by Baird Harper
“We’ve lost our place, I think.”
And Victor could feel himself slipping again, losing his place. A moment later, the psychiatrist was gone from the couch and the Tupperware went into the garbage and the oak trees fell and a look of sudden clarity washes over the face of the man inside the little gray car with the shattered windshield. “But it is a good idea,” the man says. “Yeah. We should bury him.”
Victor shakes his head. “I think we’ve lost our place.”
“But it was your idea,” the man says. “And we’re already in a cemetery.”
“You can’t,” Victor says. “It’s against the law.”
“I’ll take the fall if someone finds out. It’s the least I can do to give him a burial.” The man gets out of the car. “How about this?” He digs a handful of casino chips out of his pocket and offers them. “There’s four thousand dollars here. You help me put him in the ground and when it’s done the cash is yours.”
Victor looks at the gray chips on the man’s palm, shining in the moonlight like oak slayers with their legs tucked under.
“It was the old guy’s money,” the man says. “He had a heart attack or something. Natural causes. So really he’s just paying his own burial expenses.”
Victor peers in at the dead man again. He knows him from somewhere, he’s sure now. “This is absurd. This is not happening.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. I honestly can’t tell what’s real anymore—”
“I mean this isn’t happening,” says Victor. “I’m not letting you illegally dump a body in my cemetery. It’s time to call the police.”
“I’ll call them for you,” the man says. “Someone’s got to sort this out.” He leans back against the car door with his phone to his ear. He says, “Kate, how is everyone? Okay. Yeah, what a storm, huh? Yep. Well, listen, there’s this guy who’s stonewalling me here at the cemetery, with the body. Yeah, the body. The old guy didn’t make it. But he went peacefully, so— Kate, come on, keep it together. You did the right thing calling me. He was seriously troubled, and now, well, he’s gone to a better— Okay, yeah, I’m just calling to let you guys know I’m gonna be a while longer here. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m gonna make it at all.” He waits a moment, listening to the person on the other end of the line, or just trying to think of what else to say. Then he ends the call.
“I thought you were calling the cops,” Victor asks.
“All the cops are gonna do is put the guy in an icebox until they find out he hasn’t got a friend in the world. Look at him. He hasn’t got any family. Trust me. He’s no one. I can just tell.” The man takes the casino chips out again, pours them from one hand into the other, his face like a game show host’s. “Here, I’m adding two more grand. That’s six thousand. A simple transaction. I’ve got a dead body, you’ve got a cemetery—”
“Maybe I’m selling the cemetery.”
“Even better.” The man steps closer, trying to press the chips into Victor’s hand. It seems at any moment that black legs will emerge from beneath each one.
“And if the cops come asking about it,” the man continues, “you can tell them you agreed to it under duress. You can tell them I threatened you.” He digs into his pocket and presents a small handgun on his open palm. It looks like a toy, but Victor can tell it’s real by the way it wears the moonlight.
“Fine, seven thousand,” the man says. “It’s practically all I’ve got. I can’t give you any more.” He drops the first six thousand at Victor’s feet, and jams his free hand into his pocket. His face is turning feverish, desperate. “What do you say? Let’s put him in the ground so you can get home in time to kiss your kids good night.”
“I don’t have any kids.”
“Your wife then.”
“I’m calling the cops,” says Victor.
In an instant, the gun disappears into the man’s palm and a second later it’s pointing between Victor’s eyes, the coppery glint of the bullet winking from inside the barrel. He feels his heart pause and petrify, his last breath catching inside his chest. His senses dull and the static takes over. As if from a great distance, from the far side of the handgun, he hears the man’s voice say, “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to, if you can’t be reasonable.”
“Do it,” Victor says. He can barely hear his own voice.
The man lowers the barrel to Victor’s chest, presses it to his sternum.
Victor closes his eyes, his heart punching back against the gun.
“Eight thousand,” the man says. His voice is small and tinny, a sound mostly caught in his throat, as if it is his chest at which a gun is pointed. “That’s everything.”
“No,” Victor says. “Do it. Just go ahead.”
With his free hand, the man digs into his pocket again, offers more chips. “That’s everything, I swear. Don’t be like this. It’s a good deal. It’s everything I’ve got.” His face drips and shines, absurd and hysterical, this stranger with his little gun and his far-off voice, his pockets spilling with coins.
Victor thinks of the loose change jar on the counter at home, the crimp in Sonia’s cheek. He wants to laugh, but it isn’t funny, this part of his life. What does it mean, he wonders, not to possess the memory of coming back from death? A return unwitnessed, unwanted. Just a man standing up again and moving toward his next end. These are the thoughts that wash through him as his life spools away. He’s at the end again now. He knows it. His eyes sting, the static softens and thickens in his ears. A sucking void wells up at the center of his body, a warm stream running through his chest with a current that sweeps him into the past, waking him back into the precious few memories of his long-gone mother, onto spring-green ball fields of his youth, into laboratories full of discovery, and finally into the days of Sonia. She is alive again beside him on this river of time reclaimed. The two of them on a summer morning in bed with the sun coming up and the flop of the newspaper hitting the stoop, a chorus of songbirds not yet poisoned, a wife not yet lost, a whole town decaying but not yet dead. It is years ago now and Sonia’s ring is still on her finger and the cemetery still has its trees, the adoption papers are in the spare bedroom and the future is a promise yet to be broken.
He can’t even hear the shot, the static is so loud. The river of memories is a warm rushing wound at his core. Wet grass cradles the back of his head. Yellow haze swirls all around. Beyond the static, he can barely hear the shooter’s voice begging forgiveness. There are sirens in the distance and then bright lights overhead. As he tries to paddle back into the days of Sonia, he can feel the tickle of forceps digging a gnarled metal tooth out of his chest. He can hear the bloody bullet hit the tray.
Then there’s nothing. Just a long silent leap through darkness and void. A night without a moon, a ring sliding off his finger as the casket lid rose.
She looked small, he thought. She looked as the birds would later appear when the yellow mist brought them down from their trees, shrunken and slight, as if the poison had collapsed their hollow bones, as if they were becoming chicks again in death. Sonia, he’d thought, pressing the lid shut again, had looked like a child.
//
In a corner of this utter dark, a bulb of faintest light takes shape and warms, slicing sideways with a parting of lids. His vision returns. He’s awake again in the recent past, returned to the moment right before the end. The man with the gun still stands before him, the bullet still in the chamber. The moonlit world glistens everywhere, the rainwater like liquid gold clinging to the willow reeds and the grass and the casino chips.
“Wait,” Victor says. “Where’d you get that?”
The man lowers the gun, relief ripping through his face. His nerve seems to shatter and melt. He looks in his other hand at the casino markers, at a slim gold ring half-hidden beneath one chip. “You mean the ring? I found it.”
“Where?”
“On him.” The man turns and motions to the gray car. “In his . . . pocket.”
&n
bsp; Victor turns too, and he can see now what he couldn’t before. He opens the door and measures the aged face, touches the cold hands. He presses a finger under the jaw to make certain that Raymond Bello is dead. “You were right,” he says. “This guy is nobody. He doesn’t have any family.” Victor puts his other hand to his own neck, feels for a pulse.
The man scrambles to pick up the other casino markers in the wet grass, offering them all in a heaping two-handed bowl. “So?” he says. “Can we bury him then?”
Somewhere, hundreds of yards away, a transformer goes back online. Victor can hear the hum of the neighborhood refilling with electrons, and beneath his finger the beat of his own pulse. Distant streetlamps blink awake in a line leading straight out of town. In the new light, the moon’s strange pall wilts from the man’s face. His air of menace falls away and he seems suddenly chastened and meek. His hands, Victor realizes, are shaking, the gold hoop burrowing deeper into the chips. “So?” the stranger begs. “What do you think?”
Victor lifts the ring from the hoard of casino markers, examines it on his palm. “I need change,” he whispers. He thinks of the first words he ever said to Sonia, and then he thinks of the last.
“Sorry,” he says aloud, “but I don’t work here anymore.”
REMOVAL SERVICES
Sonia thought of her try at college, a memory of two boys coaxing her into a fraternity house bedroom where they’d arranged some cocaine on a table in the shape of a cross. Her first and only time with the stuff, but she’d gone along with it. Later the boys’ pants came off and she’d gone along with that too. The whole thing failed to bring her any regret the next day. Entire semesters passed without her imagining what her thirty-nine-year-old self might wake up remembering, but then Middle-Western flunked her out and she tired of her own promiscuity.
She started going to church again, to a sparsely attended weekday service down the road from campus, in Wicklow, presided over by a man who’d been dismissed from her parents’ church in Tower Hill when Sonia was a girl. He’d been the youth minister back then. Kids liked him. Sonia liked him. He’d worn his hair shaggy, like Christ. In a private moment, he’d showed Sonia where he’d mutilated his palms as a teenager. “Stigmata,” he’d claimed. But watching him murmur his way through those weekday services so many years later, she couldn’t fall for him again, so she walked out of the church into a cemetery down the street.
She liked to stroll through Oak Hill from time to time. It needed visitors. It needed upkeep. She picked up windblown garbage as she went, moved aside branches when they’d fallen onto gravestones.
“Do you work here?” asked a voice.
Sonia spun around to find a man standing behind her. He looked slightly wild, she thought. Like a bear who’d tucked himself into a collared shirt.
His own hands were clutching pieces of garbage too. “Does anybody work here?”
//
Sonia didn’t mind her own past. After all, it had brought her to Victor. And for the most part Victor seemed to feel the same way. They kept their former selves to themselves and lived in the present as best they could. But today the past was rising.
Sonia’s bags were packed, waiting by the door. She’d begun feeling better as the evening came on, having worried all afternoon about leaving town in the middle of a fight. And now, as she sat down with him at the dining room table to talk about the papers, he’d asked the question again.
“This again?” she said. “Seriously?”
“Yes,” said Victor. “This. Again.”
“Nothing ever happened,” Sonia assured him. “He was just a little creepy.”
“You think?”
“How long are you going to obsess over this?”
“You said he put his hands on you. Like how exactly? Like he put his hand in your hand? Like a handshake?”
Sonia tilted her head. “Now you’re being naïve.”
“I’m trying not to be.”
“We were kids,” she said, as if being a child were the same as being a victim. She thought of the papers upstairs in the extra bedroom. They were supposed to be talking about finalizing the adoption. Sonia had already filled out most of it, and now, while she was at Allie’s, it would give Victor time to finish his sections.
“He’d pat our knees,” she added. “Touch our hair. That sort of thing.”
“Your sister’s hair too?”
“My hair,” Sonia said. “Girls deal with that sort of stuff. Weird uncles and all. Mr. Bello wasn’t a pedophile, he was our handyman.”
Victor leaned back into his chair with arms crossed. “More like a handsy-man.”
“You’re punning now? I thought this was honestly bothering you.”
“It is. And I’m saying I’d like to do something about it.”
“Well, Mr. Bello’s like seventy-five years old,” she said. “And he’s in the middle of wallpapering my parents’ dining room right now so you might think twice about how pissed my mother will be if you interrupt the project with your righteous indignation.”
“Now who’s joking around?”
“You’re not a crime boss, Victor. You can’t go breaking an old man’s legs because he patted my thigh thirty years ago.”
Victor’s brow scrunched. “Who says I’m a crime boss?”
“You tell that story to everybody, hon.”
“It’s a good story.” His voice rose defensively. “And besides, I tell it with self-deprecation. Don’t I?”
Sonia moved around the corner of the table, sat sideways in his lap, and put her arms around his neck.
“You know,” he said in a less aggrieved voice, his fingers touching a button on her yellow blouse, “I did move a lot of stolen goods that summer.”
She kissed him on the forehead, craning her neck to settle against the stubbled warmth of his face. “Of course you did, Don Corleone. Tell me the story again.”
And he did tell it again, the summer job he’d had during college, unwittingly employed by one of the stale mob outfits outside the city. He’d spent the summer driving a truck between a secondhand store in Chicago and a warehouse in Triton. And it was a pretty good story, she had to admit. When he’d still been with Scanlan Chemical and there’d been parties at the house full of scientists and engineers who knew him as one of their own, it was endearing to hear that kind of tale—a chemical engineering student moonlighting for the mob. But ever since Victor bought the cemetery and changed careers, his audience of co-workers had turned coarser, more readily believing in the story’s criminal embellishments. The truth was, he’d not known at the time that he was transporting stolen goods, not until years later when “Uncle” Mel got arrested in a mob sting. And while the scientists and engineers had been willing to suspend their disbelief in order to indulge a good yarn, these cemetery employees—the oddball administrative staffers, the teenage part-timers, the gravediggers—had listened to Victor tell the story at last winter’s Christmas party with such credulous looks on their faces, as if, in the normal course of a life, a person couldn’t be expected not to have dabbled in criminal enterprise. But also there was something about Victor, too, these days, which made the story so plausible—his unshaven face, his dirt-smeared coveralls—as though he’d just come back from burying a body. Which of course he had.
Sonia didn’t love it, this new career of his—the money being less, the hours longer—but she did appreciate that Victor was made happier by it. For a long time he’d liked chemical engineering, and now, for these five years, he’d loved running a small-town cemetery. He liked digging up the earth and worrying over the trees. He liked staying late to scare off the high school kids who came to desecrate a haunted grave. Most of all, though, he liked that his mother lay under the ground there.
Publicly, he claimed he bought Oak Hill because his high school chemistry teacher was buried there, but Sonia tried to make it known that he’d actually wanted to clean up the final resting place of his mother. Friends of theirs had had questions w
hen he so abruptly quit Scanlan. Friends of hers, really. Victor was likable enough—crassly funny when he was up to it, a brooding teddy bear when he wasn’t—but he’d kept no real friendships in his own life.
“His mother died when he was young,” Sonia would sometimes explain in an effort to humanize her husband. People struggled to see beyond the tobacco bulge in his cheek, or the way he’d pop up around town dirt-stained and smelling of fertilizer. “And he never even met his father,” she would add, making the story into an orphan’s tale.
“Abandonment issues,” a friend had recently replied. “I see. Is that why he has such a hard time letting things go?”
Sonia didn’t usually address follow-up questions, not wanting to stoke curiosity after all. She knew her husband’s heart better than his mind, and it was heart that mattered. The truth of Victor Senn was that he’d come to prefer the simple worth of putting shovel to soil over a well-compensated career in a laboratory. So she brushed off such questions, usually with more humanizing statements. “He worries over those oak trees like you wouldn’t believe!”
But when, in these hours before Sonia was to visit her sister for the night, Victor became so suddenly curious about her past, she felt as if some unspoken line item in their marital contract was being breached.
“What about you?” Sonia was still on his lap, but she’d straightened her torso, holding herself at arm’s length. “It’s not like I ever get stories about your childhood.”
He looked up into his brow. “Okay,” he said. “You want to hear about my handyman when I was a boy?”
“You’re teasing me.” She closed her mouth tight and leveled her eyelids in such a way that he might understand she sometimes required sincerity. “Okay, so you actually had a handyman,” she said cautiously. “Okay, I’m believing you here. I’m trusting you.”
“He fixed things,” Victor said. “But he was like a nanny too.”
“A manny,” she said.
“Now you’re punning.”