After Life

by Andrew Neiderman

“Oh.” Jessie turned in the direction of the truck. “But I heard such a loud noise, more like a gunshot.”

  “Since when do you know about gunshots, Jess? You probably heard him screaming for help or something until he passed out.” He had seen a rifle on the floor of the cab, but he didn’t want to mention it. “Let’s wait inside,” he said. “I’ll make some warm milk so I can fall back to sleep after the police arrive.”

  Reluctantly she permitted him to turn her away from the door and then she followed him back to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later the police arrived.

  Gardner Town was part of a township that consisted of seven villages and hamlets. As such it was patrolled and protected by a township police department, a complement of twenty officers with one full-time detective. The police department had fourteen patrol cars, but usually had only two in operation during the late-evening hours.

  The two officers who arrived were local boys. The driver, Burt Peters, was a stout six-foot-two-inch man with curly black hair. He had gone to school in Gardner Town and remained in the community after graduation, working first as a private security guard and then becoming a town policeman. His partner, Greg Daniels, was a lean, muscular, six-foot black man who grew up in one of the neighboring hamlets, Hurleyville, and had come to the police force directly after his stint in the army.

  Lee and Jessie greeted them at the outside door. Lee saw that they already had picked up the drunken truck driver and placed him in the back of their patrol car. He sat with his head against the window.

  “Sorry you were disturbed,” Burt said. “It’s Tony Benson; he’s sorta famous for this kind of thing.”

  “He doesn’t even have a license to drive anymore,” Greg added, shaking his head. “Lost that last time we picked him up.”

  “Someone will come by in the morning to pick up the truck,” Burt said, and nodded. The two patrolmen started to turn away.

  “Just a minute,” Lee said. He looked at Jessie and then stepped forward. He had kept it from her as long as he could. “There may be someone else out there.”

  “Sir?” Burt said.

  “I saw bloodstains on the street, but I didn’t find any wounds or gashes on the driver.”

  “Bloodstains?” Greg said. He looked at Burt, but Burt shrugged.

  “You wanna show us, Mr. Overstreet?” Burt Peters asked.

  “Sure,” he said, and led the patrolmen off the porch and down the street to the truck. Their flashlight was a great deal more powerful than his. It washed the darkness off the pavement. Lee went to the spot and stopped. He knelt down and felt the road. There was nothing there.

  “But I saw it,” he said quickly, looking up at the two policemen.

  “You sure it was here, Mr. Overstreet?” Greg asked.

  “Positive. And they weren’t little stains either. It looked like gobs of blood had been spilled.”

  The two patrolmen nodded sympathetically. Burt ran his flashlight over the road alongside the truck.

  “Don’t see anything now, sir,” he said.

  “I know,” Lee said, standing. “I can’t understand it.”

  “Well, the night plays tricks on you, sir,” Burt said.

  “Maybe it was just some spilled booze,” Greg said. Both policemen laughed.

  “No, no, this was blood,” Lee said, “and there was a stench.”

  “Well, there still is, sir,” Burt said. “Only we have it in the back of our car.” They laughed again.

  “No, this was different. It wasn’t just the booze and all; it was…” He recalled Jessie’s telling him of her smelling something rotten and dead an hour or so before he had come home from work. “This was something dead.”

  “Dead?” Burt looked at Greg. “Well, sir, we don’t smell anything now.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Lee said. He looked off toward the cemetery.

  “We’d better get Tony Benson to the station,” Greg said.

  “Right.”

  “Benson,” Lee said as they turned to go back. The possible significance of the name had occurred to him. “He wouldn’t have a teenage son in Gardner Town High, would he?”

  “Yes, sir. Paul Benson. Great little play maker on the basketball court,” Burt said.

  “Say,” Greg said, pausing, “you wouldn’t be the new coach, would you?”

  “Yes, I would,” Lee said. “That’s Paul’s father?” he asked, shaking his head. No wonder the boy is the way he is, he thought.

  “Yes, sir,” Burt said. “He wasn’t always like this, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Went downhill after his wife died. He happens to be an excellent carpenter, only I don’t think he’s held on to many jobs lately.” Burt Peters smiled. “Small town, sir. Everybody knows everyone’s business. Sorry you were bothered. Thanks for calling us.”

  The two policemen got into their vehicle. Lee watched them drive off, Tony Benson still not moving in the rear. He turned to look back at the truck and then he joined Jessie, who waited in the doorway.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the blood?” she asked as soon as he stepped up.

  “I didn’t want to worry you. Fortunately I made the right decision.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There weren’t any bloodstains. I guess I imagined them,” he said. “I would have worried you for nothing.”

  “How can you imagine bloodstains, Lee?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” he said, although he couldn’t understand it. He had knelt down and confirmed it the first time. But what other explanation was there? They weren’t there now. “I got down on my hands and knees to check again.”

  “But I heard a gunshot,” she insisted.

  “Jess, it’s late as hell. I’ll be as limp as a wet noodle as it is.”

  She nodded and they headed back to their bedroom. Just after he put out the lights and joined her under the covers, she turned to him sharply.

  “Lee?”

  “What now?”

  “How could old man Carter sleep through all this? He didn’t come out; he didn’t try to find out what was going on.”

  “I don’t know, honey. Maybe that’s a benefit in being old. You don’t hear all the nonsense that goes on around you and you have a good night’s sleep.

  “Boy oh boy,” Lee added as he turned over, “and here I thought life in the rural world was going to be too peaceful to stand.”

  He closed his eyes. He knew Jessie was lying there thinking, but he couldn’t stop her.

  He couldn’t even stop himself, for over and over he saw the image of that dark shadow threading itself around the bone-white tombstones before it disappeared into the depths of the cemetery.

  He fell asleep when he finally concluded that the night was a magician casting out illusion after illusion, overwhelming him and making him a victim of his own imagination.

  4

  Lee sat in the physical-education office thumbing through Kurt Andersen’s old purchase orders and correspondence. Despite the warm welcome he had received from most of the staff, he couldn’t help feeling like an intruder. His predecessor hadn’t had time to clean out his personal things and no one had bothered to do it for him and his family afterward. Andersen’s entire career history still lingered on the walls in the form of congratulatory letters and plaques, as well as pictures with local dignitaries and school personnel. The correspondence in the files included many personal letters from other coaches, parents of former students, and former students themselves. After Lee had perused some of this, it was not hard for him to understand why the man had been something of an institution to the people of Gardner Town.

  From the letters Lee could appreciate how much personal interest Andersen had taken in his students. Some had kept in touch with him as long as fifteen years after graduation, and many had still been asking his advice as recently as a week before he died. Obviously he had had more than their respect, he had had their affection, too.

  As Lee read through a dozen or so
of these letters, he began to experience the particular sort of nostalgia only someone who had been teaching a long time feels. Without ever having had these students, he longed for the likes of them. From the tone of the letters and the references to events and memories, Lee conjured up a picture of an altogether different sort of school and community. There was a closeness, a comradeship, a sense of extended family that simply didn’t exist today.

  He had to smile at what the boys in the letters considered their difficulties. They were mostly insignificant compared with what occurred in present times. Absent were any references to problems with drugs and alcohol. Only an occasional letter here and there mentioned a broken family. These letters were written before the age of divorce.

  Apparently Kurt Andersen had had a nice singing voice and, especially during his younger days, had often been persuaded to sing at school dances. Lee was sure Andersen had had far more than his share of teenage girls with crushes on him, but even back when he was a young teacher, he had probably handled the problem with a fatherly maturity. Lee saw it in the way the girls had written to Andersen years later, thanking him for his advice and his sensitivity.

  What large shoes to fill, Lee thought; and yet Kurt Andersen had been the kind of teacher Lee had always wanted to be. From the records on Andersen’s discipline problems and the way he had handled them, Lee could surmise that he had been a firm man, but a fair man. Not that he had had many problems up until the last year or so. About then there was a dramatic change.

  The file marked Discipline was much thicker for the last couple of years, and the problems cited were far more serious. Andersen had caught boys selling dope in the locker rooms; he had caught boys stealing, not only from each other, but even from him. Reading the report on one such episode, Lee could sense Andersen’s shock and outrage. Students were crossing lines heretofore thought inviolate.

  When Lee reached the record of the last six months, he noted an increasingly frustrated Andersen, frustrated not just with his pupils, but with his administration, especially with his principal. The correspondence between them had become quite heated. Andersen was not only disappointed in Henry Young’s handling of the cases he had referred to him, but in the dispositions, which, Lee had to admit himself, were far too lenient.

  Students who had committed rather serious breaches of conduct were let off with mild warnings. Everyone seemed to receive probation or a gentle slap on the wrist. The most severe punishment Lee could find, even for physical violence, was a day’s detention, and even that was set up at the boy’s convenience. Apparently Andersen had reached the point where he had decided not even to bother referring his disciplinary cases to the principal; he handled them himself by meting out detention and remaining after school or having the boys do things like police the school grounds, whitewash walls, clean equipment.

  On one occasion, however, it appeared as if Young were reprimanding Andersen for doing just these things. After being assigned a task as punishment for defacing a locker, a boy had complained to the principal and the principal had informed Andersen that having the boy clean the locker room was too severe. He claimed he had given the boy a good talking to and that would suffice.

  In his angry but tempered reply, Andersen reminded Henry Young that the gym and the locker rooms were his responsibility, and as long as he was the head of the department and the coach, he would, in effect, rule his own kingdom. Henry Young simply returned his note with one line added.

  Don’t mean to give you a history lesson, but the gym and its environs are like a state in the union, and I am like the president.

  Lee grew angry just reading the correspondence. How infuriating it must have been for a man like Kurt Andersen. At the end of this folder, he found Andersen had started writing a letter of grievance to submit to the superintendent and eventually, the school board. His general complaint was the lack of support he was getting from the principal. He had started to list some specific cases, but for some reason stopped after three.

  Perhaps this aggravation and tension had a great deal to do with his surprising heart attack, Lee thought. Lee closed the files and sat back in his desk chair. Henry Young had certainly not given him any indication that there had been any bad feeling between himself and Kurt Andersen. If anything, Young had led him to believe he had lost a close, dear friend. And why did so many of the other members of the staff rave about Young as an administrator? Even Bob Baker thought highly of him. It didn’t make any sense.

  A knock on his opened door snapped him out of his reverie. He had been doing all this reading during a free period just before lunch, one of the two periods a day he had for administrative work. He looked up quickly and saw a very pretty brunette, whom he knew to be an English teacher. She was about five feet three inches tall with soft, rich-looking hair she kept brushed down and curled up at her shoulders. Beneath the bangs that were trimmed just an inch or so over her forehead were the two most alluring almond-brown eyes he had ever seen. All her features were diminutive, almost doll-like. She had a very fair, smooth complexion so clear and perfect it looked like alabaster.

  Dressed in a rather tight pink sweater and black skirt, she reminded him of girls in the fifties with their hard, pointed bras exaggerating their bosoms. Her narrow hips were well defined in the snug skirt as she entered his office. Her smile went a few steps beyond simply friendliness; it was almost licentious, enticing. He felt a slight tingling begin in his chest and shoot down through his thighs. His first thought was how the hell does she stand in front of a classroom filled with the sort of boys he had and try to teach English literature and grammar?

  “Hi,” she said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Sure.”

  She snuggled into the small chair across from him and placed a folder on his desk.

  “I’m Monica London, Miss Monica London,” she added, raising her eyebrows, “and I’m the orientation committee chairperson.”

  “Oh. Hi,” he said, and leaned forward to extend his hand. She looked at it first as if it were nearly obscene and then took it into her small one, her soft fingers not squeezing so much as rubbing up against his. Never had a simple handshake been so sensual and pleasurable. He couldn’t help being reluctant to let go, but she seemed to understand and held on to him a moment more than anyone would expect. Then she sat back, drawing her shoulders up. Her bosom lifted as the bra hoisted her breasts like two cannons fixed on him.

  “Hi,” she finally said, nearly mouthing the word rather than actually pronouncing it. He couldn’t take his eyes off her wet lips until she widened her smile. “Anyway, I’ve brought you all the information you need about the teachers’ union, dues, meetings, etcetera, and I’ve brought you information about our sick-leave bank. We ask everyone to contribute two days of their own a year toward it. Are you familiar with the concept?”

  “Oh yeah, sure. We had it at the school I was at on Long Island.”

  “Good. I just hate having to explain every little thing. Anyway, I’ve also brought you a copy of the grievance procedures, should you ever need to bring one against the administration. No one has, this year anyway,” she said. He thought about Kurt’s letter in the folder on the desk.

  “What about last year?” he asked quickly.

  “Oh, there was something,” she replied, “but it didn’t go far. I’m not on the grievance committee. I’m sure you know all about the dental and medical plans. We just got eyeglass benefits added, so you might want to read about it. It’s all in there,” she said, indicating the folder. “But should you have any questions about anything, I’m always available.” The way she said this and twisted her shoulder made his eyebrows rise, but she didn’t seem to notice or care.

  “You teach English, right?”

  “Yes. Ninth grade.” She smiled. “It’s the roughest year because both the boys and the girls are really moving quickly from adolescence into young adulthood. Their hormones are screaming,” she added. He started to laugh.

  �
��I’ll bet.”

  “But you know all about that, I’m sure. I have an apartment in the Oakwood Gardens,” she said as if the information had some relationship to the previous statement. “I understand you live by the cemetery.”

  “Yes, in the DeGroot House. Are you from Gardner Town?”

  She laughed as if to say, “How could you ask such a silly question?”

  “Oh no. I’m from Westchester.”

  “What brought you up here?”

  “I was going with someone at the time and he lived in Fallsburg, the next town over, so I started working here.”

  “Oh.” He didn’t want to sound as if he were prying, but she seemed to be comfortable talking about herself.

  “He died. We were in a terrible car accident. A tractor trailer jackknifed on us,” she said. Her eyes were wide, but her face revealed no personal emotional pain. She could be talking about an event on a soap opera, Lee thought.

  “Jeez, that’s terrible. I’m sorry. Were you hurt badly, too?”

  “I was in critical condition for about a week, but I was very fortunate. The accident happened just outside of Gardner Town and Dr. Beezly was at my side in minutes. They said my heart had stopped, but he gave me cardiac resuscitation”—she pressed the palm of her right hand over her left breast and massaged it slowly—“until my little heart just woke up and started doing its business again. I would have died otherwise.”

  “I see.” Lee felt his own heart thumping.

  Monica stood up slowly, drawing herself up off the seat like a puppet on strings unfolding. She stepped closer.

  “I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I know how busy you are trying to get started.”

  “That’s okay,” he said quickly.

  “And you’ve got a ball game only three days from now, don’t you?”

  “You didn’t have to remind me of that,” he said dryly. Then he smiled. She stood there staring at him. He had to shift in his seat. The office had gotten so much warmer. He felt beads of sweat break out on the back of his neck.