Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  Promptly the gates opened at 8am, Julianna and Scott strolled hand-in-hand into Forest Lawn. They climbed the rise above the Wee Kirk O’The Heather chapel. On the highest point of the park, the plot was noticeably new. Several fresh wreaths and tributes stood around it.

  James Maitland Stewart

  May 20, 1908–July 2, 1997

  “For He Shall Give His Angels Charge

  Over Thee To Keep Thee In All Thy Ways”

  “He never got over the death of his wife,” Julianna said wistfully. “The papers said he just became a recluse. They were together for almost 50 years.”

  As they stood in front of a nearby memorial—an immense bronze archer mounted on a platform—she began to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Scott asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, but she was shaking and he took her hands in his.

  “Ok—what happens when we go home? Where is this going, Scott?” she blubbed.

  “Hey.” He tightened his grip. “Julianna… are we… are we breaking up?” His throat constricted.

  Tears rolled down her face. “I’m so scared. You have no idea how—”

  He clasped her trembling body. Kissing the saltwarm sorrow of her lips, he framed his hands to her heartrending gaze.

  “Marry me!” he demanded.

  She broke away. “What! Why would you want to do such a thing?”

  “I dunno. Jesus, Jules,” he laughed, stunned. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and lifted his shoulders. “Because.”

  She was shaking: part fear, part anger. “Don’t do that to me. Don’t you dare. I want to know why.”

  “What do you want me to say? ‘I love you’? Hell yes, goddamit. But that’s too easy. I never said it to anyone before, because I never have, until now. And the word doesn’t even begin to cut it.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about me, Scott.”

  “I only know one thing—I won’t take no for an answer. And I won’t take go for an order. Ok, so that’s two. There you go. You’ve reduced me to gibberish.” He was crying now too. He lowered his head but it was too late to hide it. “I’m sorry you find it stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid. It’s beautiful. But it’s too important to be impulsive,” she said. “You’re too important to be impulsive.”

  Scott took a step into the space between them. “Is it? I don’t think it’s impulsive to admit that I don’t want to spend another day of my life away from you. I’d have thought it was kinda brave of me to say as much, doncha think? The whole day apart thing, I mean. That’s heavy.”

  “You think I would ever want to break up with you? Am I that mad?” she gasped.

  He smiled. “And bad. And dangerous to know.”

  “Who? Me?”

  Scott took another step. “This the best you got? You’ll have to try harder if you want rid of me.”

  Julianna glanced around, as if desperate for an exit. The park was wide open beneath her; there were too many avenues. She looked back and saw he had taken another step—the sneak! He was almost to her now. Her heart pistoned, sure to jump its mountings. Her thoughts were heady, aimless, all suspect. She couldn’t be certain that the ground was still beneath her feet. Her legs were there. She knew this much because she could feel them about to buckle.

  “Scott, stop! You’re scaring me. I’m terrified, because you are so certain. You’re so sure, and what’s really scary is that you’re not being flippant. You really are so… sure.”

  Scott stiffened. “You’re not? About me? Us?”

  She turned and looked where the bronze archer was poised on bended knee on his marble plinth. One arm drew his arrow back while the other held the bow taut. His musculature rippled and curved with the potential of his set. His head bent low and his eternal gaze followed the line of his aim, to where its threat met Julianna now—equally rigid in the moment—standing in his arrow’s path.

  Bury me under the greenwood tree, the half-remembered Tom Sawyer line came to her. She clasped her breast and looked at Scott, who seemed able to read her thoughts.

  “Should I call Cupid off?” he asked. “Send him packing? Is that what you really want?”

  Julianna thumped him hard on his chest. “Don’t you ever leave me. Never! I will follow you to the ends of the earth, Scott Jameson. I swear I will!”

  Scott closed the gap and scooped her up. They were both crying hard. Scott tried to be quiet with it.

  “You know,” he said, muffled in the clinch, “it’s not without punishment.”

  She lifted her face to him. “What’s not?”

  “Châtiment. I looked it up. On a computer!”

  “You did? Welcome to the brave new world.”

  “It’s the only word I could remember,” he laughed.

  “So what’s my punishment?”

  He sighed. “Julianna Putnam?”

  “Yes?”

  Checking the coast was clear, Scott dropped to one knee. Now she had two men—the archer and Scott—reduced to the same supplicant posturing.

  “Will—you—marry—me? Please!”

  “Yes. Yes! Yes!” she shrieked, flinging her hands up in blissful exasperation. “Scott, get up. God!”

  “You got me. That’s your sentence.”

  He stood and she threw herself into a strait-jacket embrace around him, found him shaking like a leaf.

  “Then I plead guilty with a happy heart,” Julianna murmured, as she looked at the archer. And though his eyes met hers, their burnished orbs did not betray what his witness saw.

  Chapter 14

  2005 – Boston

  Tuesday August 23

  In the evening, Scott rang China Corner to order in. The hostess took his telephone number and called up his details. “Hello, Mister Jameson. Would you like a repeat of your last order or can we do something different for you this time?”

  “Sure,” Scott grunted. “Whatever. Same address.” He hung up.

  While he waited, he examined the mystery piece of jewelry. It was obviously a broach or clasp of some kind; there was a fixing pin on the back and even it was gold. It almost filled his palm where he held it, its two inch diameter as big as the special silver dollars Mister Fuller, at the soda counter of the Triphammer A&P, would give him when Scott was the birthday boy. The thick frame of the broach was an intricately curved, almost heart-shaped border. Within its hollow center, thinner bands of gold looped and swirled and criss-crossed in a meaningless pattern. Scott couldn’t see any symbolism in the arrangement, just the numerous ram’s-horn curls which all the inner lines ended as. Whatever its significance, the intrinsic value of the metal alone had to be thousands. Such extravagance wasn’t Julianna’s style.

  At the front door, the delivery guy wanted 40 bucks for the food. When Scott made him itemize the order, the penny dropped. Scott fished out a second $20 and snapped the bags away. The last order had been over a year ago. How the hell was he supposed to remember?

  In the kitchen he opened each box.

  His. His. Hers. His. Hers. Hers. Theirs. Hers. Theirs. He resealed all hers and put them in the refrigerator.

  He stuffed a Heineken in his sweatpants pocket, clawed his open boxes together in each hand and, with chopsticks between his teeth, brought all to the coffee table in the living room. A few minutes later, he returned and stole her Crab Rangoon. As he did, he instinctively put his hand against her remaining boxes. He hardly noticed doing it and he couldn’t have explained why the urge to.

  He sat cross-legged on the living room floor, absently watching the ballgame. While Boomer Wells opened whoop-ass on a sorry succession of Royals hitters, he wolfed from the greasy boxes, working the sticks with rapid dexterity. That ability had been Julianna’s doing. She made Scott persevere at the chopsticks, tutoring him with gentle patience and unwavering belief. And conditions—she warned him how, as a professional educator, improper contact with her hottest student was off-limits, until his schooling was done. He had his incentive.

 
; The goal was simple. Julianna laid a line of ten pennies on the same coffee table. Graduation day would only be when Scott could gather all ten and hold them together as one entire stack within the chopsticks. Thereafter, the days and nights of frustration dragged for him, at the table and in the bedroom. She coaxed and still resisted so he persisted. He practiced at work, devoted entire lunch breaks to the cause. Two weeks of not getting any had killed his appetite anyway.

  The night he nailed it, he went one better. Having performed his objective, he proceeded to drop each penny, one-by-one, from the chopsticks into her hand, under her ever-widening eyes. The theatre was purely for her. He wanted to repay her faith. He wanted to dazzle his wife.

  After his ‘graduation’, they coiled naked together and ate cold Chinese on the very spot where Scott sat and remembered it now.

  A loud grinding noise suddenly broke the spell. It rose from the basement, followed by a rapid series of solid thuds. One final crack of metal echoed up and then it went quiet.

  Scott picked up his beer, went into the hall and, barefoot, descended the steps to the basement.

  The washer sat dead, wedged between the drier and the chest freezer. Blue-bubbled froth seeped from underneath its front. A dark stain of water was creeping across the concrete floor and a foam discharge rolled on it, like a fat spring cloud on a lazy breeze.

  “Shit,” Scott muttered, setting his beer down on the lid of the freezer. He tried the ‘Open’ button repeatedly but the washer stiffly refused to co-operate. He seized the rim of the door itself and pulled at it to no avail. Worse, the washer door glass was hot to the touch. Boiling water suddenly trickled under Scott’s toes and he skipped back from it.

  His muddy clothes from the cemetery, as well as three of his best shirts—custom Arthur at Bolines—were trapped behind the baking porthole of the washer door. This was serious.

  He crouched, urgently feeling around the door for a release catch. He failed to find one before the scalding water forced him to retreat more. Panicked, he seized the door again and heaved it madly back and forth. The washer just heaved with it.

  “Fuck,” he yelled. He yanked the machine violently forward, trying to upend it. Some plumbing at the rear just snatched the whole thing from his hands and yanked it back in.

  “Fuck you, you, you—” Scott kicked the washer for the want of a good insult, earning a stubbed toe for his trouble. “Gah!”

  Livid, he grabbed the back edge of the freezer instead and whipped it forward. As the freezer swung away from the wall, the Heineken bottle fell over. It rolled across the top of the flat lid and, as Scott snatched for it, spilled off the edge, crashing onto the floor beside the washer with a sharp crack. Shaking his head, Scott shoved the freezer completely clear of the wall and looked down into the space behind it. Thick foam carpeted the ground where the freezer had stood. Scott couldn’t even see the glass fragments he knew were somewhere within it. He squatted and cautiously swept his hand into the bubbles. His fingers located the broken bottle neck, and taking careful hold, he set it up on the lid of the freezer. Pressing his palm to the floor, he slowly probed within the froth for the other shards of glass. The texture under his hand changed, from concrete to plastic to fabric. He stopped and rubbed it. It was some kind of coarse carpet. When he took the plastic edge and pulled slowly on it, the entire cloud of foam moved toward him.

  What the—

  Scott blew hard against the foam, chasing it away until he finally saw what his touch had encountered. The imploded remainder of the bottle sat on a small yard-wide footmat. He took the plastic edges in his hands and lifted the entire sodden thing onto the freezer.

  Why is there a footmat under the freezer?

  He looked back at the floor.

  Huh?

  There was a rectangular plate—now revealed—on the floor. He tapped it, a thin metal cover recessed just below the level of the concrete. It was about one-foot-by-three and had a small hole punched in its center, from which a length of red ribbon emerged, coiled flat on it like a tapeworm. Scott took hold of the ribbon and pulled slowly, taking up the slack. It tensed. Then the entire plate lifted easily away and Scott came face-to-face with the hole in his basement which he didn’t know was there and couldn’t fathom why.

  Though he immediately knew who by.

  He was suddenly, completely, creeped-out and clammy-hand.

  Better the hole had been empty, some black cavity devoid of all but imagination, inviting Scott to blindly plunge his arm in and maybe keep it after. That would have been merely scary.

  But this brief hope was quickly dashed. There was plastic in the hole, lots of plastic, packed to the opening. And what made all the more of Scott’s unease was that it wasn’t everyday ‘good’ plastic, the store carryout white-bag type. It was the kind you wrapped around the spoils of ‘up-to-no-good’: porn, drugs, dirty money, dead pets, bodies or parts of; the cataract-grey heavy-duty kind you used to bury stuff you no longer cared to see, a receptacle for things to be hidden and forgotten, to preserve and prevent their corruption.

  And here was their crypt. And here Scott stood, their would-be robber, wondering if one of them might not yet stir, awakened by his discovery of it. He badly wanted to replace the plate and retreat upstairs, before some piece of plastic rustled and rippled and reached for him.

  Instead he sucked his teeth.

  So be it.

  Squatting, Scott pressed his uncertain fingertips to the nearest package, fearful of what he would feel within. Flesh? Maggots? Flies long gone cannibal-mad in a heaving wet black feast? Even the white suds had stopped coming near the hole now.

  But the bag was solid and normal and reassuringly inanimate so he removed it from the hole. It was a small item in a large plastic bag. The neck of the bag had been twisted to a seal and roped around the body. Scott unspun it, upended the bottom, and shook the contents into his hand.

  It was a Polaroid camera, with a cheerful powder-blue finish and sober black-and-grey trim. He pushed the release button and the lenspiece snapped up from the main unit. Scott hadn’t seen one in years, didn’t even think they were even in use anymore, let alone still being manufactured. Didn’t everyone do digital now? Yet here he was, holding a brand new Polaroid One600. As good as new anyway; it was in pristine condition, with no obvious signs of age.

  As he turned it over, Scott’s thumb caught on a button and the flash flared in his face. The machine’s innards churned and the front slit spat out a print. Scott removed it, instinctively shook it, and watched his image form. His skittish blanched face, frozen between a corpse light and a white wall, peered out from the frame.

  He pushed the lenspiece back down and sat the camera on the floor.

  He plucked another package from the hole, this one smaller than the first. It held four unopened Polaroid cartridges, ten shots each.

  How the hell was this put here—and when? he pondered, as he studied the hole and its remaining contents. The chamber in the floor was larger than the metal lid suggested. Scott could see that now. It extended beyond the edges of the opening, occupying space directly underneath the concrete floor. The ground currently beneath Scott’s feet was literally hollow, ground he had once assumed was solid.

  He could see parts of a consignment of covered boxes waiting in there, each wrapped in the same plastic. How many? He couldn’t say. Some were pushed into the far recesses of the hole. Scott would have to risk his arm after all—if he chose to.

  Leave them and preserve any last solid assumption?

  Remove them and topple the precarious remnants of it?

  Deal or no deal, Scott. Pick a box.

  How can I know when I don’t know? Or even if I want to know?

  Eventually Scott removed them all. He had to know. He extracted twelve sealed boxes. Whatever they contained was densely packed and heavy. They came out of the hole quietly and leadenly, like bricks.

  And when he opened the first, it wasn’t the cadavers of his fears which leaped
out.

  It was much worse than that.

  Chapter 15

  Scott arranged the boxes in front of the basement’s beat-up brown couch. A grey trash bag was meticulously folded around every one. A binding of black duct tape pressed the plastic tight to the contours of each box, revealing nothing more than all were identical in size and shape. He sat on the couch and they waited at his feet, like macabre Christmas gifts for the nastiest child on the Naughty List.

  He picked up the nearest box, set it on his knee, and drew the box-cutter blade across the top. He pried the gash in the plastic apart and exposed the Reebok shoebox for Julianna’s favorite blue-and-silver running shoes. He stripped it completely and gently tested the lid. The box was crammed to the brim by whatever it contained, its lid wedged stiff by the bloated sides. Scott chickened out of opening it. Instead, he laid it aside and went to work stripping the others. When all were unwrapped, he balled the plastic and tape and dumped it in the trash can.

  He sat again and puffed. A dozen shoeboxes rested before him: Bally, Timberland, Fornaria, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade, and more; all testament to Julianna’s assertion that expensive shoes were worth the investment, since there was a lot of planet and not a single Midas store on it sold spare feet. He took a Cole Haan box and lifted the lid off. Inside stood two dense columns of the Polaroids, only their top edges visible, like the gills of some strange fish. He tried to pry his fingers between the bunch but they were packed too tight so he ripped the sides of the box down, finally conceding that whatever came out, it wasn’t going back in.

  The photographs were bundled into smaller decks, each held by a rubber band. Scott extracted one set from the middle, turned it face-up, and stared at it. Julianna stared back. Captured in a frozen portrait, her features dominated the frame. The tips of her shoulders were just visible. Above them, her face held a high unrelenting riposte to the camera’s eye. Her mouth was closed, her lips pressed to a grimace; her jaw clenched, seized somewhere between fury and sorrow. Scott recognized the expression. A similar look had shot across her face the instant his fist slammed into it, on the night he hit her. On that night, her eyes had blazed wide with shock. Here, gazing from the white square of the Polaroid, they were filled with a look which was utterly foreign to him. In them, he saw resignation, a fatigue of feeling. Tired, pleading, she seemed to look through the camera, not at it. Her interest was elsewhere, nowhere, pupils fixed slightly off-center, wary of the lens but not retreating from it.