Gravewriter

by Mark Arsenault

  He struggled into his jumpsuit, socks, and sneakers. The perimeter fence was thirty yards across a flat lawn of tightly cropped grass. The fence was of little concern. Larry had learned to conquer chain link and barbed wire early in his career as a delinquent.

  But after the fence?

  Larry needed Garrett.

  He looked up to the window. He had been outside alone for several minutes. Where the hell was Garrett?

  Larry felt a brief burst of dread. Had the guards come for an early head count?

  He rose to his knees, slowly pushed to his feet, and peered into the cell.

  Garrett flipped the shank in the air. It spun once before he caught it by the handle. “Last chance,” Garrett whispered to Peter. “Those are the terms.”

  Peter closed his eyes a moment and inhaled fresh air. He pulled open his jumpsuit and said, “Gimme the grease.”

  twenty-one

  The Batman mask had a special place under the bed, next to a baby food jar that had once held strained peas but now held Bo’s coin collection. These were coins he must never spend: one bicentennial half-dollar, six Rhode Island state quarters, and a silver dime from 1959, which was older than Billy, but not older than Grandpa, who was older than any coin Bo had ever seen. Billy had said the dime was worth more than a regular dime because it was so old. How much more? Bo didn’t know. Maybe it was worth a quarter. Maybe a hundred dollars.

  He grabbed the box with the mask and pushed himself from under the bed.

  The Incredible Hulk clock on the nightstand had green numbers. The numbers were thick and blocky and Bo thought they looked mad sometimes. Maybe the numbers were mad because Bo was out of bed at four o’clock in the morning.

  He put on the Batman mask. His breath through the little holes in the nose whistled like Darth Vader. He squeezed the penlight Billy had given him. It went on when he pinched it and off when he didn’t. He aimed the light through the pickle jar on his bureau. The coins in the jar were the ones he could spend. The jar’s shadow on the white wall was tall and crooked. The jar held thirty-seven dollars and twenty-two cents. A fortune. Yet still not enough.

  Time for Bo to go on his mission.

  He grabbed his toy pistol. It was metal and heavy and looked just a like a real gun. The gun made Bo feel less alone in the dark. He opened his bedroom door, peered into the dark hallway, and listened.

  Silence.

  He tiptoed to Grandpa’s room, put his ear to the door, and heard nothing. He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. Grandpa was under the sheet. His wheelchair was beside the bed. Bo felt a chill. The chair never bothered Bo when Grandpa was in it, but it scared him when it was empty.

  Bo would not face the empty chair without his mask. The chair called to him. It wanted him to sit. Bo was afraid the chair would never let him up. Or that he would like having wheels so much, he would never want to walk.

  With one eye closed, he couldn’t see the chair. He could see Grandpa on his back. His pillow was under his shoulders and his head was bent backward at the neck. That looked like it would hurt. Grandpa’s jaw was open. Bo pinched the light and shot the beam into his grandfather’s mouth. His teeth were tan and the cavities greenish black, the color of a deep swamp, deep enough to drown it. Bo got scared and cut the light.

  He stepped closer and listened. Grandpa made a soft wheeze. His breath smelled spoiled. Bo pinched the light and saw Grandpa’s chest rise and fall through the beam.

  He was not dead.

  Satisfied, Bo retreated to the hall and silently snicked the door closed.

  He went next to Billy’s room. The door was already open two inches. Bo put his ear in the space.

  The sheets rustled.

  Bo listened a little longer; he wanted to hear breath—that was how he knew people were not dead. Talking was good, too. One time, Bo heard Billy cry in his sleep. Bo had been happy to hear his father cry; it meant that Billy was not dead.

  Bo had missions every night to make sure Grandpa and Billy were not dead, and that he was not alone.

  There! He heard it—Billy’s breath—a snort like a pig.

  Bo clamped a hand over his mouth. He didn’t want to laugh. He zoomed down the hall in stocking feet, to the top of the wide carpeted stairs that led down to Mr. Metts’s funeral parlor.

  His mission had made him feel safe. He probably could have fallen asleep. He thought about going to bed.

  Then he lighted the stairs with the flashlight. This was the scariest mission of them all. Maybe he would just go partway. He stepped down, down, down, to the first floor. The door there had a gold knob shaped like a lion’s head. But it was a friendly lion. Bo turned the knob and pushed into the funeral parlor. It smelled like flowers.

  He turned left, into a big room with rows of soft chairs that faced the table where Mr. Metts would put the coffin with the person who was dead. The carpet was spongy and it felt good under his feet. Three big windows looked out to the street. The streetlamp outside was yellow. Bo could make out the black outline of the Armory castle at the far end of the park.

  Mr. Metts’s silver telescope stood on three legs near the window. The undertaker had showed Bo how to read license plates across the park with the telescope. Someday they were going to take it out at night and look for Mars, and for spaceships.

  Bo passed into another room and froze. Fear tickled inside his stomach.

  There was a coffin there. It was white. Giant baskets of purple flowers, as tall as Bo, had been placed at each end of the coffin. The coffin was closed. The flowers smelled so thick and sweet, Bo became light-headed. He knew there was a dead person inside.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  He put his head down and marched past the casket, went into the hallway. He stopped at a white door with a little gold sign that said PRIVATE.

  He tested the door. Locked. It was always locked.

  Bo dropped to his knees and aimed the light at the floor. He lifted the edge of the carpet—as he had seen old Mr. Metts do. There, Bo found a gold key. Feeling brave behind the Batman mask, he unlocked the door and pulled it open.

  Inside, a brown coffin stood straight up on one end.

  Bo looked up to a window set in the coffin. In the window was a face.

  Feeling less brave, Bo blessed himself with the sign of the cross. He cleared his throat and greeted the corpse formally. “Good evening, Sal.”

  The dead man’s skin was gray and tight. His eyes and mouth were closed. Bo didn’t look too carefully at the mouth—he didn’t like to see the stitches through the lips. Clumps of Sal’s hair had fallen out. He had bald patches. The hair he still had was straight and black, like a witch’s hair.

  A newspaper story glued to the coffin told the story of Salvatore Genovese.

  Bo had learned the story by heart, from Mr. Metts.

  Sal had worked in a traveling carnival that had come through Providence in 1929. While he was here, he had died—murdered, some people said. A man who said he was Sal’s father made a deposit with Mr. Metts’s grandfather for a funeral. The father never came back. Mr. Metts’s grandfather refused to do the burial until he was paid the rest of the money. He put Sal in a special coffin with a window and displayed him in the funeral home. People came from all over to see it.

  It was still in the lobby when Mr. Metts was a little boy.

  But then some people didn’t like it. And Mr. Metts’s father, who was dead now, put the coffin in the closet and showed it only to his friends. Bo’s friend, Mr. Metts, showed the coffin only to Bo.

  Panning the light over the newspaper story, Bo scanned for the number.… There it was … the balance Sal’s father owed for the burial—$125.

  Bo could hardly imagine such a sum.

  “I made thirty cents bringing newspapers down for recycling,” he stammered to the corpse. “We’re up to thirty-seven dollars and twenty-two cents. That’s not counting my special money collection under my bed, but I’m not supposed to spend tho
se coins.”

  He aimed the beam at the dead man’s face in the window.

  Tears of pity stung Bo’s eyes. He was afraid of the corpse, but he loved it, too, because Sal needed Bo to help him get buried. Dead people cannot take care of you anymore—you have to take care of them.

  Gingerly, he reached a hand to the coffin. He tapped it for a split second, as if afraid it might burn him.

  “G’night, Sal. I’ll come back as soon as I can.” He closed the door, spun the key in the lock, and tucked they key under the carpet.

  He marched back the way he had come, into the room with the coffin. He faced away from it.

  What was that?

  A white flash, from the park outside.

  Maybe it’s a robot!

  Bo killed his flashlight and dropped to all fours. Since he and Grandpa had watched The Day the Earth Stood Still on television, Bo had been waiting for a robot to appear in the park.

  He crawled to the big window that faced the street and peeked his Batman face over the sill.

  There was a man in the park.

  The man was watching Bo’s house.

  The stranger was dressed in an overcoat and a brimmed hat, like a gangster. He was a big man. The man’s hands were in his face. There was another white flash. Bo gasped.

  He’s taking pictures of our house.

  Bo dropped to the rug. He looked straight up at the window and began to shiver. Why would a man in an overcoat be taking pictures at night? Did he know that Bo had sneaked downstairs to the funeral home? Maybe he was Sal’s father.…

  Suddenly, a face appeared in the window above Bo. The man looked in through cupped hands.

  Bo tried to scream for Billy, to dash upstairs and yell for the police, all at once, but he found himself frozen on the floor, looking up through the plastic mask at the stranger. The man’s face was wrinkled. His gray eyebrows were bushy and grew in crazy swirls. Bo was glad for Sal in the closet. At least Bo was not alone.

  What did the man want? Did he want to put Bo in a coffin in the closet, where Bo would not be buried? He imagined Mr. Metts sharing the secret in the closet with another boy. Bo hoped the other boy would visit him.

  In a moment, the man vanished.

  Had he seen Bo?

  No, he’d never looked right at him.

  Bo regained control of his body and didn’t waste an instant—he crawled, trembling, to the stairs and then up to the apartment. He knew he never should have gone downstairs that night, and now he had to live with a frightening secret. He promised himself never to tell Billy about the stranger who was watching the house.

  twenty-two

  The three escaped cons found the mango-colored Oldsmobile in the parking lot of a box company, in an industrial park across the street from the state prison complex. Garrett reached behind a tire, tore off a piece of duct tape, pulled a silver key off the tape, and unlocked the car.

  “Shotgun!” Larry called.

  “Nobody’s riding shotgun,” Garrett said. “Both you assholes, in the back.” He slid in behind the wheel.

  “Massachusetts plates,” Peter noted as he tumbled in. “Who left this for us?”

  Larry piled into the back after Peter. His undershirt was wrapped around a cut on his wrist, from scaling the barbed-wire fence. “It’s got a Rhode Island inspection sticker,” he said.

  Garrett gave a sour look over his shoulder. “You two working at the DMV? It’s a fuckin’ stolen car with hot plates. It has an expiration date of about two days, so let’s shut up and get moving.”

  The Oldsmobile stuttered in surprise when Garrett turned the key. He pumped the gas and hammered his fist on the dash, telling the car, “You work for the Nickel-Plated Outlaw, you son of a bitch.”

  The engine huffed to life. Garrett laughed like a madman, jammed the transmission into drive, and stomped the gas. The car lunged forward.

  “My stash,” Larry said. “I need my stash!”

  “Five minutes,” Garrett snapped. “If I could go five minutes without hearing about your fuckin’ stash, I could die a fulfilled human being. Jesus, Larry!” He thought for a moment. “I’ll dump you in the park; then me and Peter will take care of some business. We’ll pick you up later, and then drive through the night. We’ll be in Bangor by morning. There’s a ferry to Nova Scotia. We’ll dump this shitbox and steal new wheels on the other side.”

  “I can’t get my stash myself,” Larry cried. “I can’t swim.”

  “What? Then how did you hide it there in the first place?”

  “It was January—I walked on the ice.”

  Garrett muttered to himself. He turned right onto Pontiac Avenue, heading north, away from the prison. They passed a twenty-four-hour gas station lighted up brighter than an operating room. “That wasn’t here when I went in,” Larry said. He pointed to an on-ramp. “Ooo—take the highway.”

  Garrett shot him a hard look in the mirror and then jerked the car onto the ramp. Larry tumbled into Peter, who tumbled into the door. “It’s been awhile,” Garrett explained in what seemed like an apology for his driving. He raced onto the highway, steadying the wheel with his knee as he slipped his arms out of the orange jumpsuit.

  Larry rolled down his window, leaned against the door, and felt the wind strafe his face. What a rush, to be free. “Now I know why dogs do this,” he said.

  “Take Peter,” Garrett ordered. “Get the stash. Meet me the same place I drop you off.”

  At an interchange, he swerved onto Route 95, toward Providence, hiding the Olds among a handful of long-distance truckers plowing north at eighty miles per hour.

  Larry blanched. To leave Garrett Nickel alone with the wheels? “Won’t take long to get the stash,” he pleaded. “Come with us.”

  “I got an errand,” Garrett said. He glanced at Larry in the rearview mirror. Something monstrous stirred in Garrett’s eyes, and Larry felt a stab of fear in his chest.

  Garrett wrenched the car off the highway, cutting off a tractor-trailer in a squeal of tires and a howl of horn on the way to the exit. Larry tumbled again into Peter, who clutched both hands on the door handle. Larry whispered to him, “Sneak past a rifle tower, climb a razor fence, get killed on the fuckin’ highway.”

  Righting himself, Larry imagined that the windshield was a movie screen and what he saw there just a scary flick.

  Garrett rode the bumper of black Nissan up the ramp. “Learn to drive, asshole,” he cursed.

  He swerved around the car, plowed through a stop sign, and bounced the Oldsmobile down a narrow and pitted city street. He yanked the car left and right, curb to curb, around the potholes. Outside Larry’s window, dangerous objects flew past the car—poles, mailboxes, hydrants, a bungalow. He clung to the door and licked salty sweat off his upper lip.

  The Oldsmobile zoomed down another ramp, heading west on a darkened suburban highway divided down the middle by a concrete barrier. Up ahead, the road bordered a dark, forested edge of Roger Williams Park, which looked more like wilderness than picnic grounds.

  “When I slow down,” Garrett shouted, “you two jump out and get the stash.”

  “Where do we meet you?” Larry cried.

  “What do you mean, jump when you slow down?” asked Peter.

  Garrett checked his left wrist, though he hadn’t owned a watch in nine years. “I need a couple hours,” he said. “Get the stash, and then come back and lay in the weeds, right where I leave you. On my way back, I’ll tap the horn so you know it’s me.”

  “What do you mean by ‘slow down’?” Peter repeated.

  Larry scrambled up the grassy slope after Peter. At the top, he examined the painful dark spot on his forearm. He licked it. Blood. A scrape the size of a silver dollar.

  The Oldsmobile roared down the road, then vanished.

  “I think he was going twenty when you pushed me out,” Peter bitched.

  “Be thankful—he was about to hit the gas again.” Larry took a moment to look around and get oriented. The woo
ds were silent. “This way—Jesus!”

  He grabbed Peter by the arm and dragged him to the ground.

  Headlights approached.

  “Not a sound,” Larry warned.

  Laying flat in the underbrush, the two cons watched a Providence police cruiser slowly motor along a park road. The police took their time—they could have jogged faster. The cops probed the woods on the other side of the street with a white searchlight. Darkness gobbled up the light as they passed.

  “Are they looking for us already?” Peter whispered after the cops had gone.

  “Doubt it,” Larry said. “The slammer won’t miss us for another hour. The park closes at nightfall. They’re looking for dope sales and sex orgies. They have them here sometimes.”

  “Hmm—how much time do we have?”

  “Whoa—” Larry said. “Did you just make a joke? Congratulations—your first joke. How does it feel?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There’s no time for shooting smack and getting laid. We gotta get to the boathouse, but we can’t use the road. And not a fuckin’ peep once we get moving. There’s no highway noise in the park, so any sound will carry a long way.”

  They skittered across the road like two bugs, heading into the woods the cops had just searched, then up a steep slope. Larry winced at every snapping twig. “Do you have clubbed feet or something?” he complained. “Why are you so loud? You might as well be playing the accordion.”

  Dropping to their bellies, they wormed their way to the crest of the hill. Below them, the slope eased down through hardwood trees to another park road and then to a lakeshore. The lake at that hour was a dark plain dotted with one clump of trees on one tiny island. The gabled boathouse on the shore looked like a mansion at the edge of outer space. Far in the distance, downtown Providence twinkled white and yellow.