All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “Naw,” said the Wizard. “I got to get going.”

  “Here,” I said. I held out the money. “I don’t want it.”

  “You won it,” he said. “I should have seen you coming. Serves me right.”

  “Take the money,” I said.

  He put out his long, slender, even beautiful fingers and took the bills, and he divided them up as before, half in his pocket, half in his shoe. “You wouldn’t believe the people who are crawling around in the square.” Then he glanced at Pia and back at me, but this time he dropped that blank, three-card monte glance that was almost cheerful. No, he seemed to say, I’ll have to find another way to settle this. He looked at Pia again.

  “I’ll think of something to do,” he said to her. “I’ll call you.”

  He stood, stretched, looked at the chessboard, nodded to himself, and said, “You going to let that woman cop a plea?” He gestured to my desk.

  “I’m thinking about it,” I said. “Come back to play some other time.”

  “I plan to,” he said. “See you, Pia.”

  He closed the door.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” said Pia.

  “No?” I said. “Why not? You want to bring a hustler in here and let him take me for a mark?”

  “You could have been more graceful,” she said.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I can take care of myself. Don’t you think I know what he is? Don’t you know me at all?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know you. Who would know you better?”

  “I’ve done everything ever asked of me. You wanted a good student. You got it. You wanted someone to row with. You have it. You wanted someone to do well at school. To get the highest score possible on the law boards. You’ve got it. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m tired of being a good girl. How about that? I’m fucking tired of it.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to be stupid.”

  “What are you calling me?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.

  “You know, I can feel confined by you all the way down to the genes. I can feel them, from you, twisted on each other like chains.”

  “All the better to end-the-line of us then,” I said. The silence seeped into the room like a gas.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You know I’m never going to have kids. So maybe I can have some fun. Have you ever stood at the edge of a cliff? Wasn’t it thrilling?”

  “Look,” I said.

  “Do you know what an ion channel is?” she said.

  I closed my eyes.

  “An ion channel is a part of a neuron that allows sodium, calcium, potassium, and chloride to move in and out of the cell. An imbalance here is what causes a seizure, but hundreds of people are walking around with the genetic mutation that is known to cause seizures, and nothing happens . . . no one knows. Some do, some don’t. So, that’s a pretty thin reed, wouldn’t you say? And this condition is associated with a lot of other things, too, but the associations are unclear. You want me to go through the list and the biology, the electron flow? Let’s start with the specifics of how a brain cell metabolizes sodium, calcium, potassium, and chloride. Get out a piece of paper. I’ll show you the formulas. And the irregularities that we know about so far . . . Well?”

  “Look . . . ,” I said.

  “I warned you. Don’t underestimate me. And you think you know who I am?”

  So, we stood there, almost nose to nose.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  Still on her way up, getting angrier.

  “Why are you interested in a guy like this?” I said.

  She tossed her hair over her shoulder, then seemed to listen to the silence of the house.

  “You want to hear?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I like the way he smells. I like the way he is in bed . . . ”

  “Wait, wait . . . ”

  “I thought you wanted to hear,” she said. “He does something to me. It’s hard to describe. Like something that runs right into me, and then I wonder if everything I’ve done is a mistake. How can anyone, who is so obviously wrong for me, make me feel this way?”

  She stood in the doorway, her expression the same as when we had had minor disagreements, or so I thought: a little insistent, piercing, one eyebrow raised. The kind of look she would have given me if I had started to resist her explanation of Fermat’s theorem. Or if I had said she was rushing the slide in her boat. Of course, that’s the way it began.

  She raised a brow, and I knew that if I did what I could to get rid of the Wizard, if I went to friends on the Boston police force and had this jackass arrested, and without any trouble at all, since he was obviously selling drugs or fencing stolen computers or working some silly game, this would be nothing.

  So, the rules were clear: she’d see how far she could go, and I’d keep my mouth shut.

  So there it was: not the thing I was always afraid of, but a new aspect I had never dreamed of. And it’s at moments like this, when you stand at the abyss, where all the potential is right there, that you realize what it means to love someone. The shock, of course, is that you think you understand this, but you don’t really until that dark tentacle, that change in light, that possibility of a horror that is at once so ordinary and so appalling has made itself apparent. It walks in the door and tries to look like Kurt Cobain.

  Even then I still had hope. Or at least I hoped she knew the Wizard was some kind of cheap thrill. But, of course, something else had stirred in the depths: it was as though when she was young and we went rowing together, or when we talked things over, that we had been too close, too sympathetic, too much like each other. We had been pals, and that was coming back to haunt us: she had wanted a violent, intense rebellion, and both of us had avoided this, if only because we had both hoped, in some grown-up way, from an attitude that was too smart for the way things really happened, that we could get around the rebellion part. We had liked each other. Now, though, we were up against what we hadn’t done. And this mixed perfectly with the pure, sweet animal attraction she felt for him.

  I swallowed. When you get to be all grown-up you learn how not to cry: you bite down. You swallow. You look into the distance.

  She got up and gave me that daughterly peck on the cheek and then turned and left the room, her hips swaying in that spandex, her ponytail bouncing. Now just what the hell was I supposed to do? She was twenty-one.

  So, that’s how we started: the delayed rebellion would be played out through what she would tell me, and I would take it, stand up to it. If the rebellion was late, we were going to make up for lost time. The trouble was, of course, we had the weapons of an adult. Or she did. She had the future of the Mackinnon family in her crosshairs.

  [ CHAPTER TWELVE ]

  “WELL,” ALEXANDRA SAID in an email from Rome. “Let me tell you about the apartment they found for me. Two stories, that is a main floor with a living room and a bedroom and upstairs I have a small office from which I can walk out to a roof garden and where I can sit at night: earlier, I had a glass of wine and a pigeon flew from the street below, from the gray shadows to the air above the building, which was filled with light, and the bird suddenly seemed to be covered with gold. Of course, when I saw it, I wanted to turn to you to say, Frank, look. But you weren’t there.”

  Yes, I thought. But even as I missed her and wondered about how she spent her nights, I considered something else. For the first time in my life, I had a chance to be with my daughter, to make decisions on my own, to be closer to her than I ever had been before. Somehow, with everything else that had gone wrong, such as the Citron conviction being overturned on appeal, I wanted to take some action, to be clear-minded, to show my daughter how much I cared.

  Pia and I understood the risk, and yet, in the warmth and the intensity and wa
llop of her smile, in that intelligent expression in her eyes, which suggested that this would be all right (as though intelligence was a way out, when, in fact, as I know, it is often behind the worst things that happen), this understanding of danger only made this all the more attractive. But the risk was real, too: fury and the loss of love could make a dark place where almost anything could happen. We weren’t there yet, but we waited at the abyss. Because both of us knew, within an hour of the talk we had had, that if she told me the wrong thing, if Miller was up to something that I couldn’t take (and this, I guess, was the boundary, the limit of what we were doing with one another), I’d snap again.

  And what would that be? I’d load that L.C. Smith shotgun or that Mannlicher and walk out to the front room when Miller was here and put a 6.5 mm through his head and then reach down to touch those places where the bone had turned to a kind of granulated sugar from the impact. That was my risk, or the risk of having woken up and having allowed myself the reactions to those things I had seen rather than approaching them secondhand, through Thucydides, Xenophon, Tacitus. And, I suppose, this was part of the trap, since if I tried to tell her that I had changed, that I wasn’t the reasonable man she had always believed me to be, I would be reduced in her eyes, and if there was anything I craved, that was keeping me in one piece, it was my daughter’s approval.

  So, we were playing with the scale of the darkness that would allow this to take place, and I thought of the despair, the depths of fury that would take what I had with my daughter, those chips of light on the Charles, the smile, the delight in being perfectly understood and to turn it into that black, appalling place in which everything we don’t want is lurking and ready. So, yes, we were getting the contest we never had, although we had learned that truth does hate delay, and that by putting this off, we had made it worse. And maybe my original notions were right: a child has that mystical instinct for that psychic bruise, as though the mind was a pear with a soft spot.

  Miller came back to our house the next weekend and Pia made him some pasta puttanesca, which he ate with good appetite. When I came into the kitchen he had a glass of wine that I had been saving for Alexandra’s return, and he toasted me. And he had that look as before: he was going to work now, and we were going to settle things that needed to be settled. He wasn’t a young man who liked to be defeated, not if cunning and deviousness could be brought to bear. In my office they listened to Madame Butterfly and then the Ramones.

  “You like this oldy stuff?” he said.

  “It gets better as the time goes by,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

  Then Pia went upstairs to change before they went to a movie, and as she ran up the stairs, I wondered what it was: her diaphragm? Is that what she needed? Miller raised an eyebrow: yeah, he seemed to guess that was it.

  “All right,” I said. “You want a drink?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s be gentlemen.”

  He stood in my study and put his hands in his pockets. The books, on three walls, appeared orderly, brown, with titles in gold and red. I poured him a drink and he took it while he went along the shelves and said, “Lot of books.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Is that what you read when you are getting ready for a case, huh?” he said. “By the way, what did you do with the woman? You know, the one who wanted to cop a plea.”

  “I haven’t decided,” I said.

  “Must be tough to lose a case,” he said. “I read about one in the paper. What was the guy’s name? And that woman. Sally Sunshine? Is that what they called her?”

  “What’s it to you?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just making polite conversation.”

  He finished his drink as Pia came down the stairs, jumping two or three at a time, even though she was in good shoes with a heel. That innocence, if that’s what it is, was still there, no matter what she did. She came into the room with a faint whiff of perfume—gardenias? Some other flower? She smiled at me as though to say, Well, all right. This is the first test. You seem to be standing up to it all right.

  “I might be late,” she said.

  “We’re going out dancing,” said Miller.

  “Be careful,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “See you later.”

  They went outside, where they laughed (“Careful?” he said. “Why, where is the fun in that?”) and got into her Volkswagen. The sad whack of the doors of the car as they slammed came into the room and then the puttering of the engine left me with the tick of the house as the silence settled in, the residue of her perfume. The gun case opened quickly and I took out the Mannlicher and threw back the action, which was so perfectly machined, so goddamned German, that it moved with a kind of fluid grace, a perfection of engineering. A rifle Hegel could have loved. A box of ammunition sat on the top shelf and I picked it up, feeling the sudden heaviness, the weight, as though death was congealed here, made into an intense sense of gravity.

  Alexandra and Pia had given me a piece of stone with a fish, a fossil, about nine inches long, itched into it with all the perfect weight of time. I used to look at it when I was working on a case, or when I needed reassurance, but now, when I reached up to touch it, the thing was gone.

  Just like that: two hundred million years. Just vanished. Had Aurlon put it in the pocket of his down coat that leaked feathers from time to time?

  •••

  In the first week of February, I stopped at the card table in Harvard Square where the Raver sold handprinted epigrams that he had picked up in a flying saucer. (“Look to the beauty in yourself and look to the beauty in universe. They are related.”) The fossil of the fish sat next to some secondhand books, Dr. Spock’s Baby Care, Goodnight Moon, Physics for the Practical Man. The stand was missing, but it sat on the table with all the power of time made real. I got it for a tenth of what it was worth and then bought a new stand at an art supply shop and put it back on the mantle. When Miller came to visit his eyes stopped on it, then on me, and then he smiled.

  “That’s a nice fish,” he said. Then he looked around the room and came back to it. “Yeah, that’s nice. Can I pick it up?”

  The shape of the ancient fish, so perfectly etched on that stone, sat in his long fingers, and he moved it up and down, as though its value could be determined by weight, or that movement was a kind of assay. Then he said, “It’s probably not worth that much, I guess. In terms of money. Maybe it’s just more sentimental value.”

  “You could say that,” I said.

  “It’s funny about that,” he said. “How people get hurt. Why sometimes things get going wrong and you don’t know where they’re going to end up.”

  That smile again. And yet, he carried himself with an air of the tragic, or the romantically doomed, his hair long, his skin pale as moonlight, his entire aspect one of intensity in the face of long odds. Yes, it was Kurt Cobain. That was the look.

  “Your daughter really thinks the world of you,” he said. “Do you know that?”

  “Are you threatening me?” I said.

  “Oh, Frank,” he said. “What do you take me for?” He brushed his hair out of his eyes.

  [ CHAPTER THIRTEEN ]

  NOW, AFTER MY father has died, and I think of him in those months before that piñata party, I realize he was dying right before my eyes. It was as though he was facing an enormous, black accordion and it was closing up, getting closer, until it would be flat against him.

  So, in those months when my difficulties began to build, he came to see me, but I missed the details that should have told me the time was getting closer. Fourteen months. Twelve months. Getting closer. He seemed gray, although I thought this was just a hangover, and sometimes he stared at nothing, or through the world around us. He could hear the clock. I could not. Sometimes, though, he seemed to carry an odd whiff, as though he wasn’t all here, or he was part of some experiment that left him marked in a way that only those about to die were mark
ed. More a mood than a fact.

  So, the winter when Aurlon showed up, when he began his work, we had no snow and unseasonably high temperatures, and we didn’t even have snow on the land my father owned. It was so warm the bears were out, too.

  We knew this because the Girls Club was taking advantage of the open winter. They sat around the fireplace in what had been my grandfather’s house, sang songs, toasted marshmallows, and took walks in the woods that were gray, but at least not snowy. The springs were already running and the stream, Trout Cabin, wasn’t frozen. But a particular bear was out, one my father and I had known about and seen for years, and he was hanging around the Girls Club, digging through their trash, scaring the ones from Scranton and such places to death. Then the bear, old, enormous, waddling, but seeming malevolent to the Girls Club, walked across the property line of my father’s land and disappeared into the swamp there.

  The Girls Club’s camp director called twice a day. “We just can’t have this,” she said to my father. “What would happen if the bear mauled a girl? What then?”

  So, in the midst of this dogfight with my daughter, when my father was getting closer to that explosion in his head, his pink Cadillac, the one he would later run into the Charles and which would end up in a junkyard, pulled into my drive, the car leaking hydraulic fluid as always. The car came to the end of the drive, the tires locking when my father pulled on the brakes. Then he kicked open the door and stepped out in his retro preppy pants and a hunting jacket, a khaki coat with a Pendleton blanket lining, which he always said would have been handy in Poland. Now, he came up to the door, opened it without knocking, came into the study, where I sat at my desk with a file (bones found in a furnace, but the DNA showed they were not related to anyone in the house where they were found). He opened the gun cabinet, took out the Mannlicher and the ammunition, and said, “You know, Frank, I let you keep this. And it’s sort of yours. But I need it. And you, too. Come on. I’ve got a problem. You know, there are times when I’ve had it up to here with problems.”