Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Forty-one

“This is crazy,” Leo whispered.

It was the first week of April. Though it was one o’clock in the morning, the night was warm. The moon was cooperating, too, casting just enough light to work.

“This is restorative,” I said in a normal voice.

“Crazy,” he whispered.

“You don’t need to whisper,” I whispered. “No one can see us, down here in the dark, and the trucks on the overpass will drown out what we’re doing.”

He scraped in silence for a moment and dropped another piece into his plastic bag.

“Couldn’t you have found something else to obsess about while I was recuperating?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like being straight with that Michigan cop, Dillard. You could have told him that Aggert killed Maris, that the Kovacs brothers killed Severs. You could have thrown in that it was Aggert who beat me up.”

I shifted onto my good leg. I’d been lucky. The break in my ankle had been clean. Even with a walking cast, though, it still hurt.

“Could you identify Aggert from a photograph?” I asked, dropping a particularly fine piece into my own bag. “Do you think they’d pick him up, based on your recollection that your assailant smelled fresh, and my assurance that Aggert’s a known breath mint user?”

“What about the Kovacs brothers?”

“Same thing. I can’t identify them. My eyes were taped shut.”

“You know what I mean.” Another piece fell into his plastic bag.

“You know what I mean, too. I don’t just want Aggert picked up. And I don’t just want him tried.”

“It’s been days, Dek. You’ve heard nothing.”

“Work.” I peeled away another sheet.

“Aggert could come back at you,” Leo said, which was what he’d really been talking about the whole time. “He broke into the turret a couple of times before that night he beat me up.”

“It’s worth the risk. Besides, he thinks I mailed him that key.”

“By now he knows better. He knows you set the Kovacs brothers on him. He’s got to want to kill you.”

“Maybe he thinks I’ve already tipped the cops.”

“Maybe Aggert’s been too busy fleeing the Kovacs brothers.”

I turned toward his place in the dark. “I want Aggert to run, like Maris ran. I want him to know fear, to jump at every little whisper in the night, like she must have, for all those years.”

“For most of her life, Maris was running from Rivertown.”

I leaned against the old wood, to give my ankle a rest. “Maris trusted Aggert, and he killed her. For that, I want him to run from the Kovacs brothers. Then I want them to catch him.”

Even now, well after the Kovacs brothers had kicked me into a week’s recovery, spent thinking, in bed, I startled myself by how certain I sounded, saying I wanted a man dead.

“How much of this is about punishing Herman Mays?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.

Leo stopped scraping. “You can’t always put everything right, Dek.”

“We’re putting something right, this very minute.”

His breath quickened beside me, and I knew he was fighting a laugh. “Well, yes, there’s this…” He lost it then and laughed the longest he’d laughed since Aggert had beaten him.

“Why can’t Rivertown, tank town though it maybe, have its inviolate monuments, like Chicago and New York and”-I paused, grasping-”Pittsburgh?”

“But this, this is only-”

“Shush,” I said, not for the noise, but for the disrespect.

“Pittsburgh? Name a monument in Pittsburgh.”

“Don’t have to,” I said, working the broad, dull blade. The garbage bag next to me crinkled as I felt for the opening to drop another piece in. “The point is, every town’s got its monuments, places that must be maintained and cherished.”

“We’re defacing.”

“We’re restoring.”

“Speaking of restoring-”

“One project at a time,” I said, cutting him off.

“Have you talked?”

“Only after you called her to tell her I’d been roughed up. She wanted to come right over. I, being a hero, said my wounds were superficial. She said she was thinking of going to Paris, get a head start on an art book she was researching. I said she should go.”

“And?”

“I told her I loved her, as an adult.”

“And?”

“She said to call when I was ready to bury Maris.” I leaned into my work, and a piece the size of a road map lifted away. “I can feel your lips smiling. Keep scraping.”

We worked, then, in silence. By four in the morning, the touch of our fingers told us it was done. We dragged the garbage bags, heavy from the rubber content, over to the trash receptacles and were gone.

We’d agreed we’d wait until noon, but he was outside the turret, in the Porsche, idling, at quarter to eleven. I knew him well enough to know he’d show up an hour early. He knew me well enough to know I’d be ready and waiting. Juvenile minds, no matter what their ages, often think in perfect synchrony.

Word had traveled fast. The dirt and gravel lot under the overpass was filled, and cars were parked all the way back up the road. We left the Porsche a half mile away and hobbled down.

I counted twenty-eight people ahead of us in line, chirping like larks at the wonder in front of them.

“Six hot dogs, one cheese fries, and two lates,” Leo said an hour later, when we finally got to the window.

“Not lates, jerk weed; it’s lah-tays,” Kutz snarled from behind the little opening.

“Whatever, Mr. Kutz.”

Kutz bent down to the window. “You shits are here awful early.” Lack of a formal education had never inhibited Kutz from communicating clearly and directly.

“We heard you were renovating,” Leo said, without a hint of a smile. “Looks so much better.”

Kutz’s ferretlike eyes glistened, but that could have been from the grease.

Both Leo and I stepped back a foot to make a show of admiring the old wood trailer. It was once again its peeling, graying white, except for the hundreds of bits of purple latex that still clung to the wood like lavender corn plasters pasted on old skin. I hoped the wind would blow them off soon, so that the restoration would be complete.

Kutz pushed the plastic tray through the opening. Leo frowned at the not-steaming coffee and took a sip.

“Careful of that; it’s lukewarm,” Kutz said, through the window.

“This is your regular coffee, Kutz,” Leo said. “Weak and burned as always.”

“That whip cream shit was too expensive; I cut it out. It’s still a lahtay, just without the cream.”

“You charged us eight bucks for two cups of your same old dishwater?”

“I figure you shits are just after the caffeine, being as you might not have gotten much sleep last night.” His beady eyes moved from Leo’s face to mine. “And I figure you want everything the way it used to be, right down to the lousy coffee.”

Leo gave him the barest of smiles and took the tray from the counter.

The picnic tables around back were full. Fifty more people were eating standing up, like guests at a large garden party. It might have been my need for self-congratulation, but they all looked like they were enjoying a world once again made right.

We found an open place by the back of the trailer, set our tray on the ground-genetically imprinted to survive, most ants seem to avoid Kutz’s hot dogs-and began to eat. Ten feet away, a dozen shiny black garbage bags, the exact kind I use, sat neatly twisted shut next to the oil barrel garbage cans. A thirteenth bag had been opened by some disbeliever, its contents made visible. For a time, we enjoyed the expressions of the people who stopped by the open bag as they were leaving, to smile and sometimes finger the torn sheets of rubberized lavender paint that should never have been applied to such a landmark.

I took the last bite of my hot dog. Finally, I let my eyes find the familiar spot on the back of the trailer, visible now, once again.

And saw.

I brushed at my eyes with the back of my free hand, worked my throat to swallow the last of a hot dog instantly turned to a greasy lump.

“Leo.”

He moved closer, to look where I was looking.

“Your heart, another reason why this edifice should never have been painted-” He stopped then, seeing everything. Then he pointed, his voice now hushed. “Wasn’t there just the one…?” He let the question die, because he knew the answer-and the meaning. He dropped his hand.

I moved my fingertips to touch the heart she’d cut in the wood that August day, enclosing her initials and mine. For forever, we’d said, when wonder was new.

But there was a new carving now, cut deeper and much later, too much later. It was a larger heart, surrounding, as though protecting, the outline of the old.

“She was here,” Leo said.

I saw her in my mind, the ghost of a girl on a winter’s day, standing in the snow, cutting with the point of a key, or maybe, like the last time, with an ivory-handled knife that she’d brought along.

I looked away when my imagination began drawing another picture of her, standing outside the turret, thinking, wondering, if she should knock on the door.

She hadn’t. She’d gone away. Like the last time.