“Sorry,” I said.
She smiled. “That’s all right. I hear worse in court. From my own clients sometimes.”
We seated ourselves at the table and started on the salad. She ate some of it, but nothing was said about its excellence. Personally, I thought the croutons and bacon bits were very fresh. She bragged on the spaghetti, meatballs, and sauce. Leonard, a regular reader of Bon Appetit, bragged on her choice of wine. To me, all wine tastes pretty much the same. Bad. But I said I thought it was pretty good, too.
After dinner, we watched the movies. Jaws first. The TV was a little-screen affair Leonard had bought at a pawn shop, but the movie, cropped at the corners, scared the shit out of me anyway. I’ve never liked water, and I like sharks even less. Florida sat in the middle of the couch, and during the scary parts she didn’t leap into my lap for protection or grab my hand. I thought it would be most unbecoming of me to leap into hers, though I found myself pulling my feet up onto the couch, in case any floor sharks drifted by.
Between the movies we took a coffee break, and Florida took off her shoes, then we watched Gunga Din. I loved it again. About midnight the movies were over and we talked about them for a while, then Leonard went out on the porch to smoke his pipe.
I stood up from the couch and found I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know what to do with my mouth either. Should I say “Good night?” How about “What about them Mets?”
Florida didn’t help. She kept her seat and smiled up at me. She said, “I’m sleepy.”
“Yeah, well, it is late. You need me to drive you home? You can get your car tomorrow.”
“I’m not that sleepy. I would like to stay here, though.”
“’Cause you’re tired?”
She smiled at me again. This was the sort of smile you reserve for the feeble-minded. “You want it spelled out?”
“That would help,” I said. “I think I know what you’re saying, but if I’m wrong, boy, am I going to be embarrassed.”
“You’re not wrong. Let’s go to bed. Together.”
“One minute.”
“One minute?”
I went out on the porch. Leonard was sitting on the glider. The smell of his cherry tobacco drifted back to me.
He said, “Well, what’s the score?”
“Can I use the bed tonight?”
“Yeah, but you do the laundry tomorrow. I don’t want the wet spot.”
“Right.”
Back inside I tried not to look too much like I was waiting for dessert. “Well, you ready?”
She laughed at me. It was a nice sound. Like bells tinkling. “Where’s the bathroom?”
I showed it to her. Before she went inside, she said, “Go out and look in my car and bring my overnight bag, will you? Keys are in my purse.”
I got the keys out of her purse, went out and got the bag. She knew she was going to stay all along. I began to feel a little taller. When I walked past Leonard, he said, “I hope you still remember what to do.”
“It’ll come to me,” I said, and went inside.
The overhead fan moved moon shadows and stirred the hot air. The shadows fluttered over me and the sweat on my chest dried slowly and comfortably.
I was lying on my back, naked. Florida lay beside me, on her stomach, sleeping. I had my hand resting on one of her smooth, dark buttocks. I couldn’t resist playing my fingers over her flesh. I replayed what we had done time and again in my head. It was a good picture show no matter how many times I rewound it. I liked it better than Jaws or Gunga Din.
The bedroom window was up, and from where I lay, my head propped on a pillow, I could see out clearly. Across the way there was some laughter and some lights and shadows moved between the windows and the laughter moved with them.
I rolled on my side and put my arm across Florida’s back and kissed her ear. She smelled of sweat and sex and perfume. She moved and made a noise I liked. I ran my hand down the small of her back, over her buttocks, down one of her legs, letting my hand hydroplane over the beads of sweat. She spread her legs and I ran my hand between them. She was soft there and moist, and she moved like she thought she might do some business, but then she went still again and started snoring like a lumberjack.
That was all right. After all we’d done, my ambition might be bigger and better than the tool I needed for the job. And I was thirsty.
I rolled away from her, eased out of bed, and untangled the sheet from my ankles. I stretched, got the sheet off the floor, shook it out silently and tossed it over Florida, taking a good look at her before I did.
I found her panties on the floor, along with the little nightie she had worn so briefly. I folded them and put them at the foot of the bed, went to the window and took hold of the bars and looked out. Still busy over there.
The sound of the wind in the bottle tree came to me, like the faraway hooting of ghostly owls. I listened to the bottles and thought about going to get a drink, then, behind the sound of the bottle tree, I heard a scraping noise. It was coming from the next room.
I found my jockey shorts and slipped them on, then my jeans. I had brought a little. 38 revolver from my house, and I got it out of the dresser drawer from under my socks and eased over to the bedroom door and listened.
No sound.
I opened the door carefully and looked into the living room. I didn’t see Leonard on the couch. I heard the scraping noise again.
I slipped into the living room and saw there was a light coming from the open door of the newspaper room. I held the gun down by my leg and went over there and looked inside. Sitting on the floor, damp newspapers pushed in a heap behind him, was Leonard. He was pulling at the rotten boards in the flooring, prying them loose with a crowbar, stacking them by the papers. The little fan was pointed in his direction and was set not to rotate. It hummed pleasantly, like a bee at flower.
I went inside.
“I was going to shoot you,” I said.
He looked up at me.
“Who the hell did you think it’d be?”
“Guess I’ve got the jumps a little, those guys next door.”
“Did it come back to you? The sex stuff, I mean?”
“Yes, but we did some things I don’t remember doing before. I guess it’s OK, though. Neither of us got hurt.”
“What do you think of her?”
“Well, we haven’t sent out wedding invitations, but I like her. She’s smart. Witty. Fun to be with.”
“And she’s fucking you.”
“There’s that.”
“Come here and give me a hand. I’ve found something interesting.”
I put the gun on the table next to the little fan, went over and got down on my knees and grabbed hold of the board he was holding and helped him pull it up. There was a screech of nails as it came loose.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I came in here and started looking around, moved some papers and found this spot. You’ll notice, not all these boards are rotten.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning what happened was the floor was repaired here with untreated wood to replace old wood, and some of that has rotted because of the roof leak. I think Uncle Chester took advantage of replacing the floor to make a hiding place.”
He pointed. “For this,” he said.
In the gap in the floor I could see something large lying in the dark against the ground. There must have been about four feet between the floor and the dirt.
“When I moved the papers, I spotted it through the hole and got busy pulling the rest of the lumber out,” Leonard said. “I didn’t wake up Florida, did I?”
“From what I can tell, she doesn’t sleep. She hibernates.”
“Help me get this out of here, would you?”
I leaned down and got hold of the heavy metal trunk, for that’s what it was, and we pulled it out of there and set it on the floor beside us. It was army green and there was a padlock on it. It had CHESTER PINE stenciled in white letters o
n the lid. It smelled of damp earth.
Leonard got the crowbar and put it inside the loop of the padlock and started to give it a flex, but I grabbed his arm.
“Before you do that,” I said,. “I was thinking there might be another way.”
He looked at me, and slowly it dawned on him.
10.
Leonard went to get the key while visions of outdated coupons danced in my head.
When he returned, he tried the key and the lock sprang open. Leonard removed the lock and lifted the lid. There was a puff of dust and a smell came out of there I couldn’t quite identify. Musty, a little sharp. Leonard leaned over and looked inside, and stared. I looked too.
It wasn’t coupons.
There was a small, yellowed skeleton, blackened in spots. The skull was turned toward me. Some of its teeth were milk teeth. Probably a male, though I was no expert on that. Eight, nine years old. From the forehead to a spot square between the eyes, the skull was cracked like the Liberty Bell. The legs had been sawed off at the knees so that it would fit in the trunk, and the arms were pulled free at the shoulders, twisted from their sockets like chicken wings. Beneath and around the bones were moldering magazines, and I realized that much of the smell was from rotting paper, but that certainly wasn’t the whole of it. The bones were old, however, and most of death’s stench had long left them, and perhaps what I did smell on the bones was not death at all, but mold.
We held our positions for a while, soaking it in. Leonard got one of the newspapers and crunched it over his hand and made a makeshift glove out of it. He got down on his knees and reached inside and picked up one of the arm bones. When he lifted it, it pivoted at the elbow and some of it powdered and fell back in the box. The bones that made up the hand broke loose from the wrist and rattled back into the box, fragmenting pages from one of the old magazines; the fragments wisped and fluttered like a shotgunned bird.
Leonard held the arm bone and looked at it for a while, then carefully put it back. He used the newspaper to get one of the magazines out of there. He dropped it on the floor. Pages came apart and powdered the way part of the bone had powdered.
The magazines had been mostly photographs. A lot of the photographs were still visible. I didn’t like them. They were of children, male and female, in sexual positions with adults and each other. Leonard got out a couple other magazines and put them on the floor. More of the same. They were even some with children and animals.
I looked at them longer than I wanted to, to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, then I squatted back on my haunches and took a deep breath. The breath was full of rotting paper and that other smell.
Leonard picked up the magazines and returned them to the trunk. He dropped the newspaper he was using as a glove inside and closed the lid of the trunk and put the padlock on it and locked it.
He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and walked around in a small circle, then went to the desk chair and sat down and turned the little fan on his face. He was breathing as if he had just finished a hard workout.
“Uncle Chester,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
I don’t know how long we stayed like that, me on my haunches, Leonard in the chair, the fan blowing on his face. Finally, I said, “It may not be like it looks.”
“How can it not be like it looks? This is the key he left me. It goes to the trunk and it’s got what it’s got inside. That skeleton is a kid’s skeleton.”
“I know.”
“And those magazines. That filth… Jesus, was he getting even with me for being gay? Was he telling me he was a sicko, because he thought I was? Or did he get so far gone in the head he thought he had him a real treasure here? That I’d be one happy sonofabitch to have it. What did he do? Get this out now and then, look at the skeleton, the magazines? Jack off?”
“You’re jumping pretty far.”
“I’m jumping where there is to jump. The sick fuck had the gall to criticize me, and he was… Jesus, Hap. You think there are others?”
“I don’t know what to think. But you’ll need to tell the cops.”
“Yeah, they’re so fucking efficient. Jesus, Hap.”
I stood up slowly. “You could just put the trunk back in the hole, you know. He’s done what he’s done, and now he’s beyond punishment and can’t hurt anyone else. You could just go on with things.”
“You don’t mean that?”
“No… Just a small, sad part of me means it.”
“This child needs to be identified. There might be others. Jesus. How long could this have been going on? There might be a whole slew of bodies under the house here. They could have been down there when I came for summers. He’s up here teaching me to tie a fishing fly, reading me a story, tucking me in bed, and underneath our feet, children are rotting.”
“He was sick in the head, Leonard. You know that. It could have just happened recently.”
“That only makes it a little better. Shit, it don’t make it any better… Don’t tell Florida. Not yet.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Christ.”
“Tell you what, Leonard. Let’s put the trunk up for now. Nothing can be changed tonight. Absorb all this best you can. Tomorrow, after Florida leaves, we’ll do what you want to do. Of course, once the police know, it isn’t a secret any longer.”
“Yeah. Help me with the trunk, Hap.”
We put the trunk back. Leonard put a few boards over the hole and we stacked some of the newspapers over that. When we were finished, Leonard said, “Thanks, man.”
“Not at all.”
We washed up and I got that drink of water I’d been wanting. I went back to the bedroom.
Florida had kicked off the sheet again. She lay on her back. Her face was smooth and beautiful, and her lips fluttered slightly. Her breasts and pubic hair caught my attention, but somehow, having seen what I had just seen, I couldn’t hold any sexual interest.
I took off my clothes and eased back in bed and lay on my back and watched the fan go around and around. I listened to the wind in the bottle tree and hoped the souls of the drug dealers were being sucked inside. I wondered if Uncle Chester’s soul had gone in there, the soul of his victim… or victims.
I thought about the trunk and the magazines and I thought about Leonard. The world had certainly come down on him. I thought about the child’s skeleton and what the child had been like when he was alive. Had he been happy before it happened? Thinking of Christmas? Had he been sad? Had he suffered much? Had he known what was happening?
Across the way, in the crack house, I heard someone laugh, then someone said something loud and there was another laugh, then silence.
The shadows changed, broadened. A slice of peach-colored light came through the bars and fell across the bed and made Florida’s skin glow as if it had been dipped in honey. I watched her skin instead of the fan, watched it become bright with light. I rolled over and put my arm around her. Her skin was warm, but I felt cold. I got up and got the sheet and spread it over her and crawled under it and held her again. She rolled against my chest and I kissed her on the forehead.
“Is it morning yet?” she said.
“If you’re a rooster,” I said.
“Umm. I’m not a rooster.”
“I noticed.”
“Your breath stinks.”
“Not yours. It’s sweet as a rose… Of course, it’s growing by the septic tank.”
“You know, you’re my first peckerwood.”
“And how was it?”
“Except for the itty-bitty dick part, great.”
“Nice.”
“I’ll show you nice. In a moment.”
She got out of bed and pulled the sheet off and wrapped it around herself. “I’m going to brush my teeth. Right back. Then you’re going to brush your teeth.”
“Are we going to check for cavities?”
“There’s one cavity I’d like you to look at,” she said, and left the room. I actually began to get the
trunk and the body and the magazines off my mind. At least off the front burner.
When she came back, she said, “Leonard’s up. He always get up early?”
“Sometimes.”
“You think we woke him up last night? You know, we were kind of loud.”
“It’s OK. Why don’t you take off the sheet?”
“Teeth.”
I went and brushed then. I heard Leonard in the newspaper room. He seemed to be pacing. The old floorboards squeaked.
When I came back to the bedroom, Florida had taken off the sheet and was lying in bed with an unwrapped rubber on her abdomen, a folded pillow under her ass and her legs spread.
“Hint, hint,” she said.
11.
It was noon and hot and no breeze was blowing. Florida was long gone to visit her mother. The curb was bordered with cop cars and unmarked cop cars. Leonard had called the police about an hour back.
Next door, the crack house was up early, surprised it wasn’t them being paid a visit. They sat and stood on their porch and watched. Mohawk called to one of the plainclothes cops in the yard – a fat guy with a bad toupee – by name. The fat cop waved back.
An old black woman on a walker came out of the house across the street and stood on the porch and looked at us. It was the first time I’d seen her. She reminded me of an ancient, oversized cricket. Above her, on a high line, a crow cawed as if it needed a throat lozenge.
Leonard and I were on his front porch, sitting in the glider. Leonard looked to have shrunk during the night. His complexion had grayed.
A big black detective, fiftyish and hard looking, wearing a loose blue suit coat, was hunkered down by the glider asking us questions, while a white detective in a green Kmart suit like I had wanted to buy took notes and did battle with a fly that kept trying to light on his sweaty, balding head.
“Goddamn fly,” he said.
“They go straight for shit,” the black cop said.
“Yeah,” said the white cop. “Guess they’re gonna be all over you.”
The big black cop didn’t look at the white cop. You got the idea they did that kind of dull banter all the time, just to keep themselves awake. The black cop got a turd-colored cigar out of the inside of his coat and put it in his mouth and chewed it. He didn’t light it. He said, “That’s about it for now. The both of you will have to talk again. Maybe come down to the station.”
Mucho Mojo cap-2 Page 5