Walking the Bones

by Randall Silvis

  Sitting in the corner on a lattice lawn chair facing the table saw was Friedl—a broad sagging face, large nose and fleshy ears, thin white hair parted on the side, thick hands and forearms. His height was difficult for DeMarco to judge but he guessed at six two or three, weight two fifty, a lot of it in the belly and hips. Clad in baggy chinos, a blue chambray shirt with sleeves rolled above the elbows, and a pair of brown Hush Puppies mall walkers, the chiropractor sat hunched forward over spread knees, reading glasses perched on his nose, hands spread three feet apart holding a large sheet of paper printed with what appeared to be a construction diagram.

  DeMarco rapped on the doorframe. Friedl looked up, removed his reading glasses, squinted at the figure in the late afternoon light.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” DeMarco said. “Your wife told me I would find you here.”

  Friedl rose from his chair with some difficulty, went to the radio, and turned the music off. To DeMarco he said, “Say that again.”

  DeMarco came forward pulling his wallet from a back pocket. “I’m Sergeant Ryan DeMarco,” he said, and flipped the wallet open to his credentials. He held it open for two more steps, then snapped it shut and pocketed it again. “I’m working with the state police and the county sheriff’s department.”

  Friedl blinked, folded the arms of his reading glasses, and laid them atop the stereo. Then he faced the worktable and pressed the heels of his palms against the rounded edge. “Working with them on what?”

  “I was hoping you could help me out with some information about your foreman, Todd Burl.”

  “Such as?” Friedl asked. His voice was not shaky but hesitant, with each statement preceded by a brief pause.

  “How long has he worked for you?” DeMarco asked.

  “Well, let’s see.” Friedl looked down at the table’s surface, flicked a curl of sawdust onto the floor. “He’s been here pretty much since the beginning. I started working on this place in the late nineties. I remember it was April. Seemed cold coming up from Alabama.”

  “And how did you happen to hire Mr. Burl?”

  Friedl stared at DeMarco, blinked once, then again. “What does this concern?”

  “The incident at the Baptist Church a few years ago.” DeMarco spoke evenly, watched carefully. A quick lift of Friedl’s eyebrows. A sniff.

  “What is it you think he’s done?” Friedl asked. But his eyes had gone unfocused; his gaze no longer met DeMarco’s.

  DeMarco said, “We don’t think anything, sir. We’re just gathering information.”

  Friedl stood motionless for several beats. Then he turned, moved back to his chair, hand trailing along the table. When he reached out to steady the chair and sit, his hand, DeMarco noticed, was not steady.

  “I came back from the realtor’s office the morning I closed on the sale,” Friedl said, “and he was up here wandering around. Introduced himself and said he’d heard I might be hiring a few people.”

  “And you hired him on the spot?”

  Friedl shrugged. “Saved me putting an ad in the paper.”

  DeMarco nodded, smiled, assumed a casual posture, hip against the table. “How well do you know Mr. Burl?”

  “I know he shows up on time and does his work. Meticulously, I might add. Very detail-oriented. He keeps things running as smoothly as they can.”

  “Would you say you have a friendly relationship with him?”

  “He works for me. We talk from time to time. That’s about as far as it goes.”

  “Do you trust him? Enjoy his company?”

  Friedl put his hands together, right hand gripping the fingers of his left. “I can’t say I understand what you’re getting at here, Sergeant.”

  “Would it surprise you to hear that allegations have been made regarding Mr. Burl’s honesty? That he was fired by his previous employer, Pastor Eli Royce, for possibly engaging in activities involving drugs and prostitution?”

  Friedl winced, squeezed his fingers. “It would indeed,” he said. He switched hands now, squeezed and pulled at the fingers of his right hand. “But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? People change their ways.”

  “Some do,” DeMarco said. “So when you hired him, you knew none of this?”

  “Other than the realtor and a lawyer, I didn’t know a soul in this town. He claimed to have experience as a general contractor, said he was looking to change jobs, do better for himself.”

  “You didn’t check his references?”

  “I took him at his word.” Now Friedl leaned back in the chair, squared up his shoulders, and blew out a little breath. “It’s possible I made a mistake, I suppose. My wife thinks I give people too much trust.”

  “Him in particular?”

  Friedl nodded. “She’s told me time and again. Gives her the willies, she says.”

  DeMarco studied him for a while. He seemed tired, slow-moving, weighed down by the resignation men his age often manifest. His posture had gone limp now, hands loose and quiet atop his belly. He reminded DeMarco of some of the farmers he had known up north, tired old men who had lived on hope their entire lives only to have that hope dashed season after season by too much rain or too little rain, too many pests, too many regulations—men facing foreclosure or cancer or lung disease or just another winter.

  When Friedl looked up again his eyelids were heavy, gaze almost plaintive. “Is that it?” he said. “We done here?”

  DeMarco said, “I’m curious, sir. What’s all this for anyway?” He waved his hand toward the open doorway. “All these buildings, all the expense you’ve gone to. Millions of dollars, I’m sure. Seems like a lot for two people. Why have you done all this?”

  Friedl’s head went from side to side. “Why’s a person do anything? Trying to prove something to himself, I guess. You’ve never felt the need to do that, Sergeant?”

  Every day, DeMarco thought.

  He stood away from the table. “I’m going to ask you not to mention this conversation to Mr. Burl,” he said. “Or to anyone else for that matter.”

  “That won’t be difficult,” Friedl told him.

  DeMarco was halfway to the pergola when the music started in the workshop again. “Summertime,” Sarah Vaughan sang, her tone strangely funereal, “and the livin’ is easy…”

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SIX

  “There’s something off about him,” DeMarco told Jayme. “He’s involved somehow. I’d bet my pension on it.” He was watching a stand of red pines go by as Jayme drove them off the estate. The security bar across the lane lifted as the vehicle approached.

  “I don’t want him to be involved,” Jayme said. “What will happen to her if he is?”

  “Think about this,” DeMarco said. “His wife is black. All the victims were black. Light-skinned blacks, all eight of them.”

  She nodded. “But she’s alive.”

  DeMarco shook his head. Then, “You had a closer look at her than I did. Was it just the way she was sitting, or…”

  “Some kind of spinal deformity. She was his patient. That’s how they met.”

  “None of the girls had a condition like that, did they? I don’t remember it being mentioned anywhere.”

  “We didn’t see the full forensic reports.”

  DeMarco shook his head again, thinking, wondering. “He’s a part of it. I know he is.”

  “Oh God,” Jayme said. “His wife is so sweet…so vulnerable.”

  DeMarco said, “We don’t get to decide these things.”

  They rode in silence for a while. Then Jayme said, “He brought her here in the spring of 2005. After they were married.”

  DeMarco turned from the window; stared at the side of her face.

  “It might just be a coincidence,” she said.

  “They’re starting to pile up.”

  “I’m going to pray that he’s not invo
lved. For her sake.”

  He leaned closer, laid a hand on her shoulder. “You never told me that you pray.”

  “More lately than usual.”

  He said, “I’d like to talk with you about that sometime.”

  “About praying?”

  “More like…to who?”

  “I’m not sure,” she told him.

  And he said, “Neither am I.”

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN

  That night, DeMarco awoke with a panicky feeling and reached for his phone to check the date. He had felt certain that yesterday was a Sunday but the phone told him otherwise. This disoriented him even more. Why was his heart thumping as if he had been running hard, chased by something unseen? And why Sunday?

  And then it came to him. He had already missed too many Sundays with Ryan Jr. He felt off balance. Needed to be close to his boy. His grave hundreds of miles away.

  He slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb Jayme. In boxers and a T-shirt he tiptoed downstairs in the dark, leaning into the bannister for stability.

  At the landing he paused, tried unsuccessfully to remember why he had come downstairs. Wondered if he was sleepwalking. Or had he heard a noise? Some kind of disturbance outside?

  He went to the front door, unlocked it, looked out into the 3:00 a.m. darkness. The night air felt sticky on his chest and arms and in direct opposition to the artificially cooled air now washing across his back. He stood there staring into the darkness without looking at anything in particular, just seeing it all as a huge, dark pool filled with houses and bushes and trees and lawns, with sleeping, oblivious people, any number of whom could be slaughtered in their sleep or killed on their way to work or school in the morning. He smelled the summersweet bushes but also the acrid stench of creosote. Light traffic could be heard out on the main street two blocks away, anomalous dull lights moving about here and there. Nothing was clearly visible, everything shrouded in darkness.

  The darkness conceals itself in itself, he thought.

  Jayme touched him gently at the waist, startling him so that he stiffened for a moment. Her hands slipped around his waist and she leaned against him, mouth close to the top of his spine. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  He said, after a while, “It’s all just an illusion out there.”

  “What is?” she asked.

  “This pretty little town. Every town. It might look fine from a distance but…not if you look up close.”

  “What do you see up close?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, and she wondered where he was going with this. Maybe he was still asleep. Caught up in a dream. “Are you okay?” she said.

  She felt him shiver, felt something tremble through him.

  He said, “Have you read Montaigne?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. What did he write?”

  “‘Here we sit upon the highest throne in the world, yet here we sit upon our own tails.’ Something like that.”

  “Meaning, I guess, that we’re all still animals?”

  Again he fell silent. She leaned her forehead against his back, slipped her hands around his belly.

  He said, “You know what I see when I look out there?”

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  “I see meth labs and crack houses. Men beating up their wives and girlfriends and kids. I see drunks driving cars…vermin raping little girls and little boys…politicians lying and snooping and selling us out right and left. The streets are full of them. Cockroaches selling drugs and guns and women and who knows what else.”

  “They’re not everywhere, baby. Plus there’s a lot of us trying to clean things up. Am I right?”

  He laid his hands atop hers where they pressed warm against him. “We’re losing,” he said.

  “No,” she told him. She pressed her mouth to his back, kissed the ridge of bone.

  “I never told you what I did in Panama,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Our helicopters lit up the sky like Christmas,” he told her. “It was Christmas. Midnight Christmas night. Missiles and bombs falling as thick as snowflakes. Three days of burning down whole neighborhoods and killing anything that moved. All to get rid of Noriega. He’d been on the CIA payroll for years by then, but now he wouldn’t cooperate anymore. Now he knew too much.”

  “About the CIA?”

  “And about why we were there. I didn’t even know why. Not until years later.”

  “You were a soldier. You did what you were told to do.”

  “We used flamethrowers,” he said. “Then threw the bodies into pits and buried them. They just melted when the flames hit. Faces, names, families…everything. Four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It all just melted into the ground.”

  She was shivering when he finished. Could feel the goose bumps on his skin too. She held him harder, pressed herself against him. “It must have been horrible for you,” she said. “But, baby,” she said, and wondered what she would say next, how to use mere words to extinguish the flames.

  “I know it’s hard to understand,” she whispered. “Why things happen the way they do.” Her arms tightened around him. “But you know what isn’t hard to understand?” she asked. “And never will be?”

  “What?” he said, his own voice now as hoarse as hers, his own throat thick.

  “What’s in my heart for you. And in your heart for me. That’s something beautiful and full of light. Nothing out there in the darkness can ever change that.”

  He nodded, but remained motionless. Out in the darkness a car horn shrieked, a dog barked. After a while a whip-poor-will began sounding its call, the short, sharp whistle and the long, fading trill.

  Jayme rubbed her hands up and down his chest. “Can we go back to bed now?” she said.

  A few moments later he turned and smiled. Put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her around. And followed her up the stairs in the darkness.

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT

  He slept only briefly and then was fully awake again. His legs ached with restlessness, and after stretching and flexing and bending them several times he finally gave up on sleep and eased himself out of bed. He needed to talk to someone. Needed information he wasn’t privy to. Information no minister or counselor had ever been able to provide.

  He dressed quietly and crept out of the bedroom, leaving both crutch and cane behind. Downstairs he rinsed his mouth at the kitchen sink. He wanted coffee but not as badly as he wanted something else.

  Ten minutes later he stood on the sidewalk outside Rosemary Toomey’s house, a motionless figure in the gray preceding dawn. The morning smelled of damp grass, of trees and summersweet and the stagnant humidity of a retreating night.

  He touched the button on the back of his phone, looked at the glowing screen. 5:49. Was it too early to knock?

  Old people get up early, he told himself. Or they sleep late.

  For once in his life, he could make no decision.

  And then the front door opened.

  She stood there in a fuzzy pink robe, feet bare. “Do you want to come in?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Come on then.”

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE

  She had him sit on the sofa, his left leg stretched out stiffly under the coffee table, his back to the wide window, the draperies open but the sheer curtains closed, so that only a meager light shone upon him.

  “I can make some coffee,” she told him, her voice as muted as the light.

  He shook his head no. “I’m sorry to disturb you like this.”

  She took a seat in the wing chair to his right, a small lamp table between them. “Just say what you came to say.”

  He tried to gather his thoughts. “Do you remember when you told me, first time you and I met? You said somebody was trying to get my
attention.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  “I’m thinking maybe…maybe that happened.”

  She waited for him to say more, but he only kept looking at her, his chin low, forehead knitted with creases.

  She opened the drawer on the end table, and drew out a wine-colored velvet bag. “Would you like me to read your cards again?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why did you come here, Sergeant?”

  “I don’t know if I believe in any of that. Don’t know if I even want to.”

  “Do you believe that your son has a soul?”

  “Did Jayme tell you that? About my son?”

  She smiled, though not apologetically. “She told her grandmother, and Louise told me. She was so looking forward to meeting you. You two would have hit it off, I’m sure of it.”

  He nodded. Felt his thoughts scattering again, as if the wild thrumming of his heart was shaking everything.

  “So you do?” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Do you believe that your son has a soul? You must. Why else would you sit by his grave every Sunday afternoon?”

  “And you got this from Louise as well?”

  She smiled. “Or from Jayme’s mother.”

  Half a minute of silence passed.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “You feel like it’s a violation, that I know things about you. But it’s okay. We’re not supposed to live in isolation, you know.”

  When DeMarco looked up at her again she was laying out the tarot cards along the edge of the coffee table.

  He said, “I wanted to think he could maybe see me somehow, sitting there beside him. Wanted him to know how much I missed him. How sorry I am for what happened.”

  He watched the cards go down in three sets. Watched as she studied them. She touched her index finger to a center card. “Something has changed for you. Where have you been?”

  His chest hurt. Head filled with congestion. “He was older. I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t understand what he said.”