Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  In the dream, Billy saw Maddox again.

  He saw him because he wanted to. This was Billy’s dream. He was in control.

  Maddox sat on a plastic lawn chair, alone, looking like he had come to a concert on the wrong day. Behind the stone temple, sunlight glared off the frozen duck pond.

  Billy walked toward him. In his right hand, he felt his ice ax—twenty-five inches long, and yet less than eighteen ounces; it had a hardened steel head on an aluminum shaft, for mountaineering in the worst conditions. The hatchetlike head had a serrated blade that could have butchered a buffalo.

  Billy had not used the ax in ten years, not since the first year he was with Angie. That winter, they had driven four hours to Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, where they had stayed in a majestic inn at the foot of the mountain. He felt his dream face smiling at the memory. He remembered the hot tub, the second bottle of merlot, and leaving the room at daybreak, while she still slept, to make for the mountain’s summit alone.

  He recalled little from the climb, just the scrape of his crampons against the ice and his white breath beneath his goggles. The summit that day had been encased in rime ice as sharp as a blade and as dainty as spider silk.

  He had enjoyed the peak alone. The highpoint of his climb—the highpoint of his life.

  Back then, Billy owed money to no one. He had started work in Rhode Island, covering crime for the paper of record. And in the redroofed lodge far below, Angie waited. She would have been awake and at breakfast, probably, watching the mountain for Billy and drawing the faces around her—those of waiters and other diners—on her sketch pad.

  Billy had killed Maddox many times in his lucid dreams. He had thought the dreams would satisfy his need to make Maddox pay for what he had done. Instead, the dream violence fed his fantasies. He had studied lucid dreaming to control the violence in his nightmares; now his nightmares had become rehearsals.

  Billy felt his shoulders roll as he swung the ax. Hot blood splashed his face.

  When he was done, he rested, feeling steamy sweat against his skin. The color began to drain from the park, like a Polaroid developing in reverse, and Billy realized he was waking up.

  He saw Peter Shadd on the stage of the Temple to Music.

  Peter looked at the mess at Billy’s feet and frowned. He said, “That’s some fucked-up shit.”

  Billy glanced down. His feet had churned up the snow and the blood and had spread it all around him. “Is this what you did, Peter?” he asked.

  “Shit, man, you know I didn’t do that.”

  “Everyone else thinks you did. I hear the other jurors talking. They’re not supposed to talk about the case, but they do. They want to convict you.”

  “Do you believe in arithmetic?” Peter asked.

  “I’m no good at it.”

  “Add something and then subtract the same. What happens?”

  “The universe doesn’t notice,” Billy said.

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “That’s not you talking,” Billy insisted. “It’s not you; it’s me.”

  “Save the innocent man, then kill the guilty one. The universe doesn’t notice.”

  Billy woke into darkness with a little shudder. He was on his back, in bed. His T-shirt was dry. The hot sweat was just part of the dream. His heartbeat was calm, his breathing shallow and regular.

  The radioactive clock glowed green. The time was 3:55 A.M.

  Billy sat up, put his feet on the carpet, and passed his hands through his hair. His jaw was sore from grinding his teeth, and the foulness in his mouth smelled like sun-dried lizard. He took a BuSpar and swallowed it down.

  Gathering his sheet into a ball, he wept silently into the cotton.

  Billy cried because he had awakened into a world in which Angie was dead and Maddox alive. The dream had felt so real, as if Billy had really killed him. He wept because he would have to do it again. Billy bit on a mouthful of sheet. He thought of Angie, of the night she had told him she’d miscarried their first child. That night, Billy had locked himself in the bathroom and cried into the mildew on the underside of the bath mat, until Angie picked the lock with a knitting needle, took the bath mat away, and cradled Billy’s head against her bare belly.

  “Here I am,” she had whispered to him.

  With that memory, Billy’s shoulders stopped shaking and the fit of tears passed.

  He wiped his eyes on the sheet, blew his nose into it, and then tossed it to the corner. Switching on the lamp Angie had given him for his thirty-second birthday, he blinked the sleep away and let his eyes adjust to the twenty-five-watt bulb. Billy’s dream journal was on the nightstand. The book was a hardcover binder with a shiny gold crescent moon on the cover. He flipped to the first blank page, wrote the date, the time, and the details of the dream.

  The journal seemed radioactive, like the clock. It was a handwritten confession to a crime Billy had not yet committed.

  If anything ever happens to Maddox, I must burn this book.

  Unless, Billy thought, I want to be caught. Is that why I keep the journal?

  Hmmm, no, that’s ridiculous. Billy tossed the book back on the nightstand. Nobody wanted to be caught for anything—not speeding, not stealing cable TV, certainly not murder. But Billy had no doubt he would be caught. He wasn’t a hit man. His revenge would not be done coolly for money; it would be a premeditated act of passion. And if it came to action, passion wouldn’t care what clues it left behind.

  From the hallway came a clunk. Then the old man mumbling, “… goddamn thing in the goddamn way …”

  Billy went to the hall. The old man had steered his wheelchair into the doorjamb on his way to the bathroom and had gotten the footrest hung up on the trim around the door. A night-light low on the wall shone through the old man’s wheels and cast a faint spoked shadow on the opposite wall.

  “Pop?”

  “This goddamn door jumped in my way.”

  “Mm-hm,” Billy said, tugging the chair into the hall, and lining it up with the opening. “Why would a door do that?”

  “Insurance scam, probably.” The old man wheeled into the bathroom.

  “Do you need help?”

  “First thing I did out of the womb was piss on the doctor,” the old man said. “If I did it then without help, I can do it now.” He clicked on the light and flung the door shut in Billy’s face.

  Billy leaned against the wall and waited, listening to his father whimper, grunt, curse, and sigh. The toilet seat fell hard; the wheelchair rattled. Then silence for two minutes. And then the sounds of struggling began again.

  The old man emerged from the bathroom more ornery than when he’d gone in. “All that work for ten fucking drops,” he growled. “I tell you, boy, getting old ain’t for sissies.”

  “Maybe you and I can switch bedrooms, so you’ll have a straight drive across the hall.”

  The old man made a sour face. “Won’t that be swell for you—trying to romance a woman in my room, the former cloak closet barely big enough for a twin bed and spare pair of underwear.”

  “I’m not doing any romancing.”

  The old man mocked him with fake surprise. “Really? You don’t say?” He fingered the loose skin under his chin. “I haven’t heard your headboard banging the wall recently, but I thought I was just going deaf.”

  “You should go back to bed, Pop.”

  “So should you—and get somebody in there with you.”

  “Can we drop this?”

  “Pay her if you have to.”

  “I don’t have to—” Billy caught himself as his voice rose. He glanced to Bo’s bedroom door, then whispered calmly, “I don’t have to pay to get laid.”

  “You’re forty years old, son,” the old man reminded him. “You wanna be alone forever? Listen to me—it sucks.”

  “You weren’t alone often enough, if I recall my family history.”

  Anger stirred in the old man’s blue eyes. “I played around too much, okay?” h
e said, a sudden rasp in his voice. “I got a lot of old memories of damp sheets.” He frowned and held up his hands. The loose sleeves of his white T-shirt drooped beneath his wasted arms. “And now I have nobody. Who’s gonna want me now? Your mistakes are opposite of mine, but just as bad—and they will turn you into me.”

  They stared at each other.

  The old man looked close to tears. He had been nagging out of love, Billy realized, expressing his worries as best he could, in his own ham-fisted way. Something inside Billy melted. He said gently, “I hear you, Pop, but it’s too soon—Angie’s only been gone a year.”

  The old man looked away. He spoke down the dark hallway. “She’s been dead thirteen months, but she was gone long before that.”

  Billy glanced to his bare feet. They were getting cold on the hardwood floor. “I had a plan to get her back,” he said.

  “Oh sure, your plan—to quit gambling, write your book, pay off your debts, and win her back. How much time did you think you had? She shacked up with that asshole cop in the meanwhile. They was getting married.”

  “Never would have happened.”

  The old man sighed hard, a gasp in reverse. He said, “You and her—you divorced five years ago.”

  Billy’s his head snapped up. “No. Five years?”

  “Do the math—it’s six years come January. That’s how long you been alone.”

  The old man was right, though it didn’t seem possible. Billy absentmindedly rubbed the spot on his rib cage where Walter had belted him. It didn’t hurt anymore, but he had gotten used to rubbing it. “I didn’t want anyone else,” Billy confessed. “I was afraid it would feel like cheating.”

  The old man opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and did a double take down the hall.

  Billy looked. A four-foot wraith in Batman pajamas and a Caped Crusader plastic Halloween mask crawled along the wall.

  “Bo?”

  The kid jumped to attention and whipped off the mask. “Yes, Billy.”

  “Look, it’s Batman,” the old man said. “Where’s Robin? No—to hell with Boy Wonder—where’s Catwoman? Remember her, Billy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Eartha Kitt!” the old man cried. “She can climb my scratching post!”

  “Pop,” Billy said, gently cutting him off. He asked Bo, “What are you doing out of your room?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Um, have you been sneaking down to Mr. Metts’s funeral parlor dressed as Batman in the middle of the night?”

  A pause. “No.”

  It amazed Billy that a boy directly descended from a serial adulterer and a compulsive gambler could be such a rotten liar. Hadn’t the kid gotten any DNA from Billy?

  The boy yawned, big and phony. “I’m so tired! G’night, Billy! G’night, grandpa!” he said cheerily, and then vanished into his room.

  “First time the kid hasn’t tried to bum a dime off me,” the old man said.

  The mood had been broken; the father-son discussion was over. Fine with Billy—he had nothing more to say. “Can I push you back to your room?” he offered.

  “Leave me here,” the old man snapped. “Christ Almighty, I gotta piss again.”

  seventeen

  The witness turned almost sideways, his left ear toward the jury. His peered, cyclopslike, through his left eye toward the prosecutor, who had called him to the stand.

  “State you name,” said the clerk.

  “Lawrence Home,” said the cyclops. “But I like Larry.” He spoke with a thick tongue, and if he hadn’t come to court directly from jail, chained inside the sheriff’s van, Billy would have assumed Home was testifying through three vodka tonics.

  He halfheartedly raised his right hand to be sworn in, like a recruit being forced to volunteer for some hated assignment.

  The witness looked about thirty-five years old. He was unshaven and his stringy black hair was tangled. His face was sunburned and peeling, possibly from an outdoor detail, such as picking trash along Route 95. He was barely five-five and couldn’t have weighed more than a buck twenty. Still, Billy doubted that many men in the cell block messed with Lawrence Home. He was the sneaky-strong, wiry type, in good shape and hardened from a lifetime of street fights. As the prosecutor stood to begin his examination, Horne’s lips puckered and his left eye narrowed. Though he was Dillingham’s own witness, Home seemed to be readying for a bitter argument. He looked like a man accustomed to throwing the first punch.

  “Mr. Home,” Dillingham began, “are you currently a resident of the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions?”

  “The slammer?” he said. His demeanor brightened and he chuckled. “Yeah, I’m residing there for another eight to ten.” He looked up to share the joke with Judge Palumbo, who stared through him as though he weren’t there.

  “Did you at one time share a cell with Garrett Nickel?”

  “For three years, up at the Supermax, till we broke out.”

  “That would be the state’s High Security Center, in Cranston, correct?”

  “Call it what you want.”

  “At any time was a third inmate assigned to the cell with you and Mr. Nickel?”

  Horne grimaced and stretched his jaw. He nodded toward the defense table. “Yeah, that little son of a bitch.”

  Martin Smothers bounced up. “Your Honor!” he objected.

  Judge Palumbo calmed Martin with a nod and pushed him into his chair with the slightest gesture of his hand. “The record will show that the witness indicated that the defendant, Mr. Shadd, was his cell mate,” the judge ordered. “Extraneous comments about his momma will be stricken from the record, and the jury will disregard. Move along, Mr. Dillingham.”

  “Mr. Horne,” Dillingham continued, “can you tell the court about the first time you met the defendant?”

  “Can I tell the court?” Home repeated, looking around, seeming surprised by the question. He gave a little shrug. “Yeah—what the hell. I can tell it just like it happened.”

  Seated on the floor, Larry Home gently dragged a string through the one-inch space under the cell door. The string had been painstakingly braided from threads pulled from a towel. The line was twenty-five feet long, long enough to reach two cells over. Nobody fished better than Larry. He would weight the end of the string with a paper wad and then flick it with a finger, casting it under the cell door, where it would extend as far as twenty feet. That was far enough to tangle it with somebody else’s fishing line, and to make a person-to-person prison connection.

  The odor of dinner arrived in F Block a few minutes before the meal.

  Garrett Nickel reclined on the lower bunk and inhaled deeply. “It’s the fuckin’ meat loaf again,” he predicted. “Hurry up and get the line in before it gets here.”

  “The meat loaf is made from ground kangaroo and rotten tomatoes,” said Larry.

  “Yeah, retarded kangaroo.”

  The skinny new guy said nothing. He sat on his footlocker, feet on the floor, his head leaning back against the concrete wall, eyes staring through the building.

  The stencil on his jumpsuit read: “SHADD, Peter J.”

  The cell was about twelve feet square. It had been designed as a double room, but a prison-population boom had forced in a third bunk, crudely welded atop the other two. There was one metal toilet, a small vanity with cold running water, and three footlockers.

  The cell door was steel, with a thick glass porthole. Below the porthole, the door had a horizontal trap just wide enough for a dinner tray. On the wall opposite the door, sunlight entered through a tall, narrow window, about seven inches wide, made of thick glass. Through it, the inmates could see a seven-inch slice of freedom beyond the prison yard and a twenty-foot chain fence. They could see the former state insane asylum—now abandoned—a gloomy redbrick fortress filled with nothing but old screams. And beyond that, civilization: streets and stores and cars zooming along, drivers oblivious to the eyes on them.

  All three men wore bright oran
ge jumpsuits. Orange meant troublemaker; among Rhode Island prison inmates, the men in orange were thought to be the most dangerous, or the hardest to tame. They were held in lockdown in their cell, except for two showers a week.

  Larry pulled a battered copy of Newsweek under the door. “Got it,” he said.

  “What does it say on page thirty-three?” Garrett asked.

  Larry flipped through the magazine and then read the handwritten scrawl. “ ‘We have our people on the outside looking for your guy.… Will advise.… Stay tuned.’ ”

  Garrett clapped twice. “Excellent!” He walked to the window and peered out.

  On the tiny window ledge, Garrett had left a shampoo bottle nearly full of pink-tinted sour milk, topped with mold green curds ripening in the evening sun.

  With no ventilation, the cell was humid.

  Garrett unbuttoned his jumpsuit to the waist and slipped his arms out of it. He had been on a long, hard diet. His body had eaten whatever fat it had stored and then had begun consuming raw muscle; the veins in his arms bulged just beneath the skin.

  Garrett pulled out a six-inch shank from his sock and sharpened it against the concrete wall, grinding lazily in little circles. He soon tired of the work. “Where’s my Bible?” he asked. Before anyone could answer, he grabbed the book from his bunk and flipped through it until he found a tiny envelope of white powder. He dumped the powder on the book cover, scraped the drug into a line with the envelope, and snorted it.

  He gasped hard, like a pearl diver breaking the surface after two minutes underwater. “Whew! Nothing better for losing weight,” he said.

  Larry Home had been on a crash diet, too. But he was built smaller than Garrett and didn’t need to lose as much. Still, Larry hated to deprive himself. He was envious of the new guy—he was already skinny enough.

  A door buzzed down the hall, opened, and then slammed shut.

  The chow was coming.

  Garrett stashed the shank in his sock. “See if it’s Flagg,” he urged.

  Horne grabbed his own King James Bible off his footlocker, a book identical to Garrett’s, and yanked out a bookmark—a shard of plastic mirror half an inch wide and eight inches long. He slapped down the book, dived to the floor, and crawled to the bottom of the door. With his cheek on the concrete, he slid the mirror under the door and peeked into the hall.