by Aaron Saylor
“What got her?”
“What gets all the kids around here these days?”
“Meth, I suppose,” said Boone.
“Mmmm–hmmm,” said Harley. It was an unemotional response, like they were talking about basketball statistics or World War II history. Then the mortician said, “You’re welcome to have a seat. I need to finish up, so I got time to put my suit on. Her parents will be here in a couple of hours.”
Boone eyed the body, wondering if he had ever known this Shelley Coldiron. “Who’re her parents?”
“Ray and Jeannie Kinser. They live up on Happy Top. She teaches fourth grade. Actually Ray is the stepfather, as you might surmise by the different last names. Her real Daddy got killed a few years ago, drunk driving. I sewed him up right here.”
“What about it,” said Boone.
“Uh–huh. What about it,” said Harley. He clipped another of the girl’s fingernails. “By the way, you need to wash your hands if you’re gonna be down here.”
Boone walked over to the sink on the other side of the metal table. As he ran the warm water over his hands, a heavy silence blanketed the men. Small talk felt so unnecessary with a dead teenager nearby.
The girl lay on the slab, still quite dead indeed, impossible to ignore or talk around.
Boone turned off the water. The room went mostly quiet while Harley Faulkner plied his trade, a black stillness broken only by the fluorescent murmur of the light above their heads, punctuated by the occasional clack of fingernails being clipped.
While Harley worked, Boone studied the girl further. He began to see the story that meth had written for her. The funereal makeup lent her cheeks a generous pink, an unreal tone in decided contrast with the death pall that the chalky white powder applied left on the rest of her skin. Even through the makeup, he could still see dark circles beneath her eyes. Nor could the ghastly makeup hide the skeletal hollows in the girl’s face, or the bubbly red chemical sores that so destroyed what might have one been a pretty visage. She might have been pretty once. Boone couldn’t really tell.
Shelley Coldiron could not have been dead more than a couple of days but already she looked like she’d been buried a month.
Boone knew that look all too well. The girls that worked for Walt down at the tanning salon had it. The teenagers that hung out in the Sewardville Bank parking lot on Friday nights, they had it, too. So did the junkies down at the pool hall, and the drunks wandering in and out of the Bears Den. It was the grim visage of the lost, the self–medicated, the takers of pills, those empty souls who floated in the margins in the cold liminal spaces of humanity. There they all shuffled, from one squalid station to another, looking for any comfort that could be injected, or swallowed, or smoked.
Boone allowed himself the thought that if anyone could make her presentable in death, it was Harley Faulkner. God knew Sewerville gave him enough practice on just this type of case.
“They snort bath salts now,” Boone said.
“Huh?” said Harley.
“Yeah. I heard it on TV. The pills and the meth ain’t enough, so now you got some kids that get bath salts and blow ‘em up their nose for a high. And if the snort’s not enough then they’ll shoot the salts straight into their veins. Wham. Right in. What the fuck is that all about?”
“I hate to guess,” said Harley.
“You think it was bath salts that got Shelley Coldiron?”
Harley stood, set the fingernail clippers on the edge of the steel table. “Prob’ly not. No, I’d say not. Meth for sure.” He popped his neck, picked the clippers back up, continued preparing the body. “Seventeen year old girl, arms and legs like sticks, looks like she rubbed charcoal under her eyes. They found her out by the mailbox. Dad came home from work and right there she was. Deader’n four o’clock.
“He told me she used to be a cheerleader, straight A’s, boyfriends, Miss Popularity, the whole deal. Then she fell in with Elmer Canifax and his crowd, and that, as they say, was that. Toxicology will be back in a week or two, but that’s just nailin’ down specifics. We don’t need the damn C.S.I. to tell us this ain’t exactly natural causes.”
Fell in with Elmer Canifax. Why, sure she did.
Boone started pacing, moving about the room absently, his feet moving on their own while his mind formulated the conversation.
Harley could tell that his visitor wanted words, but he didn’t push the issue. Instead he contented himself with the dead girl’s final manicure. When he finished with the right hand, he tucked it back under the sheet then began on the left one. Harley clipped the nails on the other hand, perfectly straight, equal lengths, and when he was done he tucked that hand under the sheet, too.
Boone walked over to the corner and stood there, facing the wall.
The mortician tucked Shelley Coldiron’s dead gray hand under the sheet.
“I need a little help, Harley,” Boone said, turning back around.
Harley shrugged. “With what?”
Boone stepped back out of the corner. “Walt says you’ll help me. Need to get rid of something, if you know what I mean. It’s been a shitty goddamn day, I’d ‘preciate it if you not give me a hard time.”
He stopped, in the middle of the floor, looked down again at Shelley Coldiron. Between her lips he could see that two of her front teeth were nothing but brownish gray nubs, completely rotted out. He recognized the dental work immediately as one of the finest hallmarks of meth use, just like her sallow flesh and the bald spots on her head.
“I don’t know, I got this funeral to do,” Harley began.
“I’m telling you, I got to get rid of one,” said Boone.
“It’d mean a lot to Walt.” He tossed in those last words just in case the mortician was thinking he might actually turn down this request.
Harley sucked in air. Shook his head slowly, then exhaled. Of course he could not turn down the request. He knew too well that it really was no request all; it was a specific direction, straight from the mouth of Walt Slone. He had been “getting rid of” ones for Walt and his crew for going on twenty years. The fact was, over the years Walt encountered a number of people in his path, people that had to be gotten around or moved through or run over, and almost every one of those people sooner or later turned up in the woods of Seward County with their face caved in or their windpipe collapsed or their throat slashed or a bullet in the back of their head.
Miscreants, vagabonds, thugs, drifters, rivals all, not necessarily people that would be sorely missed by the community at large. Foul play suspected but then again you never know. Whatever. But sooner or later an SUV would pull up to the Faulkner Brothers Funeral Home around two o’clock in the morning. A dead body appeared, several hundred–dollar bills changed hands, the cremator furnace fired up to the required nine hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and in that body went. There was a corpse, then there was no corpse. Problem solved.
So, Harley Faulkner considered himself a solver of particular problems, those occasional little quandaries involving bodies whose spirit had vacated under less than natural circumstances, and in particular the quiet disposal thereof. Grisly work, and sometimes he felt uneasy, but what could you do? It paid well.
“Okay. Tell me what you got.”
“It’s Jimmy,” Boone said without hesitation. He wanted the words out there quick, before they could be reconsidered. Harley frowned. “Jimmy?”
Boone stared at him.
Deep wrinkles creased Harley’s forehead; comprehension came slow. “Sumner?”
Boone leaned forward, his eyebrows arched suggestively as he ran his fingers through his hair and hoped like hell he wouldn’t have to explain the situation any further. Harley was usually good about not asking for details, not requiring a back story for every dead body that came to his funeral home for disposal – he was on a need to know basis, and if it were up to him he would never need to know – but Boone knew that if any scenario could inspire a request for further information, this one could
. He had his own brother’s remains, needed to get rid of them, needed assurance that his brother’s funeral would have no body for viewing. How could he explain that? He couldn’t explain it.
“Jimmy Sumner?” asked the mortician.
“Yeah,” said Boone. “Jimmy.”
“Your brother.”
“Yeah.” Boone’s heart fluttered into his throat. He really did not want to talk this through.
Before any awful questions came, Harley peeled off his latex gloves, threw them in the sink, and only said, “Where is he?”
“I’ll go get him,” said Boone.
A stark, sudden terror leapt into Harley’s face. His eyes grew wide as silver dollars.
“You brought him with you?” he asked, incredulous. “Jesus, Boone, it’s light out! The middle of the damn day! What if somebody saw you, did you even stop to think for a minute that somebody might see you?”
“Nobody saw me.”
“Awful damn confident, aren’t you? If anybody saw it and saw you come here, we’re both in deep shit.”
“Nobody saw.”
Harley didn’t believe him. That much shone clear in the mortician’s horrified expression. He watched Boone exit back out of the basement, heard his heavy steps even through the funeral parlor’s thick carpeted floors, then heard the building’s back door open, then close. A few minutes went by. The back door opened and closed again, and then he heard what seemed to be something heavy being pulled across the floor.
In a few minutes Boone returned downstairs. He brought with him what was clearly a body, wrapped in black plastic. Boone strained, groaned, and pulled his grim package across the concrete floor until he got all the way to the steel table that held the meth–ridden corpse of Shelly Coldiron.
“You’re serious,” said Harley.
“Of course I’m serious,” said Boone, as he let the body drop with a sick thud. “When the fuck am I not serious?” He wiped his hands on his pants.
Warm aggravation flooded Harley’s gaunt face. “I’m supposed to believe that you came down in the middle of the day, drove all the way through town with a dead body in the back of your truck, brought it in here, and now you want me to take care of it for you?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know if I can believe that.”
Boone reached for his wallet and pulled out five thousand dollars in clean, nonsequential twenties and hundreds. “I don’t want you to do anything for me,” Boone. “Think of it as another favor for Walt Slone.”
Harley Faulkner had seen a lot of things in his years as a solver of particular problems for Walt Slone’s criminal empire. He’d followed through on more than one task that put him at odds with his own good conscience, but he was sure he had never seen something like this. Here was a man bringing him the lifeless body of his own brother and asking that it be made to disappear, leaving very little doubt that the living brother had somehow been involved with the demise of the deceased one.
“Jesus. Are you sure?” the coroner shuddered.
“Burn it,” said Boone. “Same as always.”
FAMILY
That night, Boone returned to his own home for the first time in what felt like a month but had actually been just over one day. The two–story light brick dwelling he shared with Karen and Samantha was on the opposite side of Sewardville, five miles as the crow flies from Walt Slone’s house on the hill. Though Boone liked many things about his home, he liked the distance it gave between him and Walt most of all. Even if it was only five miles.
He pulled the car into the garage and entered the house from there. The garage connected to the kitchen; when he flipped on the light, Boone saw dishes in the sink from a meal he could not remember eating.
From there he went into the living room, then down the hallway and to his bedroom. The further he went, the darker his path got, lit only by the same kitchen light he’d turned on coming in from the garage. He was too tired to reach for any more light switches, too tired to care whether he bumped into walls or furniture, too tired to do anything at all except stumble through the darkness, on a collision course with the bed where he could finally collapse into deep slumber.
When he got to that bed, he closed his eyes, lurched forward, onto the mattress, and let the silence take him.
But his thoughts kept him awake.
After leaving Harley Faulkner’s funeral home, he’d visited Mama again.
Not with any clear purpose – no sudden realization of words unsaid, no lingering need for closure, nothing more, really, than a heavy sense inside that he just should go back there. He had no idea what he might say or do when he got to Mama’s house; he knew only that he needed to try again. He could figure out the details when he got there. So Boone went to Mama’s house and knocked on the front door, just as he had that morning, hoping that this time he might find more to offer yet also completely unsure if there was anything that he could give to justify his presence in that time, that place.
It went badly. When Boone approached the house, his mother met him on the front porch. She refused to let him come any closer. He tried to explain, pleaded with her, but Mama wanted none of it. He’d driven there, looking for one glimmer of forgiveness, a moment to sit with her and be mother and son once again. He harbored no expectation that he could be blessed with total forgiveness; he didn’t deserve her forgiveness, would never even ask for it. He just wanted some time with her, time to explain, to soothe, to feel better. Time, and time, and time.
But Mama had no time for Boone.
He was there ten minutes. Mama never said a word. She hardly even made contact with him, only held up her brittle hand and pushed him backwards. Large men had pushed Boone before, men with guns, thick–necked goons, but he had never felt a shove like the one his own mother gave him that day. He fell backwards off the porch and retreated in utter defeat.
From there, Boone found his way back to his daily routine, not out of any sense of responsibility to Walt’s business, more as a way to occupy his brain and not think about Jimmy or Mama or Karen or anything. He charged on in the face of his own misdeeds, throwing up emotional drywall between himself and the conflict that surrounded him, but soon found that his most stubborn efforts provided no insulation from reality.
He collected money from the bookies, but as they counted out the cash Boone thought only of Coppers Creek. He went by the tanning salon and emptied the cash register, but saw only Jimmy’s face, disappearing beneath the turbulent water. He took the money from the whores at the salon, and still he thought only of Jimmy. He’d even gone back to the Bears Den one more time to get Walt’s weekly cut from Lorna, but by then he could barely even get out of the truck.
Somewhere along the way, the memories overwhelmed everything else. When that moment came, Boone gave up for the day, shut down and headed for the house.
Now he lay in the dark. He thought only of Jimmy. The bedroom darkness seemed like a living force, coming for Boone, a collapsing black hole that would suck him down to hell.
He figured that if the darkness wanted him, it could have him.
He lay there thirty minutes, an hour, two hours. He never changed position, just stared at the ceiling. He saw his brother’s face up there. He saw Karen again, and Samantha. He saw mobile homes, and farm equipment, the world falling into a pit of smoke and flame.
When it felt like enough, Boone sat up. He walked over to the bedroom closet, opened the door, flicked on the overhead light. The closet was full of things to which he hadn’t paid much attention in years – jackets, pants, blouses, dress shoes, golf clubs, stuff.
On a top shelf littered with haphazard stacks of clothes, he found a thick photo album, its soft, vinyl cover peeling at the corners, barely intact. He pulled the book down, and sat on the floor in the middle of the closet. Surrounded by his and Karen’s junk, Boone flipped through the pictures of everyone he loved or used to love – school, church, reunions, happy times – until he came to one photo in particular, a
3 x 5 snapshot held fast in the center of the last page by a piece of scotch tape.
When he saw the picture, the world came to a halt.
Boone lightly traced the picture’s upraised edges through the clear cellophane page cover. It showed Boone, and Jimmy, and John Slone standing in the high school gymnasium, all with late–1980’s feathered hair and mustaches. They stood dressed in white basketball uniforms with red piping and a red SEWARDVILLE emblazoned on the chest. They were all mid–laugh. Boone couldn’t remember the joke now almost thirty years later, but he didn’t really need to remember it. The laughter was what mattered.
There had been no laughter that day and Boone wondered if there might be any ever again. Jimmy was gone; John Slone was in the hospital. Karen and Samantha were in the house on the hill. Mama was lost. The machinery was sliding into the fiery pit, and the whole goddamn world would no doubt follow.
Boone sat cross–legged in his closet, gazing at the picture of a distant, impossible youth. Soon he felt the warm salt of his own tears, gentle on his face. They slipped down his cheeks and disappeared into the darkness, the way his own better memories had slipped into the cold past, never to be re–lived, but never to be forgotten, either.
Boone wiped his face, stood up and put the photo album back on the shelf with all the other junk. A few minutes later he was in bed again, but it would be three more hours before he finally fell asleep.
DREAMS
Mama, where did Daddy go?
He went away before you were born, Boone. God came down and took him up to Heaven. You know that.
I know, Mama. I was just thinking about it. Me and Jimmy were talking about it, that’s all. How come God did that? How come he came down and took Daddy before I was born?
Because he needed your Daddy. Sometimes God needs people and when he needs them, we have to let them go. It hurts but we have to let them go. Why are you asking, Boone?
I was just thinking about it, Mama. I’m sorry. I promise, I won’t ask you again, I was just thinking about Daddy because sometimes I do that.