“Everybody kept saying how good she looked—how peaceful she looked—and I was just a kid and even I knew it was a crock of shit. She looked awful, man. She looked fucking dead, that’s what she looked.”
“What do you think they look like out there?” Bernard motioned to the field with his chin. “What do you think it looks like under all that dirt and dead grass?”
“Probably mostly bones.”
Bernard plucked the blade of grass from his mouth and tossed it in the direction of the field below. The breeze caught it, and it spiraled and danced away, riding the wind. He pulled his glasses off, wiped the thick lenses with his shirttail then replaced them. “Worst thing is, we’re all gonna end up the same way. No matter what you do in your life—or what you don’t do—no matter where you go or who you are everybody croaks; everybody ends up dead and buried. Unless they torch you, spread your ashes all over. My mother had a cousin they did that to, sprinkled his ashes on the ocean.”
“Guess it won’t matter once you’re dead.”
“Guess not,” he agreed. “But still, it’s fucked up. We live our whole life knowing sooner or later, we’re going in the ground. One day’s gonna be the last.”
“Nobody, nothing lives forever, Bernard.”
He nodded absently. “We should though.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s cruel not to. It’s like, from the minute you’re born, you start getting older, right? So it’s like, you’re kind of dying right from the minute you’re born. What’s the point of life if it just ends and you’re gone and the world keeps going like you were never even there? Yesterday Curly was playing in the yard, chewing his tennis ball, having his dinner, drinking out of the toilet—being a dog. Then bang, gone. Just like that. Like he was never here at all.”
“That’s why we have memories,” I told him.
“Memories aren’t worth shit.”
I hopped off the tracks and sat down next to him. A cool breeze blew through the distant trees and across the field. The sky had turned ashen; a storm was brewing, rolling in off the ocean. We sat quietly, listened to our thoughts.
“You believe in God, Al?” Bernard asked.
“Sure, don’t you?”
“Yeah. You ever wonder about Him?”
“Like what He looks like and shit?”
“No, like why He does what He does.”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“I wonder why God hates me.”
“Bernard, God doesn’t hate anybody. He’s God.”
Bernard drew his knees up close, rested his chin on them and wrapped his arms around his legs. “You believe in the Devil?”
“I don’t know, man. I guess so.”
“If there’s a God there has to be a Devil too.”
“OK.”
“Well, it’s true. Everything has an opposite, right?”
“Sure.”
“Sometimes I get so fucking pissed, man, I just want to go crazy, you know?” Bernard looked at me and shook his head, as if the words bothered him more than they ever could me. “I want to say fuck it and just smash everything, smash everybody because none of it matters anyway. You do what you do and the world keeps going, nothing stops. If it mattered—if there was a point, it would—it would stop. It’d stop and take fucking notice. But it doesn’t.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze then shook him gently, playfully, and let him go. “Everybody feels like that sometimes, dude, don’t worry about it.”
Bernard’s eyes blinked slowly, slightly distorted behind thick glass. “I’m not worried,” he said. “One of these days I’m gonna snap, Al, and when that happens somebody’s gonna get hurt.”
Normally I would’ve teased him for making such a statement, but I let it pass and remained quiet, like I believed him.
“Hurt bad,” he muttered.
Just Bernard being Bernard. Couldn’t fight a lick, intimidated no one. Talking tough but never able to back it up. He was angry and frustrated and missed his dog, so I let him be. I let him be whatever he said he was.
“You ever think that maybe God’s just fucking with us?”
“He definitely has a twisted sense of humor.” I laughed dutifully.
“I’m serious.”
“Life sucks sometimes, that’s just how it is.”
“I think I like the Devil better.”
“You shouldn’t say shit like that, man.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“No it’s not.”
Bernard shrugged. “At least with him you know where you stand.”
“Oh yeah?” I elbowed him, doing my best to lighten the mood. “You been talking to him lately?”
“Sometimes I think I hear him talking to me.”
“Shut up!” I chased away a chill with another forced laugh. “Fucking whacko.”
Bernard offered a glimmer of a smile and pushed himself to his feet. “It’s gonna storm.”
I stood up, brushed the dirt from the seat of my pants.
“You think when you die you get to see other people who died first?” he asked.
“I think you do, yeah.”
“How about animals?”
“Sure. God made them the same as people, why wouldn’t they have a soul too?”
Bernard thought about what I’d said for a moment, his eyes again focused on the fresh dirt in the field. “I think you’re right.”
“I’ll bet you anything Curly’s running around in Heaven right now, knocking over garbage cans and eating everybody’s trash.”
“Maybe we got it all backwards,” he said softly. “Maybe none of us really start living…until we’re dead.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
As we left, a gentle rain began to fall.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ventured to that part of the tracks, and now, all these years later I sat in my car across the street from the animal burial ground and watched the goings on up to and beyond the yellow police tape. On the seat next to me was the newspaper from the evening before, the headline of which described the grisly discovery a town worker had made in the early morning hours. A body—nude, mutilated and partially decomposed—had been left amidst the field containing the bones of generations of animals in a shallow grave that had given way with the change of season. The worker had noticed something he could not immediately identify protruding from the earth, and upon closer inspection, realized it was the foot and calf of a human being. The article and subsequent television reports revealed that the body was that of a young woman who had been dead for a number of weeks, but her identity had not yet been established. State police investigators, who were scouring the field and surrounding areas, had joined the local police force, and a flood of media people had converged on Potter’s Cove to cover the event.
There had only been three murders in town in the last two decades. A teenager had shot his former best friend with his father’s handgun. A woman who had endured years of physical abuse took a hammer to her husband’s head one night after he’d passed out drunk, and a man known by police to be a drug dealer had been executed gangland style in an alley downtown. Those had been the most infamous killings Potter’s Cove had ever seen, until now, and those cases were cut and dry, easy to close. This was different.
And it was only the beginning.
Although the body had already been removed, a throng of people still filled the surrounding streets, milling about behind the police tape like fans huddled near a stage door awaiting a glimpse of a rock star. At the far end of one group, standing near the curb, arms folded and brow knit, stood Donald. In the past two weeks I hadn’t seen much of him or Rick, had only spoken to them on the phone a few times, in fact, as being apart was somehow easier for the time being.
Even though a few capsules remained on the anti-anxiety prescription, I’d stopped taking the pills several days before, and my head felt cl
earer, my senses sharper. Toni had retreated into a distant mode, and I honestly couldn’t blame her, as I’d not even attempted to look for work and had refused to discuss counseling or anything that had happened that night. Lately, I’d spent most of my waking hours thinking, remembering; searching my mind for anything that might lead me in the right direction. And I spent a lot of time driving aimlessly around town, as if hoping to find answers on the side of the road. Now I wondered how many times in the last few weeks I’d driven within a few dozen yards of where the body had been found. Cruel, really, the irony.
The frequency of the recurring nightmare had decreased somewhat, but the dark thoughts and strobe-like memory flashes of the night in the abandoned factory continued to haunt me with vicious consistency. I got out of the car, leaned against the side of the hood and stared at Donald until he noticed me. He was dressed for work, in a suit, but his tie was undone and hung loosely, giving him an unusually tousled look. The moment he saw me he walked across the street to my car.
“How are you?” he asked.
“How are you?”
It was a clear and pleasant day, but not terribly sunny. Donald removed his sunglasses long enough to paw at the dark bags under his eyes, then replaced them, concealing himself behind black lenses. “I got up, shaved, took a shower, got dressed for work as usual then called in sick and came here instead. I don’t even know why, exactly.”
“Sure you do.”
He joined me against the side of the car, pulled cigarettes and a lighter from his shirt pocket. “They haven’t released much about the victim yet.”
“Only that it’s a young woman.”
He rolled a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, left it there and returned the pack to his pocket. “Yes.” Cupping the flame, he lit the cigarette then snapped shut the lighter, his actions emphasized. “And that she’s been dead for weeks.”
“Are you still having the nightmare?” I asked.
His nod was barely detectable. “You?”
“Not as often as before.”
“Heard from Rick?” he asked.
“Not in a while.”
“He wants to get together at Brannigan’s later this afternoon. Four o’clock.”
I wished I could see his eyes. “I’ll be there.”
He took a few drags before he spoke again, the smoke slowly releasing through his nostrils. “Things are going to get worse, Alan.”
“Of course they are,” I said. “We’re damned.”
Face expressionless, he flicked his cigarette away. “Think so?”
“Don’t you?”
Without answering, Donald gave my arm a reassuring pat, moved back across the street and faded into the crowd.
CHAPTER 11
I drove down Main Street, left the festivities behind and turned onto Sycamore Way, a quiet tree-lined street that acted as a kind of palisade between Potter’s Cove’s largely commercially zoned working-class downtown and the beginnings of the middle and upper-class, exclusively residential neighborhoods to the north. The buildings on either side of the street were original town structures—historical landmarks all—restored but constructed in colonial times not long after the town itself was founded. Only a few were residences, the rest housed the town’s historical society, an art center and several small medical and law offices. Unlike the area I lived in, this part of town was clean and manicured and quaint. Here, Potter’s Cove was still more a small town than the burgeoning city it had become in the less affluent districts.
At the end of Sycamore I turned right onto Bridge Street and followed it slowly, reducing my speed to a creeping roll. Like everything else, the street had changed over time. Some new inexpensive homes had been built where small sections of woods had once resided, and many of the houses had been renovated, but for the most part it looked basically the same as it had years before when I’d grown up here. Bridge Street, named for the small wooden bridge built above a stream that cut across the very end of the road, was still a relatively poor neighborhood abutting the beginnings of more exclusive parts of town. The last outpost, the last street where houses weren’t quite as big, where cars weren’t quite as new and where people weren’t quite as well dressed, even after all these years, good bad or indifferent, Bridge Street summoned true feelings of home. Yet at the same time I felt strangely uncomfortable here as well. Familiarity, in this case, did not exclusively breed warmth and solace. I studied first the stretch of sidewalk where my mother had taught me to ride a bicycle, then the ancient stone wall where I’d had many a crash and where years later my friends and I congregated and spent hours talking, smoking cigarettes and hanging out. Despite these and a wealth of other landmarks that invoked fond childhood reminiscences, this hallowed ground also brought forth a great sense of uneasiness in me. Good and bad, even here, even amidst the perceived simplicity of the past, had melded into a single enigmatic entity.
Blinking away phantoms, I pulled over in front of our old house. I lived less than two miles away, but seldom returned here. Bridge Street was out of the way, a place people only went to if that was their destination, and it was rarely mine.
The house, a small single-story set back from the road had sat in the middle of a dirt lot when I’d lived there, but the dirt had been replaced by a lawn years ago, and instead of cracked and weathered shingles, the house now sported relatively new vinyl siding. Still, beyond the aesthetics, it basically looked the same. My old bedroom window was now dressed with lacey curtains, and I wondered who lived there these days. We had never owned the house, and after my mother’s death the landlord sold the property to another family. Since that time ownership had changed hands again, but I knew nothing of the current tenants. In fact, as far as I knew none of the families who had resided on Bridge Street at the time of my childhood were still there. Even smaller-town America had become transient it seemed, the days of families occupying homes for generations relegated to a nostalgic quaintness of yesteryear.
Hesitant to leave the false sense of security the car provided, I turned off the engine and looked to my left, further down the street toward the squat two-story house Bernard and his mother had lived in. Of all the houses on the street, it was the only one unoccupied, and since Bernard’s mother had died less than a year before, the only one still closely tied to the past. A modest two-story badly in need of a paint job, the windows were dark, the front yard unkempt and the driveway empty. Taken over by the bank, it had apparently sat unsold, empty and sealed shut since, and was well on its way to becoming the neighborhood eyesore. If it remained vacant much longer, the kids in the area would undoubtedly dub it the local haunted house—if they hadn’t already—never realizing just how near the truth they might be.
In her later years, Bernard’s mother had lost much of her beauty to the ravages of cancer. In and out of the hospital for months, eventually the doctors had admitted there was nothing else they could do for her, and she was sent home to die. Less than a month later, in the upstairs bedroom just to the right of the staircase, that’s precisely what she did. Bernard later told me he had been in the room when she died, that he’d held her hand and watched her take her final breath. I knew all too well what it was like to see that happen. My mother had died in my arms, gray skin stretched across a face I barely recognized, eyes sunken but open, awaiting things only dying eyes could comprehend. To watch your physical creator, the human being from whom you came, the literal flesh and blood vessel responsible for your conception and birth, wither and die, was something beyond explanation. Like soldiers who have survived the horrors of combat, you’d either experienced it or you hadn’t. You either understood what it was like, what it meant to be infected to your core by such things, or you didn’t.
She went quietly, he’d said desperately, as if determined to convince me. I don’t think she could even feel the pain anymore, she—she went quietly. His voice murmured to me from the past, sounding the same as it had through the phone line that morning. I’d told him how
sorry I was, and that I understood what he was going through.
I know, he’d said. That’s why I told you first.
The squeak of the car door echoed along the pavement as I stepped from the Pontiac. I made my way slowly along the sidewalk, waiting to cross until I was in front of Bernard’s old house. Memories ricocheted about—mostly blurs—but large chunks of the past remained elusive. Particularly those portions of the past tied directly to this street, this neighborhood, and this house. I had always assumed those uneventful periods in life simply faded and all but vanished over time because they held nothing of particular importance, but now I felt differently. As I approached the waist-high fence surrounding the backyard, it seemed a better bet that those things just beyond the grasp of memory had been forgotten deliberately, and not because they were unimportant, but because they held within them things too unpleasant to confront. Even now.
I felt the aged wood against my hand, pushed open the gate and stepped through into the side yard. The lawn was dead, a victim of winter, the parched brown grass accompanied by occasional patches of bare dirt scattered about like a sprinkling of landmines. As I moved deeper onto the property an unseen bird shrieked more warning than welcome from its perch somewhere within the half circle of lofty trees just beyond the fence in the backyard.
Several windows on the side and rear of the house had been broken or cracked by thrown stones, and someone had written Eat Me in spray paint along the back door. On the cement patio off the rear entrance sat the same lawn furniture that had been there the last time I had visited, days after his mother had died and only a month or two before the bank had seized the house. The white plastic table and chairs had faded and cracked in places, and one of the chair legs had been broken clean off and tossed aside. Next to a weather and time ravaged chaise lounge, several large garbage bags had been left in a neat row along the back of the house. Each bag had been filled to capacity, and I tried to imagine what they contained. The day Bernard lost the house he’d been served with a warrant and had been unable to retrieve many of his personal items still trapped within. I pictured workers gathering items—his items, his mother’s items—and stuffing them into those garbage bags.
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