The Voices in Our Heads

by Michael Aronovitz

  Not that the last week had been your average walk in the park; on the contrary, at first he couldn’t believe some of the dirt he’d uncovered. Kate Robinson, a middle school history teacher, fucked her first cousin on a camping trip when she was fourteen. Deborah Henninger, a reading specialist at Newman High, fantasized about sucking burning hot chocolate syrup off her bitchy new female assistant’s ripe little nipples, Brenda Fagaro recently got power of attorney over her stepfather’s estate and planned to siphon it off at a clip of a thousand five hundred or so per week, and Donna Rowand once hit a homeless woman with her car, then left the scene at forty miles per hour over the speed limit. True, it was all still naughty enough, but he somehow wanted more, something else, something better.

  Oh, he wasn’t abandoning ship in any way, shape, or form, Christ no. Just because he’d grown a bit . . . expectant . . . didn’t mean that he had outgrown the basic need to explore. It was this weekend jazz that really made it the pits, this open stretch of seemingly endless nothingness, this jail sentence with no one available to spy on, no subjects in perfect little rows, none of that addictive pull down in the lap that he’d come to enjoy more than drinking Champagne, or smoking cigars, or eating roast duck, or touching himself in the shower.

  By the time the weekend was over, McFinn had lost six more pounds. He’d never made it to the dry cleaner and had actually re-worn his Wednesday, after smelling it under the pits and giving it a spritz with his Burberry Brit. Mirror. He didn’t look good. There were sallow bags under his eyes and his neck was reddened with razor-rash. Didn’t care, not really. He was demonstrating at Dudley Charter, ghetto school, rough and ready staff who couldn’t get better placements. He’d fit right in, down-to-earth, one of the boys who looked like he was out late drinking last night. He had to be sure to make some comment about how much he enjoyed the collapse of Eli Manning and the Giants. He was an implant here, a newbie Eagles fan, and it never hurt to reassure your brethren of your loyalties, especially when you pronounced chocolate chauwwclit, making it clear you’d been born and raised in a neighborhood closer to the Statue of Liberty than Big Ben.

  When he got to Dudley, he was welcomed by three teachers who wanted to sign up right away for plans requiring the most contributions possible. Real go-getters. He spent the first half-hour in the lounge, presenting forms in triplicate and getting signatures. By the time he got to his first presentation (in a science lab space, no, he didn’t need a projector thank you very much) it was 10:45 and his hands were shaking, or damned close to it. He finally didn’t care how many clients he bagged, how many high-risk/high-fee plans he shuckstered, hell, he didn’t even care if his presentation was all that spectacular. He just wanted to exercise his secret power, reveal that window of opportunity, peek into the thin crack the door made with its frame, through the tiny keyhole exposing the inner core of some stranger with the promise that the vision could possibly surpass status quo.

  He went into his pitch, sitting on a stool this time, parked behind one of those black tables with the goose faucets, experiment sinks, and coned, ribbed silver spigots that shot gas if properly loaded.

  The screen came up blue, then flooded with cartoon silhouettes. The pull in his lap was outstanding.

  For a change, he didn’t go for the hottest number in the room, a thirty-something blonde with the Cleopatra cut, Nordic features, and those red librarian glasses, smart skirt, pretty knees, sitting over in the back by the windows. She could wait, hell, he wanted something new, right? Instead, for pure shits and giggles, almost to spite himself, he clicked on the plainest female in the room, bottom screen right, kind of peacock looking with watery eyes, dour lips, no tits to speak of. Her hair was actually thinning on top enough to show crown, and she had those cliché reading glasses hanging around her neck on a chain. She was wearing a masculine crew neck sweater, tan corduroys, and shoes with soft soles. What kinds of sick fantasies did this type of broad have, anyway? Probably the heavy duty stuff: leather leashes, whips, maybe some cutting tools.

  Her screensaver didn’t disappoint; in fact, it chilled him right to the bone. Dottie Rutherford was her name, and she was kneeling at the edge of a grave. Clearly, the dirt had just been shoveled in, because it mounded slightly at the top, and Dottie’s arms were sunk into it, right up to the elbows. And she was straining, neck cords pronounced, teeth clenched in a horrible grin, eyes bulging wide in their sockets. Seemed something in the dirt had caught hold and was pulling her in by the wrists.

  McFinn glanced up. He was talking about the pros and cons of borrowing from a particular tax shelter, and Dottie Rutherford was taking notes. She seemed to feel his eyes on hers and she looked up. A faint smile, warmed her whole face actually. McFinn looked back at the screen. Was this symbolic or something? Was she about to die unexpectedly? Tarnish the name of a dead relative? Go into the funeral business?

  He hit the tab “Biggest Secret.”

  What he got was the biggest thrill of his life.

  It was once a gravel lot area of sorts, now a rocky clearing with dead weeds poking through, high weeds that turned under the fender as McFinn coasted in with his headlights shut off. The woods were thick all around this place. There was a waist-high stone wall sloped along the west ridge, and a black wrought-iron border gate at the rear; vines and ivy curled and twisted through the bars as precursor to the advance of the forest, promising to overrun and erase this forgotten blemish in a slow march of elm and birch and scrub brush and bramble. Most of the headstones were gone. There were a few left, most at the perimeter poked at odd, dark angles, but McFinn didn’t plan on hunching over each, rubbing off the grit, and squinting there in the dark. He had much more sophisticated machinery when it came to the search and discover phase.

  He shut off the engine, took his computer and flipped up the cover. Didn’t even have to hit Ctrl/Alt/Delete; the light blue background came right up and he got that immediate pull in the lap, images coming up in neat, perfect rows, all cartoon silhouettes, all skulls.

  No names, of course. Wasn’t going to be easy. McFinn snickered. It was nothing more than the “Gazinta” method, “Goes-in-to” for all you humanities graduates, ha-ha. He picked a skeleton head third row, one from the left, and got a screensaver still-shotting Enoch Shlessinger, wide necktie looped in a loose knot and fashioned with a stick pin, black frock coat, and a stovepipe hat. The guy had huge wire-brush eyebrows, a gray beard, and eyes wide as moons as he was caught in freeze-frame trying to calm his neighbor’s bucking stallion as he attempted to steal him from a dark stable. Reginald Buckingham, dark tailcoat, white bowtie, winged collar, and riding boots, sat uncomfortably in a coach, seat too low, knees sticking up, nervously fingering his handlebar moustache with one hand and holding a cross in the other, on his way to his wife’s sister’s place up in Caln Township to finally act on an affair that had been brewing for years, and Belinda Mulligan was framed in an action shot, midstep in her light blue morning dress, high-necked, long-sleeved, front hair parted down center, tight little ringlets over the ears, wide-brimmed mob cap, pelisses overcoat flailing behind her as she ran away from a house fire she started by pushing her mother-in-law into the walk-in hearth area they’d not had a chance to retrofit with that newer Rumford design.

  It was all quite tempting, especially with these screensaver explanations that had been added below the still-shots, bonus of the dead or something, and McFinn almost tabbed into Tabitha Renninger’s “Darkest Sexual Secret” download option, especially since she was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen, posing under an apple tree in a riding habit and jacket, top hat with a see-through veil revealing perfect lines, porcelain skin, angelic features. Better than anything on Jersey Shore or Girls Gone Wild, that was for sure.

  He tabbed back out to the main screen. This was business.

  After seven tries, he found her, fourth row, fifth plot in from the left. Dottie Rutherford’s great-great-grandmother, Betsy Taylor. She was a “handsome woman” if McFinn had e
ver seen one, Coke-bottle glasses, big misshapen nose, gray hair put up in some sort of haughty weave, gaudy pearl necklace, day dress with wide pagoda sleeves, high neckline. Looked like she wanted to slap your knuckles with a ruler and read you verses from the Bible.

  “Hi, beautiful,” McFinn said. He smiled at her and closed the laptop. Then he wrenched open the door and walked out into the cold night, to the rear of the car, to the trunk.

  To get his shovel.

  It was way harder than he had expected it would be, the ground, the work. He knew he didn’t have to go the full six feet, as the coffin lid would meet him at around the four-foot mark, but he hadn’t accounted for the toughness and heaviness of the frozen soil, let alone the rocks that his spade point clanked against here and there, sparking, sending cold shock waves up through his palms and elbows. It took him at least forty-five minutes to scrape and shovel off a rectangle six inches or so down to act as a working template, and another two to get a couple of feet dug out all the way. He was out of the shallow recess now, leaning on his shovel, panting, sweating, staring dumbly at his work boots—these old paint-splattered things he hadn’t worn for a few years now, dull and dirty and somehow a finality of sorts in the pale light of the moon peeking over the tree line opposite the gravel lot and the running creek you could hear in the background. He had accumulated three rough piles of dirt, one down by the foot and two longer ones on either side, the one nearest his car the higher of the two, since he’d favored his back to the entrance road, tossing up and over across his weaker side to the left.

  He wiped his cheek with his forearm, and the wind kicked up.

  You only need fear what the wind may blow near.

  Yeah, fuck that noise. The wind wasn’t blowing anything around out here that McFinn could see as a threat, and besides, the initial command was that he should risk temptation. Higher up on the hierarchy, right?

  And the risk was to be well worth it.

  Turned out that Dottie Rutherford wasn’t being pulled into the freshly turned grave-dirt as the image suggested on her screensaver. Oh no, she was pushing her arms in voluntarily, straining, burrowing with everything she had. Her biggest secret was all about the letter she’d found in her attic last month, the letter that never got sent by her great-great-grandmother Betsy Taylor to her sister Ruth Marie, the letter that talked about her husband Benjamin F. Taylor, Southern gentleman and chief coiner for Jefferson Davis, the elected president of the seceded territory that marked the boundaries of the Civil War. Turns out that in April of 1861, a Confederate half-dollar design was approved, the obverse made from the same liberty-seated federal die, the reverse featuring a new Confederate coat-of-arms surrounded by cotton and sugar cane. Supposedly, only four coins were struck before the bullion supply was deemed exhausted, but according to Betsy’s letter, this just wasn’t so. She claimed that her husband Benjamin stamped, pressed, and hid away seventeen thousand of them. Claimed the location was named on a piece of parchment folded up and stowed away in a locket, one that had been passed down from her great-aunt to her mother to her, the one she was to be wearing around her neck when she was buried up north, up here, where she’d started and made a new life.

  Turned out pulling the right strings to get her exhumed wasn’t so damned easy . . . hence the strain on Dottie’s face on the screensaver. Turned out that getting a disinterment order from the probate court was a real chore, especially when it wasn’t her name on the death certificate and burial permit. The red tape was balled up, wound tight, and twisted, and you didn’t have to be a financial wizard to figure out what a fortune those coins would amount to in the current marketplace.

  McFinn lowered himself into the hole. His back was aching, his roly-poly gut hanging far over the belt line of his jeans. He settled the point of the shovel, stepped on the back edge, and pushed, the gritty sound of it coming to his ears like an accusation. It had gone too far. Turn away now.

  He shoveled harder, his nose running, the snot falling off in threads. There was no turning back at this point, no giving in, no sudden apprehensions about old skeletons lying in boxes, no fear of the wind. Those coins were going to make it so McFinn wouldn’t have to work another day in his goddamned, ever-loving, motherfucking life. Easy Street. Heaven.

  Time passed, blurred, he was on a numbing sort of overdrive, and finally his shovel hit something soft, something different. He stopped short, breath raw, blisters running.

  He’d broken wood: that sound had splinters in it. He estimated he was up at the head, considering the pattern of the perimeter stones out there and the few that had happened to be left standing to the right, yielding a rough yet telling perspective. He knew he’d been accurate in terms of width spacing, but north to south was a crap-shoot give or take a foot or so. He was deep enough in here to be blocked by a shadow that came in about waist level on a slant. His cut was also not perfectly square, not nearly so in fact, since he’d gradually punked out on the way down, not intentionally of course, but there was a coning effect, as if he were at the bottom of a martini glass. He poked his shovel a couple of times and got that dull, flat, knocking sound, poked a bit harder and got more splintering. He touched it farther back and found an edge. He could see a bit when he squinted really hard, but it was still really black and grainy and unsure. He was on his knees now, moving the ancient backfill at the edges with his hands, his breath close and harsh in this dense space. The edge at the back end there made a shape, a straight horizontal line about two feet long with corners that came off at slightly widening angles. He scooped down as far as he could go and pulled the dirt back around and behind his knees, like paddling a canoe with both hands, then backing up a pace, before the dirt sloped up behind him and blocked him at the heels. The widening angle of the wood had just stopped widening, he could feel the points on both sides where they started thinning the other way, toward center. He reached forward and touched the top edge again. Damned straight. Those points by his knees were where her elbows were. He’d gotten to the top end and broken the wood right over her face.

  He got spooked for a second. He was nose to nose with a corpse in the dark.

  Flashlight. Trunk maybe. Shine it down, grit your teeth, grab the locket. Simple. Quick. Like a Band-Aid.

  He pawed out of the hole—more of a trick than he’d expected with the slope he’d made—and limped back to the car. Hadn’t realized he had a cramp in his leg until just now. He dug for his keys and cursed himself for wearing old jeans that were so freakin’ tight on him, but he wasn’t a jeans guy anymore, and these were the best he’d had lying around for this kind of work.

  The trunk was a ragtag mess and the light wasn’t working. There were vague outlines, an old blanket, a hubcap box, the leather pouch for his jack tools, an old plastic portable file with ancient teaching shit in it. He started reaching and shoving, and his father’s voice came into his head, out back in the utility room when he’d insisted young Jimmy help him fix that goddamned electric garage door opener that had gone on the fritz again:

  “Get the screwdriver, son, no, not the Phillips, the flathead, NO, don’t shove shit around, for Christ’s sake, open your eyes and LOOK!”

  “Fuck you,” McFinn said out loud. He’d meant “Fuck it,” but what was the difference at this point? Maybe he had reached the “Stage of Schematic Aggression” or something. That gave him a short laugh, and then he said it correctly.

  “Fuck this.” He slammed the trunk. Opened the driver’s side door. Got out his computer. Now there was a light source for you.

  He walked to the edge of the open grave and patted an area with his palm, rubbed it clean, picked up a rock or two, and flicked them off into the darkness. He set the laptop down between dirt piles. Lowered himself in with a grunt and dug toe-holds into the slope of dirt. He checked his angle, then reached, slid open the slide-lock, and pushed up the cover of the laptop.

  He turned a look over his shoulder into the pit and got a quick flash in stark blacks and whites of
the rough cyclone shape he’d carved into the earth, the head of the casket he’d cleared at the base, the cover busted in three cracks following the grain line, slits right over the face of Betsy Taylor, a skull eyesocket and the bottom edge of a smiling jaw peeking through as if to offer a coy wink through closely set prison bars, and then McFinn’s arms flew up over his head.

  Falling and falling hard. He jerked his glance back forward and up, and the stars in the sky tilted, and he was being pulled, yanked at the waist, hard as all shit, and he thought,

  Tilt-a-Whirl.

  He crashed ass first into the top of the coffin and heard it splinter and crunch inward. His head knocked back and hit the dirt behind him, stunning him, but just for a second.

  He shook it off and looked at his legs splayed out before him, knees up toward his nose like that old comedy sketch where the stooge got dumped in a fifty-gallon drum, butt first, legs over the lip, and he couldn’t free himself. He pushed up and out against the edges of the coffin, strained with it. Nothing—the pull was too strong. He tried to dig his hand under him to get to the Blackberry in his back pocket, but his fat ass hadn’t left much breathing space between himself and the old wood. He was sweating, working his right hand, shoving with everything he had, and he took the skin right off his knuckles, and screamed with it, and shoved his hand under, thinking suddenly that Betsy Taylor was right under him, and then cursing because the pocket band was far too tight to get his fingers in and he had no angle whatsoever.