The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  I slowed as I passed Lockwood's place, an old farmhouse that leaned with age and had wood siding rotting from the ground up. The grass in the front yard had not been mowed all summer, looking more like a fallow field than a lawn, and an old Ford Taurus with a sheet of plastic for a back window sat decaying in the gravel driveway.

  I turned around at a field entrance just past the house and doubled back. As I neared his driveway, I saw a figure move in front of a window. A chill ran through me. The man who killed Crystal Lockwood walked freely on the other side of that window. A spike of anger boiled up inside of me as I thought about the stain of Lockwood's sin infecting Carl's name. I had told myself over and over that this was going to be a simple drive into the country, a recon mission to find a house. But deep down, I always knew that it would be more than that.

  I pulled into Lockwood's driveway at a crawl, the gravel crunching under my tires, my palms sweating where I gripped the steering wheel. I parked behind the busted-down Taurus and turned off the engine. The porch was dark. The interior of the house appeared gloomy as well, the only light coming from deep inside. I turned on my digital recorder, put it into my shirt pocket, and walked to the porch to knock on the front door.

  At first, I saw no movement and heard no footsteps. I knocked again. This time a shadowy figure emerged from the lighted room in the back, turned on the porch light, and opened the front door.

  “Douglas Lockwood?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that's me,” he said, sizing me up and down as if I had stepped across some no-trespass line. He stood maybe six-foot-two, with three days’ worth of stubble covering his neck, chin, and cheeks. He reeked of alcohol, cigarettes, and old sweat.

  I cleared my throat. “My name's Joe Talbert,” I said. “I'm writing a story on the death of your stepdaughter, Crystal. I'd like to talk to you if I could.”

  His eyes went wide for a split second then narrowed. “That's…that's all done with,” he said. “What's this about?”

  “I'm doing a story about Crystal Hagen,” I repeated, “and about Carl Iverson and what happened back in 1980.”

  “You a reporter?”

  “Did you know that Carl Iverson got paroled from prison?” I said, trying to distract him and make it sound like my angle was Carl's early release.

  “He was what?”

  “I'd like to talk to you about it. It'll only take a couple minutes.”

  Douglas looked over his shoulder at the torn furniture and stain-covered walls. “I wasn't ’specting company,” he said.

  “I only have a few questions,” I said.

  He muttered something under his breath and walked inside, leaving the door open. I stepped through the doorway and saw a living room strewn knee deep in clothes, empty food containers, and crap you might find at a bad garage sale. We had taken only a few steps into the house when he suddenly stopped and turned to me. “This ain't a barn,” he said, looking down at my wet shoes. I looked at the piles of junk cluttering the entryway and wanted to debate the point, but instead, I removed my shoes and followed him to the kitchen to a table covered with old newspapers, debt-collection envelopes, and about a week's worth of crusty dinner plates. In the middle of the table, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's stood out like a holiday centerpiece. Lockwood sat in a chair at the end of the table. I took off my coat—careful to keep the recorder in my shirt pocket out of Lockwood's sight—and draped my coat over the back of a chair before sitting down.

  “Is your wife here?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I'd just spat on him. “Danielle? That bitch? She ain't been my wife for twenty-five years. She divorced me.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I ain't,” he said. “It is better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome woman. Proverbs 21:19.”

  “Okay…I suppose that makes sense,” I said, trying to find my way back to my topic. “Now, if I recall, Danielle testified that she was working the night that Crystal was killed. Is that right?”

  “Yeah…What's that got to do with Iverson getting out of prison?”

  “And you said that you were working late at your car dealership, correct?”

  He tightened his lips together and studied me. “What are you gettin’ at?”

  “I'm trying to understand, that's all.”

  “Understand what?”

  It was about here that my lack of planning made itself known, the way a single piano key left out of tune will blare its presence. I wanted to be subtle. I wanted to be clever. I wanted to lay a trap that would pull Lockwood's confession from him before he knew what had happened. Instead, I swallowed hard and threw it out there like a shot put. “I'm trying to understand why you lied about what happened to your step daughter?”

  “What the hell?” he said. Who do you think you—”

  “I know the truth!” I yelled the words. I wanted to stop any protest he had before the words formed in his throat. I wanted him to know that it was over. “I know the truth about what happened to Crystal.”

  “Why you…” Lockwood gritted his teeth and leaned forward on his seat. “What happened to Crystal was God's wrath. She brought that on herself.” He slammed his hand on the table. “‘On her head was the name, a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations.’”

  I wanted to pitch back into the fray, but his Bible-verse outburst confused me. He was spitting out something he had probably been telling himself for years, something that eased his guilt. Before I could correct my bearings he turned to me, his eyes on fire, and said, “Who are you?”

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a copy of the diary pages. I laid them in front of Doug Lockwood with the coded version on top. “They convicted Carl Iverson because they thought Crystal wrote these diary entries about him. Do you remember the code, the numbers that she had in her diary?” He looked at the diary page in front of him, then at me, then back at the page. I then showed Lockwood the deciphered version, the ones that named him as being the man forcing Crystal to have sex. As he read the words, his hands started to tremble. I watched his face turn white, his eyes bulging and twitching.

  “Where did you get these?” he asked.

  “I broke her code,” I said. “I know she was writing about you. You were the man making her do those things. You were raping your stepdaughter. I know you did it. I just wanted to give you the chance to explain why before I go to the cops.”

  A thought passed behind his eyes, and he looked at me with a mixture of fear and understanding. “No…You just don't understand…” He reached toward the center of the table and picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels. I tensed up, waiting for him to swing at me, prepared to block and counterpunch. But instead, he unscrewed the top and took a big drink of the whiskey, his hand shaking as he wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

  I had hit a nerve. What I said had knocked him against the ropes, so I decided to push it. “You left your DNA on her fingernail.” I said.

  “You don't understand,” he said again.

  “I want to understand,” I said. “That's why I came here. Tell me why.”

  He took another big drink from his bottle, wiped the traces of spittle from a corner of his mouth, and looked down at the diary. Then he spoke in a low, trembling voice, his words coming out monotone and rote, as if he were uttering thoughts that he meant to keep to himself. “It's biblical,” he said, “the love between parent and child. And you come here, after all this time…” He massaged the sides of his head, pressing hard on his temples as though trying to rub out the thoughts and voices that clattered in his brain.

  “It's time to make this right,” I said. I greased the skids the way I had seen Lila coax information out of Andrew Fisher. “I understand. I really do. You're not a monster. Things just got out of control.”

  “People don't understand love,” he said, as if I were no longer in the room. “They don't understand that children are a man's reward from God.” He looked at m
e, searching my eyes for a hint of understanding—finding none. He took another drink from the bottle and began to breathe heavily, his eyes rolling up behind a pair of flittering lids. I thought that he might pass out. But then he closed his eyes and spoke again, this time, reaching down and pulling the words from some deep dark cavern inside his body. His words oozed out, viscous and thick, like old magma. “‘I do not understand my own action,’” he whispered. “‘For I do not do what I want…but I do the very thing I hate.’” Tears filled his eyes. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the neck of the whiskey bottle, holding on to it like a life preserver.

  He was about to confess, I could feel it. I carefully glanced down at the recorder in my shirt pocket, making sure that nothing covered the tiny microphone. I needed to get Lockwood's words in his own voice admitting to what he had done.

  I looked up just in time to see the whiskey bottle before it smashed into the side of my head. The blow sent me reeling off my chair, my head hitting the wall. Instinct told me to run for the front door, but the floor of Lockwood's house began to curl like a corkscrew. My damaged sense of balance threw me to the left, tossing me into a television. I could see the front door at the end of a long, dark tunnel. I fought against the spinning of the room to get there.

  Lockwood hit me in the back with a pan or chair—something hard—knocking me to the floor, short of the door. I made one last all-exhausting lunge. I felt the door handle in my hand and threw it open. That's when another blow caught me in the back of the head. I stumbled off the porch, landing in the knee-deep grass, the darkness swallowing me as if I had fallen down a well. I floated in that darkness, seeing above me a small circle of light. I swam for that light, fighting against the abyss that pulled me down, forcing myself to regain consciousness. Once I reached that light, the cold December air filled my lungs again, and I could feel the frosted grass against my cheek. I was breathing. The pain in the back of my head punched through to my eyes and a trickle of warm blood dribbled across my neck.

  Where had Lockwood gone?

  My arms were stones: useless limbs propped unnaturally at my side. I focused all my energy and consciousness on moving my fingers, willing them to wiggle, then my wrists, then elbows and shoulders. I drew my hands under me, my palms on the cold ground, raising my face and chest out of the weeds. I heard movement behind me, around me, the sound of grass brushing against denim, but I could see nothing through the haze.

  I felt a strap, like a canvas belt, wrap around my throat, drawing tight, cutting off my breath. I tried to push off the ground, to get to my knees, but the blows to my head had disconnected something. My body ignored my commands. I reached behind me, feeling his knuckles tightening in a desperate grip as he pulled on the ends of the belt. I couldn't breathe. What little strength I had left drained from my body. I felt myself falling back into that well, back into that endless darkness.

  As I went limp, a wave of disgust flashed through my mind, disgust at my naiveté, disgust at not seeing the man's tight grip on the bottle for what it was, disgust that my life would end quietly, unceremoniously, lying face down in the frozen grass. I had let this old man—this whiskey-soaked child molester—beat me.

  I came back to life through a dream.

  I stood alone in the middle of a fallow bean field, a cold wind whipping at my body. Black clouds rolled above my head, churning with pent-up fury, twisting into a funnel, preparing to reach down to Earth and pluck me away. As I stood firm against the threat, the clouds broke apart and descended in tiny specks, the specks diving toward me, growing in size, sprouting wings and beaks and eyes, becoming blackbirds. They swooped down in hostile disorder, landing on the left side of my body, pecking at my arm, my hip, my thigh, and the left side of my face. I swatted at the birds and began running through the field, but nothing could deter their attack as they tore the skin from my body.

  That's when I felt the world bounce. The birds were gone; the field was gone. I struggled to make sense of my new reality, my eyes seeing only darkness, my ears hearing the hum of a car motor and the whining of tires on pavement. Pain throbbed in my head, the entire left side of my body burned as if someone had scaled that part of me like a fish. The inside of my throat felt as if it had been shaved with a dull rasp.

  My memory returned as the pain sharpened, and I remembered the whiskey bottle smashing into the side of my head, the belt tightening around my neck, and the stench of his rot in my nostrils. I had been wadded into a fetal position and stuffed into a cold, dark, noisy place. My left arm lay trapped beneath my body, but I could wiggle the fingers on my right hand, feeling them twitch against the cloth of my blue jeans. I felt my thigh. Then I moved my hand over my hip and across the thin shirt covering my chest, feeling for my recorder. It was gone. I reached down to the floor beneath me, touching a nap of carpeting, wet, freezing, biting into my skin along the left side of my body: the blackbirds from my dream. I knew this carpet. It was the mat that covered the floor of my car trunk, eternally wet from the water that sprayed through the rusted holes between the trunk and the wheel well.

  Jesus Christ, I thought to myself. I was in the trunk of my car—no coat, no shoes, the left side of my jeans and shirt drenched with icy road spray—and we were moving to beat hell. What was going on? I began to shiver uncontrollably, my jaw muscles clenching so tightly that I thought my teeth would break. I tried to roll onto my back, to give some small measure of relief to my left side, but I couldn't. Something blocked my knees. I reached down carefully, my shaking, brittle fingers probing the darkness, touching the rough surface of a cinder block that leaned against my knee. I reached farther and felt a second block with a log chain connecting the two. I followed the chain as it twisted between my calves and to my ankles, where it was circled twice and hooked.

  Cinder blocks chained to my ankles. It didn't make sense, not at first. It took a moment or two to clear away the cobwebs. My hands were not tied, no tape around my mouth, but my ankles were chained to cinder blocks. He must have thought I was already dead. That's the only thing that made any sense. He was taking me somewhere to dump my body, somewhere with water, a lake or a river.

  A spectacular fear gripped me, choking my thoughts in a sudden panic. My body shook with terror and cold. He was going to kill me. He believed he already had killed me. A tiny spark of realization came to me, calming my trembling body. He thought I was dead. A dead man can't fight; he can't run; he can't mess up the best laid plans of mice and men. But this was my car. Lockwood had made the mistake of stepping onto my battlefield: I knew my trunk blindfolded.

  I remembered the small plastic panels, the size of a paperback novel, that covered the taillights from inside the trunk. I had replaced both my turn signals within the past year. I fumbled in the darkness for a second or two until I found the small latch that allowed me to pull free the panel covering the right-side blinker. With a quick twist I popped the taillight bulb out of its bracket, flooding the trunk with heavenly light.

  I wrapped my hands around the bulb, letting its heat thaw the icy joints of my knuckles. Then I twisted my torso to reach the left taillight, being careful not to move too suddenly or make any noise that might alert Douglas Lockwood to the fact that his cargo was still alive. I pulled the panel and light out of the left bracket, giving the car no taillights and illuminating the trunk like midday.

  The chain around my ankles had been secured with a single hook. Lockwood must have used every bit of his strength to cinch it that tightly. I struggled to unhook the chain, my frozen fingers curling into themselves as if crippled by arthritis, my thumb as useless as a flower petal. I gripped the light bulb again, holding it tightly in my hand, feeling it burn, the white-hot light bulb steaming against my frozen skin. I tried to unhook the chain again, and again, but could not loosen it. I needed a tool.

  I did not own many tools, but I did own a piece-of-crap car that broke down a lot, so every tool that I owned, I kept in the trunk: two screwdrivers, a small crescent wrench,
pliers, a roll of duct tape, and a can of WD-40, all wrapped up in a greasy towel. I grabbed the screwdriver with my brittle right hand, jamming the head between the hook and the chain link, wiggling it, pushing it, working the head in millimeter by millimeter. Once I felt the screwdriver bite enough chain to give me leverage, I pushed the handle skyward, forcing the link from the hook. The chain dropped to the floor with a clamor that seemed to echo in the small confines of that trunk. I bit my lip as the rush of blood poured back into my frozen feet, hurting so badly I wanted to scream. I held my breath for several seconds, waiting for Lockwood to react. I heard a slight hum of music coming from the radio in the passenger compartment. Lockwood kept driving.

  At least ten minutes had passed since I first pulled the taillights from their brackets. If there had been a cop anywhere around, he would have stopped my car by now. The corners and curves we were taking were tighter than those on a freeway, and the occasional bump in the road suggested that we were on some backwoods, county highway, lightly traveled, especially when there is a blizzard on the way.

  I went through the options in my head. I could wait for a cop to pull us over, but the percentages were all wrong. I could wait for Lockwood to arrive at his destination, opening the trunk to find me alive and pissed off, but I could just as easily be dead from hypothermia by then. Or I could break out. That's when it dawned on me that trunks are designed to keep people out, not to keep people in. I examined the trunk lid to find three small hex-nuts attaching the trunk's lock in place. I smiled through my locked jaw.

  I dug though my tools and grabbed my crescent wrench, the frozen handle burning in my hand as if it were dry ice. I wrapped the wrench with the grease towel and tried turning the worm screw to adjust the wrench. My fingers refused to move. I stuck my right thumb in my mouth to warm the knuckle, holding the taillight in my left hand to warm it up at the same time.