The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  “Crystal fought for her life. We know this because one of her false fingernails broke off during the struggle. That fingernail was found on the steps leading out of Carl Iverson's house. It fell there as Carl Iverson dragged her body to his tool shed. He dumped her body onto the floor of that shed as if she were just a piece of garbage. Then, to try and hide his crime from the world, he set his shed on fire, believing that the heat and the flames would destroy the evidence of what he had done. After he touched a match to that old shed, he went back in his house and drank from a bottle of whiskey until he passed out.

  “By the time the fire trucks got there, the shed was completely engulfed in flames. After police found Crystal's body in that smoldering rubble, they knocked on Mr. Iverson's door, but he didn't answer. They assumed nobody was home. Detective Tracer returned in the morning with a search warrant and found Iverson still passed out on the couch, an empty whiskey bottle in one hand and the 45-caliber pistol near the other.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you're going to see pictures that will turn your stomach. I apologize in advance for what you're going to see, but it's necessary so that you understand what happened to Crystal Hagen. The fire burned the bottom half of her body so badly that some parts of her were barely recognizable. The tin from the roof of the shed fell on her, covering her upper torso, protecting that part of her from the worst of the fire. And there, tucked under her chest, you'll see her left hand—unburned. And on the left-hand you'll see the acrylic fingernails that she was so proud of, the nails she had done up for her first homecoming dance with Andy Fisher. You'll see that one of the nails is missing, the nail that broke off during her fight with Carl Iverson.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, once you've seen all the evidence in this case, I'll be coming back here to speak with you again, and I'll be asking you to return a verdict of guilty for murder in the first degree against Carl Albert Iverson.”

  Lila put the transcript on her lap, letting the echo of her words fall silent. “What a sick bastard,” she said. “I can't believe you can sit with this guy and not want to kill him. They should've never let him out of prison. He should've rotted away in the darkest, dankest cell they have.”

  I leaned slightly toward her, imitating her posture and resting one of my hands on the cushion next to her leg. If I had spread my fingers I could have touched her. That thought erased all others in my head, but she took no notice.

  “What's it like…talking to him?” she asked.

  “He's an old man,” I said. “He's sick and weak and thin as a whip. It's hard to see him in that stuff you read.”

  “When you write about him, make sure you tell the whole story. Don't just write about the weak old man dying of cancer. Tell them about the drunken degenerate who burned a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “I made a promise to write the truth,” I said. “And I will.”

  The month of October flew by with the speed and tumult of a falling, mountain river. One of Molly's bartenders had to quit because the woman's husband caught her flirting for better tips. Molly had asked me to fill in until she found a replacement. I couldn't refuse because I needed to make up for the three thousand dollars I wasted on my mom's bail. So, for most of the month I worked Tuesday through Thursday nights behind the bar and weekend nights at the door. On top of that I had midterms in my economics and my sociology classes. I fell into the habit of reading only the highlighted lines of my textbooks—used books whose previous owners hopefully had an eye for what was test-worthy.

  I found a document in Carl's sentencing file that turned out to be a godsend. It was a report that gave a thorough synopsis of Carl Iverson's life growing up in South St. Paul: his family, his petty delinquencies, his hobbies, his education. It touched briefly upon his military service, mentioning that Carl had been honorably discharged from the army after serving in Vietnam, having been awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star. I made a note to myself to explore Carl's military service in more depth. I visited Carl twice in October, just before my notes and opening chapter were due. I managed to finish the first chapter by blending information from the report with the details from my notes—sprinkled liberally with my own creative license.

  After I turned the assignment in to my instructor, I did not go back to Hillview until after Halloween, a holiday I had grown to despise. I dressed up as a bouncer for Halloween, just as I had for every Halloween since I turned eighteen, and worked the door at Molly's. I broke up only one fight that night, when Superman grabbed the ass of Raggedy Ann—if Raggedy Ann had been a stripper, that is—causing her boyfriend, Raggedy Andy, to beat the man of steel to the floor. I rushed Raggedy Andy out the door. Raggedy Ann followed us out, flashing me a coy smile when she passed, as though the fight had been her plan all along, the kind of validation she had hoped for when she tucked her ample, fleshy parts into that tiny costume. I hated Halloween.

  Cold weather arrived in earnest on the first day of November, the day I went back to Hillview. The temperature barely crested thirty degrees; dead leaves gathered in the crooks of buildings and around dumpsters where breezes curled. I called that morning to make sure that Carl would be up for a visit, not knowing exactly how pancreatic cancer progresses. I found Carl in his usual spot, staring out the window. He had an afghan covering his lap, thick wool socks under his cotton slippers, and long johns under his blue robe. He was expecting me and had asked one of the nurses to move a comfortable chair next to his wheelchair. Out of reflex, or habit, I shook his hand as I sat down, his thin fingers sliding from my palm, cold, limp, like dead seaweed.

  “Thought you forgot about me,” he said.

  “It's been a busy semester,” I answered, pulling out my small digital recorder. “You don't mind do you? It's easier than taking notes.”

  “This is your show. I'm just killing time.” He chuckled at his own gallows humor.

  I turned the recorder on and asked Carl to pick up where he'd left off in our last meeting. As Carl told his stories, I found myself breaking them apart into bits of information, spreading them around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the table. Then I tried to reassemble the pieces in a way that would explain the birth and life of a monster. What was it in his childhood, in his adolescence, that planted the seed that would one day come to define him as Carl the murderer? There had to be a secret. Something had to have happened to Carl Iverson to make him different from the rest of the human race, different from me. He had given me that sermon about honesty the day we first met, and now he was telling me his Leave-It-To-Beaver upbringing, all the while hiding that dark tangent that shifted his world onto an axis the rest of us could never understand. I wanted to cry bullshit. Instead, I nodded and prodded and listened as he painted his world egg-shell white.

  It was during the second hour of our interview when he said, “And that's when the US government invited me to go to Vietnam.” Finally, I thought, an event that might explain the monster. Carl had grown weak from all the talking he was doing, so he put his hands on his lap, leaned back in his wheelchair, and closed his eyes. I watched the scar on his neck pulse as blood passed through his carotid artery.

  “Is Vietnam where you got that scar?” I asked.

  He touched the line on his neck. “No, I got that in prison. This psychopathic Aryan Brother tried to cut my head off.”

  “Aryan Brother? Aren't those the white guys?”

  “They are,” he said.

  “I thought the different races stuck up for each other in prison.”

  “Not when you're a convicted child molester—which I was. The different gangs have dibs on the sex offenders of their own race.”

  “Dibs?”

  “Sex offenders are the runts of the prison litter. If you get shit on, you take it out on the runt; if you need to earn a tear tattoo, to show you're a tough guy, why not kill the runt; if you need a bitch…well, you get the picture.”

  I cringed inside but kept my composure so that he wouldn't see my revulsion.

  “
One day, about three months after I got to Stillwater, I was on my way to dinner. That's the most dangerous time of the day. They send two hundred guys at a time to the mess hall. In that crowd, the shivs come out. There's no keeping track of who did what to whom.”

  “Isn't there a place where you can get out of the general population? Oh…what's it called…protective custody or something like that?”

  “Segregation,” he said. “Seg for short. Yeah, I could have asked for seg, but I didn't.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because at that point in my life, living didn't matter all that much to me.”

  “So how'd you get the scar?”

  “There was this big gorilla named Slattery who tried to get me to…well, let's just say he was lonely for some companionship. Said he'd cut my throat if I didn't give him what he wanted. I told him he'd be doing me a favor.”

  “So he cut your throat?”

  “No. That's not how it works. He was a boss, not a worker. He had some punk do it, some kid looking to make a name for himself. I didn't even see it happen. I felt a warm liquid running down my shoulder. I put my hand up to my throat and felt the blood spurting out of my neck. Nearly died. After they patched me up, they forced me into seg. Stayed there most of the rest of my thirty years: noisy, surrounded by concrete almost every hour of the day. It could drive a man crazy.”

  “Is prison where you met your ‘brother’?” I asked.

  “My brother?”

  “Virgil—wasn't that his name?”

  “Ah, Virgil.” He took in a deep breath, as if to sigh, and a wave of pain jolted him upright in his chair. The blood drained from his fingers as he gripped the sides of his wheelchair. “I think…” he said, tapping out a series of short breaths, as if he were giving birth, waiting for the pain to pass. “That story's…gonna have to wait…for another day.” He waved a nurse over, asking her for his medication. “I'm afraid…I'm going to be asleep…in a very short while.”

  I thanked him for his time, picked up my backpack and recorder, and headed out. I stopped briefly at the front desk to fish my wallet out of my pocket and find the business card Virgil Gray had given to me. The time had come for me to hear from the one person in the world who believed Carl to be innocent, the sole voice arguing against my conclusion that Carl Iverson had been justly punished. As I dug out the card, Janet leaned across the reception desk and whispered, “He didn't take his pain medication today. He wanted to be clear headed when you came. He'll probably be out of it all day tomorrow.”

  I didn't respond to Janet. I didn't know what to say.

  It had been a couple weeks since I got the call from the public defender's office telling me that the rest of Carl's file had been readied. I felt bad about that. I felt bad because I still hadn't picked it up. Had Virgil Gray not suggested that we meet downtown, that box would likely have stayed at the public defender's office. My assignment was time consuming enough without having to read a stack of files up to my knee. But when I called Virgil, he suggested that we meet in a small courtyard outside the government center in downtown Minneapolis. And that is where I found him, sitting on a granite bench at the edge of the courtyard, his cane resting against his good leg. He watched me as I crossed the length of the square, not waving or otherwise acknowledging me.

  “Mr. Gray.” I held out my hand; he shook it with the enthusiasm you might show for leftover broccoli. “I appreciate you meeting with me.”

  “Why are you writing his story?” Virgil asked bluntly. He didn't look at me when he spoke, his eyes focused on the fountain in the center of the courtyard.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Why are you writing his story? What's in it for you?”

  I sat on the bench beside Mr. Gray. “I told you. It's an English assignment.”

  “Yes, but why him? Why Carl? You could write about anyone. Hell, you could make up a story. Your teacher would never know the difference.”

  “Why not Carl?” I asked. “He has an interesting story to tell.”

  “You're just using him,” Virgil said. “Carl's been screwed over more than any man deserves. I don't think it's right, what you're doing.”

  “Well, if he has been screwed, like you say, wouldn't it be good to have someone tell that story?”

  “So that's what you're doing?” he said, his words dripping with sarcasm. “That's the story you're telling? You're writing about how Carl got screwed, about how he was convicted for a crime he didn't commit?”

  “I haven't written any story yet. I'm still trying to figure out what the story is about. That's why I came to see you. You said he's innocent.”

  “He is innocent.”

  “Well, so far you're the only one saying that. The jury, the prosecutor, hell, I think his own attorney, believed he was guilty.”

  “That don't make it true.”

  “You didn't stand up for Carl at his trial. You didn't testify.”

  “They wouldn't let me testify. I wanted to testify, but they wouldn't let me.”

  “Who wouldn't they let you testify?”

  Virgil looked up at a sky the color of fireplace ash. The trees around the courtyard had stripped down to their winter skeletons, and a cold wind swept across the cobblestone and up the back of my neck. “His attorneys,” Virgil said, “they wouldn't let me tell the jury about him. They told me that if I testified, it would be character evidence. I told ’em damn straight it'd be character evidence. They need to know the real Carl, not that pile of lies the prosecutor was shoveling. They said if I talked about Carl's character, the prosecutor could also talk about Carl's character, about how he drank all day, couldn't keep a job, all that bullshit.”

  “So, what would you have said if you'd testified?”

  Virgil turned, looking me in the eye, sizing me up one more time, his cold, gray irises reflecting the gathering clouds. “I met Carl Iverson in Vietnam in 1967. We were dumb kids fresh out of boot camp. Did a tour in the jungle with him—doing things, seeing things that you just can't explain to people who weren't there.”

  “And in that tour you came to know him well enough to say, without a doubt, that he didn't kill Crystal Hagen? Was he some kind of pacifist?”

  Virgil narrowed his gaze as if he were getting ready to punch me in the face. “No,” he said. “Carl Iverson was no pacifist.”

  “So he killed people in Vietnam.”

  “Yeah, he killed people. He killed plenty of people.”

  “I can see why the defense attorney didn't want you testifying.”

  “It was a war. You kill people in war.”

  “I still don't understand how telling the jury about Carl killing people in a war could've helped. I would think that if I had been in a war and had killed—what was it you said…plenty of people—that killing would come easier to me.”

  “There's a lot you don't understand.”

  “Then make me understand,” I said, getting frustrated. “That's why I'm here.”

  Virgil thought for a moment and then reached down, his hands pinching the fabric of his khaki pants near his right knee, slid his trousers up, and exposed the shiny metal prosthesis that I had seen the day we first met. The artificial leg extended all the way up to his mid-thigh, a white plastic kneecap covering a spring-loaded hinge the size of a fist. Virgil tapped on his metal shin. “See this?” he asked. “This is Carl's doing.”

  “Carl's the reason you lost your leg?”

  “No,” he smiled. “Carl's the reason I'm here to tell you about my missing leg. Carl's the reason I'm alive today.” Virgil slid his trouser leg back down, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. “It was May of 1968. We were stationed at a little firebase on a ridge northwest of the Que Son Valley. We received orders to toss a village, some no-name collection of huts. Intel had spotted Viet Cong activity in the area, so they sent our platoon in to check it out. I was walking point along with this kid…” A nostalgic smile crossed Virgil's face. “Tater Davis. Dumb kid used to
follow me around like a basset hound.” Virgil took a moment more to remember before he continued. “So me and Tater were walking point—”

  “Point?” I asked. “Like out in front?”

  “Yeah. They put a man or two out ahead of the rest of the column. That's the point. It's a hell of a plan. If things go bad, the army would rather lose those two fellas than a whole platoon.”

  I looked at Virgil's leg. “I take it things went badly?”

  “Yep,” he said. “We came over a small rise where the trail cut through a rocky knoll. On the downhill side of the knoll the trees thinned out a bit, enough to see the village ahead. Tater picked up the pace once he saw the village, but something wasn't right. I can't say I saw anything in particular, maybe it was a feeling, maybe subconsciously I saw something, but whatever it was, I knew something wasn't right. I signaled for the platoon to hold up. Tater saw me and put his rifle at the ready. I walked ahead on my own, maybe twenty or thirty paces. I was just about to give the ‘all's clear’ when the jungle exploded with gunfire. It was something else, I tell you. Ahead of me, beside me, behind me, hell, that jungle lit up with muzzle flashes from everywhere.”

  “The first bullet I took busted my shoulder blade. About that same time, two rounds caught my leg. One shattered my knee, the other busted my femur. I dropped without firing a single shot. I heard my prick of a sergeant, this piece of shit named Gibbs, ordering the platoon back over the knoll to take up defensive positions. I opened my eyes to see my buddies scampering away from me, jumping behind rocks and trees. Tater was running with all his might to make it back to the platoon. And that's when I saw Carl, running toward me.”

  Virgil stopped talking as he watched the past play out through the tears that had welled up in his eyes. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and dabbed it to his eyes, his hand trembling slightly. I looked away to give Virgil some privacy. People in finely pressed suits crossed the courtyard in front of us, heading to and from the government center, ignoring the one-legged man sitting next to me. I waited patiently for Virgil to compose himself, and when he did, he continued.