The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  The judge said: “Is your name…? Do you live at…? Do you understand your rights? Counsel, does your client understand the charges?”

  “Yes, your honor, and we waive any further reading of the complaint.”

  “How do you wish to proceed?”

  “Your Honor, we waive the rule-eight hearing, ask that my client be released on his personal recognizance.”

  The judge would then set bail, giving each inmate the choice between paying a higher bail amount with no conditions or paying lower bail—or no bail at all—provided that they agree to abide by certain conditions set by the judge.

  When Mom took her turn before the judge, they went through the same back-and-forth, with the judge setting bail at $3,000, but then he continued with the second option. “Ms. Nelson you can pay the three thousand dollars, or you can be released on your personal promise to appear at all future hearings as well as the following conditions: keep in contact with your attorney, remain law abiding, no possession or consumption of alcohol, and be hooked up to an alcohol monitoring bracelet. Any use of alcohol will bring you right back to jail. Do you understand those conditions?”

  “Yes, your honor,” my mother said, looking absolutely Dickensian in her role as the pitiful soul.

  “That's all,” the judge said.

  Mom shuffled back to the line of people in orange, all of whom now stood up and started moving in chain-gang fashion toward the door that would lead them back to the jail. As she passed, Mom looked at me with a glare that would have been the envy of Medusa. “Come down to the jail and bail me out,” she whispered.

  “But mom, the judge just said—”

  “Don't argue with me,” she hissed as she left the court room.

  “And…she's back,” I muttered under my breath. I walked out of court, pausing on the sidewalk to ponder which way to turn, left to the jail and my mother or right to my car. The judge said she could leave; I heard him. All she had to do was not drink. A bad feeling crept through my veins, like poison from a snake bite. I wrestled with my decision, eventually turning left, overruling my urge to run.

  Entering the jail, I gave my driver's license to a lady behind bulletproof glass who directed me to a small room where another glass window separated me from the cubicle where they would bring my mother. A couple minutes later they brought my mother to the cubicle, now free of her handcuffs and shackles. She sat in a chair on the other side of the glass, picking up a black phone on the wall. I did the same thing, grimacing as I drew the phone up to my face, imagining the multitudes of unfortunates who had breathed into that receiver before me. It felt sticky.

  “Did you pay the bail?”

  “You don't need me to pay bail; you can get out on your own. The judge said so.”

  “He said I could get out if I did that monitor thing. I'm not doing no damn monitor.”

  “But you can get out for free; you just can't drink.”

  “I ain't doin’ no damn monitor!” she said. “You have enough money. You can help me out for once in your life. I can't take another minute in here.”

  “Mom, I barely have enough to make it through the semester. I can't—”

  “I'll pay you back for Christ sake.”

  Now we were getting into our own litany. When I turned sixteen, I got my first job changing oil at a garage in town. When I spent my first paycheck on clothes and a skateboard, Mom threw a fit so fierce that the upstairs neighbors called the landlord and the cops. After she settled down, she forced me to open a savings account; and, because a sixteen-year-old can't open an account without a parent, they put her name on it as well. For the next two years she borrowed money from that account whenever she ran light on the rent or her car needed fixing—always with the empty promise that she'd pay me back but never doing so.

  The day I turned eighteen, I opened my own account in my name alone. Without direct access to my money, she had to switch her tactic, moving from theft to blackmail because, after all, living in her house and eating her food entitled her to bleed my account of hundreds of dollars. So I started skimming a little off the top each week, hiding the money in a can under the insulation in the attic—my coffee-can college fund. Mom always suspected that I hid money, but she could never prove it, and she never found it. In her mind the few grand that I secreted away had grown to ten times what actually lay beneath the insulation. Add to that my student loans and the pittance I got in grant money, and in my mother's mind my cache had grown to a small fortune.

  “Can't we get a bail bondsman?” I asked. “Then you don't have to pay the full three thousand.”

  “Don't you think I thought of that? You think I'm stupid? I got no collateral. They won't talk to me without collateral.”

  Her words cut with an edge I knew well, her mean streak showing through as clear as the dark roots that lined the part in her hair. I decided to come back hard myself. “I can't bail you out, Mom. I can't. If I give you three thousand, I can't afford to go to college next semester. There's just no way to do it.”

  “Well then…” She leaned back in the plastic chair. “…you'll have to take care of Jeremy while I'm in here, cuz I'm not goin’ on no damned monitor.”

  And there it was: the final card in her hand, proving that she had the royal flush; she had beaten me. I could try bluffing and say that I would leave Jeremy in Austin, but that bluff was naked and my mother knew it. She stared at me with the conviction of a falling boulder, her eyes calm, level, my eyes twitching with anger. How could I take care of Jeremy? When I left him alone for a couple hours, he needed to be rescued by Lila. I had gone to college to get away from all this crap. Now here she was pulling me back, forcing me to choose between my college education and my brother. I wanted to reach through that reinforced glass and choke her.

  “I can't believe how selfish you are,” she said. “I told you I'd pay you back.”

  I pulled my checkbook out of my back pocket and started writing the check as a current of rage passed through me. I smiled slightly as I imagined filling out the entire check then holding it up to the thick glass that separated us and tearing it to shreds. But deep down, I knew the truth: I needed her—not as a son needs a mother, but as a sinner needs the devil. I needed a scapegoat, someone I could point at and say, “You're responsible for this, not me.” I needed to feed my delusion that I was not my brother's keeper, that such a duty fell to our mother. I needed a place where I could store Jeremy's life, his care, a box that I could shut tight and tell myself it was where Jeremy belonged—even if I knew, deep down, that it was all a lie. I needed that thin plausibility to ease my conscience. That would be the only way I could leave Austin.

  I tore the check out and showed it to my mother. She smiled an empty smile and said, “Thank you, sweetie. You're an angel.”

  I stopped at Hillview on my drive back from Austin, hoping to make some progress on my paper and have Carl sign the release that would allow me to get his file from the public defender's office. I had hoped that a visit with him might distract me from the burn in my chest left there by my mother. I trudged into Hillview, my guilty conscience weighing me down. I felt as if some vacuous force, some inexplicable gravity was sucking me backward, pulling me to the south, to Austin. I thought that running away to college would get me out of my mother's reach, but I was still too close, too easily plucked from the low branch I had chosen. What would it take to wash my hands of my mother—my brother? What price would I need to pay to leave them behind? At least for today, I thought to myself, the price was three thousand dollars in bail money.

  Janet smiled at me from her station behind the reception desk as I passed. I walked to the lounge where residents, most of whom were in wheelchairs, gathered in small clusters like chess pieces in a half-finished game. Carl sat in his usual place, his wheelchair facing the picture window, looking out at the laundry hanging from the balcony rails of the apartment building outside. I stopped short of Carl when I noticed that he had a visitor, a man who looked to be in
his mid-sixties, with short, peppery hair that spiked and leaned toward the back of his head like pond reeds tipping in a breeze. The man's hand rested on Carl's forearm, and he, too, faced toward the window as they talked.

  I walked back to the reception desk, found Janet hovering over some paperwork, and asked her about the visitor. “Oh, that's Virgil,” she said. “I can't remember his last name. He's the only visitor Carl's ever had…except for you.”

  “Are they related?”

  “I don't think so. I think they're just friends. Maybe they met in prison. Maybe they were…you know…special friends.”

  “I didn't get the impression Carl swung that way,” I said.

  “He was in prison for thirty years. That might've been the only swinging he could get.” Janet put her hand to her lips and giggled at the guilty pleasure that had escaped them.

  I smiled back at her, more in an attempt to stay on her good side than to join in her joke. “Do you think I should go back? I don't want to disturb them if they're…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence.

  “I say go for it,” she said. “If you're interrupting, he'll let you know. Carl may be dropping weight like a snowman in a skillet, but don't underestimate him.”

  I made my way back to Carl, who was now chuckling over something the other man had said. Carl had never smiled in my presence, and the lift it brought to his face shed years. He saw me coming and his smile withered as if he were a child being brought in from play. “There's the pup now,” he sighed.

  The man with Carl looked up at me with an odd indifference, holding out his hand for me to shake. “Hey, Pup,” he said.

  “Some folks call me Joe,” I said.

  “That's right,” Carl said, “Joe the writer.”

  “Actually, it's Joe the college student,” I said. “I'm not a writer, it's just an assignment.”

  “I'm Virgil…the painter,” the man said.

  “Painter, as in Dutch master or Dutch Boy,” I asked.

  “Mostly Dutch Boy,” he said. “I paint houses and such. But I do a little canvas work for my own enjoyment.”

  “Don't let him buffalo you, Joe,” Carl said. “Virgil here's a regular Jackson Pollock. Too bad that's when he's trying to paint houses.” Carl and Virgil laughed at that, but I didn't understand the reference. Later I would look up Jackson Pollock on the Internet to see his paintings, which resembled something a toddler could have concocted with a plate full of spaghetti and a temper tantrum; I got the joke.

  “Mr. Iverson—” I started.

  “Call me Carl,” he said.

  “Carl, I was hoping I could get you to sign this for me.”

  “What's that?”

  “It's a release. It'll let me see your trial file,” I said hesitantly. “I need two collateral sources for the biography.”

  “Ah, young pup here doesn't believe I'll be truthful with him,” Carl said to Virgil. “He thinks I'll hide the monster that lurks inside of me.”

  Virgil shook his head and looked away.

  “I don't mean any disrespect,” I said. “It's just that a friend of mine…well, not so much a friend as a neighbor, thought I could get a better understanding of you if I took a look at the trial stuff.”

  “Your friend couldn't be more wrong,” Virgil said. “If you really want to know the truth about Carl here, the trial's the last place you'd look.”

  “It's okay, Virg,” Carl said. “I don't mind. Hell, that old file's been collecting dust for thirty years now. Probably doesn't exist anymore.”

  Virgil leaned forward over his knees then stood up slowly, using his arms to raise himself off the chair, like a man far older than he appeared to be. Brushing the wrinkles out of his slacks, he grabbed the worn handle of a hickory cane that leaned against the wall near him. “I'm gonna grab some coffee. Want some?”

  I didn't answer, as I figured he wasn't talking to me. Carl pursed his lips, shook his head no, and Virgil walked away with a practiced but unnatural gait, his right leg bending and snapping straight with mechanical rigidity. I looked closer at the rustle of his pant leg just above his shoe and saw the unmistakable glint of metal where his ankle should have been.

  I turned back to Carl, feeling as if I owed him an apology, as if I had called him a liar by wanting to check his story against the file—which is exactly what I planned to do.

  “I'm sorry, Mr. Iver—I mean, Carl. I wasn't trying to insult you.”

  “That's alright, Joe,” Carl said. “Virgil can be a bit overprotective of me. We've known each other a long time.”

  “Are you related?” I asked.

  Carl thought for a moment and then said, “We're brothers…by fire, not by blood.” His eyes turned back to the window, his gaze lost in a memory that robbed his cheeks of their color. After a moment he said, “Got a pen?”

  “A pen?”

  “To sign that paper you brought.” I handed Carl the form and a pen and watched him sign the release, his knuckles poking through his skin, his forearms so slight that I could see the pop and contraction in each muscle as he signed. He handed me back the paper, and I folded it, sliding it into my pocket.

  “One thing though,” he said, looking down at his fingers, which now rested on his lap. He spoke to me without raising his eyes. “When you read that file, you're gonna see a lot of things in there, terrible things that'll make you want to hate me. It sure made the jury hate me. Just keep in mind, that's not my whole story.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “No you don't,” he said softly, turning his attention back to the colorful towels flapping on the apartment balcony across the way. “You don't know me. Not yet.” I waited for him to finish his thought, but he just stared out the window.

  I left Carl to his memory, heading to the front door, where Virgil stood waiting for me. He held out his hand, a business card pressed between two of his fingers. I took the card. Virgil Gray Painting—Commercial and Residential. “If you want to know about Carl Iverson,” he said, “you need to talk to me.”

  “Were you in prison with him?”

  Virgil seemed to be on the cusp of aggravation, speaking in a tone that I had heard often in the bars when guys talked about their bad jobs or nagging wives—irritated yet resigned to the circumstances. “He didn't kill that girl. And what you're doing is bullshit.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I know what you're doing,” he said.

  “What am I doing?”

  “I'm telling you: he didn't kill that girl.”

  “You were there?”

  “No. I wasn't there. Don't be a smartass.”

  It was my turn to be irritated. I had just met this man, and he felt that he knew me well enough to insult me. “The way I see it,” I said, “only two people know what happened: Crystal Hagen and the person who killed her. Anybody else is just saying what they want to believe.”

  “I didn't have to be there to know he didn't kill that girl.”

  “Ted Bundy had people who believed in him, too.” I didn't know if that was true, but I thought it sounded good.

  “He didn't do it,” Vigil snapped. He pointed to the phone number on his card. “You call me. We'll talk.”

  I wasted the better part of a week and eight phone calls trying to pry Carl Iverson's criminal file from the public defender's office. Initially, the receptionist struggled to understand my request, and when she finally did understand, she gave me her opinion that the file had probably been destroyed years ago. “Regardless,” she said, “I have no authority to hand over a murder file to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who asks for it.” After that she simply passed my calls on to the voice mail of Berthel Collins, chief public defender, where my messages seemed to fall into an abyss. On the fifth day of no return call from Collins, I skipped my afternoon classes and caught a bus to downtown Minneapolis.

  When the receptionist told me that the chief was busy, I told her I would wait and took a seat close enough to her desk that I could hear her as
she whispered into her telephone. I read magazines to kill time until she finally whispered to someone, telling them that I was lingering. Fifteen minutes later she broke down and ushered me into the office of Berthel Collins, a pale-skinned man with a mop of uncombed hair crisscrossing his head and a nose as big around as a ripe persimmon. Berthel smiled at me and shook my hand as if he wanted to sell me a car.

  “So you're the kid that's stalking me,” he said.

  “I take it you got my phone messages,” I said. He looked flustered for a second then motioned me to a chair.

  “You gotta understand,” he said, “we don't get calls all that often asking us to dig up a thirty-year-old file. We store all that stuff off-site.”

  “But you do still have the file?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, “We have it. We're mandated to keep murder files indefinitely. I had a runner bring it in yesterday. That's it right there.” He pointed to a banker's box sitting against the wall behind me. I hadn't expected that much stuff. I thought I'd have maybe a binder full of paper, not a box. I calculated the number of hours it would take to read the file and watched as those numbers filled a bucket in my head. I then factored in the homework from my other classes and the tests and the lab projects. I suddenly felt dizzy. How would I ever get this all done. I began to regret my decision to get the file; this was supposed to be a simple English assignment.

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out the release, and handed it to Mr. Collins. “So, I can take that with me then?” I asked.

  “Not all of it,” he said. “Not yet. We have some files ready to go. We have to cull out the notes and work product before we let it go out of this office.”

  “How long's that gonna take?” I shifted in my chair, trying to find a position where the cushion springs didn't grind into my butt cheeks.

  “Like I said, we have a couple files ready today.” He smiled. “We have an intern working on it. The rest of the file should be ready fairly soon, maybe a week or two.” Collins leaned back in his cushy Georgian wingback chair, which I noticed sat a good four inches higher than any other chair in the room and seemed far more comfortable. I shifted again in my seat, trying to keep blood flowing to my legs. “What's your interest in this case anyway?” he asked, crossing one leg over the other.