by Neal Bowers
“When did you start coloring your hair?”
“When did you start wearing your pants inside out? Anyhow, who says it’s colored?”
“Well, I don’t recall it being quite that dark.”
“Then again, you don’t recall much of anything, do you?”
“You’d be amazed at what I remember.”
In the hesitation that followed, Davis thought of the days before everything went wrong, those weekend afternoons of idleness when they made room for each other and blocked out everything else. He wondered if Linda was recalling the same times, but then she said, “For example?”
“Remember that time I dropped a bowl of mashed potatoes?”
“No.”
“Sure you do. You must. Right after we were married. I was showing off, mixing up a big bowl of mashed potatoes by hand instead of using the electric mixer. My arm gave out, and I dropped the whole thing. What amazed me was how far those potatoes went. Splatters everywhere. Kept turning up for weeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if we could find some right now around the rungs of the chairs or up under the kitchen table.”
“Don’t have that dinette set anymore.”
“But you remember, don’t you?”
“Lots of things got dropped or broken while we were married.”
“You had potatoes even on your shoes.”
“Okay, so you dropped the mashed potatoes. What’s the point?”
“The point is, I remember.”
“So does that mean you win?” Her voice was testy.
Davis stood up, holding his fly together with his left hand and extending his right. “Thanks for checking on me. I’m okay, really. Good to see you.”
Linda took his hand for a second. “I’m sorry about your mama.” Then she was gone.
Back inside the house, Davis sat scratching the spots where the stickers irritated his legs. Nothing had changed between him and Linda. Irreconcilable differences. Still, he felt a rush of power at having given her a memory. The mashed-potato fiasco had never happened, but now that Linda had accepted it, she would carry it with her as one of the events of their marriage. Davis imagined her in her dotage, recounting the tale to anyone who would listen. It might even take on symbolic value for her: “Yep, I shoulda known right then that things weren’t gonna last.”
Altering reality by inventing a piece of the past. Amazingly simple. But while it exhilarated him, it also made him feel hollow, as if his own life were only drapery arranged by whim and misapprehension. He half believed the potato story himself. Was this what the original Word was all about, the word that was in the beginning, first utterance of a story being made up as we go along? In the beginning was the smashed bowl of mashed potatoes.
Tugging at his pants, Davis chided himself, “Things can’t be half that complicated. Or half that simple.”
In the shower, he bowed his head into the rush of water and tried to stop thinking. But thinking about stopping thought was thinking. “I think too fucking much!” he burbled. The water spinning around the drain was a vanishing clock, and Davis wondered why Ann Louise hadn’t stopped by on her way to the cemetery. It had to be well past two P.M.
*
By the time he got to Greenwood, the backhoe had scooped a large pile of dirt and was biting deeper into his father’s grave. Crossing among the markers, he fixed on the roar of the machine, which grew louder, more serious, when it was digging. A hungry rumble. Ravenous.
An officer in uniform talking to a man dressed in surgical scrubs started toward Davis, waving him away. “Sorry, sir. This part of the cemetery is off-limits.”
“I’m looking for Detective Wilson.”
“And you are?”
“I’m the son of the man you’re digging up.”
Embarrassed, the officer turned aside and pointed toward the backhoe. “She’s over there.”
At that moment, Ann Louise stood up from where she had been crouching to watch the progress of the digging. She motioned to Davis and shouted, “You’re late,” above the roar of the digger.
Davis nodded in agreement but didn’t say anything. The hole transfixed him. At any moment, he expected to see bones or fabric. The resurrection. Gabriel’s trumpet was yellow and made an awful noise. Ann Louise hovered like the angel of the afterlife, studying the deepening trough. When she stood suddenly and waved both arms, she might have been preparing to fly. The machine backed away, and the noise stopped. From somewhere near the treeline at the edge of the cemetery, two men dressed in coveralls rose and walked toward the grave. When one of them jumped in, Davis felt faint, as if he had just witnessed a suicide leap. But a voice came back from the ragged opening—“Yeah, this is about right”—and then the second man jumped in too.
“Want some coffee?” Ann Louise asked. “This is gonna take a while.”
Davis followed her to a car parked on the narrow road that twisted through the cemetery.
“Sorry you weren’t here when we started. Coroner’s a stickler for details. Wouldn’t let us wait past two. That’s him in the surgical outfit.” She gestured with a thermos, poured a cupful, and handed it to Davis. “We’re close to the coffin, so the rest of the digging has to be done by hand. Those guys in the grave will rig up a pulley. Nothing to see, really, until they get the coffin up.”
Ann Louise had turned and was sitting on the end of the front seat, her legs extending outside the car and crossed at the ankles. “I didn’t know you knew Buford,” she said between sips of coffee.
Davis stood leaning against the car, absently spinning his coffee inside the cup. “Knew who?”
“Buford, my ex. He said to tell you the pleasure was all his, whatever that means.”
Davis felt he had come in on the middle of a conversation without all the facts. “You’re talking about your ex-husband. Right?”
“Hey, you’re not having some kind of diabetic reaction, are you?”
He hadn’t thought about food or insulin since that morning, and the question made him run a quick internal-systems check: none of the jittery disorientation of low blood sugar, no fatigue associated with extreme highs. “I think I’m all right, but I don’t know who Buford is.”
“Well, he seems to know you. Acted like you were old friends when I ran into him on my lunch break.”
“Shit! It wasn’t Haupt!” Davis thought. “It was Buford!” He clenched his fists and turned in a full circle, repeating the name.
“What’s going on?” Ann Louise drew up her legs and tipped forward on the edge of the seat, ready to get out of the car.
Davis remembered the field, the hand compressing his throat. “That’s why he didn’t say anything. He wanted you to deliver the message. Jesus H. Christ!”
“Look, if you don’t start making sense, I’m gonna have Donnie put you in the squad car and run you out to the emergency room.”
“How long have you been divorced?”
Ann Louise gave him a critical appraisal but didn’t answer.
“Is Buford the jealous type?”
A change swept Ann Louise’s face as she stood and looked past Davis. “The son of a bitch is still watching me.”
Remembering Ann Louise’s sparsely furnished house, Davis recognized it for what it was, temporary shelter, a way station on the escape route from Buford. “The divorce wasn’t his idea, I take it.”
Ann Louise turned abruptly and faced Davis. “Are you gonna tell me what Buford did, or do I have to guess?”
“Let’s just say he introduced himself in an unusual way.”
“Buford’s style would be to sneak up behind you and hit you with a brick.”
Davis was surprised to find himself laughing. “That’s pretty close.”
“If you want to press charges, I’ll bring the bastard in myself.”
Ann Louise seemed disappointed when Davis said he couldn’t identify him as his attacker. “Anyhow, there were two of them.”
“Well, that’s definitely Buford’s style. Gets one of his
drinking buddies to help him mug somebody.”
“What’s his motive?” The question was falsely naive, but Ann Louise answered it straightforwardly.
“He probably thinks you and I are fooling around.”
“Does double jeopardy work in situations like this? I mean, if you’re held accountable for something you didn’t do, are you then free to do it?” The question sounded hopelessly complex and was too much of a come-on if Ann Louise understood it the way it was meant. Davis felt stupid and clumsy.
Distracted by her own line of thought, Ann Louise mused, “He must have been following me when I met you at the mall. When does the man work, for God’s sake?”
Glad for an exit from his own forwardness, Davis asked questions about Buford’s violence.
“He pushed me once or twice. Mostly, he just yelled and threw things. Didn’t like my late hours on patrol and hated every man I was teamed with. Basically, he’s a coward.”
“Doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous, just the same.”
Ann Louise appeared to be weighing that statement against her experiences with Buford when someone called her name from the grave site.
The coffin was in midair, swinging gently from the tripod pulley, and from a distance seemed to be hovering. As they drew nearer, Davis watched it sway to one side of the hole, scattering clotted earth, an old wound reopened. The workmen grappled the box like cargo from a ship’s hold.
Ann Louise spoke to the coroner, who stood on the opposite side of the grave. “What do you want to do now?”
The coroner leaned to look into the hole, studied a moment, then answered, “I think we oughta open the casket. See how many arms we’ve got.”
“How many arms?” The remark was offhanded in the cynical manner of professionals who deal with bodies and unreliable witnesses every day, and it skewered Davis. “What we’ve got is my father,” he said with bitterness.
“Does he have to be here?” The coroner put the question to Ann Louise.
She looked at Davis. “Yeah, he stays.”
As the coroner fumbled with screws, Davis stood off to the side and took an abrupt step away when he saw the lid begin to rise. He expected the hinge to make a gothic creak, but the swivel was noiseless. Ann Louise stood beside the coroner, and they both looked without bending forward, the way someone afraid of heights manages a view over the edge of a precipice.
“Well?” Davis asked.
“Everything’s in order,” the coroner said, already turning away.
Didn’t he mean disorder? Wasn’t everything in a state of decay? What the hell did he mean? What kind of lame-assed remark was that? Davis was moving steadily toward the casket when Ann Louise stepped in front of him.
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Do what? I just want to see this great ‘order.’ What’s wrong with that?” He heard the tension in his own voice.
“Davis, there’s nothing to see. Please.” Ann Louise held him loosely by one arm but let go when he moved forward.
The air smelled of earth and old clothes, almost pleasant, like the parlors in old houses Davis remembered from childhood. He expected his father to be completely skeletal after eight years underground, but a leathery covering hid the bones of the face, though the eye sockets were empty and deep. Somehow, he was still recognizable as Davis’s father. Davis would know him anywhere, even in the underworld, worm-eaten and rotting away.
“He’s got two arms.” The coroner’s voice seemed to echo through ductwork down a great distance.
Davis looked at his father and saw his bony hands folded where his stomach used to be. “Yes. Two arms,” he repeated.
“We’re out here because you claim you found a human arm. You thought it was your father’s. Well, it wasn’t.” The coroner was lining up the facts.
Sensing his movement toward the conclusion that Davis had made up or imagined the whole episode of finding the arm, Ann Louise interrupted: “Next step is to look in the bottom of the grave.”
Davis heard her but couldn’t move. His eyes were fixed on something black protruding from beneath the satin pillow under his father’s skull. It gave off a dull sheen in the light of the afternoon sun. Leather? Plastic? Glancing back to see Ann Louise and the coroner in a heated discussion of what to do next, Davis reached into the casket and poked the object hard enough to make it slide into view. An audio cassette. Davis slipped it into his pocket just as Ann Louise touched him on the shoulder. He crumpled to the ground, gasping.
“Jesus, Davis. I told you not to look.” She was kneeling beside him. “It’s all right. It’s all right,” she said, pulling him into her embrace and stroking the back of his head.
Davis couldn’t stop hiccuping for air. He had been caught in the act, tapped by the guardian of the dead. His father’s hollow eyes spun before him, twin whirlpools. “He knows. He knows.” Over and over, he said it. And Ann Louise counterpointed each time with “It’s all right. All right.”
CHAPTER 11
__________
WHEN DAVIS’S LEGS gave way, one of them twisted beneath him and went numb. As Ann Louise helped him stand, he hobbled with an arm around her shoulders. Someone happening upon the scene could mistake him for a resuscitated corpse.
“Don’t know what got into me. Shock of seeing my father like that, I guess.” He was temporizing, trying to explain himself as the cassette in his back pocket bulged and tugged him down. He thought of it as a brick, a lead brick. Why didn’t he leave things alone? No chance, now, to put it back, as he watched the coroner close the casket. How could they not have seen him take it?
“Maybe we should get you home,” Ann Louise offered as he limped a half circle to keep facing her.
“If you’re gonna look for more bones down there, I want to stay.”
The argument between the coroner and Ann Louise over what to do next had apparently concluded in her favor. “I’m just waiting for one of the guys to bring a ladder. Shouldn’t take long, but why don’t you go up to the car and sit down?”
“I’m okay now.” But his head was pulsating, and he couldn’t get his foot to wake up. “One foot in the grave,” he thought. “Can’t play around with this stuff.” He brushed at his pants to secretly check for the cassette. It was on the same side as the numbness. Trying to walk himself back into life, he paced the edge of the two graves, noticing that the thin wall between them had collapsed. One hole, now, for father and mother, man and wife. One hole in the putrefying earth. The purifying earth.
The coroner and his coveralled assistants stood near the backhoe, talking and sometimes gesturing in Davis’s direction. The policeman had posted himself next to the coffin and was mottled by the shadows of budding limbs as the afternoon sun sank lower.
Davis heard the ladder before he saw it. Jangling on the shoulder of the backhoe driver who had fetched it from the sexton’s building, the aluminum flashed among the trees. Ann Louise pointed down as the workman drew nearer, and he jabbed it into one end of the pit, rocking it a few times for stability. Then Ann Louise went down, the crown of her head bobbing out of view.
Time stalled while she was under, and Davis kept checking his useless watch. How much longer could she hold out in the breathless world of the dead? Maybe she had stumbled upon a tunnel leading further underground and had wound her way beyond return. She could be lying on the bottom, wondering why no one came to her rescue, the light above shifting in the roil of air. Too long. She had been down too long, but Davis couldn’t make himself move. When she finally reappeared, he realized he had been holding his breath.
Poised near the top of the ladder, Ann Louise called to the officer: “Donnie, get the forensics team out here.”
The coroner, who had been leaning against the backhoe, pretending disinterest, rushed forward. “What’d you find?”
“Bet a lot of money I just found Charles Winningham.”
The coroner drew in a deep breath and huffed it out. “You’re just trying to get me down the
ladder, Detective.” The last word sounded like a slur.
“You know, Ted, I figure if you were any good as a doctor, you’d be working on live people instead of hanging out in graveyards.”
Davis listened to this exchange the way a stranger monitors an argument in a department store. In his mind, he scored the match in favor of Ann Louise and gave her the win when she climbed out of the grave and told the coroner he could “go down or go away.”
Dr. Ted turned and put his first foot on the ladder with a look of weariness and resentment. Davis imagined him in a room filled with guns, polishing the stocks and barrels, pulling oily rags through the bores and chambers. Or maybe he was surrounded by pornography, videotapes and magazines. Maybe his invalid mother was in another room, calling his name, always calling.
Ann Louise watched the man with her hands on her hips, then turned to Davis. “Doing better?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m okay. Did you really find Winningham?”
“Found a skull just under the soil. I figure there’s a body attached to it. If it’s missing an arm, everything will begin to fit.”
“Except how did Winningham get into my father’s grave?”
“Most likely, someone put him there.”
Davis thought of his father’s coffin riding atop Charles Winningham for the past eight years. It was another sea image, with Winningham paddling the dark waves, towing an odd boat. He would have borne Ralph Banks forever, the dead heft and steady dissolution of him, just Winningham and Banks in that bottomless sea of black. When Davis realized his father would be returned to the grave alone, adrift in that oceanic hole, a small terror swept him.
Everyone in the exhumation group had moved to the grave. Several sat on the ground for a better view of the coroner in the shadowed hole. He was down longer than Ann Louise had been, and when he came up, he gasped for words. “Nobody else goes down. This is now a homicide site and there’s been too much tromping down there already. God knows how much evidence has been ruined.” He was looking at Ann Louise but addressing everyone.
“Since when does the coroner’s office manage homicide investigations?” Her voice was edgy. “This is my case, not yours,” she continued, her breath coming harder. “And if I want to go back down the ladder, I damn well will.”