A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  I quit working about eight o’clock. The sun was going down, and I had a pounding headache from the off-key music and the liquor laughter from next door. I had just slid the ladder into the shed when the combo stopped abruptly, as if somebody had mercifully pulled the plug of the P.A. The sudden absence of missed chords calmed the night like painkillers on a toothache, and I stopped outside the shed to breathe in the quiet.

  The silence didn’t last. A minute later, the two saxophones attacked the first notes of the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The drummer fought to keep in time. And some fool flipped a switch.

  Four spotlights hit the turret with enough mega-wattage to light a microsurgery. The combo screeched louder; people clapped. I froze, caught in the glare, staring into the white light coming from the city hall they’d built with my grandfather’s limestone, on the land they’d stolen from my grandmother. It was supposed to be high drama, the stark illuminating of the symbol of Rivertown’s renaissance. But to me it was assault.

  The bastards didn’t bother to turn off the spotlights after the last of the developers had tipsied away. The slit windows of the turret are narrow, too skinny to admit much sunlight, but that night the interior of the turret was as bright as a bus station waiting room. I couldn’t sleep at all, from the glare and the anger, and spent the night on the roof, in a small patch of shadow cast by the top of the stone wall, staring at the floodlit water of the Willahock. If not now, then soon, the turret would be floodlit all night, every night.

  And sometime, just before dawn, a switch of my own got flipped.

  The next morning I pulled into the parking lot of Mabel’s Mature Fashions. I’d found it in the yellow pages.

  “What are the largest-sized ladies’ undergarments you carry?” I asked the pink-wigged woman in the orange tunic behind the counter. She looked to be sporting the very sizes I was interested in.

  She raised one caked eyebrow.

  “Not for me,” I added quickly. My skin felt hot, and I wanted to giggle. It was probably from the lack of sleep.

  “Fifty-quadruple-D in bras, 6X in panties.” She looked me up and down. “Might be a little large.”

  I ignored it. “Do they come in colors?”

  The other caked eyebrow went up. “White only in those sizes, sir, but they’re all cotton. You could dye them to suit yourself.”

  I turned away to clear my eyes as I fumbled in my wallet for my credit card. This was not funny; this was war. I bought six sets.

  After Mabel’s, I went to a hardware store for clothesline, clothespins, and Rit Dye. Back at the turret, I boiled water on my hotplate, mixed the dye, and became Michelangelo. As a kid, I’d tie-dyed all my T-shirts once, in a quest to become a ten-year-old hippie. That had been decades before, but I hadn’t lost my touch. I transformed the panties and bras, big enough for prizewinning pumpkins, into bright, psychedelic works of what could be called art. I spread them out on my table saw and over the plastic chairs, and when they were dry, I set them on top of my new coil of clothesline.

  They would be the battle flags of my war against city hall.

  The second reception was the same as the first: umbrella tables, colored lights, eighty-proof chatter, and the same two saxophones, sounding like they’d wasted not one minute on practice. As the last of the sun disappeared from the sky, the combo went silent, just as it had during the first reception. Only this time, I was behind the turret, tensed for the first shrieking notes of 2001.

  A minute passed, then another, and then both saxophones bleated into the night air, fighting to approximate the same note.

  The four spotlights hit the turret with white light.

  I started feeding my flags onto the clothesline I’d strung on the property line facing city hall.

  I played them out slowly, letting the bright colors unfurl with their own drama. By the time the second pair of tie-dyed 6X panties—these scarlet, gold, and Kelly green—hit the white light and started flapping in the night breeze, the cocktail chatter next door had dissolved into shrieks of raucous laughter. The band stopped, confused, as the people roared, louder and louder. I fed two bras, the first one magenta and yellow, the second neon green, onto the line. The people clapped and cheered.

  And that brought Elvis.

  He stormed across the lawn, chasing his own shadow made long by the spotlights behind him. He wore a greasy powder blue dinner jacket that had the look of something discarded after a prom.

  “You got a woman living here, Elstrom,” he screamed, his face contorted, his hair wall glistening in the glow of the floodlights. A hundred yards behind him, the well-lubricated contractors and developers shrieked, drunk enough to think this was a skit, done for their amusement.

  “This is not underwear, Elvis,” I announced. “It’s art.” I clipped a bright purple and orange bra that I was particularly proud of onto the line. In the shadows of city hall, the developers hooted and clapped, a hundred happy hands.

  That infuriated him further. “It’s underwear, damn it.” Bits of spittle bubbled at the corners of his mouth. “Get her out here so I can throw both of you out.”

  “There’s no woman, Elvis.” I smiled and bent down to my laundry basket for something pink and yellow.

  “When I catch her, you’re gone.”

  At that point, someone must have cued the combo, because they took off into their approximation of “Fly Me to the Moon,” each saxophone flying in a different key. It made further discussion impossible. I closed my mouth and beamed at Elvis, mellow as a panda on Percodan.

  Across the lawn the people kept clapping, and the drummer began singing about Jupiter and Mars.

  Elvis wasn’t done. He leaned to within an inch of my nose. “What the hell do you want, Elstrom?” he screamed, spraying spittle into my face.

  “Change my zoning to residential or commercial. I’ll sell and leave,” I yelled back, waving at the still-clapping crowd behind the glare of the floodlights.

  “No can do,” he shouted. His lips gave a final twitch, and he stalked off. Someone at last thought to kill the floods, and the developers gave a final burst of applause.

  My stunt was stupid and childish. That night, I slept better than I had since I’d moved into the turret.

  The lizards held two more receptions. They didn’t risk the floodlights again, but the ambient glow from the colored Christmas bulbs was enough to light up my undies, and the effect was mostly the same. Each time I’d start stringing my flags, the crowd would roar, and Elvis would march over, his oily face shining red above the pale blue of his prom jacket.

  “Change my damn zoning, and I’ll leave,” I’d yell.

  “No can do,” he’d scream back.

  And the drummer would sing about Jupiter and Mars.

  That was how July died. Every evening I ran up my flags, to remind the lizards that I was twitching for a fight. But after the fourth reception, no more were scheduled, and that was just as well. My little battles were just diversions, things to keep my mind from circling around what I was really doing, which was holding my breath, waiting for Gateville.

  So I felt a sick kind of relief when, at the steaming beginning of August, I answered the door just after lunch and found Stanley Novak standing outside, clutching another tan envelope. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The sweat on his face said it all.

  I’d been varnishing, and Stanley didn’t look like he could survive the fumes, so I led him down to sit on the bench by the river. I took the new freezer bag out of the envelope and read the note on the child’s paper through the plastic: NEXT TIME SOMEBODY DIES. FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND SUNDAY NIGHT SAME PLACE. The perfect pencil lettering, the computer printing on the envelope, and the Chicago postmark were the same as the first letter’s.

  I looked at Stanley.

  “It came this morning. Mr. Chernek wants it analyzed to make sure it’s the same guy before he pays.”

  “It’s the same, Stanley; you can tell just by looking at it. What I wan
t to know is—”

  He stood up. “Please, Mr. Elstrom, have it analyzed. Then we’ll talk.”

  I didn’t waste the words. He was a blind pawn on the chessboard, like me. I walked him up to his station wagon and told him I’d have it checked right away.

  I drove to Leo’s. Up on the porch, television sounds came through the window screens. I knocked, waited, knocked again. After five minutes, Ma opened the front door against the chain, her head still aimed at the T.V. in the living room. People were grunting. Leo was in L.A., she said, but would be home that evening. I passed the envelope in, and as I did, Mr. Jack Daniel himself came wafting out through the crack in the door. Cocktails had started early. I made a polite grab to retrieve the envelope, but she was already shutting the door. The grunting inside had reached a fevered pitch. I let it go. I could only hope she’d drop the envelope on the hall table as she teetered back to her chair.

  Leo had told me she only drank when he was out of town. As long as he kept his trips to one-nighters, he’d said, he didn’t worry. He even brought her back the disposable plastic hotel cups she buried at the bottom of the kitchen garbage so she could think she’d left no visible evidence of her drinking.

  I called Leo’s cell phone before starting the Jeep and told his voice mail I’d left another note with Ma but that she’d been vaguely disengaged. He’d understand. Hurry home, Leo.

  It was two o’clock. The turret would feel like a cage until Leo looked at the letter and I could press for a meeting with the Bohemian.

  I drove west, meandering, wrestling with the last words on the note: SAME PLACE. Words that meant the Bohemian or the Board already knew where to drop the money, words that meant there had been other communications, letters, maybe even phone calls they hadn’t told me about. Fair enough. I was the document guy, hired to be a cog, not the whole wheel. I didn’t need to know.

  But need and want are two different things.

  I swung over to Thompson Avenue and headed west to Gateville. If I showed up unexpectedly, I might be able to open up Stanley Novak about what had happened in the past.

  From the crest of the hill, Gateville once again looked like paradise: green lawns, big houses, shading oaks, all nestled inside a protecting wall in its own little valley. I drove down the hill.

  A stake truck loaded with plastic flats of flowers was stopped diagonally in front of the wrought-iron gate, blocking the entrance. Its engine was off, but its driver was still behind the wheel. I pulled onto the shoulder across the street and shut off the Jeep’s motor.

  Two masons in white overalls were tuck-pointing the outside wall, troweling small amounts of mortar from wood pallets into the brick joints. It looked to be slow, painstaking work, pushing in the little amounts of mortar and then smoothing the joints with a jointer. One tuck-pointer sang to himself, his lips moving softly.

  Two pale-blue-uniformed guards came out from between the white pillars, waited for a break in the traffic, and crossed the street toward the Jeep. Each wore a gun belt, something the Gateville guards had never done when I’d lived there. The retaining straps of their holsters were unsnapped.

  It was good. The landscaping truck blocking the entrance and the slow-moving tuckpointers were security. The one tuckpointer hadn’t been singing; he’d been speaking into a microphone to alert the guardhouse that a Jeep had stopped across the street.

  I put both hands on top of the steering wheel where they were easily visible. One guard came up to my side window as the other moved to the front of the Jeep.

  “Dek Elstrom, working with Stanley Novak. Would you like to see a driver’s license?”

  The guard nodded.

  I kept my right hand on the wheel and extracted my wallet with my left. I thumbed it open, slid out the license, and passed it out. The guard bent down to compare my face with the photo, then backed away from the Jeep to use his cell phone. After a minute he came back and handed me my license.

  “Mr. Novak said if you need to speak with him, to call him at home.”

  “I just saw him a couple of hours ago. Is he ill?”

  “Not him. His wife.”

  “Nothing serious?”

  The guard shrugged. “Call him at home if you need him.”

  He motioned to his partner, and the two guards walked back across the street. I watched them disappear between the white pillars and thought about another time.

  Nine months before, in the black of the night of Halloween, Stanley Novak had escorted me out from between those same pillars, at the direction of my ex-wife.

  Six

  It hadn’t been an acrimonious split. We’d only been married for a few months, not long enough to build up a big list of hatreds. Instead, our divorce had been a last, loving gesture of Amanda’s, a veering away, before my unraveling of my life caused us to despise each other.

  Driving her to O’Hare on that gray drizzling October day, Amanda told me in a soft voice to take whatever time I needed to move out. She wouldn’t be back from Europe for six weeks. I told her I was going to get my life back together so we could try again. She kissed me good-bye at the international terminal like she believed me.

  I drove back to Gateville, packed what clothes I hadn’t given away in two black plastic garbage bags, and piled them inside the front door. But the next step, the one that had me turning the doorknob, throwing the bags in the Jeep, and driving away, was too big. I mixed a weak whiskey and walked slowly through the empty rooms of her enormous house. I didn’t want to stay; I didn’t want to go. An hour went by, then the afternoon, then the next day. And then the rest of that October passed, as I shuffled from empty room to empty room, pausing only to mix watery whiskeys just strong enough to keep a veil over my thoughts. I microwaved things on occasion, and slept, sometimes on the bed, sometimes on the carpet. But mostly I paced from room to room, a ghost of something I’d been, looking at nothing at all.

  I came to life, sort of, on Halloween. In the middle of the afternoon, I put ice in the sterling silver bucket that was a wedding gift from the mayor of Chicago, filled Amanda’s grandfather’s Baccarat punch bowl with fun-sized Snickers, and set out a fun-sized quart of Jack Daniel’s for myself. I settled in one of Amanda’s antique white Louis XIV reproduction chairs to wait for princesses, goblins, and Harry Potter.

  But nobody came. Not a gremlin, not a goblin, not a Spider-Man or a Superman. At dusk, I levered myself out of the chair, pulled back the brocade drapes, and looked outside. In the glow of the landscaping lights, the smooth emerald lawns were empty, save for a few errant leaves that had had the nerve to fall since the twice-a-week lawn crews had last been by.

  There were no trick-or-treaters, not in Gateville. They must have been hurried inside when I wasn’t looking, home from some organized function where they’d been supervised by nannies, au pairs, and specialists at conducting controlled Halloween parties.

  It was wrong.

  What the hell was Halloween without trick-or-treaters?

  I aimed myself back to the chair, had more whiskey and fun-sized Snickers, and reflected on that. And, at about nine o’clock, I had an inspiration. None of the kids in Gateville knew how to trick-or-treat because they’d been raised too stuck-up-the-ass rich to go out to grub for candy.

  I’d show them. I’d be the Pied Piper of tricks and treats.

  Fueled by the whiskey and, by then, half a cut-glass punch bowl of fun-sized Snickers, I got up and started hunting around the house for a mask. Of course there was no mask, but it did take some time, many overturned drawers, and four torn-apart closets to conclude that. And every time I stepped through the center hall—carefully, one foot in front of the other so as not to spill a drop—Wendell Phelps, who I didn’t suppose would like me one damn, mocked me, unseen but not unfelt, from his place on the other side of the wall.

  After the fourth or fifth such pass, I went into the dining room to confront Wendell Phelps, key Democrat, C.E.O. of Chicago’s largest electric utility, and advisor to senators,
congressmen, and other people like himself. I stared at the portrait. It was life-sized, but just of his head. Amanda had said it was a good likeness. Wendell Phelps was all head.

  The liquor and the sugar had not drained me of all my resources. After staring at the portrait for several moments, I had a second inspiration. I would go trick-or-treating as the great man himself, Wendell Phelps, C.E.O., counselor, knower of everything worth knowing.

  The canvas of his portrait, despite being stiffened by layers of crusted oil paint, was surprisingly flexible. Wielding a sharp razor knife with great care so all could be put back as it was, I excised his face from the portrait, cut out his eyes so I could use my own, poked holes at his ears, and tied on a rubber band—which took some doing, being that deep into the Jack. But, after a time, I had my mask. I filled my glass to the brim, as a soldier does his canteen before a long march, and went out trick-or-treating.

  Stanley’s guys got me before I could pound on the door of the second house. They did not believe I was Wendell Phelps. They took me to the guardhouse and called Stanley at home. He told them to call Amanda, which took a while because she was in Portugal. When they did get through, she was in no position but to approve my eviction, what with nine point eight million dollars’ worth of colored oil hanging on her living room walls and me with a razor knife and the potential for more inspiration. By that time, Stanley had gotten there and eased me into his station wagon, and out I went, flushed gently through the big white pillars of Gateville, with a fading buzz and my clothes in garbage bags following behind in the back of my Jeep, driven by one of the guards.

  I managed to tell him to take me to Rivertown, because it was where I was from, and it was what I was. I slept at the health center the rest of that night, in a Lysol-drenched room that had just been vacated by somebody who had died in his own vomit. The next morning, with a banging head, eyes recoiling from the white of a too-bright November sun, and the certainty that I had, at last, sunk to the bottom of the pond, I moved into the turret.