An Unsettled Grave

by Bernard Schaffer

  Carrie put her hand against the door, barring it from closing on her. “I have to speak with him. It’s important.”

  Before the nurse could push the door shut on Carrie’s hand, an enormous crash of metal against glass was followed by another shout, “I asked you who the hell was at the door, you goddamn useless shit!”

  The nurse charged back into the house, roaring, “If you broke that IV, you are paying for it! I told you about that last time. I wasn’t fooling!”

  More gurgling, another crash, and Carrie let herself in. She looked around the living room, scowling at the overwhelming stench of antiseptic, menthol vapor, and human waste. A portable commode was folded and leaning against the wall, and someone had draped a coat over it. Carrie saw a stack of adult diapers by the stairwell leading upstairs.

  Above the diapers, covering the wall leading into the kitchen, were framed photos so old they were bleached by sunlight. In some, a uniformed, handsome young man stared at the camera. In others, that same young man, in a field with no shirt on, was surrounded by other young men, also shirtless, all of them holding large machine guns. In the center of the wall was a large shadow box with medals piled up from the bottom, like a slot machine tray after someone hit triple bananas. Hanging above the medals was a battered green beret, and beside it, a faded patch. The patch displayed a bird of some kind, spreading its wings, with the words Phung-Hoa’ng embroidered across the top.

  Carrie picked up a framed picture sitting on an end table near the sofa. It was covered in gray dust, nothing more than an old Kodak print that was never meant for framing. A little boy flanked by two men stood in front of an older-model police car, which bore a large star on the door with the words Patterson Borough Police in large block letters across the top. The taller, older-looking of the two men was the same one in the photographs hanging on the wall. His face had changed. Something was wrong with the man and it showed. He looked unkempt, with long hair and soiled clothes.

  The younger man was in a police uniform, handsome and smiling, with his hand draped over the boy’s shoulder. And the boy had a face she recognized. His face, not yet lined with age, and eyes that were not yet haunted, unmistakably belonged to Jacob Rein.

  Past the nurse, she could see a withered man lying in a metal-framed hospital bed centered in the otherwise empty kitchen. He was gripping an IV stand that was connected to his arms, refusing to let go of it while the nurse tried to keep it from falling.

  They were screaming at each other, the nurse telling him to let go, and the man shouting at her that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. Carrie waved from the kitchen entrance and said, “Hi, Mr. Rein.”

  Ben Rein looked at her, still clutching the IV stand. “Who the hell are you?”

  The nurse glared at Carrie, but she moved past the woman into the kitchen, gently took the metal IV pole, and set it upright. “I’m a detective with the DA’s office. I have a few questions for you. But first, I believe I know your son.”

  “Who?” he said.

  “Your son, Mr. Rein,” the nurse said, tapping him on the outside of his leg through the blanket draped over him. When the IV was free, she lifted the stand and carried it out of his reach. “You know who she’s talking about. Don’t pretend like you don’t.”

  “What about him?” Ben said. “Is he in jail again?” He coughed several times, hawking a ball of green phlegm into a bowl lying at his side. “I don’t have any money for him, so don’t ask. When I’m dead, you can sell the damn house and take whatever you get to pay his bail or whatever, but you’ll have to wait.”

  “No,” Carrie said, “he’s not in any trouble. I’m actually here to speak about something else. A case I’m working on. I was hoping you might be able to help me with it.”

  He leaned back against his pillow, his large, purple-veined ears sticking out sideways through tufts of white hair. “You must be pretty desperate to come here, thinking I can help you with anything.”

  “It’s about your brother, Ollie. I want to know what happened to him.”

  “Ollie,” the old man said. The hard lines around his eyes and mouth softened. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Carrie put her hand on Ben’s arm. She could feel his bones beneath the desiccated muscle. “Please, sir. I know something happened to him. Before he passed, he was looking for a missing little girl.”

  “Hope Pugh,” Ben said. His eyes reddened and began to run.

  “That’s right,” Carrie said. “Was she friends with your son?”

  His eyes burned clear and bright then, as if the fog of illness and medication and being trapped in a bed wearing adult-sized diapers had lifted. “You said you know him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He always knew what I did. That’s why he never came back. He always knew, and he never told anyone. He’s a good boy. You tell him I said that.” His eyes fluttered. He was struggling to breathe.

  Carrie moved closer, making sure she didn’t miss a word of the old man’s strained voice. “What did he know, Mr. Rein?”

  “It was me,” Ben said. “I’m the one that killed them.”

  The nurse swept Carrie aside and draped a blanket over Ben’s chest. “You hush now, Mr. Ben. You need to get some rest. You’re talking all crazy.”

  He swatted her hands away. “Get the hell away from me! I’ve been waiting almost forty years to say this, and I’m going to say it. I’m not ashamed of what I done.” He glowered at Carrie. “It was me.”

  The nurse withdrew from the bed, scowling. “It ain’t right bothering this man when he’s sick and saying stuff he don’t mean. I think you need to leave.”

  Carrie’s heart hammered in her chest as she reached forward, wrapping both of her hands over the old man’s. His hand was nothing more than a thin sheet of skin, softer than silk, covering gnarled bones and blue, worn-out veins, and it was shaking. “Who did you kill, Mr. Rein?”

  “All of them. I killed them all.”

  II

  PEOPLE WHO DIED

  CHAPTER 9

  The last snow had fallen hard and thick that year, packing tight the moment it hit the ground. It was better than the other snowfalls, which had either been dry powder or wet goop. But this last one was a good one and the boys made use of it.

  Adam Kraussen lived less than a mile away from the house where J.D. lived with his father. The Kraussens’ place had two floors, with a finished basement, and two bathrooms. Both of Adam’s parents had cars. Both of his parents worked. Mr. Kraussen was an engineer, but he spent of most of his free time accumulating things he rarely used. He was the only person in that part of the state who owned a Betamax machine and he swore by it. He would tell anyone who would listen that VHS was inferior. He got in such a huge fight with the people who owned the local video store because they refused to carry Betamax that they banned him for life. After that, Mr. Kraussen purchased every Betamax cassette released, many of which he never watched.

  During sleepovers the boys always had a brief argument over which movie they would watch. The animated version of The Hobbit. Scanners. Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And when they couldn’t decide, they picked The Empire Strikes Back and sat next to one another reciting the dialogue, taking turns being different characters, both of them skipping the lines for Princess Leia. They’d watch movies until the sky turned light blue outside, and sleep only a little while before Mrs. Kraussen woke them up for a full German breakfast.

  During that last snowfall, the good one, they’d taken all of their Star Wars action figures outside and set up an enormous battle in the snow. It had taken hours. Their ritual was to first pile all of their figures and vehicles on the floor of Adam’s room and select them for their armies, one at a time. Adam owned nearly all of the figures, possessing his father’s knack for collecting. He made lists of everything he owned, and hung pages from the Sears Wish Book on his wall with any of the figures or vehicles he was still missing circled.

  J.D. Rein owned
two action figures. One of them was a gift from Adam, who’d gotten doubles of a bounty hunter for his birthday. His other figure was a cheap army soldier he’d found in the woods. They’d agreed to allow the soldier to be included in the Star Wars battles, because they were always in need of more bad guys.

  After the selection process, they carried their armies outside and set them up. They built snow forts and turrets and dug trenches, placed each figure in the best possible position, and hid them so that they could not be seen by enemy forces. By the time they were ready to start their toy war, it was getting dark. Mrs. Kraussen called them inside for dinner, and as they sat inside eating, Adam glanced out the window and had to adjust his thick glasses at what he saw. He cried out in despair. It was snowing, harder than before. Both of their armies were buried.

  It took a full week for the snow to melt enough for them to hunt down their figures. By the time they finished, all of them were accounted for, all tossed back in a pile on Adam’s floor, except for the second robot bounty hunter, the only true Star Wars action figure that J.D. possessed. J.D. said the one they’d found was his, because he remembered finding it on his side of the yard. Adam said he remembered which one was his, because it had a specific scratch on the bottom, the same as the one sitting between them.

  They argued, until both of them were so angry they were yelling. Mr. Kraussen called upstairs, “Boys, is everything okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Adam called back. He pulled his asthma inhaler out of his right pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He pressed the button and took a deep breath. “You take it,” he said, looking down at the pile of toys. “It’s not like you have any others, right?”

  J.D. snatched his cheap army figure out of the pile, stuffed it in his pocket, and left.

  * * *

  It warmed up on his walk home, in the way that forty-degree weather feels tropical after a long stretch of twenty-degree days and zero-degree nights. J.D. took off his coat and woolen hat, wearing just a T-shirt, enjoying the sun’s heat on his neck and exposed arms. He took the main road toward the woods leading back to Patterson, wishing he had brought his Walkman.

  It wasn’t an official Walkman. It was a cheap Japanese version with a cassette lid that had snapped off long ago. He used a rubber band to keep cassettes from falling out and had to keep switching the batteries around because the tape would start playing slower as they ran out. Switching them around helped for a little while. He’d tried leaving them in the refrigerator overnight, but that had only made it worse. The batteries would have to last, though. It was always a long time before he’d be able to find new ones.

  He’d left the Walkman at home because he had more need of it there, where he could cover his ears with his headphones and turn the volume up as loud as it would go, to help block out everything else. Here on the road, where it was quiet, he didn’t need music. He just wanted it to keep him company, to make him forget the hurtful thing his friend had said, to help him ignore the stupid, deformed action figure in his pocket and the better one he was now missing.

  J.D. crossed to the other side of the street to go around the last house on the main road, keeping his head down as he walked. A group of boys was gathered around a tall oak tree. Several were up high in the tree, hidden by its branches, and two others clung to the bottom, trying to make their way up. J.D. did not see either of the Eubanks boys, the ones who lived there, but he kept moving anyway. Not running. That would have been too obvious and would draw attention. He lowered his head and walked fast.

  He made it halfway past the house before they saw him. “Hey, faggot, where’s your girlfriend, the Four-Eyed Freak?” Little Ritchie Eubanks, the younger brother, cried. He made wheezing sounds like he was choking to death, feinting one of Adam’s asthma attacks, and the others cackled.

  J.D. scanned the road ahead, assessing how far he was from the woods. The boys were on the other side of the street. Most of them were high enough up in the tree that if they tried coming after him, he had time to run. He would toss his jacket and hat and break for the woods. There was going to be hell to pay if he came home without either item, and even greater hell to pay if he admitted he’d tossed them while running from a fight, but he decided it was worth it. He’d come back and look for them after it got dark. Or maybe he’d get lucky and the warm weather would last and he wouldn’t need them again.

  Someone high up in the tree called out to him in a deeper voice that silenced all of the others. “Hey, J.D., come over here.” Fred Eubanks was fourteen years old and already had the beginnings of a mustache. He was muscular, taller than the other boys in his grade, let alone the ones he hung out with, who were closer to J.D.’s age. He wrestled for the school team and had been so good at such a young age that other parents wouldn’t let their children wrestle him. In sixth grade, his junior high coach had to send him to practice with the high school’s junior varsity team. He’d heard stories about Eubanks threatening to break people’s necks with a chokehold, and with no adults around to intervene, J.D. had no doubt he could do it.

  J.D. looked at him from across the road, peering at his massive form in the upper reaches of the tree. “What’s up?” he said. The other kids had stopped laughing, even stopped moving, doing nothing but stare at J.D.

  “I just want to talk to you,” Eubanks said, spreading his thick arms across the branches. “Come over here. I want to ask you about something.”

  “About what?”

  “How about you stop being such a little chickenshit and get over here, before I come down and drag you.”

  Little Ritchie laughed his high-pitched, squealing laugh, and the rest snickered. J.D. turned his head, looking at the woods.

  “I’m just messing with you,” Eubanks said, smiling at him, spreading the layer of black silky hair across his upper lip. “You walk past here all the time, always going to hang out with Adam, but you never stop and say hi to us. What’s wrong, we not good enough for you? Come hang out with us for a minute. I need to ask you something.”

  J.D. scratched the side of his face, looking at how many of them he could see; tucked his coat under his arm; and crossed the street toward them. The boys at the bottom of the tree climbed upward, pulled up by their friends who reached down to give them a hoist.

  They were assembled in the branches like bats by the time J.D. made his way to the base of the tree. Looking up, he covered his eyes to shield them from the overhead sun. He could see Fred Eubanks standing on a branch high above him, and raised his head to say, “What did you want to ask me?”

  In the glistening sun, he saw it before he realized what it was. Eubanks had his fingers wrapped around his penis, bulbous and reddened, sticking out through the zipper of his jeans. “Think it’s going to rain?” Eubanks snickered as a hot stream of piss sprayed down in a wide arc, aimed at J.D.’s face.

  J.D. managed to raise his hand and look away in time to keep it from going in his mouth. He felt the side of his face and his arm and the side of his shirt and back go wet. The laughter above him was loud and screeching. They choked on it. They clung to one another and nearly fell out of the tree, screaming, “Piss Face” as he ran.

  * * *

  By the time he reached the edge of the woods, J.D. was shivering with cold. His entire body ached from running. Every time he inhaled, he was overwhelmed by the ammonia stench of urine soaked into his clothing. Worse, the rest of him was wet now too, from running through the damp woods. His socks squished every time he walked, and his sneakers and his jeans from the knees down were covered in mud.

  He didn’t dare put on his coat and hat and contaminate them, too. He ducked behind a tree, made sure no one was coming after him, and scooped up two handfuls of dirty snow from the ground. He ran the snow through his hair and smeared it down his neck, then used a pile of wet leaves to clean off his arm and hand as much as he could. The leaves left streaks across his skin and smelled of damp earth, but he didn’t care. It was better than the alternative.

&nb
sp; The leaves blew away from his fingers in the rising wind. His whole head was wet now. He shook it and ran his fingers through it, trying to brush away as much of the snowy slush as he could. He shivered, clutching his arms around his body for warmth.

  He walked around the back of the houses near his, having nowhere else to go. He was less than a mile away from home, but there was no way he could go there. He thought about his uncle’s house, which was not far away, either, but that was also an impossibility. Ollie Rein would take one look at the boy and ask questions the boy did not want to answer. Even if he was somehow convinced not to tell J.D.’s father, he would most definitely go find the boys who’d done it and deliver them a reckoning.

  As much as that idea warmed him inside, he knew that would not be the end of it. Fred Eubanks wasn’t the type to be humbled by a reprimand, no matter how severe, and especially one that came in front of his friends or parents. The next time, he would hurt J.D. permanently.

  A woman who was cooking dinner in the back of her house saw J.D. in her backyard. He leapt behind the nearest tree and hustled deeper into the woods, getting out of sight of her windows. It was getting dark, and he could see his breath frosting in the cold air with every breath. He was miserable with cold, constantly blowing into his hands. He would have tucked them inside his T-shirt if it weren’t still wet and stinking.

  He walked until he saw a clearing ahead. Some bricks, piled into a makeshift chimney. Branches were stacked across the bottom, wound with cords of rope that would help them burn when lit. He considered trying to make his own fire using sticks and dry grass like they did in the movies, but as he looked around, everything was damp.

  He sat on the wet earth next to the chimney and lowered his head to his arms, no longer caring about the odor soaked into his clothes. A few feet away, a branch snapped against the ground, and J.D.’s head shot up. Someone was coming toward him. He struggled to get to his feet, fearing the boys had followed him, but before he could run, a girl, the same age as him, stepped into the clearing.