All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “What are you doing in front of my house?” I said.

  “I just wanted to see Harvard Square. Go to the bookstores. Here. Look.”

  He took a book out of a plastic sack from Booksmith and flipped open the pages to the photographs in the middle: a shot of Kolyma, one of the camps in the Gulag. He said, as he looked at the picture, that the prisoners ate the glue from books. He guessed they must have been pretty hungry to do that. And, he said, here’s the really messed up thing: the political prisoners were pushed around by the ordinary murderers and rapists.

  “I noticed a prison in Walpole,” said Stas. “A lot of barbed wire around it. We had a lot of barbed wire in the Ukraine. In Russia. Siberia. Like here in this book.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Frank,” he said. “I came to tell you that I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Get away from me,” I said.

  “Don’t kid yourself, Frank,” said Stas. “Where are you going to go for help?”

  I took a step over one of those gravestone-like blocks of slate pavement that is the Brattle Street sidewalk.

  “I want to tell you something,” said Stas. “Rumors in prison get started, you know that? Say a guy is in for some corruption charge. But the rumor gets going that he is actually a child molester. You know what happens to those guys? A priest was convicted recently and you know how he died? In that prison in Concord?”

  “I heard,” I said.

  “Like I say,” said Stas. “I’m thinking it over. But it can’t go on forever. There are two guys who are being railroaded for some misunderstanding about auto parts. Something to do with some guy who came from Florida and got into trouble up here. I’m just mentioning this and saying I haven’t got a lot of time.”

  “Go away,” I said.

  “A lot of balls,” said Stas. “Well, I hope your daughter has a nice wedding.”

  The pigeons went up and down those stones of the sidewalk, anxious, hunting for a crumb, their feathers smooth as skin.

  “Get those gutters fixed,” said Stas. “It’s the smart thing.”

  He glanced at my house and then walked down that uneven sidewalk, his shape seeming to rise into the hot air.

  •••

  “Well,” said Alexandra. “Try this.”

  She held out a small round of dark bread. It had a layer of butter and a layer of caviar, the taste of it at once fishy and mysterious.

  “Real Iranian,” said Mr. Black. “I have a connection with a pilot who flies to the Middle East. He brings it back for me.”

  “Pretty good,” said Robert.

  “All right,” I said.

  “The main course,” said Alexandra. “Venison. Wouldn’t that be right?”

  The assistant opened an aluminum case. Venison in juniper berry sauce, morels.

  “The key to serving venison,” said Mr. Black. “Is that it must be warm. To serve venison, we will need extra servers.”

  “Some of my friends are vegetarians,” said Pia.

  “For vegetarians, I can do a nice squash and walnut risotto,” said Mr. Black.

  Outside, the street was empty, and somehow the lack of movement, the lack of that phantom shape, seemed more ominous than its presence. Then we tried other things, guinea hens, hard to eat, chicken, ghastly, but as the assistants produced these things by a sort of culinary legerdemain, I thought of McGill, about the smell of sweat and sawdust from those soft woods, or of my grandmother and how she had looked out the window while her bare feet touched, with a thrill, with a tickle, the carpet beneath her feet. And how Pop had done what was required of a decent man. The open-air market on rue Buci, the table set for one.

  So, we kept at it, Robert and Pia and Alexandra tasting the main course, and then the varieties of cake and the icing and then we got through a discussion of what should be served and who was a drunk and did the bartender have insurance, because none of us, the lawyer I was and the lawyers my daughter and Robert were going to be, wanted to be on the wrong end of a lawsuit that came from someone getting tanked up and driving down the main road from the farm and right into the Delaware.

  Pia said, “And it’s all set with the Girls Club, right?”

  “Sure, sure,” I said.

  But that woman with the butch haircut and those glasses with the heavy rims left a message for me. Of course, she did this after the invitations been mailed, with map included, and the address of the website, which also had directions to the farmhouse where the tent would be set up and where we would eat that caviar, salmon, venison, with the risotto for the vegetarians, and where we would drink champagne, as though the world was new.

  Buddy Hollyette said that same bear from my land had not only gotten into the garbage again but had stalked a girl, a thirteen-year-old who had just gotten her period. Buddy Hollyette was convinced that this was a dangerous thing, not saying whether she meant the period or the bear, but given her dislike of life, she probably meant both, and that the bear was obviously going after young girls when they were having a period. Surely, this couldn’t go on.

  She had complained to my father and what had he done? Nothing.

  She said that while she hated to interfere with the plans that had been made, if that bear followed another Girls Club member around or got into the garbage one more time, she would have to withhold the right to use the farm for the wedding.

  Now, I put down the phone and thought about going to court to get an order forbidding her to do just that, but then that meant bringing up the deed, which was written in a way that was not as clear as my father should have written it, since he liked, in a legal document, a little “wiggle room,” just in case it became convenient for him to no longer have the rights he had fought so hard to obtain. So, there I was, in my study, surrounded by the lingering aroma of venison and morels, guinea hen and chicken and puff pastry with those ridiculous hot dogs in them.

  I called Robert.

  “You and I have an errand to do. Next weekend. Will you help me?”

  “Does a bear do it in the woods?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess he does.”

  Then I opened the gun case in my study, took out the Mannlicher my father had given me, saw that it still had a thin sheen of Hoppe’s oil on it, and that, on the shelf at the top of the cabinet, a box of 6.5 mm ammunition sat like fate itself.

  Then Alexandra and I went through the other things: tent, bridesmaids’ dresses, groomsmen’s jackets and pants, flowers, transportation from the church to the farm, serving help, champagne, a bar, and then, of course, there was the matter of music: a band. Pia had always liked music, and she had gone around the house with her headphones on and then those little things that stick in the ears, moving this way and that, so that I had the physical sense of the music but not the sound.

  She and Robert wanted a popular band, and two days later the members of the band came into my study, heads shaved, tattoos here and there, spiderwebs and such. The men wore earrings and the woman who sang came too, her pale skin deep in a habit of black hair, and we all sat there for a while, looking at each other, a district attorney, his wife, and this collection of drug addicts who had come together to talk about money.

  So, we started in, one way and another, how many hours, how much money, a guarantee, what happens if it rains, and other matters, and while we went through it, the manager of the band nodding in a certain way to let me know we had solved another problem, the singer stared off into space and then said, at the end, when all was settled, in Latin, “Peace be with you.” Then they all got up and went out, leaving a scent of perfume, musk, incense, and something else, which could have been a smoky residue of a drug they smoked, opium or something like that, an alluring scent, a musky perfume of desire so perfect as to have a kind of mathematical certainty. I guessed that’s what opium was: the math of desire.

  “All right,” said Robert. “That leaves the bear.”

  Before bed, with the list of things we h
ad decided about on the sofa next to Alexandra, she said, with a sort of wistfulness, as though remembering a restaurant in Rome where she had eaten sautéed zucchini flowers, “Maybe I need something to look forward to. Don’t you think we should get away, too?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Rome,” she said.

  “Again?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “If we get out of this in one piece, I’ll take you to Rome.”

  “Oh, Frank,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  [ CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX ]

  THE MOTEL WAS on Route 2, next to an Italian restaurant that looked like one of a kind but was part of a midlevel chain, more like a knockoff of a restaurant than an actual place. Pauline’s truck sat in the parking lot of the motel. The truck bed was filled with cardboard boxes, all neatly taped and stamped with logos, Genuine Moon racing parts, Magaw cams, Flash-Tech tachometers, BST Safety Textiles (manufacturers of air bags), and Newco Autoline (transmissions). The cardboard squares fit together as neatly as the wooden blocks in a child’s puzzle. Only one other car, a Nissan with fenders so rusted as to look like red lace, sat in the parking lot, and these two made the lot forlorn. It was two in the afternoon and all the lovers and drunks had left earlier. The parking lot was covered with broken glass, just dust, really, as a sort of monument to the endless hard nights that had been experienced here.

  Pauline stepped out of the truck. I got out of the Gray Ghost. She wore a blue dress and the scent from years before, or maybe it was a powder, but I recognized it the way you instantly recall the scent of honeysuckle and where you were and what music was playing when you last smelled it. She took a step and stopped, one hip at a sultry angle, just as she had done years ago. Her hair had been done and she was wearing a little makeup. Her smile was the same as when I had come to her apartment with a bottle of wine, which we drank while her neighbor hung out his underwear to dry.

  “Thanks for coming, Frank,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d show up on such short notice.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m alone. My wife is at the farm, getting ready for the wedding. I just came from the last fitting for my daughter’s dress.”

  “Oh, Frank,” she said. “You went to see the dress?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Isn’t that sweet. I guess the wedding is coming up pretty fast. Just days, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She held up the motel key with that little plastic paddle suspended from it.

  “I’ve already got the room,” she said.

  She held the key and swung the plastic paddle of it one way and then the other, as though thinking it over. The plastic disappeared into a circle, like one made by a propeller. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  “We never went to a motel, did we?” she said. “That was too tawdry for us, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “There wasn’t any need. We weren’t hiding anything.”

  “And we didn’t travel together either, did we? You know, on the road together and hearing the trucks rumble along as you felt how wet I was . . . never wore underwear when we were in the car,” she said. “But we never went anyplace. Not far away. No chance for escape, right?”

  “Should we go in?” I said.

  “I’m thinking about it,” she said. “What is it about old boyfriends? You hate their guts for awhile, but then, you know, you get all confused about being young.” She tapped the key against her teeth. “But Frank, you don’t stay confused for long if you’re one bitter bitch.”

  A truck shifted down on the highway and made the asphalt we stood on tremble.

  “So, I wanted to show you just how good I could make you feel. If I was in the mood.”

  The concrete path went along the fronts of the empty motel rooms, all the same, the plastic curtains behind the dusty glass, the aluminum frames of the window, the doors with the thin veneer of wood, the doorknobs that looked as if they had come from Wal-Mart, and yet in the empty rooms I felt the valence left by fatigue or a desperate passion that had been there and gone. These things left a kind of vacuum behind. The trucks went by on Route 2, shifting down with a rumble and a cloud of smoke. Pauline put the key in the door with one hand and held my arm with the other.

  “Oh, Frank,” she said. “I get trembly. After all this time. That’s what I’m so bitter about. Why won’t it just go away? Do you think it would go away if I helped you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Maybe it would make me feel superior. And not so fucking bitter.”

  She pushed the door open. The place smelled of air-conditioned cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, antibacterial soap, and ozone from the professional-grade vacuum cleaner. A small desk had been against one wall, but it had been swung around so that one person could sit on one side and another could sit opposite. A chessboard had been set up there, white pieces on one side, black on the other. Pauline stood next to me.

  “It wasn’t easy, Frank,” she said.

  His hair was shorter, but his skin was the same snake belly white, improved by the acne scars that, in an odd way, suggested dueling scars. His hands were white, too, the fingers still long and delicate, like a pickpocket’s. He wore a Don’t Tread on Me tee shirt with a snake on it, a pair of blue jeans, and some Timber-land boots. A leather jacket lay on the bed next to him.

  “Sit down, Frank,” he said.

  The chair had a black plastic seat, a veneer back, little gold tabs on the end of the legs. Aurlon Miller lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke into the air.

  “I thought we’d play chess,” he said.

  He picked up a black pawn and a white one and put them behind his back.

  “Pick,” he said.

  I drew white.

  Pauline sat down on the bed, crossed her legs, put her laced fingers together over her knee.

  “Aurlon and I go way back,” said Pauline.

  He opened with a king’s pawn. I answered, doing so by rote, although I kept my eyes on that pale skin. He moved a pawn. I knew he was going to bring a bishop out and then a knight. A basic opening. But I wondered if he had learned anything new since we had last played. Trade for pieces, concentrate on endgame? Simplify things to the point where it was easy to see. Pauline squirmed on the bed. Ran one hand along her leg, down to her ankle, where she undid the buckle of her shoe and let it fall to the carpet. She smiled.

  He traded when he could. I castled. He looked across the board and said, “I bet you’re surprised to see me.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought you were gone.”

  “You mean dead, don’t you?” said Aurlon.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He castled, too.

  Aurlon looked at me. “You thought you were pretty hot with that Aron Nimzowitsch stuff. Took me a while to catch up, but you were always one jump ahead of me.”

  “I played a lot of chess,” I said, “when I was in school.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Aurlon. “And you couldn’t resist it, could you? You had to rub it in, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Sure you did,” said Aurlon. “You rock-ribbed snob. You turned up your nose at me. You had to beat me. You had to show Pia that I wasn’t up to your standards, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Hmpf,” he said. “That’s what I thought.”

  He traded, bishop for bishop, set up a trade for queens. Did he really want to do that?

  “So, you wanted to beat me down. Make me feel like something from a gutter, like something that climbed out from under a rock,” he said. “You know what I thought about that?”

  “We were just playing chess,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” said Aurlon. “We’re here to settle things. You wanted to beat me down. And you know what? I don’t take that easily. Everybody does that. They underestimate me, you know that?”

  “Tell me where you’v
e been,” I said.

  “Ask her,” he said. He pointed at Pauline.

  “Here and there. Up and down the coast. Florida to Maine,” said Pauline. “Yana told me they were going to sell you up and down the coast like an air bag.”

  “Too bad,” said Aurlon. “We were going to fuck this guy up.” He lifted his chin toward me. “You thought you could somehow humiliate me, and that I won’t play for higher stakes. That’s what I do, see? I play for higher stakes. You may think I was just after your daughter, but after a while, when you started in with that Aron Nimzowitsch bullshit, I thought I’d show you what high stakes are.”

  I moved a pawn. He answered. Outside the trucks rumbled when they shifted down.

  “How much cash have you got on you?” said Aurlon.

  “Three hundred dollars,” I said.

  “There’s an ATM in the lobby of the motel. Let’s play for five hundred,” he said.

  “Why?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “When I saw how you were trying to bust my chops, I went to see Stas. And then when you needed a car part, I sent you out there, and he charmed you. So I went back to Stas and Stas said, ‘The guy wants to get rid of you.’ And, I said, ‘So what if I go?’ Stas said that would make for some interesting possibilities. Like I’m gone, and Frank Mackinnon here asked to make me disappear.”

  “How could you make sure I’d go out to see him?”

  “Oh, Frank,” he said. “I could see you hated paying those prices for Audi parts. And you know what? I kept putting a little pinhole in the hydraulics. It was just a matter of time until you said, Hey, I’m not paying that kind of money at the Audi dealership. You were just a sitting duck.”

  He ran a finger over a pawn.

  “Ain’t that the truth?” he said to the wall. Then he turned to me and said, “So, let’s make it for five hundred.”

  “How did you get him to come here?” I said to Pauline.

  “I wanted to show you I could make you feel good,” she said. “If I was in the mood.”