Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  After visiting Gresham he would drive home and spend a while with his bottle of bathtub as he drafted the story. In the morning he could call in about the accident, tell Fleming, his city editor, that he would write the story before coming in to the office. Then he could relax for an extra hour over another cup of coffee. Around noon, he’d just waltz into the day room with the completed copy. Simple stuff, he thought, like living life as though it were mapped—fill a white page with black letters, tell the facts. Like watching the world go by from an upstairs window.

  He scribbled what he learned from the sheriff—who the victims were, the approximate time of day, the make of the vehicle. He added a few quick notes from what he could see in the dark and hollow night. He considered walking through the mud and wet grass to where the dead men lay but he knew enough of how men looked when they died violently that he could write that himself. It was a memory that visited him with the regularity of a wound clock.

  The ambulance drivers hauled two filled gurneys to the road, humped and swaddled bodies of the dead. Under those rainwet blankets, they no longer looked like the shapes of men. Covered with gray blankets, they became something else, bags of sand. He would not write that in his story, he thought as he turned to leave.

  The rain, steady and loud, feathered rivulets of water down his windshield as he sat in his automobile. With eyes closed, he pressed hard on the bridge of his nose with the palm of his hand. That was what his life had become—questions and answers. Reporter’s questions that elicited the facts but few of the truths. They were easy to ask. No abstracts, no complications, no immersions. Since his return from the war, he had become an observer of life. That was safe.

  His stories answered the five questions with the dispassion of an atomist, viewing the particles of life with scientific reserve. Never truly opening that Pandora’s Box of “Why?” Never delving deep into the visceral reasons behind beatings and murders or slit throats or rapes or suicides. Oftentimes not even using those words, using instead euphemisms—”Unlawful Familiarity” instead of “Rape” in order not to offend the readers while in the comfort of their Morris chairs. But, he sometimes thought, deep in the night when he turned his jaded eye upon himself, that lack of emotional honesty helped keep him from having to venture back into the sight of the world’s destructions, kept him from venturing into those lightless corners of life. Still, every soulless story left him increasingly more unable to sleep at night, more unable even to breathe—as though a hemp rope were being drawn ever more taut around his chest.

  Sometimes he felt lost in the America he had returned to. An America that valued normalcy and serenity at the expense of ideals and passions. America had even elected a president in Harding who had campaigned on the bland promises of blindness and forgetfulness.

  Joe watched the sheriff carry a shoebox into the rain-washed light of a car. The contents spilled when he pulled open the box and hundreds of pages of unbound paper dropped to the mud to be caught by the rain and turned into mulch. The sheriff tossed the empty box into his car and stooped to pick up a few pages, wet and limp. He looked at them and then he looked toward Joe in his car. He opened his slicker to pocket the pages then turned to the gurneyed men, not yet slid into the ambulance, to rummage through their pockets. Joe started his car, got it turned around, and drove off. In his rearview mirror, he could see the sheriff, backlit and silhouetted, step into the road to again watch him. Joe was not a paranoid man but he did not like the receding look of that attention.

  Joe had not been afraid of the dark as a child when, in those young years, the sable darkness meant adventure and mystery in the hills and arroyos near his family’s ranch near Terceo, Colorado, along the New Mexico border. Since then, however, the mysteries of night had pitched into a hard and fearful darkness. His father had died as a purple twilight deepened into night in what was called an accident. His mother died bedridden in convulsed sorrows ten years later, although her life had ended with her husband’s. Joe had then lost the last of his remaining youth in the trenches of the Great War where even daytime lacked light.

  Joe turned onto Gresham’s driveway and followed inside another set of tire tracks, sliding within their miry ruts. The two-story brick house sat tucked a hundred yards off the road and hidden by a copse. The darkness cast from rain and night and overhanging trees was palpable. Joe felt himself push on the accelerator to drive a little faster until he saw the dirty brick bungalow, weather-beaten and not much larger than the outbuilding Gresham called his garage. The bungalow was dark other than a muted light behind the curtains of the front room window, and Joe thought that Gresham might be reading.

  He pictured his friend sitting under the yellow light of an electric floor lamp with a whiskey in one hand and a book held open by the other, a robe loose around his pajamas and a pipe dying in the ash tray.

  He parked in front of the house and ran up the steps to the porch. Slapping rain from his fedora, he knocked on the front door. No answer. He knocked again. He tried the doorknob and opened the unlocked door.

  “Gresham?” he called.

  No answer except for the drumming of a mantel clock.

  He stepped into the entryway, its floor planks stained dark and wet from others who had stood there earlier in the night and not all that long ago. He called for Gresham again, louder. Again there was no response. A sober pencil of light bored into the darkness of the hallway from the front room.

  Joe smiled. More than once, he had found Gresham slack-mouthed and snoring off a drunk.

  The hallway runner had been pushed aside and left rumpled, not at all like Joe knew Gresham to keep his home. Gresham had kept his corners of the world ordered, his kitchen clean. Joe felt his body tighten and considered leaving the house to retrieve the sheriff. A childish thought. He called up the stairs toward Gresham’s bedroom. No response. He stepped into the lighted front room and found Gresham lying on the sofa, an arm hanging leisurely to the floor and another up over his head. Gresham wore his shirt and tie, still knotted from work, with his suit coat slung over the back of the desk chair. Two blackened circles of blood stained the man’s white shirt.

  He was used to finding Gresham passed-out dead drunk, but this time Gresham was just dead.

  Joe stifled a cough and stood silently for a half-dozen seconds which filled with an increasing roar. He felt a spectator in Gresham’s life just as he had felt following his own wounding during the war when he had felt a spectator to his own life.

  He knew there was no use in it but he checked for breath and the distant beat of the man’s heart. He knelt close to Gresham’s body and listened. The remnants of the rain that had ceased continued to tap a code as it dripped from the roof of the house, knocking against a pail or something else metallic and empty. The mantel clock sounded its steady rhythm before tolling the hour with nine hollow peals. Nothing else.

  He stood on unsteady legs and went to the front door to look through the window into the dark night. Voltaic wires of lightning illuminated gray processionals of rain-laden clouds. He remembered the double set of tire tracks he had driven inside of to get to the house. He thought for a moment to have a look at the tracks but realized that they would have been destroyed by the rain and by his own tires sloughing through the mud.

  Back in the front room, he glanced again at his friend lying on the sofa. Except for the two black holes in the man’s chest, he might have been sleeping. Joe touched the blood. It had stopped flowing and had begun to dry blackened and viscid. He wiped his bloodied fingers on his trousers and touched his friend’s forehead. A trace of warmth remained but that little heat was remnant and draining from the body to join whatever else had already left it.

  He looked around the room. Nothing was terribly disturbed, no tables up-ended or desk drawers spilled, although one had been left open. All of the electric floor lamps had been left upright, two turned off. The light above the sofa where Gresham lay tossed a yellow oval across the room. The cushions of chairs were l
eft untouched. A whiskey glass was on the desk, mostly full with ice remnants drifting in the amber liquid. Another glass of whiskey, nearly emptied, sat on the end table near Gresham’s head. Joe considered numbing himself with the contents of the full tumbler but then thought better of it.

  Also on the end table were a notepad and pen. Gresham was a devoted taker of notes, keeping paper and notepads in pockets and on tables for moments of need or desire as some people keep Bibles. The top page of the pad showed the ghosted indentations of the previous page’s notes, but there were no pencil scribblings.

  A copy of Joyce’s Ulysses, which Gresham had told Joe he was expecting from a friend in France, lay on the table next to the whiskey glass. A brown paper wrapping from a bookstore in Paris lay crumpled on the floor near the cupped fingers of Gresham’s empty hand.

  Not a thing in the room appeared wrong. Except the dead man.

  Joe looked at the novel, remembering that Gresham had mentioned that because of its questionable, even pornographic, nature, the book needed to be delivered by hand and not posted through the mail. A friend of a friend happened to be passing through town with a copy smuggled and well-wrapped.

  Joe walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Nothing but an empty table and uncluttered counters and shelves. One set of unwashed dishes neatly stacked in the sink. The yellowed remains of eggs mixed with toast crumbs on the plate. The pulp from orange juice clung to the sides of a glass.

  Joe went upstairs to the bedrooms there, musty and dark. In an extra room were ordered and random piles of books and wooden boxes and magazines and old furniture with broken legs or fallen-through cane seats. All carried a thin film of dust and cobwebs.

  He scanned the titles. Unlike the downstairs bookcases, which Joe had thumbed across at times while Gresham poured second and third tumblers of drink, the books in the upstairs room were from another age. Those downstairs were decidedly more modern, an uncertain term that Joe had recently been introduced to as the world had become “thoroughly modern,” works by Eliot and Lewis and Tarkington and Dos Passos and Millay. Gresham also kept a number of histories of the war in his study, the compendious volumes by Colliers and the London Times and works by Hayes and Benedict and Vast and others.

  But in that upstairs room, as though castoffs, were older books by older authors from a different century. From what often felt like a completely different world. He looked at the faded spines of Dickens and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Cooper and Hawthorne.

  Down the hall, he paused for a moment outside Gresham’s bedroom, feeling somehow immoral about entering and looking over a dead man’s most personal property. He opened the door and, still holding the doorknob, leaned slowly into the room. He flicked on the light switch. The room unfolded its lack of secrets. A made bed, a pressed shirt and suit lying atop the coverlet, an empty glass on the side table, a worn chair. A place for everything and everything in its place.

  He heard a car come to a stop outside in the muddy driveway, thought of turning off the light but left it on, and descended the stairs in time to greet the opening door. Even though the rain outside had stopped, rainwater dripped from the sheriff’s slicker onto the wood floor of the entry and his breath plumed like that of a sailor in from the tempest.

  Joe opened his mouth to speak, but before he could utter a word, the sheriff said, “Found this in one of the dead frog’s coat pockets.” He reached an opened hand toward Joe. Folded in the man’s palm was a single piece of paper. Joe unfolded the paper. At the top was Gresham’s name, below that the name of the newspaper with its address and telephone, and below that, in different ink but the same script, the address and phone number of Gresham’s home. The ink was black. The script was ornate and masculine, long sweeping letters like the calligraphic penmanship of a monk and not at all like his own quill driving.

  The sheriff took the paper from Joe’s fingers. “Now why would he have this?” he asked slowly. He stared pointedly at Joe and flexed his brows.

  “No idea,” Joe said. He found himself on the answering end of the questions of fact; however, the questions carried an undercurrent of distrust in the sheriff’s tone.

  “You upstairs?” the sheriff asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I see, and where is the owner of the house? Upstairs also?”

  Joe looked toward the front room entry and said, “No.” He paused, his mouth foul and warm. “He’s in the next room. Dead.”

  The sheriff blinked but did not move. His eyebrows tightened further as he studied Joe, then he stepped forward and closed the door behind him. “How long before you were going to tell me this, Joe?”

  “I just did, Sheriff.”

  “I see. Only it took you a good while to get around to this bit of news.”

  “What’re you getting at, Sheriff?” The sheriff had suspicions. Joe didn’t know what they were, but he knew Jackson wasn’t showing his hole card.

  “I’m not getting at nothing, Joe,” Jackson said slowly, his voice thick. “You just happened to mention it like it wasn’t nothin’ too important or it was somethin’ you’d just as soon I didn’t know.”

  Joe shook his head. “Nothing like that.”

  “Maybe not, but right this minute I think I’ll have a see to this dead man.” He stepped past Joe, took two steps toward the front room before turning and speaking to Joe over his shoulder, “You stay right there.”

  “Like you’d let me go,” Joe said.

  The sheriff let it ride and walked on into the front room.

  Joe leaned against the banister and closed his eyes. With the meat of his palms, he pushed against his closed eyes making himself see white flashes like Very flares on the inside of his eyelids. He heard as through cotton wadding. The air in the room smelled sharp and electric.

  He heard dead men and saw dead men. Flayed breathing just before death. Wailed expirations of life. Eyes curled back into their heads and mouths wide, exposing tongues grotesque and huge. A fog of poisoned gas wrapping around the dying body like a winding-sheet until only soft eddies in the chemical fog remained from the body’s last convulsive movements.

  He remembered something Gresham had once said about the dead, that years don’t remove them from place or memory, that hard rains can’t wash them away. Like the stories old men tell of war and of slaughter, the memories of death have no end. They become as part of a man’s being, etched upon his soul. Those memories of dead men remain. As do sometimes the dead men themselves.

  From the front room, Joe heard the sheriff exhale loudly, “He’s dead, all right.”

  “No shit,” Joe whispered just loud enough for himself to hear.

  The sheriff walked back to stand in front of Joe, rubbed his hands vigorously and pushed them deep inside the pockets of his slicker. He looked at Joe and nodded back toward the front room. “Damn, Joe, but dead bodies are beginning to pile up tonight. Only this one’s been murdered.”

  Joe straightened and frowned at the sheriff. In his tunnel vision he saw only his friend’s body lain out in the next room.

  The sheriff continued, speaking in a monotone, “Funny that you should arrive at the other accident scene and now I find you here with a murdered friend. Even funnier that those Frenchies had your friend’s name and address on their person.” He sighed and spoke loudly and specifically to Joe. “If I believed in coincidences, which I definitely do not, I’d think you were just unlucky. But like I said, I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  Joe sighed into his hands. “I can only tell you what I know.”

  “What is it you know, Joe?”

  “Not much,” he said. “I got here just a couple of minutes before you. You see what I saw.”

  “I see. Where’s the telephone in this house,” said the sheriff as he looked around the entry.

  “Front room.” Joe pointed without looking. “On the desk across from the sofa.”

  “You mean across from the sofa on which lies your friend who just happens to be a dead man?�
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  “Yes,” Joe nodded still looking down at the floor. He didn’t like the flow the conversation had taken.

  The sheriff opened the door to call in his deputy and told him to look around the front room. Like an afterthought, he said to Joe, “You seem to know this house pretty good.”

  “He was my friend.”

  “I see. You and him were partners, huh? Good friends?”

  “Yes.” Joe did not feel like elaborating. He wasn’t kidding when he added, “Like brothers,” for they had been brothers in blood spilled on distant fields. Neither he nor Gresham had any remaining family, so their friendship had deepened when each had discovered someone whose experiences were similar enough that they could talk about them to each other. It was a shared bond in a fraternity that few belonged, one forged in the foundry of the Great War.

  The sheriff nodded. He pushed the tobacco wad from right cheek to left, but said nothing. He sighed and walked back to where Gresham was.

  Joe watched the sheriff’s back lit by the electric light in the ceiling and wondered what had taken place. Murder, he knew. The Frenchmen in the accident were probably the murderers. That left a litany of questions. One of which was typeset in capital letters: “WHY?” Following close on that question were how he had the bad luck to find himself embroiled in the mess and then how to convince the sheriff that he had nothing to do either with the Frenchmen’s or with Gresham’s deaths.

  “Damn,” he said, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. He tried remembering the Hail Mary, but could not finish, for he was certain that since the war such prayers were no longer answered. He could hear the sounds of furniture being roughly pushed aside and drawers opened and papers shuffled. The sounds of unwelcome men rifling through the life of a lost soul.

  After his telephone call, the sheriff returned. He said, his voice flat, “Okay, Joe, tell me everything. Take it from the top. The whole night.”

  Joe told the sheriff what little he knew, about the tire tracks in the driveway and about finding the door closed but unlocked. He told the sheriff about missing dinner with Gresham and about driving out to talk with him, about how he thought Gresham had simply decided against driving into town in the rain for their dinner meeting. He told the sheriff about passing the driveway and coming onto the accident.