by Lee Martin
“Something to do with Dewey?”
“I expect so.”
“You should stay here. You’ll give something away.”
I shake my head. “It’ll look funny if I don’t go, like I’ve got something to hide.”
For a moment, I’m tempted. Then I have to admit to myself that I’m curious, not only to know what Duncan’s found but also to see what it’ll mean to me. I tell myself that maybe what I see won’t matter at all, that I’ll be able to look at it the way I would if it were something from one of Duncan’s It’s Us stories—something about someone else—and I’ll walk out of that annex finally free from that part of my life.
The phone rings, and it’s Arthur calling up to say he’s going over to the state park to have lunch at the Lakeview Inn and he wants to know if I’d like to come along. I tell him, no, not this time. I tell him my brother’s still here, and I wouldn’t be a very good host, would I, if I left him here all alone?
“Hell’s bells, Sammy,” Arthur says. “Bring him along. Three old sailors on shore leave. No one to answer to. We’ll have a ball.”
I tell Arthur, maybe next time, and I’m surprised by the twinge of regret I feel. Imagine—me, the old stay-at-home, just a wee bit sad to miss a chance to chum around with Arthur. Why shouldn’t I say yes? I have Cal’s shopping to do at Wal-Mart, and I’m afraid that if I take the time for lunch with Arthur and then come back to town to do that shopping, Cal will get fed up with me, and I’ll come home and find him gone (if it happened once, it can happen again), and I can’t bear the thought of that. Once, when the only picture I had of him in my head was the way he looked when he was a young buck, all jazzed up and full of himself, it was easy enough to think, wherever he was, he was doing well. But now that I’ve seen him as an old man—now that I’ve felt the sadness he carries with him—I can’t bear to think of him alone, getting rotten and wheezy inside his skin.
“You know, Sammy,” Arthur says. “Folks have been asking about you.”
It cheers me to hear this, to know I’ve become the sort of person people would miss. “Folks?” I say.
“Some of the boys from the Seasoned Chefs. No one in particular.”
And just like that I feel unremarkable. “Then why mention it?” I say, my voice sharper than I intend.
“Jeez, you don’t have to be a sourpuss. Did you ever think maybe I miss having you around?”
“Do you?”
“Aw, jeez, Sammy, are you going to make me say it?” There’s a long silence, and I refuse to fill it. I simply wait. Finally, Arthur says, “Okay, I’m hanging up now. I mean it, Sammy. I’m not going to say it. You can wait all you want, but I’m not saying another word. Honest to God. Not one more word. Sammy? Sammy, are you still there?”
“I’m here,” I say.
“Good. That’s good,” he says, and then he hangs up the phone.
AFTER BREAKFAST, PEOPLE START COMING TO SEE STUMP’S house. Ever since the It’s Us story ran in the Daily Mail, this happens from time to time. Some folks even come to my front door and leave Christmas presents for Stump: chew toys, dog biscuits, things like that. He graciously accepts them with a sniff and a lick.
“Looks like you’re making out all right,” I tell him.
We stand just inside the front door, and I bend over to scratch around his ears. He whimpers with delight.
“Lots of traffic around here,” Cal says. Then he goes back into his bedroom and shuts the door.
I don’t tell him how much it thrills me to see the people come, to have them chat a while.
It’s one of those bright winter days with lots of sun, and I let Stump out in the yard. He climbs the gangway to the deck of his ship. I go out to chat with the folks who keep stopping by, to accept gifts if they’ve brought any, so they won’t come to my door and cause Cal concern.
Finally, it’s close to ten, and I tell Cal I’m going to meet Duncan, and, when I’m done, I’ll do the shopping at Wal-Mart.
“It’ll be too late for a roast,” he says, and I just let him say it, and then leave him to stir in his own juices.
Uptown, the pine tinsel is wrapped around the streetlight poles; overhead the giant tinsel stars and candles sparkle in the sunlight. The time and temperature sign at the First National Bank reads 10:06, 32 degrees. Exhaust steams out of the tailpipes of cars idling in parking spaces by the Daily Mail office, and a woman in black slacks and a bright red sweater hurries into the post office. I take my coin purse from my pocket and fish out a quarter for the parking meter. It cheers me to think of myself as a law-abiding citizen with change for the meter and a careful attention to time. If not for everything swirling around me—Cal’s story, and now this summons from Duncan—I’d be tempted to fall in love with this glorious day.
Duncan is waiting by the front counter, where a woman wearing white squirrel earrings types away at a computer. Then the phone rings, and she answers it. “Merry Christmas.”
Duncan looks at his watch. “Mr. Brady,” he says. He has his coat on, a quilted blue jacket, and a sock hat, black and orange striped. He’s ready to go, and I know he’s been thinking I wouldn’t come. “It’s almost ten after,” he says.
“And I’m here,” I tell him.
“So you are. All right, then. Let’s go.”
We walk across Whittle, around the south side of the courthouse and then at Kitchell we turn to the south and walk the half block to the police annex, an old stone-block building, bars still on the windows. All the way, we don’t say a word. Then here at the door to the annex, Duncan turns to me and says, “I was stunned when I came across this. I’m working on a story about the annex and the officer who catalogs the things they keep in the basement. I had no idea what I was about to find.”
We go into an office on the first floor, and a woman with glasses on a chain around her neck says to Duncan, “Back to look around some more?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer. She opens a drawer at her desk and hands him a key.
In the basement, he unlocks the door to a small room, snaps on an overhead light, an old fluorescent ring, and we step inside. Shelves line the walls, and they’re stacked with cardboard cartons. Duncan finds the one he’s after and sets it on a wooden table in the middle of the room. He takes off the lid.
“Go on,” he says. “Look.”
I stand over the box and look inside. The room smells of the stone walls—the damp and the must—and the stink of mildew comes from the box itself and what lies inside: even though they’re tattered and torn, I know I’m looking at a pair of dungarees; a T-shirt with blue and yellow stripes; a pair of black high-top Keds sneakers, the white rubber toes scuffed and worn; a brown leather belt studded with silver-plated conchos the size of nickels; and a locking buckle, a treasure chest that has to be undone with a key before the buckle will open. I know that’s the case because this belt was the most prized possession that Dewey Finn ever had. The underside of the belt is zippered, like a money belt, and he kept the key in a leather pouch right beside the buckle.
“They’re his,” I say, and my voice breaks. I recognize too late to do anything about it that Duncan has taken note of how shaken I am to be here looking at these clothes, the shirt and dungarees ripped and stained with what I know is Dewey’s dried blood.
“That’s right,” says Duncan. “Dewey’s. The clothes he was wearing that day at the tracks.”
“So you know how it happened?”
“I’ve read the newspaper report.”
I remember the story on the front page of the Daily Mail and the banner headline, LOCAL BOY KILLED AT B & O TRESTLE. A photographer had taken a picture of the train, the National Limited, after it finally came to a stop that evening. Readers of the paper could look at the engine head-on, the way Dewey would have, if indeed he turned his head and saw the train take the curve and bear down on the trestle. He was lying across the tracks, the article said. Dewey Finn, age fifteen, of Rat Town.
For a good while, I can’t say anythi
ng. It’s like I’ve traveled back fifty years, and I don’t have any more idea what to say now than I did when Hersey Dawes came to tell the story of Dewey lying down on the tracks.
“I’ve got no idea why he did it,” I finally say.
“That’s not why I asked you to come here.” Duncan is nearly whispering, and I remember the way people, not knowing what in the world to make of such a thing, spoke in low, halting tones at Dewey’s funeral. “I thought you’d want to see this because Granny Nancy told me you and Dewey were close. Closer than just friends.”
I ignore the insinuation. “He lived next door.”
Duncan reaches into the box and lifts out the concho belt. He holds it across his palms and away from his body as if it’s a snake. “This is quite a belt,” he says. “I wonder why someone cut it. Something to do with the accident, I suppose.” I see now that the belt has indeed been severed. The tongue still fits into the buckle, which is locked, and the other end of the belt is ragged from whatever blade cut it away. “What I’m trying to figure out,” Duncan says, “is how this buckle opened in the first place.”
“There was a key,” I say, remembering Dewey thrilling to how mysterious this all was. I show Duncan the underside of the belt, where the leather is split, its seam barely noticeable. I part it, and find the hidden zipper. “This pouch,” I say. “That’s where Dewey kept the key.”
Duncan puts his finger into the pouch and wiggles it around. “It’s not there.”
“It was just a little key,” I say. “A little gold key.”
“Who knows where it might have ended up?” Duncan lays the belt back in the box. “Imagine my surprise when the police chief told me there were still items stored over here, you know, things from past cases, and I found this box clearly labeled with Dewey’s name and the date he died.”
He shows me the lid, labeled with black marker, and I have to ask the next question. “Why would these things be here? Why didn’t Dewey’s parents take them, or why weren’t they kept at the funeral home? Why the police?”
Duncan puts the lid down on the carton. “I guess they were looking into it at one time. There’s a coroner’s inquest, you know.”
I remember that indeed there had been an inquest. “That’s regular procedure when there’s a suicide.”
“Or when there’s foul play.”
Just a few hours ago, I convinced myself I could come here and look at whatever Duncan had to show me and feel distant from it as if it didn’t mean anything to me at all, but now I see it was all bluff on my part. It takes me a while before I can find a voice steady enough to speak.
“The inquest ruled it was suicide. I remember that distinctly. He lay down on those tracks.”
“Right,” says Duncan. “The inquest. I’ve read it, you know. I’ve studied the attending physician’s report about the wounds to the body, and something doesn’t add up, Mr. Brady. The wounds ran vertically down Dewey’s body—skull to chest to pelvis. To my way of thinking, that shows he was lying parallel to one rail and not horizontally across the ties the way someone would if he wanted to kill himself.” He stops there and looks at me for a long time, waiting, I’m sure, for me to agree with him. When I don’t say anything, he says, “These things were probably being stored until the inquest was finished. Then, for whatever reason—maybe the family just couldn’t bear to have them back—they got put away here, and then all those years went by, and here we are, aren’t we, Mr. Brady?”
I look him straight in the eye. “I don’t know anything about the condition of Dewey’s body or what it might mean. It was a horrible accident, one that never should have happened, and that’s all I know about it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to be going. I told my brother I’d do some shopping for him. He wants to make a pot roast.”
“All right, then,” Duncan says. “I hope you didn’t mind me showing you these things. I hope it didn’t upset you too much.”
“I’m fine,” I tell him. Then I turn to go.
Before I reach the door, Duncan says, “I bet Dewey got a kick out of that belt buckle. I doubt there’s many others like it.”
“One of a kind,” I say. Then I tell him good-bye.
IT TAKES A LONG TIME BEFORE I CAN BRING MYSELF TO start my Jeep and go on with my day because now that I’ve seen those clothes and that belt, all I can think of is the evening Dewey and I were walking down the alley that ran behind our houses, and he took my hand. That was all. He took my hand and held it while we walked. “Sammy,” he said, “you’re a pal.” We were fifteen. We thought we’d be friends forever. But he took my hand. Then, at my back door, he leaned over and kissed me on the lips, and I let him. “Sammy, sweetheart,” he said, and then he slipped off into the dark.
Sometimes, I close my eyes and dream myself back to that night. I feel the heat of his skin. I can still call to mind the way that alley in Rat Town seemed all at once a frightening and wonderful place. I had no words for it, the way I felt. All I could do was go on into my house and sit there alone in the dark and try to tell myself I wasn’t the boy Dewey thought I was, wasn’t like him, wasn’t his sweetheart.
I was scared to death because he knew the inside of me, knew it before I did. It was a wrong thing to be, a boy who liked other boys the way he was supposed to like girls. I knew that, growing up in Rat Town where men like my father and my brother ragged anyone they thought didn’t have enough lead in his pencil, called him a pantywaist or worse, called him a fairy or a queer, asked him who he was cornholing. You have to understand that I would have done anything not to be the boy Dewey somehow knew I was.
Then Cal told me that he saw us. That night in the alley. He saw Dewey take my hand. He saw that kiss.
He came into my bedroom one evening shortly after, and he said, “What’s the story?”
“Story?” I said, not knowing yet that he’d seen what he had.
“You and your girlfriend.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Looked that way to me out there in the alley.” I was sitting on the side of my bed. Cal put his hands on my knees and leaned in close to my face. He puckered his lips and kissed the air between us. “Sure looked like love,” he said. “Sure did, Sammy sweetheart.” Then he slapped my cheek, not just a pat the way he did sometimes when he wanted to get my attention, but a smack hard enough to make my eyes sting. “Hey,” he said, “you asleep?”
FINALLY, I START MY JEEP, AND I DRIVE OUT TO WAL-MART, where I take my time. I let my slow parade up and down the aisles, the shy nods to the folks around me, bring me back to the world of the living. I find the things on Cal’s list—the boneless chuck, the carrots and celery and potatoes, the olive oil and garlic cloves and oregano—and I let the time passing take me farther and farther away from that room in the police annex and those things of Dewey’s that, though I didn’t let Duncan know this, cut me to the bone.
When I come home, the sun is almost gone, and I know it’s too late for Cal to make that roast for our supper.
When I open the kitchen door and step inside, I hear his voice coming from the living room. At first I think he must be talking to Stump, but, no, Stump is waiting by the refrigerator, eager for his duck and potato.
“Zwilling?” Cal says, and hearing the name of the man from that grain elevator in Ohio draws me up short and gives me the whim-whams. Is Cal saying it to me? Is he expecting Herbert Zwilling, or is that man—I remember his beefy face from the picture on the television—standing in my living room right now? “Zwilling, you still there?” Cal says. “I thought I lost you. No, it’s this damn phone. The battery’s going down.”
I understand then that he’s talking on his cell phone.
“Don’t threaten me,” he says, his voice rising. “Just let me take care of things.”
I’m not sure what I’ve heard. I want to say it’s nothing, only an ordinary conversation, but I fear that Cal hasn’t told me the whole story about him and Leonard Mink and that plot to blow up the Sears Tower,
and now here’s Cal talking to Herbert Zwilling, talking to him with heat in his voice, and the promise to take care of things. I can’t get it out of my head or ignore the way this all makes me feel, as if I’ve stepped into the middle of something I’m not meant to know.
Stump, tired of waiting for his duck and potato, barks. I slam the door closed, stomp my feet on the rug, make a big show of coming home. Then I call out, “It’s me.”
Cal doesn’t answer right away, and the silence spooks me as if he’s using it to gather himself, wondering how much of his conversation I’ve heard. I’m afraid to move. This conversation I’ve overheard—it’s changed everything between Cal and me for reasons I don’t even know.
“I’m in here, Sammy,” he finally says, and what else can I do but walk into the living room where he sits on the couch, a handgun—the Ruger Single Six, I suppose—resting in his lap.
9
BEFORE I CAN SAY A WORD TO HIM ABOUT WHAT DUNCAN showed me at the police annex and the things he said about the coroner’s inquest, Cal snaps the cylinder of the Single Six shut. “They’ve been coming,” he says. Spread out on the coffee table is a section of newspaper and on it he has what he’s needed to clean the Single Six: swabs and solvent and brush and small patches of white cloth and 3-in-One oil. “Coming all the while you’ve been gone.”
I stand in the archway that separates the kitchen from the living room, afraid to move, afraid to take my eyes off that gun.
He tightens his hand around the grip.
“Who?” I ask him. “Who’s been coming?”
“People.” He raises the gun and uses the barrel to scratch his chin. “They’ve been knocking on the door, coming around the house, putting their faces up to the windows. I don’t know who they were. I just know they were nosing around.” He gets up and comes over to where I’m standing. He has the Single Six in his hand. He taps the barrel against my chest as if he holds nothing more than a pencil. “I didn’t know what to make of all those people,” he says. “I just knew I wasn’t opening that door.”
