Richmond Noir

The Thirteenth Floor by Howard Owen

Monroe Park

Jackson is what you’d call a lackey. He’d been at the paper longer than I had, and he wanted to stay there, which was a problem, because Jackson and I were part of what the new broom apparently meant to sweep clean. We were the Old Guard, and experience wouldn’t get you a cup of coffee around here.

Jackson and I, we’d drunk plenty together, hung out. He’d gone to two of my weddings. But if he had one butt to hang out to dry, and it was mine or his... You get the picture.

I’d been covering the legislature for the last fifteen years. It was a sweet deal, with nobody really watching over me down at the Capitol. More was known than was ever reported. I always thought some of those country boys got themselves elected just so they could come to Richmond and party. And what was said and done at the parties, it was understood, stayed at the parties.

The new broom was being wielded by Hanford. Hanford the Hangman, they called him. Probably still do. He’s a forty-something ex-jarhead and seems to be under the mistaken belief that he stormed Iwo Jima. They’d brought him in from some place where grace is considered a liability. He’s the kind of stiff who’s necessary so the guys at the top, the real money, don’t have to get their hands dirty with firings and demotions and such. He’d been there a month when Jackson called me aside and told me, off the record, that Hanford had informed all the department heads that he wanted them to “work ’em till they drop.”

Maybe Hanford thought I was too old, although he put me on a beat that would wear even a young guy down. Maybe he’s prejudiced against smokers. Or so-called heavy drinkers.

Maybe it was because I flat out refused to slip into our former lieutenant governor’s hospital room and get a damn deathbed story from a poor sap who was dying of AIDS. Who can say?

At any rate, Jackson called me in to tell me there was a reorganization. Night cops. The night police beat.

“I do it to you,” he told me, not quite looking at me with those tired, bloodshot eyes, “or he does it to you, after he fires me.” I appreciated his honesty. And I figured Jackson would probably be gone before me. He made more money. Everybody around that sinking ship knew the bottom line. The publisher’s favorite saying was, “It is what it is,” code for, Shut up and keep rearranging those deck chairs...

So, it was a Friday night. We knew it was Pearl Harbor Day because, in a private e-mail sent to everyone who worked at the paper, from receptionists to pressmen, Hanford reamed out the poor night guy who’d failed to run a story on A1 to that effect.

Around 10:30 I heard, over the cop radio, turned up just loud enough so it didn’t disturb the copy desk watching an NBA game on one of the overhead TVs, that there’d been a shooting at 612 West Franklin.

I stopped playing solitaire on the computer.

“Isn’t that your...?” Sally Velez asked me from the metro desk.

“Yeah,” I said, and was on the elevator in about a minute.

612 West Franklin is the Prestwould, where I was living. It hovers over Monroe Park like a dark angel, casting its twelve-story shadow across the college kids and the homeless. They’d brought a guy down from New York City in the late ’20s to build it. Guess they had what you’d call delusions of grandeur. They finished it just in time for the Great Depression to punch in and end that kind of fairy-tale building. But it’s something. The sick puppy who had the unit across from mine, halfway up, said that if the 9/11 bastards had flown those planes into the Prestwould, they’d have just bounced off and killed a bunch of bums in the park.

The place has a lot of characters in it, but mostly of the midnight-and-magnolias Old Richmond type. The majority of them, to my knowledge, do not pack heat.

I was there in ten minutes. The night photo guy was out covering a fatality on the interstate, so I’d grabbed one of those moron cameras even reporters can use. They’d trained me how to use it the previous week. There wasn’t much crime-scene photography at the legislature, although maybe there should have been.

I saw Gillespie as soon as I got out of the beat-up company Citation and put out the Camel I wasn’t supposed to be smoking in it. He was leaning his fat butt against the patrol car. He’d been a young cop when I was on my first tour as police reporter, more than twenty-five years ago. He recognized me.

“Black,” he said. It wasn’t a greeting, just a confirmation. “I heard they kicked your ass back to the curb. You’ve put on weight.”

I mentioned that he seemed to have cornered the Krispy Kreme market.

He gave me the finger, but otherwise didn’t seem to take offense as we braced ourselves against the wind.

“What happened?” I looked up the side of the building. Most of the lights were out. The residents of the Prestwould were so used to sirens screaming by on Belvidere and Franklin that most of them wouldn’t know what had happened until morning. Only the twelfth floor, the Randolph unit, was lit.

“We got a call from the night security guy,” Gillespie said. “He got a call from some guy on eleven, saying he’d heard gunshots up above him.”

Nobody had really lived in that apartment since Taylor Randolph died in October. Far as anyone knew, her nephew, Mac Constantine, was her only living family, other than her sister Jordan, who the nephew had moved into an adult group home. Said it wouldn’t be safe for Aunt Jordie to be there by herself. He was a jerk, but maybe he was right. The nephew inherited the unit, and he stayed there sometimes. I’d been to one of his parties. I figured he would put it up for sale or just move in permanently, if he could afford to. The Randolphs were Commonwealth Club from way back, knew all the right people, but I knew Taylor had been hard-pressed to pay a four-figure condo fee, assessments, and seven grand a year in property taxes.

I’m renting, thank God.

When they went up, Gillespie and the other two cops, they found the door cracked. Inside, they found the nephew. It was a mess, Gillespie said, and when they let me up, I could see that the carpet looked like somebody had spilled a gallon of cheap Pinot Noir all over it. Pieces of indeterminate matter that probably used to be part of Mac Constantine’s brains speckled the rug and white walls. What was left of his head was, like the rest of him, under a sheet that was getting stained from beneath.

“You don’t wanna see,” Gillespie said before I even asked.

“So where...?”

“We figure the service elevator. Didn’t take the main one, or the guard would have seen him come out. Down there, up the stairs, out the back door. He must have took the gun with him.”

I walked through the rest of the unit. A lot of Taylor’s clothes were still in the closets. A half-empty bottle of Coke sat on the kitchen counter alongside the remains of a half-eaten pack of cheese Nabs.

I got the basics and was back at the paper in another twenty minutes, in time to get something in for the city edition. They even used one of the photos I took.

“Good job,” Sally Velez said to me. “You might have a future in this business.” I gave her the same one-finger salute Gillespie had given me.

I skipped the usual round or three at Penny Lane. Something was bothering me. It was like that piece of meat you realize is wedged between your molars after you’ve eaten a good steak. You know you can’t stop until you find a toothpick.

Next day, I took my morning stroll through the Fan. People were out walking their dogs, raking leaves, doing all the crap people do. Kate and I’d had a town house over near the river, and we’d spend Saturday mornings like that, more or less.

Kate was my most recent wife. She was the one who’d wanted to move to the Prestwould. Said she’d seen it all her life and always imagined what it would be like to live there. We’d only been married eight months when we stumbled on a rare rental unit and did the deed.

I’m not sure Kate understood what she was getting into, marrying me. What might have seemed at least regionally exotic — hearing my stories of state senators acting badly, going to cocktail parties where the governor called me by my first name (he knew the janitors’ first names too) — soon just became a pain in the ass. So did those long nights waiting for me. And then not waiting for me.

I could’ve drunk less, I’m sure. There were times when it would have been hard to have drunk more, and she wasn’t the only one that was guilty of tippy-toeing outside the sacred bonds. Like our charming city’s teenage drug desperadoes, who seem to believe that thinking might hamper their nerve or their aim, I have been known to not properly consider the consequences of my actions.

Because she’s a lawyer headed for partner and I’m a half-assed, broken-down political writer turned night-cops reporter, she hasn’t been busting my chops. I don’t even think she hates me. Maybe she just sees me as a youthful indiscretion, something she can learn from and get over.

She surprised me by moving out of the Prestwould herself instead of telling me to. Said the place was pretty much ruined for her. It isn’t exactly growing on me either, but it’s a roof, at least until I can’t make rent anymore.

The ten-incher I did on Mac Constantine’s murder was on A1. Couple of black guys get gunned down in the East End and it’s B6, maybe B1 if it’s a slow news day. But Mac Constantine was rich and white. Since Taylor Randolph was descended from two presidents, I suppose Mac was too. And he had been on the city council.

At the end of my daily constitutional, I waded my way through the TV trucks and a couple of dozen reporters and cameramen who weren’t allowed inside the Prestwould. They were waylaying every elderly citizen who tried to get past them and into the building. Good thing we have security guards. A couple of the TV folk, trying to save their well-tended hair from the wind that was bringing in the season’s first real cold front, recognized me and begged to be let inside. I made sure the door closed all the way.

When I got up to the twelfth floor, I saw they’d padlocked the door and sealed it off with yellow crime tape. As I went through the door separating the lobby from the back stairs and turned a corner, though, I saw that Gillespie was the same fiend for detail he’d always been. The back door, the one that opened into Taylor Randolph’s kitchen, was untouched, even though they must have gone out that way the night before to check on the service elevator I was standing alongside. The door was locked, but Taylor had entrusted me with a key. I think she’d given one to half a dozen other residents, just in case she needed help. She worried a lot, about her health and about Jordie.

Jordie wasn’t quite right. One day, after I’d helped move some furniture, Taylor told me, over Scotch, cheese, and crackers, that she was afraid of what might happen to her sister if she, Taylor, went first. She didn’t expect that, but she was still worried. Her nephew and heir had promised to take care of Jordie, but Taylor frowned when she said it.

Jordie was pretty much given the run of the Prestwould. She was close to eighty, I guess, about five years older than Taylor. They both had snow-white hair, although Jordie was fond of wearing a black wig that scared small children. Both seemed like they’d live to be a hundred. You never knew when you might suddenly run into Jordie, riding the elevator or walking from room to room in the basement, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes perfectly sane. The sisters had never married, and everyone said Taylor gave up everything to take care of Jordie, who’d started hearing those little voices when she was still in her teens. A combination of pills, Taylor, money, and an occasional visit to rest at Tucker’s had kept her among the uninstitutionalized. At least until Taylor’s heart suddenly gave out one Sunday morning.

I wasn’t there when they took Jordie away, and was glad I wasn’t, from what I heard. Jordie did not go gently into that good night of the adult home. Mac Constantine reportedly said that it was the only solution, that he wouldn’t be able to take care of her, not even if he moved in with her. Evidently, Taylor hadn’t made her wishes specific enough in her will to ensure that one of the last two surviving members of her old and tapped-out family did right by the other.

Jordie was, to say it plain, thrown out like bad meat.

I let myself in through the back door. Everything was pretty much the way it had been left the night before, including Mac Constantine’s blood on the Turkish carpet, a dark brown Rorschach blot no rug cleaner was ever going to remove. The radiator was doing its usual version of the Anvil Chorus and filling the room with heat that smelled like rusty metal.

It didn’t take long to confirm what I thought I’d seen the night before. Take a few memories, stir in a flash of color you glimpse from the corner of your eye, add one phone call. I guess you couldn’t really fault Gillespie, sap that he is, for not knowing what he couldn’t have known. Although I’d have plenty to blame him for later.

When I got to work, Jackson wanted to know where the hell I’d been and what was I doing about the Mac Constantine murder. It was all over TV, perfect for the good-hair people to get all breathless about, even if they didn’t know shit.

I’d checked in with Gillespie and confirmed that the cops were grilling just about anybody who’d gone to one of Mac Constantine’s parties. They’d been the talk of the Prestwould since he’d started staying there on occasion. There were some good leads, although so far everyone seemed to have a solid alibi. Constantine was a collector. What he collected was enemies. There had been a couple of fights, because that’s what Constantine apparently did when he had too much to drink. Hell, that’s why he wasn’t on city council anymore. Nobody who watched council meetings on public access TV would ever forget the night he came straight to a meeting from the lounge at the Jefferson Hotel and wound up duking it out with one of his constituents. The constituent, who’d had truth on his side, had accused Constantine of being the hired boy of a developer trying to turn a block of Jackson Ward into high-rise condos.

“I’ll have something for the first edition,” I told Jackson, then advised him I might have something better for the metro. When he asked me what, I told him to wait for it. “You know,” he said, “it’s crap like that, knowing stuff and not writing it, that got your ass put on the police beat.” If it hadn’t been that, I told him, it would have been something else. And walked back to my desk.

The newsroom seems like it’s running on low power these days, and it isn’t just that you can’t make as much noise with a computer keyboard as you could with a typewriter, or that half the editors have wires coming from their ears so they can listen to music and not be bothered by such irritants as conversation. It’s more than that, more than the weak-ass lighting suitable to computer moles but not to actual life on planet Earth. The problem is, despite the directives that we should be a twenty-four-hour-a-day news source, there just aren’t as many bodies. Revenue is down, so expenses (meaning reporters and other such frivolities) have to be down too. Nobody admits to a hiring freeze, but there are icicles on the ceiling.

I saw Hanford hanging over the shoulder of one of the page designers. The headline read, WHO KILLED MAC CONSTANTINE? “Yeah,” Hanford said, slapping his thigh the way you would if somebody told you the funniest joke in the world. “Yeah. That’ll sell some damn papers.”

Maybe, I thought, you’ll have to rip that up before the night’s done.

The moon was rising pale as a frozen ghost over the Hotel John Marshall when Gillespie picked me up in front of the Times-Dispatch building. It was almost 9, and my first story, the one that would hold a spot until later, had already cleared customs with the copy desk.

“This,” said Gillespie, who didn’t even know what a clichéwas, “had better be good.” We turned on 4th Street and then west on Grace. At the Belvidere stoplight, I looked up and thought I saw what I was looking for, barely visible from down below. Gillespie parked his cruiser in the loading zone in front of the Prestwould, and we went in.

Like Jackson, he wanted to play Twenty Questions, but I wasn’t saying anything until we got up there. Gillespie was panting just from climbing up the front steps, the wind nipping at our heels. I was thankful the elevator was working.

When we stepped out on twelve, I finally told him what I was thinking, and about what I’d seen from his car. “You won’t need it,” I said as he reached for his Glock.

“Let me be the judge of that.”

I led him through to the hallway where the service elevator was, and he actually seemed surprised to see there was a back door, which I unlocked with Taylor’s key.

“I hope you haven’t been snooping in here, compromising a crime scene,” Gillespie said.

I didn’t grace him with an answer.

It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad. The Nabs were still on the kitchen counter, and you could follow the trail of orange into the utility room. It used to be a maid’s room, back when everybody at the Prestwould had live-in help. Taylor had used it mostly for storage. Where the maid’s postage-stamp toilet had been, there was now a closet.

I walked over to the closet and opened the door. The ladder was still there, the way I remembered it the time Taylor showed me.

“How the hell am I supposed to get through that?” Gillespie asked me, looking up at the two-by-two covering.

“Don’t worry your fat butt. There’s an easier way.”

I led him back through the kitchen door, then another that led to the back stairwell. We climbed it and came to the locked door leading to the roof, Gillespie breathing hard. The building manager always had the key, and I had tipped him pretty well at Christmas. When I’d stopped by to see him earlier that afternoon, he remembered my generosity.

“Thirteenth floor,” I said as I worked the key. The terrace. That’s what they called it whenever somebody, usually a newcomer, would have the bright idea of putting a swimming pool or a garden up there. The old-timers would have to explain to the sap about the cost involved, plus damage to a roof that already leaked like a sieve whenever we had a tropical storm.

“Remember,” I told Gillespie, “no gunplay.” He grunted and I pushed the door open.

You could see why anyone would’ve wanted a garden or something up there. Under the full moon, the downtown buildings were outlined in lights for the holidays. Richmond may have showed its age spots and wrinkles in the sunshine, but the old girl looked good at night in December. Directly below and across West Franklin, Monroe Park’s lights winked up at us. It would have been a pretty place to have a bourbon or two on a summer night and put the day in a sleeper hold.

I wasn’t much in the mood for sightseeing, though. For one thing, it was cold as a gravedigger’s ass.

We tiptoed across the roof like it was a minefield. I couldn’t swear we wouldn’t hit a soft spot and fall through. Gillespie had his flashlight, and I glimpsed the rectangular shape I’d remembered, off to the east side. It was a kind of half-assed tool shed, built for who the hell knows what. A sliver of light, which I’d seen ten minutes ago from Gillespie’s car, leaked out of it.

We were walking on a bed of loose rocks and couldn’t have slipped up on a deaf man. We weren’t more than five feet from the shed when the door opened suddenly. I heard Gillespie grunt and jump.

Jordie Randolph had never been a beauty. I’ve seen pictures. Now, she couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, and her eyes were like a couple of holes somebody had burned into a silk tablecloth. She was in the same shabby bathrobe that had been her preferred garb around the Prestwould. The black wig was slightly askew. She’d tried, for some reason, to put on lipstick in the recent past, with unfortunate results. Under better circumstances, it might have been comical.

She didn’t say a word, didn’t seem even to recognize me.

I said, “Jordie—”

“Put your hands in the air! Get down on the ground! Now!” Gillespie was kneeling as he shouted. He had dropped the flashlight and held his Glock with both hands, the way he’d been taught. In the moonlight, I could see that he was shaking.

I think I said, “Gillespie, don’t,” believing I could convince him that an addled eighty-year-old woman armed with a pack of Nabs didn’t need the full monty.

Jordie looked from Gillespie to me and back again. She didn’t seem at all fazed by the Glock.

“It’s okay, Jordie,” I said, holding my palms up, approaching her an inch at a time with all the caution I would have given a wild, cornered animal. “It’s okay. We just want to help you.”

She did something peculiar then. At first I thought she was crying, but then I realized otherwise. Jordie was not prone to laugh, or even smile, but she was laughing now. When she spoke — “Mac’s dead” — she sounded as sane as I’d ever heard her. “He’s dead.” She wiped her nose and tried to quell a giggle.

I glanced at Gillespie, whose shake had subsided.

“Put your hands in the air!” he repeated.

Before I could do any more brilliant negotiating, Jordie sealed the deal. She raised both hands in the air as instructed, still holding the Nabs. Then she turned her back to us. She was two steps from the side of the building. As a cold gust of wind hit us from the north, she started moving.

Nobody said anything else.

She took three steps, spreading her upraised arms like she thought she might just float down. Before I had time to move, she was, as Gillespie had requested, on the ground. More specifically, she was splattered on top of Bert Campbell’s Cadillac DeVille in the parking lot below, a dark spot we could barely make out, with little lines trickling from it.

“You stupid son of a bitch!” I screamed at Gillespie, and for a moment thought he was going to shoot me. I’m pretty sure I took a swing at him. I must have missed.

“She might’ve been armed,” was what he kept saying, all the way down the elevator.

The next morning, I woke late from a very bad dream. I’d given Jackson his write-through for the metro, then set a personal record by eschewing Penny Lane’s alcoholic charms two nights in a row. When I picked up the paper outside my door, I saw the picture of Jordie Randolph splayed across the top of the Cadillac. It took up five columns. The headline read: KILLER’S REMORSE? They had to put the question mark on the end because at that point they could only assume.

It wouldn’t take long, though, for one of Gillespie’s sharp-eyed associates to find the gun, half-buried in the rocks on the Prestwould’s rooftop, like I figured they would.

One call to the New Horizons Adult Home the morning after Mac Constantine’s murder was all it’d taken to find out that Jordie had disappeared two days earlier. By the time they got around to calling her next-of-kin nephew, he wasn’t up to answering the phone, being dead at the time. New Horizons wasn’t much on doing follow-up calls, apparently.

What I figure is this: Jordie still had her keys to the apartment. She came back and got in through the basement door, something the building’s surveillance tape would show as soon as somebody bothered to look at it.

Maybe Constantine wasn’t there when she entered the apartment. Maybe he came home later and she hid. I’m thinking he misjudged his aunt. He probably thought that because she was seriously deranged she also was retarded. But I knew Jordie was able to use a gun. Taylor told me once that their father had taken both girls to firing ranges when they were in their teens and made sure they knew how to shoot. Taylor had kept a gun around the apartment, and one time, years ago, Jordie supposedly got hold of it and threatened to shoot herself over some imagined wrong. Taylor talked her out of it.

Everyone knew Mac Constantine carried a pistol. The one party I’d been to at his Prestwould unit, I was appalled to see that he left it sitting on the kitchen table, like it somehow showed what a tough guy he was. He was just the kind of moron to leave it loaded too.

Maybe Jordie hid in the maid’s room when she heard the door open that night. Maybe she had the gun already. Maybe, when Mac Constantine turned around and saw her, just before he ruined Taylor’s rug with his brains, he didn’t take her seriously. Maybe he laughed.

It was the Nabs that had tipped me off.

When I saw those orange crumbs on the floor and that half-eaten pack sitting on the kitchen counter, I knew Jordie had been there. It was the only thing she seemed to care about eating much of the time, and Taylor kept boxes of them around. It wasn’t like a healthy diet was Jordie Randolph’s biggest worry. And it wasn’t like Mac Constantine to be munching on Nabs. He was more of a foie gras kind of guy.

After she did it, she probably panicked and retreated to the utility room and then, later, up the ladder in the closet to the tool shed on the roof. One time, the first couple of months Kate and I lived there, she’d disappeared for two days, and that’s where they found her, living on Nabs and rainwater.

Next morning, Hanford sent word down, via Jackson, that he wanted a tick-tock piece a.s.a.p., telling everything from the history of the Randolphs to Mac Constantine’s demise, which he saw as the final chapter in another fucked-up Southern family’s spiral to oblivion. He actually used that phrase, which was pretty poetic for Hanford. I saw it as a major invasion of privacy. And the last straw. I went to the fourth floor and told Hanford this, suggesting also that he commit an act of self-gratification. He seemed happy that he didn’t have to fire me. That afternoon I walked over to police headquarters and tried to get Gillespie back walking a beat. They listened politely for a while, then not so politely showed me the door. Jordie Randolph didn’t deserve to have it end the way it did, but you don’t always get what you deserve. Gillespie sure didn’t.

Back home in the Prestwould, I called Kate for the first time since she left.

“What are you going to do?” she asked me after the requisite pregnant pause. She sounded worried. I really don’t think she hates me.

“I haven’t decided,” I told her, as honest as I could be. “I’m not sweating it though. A guy like me, I’ve got plenty of options.”

Mr. Not by Hermine Pinson

Devil’s Half Acre

The Raggedy Ann was almost as tall as Tug, who looked not at the doll but at the hand of the man who had flung it on the couch. The man — Mr. Not, as Tug always referred to him, silently — reached up to pat an imaginary loose strand on his head, then looked around the room, as if to survey his property.

“Where’d you find that?” said Tug’s mother Velma. “And what’s that smell? Ray Harold, I thought you hated Tug having Marguerite. Now you bring him home another doll?”

“Oh, Vee, quit yapping. I got it at a toy shop over on Broad Street. The owner sprays everything to keep it fresh.” Ray Harold tore at the plastic bag the doll was wrapped in. When he had liberated the thing, he smiled a small, mean smile and thrust the doll at the boy.

“Go ahead, take it, Harold. I told you if you acted like a sissy, I’d treat you like one. You’re nine years old. Stop peeing in your bed and maybe I’ll buy you something for big boys.” Ray Harold bent down and stared into Tug’s eyes. The boy stiffened like a miniature soldier at the sour smell of liquor on Mr. Not’s breath, but he picked up Raggedy Ann from the couch.

“Thank you,” said Tug.

“Thank you, Uncle Ray,” corrected Velma. “Where’re your manners?”

“Thank you... Mr. Vermeer,” said Tug.

Ray Harold snorted in disgust. “Vee, pour me a drink. I need to sit down and catch my breath. Regina was at it again tonight, threatening to come over here and break all the windows.”

“Why don’t that woman take care of her own household and quit trying to interfere in mine?” said Velma while she poured her longtime lover a glass of Johnnie Walker. “Tug, this is grown folks’ talk. Take your doll to your room. You can watch that new Batman movie I bought you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Tug dragged Raggedy Ann by its stitched foot along the hardwood floor. He propped it in a child-size chair in the farthest corner of his bedroom, then inserted The Dark Knight into his DVD player and undressed for bed. He kept the sound low, so he could listen to the voices at the other end of the hall. Whenever Mr. Not came around, it was always the same routine. Tug, go play. Tug, go to your room. Tug, go downstairs. Tug, go next door. His mother had wanted him to call his godfather Uncle Ray, but Tug refused to call him anything to his face when he could get away with it, and when he couldn’t, he called him Mr. Vermeer. The name sounded to Tug like a cat howling to be let in at night. Vermeer. He thought it suited the man whose very presence in the house on East Leigh Street spoke no and not.

Ordinarily, Tug would become engrossed quickly in a movie, but he couldn’t concentrate with Mr. Not there. He never knew what was going to happen. Mr. Not changed the way his mother acted. When she wasn’t at work in the dining room office downstairs, she spent time doing things with Tug, playing checkers, playing cards, reading to him, taking him skateboarding. But whenever Mr. Not was in the house, her voice changed from being calm and almost musical to sounding whiny and high-pitched. Sometimes, when Mr. Not was around, she even called Tug “Harold,” despite the fact that she’d given him the nickname herself.

“Shhh,” Tug said to Marguerite. She was a bisque brown porcelain doll in a gingham dress, and he held her close to his chest and tiptoed to his hiding place behind the window drapery on the second-floor landing, midway down the hall from his bedroom. It was an excellent place to listen to his mother and Mr. Not...

Velma went to the refrigerator, removed a can of beer, and sat down at the kitchen table.

“Regina says she wants you and Harold out of this house by the end of the summer,” said Ray Harold, already on his third drink.

“I never asked to live here. I never did. I used to think you put me and Tug in this house because you loved me, but I now think it was just cheaper than paying rent on an apartment.” Velma popped the can’s top for punctuation.

“This house is the property of the Vermeer family. We have owned it—”

“For over fifty years,” finished Velma, wiping beer foam from her lip. “I know.” She glared at Ray Harold, then she laughed.

“The thing about you, Velma? You don’t have any class!”

“No, Ray Harold, I don’t. I wasn’t born the illegitimate great-great-grandson of a Confederate captain. I didn’t graduate from Hampton University. I didn’t grow up on Quality Row. And my grandfather didn’t work for Charles T. Russell, the famous black architect.” Velma sat down and faced him across the table. “I don’t have any class, but I do have you, may God have mercy on my soul!” She stood up again. “I’m tired and I’m going to bed. I want to take Tug skateboarding tomorrow, and later on I have some paperwork to do... for you!” She turned off the kitchen light and climbed the stairs to the master bedroom.

“For me,” said Ray Harold. “That’s right. The cancellation of that bid to renovate the Eggleston. And make sure you do it correctly.” He sighed and stared into the bottom of his empty glass.

“Don’t you worry about it. I always do,” replied Velma from the top of the stairs, dragging out the last three words to register her disgust.

Ray Harold was now climbing the stairs behind her. “Yes, you always do, you always do. But in return I let you live here in luxury. I paid for this house—”

“And now I’m paying for it.” Velma moved around her bedroom, finally settling at the vanity to wipe off her makeup.

“Don’t start that shit!” barked Ray Harold, stomping into the room.

“Start what? I don’t know how you treat Regina. I only know how you treat me. And sometimes it takes me months to recover from your brand of loving.” She rubbed her jaw as she checked her reflection in the mirror.

“Then why do you stay?” Strolling over to his mistress, he massaged her neck and shoulders with a gentleness that also declared his ownership.

“Good question.”

“Baby, let’s not fight. I’m going to go home soon and get this mess straightened out.”

“Uh-huh.”

Except for the rustle of sheets and some low groans of pleasure, things were quiet now. Tug guessed they had made up, so he tiptoed back to his room. He left the DVD playing and got into bed, holding his hand over Marguerite’s mouth to keep her from screaming out, Go home, Mr. Not! It took awhile before he fell asleep.

In his sleigh bed, Tug flew in living color. He was Mr. Spock looking down at a huge bright planet from his starship in space, a great wizard scanning a shining magic world below. He swooped down and surveyed blue pinetops and green grass that grew into a thick jungle right before his eyes. Then, as he floated in the quiet of dreamtime, clouds started to gather behind and above him, below him, all around him, and the air took on a strange smell with the sweetness of synthesized flowers. Uh oh! Was that a zig-zag? Was the Sandman near? The phone rang. Tug could see Mr. Not’s clown face and smeary smile when he talked. “Regina, I told you to stop calling here. I’ll see you when I get home.” Then Batman sat on Tug’s bed. I see what I have to become to stop men like him.

Tug woke to the feeling of a draft on his bottom. The odor of pee and sweat and sleep stuck in his nose. He got up and stripped the sheets from his bed.

When his mother met him coming out of his room, Tug didn’t bother telling her how the zig-zags had wrapped around his legs and squeezed his stomach until he had to land, and she didn’t ask him why he’d wet the bed again. She took the soggy sheets from him.

“Your breakfast is ready, Tug,” she said as she headed to the washing machine in the basement.

“Can we still go to the cemetery?” he called after her, afraid she might not allow him to go skateboarding in the parking lot anymore.

“I don’t see why not,” she answered, her voice calm and even.

Nearly every weekend in good weather, the two of them, and Marguerite, made the trip to the cemetery parking lot on 15th and Broad. Tug’s mother told him it was a sacred space where the ancestors slept below the streets.

“Will they ever wake up?” he’d asked her once.

“Not till Judgment Day, I expect, but they won’t hurt us. This place is special, because most all the people buried under here lived way back, during slavery. Gabriel the Blacksmith is buried here, and he led a slave revolt two hundred years ago. They caught him and hung him on the gallows, but he was a hero to the people.”

“We’re not slaves, Mommy.”

“No, Tug, we’re free, we’ve been free for over 140 years now.”

“Then why does Mr. Not try to own you?”

His mother opened her mouth, then shut it again. “Your godfather loves us, honey. If he seems a little gruff, that’s just his way. I love your... him, maybe too much,” she finally said.

“Gabriel was a blacksmith? Does that mean he worked in a forge, like the black god you showed me in that big book on Africa?” “Like Ogun,” said Tug’s mother, surprised he remembered their conversation about the Yoruba god.

“Yeah, Ogun was a god and a ninja too.” Tug thought of the comics he read at night in bed with Marguerite by his side.

According to their usual Saturday routine, Tug helped his mother make the beds, dust, restack magazines, place books back on their shelves. He did it not simply because it meant they would get to the parking lot sooner, but also because he liked being in the house with nice furniture, clean linen. He enjoyed the rhythms of domesticity.

Skateboarding was the only outdoor activity Tug enjoyed. He looked forward to sailing over the concrete, arms out, knees bent, with open space and no cars to dodge, while his mother and Marguerite watched him fly. Somehow knowing that the parking lot was also a cemetery comforted him. His mother once told him that ever since he was three years old, he’d always had a special affinity for graveyards, turning to look and point whenever they passed one in a car. Now he imagined the graves as a city below the ground, with Gabriel Ogun presiding.

As they were finally preparing to leave for the parking lot, Tug heard the front door open and close. Mr. Not was back. He didn’t usually come around until nighttime.

“Vee, I have to talk to you. Regina threw my clothes and my good shoes outside this morning, and now she’s threatening to come over here and run you out of this house. Harold, go and play while I talk to your mama. And take your sissy doll with you.” Mr. Not grabbed Marguerite and flung her at the boy.

“Go on, it’s okay,” said Tug’s mother. “When we finish discussing business, I’ll take you to the parking lot. Okay?”

Tug backed out the door with his eyes fixed on Mr. Not.

He went and sat in the swing, humming to Marguerite and rubbing her back the way his mother sometimes affectionately rubbed his.

“Go ahead, Marguerite, you can hum too. I lost you last night when I hit the zig-zags. Next time, hold my hand tight, so the Sandman and the zig-zags won’t get us.” Tug had brought his skateboard and backpack with him, and now he rolled the board underfoot back and forth.

He continued to hum while he listened to the escalating discussion in the kitchen. Suddenly, his song was interrupted by the Raggedy Ann doll sailing out the back door, head first, landing in a heap on the ground. The doll had lost its green cap and lay there with legs splayed, its smiling face kissing the grass. Tug left the swing and walked past Raggedy Ann to see who had thrown it out. At first, he thought it was Glenda the Good Witch, but when she said his name he realized it had been his mother. With her silk dressing gown streaming behind her, she strode over to Tug and grabbed him by the hand. Tendrils of hair had come loose from her long ponytail.

“I’m going to bring you next door to Mrs. Richardson’s house, and you stay there until I come get you.”

“But you said you were going to take me skateboarding.”

“I am, I will, but just wait there until I come get you.”

Mrs. Richardson was accustomed to her friend and neighbor Velma Holloway sometimes arriving unannounced with her son. Tug’s mother told him to sit down in the family room, then walked with Mrs. Richardson into the kitchen. When they returned from their brief conference, his mother said, “You mind Mrs. Richardson. I’ll be back in a few minutes, then we’ll go to the parking lot. Let me go get my business straight. Thanks, Betty.”

Tug folded his arms and looked away when she tried to kiss his cheek. After she left, Mrs. Richardson inserted a DVD of Tug’s favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz. “Call me when it gets to the part with the lollipop kids. That cracks me up,” she said. Then she returned to the kitchen to finish chopping vegetables while listening to Smokey Robinson croon, “Ooo baby, babeee... I did you wrong,” on Power 92, oldies-but-goodies radio.

The witch’s feet shriveled up and disappeared under the house, but Tug wasn’t thrilled the way he usually was. “Marguerite, do you think Mr. Not’s going to make Mommy cry again?” He looked around for Marguerite, only to realize he’d left her and the skateboard by the swing.

Going out the side door, Tug ran from Mrs. Richardson’s yard directly into his own. There was no fence dividing the two row houses. He gently lifted Marguerite and patted her head.

“I didn’t mean to leave you. It’s just that Mommy was rushing me.” As he turned to go back the way he came, Tug heard raised voices from the second floor of his house.

With Marguerite in tow, he ran inside and crept up the carpeted stairs. He walked past the bathroom and glimpsed Mr. Not shaving at the mirror that hung over the sink. Then Tug rounded the corner and saw his mother sitting on her bed, arms crossed, smoking a cigarette. He took a few quiet steps back and watched as Mr. Not turned his head at odd angles, like a bird trying to see behind itself, as he delicately pressed blade to skin to get the last bit of stubble from his lower jaw. Silence had overtaken the bickering couple. Tug thought he heard the faint music of an ice cream truck, but didn’t run to his mother. He went and hid with Marguerite behind the long velvet drapes on the second-floor landing, where he could observe. He listened for something he could not know he was listening for, a prelude to a kind of dance. Velma’s shaking foot kept time...

Ray Harold Vermeer studied himself in the mirror, touched a hand to his temple. The phone rang and Velma got up to see who was calling; when she saw Betty Richardson’s number on the caller ID she didn’t answer, but let it go to voice mail.

“Vee, I swear, Regina’s just bluffing.”

Velma placed her cigarette in the ashtray, rose from the bed, and walked toward the bathroom, as if she had been summoned. “Then why did you come over here this morning? You say this is my house, but when you and Regina argue, she threatens to fly on over here and act a fool, same way she did the time we moved in, calling me a slut in front of my neighbors.” Pulling another cigarette and matches out of her robe, Velma lit up with trembling hands.

“Will you forget about her for one minute! Why can’t we just spend a little time together like we used to before Harold came into the picture and Regina went on the warpath? Take off that bathrobe. Daddy wants to show you something when he comes out the bathroom.”

“Ray Harold, I’m tired of you thinking you can show up here any time you feel like it and disrupt my plans, just so you can get some and then go on about your business.”

“Hey, wait a minute. I didn’t come here just to bed you, woman. I got good news!” Ray met Velma in the hall and stood there in his undershirt. The phone rang again. Neither made a move to answer, until finally Velma could stand it no longer. She went and picked up the receiver.

“Regina, stop calling my house.” She listened. “Well, bring it on, then!” She slammed the phone down. “That’s it. We’re moving! As soon as I can get my things together, me and my son are leaving this house. I don’t care if it’s in the historical register, it’s never going to be mine!”

“Wait a minute, Vee. Look, I was going to surprise you, but I guess I’ll go on and tell you. I think we’re close to getting a contract to start work. You remember I told you the mayor knew my daddy and my granddaddy? Well, he put me in touch with some people I need to know. People who matter. I want you to be cool until I get this contract on the old Hippodrome. Vee, we’re going to—”

“Ray Harold.” She called his name as if it were a command to be quiet. “I’m not interested. When are you going to acknowledge to everyone, including Tug, that he is a Vermeer, that he is your son, your only son? And when are you going to stop belittling him? I’m tired of being laughed at by my enemies, pitied by my friends, and scorned by my family, all because I haven’t figured out how to leave you.” Velma walked past Ray Harold and into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

Ray Harold banged on it.

“Velma, come on out so we can talk this over. I don’t have much time before—” “Before what?” said Velma through the closed door.

“Before you have to go home to that witch? You know, I used to be impressed with you, how you were a man of position in the community, one of the top black contractors in Richmond and from a good family. I didn’t think you wasn’t honorable the time one of your schemes to be a major player in the renovation of down-town fell through.” Velma opened the door to the bathroom with tears in her eyes. “You remember that night? You buried your head in my lap and cried like a baby. I had a boyfriend who wanted to marry me, but I gave him up for you, and when I had your son, you didn’t even claim him until you saw he looked just like you. That’s when you moved us into your daddy’s house. Your daddy’s house. This isn’t my house or yours!”

Ray Harold slapped Velma so hard she stumbled backward into the bathroom. He followed her inside and shut the door.

Why did they go in there? What are they doing? Tug couldn’t see them, so he left his position on the landing and lay on his side in the hallway inhaling dust as he peered under the door. Mr. Not’s feet flanked the toilet bowl. His pants aren’t falling around his legs like mine do when I’m sitting down so he must not be using it. What’s he doing? A few inches away, his mother’s feet faced the toilet bowl.

“You told me I made you feel brand new. You told me you were getting a divorce. You didn’t tell me I’d have to share you with your wife, and you won’t even tell our son you’re his father, acting like you’re some kind of white man and I’m your concubine.”

Tug bit his underlip till it hurt, then kept biting it.

“You can’t leave well enough alone. I brought you from nothing. You and that little faggot live in a fine house, you wear the best clothes money can buy. You use my credit card and it says Vermeer. People know that boy’s my son. And you know I’m still trying to work things out with Regina so that things can be divided—”

“You go ahead and divide whatever you want to. I’m taking Tug back to Charles City.”

Mr. Not’s shoes tapped the floor three times. The second tap made the fine mahogany floorboards ring as the door rattled and bounced in its frame. Startled, Tug rolled back, then returned to the same spot, desperate to see what was happening. It didn’t occur to him that the door might fly open at any second. All he knew was that he had to get closer to see as much as he could.

“You’re not leaving me or taking my son anywhere!” shouted Mr. Not. Then Tug heard a rattle-bang of flesh against metal. His mother’s feet stumbled, and he moved even closer, sticking his nose as far under the door as he could. He saw two knees on the bathroom floor — hers.

“Ray Harold, please! Don’t do this!”

What’s happening in there? Marguerite, we have to help Mommy! Somebody! Mrs. Richardson! Batman! Gabriel Ogun!

He cried out, “Mommy!” and the door opened suddenly, and sunlight beaming through the stained-glass bathroom window put Mr. Not’s face in deep shadow. He stood with his legs wide apart, his face a mask of anger when he looked down and saw Tug on the floor.

“Go play” — he inhaled all the air around him — “son. Your mama and I have to discuss some things.”

“You’re not my daddy,” said Tug. “You’re Mr. Not!”

“Go play, Tug. It’s all right,” said his mother, but she didn’t look him in his eyes. Instead, she stared at the back of Mr. Not’s head.

Something heavy, a zag, wrapped around Tug’s stomach and squeezed and squeezed and wouldn’t let go until it released itself down his legs. He was awake and the blue zig-zags were marching across his wide-open eyes.

“Go change your underwear, sissy,” said Mr. Not. Then he stepped back into the bathroom and closed the door in Tug’s face. When Tug’s head cleared, he knew the zig-zags were really drops of blood on the tiled floor. He knew Mr. Not wouldn’t disappear under the house like the Wicked Witch. What would Mr. Spock or Batman do? What would Gabriel Ogun do?

Tug grabbed Marguerite and dashed downstairs to the dining room where Mr. Not kept a glass-paned bookcase. Some shelves held books and building models, but on one shelf there was a set of fancy long knives, glinting in their velvet exhibit covers. Tug had always admired them for their beauty. They made the bookcase look royal and mysterious. Tug gazed now at the array of knives, not knowing an East African panga from a Malaysian golok, but he went into the drawer of the antique desk across the room and got the big key and picked a panga from the case.

Holding Marguerite in one hand and the panga in the other, Tug climbed the stairs to the hallway bathroom. Then he set Marguerite on the floor and slowly opened the door. His mother sat with her back pressed against the tub. Mr. Not was kneeling down with his hand wrapped around her silk bathrobe, the one he had given her as a Valentine’s Day gift. Her nose was bleeding, and she was staring at the floor.

Tug heard the rhythm of a hammer crashing down on an anvil with the force of a black god. With both hands on the long knife, Tug raised it high above his head and plunged it deep into Mr. Not’s back. The man straightened with a sharp intake of breath and looked up at the ceiling. He reached behind him to remove the knife, which had pierced his kidney. Then he turned around to face his attacker and peered into Tug’s eyes, but his mouth couldn’t register surprise. Mr. Not had only enough strength left to slump down next to Velma, who did not glance up until he was sitting beside her, leaning his head on her shoulder.

Tug jumped back into the hallway, picked up Marguerite, stuffed her in his backpack, continued out to the swing set, grabbed his skateboard, and ran and ran and ran. He didn’t know where he was headed as he sprinted down East Leigh with its manicured lawns behind wrought-iron fences. When he got to Broad Street, he stopped and just stood there, looking neither left nor right. A wiry man of average height sidled up to him.

“Look lively, son. Where you headed?”

Tug glanced up at the Tin Man. “To the cemetery. I mean, to the parking lot.”

“Well, you’re on the wrong side of the street. Cross here and catch the Riverview or the Churchill bus. That’ll get you where you want to go. What’s your name, son?”

“Harold Holloway. Are you the Tin Man?”

“No, they call me Dumptruck. Be safe, son.” The man smiled him on his way.

Tug caught the Riverview and the driver let him ride without paying a fare. He got off the bus when he recognized 12th Street and Broad and walked the rest of the way to the overpass with the historical marker that told of the exploits of Gabriel the Blacksmith, who was hung on the gallows and buried in the Burial Ground for Negroes. Tug followed the cobblestone path that led to the empty parking lot with numbered spaces and overgrown grass in the medians.

After setting his backpack down, he took Marguerite out and leaned her against some tall weeds. “Marguerite,” he said, “don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t want to.” He jumped on his skateboard and rode it as best he could on the expanse of concrete. He glided back and forth over the blacktop for hours.

The lights of the city started winking on. MCV Medical Center glowed on the hill. Tug wanted to go home. He wanted to see his mother, but didn’t know if she would be angry with him. He remembered once when Mr. Not had slapped her and Tug tried to come between them, his mother had swatted him firmly on his buttocks and sent him to his room with the warning to stay out of grown folks’ business. Where could he go? Back to Mrs. Richardson’s house?

There were places to hide under the old tracks, but he was afraid to go into the dark wooden enclosures that looked like they’d once kept slaves penned up. Tug wanted to be headed home on the Starship Enterprise with Mr. Spock or in the Batmobile with the Dark Knight. He wanted to be in the house on East Leigh Street with his mother, watching Dorothy click her heels. He turned to the stone arch under the freeway. There, the concrete parking lot gave way to dirt. What had his mother told him about those black ancestors who slept below the ground? She had said they wouldn’t hurt him. Gabriel, where are you? Will they hang me on the gallows? Tug found a place under the freeway. Exhausted, with his back against the wall, he sat Marguerite on his lap to comfort her.

The sun shone brightly down on the parking lot. As Tug flew over it, he watched brawny black men and strong black women holding down the Sandman so he couldn’t get away. When Tug drew closer, he saw that it was Mr. Not they all held fast. His face was chalk-white and his lips were smeared in a grotesque smile. Bury him, said Gabriel Ogun.

Yes, said the people, dig a deep hole!

After explaining to the police how Ray Harold Vermeer came to be sitting lifeless on the bathroom floor, Velma enlisted their aid in finding her son. The police questioned people up and down East Leigh Street. The answers they got led them to Broad Street, where they talked to shopkeepers and bystanders, including a little man named Dumptruck, who confirmed Velma’s suspicions. The police drove her out to the Burial Ground for Negroes, where she found Tug under the overpass. With Marguerite sitting beside him, spotless in her gingham gown, the boy was asleep on his knees. In front of him was a hole three feet deep and a foot and a half wide. Tug’s fists were filled with red soil. On his lips were the words of the people:“Bury him deep! Bury him deep!”

The Aprentice by Clint McCown

Hollywood Cemetery

Yes, I understand the gravity of my actions. I’m no idiot. I’m something of a historian, in fact, and I know that history itself is more or less a record of our greatest collective depravities: who did what to whom and for how long. And the desecration I’ve committed — yes, I admit it was a desecration — strikes at the heart of something we in these parts hold dear. This is Richmond, after all, capital of the Confederacy, where history is still a living, breathing animal, with teeth and fangs and a clear sense of identity. And once you start messing with identity, you’re treading on dangerous ground. Eddie sure found that out. He’s the one who put me up to it, by the way.

It wasn’t a political statement, though I’m sure there’ll be reporters who try to turn it into that. But nothing could be further from the truth. I treasure my Southern roots. My family used to be one of the most prominent in the city, having once owned the ironworks factory on the James River during the war. Had Grant’s army not driven my ancestors into exile when the city fell, I might have been a person of some influence in our community. But sometimes the world spins off-kilter. My inheritance was siphoned off by carpetbaggers. As a consequence, I was never allowed to take my rightful place among the aristocracy, and have instead been forced into a series of menial occupations, the most recent being that of a bulldozer’s apprentice. You might think that a family’s reversal of fortune shouldn’t weigh so heavily on a descendant born a century after the fact. But I assure you, the pain is as acute to me as if I’d suffered the loss only yesterday.

My doctor refuses even to acknowledge my fallen state. He says I’ve manufactured a personal family history from the intellectual pieces of my former life. That’s an intriguing tactic on his part, I have to admit. I suspect he has an article in the works and I’m his guinea pig in what he imagines will be some breakthrough form of therapy. But he’s destined for disappointment. I could never disavow my heritage.

My misstep, let’s call it, was no easy chore. Cemeteries have always given me the creeps. But besides that, the place tends to be crowded. Hollywood Cemetery is like the Disney-world of final resting places. It’s in a beautiful spot, up there on that high bluff overlooking the James River. Young lovers picnic there. Artists set up their easels. Photographers prowl around the statuary. Kids climb on the mausoleums. Historians walk the avenues taking notes. I used to do that myself, actually, when I was researching my dissertation. I was writing about the military and political history of the United States in the nineteenth century, so Hollywood Cemetery was the ideal field trip for me. President Monroe is buried there, and President Tyler too. Tyler was the father-in-law of Jefferson Davis, by the way. And there’s General George Pickett, of the infamous Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. He’s buried at the north end of the cemetery, along with eighteen thousand regular Confederate soldiers. J.E.B. Stuart is in Hollywood, and General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee. Twenty-five Confederate generals in all. General Longstreet isn’t there, but three of his children are, killed by the scarlet fever epidemic of 1862. Seven governors of Virginia. And, of course, the proverbial jewel in the crown, President Jefferson Davis himself.

I wish the place weren’t named Hollywood, though. That makes it sound too phony, fake, like it’s a hangout for dead movie stars. But Hollywood Cemetery was a landmark in Richmond long before the first silent films ever came out of that other Hollywood. Maybe that Hollywood was named for this one. In any case, our Hollywood is the greatest Confederate cemetery in the country. Maybe even in the whole world.

As you can probably tell, I’m highly educated. I might have been a renowned scholar but for my accident. Apparently — and I say apparently because I have no memory of the event — I was struck by a car while riding my motor scooter without a helmet. Why a scholar would be on a motor scooter, I haven’t a clue. Motor scooters are undignified — scholars should drive used Volvos. In any case, they say I suffered significant head trauma — something I believe because I do get terrible headaches almost daily.

There was another side effect of the accident that’s been a slight problem. When I came out of the coma, I developed a compulsion to keep talking, even when no one is around, like those people I’ve heard about on the subway trains in New York City. It’s like the accident turned on a faucet in my head and words just keep pouring out all the time, except when I’m on medication. I can’t explain it. As soon as I get a thought, it comes right out of my mouth. So they give me pills to stop the leak. Of course, the bad thing is that whenever I stop taking the pills they find out right away because I can’t keep myself from telling everybody about it. That’s one reason the police know every detail of what I did in the cemetery. I might as well have given them documentary footage.

So, anyway, I know there was an accident, and I know there were consequences.

Much of what they tell me about my condition, however, is untrue. They say I’m given to violent outbursts, but that’s all a matter of perspective. They say I’ve lost certain social skills, that I no longer comprehend the subtleties of human interaction. Yet who among us comprehends our neighbor? They say I don’t make logical connections the way normal people do.

By they, of course, I mean my therapist, Dr. Myles, and sometimes my Uncle Morty. Uncle Morty is a good man, but he’s been duped by Dr. Myles. He believes everything the doctor tells him about me, almost as if he were the doctor’s apprentice. Though Uncle Morty isn’t an apprentice, he’s a general contractor.

I know about apprentices because that’s one field in which I have truly excelled. When I first came to work for my Uncle Morty two years ago — no, wait, it’s been longer than that. Let me think. Seventeen. Yes, that’s it, seventeen years. And in the seventeen years I’ve worked for my Uncle Morty, I’ve been every kind of apprentice you can think of. It was Uncle Morty and Aunt Eileen who took me in after I lost my fellowship at the university. They say they’re my parents, and that’s sweet of them, but I don’t feel comfortable enough to allow them that level of intimacy. Still, Uncle Morty figured out the perfect job for me. He said I could be the company apprentice. It’s almost the same thing as being a student, except you don’t have to write papers or study for tests.

“All you have to do is watch,” he told me. “Watch and learn.” I think we both thought it would help me regain my focus. And we were right.

I started off as a janitor’s apprentice and I stayed at the main building all day. Uncle Morty owns a big construction company, and he has a sheet-metal warehouse where he keeps his heavy equipment. As you might imagine, floors have to be kept clean in a place like that, and my job was to watch Arby the janitor keep everything in order. Just watch and stay out of the way — that was my entire job description, and it came straight from Uncle Morty. I did that job pretty well, and after a while I got promoted to groundskeeper’s apprentice. In that job, I had to watch Miguel ride the lawn tractor and patch the driveway and fertilize the grounds. That’s what we called the yard around the building — the grounds. I don’t know why we didn’t call it a yard, because it sure looked like one. I thought about asking Miguel about it once, but I didn’t. Asking questions wasn’t part of my job.

I was an excellent groundskeeper’s apprentice. I stared at Miguel all day long, even on our breaks, which probably made him feel important. Pretty soon Miguel talked to Uncle Morty and the next thing I knew, I was promoted to plumber’s apprentice, watching Big Dan. I watched him like a hawk, or like an owl, maybe, until he went to Uncle Morty and got me another promotion, this time to carpenter’s apprentice with Wilber. I liked working with Wilber because he had the same name as the guy on Mr. Ed, which was a TV show about a talking horse. I liked that show a lot. It proved that anything was possible.

After Wilber I became an electrician’s apprentice for Gus, which I also liked because Gus sounded like a proper name for an electrician. Then I was a mason’s apprentice for a guy whose name I can never remember because I keep thinking his name ought to be Mason, which it isn’t. Then I began to move through my apprenticeships on all the pieces of heavy equipment — the forklift, the backhoe, the grader, and finally, all the way to the top of the apprenticeship mountain, the bulldozer. Basically, they’re all excavators. My favorite is the Cat 312CL because it has an enclosed cab and a mechanical thumb. The enclosed cab makes it less noisy, plus you can keep away from bad weather. But the best part is the mechanical thumb, which is what separates it from an ordinary backhoe. A normal backhoe claws and scoops, but an excavator with a mechanical thumb can actually grab things. The dredger bucket clamps tight around whatever you’re trying to pull up. I don’t know why they call the extra part a thumb, though. To me it’s more like the bottom half of a set of jaws, like on a giant dinosaur. There’s true power in an excavator with jaws like that. It’s a dangerous piece of machinery.

But just because I got shifted around through so many positions in the company, don’t think I couldn’t hold a job. The job was pretty much the same whatever it was, because whatever it was, I was still the apprentice. I watched and I learned, and I stayed out of the way. But at the same time, I was moving up through the ranks. I think Uncle Morty was trying to familiarize me with the whole operation — you know, grooming me to take over the business when he retires. I could do it too. After so many years of apprenticing there, I know how everything works.

Eddie knew how everything worked too. He was site foreman on the cemetery project. I know that was a tough job because I used to be a foreman’s apprentice and I’ve seen how busy things can get.

Uncle Morty was real happy when he first got the cemetery contract, but it turned out to be a nightmare. That’s what I heard him say, that the cemetery project had been a nightmare. One nightmare after another, he said, starting with the retaining wall and ending with Eddie and Aunt Eileen. I don’t know what Aunt Eileen had to do with any of it. She’s not really on the payroll. But she was sure there a lot. She used to come out to watch us on the days Uncle Morty had to be away at other projects, I guess to report back to him on what kind of progress we were making. She and Eddie would eat lunch together behind the chapel, I guess so he could fill her in. It’s not the best spot in the cemetery, as far as getting a good view is concerned. It’s way too overgrown with bushes. I prefer the spot just across from President Tyler. That’s where you get the most picturesque view, and when I look out at the broad stretch of the James below — where it’s too rocky and shallow for boats to navigate — I can almost forget I’m in a cemetery surrounded by skeletons and who knows what other bad things.

The problem with the cemetery was that parts of it were starting to fall away into the river. Erosion. And, of course, a lot of the most important bodies were planted near the edge of the bluff, where big chunks were already starting to crumble away. I don’t know why so many of the famous people got buried near the edge, but that’s how it is. Maybe folks thought they deserved a nice view. Jefferson Davis was a good twenty paces from the edge, which afforded him a few more years of security, in terms of natural processes. But Presidents Monroe and Tyler were in more imminent danger. Tyler was buried barely eight steps from the precipice. One good mudslide and he’d be floating down the James and out to sea, with Monroe only about five steps behind him.

So the city hired Uncle Morty to erect a retaining wall along the bank to keep every body in place. It’s hard to build a wall on the face of so steep a bluff. And even if you get the wall in place, it’ll block the drainage, which increases the weight and makes the problem worse than it was before. What you have to do is drill drainage holes under the graves to allow the excess water a way to escape. And I can tell you, from my time as a driller’s apprentice, that’s one tricky feat of engineering.

It’s risky work too. I almost went over the edge myself one day when I sat on a stack of twenty-foot PVC piping. The stack gave way and about half the pipes rolled over the cliff. Eddie tried to blame me for it, but Uncle Morty said it was Eddie’s own fault for putting the pipes too near the edge and for not keeping an eye on me like he was supposed to. I sided with Uncle Morty in that argument. So it was Eddie’s fault we lost half a day’s work getting the pipes back up to the work site.

The time I didn’t side with Uncle Morty was when he tried to fire Eddie. I know Uncle Morty was under a lot of emotional strain, because Aunt Eileen had just told him she was leaving him for somebody else. That came as a big surprise to me. Things had been peaceful at home, with nobody ever saying anything to anybody, so I’m not sure why Aunt Eileen was so unhappy. In any case, it was understandable that Uncle Morty might have been a little on edge. But Eddie hadn’t done anything wrong all day, everything was going just as smooth as could be, when Uncle Morty drove up in his Cadillac and got out, already mad as I’d ever seen him. He told Eddie he was fired and good luck supporting his new girlfriend without a paycheck. Eddie said he’d file a union grievance and bring the whole project to a standstill. That stopped Uncle Morty on the spot. He paced around for a minute like he was about to explode, and then he said, “Fine, then you’re not fired. But you’re not the foreman anymore.” Then he pointed a finger straight at me. “You work for him now,” he said, and Eddie looked at me with his eyes squinted and his forehead wrinkled.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie asked him.

Uncle Morty got a satisfied look on his face. “From here on out, you’re his apprentice.”

Eddie seemed baffled, and maybe a little angry too. “That moron don’t do shit around here,” he said.

Uncle Morty smiled, but not like he was happy. “You’re free to quit if you don’t like the job,” he said.

That was a proud moment in my life. After years of being everybody else’s apprentice, I finally had an apprentice of my own.

Eddie wasn’t happy about it, though. I still had Ted, the bulldozer operator, to watch, and a bulldozer is a pretty interesting piece of equipment. But all Eddie had to look at was me, and I can tell you I’m not that interesting. I tend not to move much, because watching something closely takes a lot of concentration. That’s what makes me a good apprentice. So Eddie had a pretty dull time of it. At first he complained a lot. He said nobody could treat him like that and get away with it. But after a few days he calmed down, and took on a whole new attitude. He told me dirty jokes and offered me chewing gum and sometimes he’d put his arm around my shoulder like we were golfing buddies. He asked me a lot of questions about my accident — which is not a proper thing for an apprentice to do, but I didn’t correct him. It was kind of nice having somebody take an interest in me. In just a week’s time, I had more conversation with Eddie than I’d had with anybody else in all the years I could remember. And Eddie listened to everything I said, almost like Dr. Myles. Sometimes he even took notes like Dr. Myles, which was certainly flattering. Eddie said he disagreed with most of Dr. Myles’s diagnosis. He didn’t think I was paranoid at all. And he thought it was unfair that Uncle Morty wouldn’t let me run any of the heavy machinery, especially since I’d studied how to operate every type of excavator we had.

One day we took a walk around the old part of the cemetery on a break — sometimes you just need to stretch your legs — and we walked by the black wrought-iron dog near the top of the first hill inside the main entryway. I told him that dog had been made in my family’s ironworks factory before the war. It’s a cute dog, life-sized, and it stands watch over the grave of a little child. Sometimes people leave toys there at the dog’s feet, which is sweet I guess, though not very practical. Anyway, that got me talking about my family’s history. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I was telling Eddie about the loss of my family’s fortune after the war. I thought he’d just tell me to get over it, like everybody else, but he didn’t. He took a genuine interest in my pain, and promised to look into the matter for me. I didn’t know at first what he meant by that. But the next day, which was Sunday, he called me up and told me to meet him right away out at the cemetery. He said he’d be waiting at the Jefferson Davis gravesite. He said he had the answers I was looking for.

It took me awhile to get there because I had to take the bus, and then I still had to walk a good ways after that. By the time I got there, Eddie had already put up construction tape across the car paths at that end of the cemetery. I asked him what the tape was for, and he said we needed privacy to sort everything out.

“Sort what out?” I asked him, and he explained it all. He said he’d got on the Internet and found out that Jefferson Davis had spent all the years after his presidency collecting evidence that certain prominent families of Virginia had been swindled out of their fortunes by carpetbaggers, and that my family was among them. He said that President Grant had been obsessed with preventing the Davis papers from ever coming to light.

“The Grant administration was the most corrupt in history,” I told him.

“Well, there you go,” he said, obviously pleased that I’d know such a thing.

The problem, Eddie explained, was that all the incriminating documents had disappeared when Davis died. But if somebody could find those documents, the government would have to pay restitution to the victims’ families.

“And here’s the interesting thing,” Eddie said, smiling. “Jefferson Davis died in New Orleans, and that’s where they had his funeral.”

“But he’s right here,” I told him, and I pointed to the life-sized stone likeness of the president of the Confederacy standing atop the gravesite.

“That’s what they want you to think,” Eddie said.

“But they shipped his body here and reburied it,” I said.

Eddie shook his head. “Not his body. A coffin. And nobody every looked inside.”

Then he laid it all out for me, and it made perfect sense. The government had used President Davis’s death as a cover to hide all the evidence that would have brought down so many of those who had prospered illegally after the war. All the papers that would restore my family’s fortune were stashed away inside the president’s casket — the last place anyone would ever think to look.

“And here’s the clincher,” Eddie told me. He put his arm around my shoulder again and led me over to the Davis grave. I looked down at the broad, flat stone that claimed to be covering the remains of President Davis and his wife, Varina Howell Davis. Then Eddie pointed to an adjoining plot directly in front of the stone statue of the former president. Not ten steps from the foot of the Davis grave, a more modest tombstone rested on a well-trimmed patch of ground, and it had a single word carved into its face: GRANT.

I was dumbfounded. There’s no way the president of the Confederacy would be placed in a spot where his statue had to stare forever at the name of the man who brought about his ruin, the man responsible for the fall of Richmond itself, the man who forced Lee’s surrender a few weeks later at Appomattox Courthouse. I felt a chill run up my spine.

“But what can I do?” I asked Eddie. He frowned and scratched his chin like he was thinking, but I figure maybe he had his answer ready all along.

“If it was me,” he said, “I reckon I’d dig up those papers and set everything right again.” He took a slow breath and shook his head. “’Course, that would take a mighty big piece of equipment.”

I’d never been more excited in my life. “I can run the bulldozer,” I told him. “It’ll scrape these marble slabs right out of the way. The statue too.”

“Say, that’s a smart idea,” he said, and he patted my shoulder.

“You wait here,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he answered. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

I hustled back to the chapel area where we stored the heavy equipment and climbed onto the bulldozer. I’d never really run the machine before, but that didn’t matter. The point of being a good apprentice is to be ready when the time comes, and so I’d always watched carefully when Ted operated the controls. I knew exactly what to do.

It took me a minute to get the hang of steering. I don’t even have a driver’s license — the state of Virginia won’t issue me one, I think because of my headaches. And I do feel bad about all the gravestones I knocked over on my way back to the Davis family plot. Collateral damage, I think it’s called.

When I got there, I wasted no time. First, I positioned the bulldozer in front of the memorial, raised the blade, and plowed ahead into the stone base of the statue. It cracked loudly, and the statue broke off at the ankles, toppling backward onto the ground. Then I backed up a bit, lowered the blade to scraping level, shifted the bulldozer into a more powerful setting, and rammed into the covering of the so-called graves. The bulldozer barely slowed as it scooped the shattering marble away, shoving the ragged pieces onto the broken remains of the fallen statue.

I backed away again and shut off the engine. Eddie walked up beside me as I climbed down from the seat and we both stepped to the edge of the grave to see what I’d uncovered.

Nothing. Just the next layer of ground.

“You’ll need the backhoe,” Eddie said. “You’ve got to dig deeper.”

I could see he was right. So I trotted back to the chapel and climbed onto the excavator I liked the best, the Cat 312CL, the one with the mechanical thumb. It was easier to drive than the bulldozer, and in a matter of minutes I was back at the Davis gravesite, lowering the opened jaw into the soft earth. I was careful to keep to the left side of the pair of graves, because I didn’t want to disturb Mrs. Davis, since she might really be down there. The sky was starting to spit rain now, and Eddie stepped away to the protection of the nearby doorway of the tomb of General Fitzhugh Lee. Rain didn’t bother me, of course, because I was safe inside the Plexiglas walls of the cab.

After about fifteen minutes, I pulled up a few splintered board fragments, and I knew I was almost there. I dipped the jaws back into the hole and bit off another chunk of ground. I had hoped to fish up a strongbox, watertight and ready to have its lock broken.

But of course that isn’t what came up at all.

There, dangling like a hanged criminal from the end of the Cat 312CL, was the great man himself. Or, rather, the remnants of the great man, for he was now just a decomposed corpse draped in dark rags. His bright finger bones hung from the ragged sleeves, and I could see parts of his rib cage through the disintegrated jacket and shirt. I couldn’t see the face, because the skull was clamped tight inside the jaws of the excavator. In a panic, I swung the arm away from the hole, which was a mistake, because that popped off the skull and flung the remains of the former president onto the macadam pathway. I looked over at Eddie in horror, and this time he was talking on his cell phone. He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

So there were no documents about the Confederacy. There never had been, I realized. The only thing in that hole was the long-dead leader of my long-dead country. And I had defiled his remains.

The rain was coming down harder now, and the wind shifted so the Fitzhugh tomb wasn’t keeping Eddie dry anymore. He trotted over to one of the broad, stately trees by the opened grave and sheltered himself against the trunk. I just sat there in the cab of the Cat 312CL, watching rain slide down the Plexiglas.

“I can’t wait to read about this in the papers,” Eddie shouted.

I opened the cab door so I wouldn’t have to raise my voice. “You lied to me,” I said.

My calm demeanor may have misled him.

“Blame your Uncle Morty. I told him, nobody treats me like he did and gets away with it.”

Sirens started up in the distance.

“You hear that, moron? That’s the cops.” He held up his cell phone and grinned. It was as evil a grin as I ever hope to see.

At that point there was only one thing I could do. I stepped down from the Cat 312CL and climbed back onto the bulldozer. Eddie just stood there with his arms crossed, gloating, while I cranked up the engine. I guess he figured I was going to try to move Uncle Morty’s equipment back to the chapel before the police arrived. But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. In fact, because of my peculiar medical syndrome — the one that makes me talk too much — I said right out loud what I was about to do. But I guess he didn’t hear me over the racket of the bulldozer. If he had, he wouldn’t have just stood there looking so smug.

I raised the blade a couple of feet, swung the bulldozer around toward him, and hit the throttle. He barely had time to stop smiling. I think he hollered something, because his mouth flew open and his eyes got very wide. But I rammed him anyway. The concave blade covered up his torso completely, so that when it pinned him against the trunk, his head popped off just like Jefferson Davis’s. One of his legs got pinched off too. Naturally, those were the details they played up in the newspaper — which I found annoying, if you want to know the truth. It cast me in a ghoulish light, as if the dismemberment had been intentional. But I swear on the Holy Bible, I only meant to kill him.

I feel bad for the trouble I’ve caused Uncle Morty. He’s family, and I see now that I should have been more concerned with protecting him than with connecting myself to relatives I never even met. It’s good to respect one’s ancestors. But the living deserve some consideration too. That’s a new perspective for me. I imagine Dr. Myles will be pleased with my progress.

I’m not especially worried about going to jail. Since everything I did was justified, I can’t see myself as guilty. So even if they do lock me up, I wouldn’t really be a criminal. I’d be more like a prisoner of war. Not a full-fledged prisoner of war, of course, because the war ended a long time ago. I guess I’d be more like an apprentice.

Yeah, that’s it: a prisoner’s apprentice. The best they’ve ever seen.