The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  “Carl came running up the trail, screaming like a mad man, firing at the muzzle flashes in the tree line. I could hear Sergeant Gibbs screaming at Carl, telling him to fall back. When Tater saw Carl, he stopped retreating and jumped behind a tree. Carl got to me and dropped down on one knee, putting himself between me and about forty AK-47s. He stayed there, firing his rifle until he was about out of rounds.”

  Virgil took in a slow breath, again on the verge of tears. “You should've seen him. He picked my rifle up with his left hand as he squeezed off the final rounds from his rifle, firing both guns at the same. Then he dropped his M-16 across my chest and went on firing mine. I popped a fresh magazine into his rifle and handed it back to him in time to reload my rifle again.

  “Did Carl get hit?”

  “He took a bullet through his bicep on his left arm, another one cut a crease in his helmet, and another took the heel off his boot. But he never budged. It was a sight.”

  “I bet it was,” I said.

  Virgil looked at me for the first time since he started telling his story. “Have you ever seen those old movies,” he said, “where the sidekick gets shot and he tells the hero to go on without him, to save himself.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, I was that sidekick. I was as good as dead, and I knew it. I opened my mouth to tell Carl to save himself, but what came out was ‘don't leave me here.’” Virgil looked at his fingertips, which were folded together on his lap. “I was scared,” he said, “more scared than I had ever been in my whole life. Carl had done everything wrong—militarily speaking, that is. He was saving my life. He was willing to die for me, and all I could do was tell him ‘don't leave me here.’ I've never been so ashamed.”

  I wanted to say something comforting, or to pat him on the shoulder, to let him know that it was okay, but that would have been an insult. I wasn't there. I had no say in what was or wasn't okay.

  “When the battle was at its worst,” he said, “the entire platoon was firing to beat hell. The VC were dealing it back in spades with Tater and Carl and me right in the middle of it all. I looked up and watched torn-up leaves and the splinters from the trees falling like confetti, the tracer rounds crisscrossing above us—red from our guns, green from theirs—noise and dirt and smoke. It was amazing, like I was outside of what was happening. The pain was gone; the fear was gone. I was ready to die. I looked over and saw Tater crouched behind a tree, laying down fire as best he could. He emptied his magazine and reached for a new one. Right then, he took a bullet in the face and fell dead. That's the last thing I remember before losing consciousness.”

  “You don't know what happened after that?” I asked.

  “I was told that we had air support hovering above the mission. They dropped a load of napalm on the VC position. Carl covered me like a blanket. If you look closely, you can still see scars on the back of his arms and neck from the burn he took.”

  “Was that the end of the war for you two?” I asked.

  “It was for me,” Virgil said, clearing the choke out of his throat. “We got patched up at the firebase first, and then it was off to Da Nang. They sent me to Seoul, but Carl never made it past Da Nang. He spent some time recovering and then went back to the company.”

  “The jury never got to hear that story?” I said.

  “Not a word of it.”

  “It is an amazing story,” I said.

  “Carl Iverson is a hero—a true god-damned hero. He was willing to lay down his life for me. He's not a rapist. He didn't kill that girl.”

  I hesitated before I said my next thought. “But…that story doesn't prove that Carl is innocent.”

  Virgil shot me a cold stare that bore into my temples, his grip on his cane tightening as if he were preparing to beat me with it for my insolence. I didn't move or say a word as I waited for the anger behind his eyes to thaw. “You sit here all warm and safe,” he sneered. “You have no idea what it's like to face your own death.”

  He was wrong. I didn't feel warm; and with his knuckles turning white as he gripped the handle of his cane, I didn't feel particularly safe, although he had a point about the facing death part. “People can change,” I said.

  “A man doesn't jump in front of a hail of bullets one day and murder a little girl the next,” he said.

  “But you weren't with him for the rest of his tour, were you? You flew home, and he stayed there. Maybe something happened; something that turned a screw in his head—made him the kind of guy that could kill that girl. You said yourself that Carl was a killer in Vietnam.”

  “Yeah, he was a killer in Vietnam, but that's different than murdering that girl.”

  Virgil's words brought back the first conversation that I'd had with Carl, how cryptic he'd been about the distinction between killing and murdering. I though Virgil might be able to help me understand, so I asked, “Carl said that there's a difference between killing and murdering. What does he mean by that?” I thought I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from Virgil before I talked to Carl about it.

  “It's like this,” he said. “You kill a soldier in the jungle, and you're just killing. It's not murder. It's like there's an agreement between armies that killing each other is okay. It's allowed. That's what you're supposed to do. Carl killed men in Vietnam, but he didn't murder that girl. See what I'm saying?”

  “I see that you owe your life to Carl Iverson, and that you have his back no matter what. But Carl told me that he'd done both. He killed and he murdered. He said he was guilty of both.”

  Virgil looked at the ground, his face softening with some thought that seemed trapped in his head. He rubbed the stubble on his chin with the back of his index finger and then nodded as if he had come to some silent conclusion. “There's another story,” he said.

  “I'm all ears,” I said.

  “It's a story I can't tell you,” he said. “I swore to Carl that I would never tell anyone. I never have, and I never will.”

  “But if it helps to clear—”

  “It's not my story to tell; it's Carl's. It's his decision. He's never told a soul, not his lawyer, not the jury. I begged him to talk about it at his trial, but he refused.”

  “It happened in Vietnam?”

  “It did,” he said.

  “And it shows what?” I asked.

  Virgil bristled at my question. “For some reason, Carl seems interested in talking to you. I don't understand it, but he seems willing to let you in. Maybe he'll tell you about what happened to him in Vietnam. If he does talk about it, you'll see. There's no way in hell Carl Iverson could have killed that girl.”

  After my meeting with Virgil, I stopped by the public defender's office to pick up the rest of the file, carrying it home on my shoulder, my mind juggling the competing sides of Carl Iverson. On the one side, Carl was a man kneeling in a jungle, taking bullets for his friend. On the other side was a sick bastard capable of extinguishing the life of a young girl in order to satiate his deviant sexual desires—two sides, one man. Somewhere in the box on my shoulder, there had to be an explanation of how the first man became the second. The box seemed impossibly heavy as I mounted the staircase to my apartment.

  As I reached the top step, Lila opened her door, saw me, pointed at the box on my shoulder, and asked, “What's that?”

  “It's the rest of Carl's file,” I said. “I just picked it up.”

  Her eyes lit up with excitement. “Can I see it?” she said.

  Ever since Lila had read the prosecutor's opening statement in the transcript, Carl's case had become my lure, the key to getting Lila into my apartment so I could spend time with her. I would have been lying if I'd said that my interest in digging deeper into Carl Iverson's story didn't have a lot to do with my attraction to Lila.

  We went to my apartment and started digging through the box, which held a few dozen folders of varying thicknesses, each with the name of a different witness or a label like forensics, or photos, or research. Lila pulled out
a file labeled diary; I pulled out another with the words autopsy photos written on the flap. I remembered the prosecutor's warning in his opening statement about the intensity of the photos. I remembered, as well, the words of Carl's public defender, Berthel Collins, and his reaction the first time he saw the photos. I needed to see those photos—not in the sense that I required their viewing for my project; I needed to understand what happened to Crystal Hagen. I needed to put a face to the name, flesh to the bone. I needed to test my mettle, to see if I could handle it.

  The autopsy-photo folder was one of the thinnest in the box, containing maybe a couple dozen eight-by-ten pictures. I took a breath, closed my eyes, and prepared myself for the worst. I raised the folder cover quickly, like tearing off a bandage, and opened my eyes to see a beautiful young girl smiling back at me. It was Crystal Hagen's freshman picture. Her long, blonde hair parted in the middle, curled back along the frame of her face, emulated Farrah Faucet, as did most of the girls of that time. She smiled a perfect smile, white teeth glistening behind soft lips, her eyes sparkling with a hint of mischief. She was a beautiful girl, the kind of girl that a young man would want to love and an old man should want to protect. This would be the picture that the prosecutor would have propped up in front of the jurors to make them feel for the victim. There would be other pictures he would use to make them despise the accused.

  I stared at Crystal's picture for several minutes. I tried to imagine her alive, going to school, worrying about grades or boys or the myriad inconsequential anxieties that seem so overwhelming to a teenager and so mundane to an adult. I tried to imagine her as an adult—aging her from the freshman cheerleader with the long, flowing locks to the middle-aged mother with practical hair and a minivan. I felt sorry that she was dead.

  I turned to the next picture, gasping as my heart seized up inside my chest. I slapped the file folder closed to wait for my breath to return. Lila was reading her file—the diary entries—so intensely that she didn't notice my jolt. I had only seen the image for a second, long enough for it to become seared on the back of my eyelids. I opened the file again.

  I had expected her hair to be gone; it doesn't take much heat to burn hair. What I didn't expect was for her lips to be burned off. Her teeth, bright white in her class photo, now protruded from her jawbone, stained yellow by the fire. She lay on her right side, exposing the melted tissue of what used to be her left ear and cheek and her nose. Her face was nothing more than a tight black mask of charred skin. As the burning muscles in her neck contracted, her face had twisted around to look over her left shoulder in a grotesque expression that mimicked a scream. Her legs were bent in a fetal position, and the meat of her thighs and calves had fused to the bone, burnt and shriveled like beef jerky. Both her feet had been burned down to stumps. The fingers of her right hand curled into her wrist, which tucked into her biceps and chest. All her joints had knotted up as the heat from the fire shrank the cartilage and tendons.

  I could see where a sheet of tin had fallen across her body, protecting part of her torso from the worst of the flames. I swallowed back a gag in my esophagus and turned to the next picture, which showed Crystal rolled onto her back, her body frozen in a curl. The medical examiner held Crystal's left wrist in one of his latex-gloved hands. The skin on her left hand had been better protected, having been trapped under her body. In the medical examiner's other hand, between his thumb and forefinger, he held the broken fingernail by its edges, matching it up with the other fingernails on her left hand. It was the fake nail that they found on the steps leading from Carl's house to his shed.

  I closed the file.

  Had Crystal's family seen these pictures? They had to have. They attended the trial. These photos were trial exhibits, probably blown up to a size that could be viewed across a large courtroom. What had it been like to sit in that courtroom and see these pictures, the mutilation of their beautiful daughter? How could they not charge over the bar separating the gallery from the defendant and rip out the man's throat? It would have taken more than an old bailiff with a baton to stop me if this had been my sister.

  I took a deep breath, opening the file once again to Crystal's school picture. I felt my heart rate mellow, my breathing returning to normal. Wow, I thought. I had never had such a visceral reaction to a picture. The juxtaposition of the pretty, vibrant cheerleader with the charred corpse made me happy that Carl had rotted for decades in prison, and it made me regret that Minnesota forbids putting criminals to death. If those pictures had that effect on me, they must have had a similar effect on Carl's jury. There was no way Carl was going to walk out of that courtroom a free man. It was the least the jury could do to avenge Crystal's death.

  Just then, my cell phone rang, interrupting my thoughts. I recognized the 507 area code from Austin, but not the number.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Joe?” came a man's voice.

  “This is Joe.”

  “It's Terry Bremer.”

  “Hi, Mr. Bremer.” I smiled at hearing the familiar name. Terry Bremer owned the duplex where Mom and Jeremy lived, where I used to live. At that thought, my smile faded. “Is something wrong?”

  “We had a small incident here,” he said. “Your brother tried to heat up a piece of pizza in the toaster.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He's fine, I think. He set off the smoke detectors. Mrs. Albers from next door came over to check on him because the alarm didn't stop. She found your brother curled up in his room. He's really freaked out here. He's rocking back and forth and rubbing his hands.”

  “Where's my mother?”

  “Not here,” Bremer said. “Your brother mentioned something about her going to some meeting yesterday. She hasn't come back yet.”

  I wanted to hit something. I balled my hand into a fist and drew it back, my eyes focused on a smooth section of wall just itching to be pounded. But I knew that would be nothing but a ticket to bruised knuckles and forfeiture of my damage deposit. It certainly would not make my mother grow up. It wouldn't bring Jeremy back from his panic. I took a deep breath, lowered my head, and unclenched my fist.

  I turned to Lila, who was looking up at me with a worried expression. She had heard enough of the conversation to figure out what had happened. “Go,” she said.

  I nodded, grabbed my coat and my keys, and headed out the door.

  Terry Bremer stood on bowed legs and carried a tin of chew in his back pocket, a good ol’ boy who owned a bowling alley, two bars, and a couple dozen apartment units in Austin. He was one of those guys who could have been at the helm of a multinational corporation had his wall held the sheepskin of Harvard Business School instead of Austin High School. As landlords go, he was a good guy, affable, responsive. He'd given me my first bouncer job at a little hole-in-the-wall he owned called the Piedmont Club. It happened a couple weeks after I turned eighteen. He had come around for the rent—rent that my mother had blown on a trip to an Indian casino the weekend before. Instead of yelling or threatening to kick us out, he hired me to watch the door, clear off tables, and haul kegs up from the cellar. It was a good deal for me because it put money in my pocket and taught me how to deal with angry drunks and idiots. It was a good deal for him because if my mom blew our rent money, he simply withheld it from my check.

  “Is my mother back yet?” I asked when I walked into the apartment.

  Mr. Bremer stood just inside the door like a sentinel waiting to be relieved of duty. “No,” he said, “and by the looks of things, she hasn't been around since yesterday.” He took his cap off and brushed his palm across the smooth skin of his bald head. “I gotta tell ya, Joe, Mrs. Albers was on the verge of calling social services. Jeremy could've burned the place down.”

  “I know, Mr. Bremer, it won't—”

  “I can't be getting sued Joe—your mom leaving him alone like that. If he burns the place down, I'll get sued. Your mother can't leave a retard home alone like that.”

  “He's not a retard,�
�� I snapped. “He's autistic.”

  “I didn't mean nothin’ by it, Joe. But you know what I'm saying. Now that you're off at college there's no one around to keep things in line.”

  “I'll talk to her,” I said.

  “I can't have this happen again, Joe. If it does, I gotta kick ’em out.”

  “I'll talk to her,” I said again, a little more insistent. Mr. Bremer put on his coat, paused as if to continue the conversation, to make sure he'd made his point, then must have thought better of it and headed out the door.

  I found Jeremy in his room. “Hey, Buddy,” I said. Jeremy looked up at me, started to smile, but then stopped, his eyes falling to the corner of the room and his brow taking on that worried expression he wore when life didn't make sense to him. “I heard you had a little excitement here tonight,” I continued.

  “Hi, Joe,” he responded.

  “Did you try and cook your own supper?”

  “Maybe I tried to make some pizza.”

  “You know you can't make pizza in the toaster, don't you?”

  “Maybe I'm not allowed to use the stove when mom is not home.”

  “Speaking of that, where is mom?”

  “Maybe she had a meeting.”

  “Is that what she said? Did she tell you she had a meeting?”

  “Maybe she said she had to go to a meeting with Larry.”

  “Larry? Who's Larry?”

  Jeremy sent his gaze back to the corner of the room. It was his signal that I'd asked a question for which he had no answer. I stopped asking questions. It was getting near ten o'clock. Jeremy liked to be in bed by ten, so I had him brush his teeth and get ready. I waited in the doorway to his bedroom as he changed into his sleeping clothes. When he took off his sweatshirt, I saw the faint shadow of a bruise across his back.

  “Hold up there, Buddy,” I said, walking over to get a better look at what I thought I'd seen. The bruise, about six inches in length and the width of a broom handle, started just under his shoulder blade and extended to his spinal cord. “What's this?”