Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Eighteen

Leo’s silver Porsche was parked in front of the turret. Light came out in thin beams from the slit windows on the first and second floors. I parked behind him and walked up to the door. It was locked tight.

“Hi, honey, I’m home,” I called up, inside. There was no responding laugh. After the dark ride home I could have used a chuckle, even a friendly insult, and Leo was always good for those, but nothing came back at me from the second floor. I went up the stairs.

The kitchen was dark. Across the hall, what passes for a blast of heat in my stone cylinder blew at me when I opened my office door. Leo sat huddled next to the space heater, shrunken inside his traffic engineer’s parka. He was staring into an inch of brown whiskey he was swirling inside a clear plastic cup as if he were seeing his future-and not liking what he saw.

“Problems?” I asked, shedding my pea coat before I got used to being warm.

“You could say,” he said. He turned to look at the card table.

He’d brought back the old Underwood.

I followed his eyes as he looked back at me. He tried for a smile, but his lips had begun to tremble.

“No, Leo.”

His eyes were glassy in the light from the sculpted plaster lamp.

I looked again at the typewriter on the table.

“No,” I said louder, as if I could null what he’d done.

The air in the office clawed at my chest. Suddenly, it was too hot to breathe. I went to the space heater, knelt to turn down the dial. Beside me, Leo sat motionless, slumped inside his jacket. I had to focus now, on the doable, on what I trusted. That meant starting with setting the dial just right.

“Want some coffee?” I said when I stood up.

“Not now, Dek.” His voice was soft, indistinct almost. Slurred only by the whiskey, I wanted to think.

“I’m going to make coffee.”

“Dek…”

“I need coffee.” I didn’t need coffee; I needed time, time to quiet the drummers that were beating on the inside of my chest, time to calm the pumpers who were sending too much blood to my ears.

I walked into the would-be kitchen. It was different now, different than it had been that morning. Then, the five new cabinets hanging on the stone walls, and the six still stacked on the floor, waiting, had been the future. Now, they looked like failure, the artifacts of a fool’s life.

I peeled the plastic lid off the coffee can, measured out four scoops, holding each one up to the light to make sure the dipper was filled exactly level. Precision was necessary now, that and focus and concentration. It would take time, but I had the time; Leo could wait. I smoothed the grounds in the paper filter, ran water into the reservoir, and switched the maker on. I wanted to scream at the pounding in my ears, drowning out the coffee dripping into the carafe. I could have watched it all night, except for the pounding.

After a time, Leo came in, still swirling that damned inch of brown whiskey. Raising it to his lips, he finished it, then set the cup on the makeshift plywood counter. He leaned against the refrigerator, small in his big coat, and watched me watch the coffee. He waited. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. We both knew the conversation we were about to have. We’d already had it, in the fraction of a second when I’d turned from the typewriter to see the confirmation in his eyes. We just hadn’t said it with words.

It had been his loss, too.

The coffeemaker burbled and stopped dripping. He pulled a quart bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of one of his enormous orange pockets and raised his sad, black eyebrows. I nodded. I half-filled two coffee cups and held them out to him. He added an inch of the Jack to each.

“Whatever we don’t drink, I am taking away,” he said, capping the bottle and setting it on the plywood. I do not have a good history of being left alone with whiskey.

“Sounds prudent,” I heard myself answer.

He took one of the cups, and we walked across to my office. The room was still too hot, but that was all right. The room was cold, too. Leo eased down into the white plastic chair; I sat on the red swivel, took a sip, felt the fire of the Jack Daniel’s burn its way down my throat.

For a minute, we stared into our coffees. Then I said, “OK, Leo.”

He set his cup on the floor, pushed himself out of his chair, and moved, like an old man with arthritic legs, to the card table. He grasped the typewriter and turned it upside down so that it rested on its platen. Then he unscrewed the little finial bolt on the top of my ridiculous swirled plaster lamp, removed the pleated shade, and aimed the bulb at the bottom of the old Underwood. I stood up. The black paint had been chemically removed from the underside of the front rail.

“I didn’t remove any more paint than was necessary, because I knew where to look,” he said quietly, angling the bulb further so I could see the old metal.

I wanted to turn away.

“As you can see, nothing was left visible to the naked eye.” The metal had been scraped with a bastard file, leaving rough, cross-hatched grooves along the rail. “But she didn’t obliterate it all.” He set down the desk lamp and reached inside his pocket for a photocopy folded lengthwise. He handed it to me.

It was the same cross-hatched pattern of file marks, enlarged enough now so that they looked like slashes from a knife. Mixed in with the cuts was a series of specks, grouped in clusters.

I handed back the sheet. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re showing me, damn it?” I took another pull at the coffee and Jack.

“You’ll see it the way I did,” he snapped. He pulled another photocopy out of his jacket and started to hand it to me.

“No.”

He started to say something, then shrugged and set the sheet on the table next to the Underwood. “I don’t have the equipment or the training for picking trace images off metal. I do know a guy who gets called in on thorny gun registration questions, the ones where someone has filed off a serial number.” He was back to sounding calm, speaking in the almost trancelike voice he used in his lectures to art examiners, but I knew he was struggling for control as hard as I was. “Often, there’s nothing he can do. Occasionally, though, the attempted obliteration was too rushed to totally eliminate what was there, and traces remain, invisible to the naked eye, but not to great magnification.” He looked at me. “I didn’t tell my guy what I was looking for,” he added.

I took another sip of the spiked coffee. It tasted bitter, like death.

“Go on,” I said.

He took the second photocopy from the table. “I asked him to reconstruct what he thought remained,” Leo said, “kind of like connect the dots.” He held it out.

This time I took it.

M F RE NE was scratched in uneven letters on the underside rail in the photocopy.

“You remember when she-?”

I crumpled the photocopy and threw it across the room.

“Dek-”

I reached to touch the bottom rail of the old Underwood. The metal was cold. I kept my hand on it until the metal warmed to my touch.

Of course I remembered.

She asked us, after school, to come with her. “For moral support,” she’d said, smiling mysteriously. We’d go, certainly; Leo and I were weeks past needing any kind of justification to follow her anywhere. So it was, on a gray afternoon in early February, that the three of us marched from Rivertown High to one of the dingy side streets off Thompson Avenue.

She laughed when she stopped us in front of a junk shop. “Behold,” she said, and with a grand wave of her hand, as though she were presenting the crown jewels, she pointed to the old black typewriter in the window, set alongside a weed whacker with a frayed rubber cord, a girl’s faded pink tricycle with a cracked front tire, and a set of chipped floral teacups. “I’m going to write my way out of this town,” she announced as we went in.

The junk shop smelled of mildew and used-up lives. The crafty old character inside told her the old Underwood had been reconditioned, but when he pulled it out of the window and set it on the counter, we could see that all he’d done was turn a hose on it and leave it to dry in the sun. He wanted fifty bucks for it; she offered twenty. Leo and I lounged by a rack of women’s clothes that smelled of sweat and mothballs, high school senior males, clueless but striving for cool, as she and the old man dickered in the gloom. She was golden and blond and blue-eyed, tenacious as a ferret. He was grizzled, big-bellied in a stained undershirt, and had a greasy bald head that looked hardened, like a crustacean’s shell, around a brain that must have been haggling for fifty years. Still, we were betting on her, and we almost applauded when she ended up giving him twenty-six for that old Underwood; her crumpled twenty, four of mine, two of Leo’s. I suspected it was less her willpower that ended it than the old crafty’s recognition that twenty-six was all we were packing, and that there was little chance that anyone else would want that old typewriter. Folks in Rivertown communicated more with whiskey drinks and long-necks than with small words typed on a page.

With our princess between us, Leo and I traded off lugging the old iron back to her father’s apartment above the pinball place. Because we were boys, bent on impressing a girl and supposed to know of things mechanical, we turned it upside down on the kitchen table and slathered it with too much oil from a can some tenant had left under the sink.

She went to a drawer, came back with a fork, M.M.’S FUTURE MACHINE, she scratched on its underside, in scraggly letters. Then she hid it in the back of her closet so her father wouldn’t see it when he came stumbling home, late that night, stinking of whatever was on the skin of the women who worked the men behind the bowling alley.

I crossed the room, picked up and smoothed the photocopy I’d crumpled and thrown, and looked again at the connections Leo’s expert had drawn between the specks, M F RE NE. It wasn’t hard to fill in the rest of the letters: M. M.’S FUTURE MACHINE.

Leo took my cup off the card table, went into the kitchen, and returned with more coffee and Jack. He’d made the mix stronger this time, at least fifty-fifty. He sat by the space heater, I sat back down in my desk chair, and for a little while we said nothing.

Sometime later, his voice came through the whiskey. Except it wasn’t his voice, his adult-Leo voice. It was the voice he’d had when he was in high school, creaking and starting, prone to change pitch without warning. “Can we hope Maris is still alive?” that voice asked.

I drank more and told that voice I didn’t know.