Loose Ends

by Neal Bowers

  When he stepped into his mother’s house and switched on the overhead light, he saw how filthy he was. He left a little dune of dirt on the entryway rug when he took off his shoes, and could feel more soil inside his socks, between his toes, as he took long strides across the carpet. No Ann Louise Wilson in the phone book, but A.L. had to be the right one. Windom Lane, wherever that was. After five rings, an answering machine picked up, Ann Louise’s voice saying simply, “Please leave a message.”

  “Ah, Davis. This is Davis Banks. I need your advice about something. I’ll try again later.” He sounded stupid and wished he could erase himself. Maybe he should call back and leave a better message, but he might do even worse. When the machine beeped, he realized it had been recording dead air as he held the phone, the emptiness of the open grave. Zero acoustics. Forcing a yawn, Davis made his ears pop, trying to return to level ground; but the house itself seemed sunken in sand, drifts above the roofline, obliteration.

  Imagine the highway’s sweet fatigue, hour upon hour of broken center line, tires shushing, wind buffeting the car like a storm of petals. The brain says, “Stay awake,” but the body has its own urges. The brain says, “Stay awake or die,” but the body is half in love with death and hears the lovely interval between words, the breathless stops. So it is when the limbs go under, heavy with sugar, glazed and ponderous, the blood slowed to syrup. Davis lay on the floor, knowing he needed insulin, the word itself sounding in his brain like the twilight call of the whippoorwill. The darkening field and the darker woods. Whippoorwill. Insulin.

  “Did you know I could commit suicide with five pounds of Swiss chocolate?” Rim shot. No laughter. “That is, if I wanted to go out in style. Or I could get down and dirty with a case of Little Debbie Snack Cakes.” No sound in the dim room, just Davis thumping the microphone. “Hello. Anybody there?” Electronic feedback, piercing screel. “Hello.” And then a thumping, knocking. Siren. Ambulance on the way. Knocking. “Hello.” And Davis rose from the swamp of himself, hearing the whine of the telephone, off the hook, and someone pounding at the front door.

  “Davis. Davis. Are you in there?” It was Ann Louise, her fist raised to bang the door again, when Davis opened it. “What happened to you?” she asked, eyeing his dirty shirt and pants.

  “Just a minute,” he said, turning back into the room.

  “Davis?” Ann Louise called after him, standing in the entryway next to his shoes. The phone pulsed, insistent. “Are you all right?”

  In the bathroom’s spitting fluorescence, Davis injected himself. No point in taking a reading to prove what he already knew: sugar dangerously high. No need to estimate the insulin dosage. A dozen units would be just a beginning. Coming down from such heights was slower than climbing. Adjusting to the different altitudes, needle by needle. Drop too quickly and the bottom comes up to kiss you. “Can’t keep letting this happen,” he thought, but another voice, more weary, asked, “What’s the difference?” His spine still held the grave’s cool press of earth.

  “Davis,” Ann Louise insisted, saying his name as if it were an imperative. “What’s going on here? I got a strange message on my machine and couldn’t call you back because your phone was off the hook. Now you won’t answer me, but you seem to be having a pretty good conversation with yourself.”

  Davis hadn’t realized he was speaking instead of thinking. “What’d I say?”

  “Look, you need medical attention.”

  “How much do you know about diabetes?” Davis challenged.

  “I know sometimes a person having an insulin reaction may appear to be drunk.”

  “And that’s it? The full extent of your knowledge?”

  The derisive tone in Davis’s voice made Ann Louise bristle. “I’m a cop, not a doctor.”

  “Just trust me on this, okay?” Davis insisted. “I don’t need anything but the insulin I just took.”

  “This is the way you live your life? Falling asleep and waking up just in time to shoot up some insulin?”

  “That’s about right.” Davis waved a hand from side to side, metronome motion. “Say one end of the wave is high and the other end is low. Where you want to be is somewhere in the middle.” He kept up the monotonous movement, then asked, “How much of the time is my hand in the middle?” When Ann Louise shrugged, he said, “Never. It’s always rising or falling.”

  “What you’re saying is, you’re never all right.”

  Davis stopped moving his hand but didn’t respond, thinking the question should answer itself. Leaning over the sink and looking into the mirror as he spoke, he said, “I need your advice.”

  “You don’t strike me as someone who takes advice.” Ann Louise crossed her arms as if evaluating him.

  “What can a person do if he discovers an undertaker has ripped him off?”

  “Hire a lawyer, I guess.”

  “But what if it happened eight years ago, and the only way to prove it is to exhume a body?”

  “Exactly what are we talking about here?”

  As Davis recounted his visit to the cemetery and what he had found, her mood changed from irritation to excitement. “We’ve got to go have a look,” she said.

  “In the dark?” Davis protested. “Anyway, the cemetery’s closed by now.”

  “Come on. You don’t have to go in. Just point me in the right direction so I can find the grave.”

  Too groggy to argue, Davis picked up his shoes and carried them out the front door. Sitting on the steps, he laced them as Ann Louise walked partway to her car and then back, pacing the lawn in her nylon running suit as if warming up for the long miles. Each step whispered “now,” and the streetlight shining on the navy fabric made her look slickery and fast.

  Driving to the cemetery, she leaned forward as though stretching for the finish line, as though she could get there before the car. Because the chain at the entrance of Greenwood blocked the road, Ann Louise pulled over near the wall, so close that Davis couldn’t open the door and had to slide across to get out on the driver’s side. She had already stepped over the chain and was vanishing in the dark when he called her name. The sound of it surprised him, an invocation in this place of the dead. No response. When he called a second time, a beam of light swung toward him, pulling him down the narrow lane. Until Ann Louise spoke, he would have sworn the light had lifted him several feet above the ground. “Don’t just stand there; come on and show me the grave.” Her voice could have been coming from the other side of a door.

  When her flashlight beam found the yellow backhoe, Ann Louise outpaced Davis and was watching the small circle flatten and dim at the bottom of the grave when he walked up beside her. “Can’t see anything from here,” she said, sitting and then dropping over the edge.

  “Dark as the grave down there,” Davis wisecracked.

  Ann Louise said nothing as she followed the light that bobbled in front of her like a terrier on a leash. End to end. Corner to corner. Now and then she stooped. Davis could hardly see her, just the light and a shape that might be anyone. Any body.

  “See anything yet?” He leaned as far over the edge as he could, letting his voice fall like a fistful of dirt. Then the light went out. “Ann Louise? You all right?” Nothing. “Don’t play games, Ann Louise!” On his stomach now, his face level with the edge, he was about to scream into the pit when he realized Ann Louise was immediately below him, looking up.

  “Who’s playing games?” she said, her face a pale, floating oval.

  “Why’d you turn off the light?” Davis barely whispered.

  “Why’d you bring me out here?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t my idea to come out here in the middle of the night. That was Detective Wilson’s mission, as I recall.”

  “There’s no arm down here, Davis.”

  “Come on. I didn’t make it up. There was a sleeve with bones in it.”

  “You want to look for yourself?”

  Davis began to lift himself, thinking he would show Ann Louise exactly wh
ere it was, but then flattened out again and reached down a hand, saying, “Here, grab hold.” One tug and she had her elbows over the edge.

  “I can make it,” she insisted, holding still until he released her arm. In what seemed a single motion, she was out and sitting on the grass. Davis lay facedown, watching the darkness in the grave well up and spill over. “Don’t sulk,” Ann Louise said, stretching “sulk” to two syllables. “Coons probably got it.”

  The explanation was something he might devise to sustain one of his lies. The other possibilities blinked in his mind like flash cards: Kids found it and took it as a secret relic; someone saw him scramble from the grave and made off with the arm after he left; his father reached through the dirt and retrieved the detached part of himself; no arm ever existed except in his imagination. The last option made him uneasy. Had he perfected the lie so well he could trick himself? Rolling over and sitting up next to Ann Louise, he asked, “Do you believe in the truth?”

  She was silent for so long that Davis closed his eyes and imagined she had disappeared. “I believe in the facts,” she said finally, “just the facts,” her voice taking on the staccato pattern of Sergeant Joe Friday.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. The facts don’t lie, so they’re as close to the truth as you can get.”

  “But what if you’ve got two sets of facts—I saw a body part in that grave and you didn’t? Where’s the truth?”

  “Come on, Davis. Be logical. These facts don’t cancel each other. Besides, I’ve got another fact right here.” Extending her clenched hand palm down, she said, “Take it.”

  Davis didn’t move, thinking it was some kind of joke. “It’s not a worm, is it?”

  Ann Louise laughed. “Just go ahead and take it.”

  When Davis opened his hand, Ann Louise placed hers on it and slowly opened her fingers. Sensation of a caress, soft hover of fingers over his wrist, where the pulse quickened. He was leaning toward her, thinking of her green-gold eyes, when she withdrew her hand and his spontaneously closed around what she had given him, something small and solid. A ring. “Does this mean we’re going steady?” he asked clumsily.

  Without answering, Ann Louise handed him her flashlight. In the yellowish light, the ring looked like a museum piece, a clunky chunk of gold with a red stone. “It’s a class ring,” he said flatly. Then, rubbing away as much of the dirt as he could, he squinted to read VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY and the year, 1954. “You found this in the grave,” he said, trying to register the significance of what he studied.

  “Is it your father’s?”

  Davis remembered how squeamish his father had been about rings. He couldn’t wear even his wedding band. Claustrophobia overwhelmed him, a certainty that he could never get it off. It had been a point of tension in the family, because his mother thought a ring was an extension of the wedding vows. “People will think you don’t love me,” she would complain. “They’ll suspect you’re playing around.”

  “Davis,” Ann Louise said softly, calling him back to the moment.

  “Uh, no. No, it’s not my father’s. He didn’t wear rings. Anyway, he never went to college.” Davis was tipping the ring, trying to find an inscription or initials inside the band.

  “I don’t think there’s anything engraved, but I’ll take a closer look in better light.” Her hand entered the flashlight beam, and Davis placed the ring in her small, cupped palm. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  As she stood waiting for him to get up, Davis asked if the ring might have come off the finger of the hand and arm he had found. “Or could it have been dropped by a gravedigger?”

  “How many Vandy grads in their mid-sixties do you think are digging graves for a living?”

  “Well, it’s not my father’s. So how do we explain it?”

  “We don’t explain anything. I’ll drop you at your mother’s place and call tomorrow about what I find out.”

  Davis got to his feet prepared to protest, but Ann Louise had moved away already. He swung the flashlight beam in an arc ahead of him as he walked in the direction of the car. She was nowhere to be seen. He wasn’t afraid to be in the cemetery at night, but this vanishing act unsettled him. Unless she jogged back to the car, she should be only a few steps ahead; but when he stopped to listen for the swish of her nylon running suit, he heard nothing.

  When he didn’t find her at the car, he began calling her name in the forlorn, urgent way a child calls for a lost pet. Traffic on the street was intermittent, and Davis ducked from view each time headlights lit up the roadside. One car turned into the cemetery entrance, idled for a few moments, and then backed out, continuing in the same direction. “Kids looking for a place to park,” he thought.

  Suddenly, Ann Louise was next to him, on the other side of the low stone wall. “Could you have made a little more noise?” she asked sarcastically.

  “Where’d you go? I thought you had fallen into an open grave.”

  She was fumbling with something at her side, and Davis realized she was holstering a gun. “Heard something.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “Just the dead shuffling in their boxes.”

  “You thought somebody else was out there, didn’t you?”

  “Look, I always err on the side of caution. I’ve drawn down on everything from june bugs to leaky faucets. It was probably the coons that dragged off the arm you found.”

  “Just being in a cemetery at night makes you jumpy?” When she didn’t respond, he wondered how high she’d jump if he yelled “Boo!” Might pull her gun and start firing into the dark. Then, with mock seriousness, he said, “Guns don’t work with ghosts and zombies, you know.”

  “Look, smart-ass, we’ve had lots of vandalism in the cemeteries around here. Now and then we luck out and catch a couple of kids pushing over grave markers.”

  Before he could stop himself, Davis was saying, “I met a guy who was working on a vandal-proof graveyard.” Usually, he would have cast himself in the role. It felt strange to modify his technique. “Anyhow, he’s developing some kind of photosensitive system that detects any sudden movement through a ninety-degree angle. Don’t ask me how it works, but he swears it will light up a graveyard like Yankee Stadium.”

  Ann Louise was laughing as she got into the car and pulled far enough from the wall for Davis to get in. “Pretty good,” she said as he sat down and slammed the door. “You know how I can get in touch with this guy?”

  Davis felt his face grow warmer. “You think I made it up, don’t you.”

  After a silent moment, Ann Louise started the engine.

  Davis said nothing, and when the car stopped in front of his mother’s house, he got out. When Ann Louise rolled down her window and said she would call him, he raised a hand in acknowledgment but didn’t look back.

  Inside the house, Davis felt his mother’s absence, a palpable presence, vestigial ache of a lopped-off part of his life. She might call out at any moment, asking where he’d been. The expectation was so strong that at first Davis simply glanced at the purse dropped on the chair nearest the door, just where his mother always left it as she stepped out of her shoes. He half expected to see her shoes, black flats side by side, so evenly squared that to step into them would be to stand at attention.

  Lifting the purse by the straps, carefully, like a bag with a copperhead coiled inside, Davis held it at arm’s length. Black. Big enough to contain a bowling ball and almost that heavy. It hadn’t just dropped from the vapor. Someone had a key and might still be in the house. Moving quietly from room to room, Davis took shallow breaths and braced himself for the jolt that didn’t come. He was alone.

  At the dining room table he unzipped the main compartment and dumped the contents: lipstick, a large bottle of Anacin, a ring of keys, crumpled tissues, pepper spray, another romance novel, a worn wallet with attached coin purse, a pack of cigarettes, and a strip of three condoms. He moved the items around like checkers on a game board, touching th
e condoms, thinking, “No, not my mother.” And the cigarettes. She had kicked the habit years ago. There wasn’t an ashtray anywhere, and Davis would know if anyone regularly smoked in the house. The bitter scent would be woven into the carpeting and the curtains.

  Moving his hand around inside like a conjurer who might extract a rabbit next, he found three linty breath mints. In the zippered side pockets, several gasoline-card receipts and some expired fast-food coupons. An accordion of foggy plastic windows unfolded when he opened the wallet: a driver’s license, voter registration card, a picture of Davis’s father, and one of Davis taken at least ten years ago. The money pocket held eight dollars, all ones. Unsnapping the coin pouch, he spilled everything onto the table. In the little pile of dimes and quarters was a tightly folded piece of paper, smaller than a nickel. When he opened it, Davis read “Block D, 1322 Perimeter Road.” He held the purse upside down and shook it hard. A penny and two more dimes clattered out.

  The purse lay deflated, a punctured lung, and Davis likewise felt the energy drain out of him as he looked down at the important items of his mother’s daily life. But something was missing. The pills. His mother had often said, “I take so many I rattle,” and she carried them with her everywhere. If some things had been taken out of the purse, then others could have been added; and Davis wondered who had invented this image of his mother.

  Stupid thought. The pills were probably removed at the hospital by doctors trying to determine what medications she used. These were his mother’s effects. The cigarettes, the condoms, the dumb-ass romance novel. This was Ellen Banks. Sweet little Ellen, the stoic widow.

  But who had returned the purse? Who had a key to the house? Davis was breathing rapidly, too rapidly. He needed to invent a story, a Ben Blau diversion; but nothing came to him, and he lifted the empty purse to his face and breathed deeply. Familiar smell of leather. Strange smell.

  CHAPTER 7

  __________

  DAVIS WAS TRYING to decide if it was too late to call Ann Louise when the phone clattered. Half a ring and he answered.