  “I don’t see what you need the gun for,” Kim tells Chris. “Not if he’s cooperating.”

  “Don’t be dumb. It’s got to look realistic.”

  “A knife would do,” Kim says. It’s in her mind that the gun is a bad idea, that Chris is too impulsive to be trusted, that he will screw up in some spectacular way.

  “There might be trouble,” he says. “You get less trouble with a gun.”

  “They’ll question me,” says Kim. “They’ll question everyone who works at the stores. They’ll figure an inside job.”

  “We get the money and we’re out of here.” Chris sounds so decisive and confident, that, despite her indifference, Kim feels her heart clench. She foresees separation and despair; she sees the truck, the highway, exile from real life.

  “All you gotta do is to drop me off,” he says so enthusiastically she understands that he is enjoying this, the excitement and importance of it. “I take him and his car. He calls the wife. She gets the money and drops it off. We’re all home free.”

  “Where do you leave the car?” asks Kim. “Where do you leave him?”

  “Maybe here. You’re at work. You don’t have to know nothing.”

  “I take the truck for the first time ever to work, someone’s going to notice.”

  He doesn’t like that. He looks like he might want to make an issue of it, make her agree to what’s a purely dumb idea. But he surprises her. “Maybe you start driving the truck to work,” he says. “I’m thinking of getting a bike, anyway. I saw this Harley I’d like and I can afford it.” He picks his head up, like she’s going to give him an argument.

  “All right,” she says, thinking maybe he’ll get a bike and break his damn neck. “I’ll start taking the truck. But Stu’ll want me working the night shift if I have a ride.”

  “What do you care when you work?”

  Kim hesitates, feeling how events can slide one way or the other. Life’s a teeterboard and you can slip off either end. “I don’t want to be there alone at night. Stu comes by. I gotta watch him, he’s always . . .”

  “See you don’t give him any reason,” Chris says. “But if he tries anything, I’ll break his face.”

  * * * *

  Chrysanthemum season. Maureen has two big pots in the back of her car and four smaller ones. The big ones are the size of bushel baskets and have mauve flowers. The smaller ones have white flowers and should stand the winter, Maureen says. Kim helps her pull out the begonias, though they’re still pretty, pretty enough so she regrets not being able to take them home. She’s getting an appreciation for flowers and sees how the begonias would brighten up the trailer. She thinks about having them on the kitchenette table so that she could look at flowers instead of at Chris all the time.

  Maureen digs in the new plants, and Kim brings some water from the faucet down the dirt track.

  “So you’re driving to work now,” says Maureen.

  “Chris has this bike he bought.”

  “Used?” Maureen asks, like she’s really interested in Chris and his purchases.

  “New,” says Kim. And Maureen stops tidying up around the plants and looks at her.

  “New.” Maureen doesn’t say anything else, so that an idea Kim had put aside comes crashing back: mega cash for a phony kidnapping. Maureen frowns and shakes her head. She’s quiet all through lunch, thinking this over and when she finally speaks, she says, “Would Chris shoot somebody? In cold blood, would he shoot someone?”

  Kim doesn’t like to say she has no idea, but she doesn’t, though she’s lived with Chris for two years. “Why do you ask that?” she says. “What do you mean?”

  “I can raise maybe $50,000,” Maureen says. “In an absolute emergency, life and death, with bridge loans, twice that much. Subtract a new Harley Davidson and probably money afterwards and how much is left?”

  “Chris wouldn’t know that,” says Kim, but she’s already hoping maybe they’ve been wrong. Maybe Chris has another job, maybe Stu Gleb isn’t involved at all.

  “Stu knows to the penny. He knows our money isn’t liquid.” Maureen has to explain this to Kim, how money can be liquid or not, how it can be tied up.

  “So why is he doing it? Why is he doing this thing with Chris?” Kim asks.

  “This is going to be Stu’s version of the divorce,” Maureen says. “I think he wants to get his hands on everything; I think he doesn’t care about the ransom at all.”

  “You have to tell the police,�
�� Kim says.

  “And what would happen to you? They’d guess how I found out.”

  “I could leave,” Kim says. “I could get out of town.”

  “If that’s what you want,” says Maureen. “But I have a better idea.”

  * * * *

  Chris goes out on the bike the next night and soon as he clears the yard, Kim begins looking for the gun. She told Maureen “no problem,” but after she searches under the bed, the bedside table, Chris’s footlocker, the shelf above their coats, the medicine cabinet, even the cupboard by the door where they put canned goods, Kim starts getting nervous. Outside, she checks the truck over like a sniffer dog but can’t find a thing. Back inside, the phone rings.

  “Find it?” Maureen asks.

  “Not yet. I thought you didn’t want to call.”

  “I’m at the gas station. Would he keep it in the bike?”

  “He might. He’s got those carrier things. They probably lock.”

  “You’ll have to check,” says Maureen.

  So there’s Kim with bullets rattling in her jeans pocket and the whole trailer turned upside down, when Chris roars into the yard.

  “Cleaning,” she says.

  “Don’t be crazy. We’ll be outta this dump soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” he says and laughs, as if he thinks he’s pretty funny.

  Within minutes, the phone rings again. Kim knows it’s Maureen, she just knows it is, but Chris picks it up, listens a minute, then swears and says he doesn’t have time for any damn opinion poll. Kim lets out her breath.

  After dinner when she carries out the garbage, Kim tries the catches on the motorbike’s carriers. She tries again later on the excuse that she’s left a sweater in the truck, but what she finally has to do is to get up a half hour earlier than usual the next morning. Chris is still asleep when Kim gets the bike keys out of his pocket and goes outside barefoot, half frozen, and shaking with nerves to unlock the carrier. There’s the gun, black and ugly and serious looking.