Finders Keepers (4 page)

“You shot me,” Curtis said, sounding breathless and amazed. “You fucking
shot
me, Morrie!”

Thinking how much he hated that nickname—he'd hated it all his life, and even teachers, who should have known better, used it—he reversed the gun and began to hammer Curtis's skull with the butt. Three hard blows accomplished very little. It was only a .38, after all, and not heavy enough to do more than minor damage. Blood began to seep through Curtis's hair and run down his stubbly cheeks. He was groaning, staring up at Morris with desperate blue eyes. He waved one hand weakly.

“Stop it, Morrie! Stop it, that
hurts
!”

Shit. Shit, shit,
shit
.

Morris slid the gun back into his pocket. The butt was now slimy with blood and hair. He went to the Biscayne, wiping his hand on his jacket. He opened the driver's door, saw the empty ignition, and said
fuck
under his breath. Whispering it like a prayer.

On 92, a couple of cars went by, then a brown UPS truck.

He trotted back to the men's room, opened the door, knelt down, and began to go through Freddy's pockets. He found the car keys in the left front. He got to his feet and hurried back to
the snack alcoves, sure a car or truck would have pulled in by now, the traffic was getting heavier all the time,
somebody
would have to piss out his or her morning coffee, and he would have to kill
that
one, too, and possibly the one after that. An image of linked paper dolls came to mind.

No one yet, though.

He got into the Biscayne, legally purchased but now bearing stolen Maine license plates. Curtis Rogers was slithering a slow course down the cement walkway toward the toilets, pulling with his hands and pushing feebly with his feet and leaving a snail-trail of blood behind. It was impossible to know for sure, but Morris thought he might be trying to reach the pay telephone on the wall between the mens' and the ladies'.

This wasn't the way it was supposed to go, he thought, starting the car. It was spur-of-the-moment stupid, and he was probably going to be caught. It made him think of what Rothstein had said at the end.
What are you, anyway, twenty-two? Twenty-three? What do you know about life, let alone literature?

“I know I'm no sellout,” he said. “I know that much.”

He put the Biscayne in drive and rolled slowly forward toward the man eeling his way up the cement walkway. He wanted to get out of here, his brain was
yammering
at him to get out of here, but this had to be done carefully and with no more mess than was absolutely necessary.

Curtis looked around, his eyes wide and horrified behind the jungle foliage of his dirty hair. He raised one hand in a feeble
stop
gesture, then Morris couldn't see him anymore because the hood was in the way. He steered carefully and continued creeping forward. The front of the car bumped up over the curbing. The pine tree air freshener on the rearview mirror swung and bobbed.

There was nothing . . . and nothing . . . and then the car bumped
up again. There was a muffled
pop
, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.

Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis's head was gone.

Well, no. Not exactly. It was there, but all spread out. Mooshed. No loss of talent in
that
mess, Morrie thought.

He drove toward the exit, and when he was sure the road was empty, he sped up. He would need to stop and examine the front of the car, especially the tire that had run over Curtis's head, but he wanted to get twenty miles farther down the road first. Twenty at least.

“I see a car wash in my future,” he said. This struck him funny (
inordinately
funny, and there was a word neither Freddy nor Curtis would have understood), and he laughed long and loud. He kept exactly to the speed limit. He watched the odometer turn the miles, and even at fifty-five, each revolution seemed to take five minutes. He was sure the tire had left a blood-trail going out of the exit, but that would be gone now. Long gone. Still, it was time to turn off onto the secondary roads again, maybe even the tertiary ones. The smart thing would be to stop and throw all the notebooks—the cash, too—into the woods. But he would not do that. Never would he do that.

Fifty-fifty odds, he told himself. Maybe better. After all, no one saw the car. Not in New Hampshire and not at that rest area.

He came to an abandoned restaurant, pulled into the side lot, and examined the Biscayne's front end and right front tire. He thought things looked pretty good, all in all, but there was some blood on the front bumper. He pulled a handful of weeds and wiped it off. He got back in and drove on west. He was prepared for roadblocks, but there were none.

Over the Pennsylvania state line, in Gowanda, he found a coin-op car wash. The brushes brushed, the jets rinsed, and the car came out spanking clean—underside as well as topside.

Morris drove west, headed for the filthy little city residents called the Gem of the Great Lakes. He had to sit tight for awhile, and he had to see an old friend. Also, home was the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in—the gospel according to Robert Frost—and that was especially true when there was no one to bitch about the return of the prodigal son. With dear old Dad in the wind for years now and dear old Mom spending the fall semester at Princeton guest-lecturing on the robber barons, the house on Sycamore Street would be empty. Not much of a house for a fancy-schmancy teacher—not to mention a writer once nominated for the Pulitzer—but blame dear old Dad for that. Besides, Morris had never minded living there; that had been Mother's resentment, not his.

Morris listened to the news, but there was nothing about the murder of the novelist who, according to that
Time
cover story, had been “a voice shouting at the children of the silent fifties to wake up and raise their own voices.” This radio silence was good news, but not unexpected; according to Morris's source in the reformatory, Rothstein's housekeeper only came in once a week. There was also a handyman, but he only came when called. Morris and his late partners had picked their time accordingly, which meant he could reasonably hope the body might not be discovered for another six days.

That afternoon, in rural Ohio, he passed an antiques barn and made a U-turn. After a bit of browsing, he bought a used trunk for twenty dollars. It was old, but looked sturdy. Morris considered it a steal.

2010

Pete Saubers's parents had lots of arguments now. Tina called them the arkie-barkies. Pete thought she had something there, because that was what they sounded like when they got going: ark-ark-ark, bark-bark-bark. Sometimes Pete wanted to go to the head of the stairs and scream down at them to quit it, just quit it.
You're scaring the kids
,
he wanted to yell.
There are kids in this house,
kids,
did you two stupes forget that
?

Pete was home because Honor Roll students with nothing but afternoon study hall and activity period after lunch were allowed to cut out early. His door was open and he heard his father go thumping rapidly across the kitchen on his crutches as soon as his mother's car pulled into the driveway. Pete was pretty sure today's festivities would start with his dad saying Gosh, she was home early. Mom would say he could never seem to remember that Wednesdays were now her early days. Dad would reply that he still wasn't used to living in this part of the city, saying it like they'd been forced to relocate into deepest darkest Lowtown instead of just the Tree Streets section of Northfield. Once the preliminaries were taken care of, they could get down to the real arking and barking.

Pete wasn't crazy about the North Side himself, but it wasn't
terrible
, and even at thirteen he seemed to understand the economic realities of their situation better than his father. Maybe because he wasn't swallowing OxyContin pills four times a day like his father.

They were here because Grace Johnson Middle School, where her mother used to teach, had been closed as part of the city council's cost-cutting initiative. Many of the GJ teachers were now unemployed. Linda, at least, had been hired as a combination librarian and study hall monitor at Northfield Elementary. She got out early on Wednesdays because the library closed at noon that day. All the school libraries did. It was another cost-cutting initiative. Pete's dad railed at this, pointing out that the council members hadn't cut their
salaries
, and calling them a bunch of goddam Tea Party hypocrites.

Pete didn't know about that. What he knew was that these days Tom Saubers railed at everything.

•••

The Ford Focus, their only car now, pulled up in the driveway and Mom slid out, dragging her old scuffed briefcase. She skirted the patch of ice that always formed in the shady spot under the front porch downspout. It had been Tina's turn to salt that down, but she had forgotten, as usual. Mom climbed the steps slowly, her shoulders low. Pete hated to see her walk that way, as if she had a sack of bricks on her back. Dad's crutches, meanwhile, thumped a double-time rhythm into the living room.

The front door opened. Pete waited. Hoped for something nice like
Hiya, honey, how was your morning?

As if.

He didn't exactly
want
to eavesdrop on the arkie-barkies, but the house was small and it was practically impossible not to overhear . . . unless he left, that is, a strategic retreat he made more and more frequently this winter. And he sometimes felt that, as the older kid, he had a
responsibility
to listen. Mr. Jacoby liked to say in history class that knowledge was power, and Pete supposed
that was why he felt compelled to monitor his parents' escalating war of words. Because each arkie-barkie stretched the fabric of the marriage thinner, and one of these days it would tear wide open. Best to be prepared.

Only prepared for what? Divorce? That seemed the most likely outcome. In some ways things might be better if they did split up—Pete felt this more and more strongly, although he had not yet articulated it as a conscious thought—but what exactly would a divorce mean in (another of Mr. Jacoby's faves)
real world terms
? Who would stay and who would go? If his dad went, how would he get along without a car when he could hardly walk? For that matter, how could either of them
afford
to go? They were broke already.

At least Tina wasn't here for today's spirited exchange of parental views; she was still in school, and probably wouldn't be home directly after. Maybe not until dinner. She had finally made a friend, a bucktoothed girl named Ellen Briggs, who lived on the corner of Sycamore and Elm. Pete thought Ellen had the brains of a hamster, but at least Tina wasn't always moping around the house, missing her friends in the old neighborhood, and sometimes crying. Pete hated it when Tina cried.

Meanwhile, silence your cell phones and turn off your pagers, folks. The lights are going down and this afternoon's installment of
We're in Deep Shit
is about to begin.

TOM: “Hey, you're home early.”

LINDA (wearily): “Tom, it's—”

TOM: “Wednesday, right. Early day at the library.”

LINDA: “You've been smoking in the house again. I can smell it.”

TOM (getting his sulk on): “Just one. In the kitchen. With the window open. There's ice on the back steps, and I didn't want to risk a tumble. Pete forgot to salt them again.”

PETE (aside to the audience): “As he should know, since he
made the schedule of chores, it's actually Tina's week to salt. Those OxyContins he takes aren't just pain pills, they're stupid pills.”

LINDA: “I can still smell it, and you know the lease specifically prohibits—”

TOM: “All right, okay, I get it. Next time I'll go outside and risk falling off my crutches.”

LINDA: “It's not
just
the lease, Tommy. The secondary smoke is bad for the kids. We've discussed that.”

TOM: “And discussed it, and discussed it . . .”

LINDA (now wading into even deeper water): “Also, how much does a pack of cigarettes cost these days? Four-fifty? Five dollars?”

TOM: “I smoke a pack a
week
, for Christ's sake!”

LINDA (overrunning his defenses with an arithmetic Panzer assault): “At five a pack, that's over twenty dollars a month. And it all comes out of my salary, because it's the only one—”

TOM: “Oh, here we go—”

LINDA: “—we've got now.”

TOM: “You never get tired of rubbing that in, do you? Probably think I got run over on purpose. So I could laze around the house.”

LINDA (after a long pause): “Is there any wine left? Because I could use half a glass.”

PETE (aside): “Say there is, Dad. Say there is.”

TOM: “It's gone. Maybe you'd like me to crutch my way down to the Zoney's and get another bottle. Of course you'd have to give me an advance on my
allowance
.”

LINDA (not crying, but sounding on the verge): “You act as though what happened to you is my fault.”

TOM (shouting): “It's
nobody's
fault, and that's what drives me crazy! Don't you get that? They never even caught the guy who did it!”

At this point Pete decided he'd had enough. It was a stupid play. Maybe they didn't see that, but he did. He closed his lit book. He would read the assigned story—something by a guy named John Rothstein—that night. Right now he had to get out and breathe some uncontentious air.

LINDA (quiet): “At least you didn't die.”

TOM (going totally soap opera now): “Sometimes I think it would be better if I had. Look at me—hooked through the bag on Oxy, and still in pain because it doesn't work for shit anymore unless I take enough to half-kill me. Living on my wife's salary—which is a thousand less than it used to be, thanks to the fucking Tea-Partiers—”

LINDA: “Watch your lang—”

TOM: “House? Gone. Motorized wheelchair? Gone. Savings? Almost used up. And now I can't even have a fucking cigarette!”

LINDA: “If you think whining will solve anything, be my guest, but—”

TOM (roaring): “Is whining what you call it? I call it reality. You want me to drop my pants so you can get a good look at what's left of my legs?”

Pete floated downstairs in his stocking feet. The living room was right there at the bottom, but they didn't see him; they were face-to-face and busy acting in a dipshit play no one would ever pay to see. His father hulking on his crutches, his eyes red and his cheeks scruffy with beard, his mother holding her purse in front of her breasts like a shield and biting her lips. It was awful, and the worst part? He loved them.

His father had neglected to mention the Emergency Fund, started a month after the City Center Massacre by the town's one remaining newspaper, in cooperation with the three local TV stations. Brian Williams had even done a story about it on
NBC
Nightly News
—how this tough little city took care of its own when disaster struck, all those caring hearts, all those helping hands, all that blah-blah-blah, and now a word from our sponsor. The Emergency Fund made everybody feel good for like six days. What the media didn't talk about was how little the fund had actually raised, even with the charity walks, and the charity bike rides, and a concert by an
American Idol
runner-up. The Emergency Fund was thin because times were hard for everyone. And, of course, what
was
raised had to be divided among so many. The Saubers family got a check for twelve hundred dollars, then one for five hundred, then one for two. Last month's check, marked FINAL INSTALLMENT, came to fifty dollars.

Big whoop.

•••

Pete slipped into the kitchen, grabbed his boots and jacket, and went out. The first thing he noticed was that there wasn't any ice on the back stoop; his father had been totally lying about that. The day was too warm for ice, at least in the sun. Spring was still six weeks away, but the current thaw had gone on for almost a week, and the only snow left in the backyard was a few crusty patches under the trees. Pete crossed to the fence and let himself out through the gate.

One advantage to living in the Tree Streets of the North Side was the undeveloped land behind Sycamore. It was easily as big as a city block, five tangled acres of undergrowth and scrubby trees running downhill to a frozen stream. Pete's dad said the land had been that way for a long time and was apt to stay that way even longer, due to some endless legal wrangle over who owned it and what could be built on it. “In the end, no one wins these things but the lawyers,” he told Pete. “Remember that.”

In Pete's opinion, kids who wanted a little mental health vacation from their parents also won.

A path ran through the winter-barren trees on a meandering diagonal, eventually coming out at the Birch Street Rec, a longtime Northfield youth center whose days were now numbered. Big kids hung out on and around the path in warm weather—smoking cigarettes, smoking dope, drinking beer, probably laying their girlfriends—but not at this time of year. No big kids equaled no hassle.

Sometimes Pete took his sister along the path if his mother and father were seriously into it, as was more and more often the case. When they arrived at the Rec, they'd shoot baskets or watch videos or play checkers. He didn't know where he could take her once the Rec closed. There was no place else except for Zoney's, the convenience store. On his own, he mostly just went as far as the creek, splooshing stones into it if it was flowing, bouncing them off the ice when it was frozen. Seeing if he could make a hole and enjoying the quiet.

The arkie-barkies were bad enough, but his worst fear was that his dad—now always a little high on the Oxy pills—might someday actually take a swing at his mother. That would almost certainly tear the thin-stretched cloth of the marriage. And if it didn't? If she put up with being hit? That would be even worse.

Never happen, Pete told himself. Dad never would.

But if he did?

•••

Ice still covered the stream this afternoon, but it looked rotten, and there were big yellow patches in it, as if some giant had stopped to take a leak. Pete wouldn't dare walk on it. He wouldn't drown or anything if the ice gave way, the water was only ankle deep,
but he had no wish to get home and have to explain why his pants and socks were wet. He sat on a fallen log, tossed a few stones (the small ones bounced and rolled, the big ones went through the yellow patches), then just looked at the sky for awhile. Big fluffy clouds floated along up there, the kind that looked more like spring than winter, moving from west to east. There was one that looked like an old woman with a hump on her back (or maybe it was a packsack); there was a rabbit; there was a dragon; there was one that looked like a—

A soft, crumbling thump on his left distracted him. He turned and saw an overhanging piece of the embankment, loosened by a week's worth of melting snow, had given way, exposing the roots of a tree that was already leaning precariously. The space created by the fall looked like a cave, and unless he was mistaken—he supposed it might be just a shadow—there was something in there.

Pete walked to the tree, grabbed one of its leafless branches, and bent for a better look. There was something there, all right, and it looked pretty big. The end of a box, maybe?

He worked his way down the bank, creating makeshift steps by digging the heels of his boots into the muddy earth. Once he was below the site of the little landspill, he squatted. He saw cracked black leather and metal strips with rivets in them. There was a handle the size of a saddle-stirrup on the end. It was a trunk. Someone had buried a trunk here.

Excited now as well as curious, Pete grabbed the handle and yanked. The trunk didn't budge. It was socked in good and tight. Pete gave another tug, but just for form's sake. He wasn't going to get it out. Not without tools.

He hunkered with his hands dangling between his thighs, as his father often used to do before his hunkering days came to an end. Just staring at the trunk jutting out of the black, root-snarled
earth. It was probably crazy to be thinking of
Treasure Island
(also “The Gold Bug,” a story they'd read in English the year before), but he
was
thinking of it. And was it crazy? Was it really? As well as telling them that knowledge was power, Mr. Jacoby stressed the importance of logical thinking. Wasn't it logical to think that someone wouldn't bury a trunk in the woods unless there was something valuable inside?