Bones are Made to be Broken

by Anderson, Paul Michael

  He poured himself another drink and knocked it back, then poured again. I drank with him. My thoughts were getting foggy, but I didn’t feel drunk.

  Finally, I said, “Why are you telling me this?”

  He looked at me; actually looked at me.

  I wished he hadn’t.

  Red and wet and dead and damned, they were the eyes of a man trapped.

  “You don’t see it, David?” he asked. “They saved me.”

  And I started to see it; a closed-off part of my mind opened and I could hear the Talking Heads playing “And She Was” in the distance, nearly submerged over the sound of a car engine, all of it echoing and warping off cinderblock walls, hear Billy’s voice, “Fuck you, David! Wake up, man—wake the fuck UP—”

  I shut the memory off. I didn’t want to relive that.

  My eyes met Billy’s.

  He half-nodded, as if he saw something on my face.

  “What does this have to do with where you’ve been?” I asked. I pointed to the blood on his ear. “Or that?”

  “Because they’ve been waiting for me,” he said.

  Five weeks taught me a lot about my friendship with Billy Kinson.

  I daily drove by his crackerbox of a house, wanting to see his car in the driveway.

  Then I’d go home, park in front of my garage—never in it—and go into the house that had become more of a shrine to my dead wife than I cared to admit. I’d go in, where her clothes still hung in the closet, where the hood over her sewing machine still rested. Where the books in our bedroom bookcase were still divided his-and-hers and where her makeup on her dresser grew older and more antique. I’d go in and wait for the call from the one person who’d been there when Maggie passed six years prior.

  Five weeks.

  I went to the police to file a report the second week. It went less than splendidly. The reporting officer stared at me with barely disguised disgust, as if I was some fey lover looking for his wayward Romeo. He pointed out—and I, logically, knew—that Billy was a grown man who’d given notice.

  But the cop hadn’t seen Billy’s face in the teacher’s lounge.

  But the cop didn’t live in the museum I did.

  Five weeks.

  And then Billy called. And then Billy showed up with blood on his face and a dead look in his eyes and his story of accidental saving in a slaughter.

  The night stretched on. We drank. I was cold and seemed to get colder.

  “They don’t come back to tell their wives they loved them,” he said. “Or to show where Auntie Rose hid the Great Depression money in the walls. That’s all Hollywood bullshit.” He sipped his drink. Under the weak light, his face resembled a skull. “They have unfinished business.”

  “Why you?” I asked.

  “Because they saved me,” he said, refilling his drink. “It’s all about balance. The Chinese had it wrong when they said that the life you save becomes your responsibility. It’s the other way around. I owe them.”

  “They told you this?”

  Billy knocked back his rum. “I knew what I had to do to balance the scales and let them go.”

  “They hung around for you? They’ve been around all this time for you?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know where they’ve been since they died. That doesn’t matter—I see them now. And it isn’t me—it’s the business I have to settle for them.”

  I held my tumbler in both hands. I wanted to tell Billy maybe he wasn’t as over Vietnam as he thought. I wanted to tell him that the idea of ghosts in general was so much Hollywood bullshit.

  But I was cold and tapped out and I couldn’t think. Instead, I asked, “What did you do, Billy?”

  He refilled his glass and, with his skullface, stared out into the shadows. Was he seeing them then? Were they standing around us, watching? That was ridiculous.

  Finally, he told me of a house in Nebraska he burned down late one night, the house Brian Spuken’s brother-in-law had built with money he’d made by swindling Spuken’s father and selling family land to a pig combine. No one was home that night, but Billy didn’t mention if that would’ve stopped him.

  He told me of a long, surreal drive deep into Baltimore’s Combat Zone, following Daryl Espirito’s brother, an undercover officer. Billy had followed Espirito for three days at that point, shadowing his every move. Daryl Espirito’s brother had stolen Daryl’s first girlfriend, married her, and then subjected her to seven years of mental and physical hell before she finally escaped to Philadelphia. Now, sitting under a broken streetlamp, Daryl Espirito’s brother didn’t see Billy Kinson come up to the car, the switchblade he’d bought at a pawnshop curled in his hand to not reflect any light. Daryl Espirito’s brother didn’t see Billy until Billy was right beside him and, before he could react, Billy was stabbing through the open window, taking Daryl Espirito’s brother in the throat, the face, the shoulder, the chest.

  It was Daryl Espirito’s brother’s blood I’d seen on Billy’s face when he came home.

  “But why now?” I asked. “Why would they come now?”

  But of all the things he told me, he didn’t tell me that. He finished his drink and remained silent.

  The next morning, I awoke to fresh coffee and an empty house.

  I’d slept on his living room couch and rain continued to patter against the window above my head. My clothes felt stiff and uncomfortable. My sleep was dreamless and deep and utterly unrestful.

  I shuffled over to the kitchen table with the empty bottle of Captain Morgan still resting on it. Where I’d sat last night was a cup of coffee and a Stick-It note attached:

  SORRY,

  he’d written.

  I peeled the note off and stared at it. I replayed the conversation from the night before. A nervous breakdown. It was the only thing that made sense. I wasn’t going to entertain notions of ghosts and eternal balance. I taught Poe and Hawthorne but I had no intention of living it. He’d said it himself—what happened in Khe Sanh had twisted him so hard it’d taken years to get over. What if he’d never gotten over it? What if he’d just buried that twisting with distractions?

  Was there a smoldering ruin of a house in Nebraska, a corpse in a car in some dismal part of Baltimore?

  I left the coffee half-empty on the table.

  I made it to my house before delayed reaction set in. My knees unhinged beside my car and I kneeled on the wet cement like a Muslim praying, feeling the twitching nerves in my spaghetti legs, my Jell-O guts, the cold eke into my skin.

  My best friend since Maggie died, my anchor, had lost his mind. Billy Kinson was the reason I was still alive, still sane, still teaching. It’d be like a physicist learning that the Three Laws of Thermodynamics are so much fluff.

  I used the car to pull myself up and found myself staring at my garage. It was a stand-alone structure, joined with my house via a breezeway.

  I hadn’t gone inside for four years.

  I lurched towards it, remembering the warm envelope I’d been cocooned in, the soothing rumble of the car, the righteous beat of Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up.”

  I reached the door, looked in. It was an empty shell, the floor neatly swept. Billy had gone through, transferring what was useful to my basement, junking the rest.

  It was as serious as a suicide attempt can be when you’re in your late-fifties and your wife’s dead of ovarian cancer like some sick joke of a pregnancy, and you have no family left, no one to look forward to, no hope.

  I fumbled my keys out and unlocked the garage door. I opened it with a grunt and a squeal of hinges.

  Billy found me only because I hadn’t answered my phone and I’ve always been one who can’t bear to let a call ring out. When he’d arrived at the house, he’d seen the wisps of white smoke seeping under the bottom of the garage door.

  I stepped inside, footfalls echoing off cinderblock, smelling stale dust, old motor oil.

  He’d saved my life. I wasn’t healed from Maggie’s death—please see t
he museum I live in—but I’d been able to redirect my focus. Before, Billy Kinson had been a good friend. Afterwards, he became my best friend, the one I’d stop a bullet for because, in a way, he’d already done it for me.

  And now that man was an arsonist and a killer and off doing Christ knew what because he said four people saved his life and he owed them.

  He’d saved my life.

  Is that why he’d told me anything? But what had he told me, when you got right down to it? How much of it was practical? How much better off was I before I knew those things?

  He was gone again, and I was left waiting, smelling the stale air of my would-be tomb.

  I slumped down as Billy passed me, his headlights illuminating the interior of my car like a prison searchlight.

  I’d spent three days staked out on his street amongst the other cars of downtown shoppers, waiting for his return. I was spinning my wheels, but I didn’t know what else I could do. The police here would laugh at me and the police in Nebraska and Baltimore would think I was a twisted crank caller. I was stuck, like in those endless days leading up to when Maggie’s chest finally stopped rising in that damned hospital room.

  When my interior darkened again, I sat up and peered into the side-mirror. I watched Billy pull into his driveway, cut the engine, and get out. He let himself into his house.

  I slumped in my seat. Now what? Before, I’d waited on his stoop, but all it had done was lead me here. A very small but very strong part of me wanted to forget I’d even known Billy Kinson, but that’d be like trying to ignore the need to breathe. Billy was my life-line.

  Headlights suddenly re-illuminated my car, and I dropped down as if my driver seat was a trapdoor, my heart in my throat. I told myself it was just some other car—his street was drowsy, not soporific—but when I peeked through the side-window, I saw the trunk of Billy’s little Subaru passing me.

  I sat up a little more. He reached the red light at the end of his street and waited for the green.

  He could’ve been going out for food, or gas, or any of the mundane day-to-day things that seemed absurd in the current context.

  But in my heart of hearts, I knew what was happening. The last trip had taken care of the third of his four.

  This was to be the final trip.

  Decision time. Do I follow? Why had I staked his house for three days, if I was just going to let him go?

  The light turned green and Billy went through the intersection, passing the sign that marked the route to Interstate 79.

  I keyed the ignition and peeled out of the parking space with a squeal of tires. I passed the intersection at twice the posted limit.

  My body did the driving. The rest of me, the interior me, caterwauled—undecided, confused, helpless. What could I do? What couldn’t I do?

  I followed him onto the Interstate, busy with summer traffic in spite of the late hour.

  I followed him into darkness.

  How do I convey to this page the eternity of that three-hour trip? How do I express the constant, blood-pumping, nerve-singing, head-pounding agony of following Billy Kinson over two-hundred miles into Buffalo, New York?

  My thoughts and fears worked on me. I was treading in dark water where anything might be lurking beneath the surface. Billy Kinson, my best friend, had a breakdown and I was following him to a strange place for what could only be a horrible reason. How would he react if he caught me? What would I witness if he didn’t? What would I do?

  You’d think these thoughts would’ve kept me awake as midnight came and went, but nerves can only take so much constant stimulation. By one o’clock, my eyes burned. My arms felt weighted, my hands frozen into claws around the steering wheel. I salivated for coffee or even a Coca-Cola, but I didn’t dare stop because Billy didn’t.

  We entered Buffalo a little after two o’clock. Our arrival was less than auspicious. Arc-sodium lights signaled the end of the Interstate, but nothing else did. In the dark, Buffalo is a city of stout, ugly buildings with black windows for eyes.

  Billy took rights and lefts like he’d lived there all his life. We never entered downtown proper and never left the city limits. This went on for another hour. I felt like Dante, following an indifferent and ignorant Virgil into the inner circles of Hell.

  And then, into the second hour, I lost Billy.

  A part of me thought, all this way just to lose him now?

  Another part of me felt only relief. He was no longer my responsibility.

  I drove around, partly looking for Billy, partly trying to find my way back to the Interstate. I kept my speed low and read every street sign, trying to divine direction.

  As I paused to stop at the intersection of Geist and Sgaile, Billy’s Subaru cut me off and stopped.

  My heart might’ve been a model, stuck into the chest of a waxwork. Even the constant yammering chaos in my head stopped.

  He got out of the car, leaving it running, and came around.

  I wanted to leave. That instant of What was I doing here? I’d felt when Billy first came home was a mild suggestion to the fight-or-flight panic that roared through me. I wanted to jam the car into Reverse and stand on the gas pedal.

  But I was frozen.

  I watched him come towards me.

  I watched him stop beside my door.

  I watched him open it and hunker down.

  He stared at me and I stared back and it was like there was nothing and no one else in the world.

  “I think I know the answer,” he said, “but what are you doing here, Silva?”

  I opened my mouth. I think I opened my mouth. Nothing came out if I did.

  He inclined his head towards his Subaru. “There’s a parking space over there. Take it.” And, with that, he walked back to his Subaru. He got in and pulled forward enough for me to get through.

  There was no question of doing what he asked.

  I parked my car and got out and Billy pulled up beside me. I got in.

  “You can’t stop me, David,” he said as he drove away. In the light-dark-light-dark of the streetlights, he looked more haggard than ever.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said honestly. I glanced into the backseat, but it was dark and empty. Of course it was. The only ghosts were in Billy’s head.

  We made a number of turns, none of which I could follow if I tried. “Do you … see them now?” I asked.

  Another glance at me. “You think I’m cracked, don’t you?”

  I felt a flare of anger at that. “Look at it from my perspective, Billy. Jesus! Do you know how cracked you sound? You’ve killed, you’ve burned houses down, you’ve—what did you do the last time?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I wanted to slug him for the flat way he said that, the way he didn’t even look at me. “You’ve done all that because you saw fucking ghosts? And you have the balls to ask if I think you’re cracked?”

  I was shouting, but Billy didn’t even flinch.

  I made myself lower my voice. “You said it yourself—you went off the reservation when you got discharged. Don’t you think—can’t you consider—the idea that maybe, maybe, you’re still not well? You say you see the ghosts of the four people who saved your life. You said, when you got back to the States you tracked down these people’s families. Don’t you see how it makes sense? Guilt plus prior knowledge equals … whatever the hell it is you think you’re doing.”

  “I’m not ill,” he said. “And your arm-chair psychology sucks, David. I saw them—physically.”

  “It’s a delusion,” I said.

  That earned me a look—a shot of real anger. “It’s not a delusion, David.”

  “Then why now? You never answered that before. Why would they come back to balance the scales now?”

  “Because we’re here,” he said, and pulled over.

  I looked out the passenger window and realized we were parked in front of a large house atop a modest hill; the grass sloped gently down to the sidewalk, ha
lted by a tall iron-fence. A few scattered lights glowed in the house, not many.

  As Billy switched the car off, I said, “Stop, Billy. Don’t make this any worse. Think about what I said. A part of you must know this is true—I mean, you let me into the car with you.”

  “I wanted to know where you were so you couldn’t get in the way,” he said. He stared through the windshield. “This is real. This is happening. I see why you think this way, but you’re not seeing what I am. I didn’t choose the action, or the order, or the time frame. As I balance the books, they disappear. Everything they’ve told me, it’s all true. Go look it up, sometime. It’s in the papers.” He turned to me. “But this is happening now, David.”

  “I’ll scream,” I said. “I’ll wake the entire goddamn neighborhood up.” I felt for my pockets and pulled my Nokia out. “And I’ll call the cops.”

  He’d aged in the past two months, but he was still wickedly fast: before I could blink, he was heaving my phone out his door. It shattered in the street with a pathetic plastic cracking sound.

  When he turned back, his hand held the switchblade. The blade was the brightest thing in the darkened car, a thin slice of deadly silver.

  He’d cleaned Espirito’s blood off of it, of course.

  I couldn’t look away from it. The man who had kept me from killing myself had pulled a knife on me. All circuits are down; please call back later.

  “Don’t make me do something about you, David,” he said. “You’re my best friend but I won’t let you stop me.”

  He got out and the instant the blade was out of sight, I came back to myself and scrambled out of the car.

  He stopped in front of the hood. “Get back in the car.”

  “No.” My voice shook with my heartbeat. “You going to kill me?”

  He stared at me for a long moment, then started up the long front steps to the porch. I stared after him, then looked up at the house. It seemed to lean towards us with its narrow structure, its tall windows, its peaked roof.