Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

“Let’s say that when he picks up the first one, he intends to have sex with her. He can’t do it. He can’t orgasm. He has slid along that continuum from sex to rage and so he breaks her neck and finds his…release in that. Afterward, he doesn’t even want the money from the transaction. He hides the body along the river, and the next opportunity he has to pick up one of these women, he repeats the cycle. So you have bodies number one and two. My guess is that there are more like this you haven’t even found yet. So far, it’s unremarkable. The fantasy is moving along a standard continuum.” He turned to face her. “But what did I say, where do we catch these guys?”

  She thought back. “In the aberration.”

  “That’s right. So where is the aberration? What is different? What changes?”

  “I don’t…after we find the first body, he changes. He replaced the body we found along the river with a new one.”

  “That’s right. That’s right. The entire fantasy changed. Something caused him to change, something happened that makes him want to show the bodies off, to use the bodies to communicate with the outside world, to replace the ones that the police find with new bodies. To begin killing other people—his uncle, the pawnshop owner. So what is that trigger? What happened to Lenny Ryan that changed him? Who is he trying to communicate with, Ms. Mabry?”

  Caroline covered her mouth. “Oh, my God.”

  Blanton drove slowly, maybe ten miles per hour, along the shoulder of the road. The slower he drove the faster he spoke.

  “He watched you try to save that boy and he was moved. He changed for you. He plants bodies for you to find. He led you down an alley to show you a body and after you found it he went to get another whore. And which one did he go after? Jacqueline, a girl you’d recently talked to. Don’t you see? He’s acting out your initial meeting, giving you the opportunity to save these people.”

  Caroline’s breathing felt shallow and rushed.

  “You said he replaces the bodies because he wants people to see. That’s right. Now keep going. Who does he want to see? Who does he think can save these hookers? Who does he wish could go back and save his girlfriend?”

  Her voice was rusty and weak. “Me?”

  “Yeah,” Blanton said. “You.”

  31

  Lenny Ryan’s beard was coming in nicely. He turned from side to side, dragging his fingers through the thick, dark whiskers. He finished running the razor over his bald head, and when it was shaved clean, wiped off the rest of the shaving cream with a towel. He put his glasses back on and considered his face in the mirror—like a reverse portrait of himself, no hair on top, lots of hair on his chin, the weakest prescription of glasses he could find. When he was done, he held up the driver’s license and turned side to side, checking it against the picture of Angela’s ex-husband, David Nickell, a bald man with glasses and a beard.

  He heard Angela outside the bathroom. “Gene? You ’bout done in there?”

  He came out and she was standing there in her bathrobe, smiling at him. She rubbed his bald head. “You take longer in the bathroom than a damn woman.”

  He watched her walk into the bathroom. He didn’t like heavy-set women but there was something about Angela that made him feel good, made him feel safe and unhurried. He walked into the kitchen and pulled on a pair of boots. That was the best thing about meeting Angela at the truck stop that night. Her husband had run off in such a hurry, he’d left not only his driver’s license but his car and most of his clothes too, and damn if they didn’t mostly fit, except the pants, which were a little loose in the waist and a little too short. But these boots were great; whatever eventually happened with Angela, he was going to keep these boots.

  He went out. He liked stepping outside and not hearing any cars, just the hum of the single power line and the clicks and whispers of the woods around Angela’s cinder-block cabin. The house was an hour north of the city, in a narrow valley where the farmhouses and trailers were spaced almost a mile apart along the highway; the minute he saw it, Lenny remembered how much he liked the country.

  It was warm already, the sun baking down between the pine and fir trees. He trudged across the dirt driveway toward the chicken house, reached over, and unlatched the hook. Inside the pen, alfalfa and straw crackled beneath his feet. He reached beneath the roost into the first nest and found an egg, causing a hen to protest by pecking at his leg. Without thinking, Lenny swung his foot toward the chicken—much harder than he’d planned, like a punter—raising a great cloud of straw and dirt and at its center, one howling chicken. He found himself shocked again by his stored-up anger and he stared at his wake, at the dirt settling into the beam of sunlight, at the agitated bird racing from the henhouse.

  After a moment, he went back to looking for eggs. He found eight. Holding out the bottom of his white T-shirt, Lenny made a little pouch to carry them back to the house, taking small, careful steps. He opened the back door without looking away from the nest of his shirt, the bell jangling as the door swung closed behind him. He eased the eggs from his shirt to the table. He could hear Angela showering in the bathroom down the hall as he cracked the eggs and plopped them into a metal mixing bowl. He added a little milk and a sprinkle of cinnamon, the way his momma had always made eggs. He supposed she added the milk to stretch out the few eggs they had, but he’d learned to like the taste of eggs done that way. He whipped the egg mixture and set it aside, then grated some onion and cheese, chopped up a green pepper and the little bit of ham they had left over from dinner last night.

  The gas flame sputtered and sparked and glowed blue. Lenny dropped a chunk of butter into the pan and held it just above the flame, until the butter was completely melted and just beginning to brown. Then he poured the eggs in and set the lid on the pan.

  “Boy. Smells good.” She trudged past him and started upstairs to get dressed. But she paused on the bottom step. “So what are you doing today, Gene?”

  He lifted the edges of the omelet and let the uncooked egg run beneath it. Then he put the lid back on the pan. “Going into town.”

  “Spokane?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I gotta work tonight, but if you want to come back by two, I could go with you.”

  He didn’t look up. “I’m gonna be later than that.”

  “That’s okay, I guess. I got plenty I can do around here.” She went upstairs.

  He dropped two slices of bread in the toaster and poured two glasses of orange juice. He folded the cheese, ham, and vegetables into the omelet and put the lid back on. And then he sat reading last Sunday’s paper, which Angela had brought home from the restaurant. He flipped to the real estate section and ran his finger along the commercial section. Nothing. This was crazy, thinking he would ever figure anything out. He leaned over the newspaper and stared out the window.

  She came back down in her waitress dress and shoes, something on her mind. He cut the omelet into two halves and put one half on a plate for her with a slice of toast.

  “So what do you do when you go to Spokane, anyways?”

  “I told you. Get my mail. See a couple people. Do some things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  He looked up and finished chewing, but didn’t answer.

  She picked at her own eggs. “You gonna be late, then?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  She stared at her fork. “It’s just, you haven’t been to Spokane in quite a while.”

  “A few weeks.”

  “Seems like things are going pretty good around here, yeah?”

  He chewed a mouthful of eggs and watched her. She took a drink of her orange juice. This wasn’t like her to ask a lot of questions, even though Lenny knew she had good reason. She had to know he was hiding. After all, he’d moved in the night they met; the next day he’d shaved his head and started growing this beard. But if she found it strange that he looked more and more like her ex-husband, Angela never mentioned it. She seemed like the kind of person who had decided long ago there
were things she didn’t want to know. So she rarely asked about his business unless Lenny brought it up first—which he realized he had to do now if he wanted to enjoy the rest of his breakfast.

  “What is it?” he asked finally.

  “It’s just…you’d tell me if there was somebody special in Spokane, right?”

  “There’s nobody special.”

  “But you had a woman like that, for a while?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s not around anymore?”

  “No.”

  Angela nibbled around the edge of her toast. “I’m sorry. I probably sound like a jealous old biddy.”

  He looked up. “You sound fine.”

  She rolled her eyes at herself, laughed, and took a bite of omelet. “Boy, them’s good eggs, Gene. You’re gonna make somebody a good wife some day.”

  Lenny ate his eggs.

  32

  Caroline shifted and squirmed from New Orleans to Salt Lake City, falling asleep and waking up seconds later, staring at her watch, unable to comprehend that virtually no time was passing. They hit storms across the Midwest and had to climb, and before sliding the cover down on her window, Caroline could see flashes of lightning beneath the plane. The engines groaned and the plane rattled as it climbed, adding sound to Caroline’s brief dreams—glimpses of women drowning in refrigerators, the embalmer Russell having coffee with her mother, the Mississippi River curling over a great falls.

  Next to her, a woman hushed a baby already asleep—“Shh, shh, shh”—and that sound, too, scraped at Caroline’s nerves, until she had to get up and go to the rest room at the back of the jet. She walked down the narrow aisle, faces turning up toward hers, as if these people wanted something from her too. She felt beads of perspiration on her face.

  At the back of the plane a man was crouching in the aisle, talking to an attractive girl. Caroline waited patiently until the man stood, without looking at her, without breaking his conversation, and pressed himself against the seat back for Caroline to pass.

  In the rest room, she washed her face and stared at herself in the mirror.

  The flight was delayed an hour out of Salt Lake, so she sat in a coffee shop and wrote out a rough report of her meeting with Blanton in longhand on the yellow legal pad. He’d jotted down a brief profile of an unknown subject—UNSUB—that matched Ryan perfectly (“…UNSUB acts out retaliation fantasies pertaining to deep trauma through the creation of a surrogate for the subject of the original trauma…”). Thankfully, the section of his report pertaining to Caroline (“…possible involvement of Det. Mabry as a rival or symbolic figure in his evolving fantasy…”) was short and understated.

  Salt Lake City to Spokane was an easier flight, and Caroline settled into a window seat without anyone next to her. She closed her eyes, eager to sleep, but the pilot’s voice interrupted her. “We’re beginning our final approach into Spokane—”

  Caroline checked her watch and couldn’t believe it. She’d slept the entire flight, and if she’d dreamed, she didn’t remember.

  She felt drugged as she walked down the jetway, behind the woman and baby she’d sat near on the first leg of her flight. “There he is!” the mother kept repeating. “There he is! There he is!”

  The baby’s father, a tall man with long hair, wearing a knee brace, stepped from a crowd and swallowed them both in an embrace. They pulled off to the side of the flow of passengers, and Caroline’s head turned as she passed them, and she saw the man kiss his baby on the top of her head.

  Even at midnight the airport seemed strangely crowded. Joel was sitting away from the people, two gates away, and he stood when Caroline approached, reached out and took her travel bag. She didn’t offer any resistance. He bent down and kissed her.

  “Hey,” he said. “You look tired.”

  She let him carry her bags to his Jeep. They climbed in and fastened their seat belts, but he didn’t start the car.

  “What’s the matter?” Caroline asked.

  He turned. “I have to tell you something. I was going to wait until we got home, but I have to tell you now.”

  Caroline felt sluggish, doped. “Okay.”

  “Last night, I was out with Derek and Jay…it was the last thing I thought would happen, but…I met this girl and…I’m sorry…I went home with her.”

  Caroline nodded, said “Okay,” leaned back in her seat, and closed her eyes.

  PART IV

  JULY

  Death by Water

  33

  As always, the first sign was the disappearance of the rapids near stateline, where the river dropped to reveal rocks as white and shiny as cleaned bone—rounded boulders and fingered slabs picked up ten thousand years earlier by glacier and deposited dumbly along the gravel and dirt riverbed. A few miles downstream, the receding water brought three old men with metal detectors to a calm stretch of midriver, where there were rumors of a sunken ferry boat and lost mining treasure. The old men combed the newly exposed banks, each listening to his own progress through headphones, each playing in his mind some version of the story of old coins and silver nuggets, each willing to settle for a narrative of old plows and car parts—for anything containing mystery, really, since that’s what their lives lacked. Like all people, they realized too late that mystery was the key to staying interested in the whole business, to distracting themselves from the surety of what came next; that a man strives and settles and strives and settles and this pattern eventually kills him. But the old men didn’t acknowledge the affliction, not to one another. Instead, they passed on the glistening riverbed with nods and raised eyebrows, sweeping their metal detectors before them like blind men with canes, oblivious to the deep water at their backs, where life goes on—swimmers and fishers and boats carving the river into sheets and beads that explode in tiny prisms and rain back on the river.

  All along the Spokane, for twenty miles, for a hundred years, people came down to the tame July river, shadowing it from Lake Coeur d’Alene in the rich Idaho woods to the channeled scablands to the west, where the river paused to note the end of the forest and the return of the great, hard western desert. Smack between rock and forest was the city’s center, where a low river felt more like desperation than recreation. Here the rocks weren’t white and shiny, mere ripples in the flow, but black and hard: volcanic basalt columns flaked and knapped by the current into giant arrowheads, into massive Clovis points. Here the rock battled the water, bending it through tight channels and around craggy islands, beating it onto each ledge of the falls. And if there was another surety in the water’s eventual victory, each summer these hard black stones promised it wouldn’t be any time soon. But with the falls dried up to a deferential trickle, the spectators stayed away. After all, who takes pictures of rocks?

  So maybe that’s why they just didn’t notice the drought. Whatever the reason, it snuck up on the city, this lack of rain. Fifty-four days, by the time the newspaper recorded it with a color photograph of a second-generation wheat farmer rubbing dry dirt between forefinger and thumb, as if that meant anything. The people saw the photograph and read the story about the drought as if they were watching a program on television—something detached and theoretical, marking time between dinner and bed. Did they actually believe that water came from the sky anyway, that farms still existed? Taps still ran. Cans of food were replaced on grocery shelves. What did a drought matter when every morning the sprinkler system greened the lawn?

  These things were the true measure of water, not some exhausted river limping through the falls, shuffling out of downtown and lying down to die in the flatland between Peaceful Valley and Nine Mile. With the dams closed, the water beyond downtown pooled and became mostly still, a series of lakes safe enough for drunk rafters and whining Jet Skis and dogs chasing tennis balls. What was left of the river was allowed to squeeze through the turbines and past the wastewater treatment facility, where round ponds of sludge were separated from water, past housing developments, horse and cattle ra
nches, until it was just a stream, curling past the Spokane and Colville Indian reservations until finally it fed the Columbia, which had long since stopped being America’s great river and had itself become just a series of dams and lakes.

  In the mythic river of the west there is balance and peace, a fly fisherman harmonizing with the water. But the streams had all been toileted by cattle or muddied by roads. The rivers had all been broken. What rocks failed to do, dams accomplished with disappointing ease, turning the big rivers into pools of beaten and still water.

  It was in one of these dam-formed lakes, just twelve miles from downtown Spokane as it turned out, that the water pulled far enough back to reveal the skeleton of an old horse-drawn swather, which had been abandoned by a farmer and overtaken by water eighty years ago and which emerged from the river during periods of drought, every ten years or so, to be discovered by someone poking around the riverbed. The swather was discovered this time by two boys making their way upstream with sticks, stirring the mud flats for frogs. Long metal railings like ribs stuck out from the swather just above the water level, along with a cab seat that looked to the boys like an exaggerated bicycle seat.

  They picked their way out to the rusted tractor; the boys would tell TV reporters that there was a funny rotting smell. Then they both saw what appeared to be a man constructed of balloons tangled in the metal ribs of the swather, his body bloated and unrecognizable, his clothes long since torn away, his flesh washed clean of features and bleached the color of the mud flats. Anyone who had known him when he was alive would have had trouble believing that all the head-busting and pussy-chasing and law-breaking would amount to this, that a young man who had been so feared and desired had become nothing but a dilution of his own parts, a watered-down soup of the complex recipe of chemicals and compounds that make a man. It was the river’s oldest trick and now it was done. Three months after taking Burn, the river had finally given him back.