The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  But as we headed to my apartment that night, life was good. Jeremy and I listened to the Twins game as we drove—at least I listened to it. Jeremy heard the game but couldn't follow it from one minute to the next. I chatted with him, explaining things about the game as we drove, but he would rarely respond. When he did, he stepped into the conversation as if he had just come in from another room. By the time we pulled off I-35, up near campus, the Twins were laying a walloping on Cleveland, having scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth to take a six-to-four lead. I whooped as each run scored, and Jeremy whooped in imitation of me, laughing at my excitement.

  When we arrived, I led Jeremy up the steps to my apartment on the second floor, his garbage bags in hand. We bounded through the door just in time to turn on the TV and watch the Twins throw the final out to win the game. I held my hand up to high-five Jeremy, but he was turning a slow circle, taking in the smallness of my apartment. The kitchen and living room were at opposite sides of a single space; the bedroom was barely bigger than the twin bed it contained; and my apartment had no bathroom, at least not within the confines of its walls. I watched as Jeremy scanned the apartment, his eyes covering the same territory over and over again, as though the next pass might expose a hidden bathroom door.

  “Maybe I need to go to the bathroom,” Jeremy said.

  “Come on,” I said, motioning to Jeremy. “I'll show you.”

  My bathroom was across the hall from my front door. The old house had originally been built in the 1920s to hold one of those large, turn-of-the-century families that gave birth at a pace to outrun infant mortality rates. It had been subdivided in the 1970s with a three-bedroom apartment on the main level and two single-bedroom apartments upstairs, with only one of the upstairs units big enough to have its own bathroom. So at the top of the steep, narrow stairway, the door to the right was my apartment, the door to the left was my bathroom, and the door straight ahead was the other second-floor apartment.

  I dug Jeremy's toothbrush and flavored toothpaste out of one of the garbage bags and headed across the hall to the bathroom with Jeremy following at a cautious distance. “This is the bathroom,” I said. “If you need to go, just lock the door.” I showed him how to flip the deadbolt.

  He didn't walk into the bathroom. Instead, he examined it from the relative safety of the hallway. “Maybe we should go back home,” he said.

  “We can't, Buddy. Mom's at her meeting. Remember?”

  “Maybe she is home now.”

  “She's not home now. She's not gonna be home for a couple days.”

  “Maybe we should call her and see.” Jeremy began rubbing his thumbs across his knuckles again. I could see a slight tremor growing out of his anxiety. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder to try to settle him down, but that would only exacerbate his reaction. Jeremy's autism was like that.

  Jeremy turned toward the steps, contemplating their steep pitch, pressing his thumb even harder into the back of his hand, kneading the knuckles like bread dough. I moved to block Jeremy from the steps. He was taller than me by two inches and outweighed me by a good twenty pounds. About the time he turned fourteen he surpassed me in height, weight, and looks: his golden hair curled around his head with a Nordic swirl, where my dirty blonde hair stuck out like straw if I didn't tame it with a touch of hair gel; his jaw was square, with a boyish dimple on the tip, where my chin was forgettable; his eyes sparkled ocean blue when he smiled, where my eyes were the hazel of weak coffee. Despite having every physical advantage over me, he remained my “little” brother, and therefore susceptible to my influence. I stood a step below him, my hands on his biceps, easing him back, trying to turn his attention away from the stairs and back toward my apartment.

  Behind me, at the bottom of the steps, I heard the door to the foyer open and close, followed by the cadence of feminine footsteps. I recognized the sound of her footfall, having listened to her pass by my door every day now for the past month. I knew her only as L. Nash, the name on the piece of tape that crossed her letter box. She stood all of five feet two, with short, black hair that whipped around her face like water dancing off rocks. She had dark eyes, a pixie nose, and a chilly penchant for being left alone. She and I had passed each other many times in the hall or on the steps. When I tried to engage her in small talk, she smiled politely, responded appropriately, but never stopped—always doing her best to pass by my interruption without seeming rude.

  She paused halfway up the stairs to watch me holding Jeremy by the arms, physically preventing him from leaving. Jeremy saw L. Nash and stopped moving, dropping his eyes to the floor. I stepped to the side to let her go by, the walls of the stairway squeezing together as she passed, the scent of her body wash and baby powder brushing my nose.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” she returned, raising an eyebrow in our direction and walking the remaining few paces to her apartment door. I wanted to say something more, so I blurted out the first stupid thought that jumped into my head.

  “It's not what it looks like,” I said. “We're brothers.”

  “Yeah,” she said, as she turned the key in her lock. “I'm sure that line worked for Jeffrey Dahmer, too.” She stepped into her apartment and closed the door.

  Her quip left me dumb. I wanted to shoot back my own clever retort, but my mind had seized up like a rusty bolt. Jeremy didn't watch L. Nash like I did. He stood quietly at the top of the stairs, no longer rubbing his thumb to his knuckle. His emergency had passed. The stubbornness in his eyes had been replaced by fatigue, it being well past his normal bedtime. I guided him into the bathroom to brush his teeth and then to the bedroom, where I rolled my old television in so that he could watch his movie on the DVD player. Then I grabbed a blanket and settled onto the couch.

  I could hear Jeremy watching his movie, the familiar dialogue and music lulling him to sleep, distracting him from the insecurities of this new environment. Despite the drama at the top of the steps, I had to admire Jeremy for adapting as well as he did. Even small changes in his routine, like a new toothbrush or the wrong breakfast cereal, could knock him off kilter. But here he was, in an apartment he had never seen before, an apartment half the size of the one he called home, an apartment that didn't even have its own bathroom, falling asleep for the first time in a bed that didn't have a top bunk.

  I'd turned off my phone earlier in the evening to avoid the barrage of calls I expected from my mother, but now I pulled it out of my pocket, turned it on, and checked my missed calls. There were twenty-one calls from a number in the 507 area code, no doubt my mother calling from the detox center. I could just hear her screaming at me for shutting off my phone and for leaving her in detox and jail—even though I had no part in that decision.

  The first nine voice messages were from my mother:

  “Joey, I can't believe you'd treat your own mother like this—” [Delete]

  “Joey, I don't know what I did to deserve—” [Delete]

  “Well, now I know that I can't count on you—” [Delete]

  “I know I'm a terrible mother—” [Delete]

  “Joey if you don't answer your phone I'll—” [Delete]

  “You don't love me—” [Delete]

  “I'm sorry, Joey. I just wish I was dead. Maybe then—” [Delete]

  “You think you're some hot-shit college—” [Delete]

  “Answer your fucking phone—” [Delete]

  “Joe, this is Mary Lorngren from Hillview Manor. I just wanted to call and tell you that I spoke to Mr. Iverson about your project…and he has agreed to meet with you to discuss it. He wanted me to make it clear that he is not agreeing to do it, mind you. He wants to meet with you first. You can call Janet tomorrow to find out when is a good time to come by. We don't like to disturb the guests during their meal times. So, just call Janet. Bye-bye.”

  I turned off my phone, and closed my eyes, a slight smile creasing into my cheeks, absorbing the strange irony that I might soon be interviewing a savage murdere
r, a man who gave no thought to ending a young girl's life, a criminal who survived for more than thirty years in the worst hellhole prison in Minnesota, yet I did not dread that conversation nearly as much as I dreaded seeing my own mother again. Still, I could feel a wind at my back, one that I chose to see as favorable, one that I hoped would bring me a good grade in my English class. With my sails filled, I might be able to overcome my procrastination in starting the assignment. It never occurred to me, as I nestled on my couch, that such a wind might also be destructive. When I finally fell asleep that night, I did so wrapped comfortably in the belief that my meeting with Carl Iverson would have no down side, that our encounter would somehow make my life better—easier. In hindsight, I was at best naïve.

  Carl Iverson wasn't wearing shoes when they arrested him. I know this because I found a picture of him, barefoot, being led past the remains of a burned-down shed toward a waiting squad car. His hands were cuffed behind his back, his shoulders slumped forward, a plain-clothed detective holding one of his biceps and a uniformed officer holding the other. Iverson wore a simple white t-shirt and blue jeans. His dark, wavy hair was pressed into the side of his head as if the cops had just pulled him out of bed.

  I found this picture in the bowels of the University of Minnesota's Wilson library, in a glass-walled archive where thousands of newspapers are stored on microfilm, some dating back to the days of the American Revolution. Unlike the rest of the library, where shelves were filled with stories of the heroic and the famous, the archive room held newspaper articles written by guys with pencils behind their ears and ulcers in their stomachs, articles written about everyday folk—the quiet people. They could never have dreamt that their stories would survive for decades, even centuries, to be read by a guy like me. The archive room had the feel of a tabernacle, with millions of souls packed away on microfilm like incense in tiny jars, waiting for someone to free their essence to be felt, tasted, inhaled again, if only for a moment.

  I began with a search for Carl Iverson's name on the Internet. I came up with thousands of hits, but one site had an excerpt from some legal document that referred to an appellate court decision regarding his case. I didn't understand all of the legal jargon, but it gave me a date when the murder took place: October 29, 1980, and it gave me the initials of the murdered girl: C.M.H. That would be enough information to find the story in the newspaper.

  I moved from task to task quickly, pressed into efficiency by my brother's unexpected presence in my life, and more than a little flustered at having one more ball to juggle. I found myself thinking about Jeremy and wondering how he was managing back at my apartment. I wondered if my mom's bail hearing would happen by Friday. I had to work at Molly's on Friday and didn't want to go to work and leave Jeremy alone. I needed to get him back to Austin before the weekend. Molly would almost surely fire me if I had to miss work again.

  I'd woken Jeremy that morning before I left for school, poured him some cereal, pulled the TV back into the living room, and showed him again how to use the remote. Jeremy was eighteen years old, so it's not that he couldn't pour his own cereal. Yet the unfamiliarity of my apartment would likely have befuddled him. He would go hungry rather than open a strange cupboard door to look for food. I considered skipping my classes that day, but I had already lost too much time procrastinating. I laid out some of Jeremy's favorite DVDs and told him that I would be back in a couple hours. I hoped that he would be okay being alone for that short time, but my concern was growing with every passing minute.

  I went into the microfilm stacks, found the reel for the Minneapolis Tribune for October 29, 1980, slid it into the reader, and scanned the front page for the story. It was not there. I moved to the following pages and still found no mention of a murder, at least not one that involved a fourteen-year-old girl or the initials C.M.H. I read the entire newspaper and came up blank. I leaned back in my chair, ran a hand through my hair. I was starting to think that the date in the court opinion was wrong. Then it dawned on me. The story would not have made the paper until the next day. I rolled the spool forward to the next day's edition. The top story for October 30, 1980, was a half-page article about a peace treaty between Honduras and El Salvador. Beneath that I found the story I was looking for, a story about a girl murdered and burned in Northeast Minneapolis. The article ran down a sidebar beside a picture of a fire. The picture showed firefighters shooting water on what appeared to be a shed about the size of a single-car garage. The flames shot skyward a good fifteen feet above the roof, suggesting the photographer had snapped the picture as firefighters were just beginning their efforts to extinguish the flames. The article read:

  Human remains found in Pierce Street blaze

  Minneapolis police are investigating after charred human remains were discovered yesterday in the debris of a burned tool shed in the Windom Park neighborhood of northeast Minneapolis. Firefighters responding at 4:18 p.m. to reports of a fire in the 1900 block of Pierce Street N.E., arrived to find the tool shed engulfed in flames. Police evacuated neighboring houses while firefighters battled the blaze. Fire Marshal John Vries reports that investigators combing through the debris discovered a charred body amid the rubble. The body has not yet been identified. Police have not ruled out foul play.

  The article went on for a few more paragraphs with unimportant details about the estimated damage and the reaction of neighbors.

  I printed a copy of the page and then spooled through the microfilm to the next day's edition. In a follow-up article the police confirmed that the body found the day before had been identified as fourteen-year-old Crystal Marie Hagen. The body had been badly burned, and authorities suspected that she had already been dead when the fire was set. The burned-out shed was located next door to the house where Crystal had lived with her mother, Danielle Hagen; her stepfather, Douglas Lockwood; and her stepbrother, Dan Lockwood. Crystal's mother, Danielle, told reporters that they had noticed that Crystal was missing shortly after word spread that a body had been discovered in the debris of the shed. Crystal was positively identified as the deceased using dental records. The article ended with the note that thirty-two-year-old Carl Iverson had been taken into custody for questioning. Iverson lived next door to Crystal Hagen and owned the shed where Hagen's body was found.

  Next to this article I found the photograph of the two officers arresting a barefooted Carl Iverson. Using the knobs on the microfilm reader, I enlarged the picture. The two cops wore coats and gloves, in contrast to Iverson's t-shirt and jeans. The uniformed officer had his gaze set on something behind the photographer. From the hint of sadness in his eyes, I speculated that he might have been looking at Crystal Hagen's family, as they watched the arrest of the monster that killed and burned their daughter. The plain-clothed cop had his mouth open, his jaw slightly crooked, as if he were saying something, maybe even yelling something at Carl Iverson.

  Of the three men in the photo, only Carl Iverson looked at the camera. I didn't know what I was expecting to see in his face. How do you hold yourself after committing murder? Do you strut as you walk past the charcoal-black aftermath of the shed where you burned her body? Do you wear a mask of nonchalance and pass by the ruins with no more interest than if you were walking to the corner store for some milk? Or do you flip out with fear, knowing you've been caught, knowing that you've breathed your last measure of freedom and will spend the rest of your life in a cage. When I zoomed in on Carl Iverson's face, on his eyes as he looked at the photographer, I saw no pride, no false calm, and no fear. What I saw was confusion.

  There is an odor that permeates old apartment buildings. When I was a kid, I noticed its effect on the people who came by to visit my mother's apartment, that split second of corruption as the taint of decay hits them square in the face, the twitch of the nose, the flutter of blinking, the reining in of the chin. When I was little, that mustiness was what I thought all homes smelled like. Not scented candles or fresh-baked bread, but dirty sneakers and unwashed dishes. By the
time I was in junior high, I found myself looking away in embarrassment any time someone came to the door. I swore that when I grew up and got my own apartment, I would get one that smelled of old wood, not old cats.

  As it turned out, that was not easy to do on my budget. The triplex apartment building I lived in had an ancient cellar that breathed dankness up through the floorboards, filling the structure with a pungency born of wet dirt mixed with the tang of rotting timber. The odor was strongest immediately inside the common front door where our letter boxes were bolted to the wall. Within that foyer, the steps to my apartment rose to the right, and to the left a door led to the main-floor apartment where a Greek family, the Kostas, lived. Sometimes the aroma of rich cooking spices seeped through that door, mixing with the cellar funk to overwhelm the senses.

  I made a point of keeping my apartment clean, vacuuming weekly, washing dishes after every meal; I'd even dusted once in the short time that I had lived there. I wasn't a clean freak by any stretch. I simply refused to let my apartment succumb to its natural state of entropy. I went so far as to plug an air freshener into an electric socket that pumped out spurts of apple and cinnamon to welcome me home every day. But what caught my attention that day, as I walked through my door, wasn't the pleasantry of the artificial air freshener; it was Jeremy sitting on my couch beside the girl I knew only as L. Nash, and they were giggling.