The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

  “I’m glad you’re you,” she said.

  “Casey-”

  “Dig.”

  They managed to dig a grave one meter deep and one and a half meters long. Casey stripped Carson of his clothes, tossing his wallet on the ground. Prime rolled the body into the grave, feeling a moment’s nausea at the cold skin. Then Casey poured a bucket of lye over the body. Prime’s father had some in the barn, which he used to correct soil pH.

  “Fill it in,” she said.

  Prime pushed dirt over the top of the corpse with the shovel head. The sound of clods on flesh was nauseating, but he didn’t stop. When they were done, the grave was a ridge of dirt in the clearing.

  “We’ll throw some grass seed on it this weekend,” Prime said.

  “Your father never comes over here, does he?” Casey asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  They stood for a moment; then Prime dragged the tools back to the barn. It was nearly 5:00 A.M. They were dirty, sweaty, and shivering now that the physical effort was over. Prime felt giddy.

  “I did it. I got away with it.” He barked a laugh, realized it made him sound maniacal, and stuffed it back down his throat.

  Casey took his hand. “Let’s go.”

  They started walking into town, keeping to the edge of the road.

  “We did it,” she said softly. “We killed a man.”

  “We got away with-”

  “Shut up, John!” Casey cried. Prime realized she was crying.

  “Casey-”

  “Shut up! We killed a man. Whether right or wrong. We-both of us-killed a man tonight. We’re murderers, and God will judge us in heaven.”

  “There’s a million of him that are still alive,” Prime said.

  “What?”

  “Across all the universes, Ted Carsons are still alive out there.”

  “But this one, right here,” she said, “is dead. You and I took a life.”

  “It was just me,” Prime said. “I’d say that in court.”

  “It was us! We’re in this together.”

  Prime bristled. “Did you help me so that you could tie me down?”

  Casey snarled at him, “Go, if you want! No one is holding you down. Go use your stolen ideas to make a fortune, and keep it all for yourself. I really don’t care.”

  They walked in silence.

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said after a while.

  “It’s been a stressful night,” she said.

  “The police will come looking,” he said. “He might have let people know where he was going.”

  “It was just talk,” Casey said. “He never showed up at our apartment.”

  “What about our dirty clothes and the mud on our shoes?” Prime asked.

  “Your father owns a farm, doesn’t he?”

  John nodded.

  “You scare me,” he said.

  “Me too,” she said. “Let’s go home. You have work in a few hours.”

  CHAPTER 21

  John picked Casey up at eight on Saturday night. In fact, he was there at seven thirty, but he stopped at the Burger Chef not far from her house and sat in his car in the parking lot. He considered being fashionably late, but the stress on his nerves with just showing up on time was bad enough. At five till, he drove over.

  Her little brother, Ryan, opened the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m here to pick up Casey,” John said. Saying it to a little boy was a lot easier than saying it to her parents.

  “You’re not Jack.”

  “I’m John.”

  The boy eyed him, then swung the door open. “I guess you can come in.” He yelled up the stairs, “Casey, your stem is here!”

  From upstairs came an answering shout: “Shut up, you little puke.” Then, “Hi, Johnny.” She poked her head around the bannister on the steps leading upstairs.

  “Hi, Casey,” he managed to say.

  “Be right down.”

  Ryan disappeared into the kitchen and John heard: “Casey’s date is here. Are you going to grill him?”

  “Hush, dear,” Mrs. Nicholson said.

  Mr. Nicholson appeared from the kitchen and approached John with his arm extended. “Hello, John. I’m Casey’s father.”

  “Uh, good evening, Mr. Nicholson.” It wasn’t easy remembering that this wasn’t the Mr. Nicholson that John had met once or twice at church and nodded to in passing. He had never met this man.

  “Casey has been a bit reticent about you, so you’ll have to give me your detailed curriculum vitae and the last six years of tax returns.” He paused, then laughed. “Just kidding. But do tell me about yourself.”

  “I go to the University of Toledo. I’m a freshman, from Findlay. My major is physics.”

  He guided John to the living room, nodded. “Uh-huh. Physics. Very respectable. I’m an insurance salesman myself. Tried suffering through calculus and couldn’t.”

  John nodded.

  “John, hello. I’m Casey’s mother. Can I get you a pop?” Mrs. Nicholson was chubbier than he remembered. She offered him dry hands to shake.

  “No thanks, ma’am.”

  “Do you have proper insurance on your car, John?” Mr. Nicholson asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Alex!” Mrs. Nicholson said.

  “Just checking to make sure he’s covered,” he said quickly.

  “Dad, enough of the grilling,” Casey said from the entryway. She was dressed in a short black dress. A jeans jacket hugged her shoulders. “Let’s go, John.”

  “Honey, have a good time.”

  Casey grabbed his hand and dragged John out the door.

  “My parents are so embarrassing.”

  “They’re not so bad.”

  Casey gave him a look.

  “Your brother told me I wasn’t Jack.”

  “Well, you’re not.” As John opened the door, she slid into the car. “Let’s go eat.”

  Hilliard Avenue, the main drag, was teeming with life. Teenagers were dressed in all sorts of clothes to attract the opposite sex. Cars cruised the street. He felt a homesickness so sharp he almost felt ill.

  A body bounded from the curb sidewalk, and John slammed on the brakes, though he was only going fifteen kilometers per hour on the packed street. His heart thudded in his chest. The seat belt slowly unloosened.

  A sweatshirt-hooded teen slammed his palm on John’s car, then flashed him the bird with both hands.

  “Hey, Casey!” the teen yelled. He grabbed his crotch.

  John realized with a shock that it was Ted Carson.

  John gripped the steering wheel with viselike hands. Ted Carson.

  “Hey, Casey! Come on out and play!”

  “He’s drunk,” Casey said.

  Rage seethed inside John. He leaned on his horn, blasting the street with the Trans Am’s alarm.

  Carson lifted his foot and slammed the fender of the car. John took his foot off the brake and the car jumped forward a few centimeters.

  Carson jumped back but not out of the way. John steered around him and past.

  “What an asshole,” Casey said.

  “Carson is that.”

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve run into him a couple times,” John said, remembering the fight the two of them had had, how his mother had manipulated John’s mother into taking Carson’s side, and how he’d been cornered into writing an apology letter for beating the crap out of Ted.

  But that wasn’t this Ted Carson.

  “He was a year behind me,” Casey said. “He’s dropped out, I think, still in town. I think he works with his father at the appliance plant.”

  John watched in the rearview mirror as Carson shot him a double bird again. His friends were laughing from the sidewalk.

  “Some things never change,” John said.

  “You said it.”

  During dinner, at a small restaurant called the Riverview, Casey said, “That Ted Carson really burns me up.”

>   John shrugged. “He’s a loser, always will be.”

  “He tried to hit on me once,” she said.

  John felt a moment’s jealousy. “Yeah?”

  “At a party in town,” she said. “He grabbed me. I kicked him in the crotch.”

  “Good response.”

  “It works for most grabby boys,” she said.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You probably won’t have to worry about it,” she said. John wasn’t sure if that meant she trusted him not to touch her or she was going to let him if he tried.

  Remembering what John Prime had told him, he said, “I heard Carson tortured animals.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say!” Casey said.

  “During dinner or at all?”

  “At all.”

  “What if it’s true?” John asked. What was true in one world was probably true in another.

  “Have you seen the evidence? With your own eyes?”

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  “Have you heard ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”

  “How many squirrels need to be dissected while still alive for us to know someone’s a bad egg?”

  “How many innocents should suffer to capture one bad egg?”

  John grinned; then Casey grinned back. She said, “I don’t agree with you, but you’re a lot more interesting to talk to than Jack.”

  “Jack?”

  “Jack would have jumped right out of the car and laid into Carson.”

  “Who the hell is Jack?” John asked. “And why do people keep bringing him up?”

  “My ex-boyfriend.”

  “Uh-oh. I thought he was just some frat boy from college.”

  “He’ll probably be at the dance we’re going to.”

  “Dance?”

  “Who needs a movie when we can dance?” She smiled. “Oh, wait. I just remembered you like that country and western crap. Too bad.”

  John said, “I hear that The Revolutionary War Witch is a great movie.”

  “Uh-huh. We’ll catch it next week at the U.”

  “So we’re going out again,” John said as casually as he could.

  “Despite your views on Ted Carson.”

  The dance was at a warehouse next to the railroad tracks over on the east side of town. The warehouse was empty, hidden behind two other buildings, isolated, and perfect for a party.

  The music was the rock-and-roll stuff that he usually heard on the radio, bouncy fifties music, and not the hard reverb that would have been impossible to dance to. The teens in his universe would be listening to heavy metal. Here they listened to songs the Big Bopper might have written and sung.

  “I suppose you’re gonna tell me you don’t know how to dance,” she said as they walked in past a hulking doorman who waved them right in when he saw Casey. Apparently she was well known at these things.

  “I know how to dance,” John said. He didn’t know the bouncing dances that the kids on the floor were doing, but he had been in a play during his sophomore year when he took drama. The play had been called Sock Hop, big on Broadway during the seventies. It featured a number of fifties-style dances, and he’d had to learn the jitterbug. “The question is if you do.”

  She looked at him with mock outrage. “Johnny, you amaze me.” She grabbed his arm. “Let’s go.”

  He showed her the slow-slow-quick-quick step twice, and she mimicked it gracefully enough; then he grabbed her in promenade and launched into it.

  She stumbled once and then she had the hang of it. She’d been a cheerleader and studied dance when she was younger, and the basic steps of the jitterbug were easy. When he spun her out, she squealed, but when she came back in again, her face was lit with a smile.

  They danced three dances straight, John adding moves as they went. He was rusty at first too; it had been three years since he’d done it. When he’d learned it for the play, his mother had danced with him in the kitchen, his father looking on and laughing. At least until John’s mother had taken his father’s hand and shown that he too knew the double lindy.

  John noticed that people were watching them. They were frenetic and different enough in their moves that it drew interested attention. A small circle formed around them. Apparently the jitterbug had been forgotten here or it had lapsed into the junkyard of fads.

  “Enough,” Casey said, pushing him away. She was breathless, her chest heaving, and John wanted very much to clutch her to him again. He settled for slipping his arm around her waist and leading her to the makeshift bar. She didn’t shrug his arm off but instead leaned closer to him. If they hadn’t been dancing for twenty minutes, John would have retracted in fright, stiff at her encroachment. But there was an intimacy that had formed between them suddenly. Dance had its social function, and John was suddenly glad he’d worked so hard to learn those dance steps.

  “Two ice waters,” he said to the bartender.

  Casey took hers, dipped her finger in, and wetted her right cheek. Impulsively, John wetted her other check from his own glass.

  “Told you I could dance,” he said.

  “I’ve never done that before. Where’d you learn that?”

  “For a school play,” he said truthfully.

  “That was damn fun.” She flickered the water from her finger at him.

  “Hey, Casey,” someone said behind him, and he turned to see a tall, dark-haired young man standing there.

  “Jack,” Casey said.

  “You wanna dance, Casey?” he said, edging past and in front of John.

  “Too tired, Jack. Besides, John has all my dances tonight.”

  Jack turned and looked at John. He was three centimeters taller than John, perhaps six foot two. His shoulders were broad, and John felt his guts twist. How many fights had Jack been in during the last year? John hoped that Jack was a sensible person but smelled alcohol on his breath.

  “Yeah? I saw that crazy dance he was doing. Must have learned it from his grandmother.”

  John sighed but remained quiet. Jack probably had a half-dozen friends to back him up. John had no one.

  “Beat it, Jack. You’re boring me,” Casey said. She drained her water.

  “I didn’t used to bore you,” he said. “I used to make you real happy.”

  “So does a good dump. And you’re about as smelly.”

  John choked on his drink of water and sputtered a half laugh, half cough.

  Jack turned red and then instead of throwing a punch or insult as John expected, he turned and walked off.

  “Did you have to taunt him?”

  “Oh, yeah. I did,” she said with a smile. She looked over John’s shoulder. “Uh-oh.”

  John turned and saw the red-blue flashing of lights coming through the warehouse windows.

  “Cops.”

  “Better go,” Casey said.

  She grabbed his hand and headed behind the bar. There was a sheet metal door there with an unlit exit sign. They pushed through it into the cold night. John’s ears seemed cushioned by the sudden silence.

  “Car’s on the other side of the building,” John said.

  They edged along the building. The music suddenly died and he heard screams from inside. The raid had commenced.

  There were three police cars out front and a dozen patrolmen coming in. Two started their way to cover the side exits.

  John and Casey ducked behind a Dumpster and watched the two officers jog by.

  “Let’s go,” John said, and they dashed to the first row of cars.

  Two more patrol cars pulled into the lot, and one stopped next to his Trans Am.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “They’re probably not gonna bust us,” Casey said. “Just give us a warning.”

  “Yeah, I can’t take the chance,” John said. He didn’t know how well his ID cards would hold out against a thorough search.

  “You can’t?” Casey asked.

  “No, I can’t. I can’t get caught.”


  “Really, John. Three surprises in one night. I haven’t been surprised three times on a date since I was a virgin.”

  John couldn’t help laughing, and he stifled it by clamping a hand over his mouth.

  “Stop it. We have to get out of here.”

  “We can’t leave the car, so let’s wait here a few minutes.”

  Officers started leading kids out of the warehouse, some of them cuffed. The patrolman in the car next to John’s car finally got out and walked toward the front of the building.

  As he passed them, John and Casey went around the car they were hiding behind and dashed across the open space to the last line of cars. They slid into their seats and doused the dome light quickly.

  They watched, holding hands, until the police all had gone inside the building or left with their collars.

  “Coast is clear, Johnny.”

  “Coast is clear,” he agreed, and started the car.

  As he drove her home, he considered and discarded a dozen strategies that would allow a good-night kiss. He need not have bothered. She grabbed him around the neck as they reached her porch and kissed him with a warm, half-open mouth. It lasted ten seconds, and John felt her slide against him and fit like she belonged there.

  “Good night, John,” Casey said, looking solemnly into his eyes. “See you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 22

  John Prime was exhausted the next day, yet hyper-aware of every sound, every person at his shoulder. He kept hearing people saying “Carson” over and over again, but when he focused on the conversation they were saying “cars” or “cartoon” or “Khartoum.” He almost ran from the building twice.

  Sweating, almost gagging, he took his break in a stall in the locker room.

  “Keep it together. No one knows,” he whispered to himself. “No one even knows he’s missing yet.”

  At the end of the day, Prime saw Carson’s father talking to one of the foremen in the parking lot. Prime averted his gaze and got into his car.

  Abby cooed at him when he got home, as if nothing had happened, but Casey looked at him with hollow eyes. There was no smile, no hug, no twinkle in her eye. When he neared her, his guilt merged with hers into a black swirling mass. What had they done?