“See, it was always about the hardware,” Jerome says.
“Last time I had the jack out, I think I threw the tire iron back by the dented tin that once had three types of popcorn in it.”
“But your tire iron wasn’t ‘by’ the dented popcorn tin,” Jerome says. “It was inside it.”
He jumps up out of his squat faster than I would have expected, a flurry of knee-bones and dirty elbows, and while he’s raising up the piece of steel that he’d had hidden there in the mud I wonder which specific intervals he used to sneak over to my trunk, root out the popcorn tin, take out my tire iron, and bury it while I temporarily had my eyes off him, doing my own sneaking behind the machinery making sure I didn’t snag a toe and go headlong. I think about how clever this son of a bitch has been, making his moves while I was making mine, then slipping back into his role changing the tires as if he’d never altered that numb and sluggish prisoner’s march.
His eyes are wide open bursts, lips curled back in a scream, and he brings down his weapon like the Hammer of God. I hear it hiss through the wet air.
And all I feel is the nothingness.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Jerome Anthony Franklin struck Jonathan Martin Delaware Deseronto square between the eyes and buried the flat edge of the tire iron three and a half inches into his skull. The sound was thick and meaty like a hatchet head sunk in wet timber, and the monster’s arms flapped spasmodically, his big feet backpedaling. He was dead before he splashed down into the mud.
Deseronto looked at himself lying there on his back, hair plastered and straggled down one side of his face, forehead stoven down to a bloody groove, both of his sightless eyes crossed in at skewed angles. Standing over him, Jerome Anthony Franklin was hunched over, breathing heavily, face dead set in that he believed he had done the right thing.
And like fumes of exhaust, Deseronto got a whiff of the future, probably some after-effect left by the ghostlike presence of Marissa Madison still lingering in the air space. He saw Jerome Anthony Franklin in a midnight-blue Amosu designer suit defending himself in a court of law, not only against charges for the bludgeoning but also an aiding-and-abetting scenario, as if the two had been a team all along like the Maryland snipers. Deseronto saw television cameras, newspaper clippings, and Internet postings claiming that the young man’s defense was, in fact, the most powerful judicial presentation ever given on American soil by someone without a law degree, and his brilliant closing broke viewing records on YouTube. The verdict was innocent on all charges, and Jerome Anthony Franklin was named “Philadelphia’s Favorite Son,” referred to as “The Man Who Got Deseronto” and offered full scholarships to Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and Harvard.
The image of Jerome’s future was fading, but Deseronto was granted a final look, a “montage sequence” showing the young man slightly older, running for office, marketing himself as a self-made American man and promoting a platform supporting the underprivileged, the forgotten, the underdog, and the plea that the greatest American ideal was founded upon the principle that we all deserved second chances, that our country loved those who got back on their feet after failure, brushed themselves off, took the hard road through personal industry, and finally made something of themselves. His campaign was launched with television ads featuring inner-city children achieving great things in scholarship, civic activities, music, and sport, and each was backgrounded by his old hit, “You Made Me a Memory.”
The future vision finally winked out when there was a scene portraying a forty-something Jerome Anthony Franklin, as governor, unveiling a street sign replacing the one at the corner of West Chester Pike and New Ardmore Avenue in Broomall. It said “Madison Lane.”
Jonathan Martin Delaware Deseronto turned and left his dead body lying there in disgrace.
There was someone calling for him back at the motel.
It was his mother, up in room 457.
AFTERLIFE
I ’m standing by my mother’s death bed in room 457. The walls are striped green and maroon and there’s a Bible on the end I table. There’s a TV, a sitting chair, a mirror, and a bathroom off to the left.
Mama’s lying there making bony shapes under the sheets and she has the breathing mask on, partially askew with the funnel out so she can whisper to me in tones of the dead. I’m standing there and I hang my head, letting my spirit-hair dangle in front of my face.
“I tried to warn ya,” she says, voice holding on to that last bit of strength, “but in the end I don’t think it would have made any difference.”
She coughs, and I look up through my hair a little. Her slight frame convulses, and her knees come up in points. She gets it together and turns back to me slowly, one red eye staring dully through the black buckled strap bands.
“You killed the wrong bitch, Johnny,” she says. “She’s big up in here.”
“What you talking about?” I say.
“You always was slow. Listen. There ain’t no heaven or hell for us, Johnny. There’s just here. This place. Where I get to watch you pay your debt and do what you were born to do. I helped create you, and now I’m the asshole strapped to the chair digging your gospel.”
“I still don’t see what you mean,” I say.
“Then shut up and pay attention. You’re a sociopath, Johnny. An emotionless beast who doesn’t understand where feelings come from. You’re a cold receptacle. And now that you’re dead you can start.”
“Start what?”
“Your job, Johnny. You’re a swallower now. You’re here to greet the dead one by one, and swallow down their two most profound memories, their very best and their very worst. Once you live through the scenarios you’ll take ’em for keeps, that is if your patrons decide to sacrifice their moment of glory to be relieved of their misery. That cop you killed, his name was Billy McNichol. His best memory was the day he made the force, throwing his hat in the air at the war memorial with the rest of them and seeing his old Pop there in the bleachers dabbing the corner of his eye with a hankie. His worst memory was watching a YouTube video, one minute and thirty-three seconds of it in the situation room with three other officers, a detective, and a representative from the DA’s office, all of them studying the bumpy and shaky footage there in the lacrosse equipment room at the high school with gray lockers in the background, a weight bench, and a wall poster that preached exercise as a way to conquer obesity. The three assailants had their sweatshirt hoods pulled drawstring tight over their heads, scrunching their faces into alien ovals they thought would be harder to identify, and they’d formed a rough triangle with Billy’s sixteen-year-old son Steven as the pinball, shoved repeatedly between them, head snapping back over and again with the force of their punches, later to go comatose in the hospital and pass quietly, all because Billy had told him the day before to stand up to the tall one named Conner Wexman, stand up to him good and don’t come back into this house until you’ve learned to be more of a man out there.”
My cheek twitches.
“And then there’s the girls, I suppose.”
Mama caws like a crow and then she’s coughing again. After a sluggish recovery, she moves the mouthpiece farther up her cheek with frail, shaking fingers.
“Yeah, there’s the girls,” she says. “Ain’t difficult math, Johnny. Don’t take a genius to figure that you’d be obligated out of the gate to swallow the best and worst experiences of your victims—Becky Lockhart, Sarah-Jean Kennedy, Veronica Kimbel, Meghan McGillicutty, Rennatta Rogers, yadda-yadda, that is if they opt for the trade-off. Even though there are a few souls out here that prefer to take all their baggage with them into the beyond, there are far more that would rather be free of it.”
I squint down like a Chinaman.
“Good amount? More? You mean . . .”
Mama licks her dry lips.
“You’re gonna be a busy boy up in here, Johnny. This here is the junction point. Like a toll booth. And you’re the operator behind the glass.”
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br /> “How many altogether?” I say.
She looks at me with that blurry red eye and says,
“Go to the window and see.”
I move across the room and pull over the thick cloth curtain, and it smells of dust making me know that even in death my senses are primed and ready for bear.
Outside it’s still dark, but not so dark I can’t see. I’m looking at the embankment I drove my Toyota down, but from a different angle. And it’s flooded with people, standing and staring up at my window, and all of them are wearing what they died in. It’s an ocean of people standing and waiting on the hill, and while the front of the line snakes around the corner of the motel out of sight toward the entrance, there’s a back side of that line going up and beyond the embankment as far as the eye can see, all along the lip of the Exit 6 ramp and leading off toward the highway.
“It’s infinity, Johnny,” my mama says.
And then there’s a knock at the door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Aronovitz is the acclaimed author of two short story collections, Seven Deadly Pleasures and The Voices in Our Heads, and a novel, Alice Walks.
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