by Adam Vine
“So, nine?”
“Nine is fine,” Carter said. “Nine is fine.”
***
I went to dig. I hoped Jay wouldn’t want to go downstairs with me, but I couldn’t get rid of him. Popeye sat in the corner where we’d found the dead cat and whined.
“What’s Bumble doing today? You talk to her?” Jay said.
I hung the Piano Man’s Coleman lantern from the basement ceiling. “Texted. She wants to come over later.”
“Oh. Got it.”
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
“Did you guys go surfing this morning?”
“Yup.”
“How’d it go?”
“It was fun, man. Bumble can shred.”
She went surfing with him.
I stepped into the hole and started to dig. The soil was dry and held a comforting, familiar cold. It gripped my feet as I dug, old memories parting with every crunching fall of the shovel’s blade. The image of Bea writhing naked on her bed replayed over and over again in my mind, every detail in perfect color and form, as if she was there, floating like a specter in front of me.
She went surfing. With him.
I felt Jay’s hand on my shoulder. “Drew! Yo! Are you there, man?”
I looked up. The hole was almost up to my waist. My shovel was scraping something hard, which felt like rock.
“Dude, come back to reality. You look like you’re on acid,” Jay said.
“What?”
“Have you heard anything I’ve said for the last ten minutes?”
“Something about acid?”
“Drew. Mayhem. You’ve been digging for an hour. There’s nothing down there.”
But there was. I could feel it.
Popeye yipped.
“One more foot,” I said, and struck hard to break the brittle earth.
Jay rubbed his eyes. “What are we looking for, again? I forgot.”
“Evidence.”
Jay pulled a joint out of his pocket and torched the tip. “I’m going up to the deck to blaze, you madman.” Popeye followed him upstairs.
I tried digging a few other holes, but the soil was too hard to break. Disappointment settled in. What did I think I was going to find?
***
A noise startled me on my way upstairs. It was a moan, echoing from my pocket. I thought the sound was coming from my iPhone – that I’d accidentally left porn open on my web browser, and it had somehow started playing – but as I reached into my pocket, I remembered my phone was in my room.
The coil in my gut wound as I recognized the voices, a man’s and a woman’s, moaning together as they made love.
It was Carter and Natalia.
I felt my erection rising against the inside of my pants.
My fingers brushed the edge of the Polaroid. I slowly drew it out of my pocket. It should have been the picture I’d taken of all my friends together before the Housecleaning last night. But it wasn’t. The picture had changed.
It showed Carter and Natalia having sex in their room. There was soft music playing. Natalia was on top of him, biting her own forearm. They were both naked, covered only by the dim, smoky shadows of the room.
My first thought was how good Natalia looked naked. Her hip bones showed with every thrust, and her belly was flat and defined. Her breasts were too big for her tiny frame, bouncing up and down to the rhythm of their lovemaking, two-toned from the tan lines that divided them. She had deep dimples in the small of her back. She was physically perfect. But I’d always known that.
My next thought was how I would have killed to have Carter’s body, a hulking mass of smooth chestnut skin and muscle. From the sounds Natalia was making, he knew what he was doing.
My boner died, and my face grew hot. I could give it to Natalia as good as he can, I thought. I’d never had sex, but what they were doing looked a lot easier than the hardcore stuff I watched on my computer (or sometimes, my iPad or phone). It looked pleasant, endearing, like the sweetest, best thing in the world. And it was the one thing I couldn’t have. What was so damned special about him?
Trembling, I put the picture back in my pocket.
***
Bea called me an hour later, while I was surfing some involuntary celibacy forums I frequented online.
“Meet me at the library in twenty minutes,” she said.
“What did you find?”
“Not over the phone.”
“What, did you go through a bunch of old newspaper clips or something?”
She snorted, “No, dude. I was using their Internet. Ours is down because Meg tried to hook up to the arcade game cabinet in the living room, and messed it up for the whole house.”
“Did you try unplugging the router and plugging it back in again?” I said.
“Do you think I’m retarded?” Bea said.
“No. Uh, if it’s that bad, why didn’t you just come over here?”
“You said Alfonso was coming over.”
“So what?”
“So, he creeps me out.”
“Why? He’s harmless. The guy can’t even see his own dick.” Neither can I, I thought. Not that it matters.
Bea sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it. Are you coming or not?”
***
The library was a ten-minute bike ride down the hill, on Center Street. It was a cloudless day, but cold, the sun shining a distant pale white through the winter branches. Bea was leaning against a brick pillar outside the library’s front door, wearing her neon green Nike running shoes and big, dark sunglasses.
“Bumble Bond! You look like you’re on a stakeout,” I greeted her.
“I am. You look like shit.” Bea gave me a side-hug. Like nice, friendly friends.
“Haven’t been sleeping,” I said.
“Me either. Let’s get to it.”
We sat down at the library computers. Bea typed an address into the browser and a password screen popped up. She logged in.
“What are we looking at?” I said.
“This is an academic database the history department uses to peer-review research papers. Meg gave me her password. I came here as soon as I got home from surfing this morning. Been here all day. I actually started researching this stuff right after we found the pictures, but nothing really significant showed up until today. Look.”
She opened a black-and-white picture of a huge grass field overlooking the sea. A lonely clapboard shack with a rotten shake roof stood half-crumbling on the crest of the hill. Down below, a few baby fruit trees stood entwined in rows. The stark shadows of redwoods encroached to either side.
“When was this taken?” I said.
“1948.”
“It looks so different. But it’s definitely Sunny Hill.”
My eyes followed the familiar topography, the well-known cleft between the hills where the cobalt slash of the Pacific Ocean peeked through, our backyard orchard seventy years younger, the same stands of redwoods, unchanged.
“What is that?” I pointed to the shack.
“That is the residence and final resting place of Scudds Gurney, PhD, A.K.A. Dr. Midnight, graduate of the University of California at Berkeley class of 1903. He was hired as a physics professor in 1904, and then got himself fired in 1909. After that, he became a famous local street performer on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, famous for his optical illusion shows involving trick mirrors, until 1945. Also, noted town drunk, wife-beater, and Nazi sympathizer. I called my grandpa, who grew up here, to ask about him. He said pretty much everyone in the Japanese community here especially hated this guy, because of his open and vocal support for the Axis Powers.”
“Jesus tractor-fucking Christ.”
“Yup. He was a piece of work.”
“So, Alfonso lied to us,” I said. “He told us the land used to belong to the Church.”
“It did.” Bea clicked through to another photograph, also black-and-white, of two men shaking hands.
I knew r
ight away from the dead-behind-the-eyes way the man on the right stared at the camera, and his silver-capped teeth, that he was Scudds Gurney. The other man was a Catholic priest. Scudds wore a pinstripe suit that reminded me of a clown costume, tall beaver hat and suspenders, included. He had an accordion strapped around his neck. A fellow musician, I thought.
Bea continued, “Gurney bought the land at a church auction for pennies on the dollar.”
“So who was this guy?” I gestured at the picture of Scudds. “And why was he buried under our house in an unmarked grave?”
“Get out your tiny violin, because this one’s a tearjerker,” Bea said.
“Hit me.”
“Gurney bought the land after the first World War. His family was rich, old steel money from back East.” Bea opened two articles in the sidebar of the computer screen. “When Scudds’ parents died, a week after he purchased the land, he found out his inheritance was smaller than he had anticipated, practically nothing. He squandered his last dime buying the hundred acres between High Street and Walnut.”
“So, in other words, Sunny Hill and everything around it.”
“Yep.”
“He had all that land, and no money to build a house?”
“Hammer, meet nail.” Bea replaced the articles in the sidebar with a fresh set. “Gurney was never a successful physicist. He had a PhD from one of the best schools in the country, but his ideas were too far out for his peers to take him seriously. He wanted to use mirrors to find a way to change the flow of time, so he could see far into the future or the past… corny science fiction stuff. Unsurprisingly, he couldn’t get funding, and was shunned by his colleagues. Eventually, everyone just stopped paying attention to him.”
Bea pulled up a new set of photos. The grainy grayscale images all showed Gurney wearing the same disturbed smile, standing next to a device that looked like an old-fashioned film plate camera enclosed by a folding, three-sided mirror.
“He put on magic shows at the Boardwalk to make ends meet, using his patented Dr. Midnight’s Magic Mirrors, which made the viewer think they were seeing themselves a few seconds in the future. Optical illusions, but he made enough money to get by, while slowly saving to build a house. Then the Great Depression hit, and people stopped coming to Santa Cruz for vacation. Suddenly, all old Scudds had to his name was this temporary shack he’d built to live in while he waited to build his real house.”
Bea clicked back to the 1948 picture of Sunny Hill. She pointed to the rotten clapboard walls and wood shake roof of Scudds’ shack, all mildew-eaten and overgrown with grass. “This was taken just before it was torn down. Scudds died in that shack, and developers bought up the land. His life savings was only enough to buy him a few more years of getting drunk and eating beans in the candlelight.”
“And all of this was in that article? Seems like a lot of detail for a newspaper,” I said.
“No, but you’d be surprised how much you can read between the lines of a few fiery opinion pieces and an obituary. He was a hated man.” Bea clicked open both the obit and the formal death notice.
Local magician, mad scientist, and Nazi sympathizer, 63, found dead.
“Why was he hated, because he was a Nazi? Or was there another reason?” I said.
“Not only that. His wife left him the night he died, and the police found her wandering the streets with her jaw nearly torn off, he’d beaten her so bad. She didn’t remember her own name. Sorry, I think I clicked out of that article.”
“So, he drank himself to death?” I said.
“Apparently. They found him three days stiff, with his last will and testament scribbled on the boards of his shack, if you could call it a will. All he'd written was, Bury me here. His wife sold the property to pay off their debts, and you know the rest of the story.”
Bea replaced the picture of Scudds Gurney’s shack with a modern Google Maps image of our house, maybe a year or two old.
I gave Bea a slow golf clap. “Solid detective work, Bumble. Better than Naomi Watts in The Ring. I could never find all this stuff, let alone put the pieces together like this.”
“I refuse to watch The Ring,” Bea said.
“Why? It’s one of the scariest movies of all time.”
“Exactly.”
I took a moment to soak in everything Bea had said. “But, wait… even if this Scudds Gurney character wanted to be buried in his shack, that doesn’t explain why he actually was. Just dig a few feet down, throw the guy’s body in the dirt, and leave him there to rot? Maybe in the 1700s, but in 1948, there were laws against that kind of thing. And the developers… wouldn’t they have found him while they were laying the foundations for the house?”
Bea shrugged. “I dunno, dude. I don’t think it’s that far-fetched that that they dumped this guy in a hole and called it a day. People hated him. And I mean hated. He was still preaching the virtues of Hitler on the corner of Pacific Avenue two years after the war ended.”
“I guess I’m still not fully there yet,” I said. I just watched my roommates bang through a magic Polaroid picture, but this is too far-fetched? I wondered.
Bea broke through my self-interrogation. “Suppose you’re the officer who responds to the call about a funky smell coming from…”
She was interrupted as a woman materialized out of the bookshelves next to us, approached the computers, and said, “Any of you have a cigarette?”
The woman looked homeless. She had naturally dreadlocked, dishwater-gray hair, was missing teeth, and her clothes were coming apart at the seams. I’d seen her around downtown before. People at our university had nicknamed her Chomper. She was always bothering people and making scenes to get attention.
“No, sorry,” Bea said.
I added, “We don’t smoke.”
“Please? I really need a cigarette,” the homeless woman said. When she spoke, her words slithered through her missing teeth like she only half-believed them.
“You can’t smoke in here,” Bea said. “Ask someone outside.”
The homeless woman shambled off, muttering, “Bullshit. Bullshit. Lying bitch. You little bitch.”
Bea stared at the homeless woman’s back. “Take a bath while you’re at it,” Bea said under her breath. She looked at me and shook her head, her lips a thick, clenched line.
I shrugged. “Thought experiment,” I reminded her.
“Oh. Right. Sorry. That rattled me a little.”
“I can tell. Don’t worry about it. She’s just a crazy bag lady.”
Bea took a deep breath and started over. “Let’s say you’re the cop that rolls up to Sunny Hill when the neighbors complain about the smell, and you find the town villain, Scudds Gurney, dead in his own vomit.”
“Continue.”
“You inform his wife, who was very recently almost beaten to death by this same man. The cause of death is obvious, at least for a cop in 1948. The body is surrounded by empty bottles, the place reeks like moonshine, and his last wish is scribbled on the wall.”
I adjusted my glasses. “I’m still with you.”
“So, what would you do if you were that cop? Waste the city’s money on an autopsy and a taxpayer-funded spot in the local potter’s field, when he left a specific written request to be buried on his own land? I mean, what’s an hour or two of manual labor versus days, and mountains of paperwork?”
As much as I loved her, Bea could be a real dumbass sometimes. “I said I buy it. But what’s a potter’s field?”
“Oh, sorry.” Bea rubbed her eyes. “I’ve been reading these old articles so long I’m starting to sound like them. These days, we would call it a common grave. It’s a plot of public land, usually part of the cemetery, reserved for the dead whose families can’t afford to buy plots, or those who have no families: orphans, the homeless, prostitutes, drifters...”
“Is that what you and your roommates found under the co-op?”
“We think so. The story is the co-op was built on top of a cemetery. I neve
r thought about it much before today, but now, I definitely think it’s true.”
“Alfonso said that was just an urban legend,” I said.
Bea made a cruel face and snarled. “Alfonso thinks the people at the Lighthouse actually like him.” Lighthouse Bistro was the restaurant where Bea worked as a waitress, an upscale place down by the waterfront. She once told me that the cooks kept a tiny picture of Alfonso’s head taped above the fry station, labeled with the nickname Baby Nuts.
“What does this tomb under the co-op look like?” I said.
Bea’s gaze floated into the stacks, following the path the homeless woman had taken as she rambled off. “It’s a big concrete wall at the end of the crawlspace underneath the house. It looks like a box, with three of the sides buried, like someone dug up a corner, and left the rest alone. Didn’t I show it to you yesterday?”
“Nope.”
“Huh.” Bea scratched her head. “Oh wait. Never mind. That was Jay.”
***
The homeless woman accosted Bea and me again while we were walking downtown to get coffee after leaving the library. She saw us from a good twenty feet away and hissed, then let loose a foul string, pointing at Bea. “You don’t have to feel bad to feel good. Dirty little animals! Men are all animals! His fat ass should be locked in a cage! He’s the one who’s going to rape you anally. You little whore. You little bitch!”
“Leave us the fuck alone,” Bea said over her shoulder, walking faster. I quickened my pace to keep up. The bag lady didn’t follow.
Snapshots #23a and 23b
Captions: Jay Trims the Trees
(first photo)
The Fat of the Land
(second photo)
Here are two of my favorites, from the first time Jay came to visit me at Sunny Hill, right after I moved in at the beginning of junior year.
Jay and Rob drove down to Santa Cruz from our hometown of Little Hills. None of my other roommates except Sam had moved in yet. Sam is a good-looking, clean-cut gay guy with a square personality, from a wealthy part of L.A. He’s a lot smarter than Jay or Rob, a bio major, but we all managed to get along. Bea and the co-op girls weren’t in town yet, either, so it was just us, the Little Hills boys, Sam, and a keg of beer Rob stole from Black Dog Brewery, where he worked. We drank and smoked weed on the sun deck through a red evening deep into the night, listening to speed metal and playing beer pong. Everyone else I hit up said they weren’t in town yet, or were too tired from moving into their new places to come over and drink.