by Jon Cohen
Wait here.
He almost turned back. No, if he hurried, they could make the movie. And she wouldn’t stay mad at him, not for this dumb little thing. Besides. What if he won? Because wasn’t that the strange dreadful excitement he suddenly felt in his gut, the almost physical premonition all lottery winners described? I knew I was going to win. This time I just knew it. And who hits these jackpots? The taxi driver from Bangladesh, the secretary in the auto parts store, the Forest Service bureaucrat in his cubicle. Yes, the bureaucrat—he wins the lottery this time and everything changes like magic.
Harry rushed into the cramped convenience store. A stroke of luck, only two other people in line, an old woman in a mottled fur coat and a construction worker.
The woman gathered up a fistful of tickets and turned to the construction worker and said in a sly cigarette wheeze, “Sorry pal, I got the winner right here.”
The construction worker laughed and replied in a thick Philly accent, “You know, that many tickets, you don’t seem so sure of your luck.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” she teased.
Harry swallowed. These people, so casual with millions at stake. The construction worker reached for his wallet and Harry, aping the move, reached for his own. The construction worker pulled out a five and slapped it down on the counter. Harry patted his back pockets. Empty. Oh shit. He’d left his wallet at home.
A flood of people came and got in line behind him. He shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. Change clinked against his fingernails and he pulled out four quarters. The exact price of a ticket. A sign. His heart thumped.
“Next,” muttered the clerk.
Harry stepped forward. “One, please. One ticket.”
The bored clerk waited a beat and lifted his eyes. “You got some numbers for me or what?”
Harry froze. He felt the press of people behind him, as if there were thousands lined up now. His number, his all-important, make-or-break lucky number. But his mind was blank. His lucky number was a mix of Beth’s birthday, their wedding anniversary, his own birthday—but he couldn’t remember any of them.
“You want the computer should pick?” the clerk said.
Harry gripped his forehead and squinted.
“Yo pal,” the clerk said.
Harry looked out the window and saw Beth across the busy street where he’d planted her, going up and down on her toes in the cold. Behind her in the lot, the wrecking ball high up on the demolition crane swung back and forth like a pendulum on a great clock.
“The computer, sure, yes,” Harry breathed.
The clerk hit a button.
A number came rushing back into Harry’s head. “May 23, 1980. Beth’s birthday is May 23!”
The ticket machine churned out his lottery ticket. The clerk caught it in his hand like a cop catching an abruptly birthed baby. Harry had a sudden, absolutely terrifying sensation as the clerk handed him the flimsy square of paper.
“Oh God,” said the woman behind them.
Clutching his ticket, Harry pivoted and looked at her. She was staring wide-eyed out the window facing Market Street. Everyone in line turned in unison, like startled cattle. Harry caught the last second of it, the warehouse wall tumbling down in slow motion, the shattered bricks scattering like pigeons, the demolition crane buckling. A steel strut the length of a train rail snapped free from the collapsing center of the crane and sailed toward the street, turning end over end like a giant cheerleader’s baton.
What might Beth have seen in her final moments?
The woman with a phone to her ear pushing a stroller? Steam rising from the manhole cover in the middle of the street? Harry in the convenience store clutching his lottery ticket?
The immense rusty length of metal crashed through the plywood barrier behind her.
Stumbling out of the store, all Harry could see was rubble, a rising plume of ghostly white dust and, fluttering across the sidewalk, a large torn piece of Beth’s red wool coat.
2
Harry stared at the cardboard box on the kitchen table. It was two weeks after the memorial service, a cold March afternoon. He was still in his pajamas.
Breathe.
He gulped air like a drowning man. Circled the kitchen table. His legs were weak, he wasn’t eating properly. And sleep? Hideous. Impossible. He couldn’t even get into the bed at night, lay at the foot of it like a dog and trembled until sunrise. He placed one hand on the box.
Breathe.
He placed his other hand on the box. Oh Beth, how playfully we tossed around the notion of death, like a party balloon, batting it back and forth over the years of our marriage.
“I’m freezing to death, Harry, stop hogging the quilt,” she said one cold winter night.
“Sorry,” he said, then yanked the entire quilt off her and wrapped himself in it like a mummy, laughing wickedly as she shrieked and pummeled him with a pillow.
Another time:
“I’m dead on my feet, Harry, let’s go up to bed,” she said, walking past the couch.
He lowered his book. “Hey, thanks for asking. Yes, I’d love to have sex with you.”
She stopped and stared at him. “Seriously? I say ‘dead on my feet’ and you hear ‘sex’?”
“Did the sentence contain ‘bed’?”
“Ha!”
He chased her up the stairs and they fell into bed.
Breathe, Harry, he told himself. He slid a paring knife along the taped edges of the box and lifted the flaps. And there she was, inside a clear, heavy-gauge plastic bag, Beth turned into ashes. “Oh,” he said, and closed his eyes, unstuck in time. He was standing in another kitchen, in their first apartment, five blocks south of the Ohio State campus on Pugh Street. They were both in graduate school, just married, twenty-three years old and vibrating with adoration and desire. Naked and slinky as a cat, Beth walked across the kitchen and slid her arms around him, her breath hot in his ear.
Unstuck, Harry saw Beth on Market Street, the crane collapsing behind her in the same instant he saw her young and naked and alive as they laughed, sexing around in that tiny kitchen on Pugh Street, bumping into chairs and cabinet doors.
That they had been so absolutely physical. That they could, anytime they wanted, reach out and touch each other. Confirm each other with a look, a smile. He shook his head and stared at the ashes. You can’t be in a bag. I have to get you out of there. I have to get you out. He paced the empty rooms of his empty house.
At midnight, he rushed out to the garage and placed the bag of ashes in the basket on the front of his old three-speed bicycle. Unstuck again, he saw young Beth perched on the handlebars, just after they had bought the bike at a yard sale. Her laughter, as he pedaled down Kirlsen Hill toward campus.
He blinked away the memory and set off through the streets of Waverly, pedaling in and out of the glare of the streetlights, like flares that lit up his guilt. Inside all the houses, husbands were pulling their wives close, kissing them good-night. No, not good-night or goodbye or wait here. No, these husbands were holding their wives tight. These husbands would never let go, never turn their backs. They were holding on for dear life, because that’s what you do, you hold on to her and never let go. Beth, why did I let you go? The wheels on the rusty bike emitted desolate squeaks.
A cold sliver of moon followed overhead as Harry circled the town. “What am I going to do with you?” he whispered hoarsely to the bag in the basket. Which couldn’t possibly contain the remains of his wife, could it? Surely he hadn’t done this? But he had.
Clouds swallowed the moon. The dark night grew darker. He pedaled up the long, steep hill at the end of Springer Avenue, faster and faster. The bike veered wildly. “Widower Bicycles Self to Death,” The Weekly Waverly would report, below the pet-grooming and duct-cleaning ads. But the hill failed to deliver a heart attack.
S
weat-soaked and gasping, Harry peeled off his coat and let it flap away into the street behind him. He turned onto Guernsey Road. A jagged pothole loomed and he swerved, smacking into the granite curb in front of a large Tudor house. The bag of ashes bounced out of the basket and sailed into the air.
Barks of delight pierced the night. A Jack Russell terrier burst out of the dark, crossing the wide front lawn in grasshopper leaps. Intruder! The dog skidded to a halt and looked up at the rising bag. Balloon!
On the ground, entangled in his bike, Harry watched in horror as the bag dropped back toward earth, and the little dog—jaws agape, tongue lolling—leaped.
“No! No, no, no!”
The dog sank its teeth into the bag, jerked its head back and forth, then raced across the yard in a wild zigzag, a berserk canine comet with a billowing tail of ash. A door opened on the side of the house and someone called out. “Bud! Bud, what the hell?”
Bright-eyed little Bud ran up to Harry and dropped the empty bag like he’d just retrieved a ball. The dog sneezed and shook himself, coating Harry in ashes and white grit.
“Bud!” Footsteps clunked down a side porch. Bud galloped away.
Harry grabbed the empty bag and took off in the other direction. Five blocks later he collapsed against a telephone pole, heart slamming in his chest. Oh God!
But wait, why was this a catastrophe? Beth hadn’t been scattered by just any dog. No, it was good ol’ Bud from Beth’s daily walk to the train.
Harry stared at the plastic bag, torn and slobbery with dog spit. Oh God!
He clutched it to his chest and staggered into the black remains of the night. Every so often he bumped into a mailbox or a streetlight and gave off a little poof of ash. Just before dawn he stood in a daze before his empty house. It was as welcoming as a mausoleum.
The house suddenly cleared its throat. “Harry,” it growled. This did not startle Harry. It was right that the house should growl at him. The house had been fond of Beth. She had been its life and light. Now look at it. Pathetic and dark. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything. I’m so sorry.”
“Yo, Harry.”
Harry saw the glowing tip of a cigarette, then the outline of intimidating male bulk sitting on the front porch steps.
He advanced cautiously. “Wolf?”
Slit-eyed behind his cigarette smoke, his brother stood up. Wolf’s real name was Gerald Wolford Crane. The nickname came in the fifth grade when Wolf’s voice dropped two octaves and he began to shave.
“Come closer, Harry,” Wolf said.
Harry inched forward.
Wolf squinted at him. “What’s that all over you? You look like a powdered donut.” He reached out a large hand and slapped ashes off Harry’s shoulder. Harry grabbed the front porch post to keep from toppling over.
Wolf studied a piece of white grit on his fingertip, then noticed the empty plastic bag in Harry’s fist. He slapped his hand against his pants. “Shit, Harry! What’d you do?”
What I did, Wolf, by the very blackest of magic, was turn sweet Beth into ashes. Harry slipped his hand into his pants pocket. It was just a piece of paper, but the losing lottery ticket weighted his pocket, heavy as death. He curled his fingers around the ticket and gripped it tightly, as one might a talisman. Yes, his unlucky talisman. He carried it with him everywhere. He would leave instructions in his will to have the ticket placed in his mouth and his lips sewn shut so that he could taste its curse throughout eternity.
Harry smoothed the bag and folded it. “Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “I scattered Beth’s ashes.” Actually, Wolf, I outsourced the job to a dog. Come spring, Bill Belson’s Beth-fertilized lawn would be greener than a golf course. The dog, the fatal lottery ticket—there was so much to confess. Harry started to speak, but Wolf broke in.
“Scattered? She’s in your hair. For fuck’s sake, Harry, that was your wife, not a bag of confetti!”
Harry gently brushed a white flake from the forearm of his coat and watched it fall. He eased it into the frozen dirt with the toe of his shoe and looked up at his brother, who was shaking his big head.
“It’s not as easy as you think,” Harry said. And confessing anything to Wolf, impossible. He’d momentarily forgotten the first rule of Being Younger Brother to Wolf: give him nothing. Wolf fed on human frailty.
“Yeah, well, you should’ve let me come with you. It could’ve been done right.”
What else was Wolf here to do right? He was supposed to be back in Virginia in his own empty house. Wolf was in the process of divorcing his third wife, whom Harry had never met. The Crane brothers were shedding wives like dogs shed hair. Like Jack Russells shed ashes.
“Up kind of early, aren’t you, Wolf? And, you know, in the wrong state.”
Wolf flicked his cigarette onto the frozen lawn. “I’ve been doing some legwork, Harry. I’ve been looking into things.”
Harry tensed. Wolf looking into things was never, ever good.
Harry plucked from his memory a random and typically unpleasant Wolfian moment. The year: 1992. The place: Plover, Wisconsin. The event: a pale and trembling eleventh grader stopping Harry, a lowly ninth grader, in the hallway of Plover Central High School.
“Excuse me, Mr. Crane,” the eleventh grader said, unable to meet Harry’s startled eyes. “May I have your permission to open my locker?” For a week the kid would anxiously reappear. “Mr. Crane, may I eat my lunch?”
“Want an ice cream sandwich, Mr. Crane? Want two?”
Wolf, of course, was behind it. God only knew what the kid had done. Glanced at Wolf in the lunchroom, brushed his shoulder in the gym, breathed in a way Wolf didn’t like. Existed on the planet. Younger brother of a legendary high school gorilla, Harry was perpetually furious and helpless. “What’s going to happen to me when you graduate?” he’d say. “They’ll string me up.”
Smoking openly in the school parking lot, Wolf snorted. “I doubt it. I think it’s going to take this place a few years to get over me.” His flicked cigarette butt sparked against a teacher’s car door.
What was the source of Wolf’s unremitting need to stamp his boot print upon the world, when Harry trod so gingerly? Harry was eight and Wolf was ten when their father, middle-aged and mild-mannered, walked out on the family. Drove, actually. Jeffrey Crane worked in sales at Bingham’s Chevrolet in North Plover, and one day he didn’t come home at five o’clock. They were told he had purchased a Chevy Citation X-11 in cash, 3 percent off with his employee discount, and had driven off the lot with a jaunty wave. Two days later, an envelope arrived addressed “To: Barbara Crane & Family.” Inside was a note written on the back of a Bingham’s Chevrolet sales slip: “I’m off to try something else. The change will do me good. Best of luck everybody, JC.”
Soon after, Barbara Crane began to disappear, too, day by day, sigh by sigh, going through the motions of motherhood, cooking, cleaning, signing report cards, but no longer there.
And the two boys? Harry went quiet and Wolf went wild.
Harry selected another moment from the stockpile of his brother’s exploits: Wolf pantsing the star quarterback of the Plover High School football team on the field during the second quarter. Harry, along with several hundred people sitting in the stands, watched openmouthed as the quarterback stood in the klieg lights frantically attempting to reinstate his sweaty jockstrap. Wolf was given fifty detentions. Never enforced, of course. The principal, like everyone else, was afraid of him.
Another time, hidden behind a stand of trees, Wolf gripped a stolen baseball bat and homered a blazing, gasoline-soaked tennis ball into Windham Park, where volunteer firefighters were prepping for Fire Prevention Day, igniting the back end of Ladder Truck Number One. Pushing always to a limit just short of incarceration, Wolf in his youth was an action movie with way too much action. By the time he left Plover, his audience was exhausted.
Wolf attacked, Harry demurred. It was the yin and yang of their brotherly existence. After their mother read their father’s goodbye letter out loud in stunned amazement, Wolf slapped a framed photograph of his father off the mantelpiece and stormed out of the room.
Harry said softly, “Mom. Mom?” When she finally looked up, he said, “Is it all right if I go outside?” Upstairs, Wolf was clawing apart his room. The house heaved, things crashed. “Mom,” Harry said again. “I’ll just be out in the front yard, okay?”
His shell-shocked mother could only nod.
Young Harry opened the front door and looked up into a sky of deep, dappled green. A glorious American beech, the largest tree on the block, stood in the front yard. The massed leaves made a dome over their entire yard, as vast as the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, which Harry had seen once in a book.
A year earlier, Harry had discovered that his father had carved “JC” into the tree, in letters so tiny that only a person who spent a great deal of time with the tree would ever see them. His father was gone, but he had left something behind, something that only Harry knew about. Harry walked over to the tree, making sure to avoid even glancing at the initials, which were about five feet up, just above the collar of the first branch. If Wolf ever discovered his father’s initials, he would surely hack them into oblivion.
Harry positioned himself so that the beech was between him and the house. The tree blocked the sound of Wolf busting things in his room. Harry pressed his back and his hands hard to the wide trunk and closed his eyes, filling his senses with it, so that all there was in the world was Harry Crane and his tree. The tree was fixed to the solid ground. Maybe its roots went all the way down to the center of the earth. It would never go anywhere. It would be there at night and in the morning when he woke up. It would be there under blue skies and in the rain, and for all his birthdays. The beech tree was eternal and true.
