The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  “Where'd she hide them? Home? School?”

  “I honestly don't know. She never said. She got weird after that, sad and distant. She didn't seem to want to be around me.” He paused to take another breath, to calm the emotion swelling up in his chest. “I didn't realize until I heard the closing argument—until I heard the words from her diary—that she was being…well…you know.”

  “And you didn't mention to anybody about the diary being misread?” Lila said.

  “No.” Andrew lowered his eyes.

  “Why didn't you tell his attorney?” I said.

  “That prick dragged my name through the mud. I'd just as soon spit on him than talk to him. You can't imagine what it was like to open a newspaper to see some defense attorney accusing you of raping and murdering your girlfriend. I had to go to therapy because of that bastard. Besides, I lettered in three sports in high school. I was good enough to get a baseball scholarship to Mankato State. If I had told anyone about stealing that car, I would've been arrested, suspended from school, kicked out of sports. I would have lost everything. That whole thing fucked me up pretty bad.”

  “Fucked you up?” I said, my anger bubbling through. “So let me get this straight. Rather than ruin your letter jacket, you let the jury believe a lie.”

  “There was a ton of evidence against that Iverson guy,” Andrew said. “What'd it matter if they misunderstood the diary? I wasn't gonna stick my neck out for him. He killed my girlfriend…didn't he?”

  Andrew looked back and forth between Lila and me, waiting for one of us to answer. We didn't say a word. We watched as he swallowed the dust from his tongue. We waited as his words echoed off the walls and came back to him, tapping his shoulder like Poe's tell-tale heart. Lila and I waited, saying nothing until finally he looked down at the top of his desk and said, “I should have told someone. I know that. I've always known that. I guess I was waiting for the right time to get this off my chest. I thought I might forget about it someday, but I didn't. I couldn't. Like I said, I still have nightmares.”

  On television, people dressed in nice clothes when they attended the theater, but I didn't have any nice clothes. I had moved to college with a single duffel bag filled with jeans, shorts, and shirts, mostly collarless. So I did a pilgrimage to a second-hand store the week of the play, finding khakis and a button-down shirt to wear. I also found a pair of deck shoes, but the seam above the big toe on the right foot was torn. I poked a paperclip through the holes where the stitching had been and sealed the tear, twisting off the excess.

  By 6:30 I was ready to go, although I couldn't get my palms to stop sweating. When Lila opened her door, I was astonished. A red sweater hugged her torso and waistline, showing off curves I didn't know she had, and a shiny black skirt squeezed her hips, sliding down her thighs as smooth as melting chocolate. She wore makeup, which I'd never seen her do before, her cheeks, her lips, her eyes all quietly demanding my attention. It was like washing the dust off a window that you didn't realize was dirty. I fought to keep from grinning. I wanted to grab her and squeeze her and kiss her. More than anything else, I wanted to spend time with her, walking and talking and watching a play.

  “Well, don't you look nice,” she said.

  “Back at you.” I smiled, pleased that my hand-me-downs had passed muster. “Shall we?” I said, motioning down the hall. It was a beautiful night for a walk, at least for Minnesota in late November—forty degrees, clear, no wind, no rain, no sleet, no snow—which was a good thing, since it was a ten-block walk to the Rarig Center for the play. Our path took us across Northrop Mall, the oldest and grandest part of campus, and then across the footbridge that spanned the Mississippi River.

  Most of the students had gone home for the Thanksgiving break. I thought about going home to see Jeremy, but the downside always seemed to outweigh the upside. I had asked Lila why she wasn't going home for the holiday. She simply shook her head and didn't answer. Even I knew that meant to leave it alone. Besides, I chose to look at the positive—with the campus so empty, it made our walk seem all the more private, more like a date. I walked with my hands in my coat pocket, my elbow cocked out to the side just in case Lila decided to link her arm with mine. She didn't.

  I didn't know a thing about The Glass Menagerie before that night. If I had, I might not have gone—even if that would have meant missing out on my date with Lila.

  In the very first scene, this fellow named Tom walked onto the stage and started talking to us. Our seats were right in the middle of the theatre, and he seemed to pick me as a focal point for his attention from the get-go. At first, I thought that was cool, this actor saying his lines as though he was talking to me personally. As the play progressed, we met his sister, Laura, whose debilitating introversion seemed oddly familiar to me, and his mother, Amanda, who lived in a fantasy world waiting for some outside savior—a gentleman caller—to arrive and save them from themselves. I felt a trickle of sweat bead on my chest as visions of my own screwed-up little family moved on that stage.

  As the first act came to an end, I heard my mother on stage as Amanda, chastising Tom, saying, “Self, self, self, is that all you ever think of?” I could see Tom pacing in his cage, the apartment, trapped there by his affection for his sister. The theatre grew warmer with each line. At intermission, I needed to get some water, so Lila and I walked to the lobby.

  “Well…what do you think about the play so far?” she asked.

  I felt a little sick in my chest, but I smiled politely. “It's marvelous,” I said. “I don't know how they do it, memorizing all those lines. I could never be an actor.”

  “There's more to it than just memorizing lines,” she said. “Don't you love the way they pull you in, make you feel the emotions?”

  I took another drink of water. “It's amazing,” I said. I had a lot more to say about that, but I kept those thoughts to myself.

  As the lights went down for the second act, I put my hand on the armrest between us, my palm up, hoping that she might want to hold it—a forlorn hope at best. In the play, the gentleman caller showed up, and I held out hope for a happy ending. I was wrong; everything fell apart. It turned out that the gentleman caller was already engaged to marry another woman. The stage erupted in anger and recrimination, and Laura retreated back to her world of tiny glass figurines, her glass menagerie.

  The actor playing Tom walked to the front of the stage, pulled the collar of his pea coat up around his neck, lit a cigarette, and told the audience how he left St. Louis, leaving his mother and sister behind. I felt my throat and chest tighten and my breath stumble. Tears began to well up in my eyes. These are just actors, I told myself. It's just a guy saying lines that he memorized. That's all. Tom lamented about how he still hears Laura's voice and sees her face in the colored glass of perfume bottles. As he spoke, I could see Jeremy looking out the front window at me the last time I drove away, not moving, not waving goodbye, his eyes accusing me, begging me not to leave.

  Then the son of a bitch onstage looked directly at me and said, “Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be.”

  I couldn't stop the tears from falling down my face. I didn't raise my hand to wipe them away; that would have drawn attention to my state. So I let them fall, unfettered. That's when I felt Lila's hand gently wrap into my fingers. I didn't look at her; I couldn't. She didn't look at me either. She just held my hand until the man on stage stopped talking and the pain in my chest subsided.

  After the play, Lila and I walked to Seven Corners, a hub of taverns and eateries on the West Bank of campus, named for a particularly confusing cluster of intersections. On the way there, I told her about my trip to Austin, about leaving Jeremy with my mother and Larry, and about the bruise on Jeremy's back and the blood on Larry's nose. I felt that I needed to explain why the play messed me up the way it did.

  Lila said, “Do you think Jeremy's safe?”

  “I don't know,” I said. But I think I did know. Th
at was the problem. That was the reason that last scene of the play tore me up the way it did. “Was I wrong to leave home?” I asked. “Was I wrong to go to school?”

  Lila didn't answer.

  “I mean, I can't stay home forever. No one can ask me to do that. I have a right to live my own life, don't I?”

  “You are his brother,” she said. “Like it or not, that means something.”

  That wasn't what I wanted to hear. “Does it mean I have to give up college and everything I want in my life?”

  “We all have our own baggage to deal with,” she said. “Nobody gets through life unscathed.”

  “That's easy for you to say,” I said.

  She stopped walking and looked at me with an intensity normally reserved for a lover's quarrel. “That's not easy for me to say,” she said. “That's not easy at all.” She turned and started walking again, her cheeks getting rosy from the November chill. A cold front was on its way—one that would usher in the deep freeze of winter. We walked on in silence for a while and then she linked her arm through mine and gave my arm a squeeze. I think it was her way of telling me that she wanted to change the subject, which was fine with me.

  We found a bar with a few open tables and music playing at a decibel level that would allow us to talk. I scanned the room, looking for the quietest table, and found a booth for us far from the noise. After we sat, I dug around for a topic of small talk.

  “So, are you a junior?” I asked.

  “No, I'm only a sophomore,” she said.

  “But you are twenty-one, right?”

  “I took a year off before coming to college,” she said.

  The waitress came by to get our drink order. I ordered a Jack and Coke, and Lila ordered a 7 Up. “Oh, you're hitting the hard stuff are you?” I said.

  “I don't drink,” Lila said. “I used to, but not anymore.”

  “I feel kind of strange, drinking alone.”

  “I'm not a temperance chick,” she said. “I have nothing against drinking. It's just a choice I made.”

  As the waitress set our drinks on the table, a loud roar erupted from the corner of the bar where a table full of drunks were competing with one another to be heard in some inane debate about football. The waitress rolled her eyes. I looked over my shoulder at the group of guys pushing and jostling in that good-natured way that so often turns into a brawl after one too many drinks. The bouncer at the door had his eye on them as well. I settled back down into my booth.

  After the waitress left, Lila and I launched into a discussion of the play, with Lila doing most of the talking. She was a big fan of Tennessee Williams. I sipped my drink and listened to Lila talk and then laugh. I had never seen her so animated, so passionate about anything. Her words rose and purled in a graceful arabesque and then kicked with jazz. I hadn't realized how lost I had become in our conversation until Lila abruptly stopped talking in mid-sentence, her eyes fixed on something over my left shoulder. Whatever it was, it had stunned her into silence.

  “Oh, my God,” came a voice from behind me. “It's Nasty Nash.”

  I turned to see one of the guys from the loud table standing a few feet from our booth, his left hand holding a beer that shook as he teetered. He pointed at Lila with his other hand, and in a booming voice, called her out.

  “Nasty Nash. I don't fucking believe it. Remember me?”

  Lila's face had gone pale, her breathing shallow. She stared at her glass, which she held with trembling fingertips.

  “Huh? Don't remember? Maybe this will help.” He put a hand down in front of his crotch area, his palm turned down as if he were holding a bowling ball. Then he started pumping his hips. He screwed his face up, biting his lower lip, tipping his head back. “Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Doing the nasty.”

  Lila began to shake—whether with rage or fear, I couldn't tell.

  “What do you say we take a trip down memory lane?” the slob said, looking at me and smiling. “I don't mind sharing, just ask her.”

  Lila stood and ran from the bar. I didn't know whether to chase after her or give her some space. That's when the slob spoke again, this time to me. “You better get her, dude. She's a sure thing.” I felt my right hand tighten into a fist. Then I relaxed it.

  When I first started working at the Piedmont Club, a fellow bouncer named Ronnie Gant showed me a move that he called Ronnie's rope-a-dope, which, like a magician's illusion, relied upon misdirection. I rose from my seat, looked at the slob, and smiled a big hearty smile. He was three steps away from me. I walked toward him, taking my three steps at a casual pace, just a couple guys saying hello, my arms outstretched in a friendly gesture. He smiled back, as if we were sharing an inside joke. Get him to drop his guard.

  I gave him a thumbs-up on my second step, joining him in a laugh, my smile disarming him, distracting him. He was taller than me by three or four inches, and he probably outweighed me by forty pounds, which he stored mostly in his ample gut. I kept his eyes focused on my face, his beer-addled brain focused on our apparent connection. He didn't see my right hand slink down to my waist, cocked at the elbow.

  With my third step I invaded his personal space, planting my right foot squarely between his feet. I shot my left hand up under the slob's right armpit, grabbed the shirt behind his shoulder blade, cocked my right arm back, and jammed my fist into his stomach with all the force I could muster. My punch landed in that soft catfish belly that every man has just below his ribcage. I hit him so hard that I could feel his rib bones wrap around my knuckles. The breath shot from his chest, his lungs exploding like a balloon. He wanted to double over, but I clutched his shirt and shoulder blade with my left hand and pulled him into me. His knees started to buckle, and I could hear the squeaking of his lungs as they fought for air.

  The key to Ronnie's rope-a-dope was subtlety. If I had clocked him in the jaw, he would have fallen back making a huge fuss. His buddies at the loud table would have been on me in a flash. A couple of his friends were already watching me. But to an outsider, I looked like a Good Samaritan helping a drunk to a seat. I walked the slob to the booth where Lila and I had been sitting and plopped him down just in time to watch him puke.

  His two friends started making their way toward their buddy. The bouncer also took notice of me. I mimed the international sign for drinking too much: thumb and pinky stretched out to simulate the handle of a beer stein and a wave up and down with the thumb near the lips. The bouncer nodded and started over to deal with the vomiting drunk. I wiped my sweaty palms across the thighs of my pants and walked out the door, calmly and orderly, as if I had become bored with the evening.

  Once outside, I started running. The slob would soon be breathing enough to tell his friends what happened. They would, no doubt, come after me in numbers far from fair. I headed for the Washington Avenue footbridge that connected the West Bank of campus to the East Bank. Before I could turn a corner, two guys came out of the bar and saw me. I had about a one-block head start. One of the guys was built like an offensive tackle, big and powerful and slow as mud. His friend, however, had some legs, a tight end maybe or a linebacker in high school. He might be trouble. He screamed something that I couldn't make out over the whistling of wind and pounding of blood in my ears.

  I saw right away that I wouldn't make it across the footbridge; the tight end would catch me in that long straightaway for sure. Besides, Lila would be on the footbridge by now. If they saw her in the bar, they might recognize her and go after her instead. I ran for a cluster of buildings around Wilson Library, reaching the first building, the Humphrey Center, with only a couple hundred feet between me and the tight end. I had been holding back just a bit as I ran, letting him think I could only run so fast. When I turned the first corner, I poured it on, twisting and twining around every building I came to: around Heller Hall, then Blegen Hall, then around the Social Sciences Building and Wilson Library. By the time I made my second pass around the Social Sciences Building, I could no longer see the tight end behind m
e nor hear his footsteps.

  I found a parking lot and ducked behind a pickup truck to wait, my lungs heaving and burning as they shoveled oxygen in and out. I lay on the asphalt to breathe and recover from my escape, peering under the truck across the mostly empty parking lot and watching for my pursuers. After ten minutes, I saw the tight end about a block away, walking up Nineteenth Avenue, making his way back toward Seven Corners and the bar. When he had gone, I took a deep breath, stood and brushed the dirt and grit from my body, and headed for the footbridge and Lila's apartment, where, hopefully, she would be waiting for me.

  I could see a dim light falling from Lila's apartment as I approached the building. I paused on the front stoop to collect myself and catch my breath after my jog home. Then I walked up the narrow staircase and down the hall to knock gently on Lila's door. No answer. “Lila,” I said, through the door. “It's me, Joe.” Still nothing.

  I knocked again, and this time heard the unmistakable click of the deadbolt being turned back. I waited for the door to open but it didn't, so I opened the door a few inches and saw Lila sitting sideways on her couch, her back to me and her knees tucked up to her chest. She had changed out of the sweater and skirt and into a gray sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. I stepped inside her apartment, carefully closing the door behind me.

  “You okay?” I asked. She didn't answer. I walked to the couch and sat behind her, putting one hand on the back of the couch, my other hand gently touching her shoulder. She shuddered slightly under my touch.

  “Remember,” she said, her voice shaky and weak, “how I told you I took a year off before starting college?” She took a deep breath to try to settle herself before continuing. “I went through a bad spell. Some stuff happened in high school, stuff I'm not proud of.”

  “You don't have to—”