Helen massaged her sore finger, twisting the ring that joined her to Roy. She wanted to understand, but Roy's words were hard to follow. She wanted to ask him what it was (His compassion? His faith?), but she was afraid that he might break down if she admitted that she didn't know what he was talking about.
"It'll be hard gettin' back to Iwo. It'll be even harder to find the guys. God, we dug so many graves. But there's gotta be a way that we can do it."
Helen leaned against the counter. No, Roy. Oh God, no.
Roy smiled. "That's my pretty girl. I knew you'd be on my side." He wheeled himself to the back door, a look of pure contentment on his face. "Lately, I've been hearing a lot from the guys. They want to give it back to me. They know they took it, and they know how bad we need it back. Even the guys who died on Iwo know that." His hands curled into fists. "God love 'em. Y'know, I think that those poor souls want to help us worst of all."
That night, Helen gave Roy some medication to help him sleep. Then she went next door and used the neighbor's telephone.
Three men from the VA hospital came for Roy the following morning.
In 1955, after seven years as a maid at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, Helen was appointed chief housekeeper. Her days off were Tuesday and Wednesday, and she spent them with Roy at the hospital.
In 1955, the doctors decided that Roy was ready to be released. Helen was against it, but there was no use arguing with the bureaucracy.
At first Roy seemed okay. He took the Hudson out of storage and overhauled the engine himself. He even got a bit part as a disabled vet in an Audie Murphy movie.
One day Helen came home from work and found Roy on the front porch, reading the afternoon paper. He looked up at her and said, "They're comin' home, Helen. The boys are comin' home."
Helen shivered as she read the article.
"Helen, if you put me back in the hospital I'll kill myself."
Helen dropped the paper. A hot wind carried it across the front lawn and it tumbled past the open, gaping trunk of the Hudson.
She realized that she was too tired to fight Roy this time.
In 1955, the dead of Iwo Jima were exhumed and returned to American soil.
The first time they did it, on a cold October night in a Nebraska churchyard, Helen had no idea what to expect. She wheeled Roy across a frosty lawn, searching for Gary Van Bellen's headstone. Roy was shivering, and her first thought was that he needed another blanket, but just then Roy spotted Van Bellen's grave, and his half-suppressed cry of joy convinced her that he'd been shivering with anticipation.
"Dig it up," Roy said, his fingers scratching the leather armrests of his wheelchair.
Helen almost refused. For one horrible moment she was afraid that Roy wanted her to rip open Gary Van Bellen's coffin and chop off the dead man's legs. She imagined Roy screaming, "He stole them, Helen. Stole my legs! And now I want them back!"
That's how it would have happened on Inner Sanctum. And that would have been the end of it. The cops would have arrived, stopped Roy, comforted Helen. But no cops arrived, and what might have been the end was only the beginning.
The digging wasn't bad. Helen had thought that coffins were buried six feet under, but that wasn't the case. Two feet down she hit the wooden cover of a coffin vault, which she pried opened with a jack-handle. A few feet below, in a shadowy hole that smelled like earthworms and dead flowers, lay Gary Van Bellen's coffin.
Roy handed Helen a crowbar, and she opened the pine box.
She didn't look down. Her mind warned her against that. But she smelled the rotten smell, and her mouth went instantly dry.
"Take it!" Roy insisted. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. His black hair was smeared sweatily across his forehead, and his once-tanned face was as pasty as moonlight.
Roy shoved an ear of sweet corn at Helen. Her fingers drifted over the wispy, tickling corn-silk and closed around the yellow ribbon that Roy had tied around the husk.
"Okay. Now put it in his hands."
Eyes closed, Helen bent down and let her fingers do the seeing.
"Gary," Roy whispered. "It's like a trade, see? Now you got to give me something back."
Helen's hands drifted over a tattered uniform.
"I know you don't need it anymore, Gary. I gotta have it again."
Helen's fingers brushed a cold metal bracelet and then found Gary Van Bellen's hands. Thin, shrunken fingers. So stiff. So dry.
"It's an offering, Gary. To show you that I remember. You told me all about the farm. It's to show you that I listened." Roy raised his lantern with one hand and flipped through a yellow notebook with the other. "See, here's your story. Helen wrote it down for me. All about your family. I'll read it to you."
Small hands. So cold. Helen raised them, just slightly, and something cracked as she slipped the ear of corn underneath.
An offering. That's what Roy had called it. And when they were safely back in the Hudson, heading for the Wyoming border, Helen was sure that Roy had made his peace and everything was going to be okay again.
Roy parked in the shadow of an abandoned farmhouse. He taped an old newspaper over the car windows, but even with the morning light blacked out he was too keyed up to sleep. Helen lay in the back seat, staring at a page of comic strips, listening to her husband talk. "Honey, I can feel it coming back. Gary really helped me. He always did come through, and this time wasn't any different. I told you that he didn't need it anymore. I knew he'd understand. God, he wanted to give it back so bad."
They crossed into Wyoming at dusk. Roy hadn't said anything about going home, but Helen just naturally assumed that they were heading for California since they were traveling west.
False assumption.
"God, I feel good. It's almost like gettin' my legs back. Like gettin' something back that's been missing so long you forget what it's like to have it." Roy's hand brushed Helen's muddy slacks, patting the smooth curve of her inner thigh. "That Gary. I knew he'd help me. I just hope Rod will understand too. It shouldn't take us long to get to Laramie."
Roy told Helen to get out another yellow notebook, and he repeated the same old stories, the stories he said he'd heard from Gary Van Bellen's dead lips. Stories about Bougainville and Iwo Jima and the night he battled Sugar Ray Robinson.
Soon the notebook was full.
They stopped to sleep for a few hours, and then crossed into Albany County at sunrise. "Not far to Laramie," Roy said. "God, I'll bet it'll look just like Rod said it would."
Roy never said as much, but it seemed fairly obvious to Helen that the offerings were tokens of memory, something tangible that tied Roy to each man's past. Gary Van Bellen's was easy to figure: an ear of corn for a corn farmer. Rod Markham's— a bouquet of Indian paintbrush, columbine, and forget-me-nots —was almost conventional. Except this bouquet was wrapped in a rusty tangle of barbed wire, probably because Rod had spent his teenaged years riding fence for a Wyoming rancher.
Helen didn't try to understand some of the offerings. In the Chicago grave of Vinny Tocolli, she buried a dented canteen filled with the gold teeth that Roy had taken from Japanese corpses on Iwo. In a sandy grave on the Northern California coast, she covered Sal Harbeck's corpse with four gleaming hubcaps stolen off a new Cadillac, and then watched Roy pour a bottle of champagne into the grave, listening to the bubbly liquid splatter over the drumlike metal discs. Moist, salty air clung to her lips that night, ruining the taste of the champagne that she downed just to get through the ordeal.
Most of Roy's buddies came from small towns, so finding their graves was as easy as finding the local cemetery. Searches were harder in the big cities — some had a dozen or more cemeteries — but Roy wouldn't let Helen contact the VA or Marine Corps for help. He didn't trust the government. He used the phone book instead, contacting relatives of the deceased. Sometimes he would visit their homes and stay for dinner like a favorite uncle.
They drove across the country, then back again, never traveling
in a pattern that made any sense. Roy would cruise from New York to Miami and then decide that he had missed a stop in Virginia. After the first month Helen stopped looking at the odometer, because the enormous number she saw growing there frightened her.
In Santa Fe they buried a kite with a tail made from a prostitute's nylons. In Seattle they interred a set of cards backed with pictures of Gypsy Rose Lee. And in a grave in the middle of a dusty Texas boneyard, they placed a bible, a shotgun shell, and a hickory switch.
After every stop, Roy dictated the same old stories, sure that he was finally setting the record straight. Helen didn't have the heart to tell him that his memory was as inconsistent as ever. She began to hope that someone would catch them and bring Roy's twisted pilgrimage to an end.
Roy said it over and over. "God, if we could only find Don Bragonier. I got so much back from the other guys, but I gave the most to Don. He's the one I really need. If we don't find him... Well, we just gotta keep looking."
Between cemeteries, they lived hand to mouth. Roy had an uncanny knack for finding backroom poker games in which he usually did quite well. He'd learned a few tricks in Hollywood, and he cheated brazenly because he believed that no one would accuse a cripple of cheating, especially a cripple who told such great stories about boxing and war and Hollywood.
On a warm July night in the backroom of an upstate New York roadhouse, Roy met a gambler who had grown up with Don Bragonier.
And on the same night, kneeling on the oily pavement outside the Hudson, Helen prayed that their ordeal would finally be over.
The little old lady smiled warmly. "More coffee, Roy?"
Roy swallowed a bite of cherry pie. "Sure, Mrs. Bragonier. And thanks."
Mrs. Bragonier nodded at Helen, who waved a hand over her cup, refusing the silent offer. Helen asked, "Can I help you with the dishes?"
"No, dear," said Mrs. Bragonier, disappearing into the kitchen. "Guests aren't allowed to do dishes in this house."
They had arrived three hours earlier, three hours late according to Roy, who had become hopelessly lost in a maze of twisting Vermont roadways. He had insisted on contacting Don's family directly because that was the fastest way to find Don's grave, and although they hadn't phoned ahead, Mrs. Bragonier had welcomed them with open arms. The old woman recognized Roy from a wartime photo that her son had included in one of his many letters, and she seemed genuinely happy to have some company on a Fourth of July holiday that she would otherwise have spent alone. "Donald was my only child," she had explained. "And now that his father's gone, it's pretty lonely around here."
Helen had smiled through it all, but underneath she'd felt terribly out of place. After two years in the Hudson, she couldn't accustom herself to chatting in Mrs. Bragonier's dining room. The elegant Victorian furniture, the smell of freshly cut lilacs, and the seeming vastness of the room itself made Helen feel insignificant.
Mrs. Bragonier filled Roy's coffee cup and then sliced another piece of pie for him. Helen wished that he would get on with it, just find out where Don Bragonier was buried so they could leave the old woman's enormous house. But Roy was hesitating, she could tell, and she didn't know why.
Helen twisted her wedding ring. Had Roy realized that Don Bragonier was the last man on his list? Was he afraid that, after all his searching, the fabled Don Bragonier wouldn't be able to help him any more than the others had?
Roy patted Helen's knee and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Her hands drifted beneath the table and her fingers curled into the linen tablecloth.
"Donald mentioned you in his letters," said Mrs. Bragonier. "I know that you two were especially close, and I want to thank you for visiting."
It was a goodbye, but Helen could tell that Roy wasn't getting the message. A confused grin crossed his lips. "Donald? Oh, yeah— Don Bragonier. A great guy." Roy stared at Mrs. Bragonier and recognized something of Don in her face. "Ma'am, I don't mean to be rude, but when is Don going to get home? I really have to talk to him."
For a moment Helen expected Don Bragonier to come banging through the front door, a big, smiling hello on his lips. But then she saw Mrs. Bragonier redden, and she was out of her chair, trailing the old woman as she fled to the kitchen.
Helen caught Mrs. Bragonier's thin wrist. "I'm sorry. He forgets — "
Mrs. Bragonier whirled, but not in anger. She drew Helen into a warm embrace. "I understand," she whispered. "Donald's father was the same way. After the war ended, a day didn't go by without him asking when Donald was coming home. You see, he could never accept Donald's death. And your Roy, he's seen so much misery. He's suffered so. Believe me, I understand how it must be."
Helen smiled at that, and she wished, hugging Mrs. Bragonier, that the little old woman could truly understand.
Helen pushed Roy down a mossy gravel path, eager to find the grave. The soft glow of Roy's lantern revealed crooked headstones near the iron gate and then shone on straight, polished markers as they entered the newer section of the cemetery.
Donald Bragonier was buried near a birch grove. Helen slipped on a pair of leather gloves and set about her task.
A dull ache pulsed in her wrists as she worked the shovel into the hard soil. Her ragged breathing mixed with the summer wind, and she shuddered when she thought, for just an instant, that she heard a baby crying in the birches beyond the cemetery fence.
Helen ignored the sounds and opened the coffin. The familiar smell of rot and velvet poured over her.
"Take it. Take it."
Helen took the sax from Roy. Eyes shut, she eased the golden instrument into the coffin, heard its thin bamboo reed scrape the velvet lining.
She had no trouble closing the lid. There was plenty of room in the coffin for the sax, because there wasn't much left of Donald Bragonier
"Don, you're my last chance. C'mon, buddy."
Sweat poured down Helen's forehead. A familiar shiver scraped up her spine.
"C'mon, Don. I know that there's more. You're forgettin' something."
Helen's head came up. She stared at Roy, a big man weeping in a sagging wheelchair. He looked down and his hands closed over her reaching fingers.
"It ain't no use, Helen. It just ain't no use."
Helen crawled out of the grave. This was how it would end. All the traveling. All the horror and misery. And it would end the same way that it had begun.
Roy's arms curled around her waist and she kissed him. She made to wipe his tears away but was surprised to find that they were already gone.
Roy's eyes were alive again. Helen remembered a night in Reno, long ago, the way his eyes had sparkled at her, and she smiled.
Roy tugged the glove off Helen's left hand. "God, Helen. I know how to find the rest of it. It's been in front of me all along and I just didn't see...."
How long ago had it been? Helen shook her head. Funny to forget your own anniversary.
Roy slid the wedding ring off her sweaty finger. "Thanks, doll. It helps. I think I almost got it back now." He let her hand slip free of his grip.
Helen stared down at the pale skin circling her tanned ring finger. Something slipped away. Roy was talking again, but she couldn't quite hear him. The wind was whispering through the trees. A baby was crying in the woods.
"I knew I gave it to them," Roy whispered. "Me, I mean. I gave a lot of me to those guys in the war. But I forgot that I gave so much of me to you."
Helen's fingers were slivers of ice. She turned away from the sad man in the wheelchair, picked up the shovel, and began to fill the open grave with hard clumps of soil.
Something exploded in the distance; the night sky flushed red and pink. Fireworks. The Fourth of July. Helen stared up from her work and watched sparks shower over a lake that was miles away.
Roy's voice was almost lost in a booming explosion. "Just wait here, Helen. I'll be back. There's gotta be a way. Maybe I can get Don's letters from his mother. Maybe they'll fill in the blanks."
Helen watched as flowers bloo
med in the icy blue sky — Indian paintbrush, columbine, and forget-me-nots. The colors melted away, and a faint glow spread over the woods surrounding the cemetery.
Something small and white crawled through the birch grove. Helen dropped the shovel. She turned away from the crawling thing and saw the man in the wheelchair shoving a battered alligator-skin case into the trunk of his car.
Why was he doing that? Why had he locked her baby inside that tiny suitcase?
The Hudson roared alive. Roy backed out of the cemetery and headed down the wrong side of the road. The Hudson's Drive-Master transmission rattled noisily as the big car accelerated.
"Wait," Helen cried. "Don't go. I gave something to you, too, and you've got to give it back."
Something rattled in the distance. Helen recognized the sound: gold teeth rattling inside a dented canteen.
The crying thing curled around the base of a tree. Helen ran to the cemetery fence. Her baby was going to catch its death.
Her baby. Roy's baby.
Helen wanted to yell at her child. Her mouth opened. She swallowed. Her hands closed around iron spikes and she laughed.
Strange not to remember her own baby's name.
Scarlet sparks erupted in the sky, silhouetting the treetops, and then darkness closed over the woods.
No wind. No crying. Silence.
Helen dropped to her knees. The grass was wet, shiny in the rum-colored moonlight. This odd place, with all its granite headstones. This was the place where her husband was buried.
But what was his name?
She hurried down the mossy path, reading headstones by the light of her lantern, but none of the chiseled names seemed familiar.
Skyrockets exploded overhead. People were cheering in the distance.
Bad Intentions Page 12