“Call me tomorrow,” I said.
He waved and slammed the door.
I woke around three that night. Cotton filled my mouth, at the awful, dehydrated feeling I’d never gotten used to after a night of drinking. I shuffled through the apartment, poured a glass from the kitchen tap, and drank a full twelve ounces. Then I looked at my fingernails. An image of Jerry’s dirty hands flitted through my brain, enough to cause a chill and keep me up surfing late night television for another thirty minutes. I settled on a segment of The Longest Day, the bit where French resistance fighters take on the Germans from a bombed-out nunnery. It’s funny to recall the details, to go through the paces in my memory. I imagined Jerry’s death happened somewhere right around three, when I woke. The coroner couldn’t pinpoint as much, of course, but placed Jerry’s final breath in the vague, no-man’s land after one and before dawn. Jerry had left one cryptic text shortly after I dropped him off.
they want to be whole
Nothing more.
But I didn’t find out until Monday. None of us did. Jerry didn’t show for school. The secretary called. The principal called. No answer from anyone. He hadn’t phoned on Saturday, the day after our drinking binge at Heather’s, but we were adults. The police had to force his door because his landlord was on vacation.
At the end of the week, Travis and I drove to Chapman, Jerry’s hometown. It was a two gas station town, maybe two thousand residents, and the total included about three hundred spares from the local cemetery. I felt a chill as we drove by the cold, grey stones. The dead reign there alone. Jerry’s mother still lived in Chapman and insisted on burying him nearby. Travis came because Jerry was in his department; Jerry’s mother asked me to be a pall bearer because I was Jerry’s closest friend on the faculty.
Grey clouds clotted the sky during the service, but the rain held off. After the funeral, after the brief but intimate graveside service, after we put my colleague and friend in the earth, we shared bland potluck fare in the nearby church basement with Jerry’s extended family.
His mother approached me, clasped my arm, and said, “Thank you, Aaron. Jerry always spoke fondly of your friendship. He has a few things at the house…I thought you might like to have. He told me once you both collected old LPs.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Please stop by, after the dinner.”
Jerry’s childhood home rested at the end of a quiet street in a quiet town, another ranch style house with half brick façade in the front, but with one distinction which marked it different. The house was recessed, with the first floor sitting two or three feet below ground level. I didn’t notice when we came to the front door, but realized as we descended a small staircase to the left. Jerry’s mother led me to his room while Travis phoned an assistant coach.
A small collection of LPs, most in near mint condition and some still in plastic cellophane, lay arranged on the bed in Jerry’s room. A series of posters lined the wall, bands and movies popular fifteen years ago, and I suspected the room hadn’t seen much redecorating since Jerry had been in high school.
“Feel free to take anything you want.” She hesitated at the door, her blue eyes misting with tears. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me. I’m…well, I’m tired.”
I pulled a few albums from the assortment, including Neil Young’s Harvestand an older, rather rare copy of Kind of Bluemastered in stereo, and was just about to return downstairs when I noticed a small bookcase. As a lover of books, I couldn’t help perusing Jerry’s old collection, even though it was mostly what one would expect—Twain, Bradbury, Dickens, standard high school fare—but I found a black, three-ring binder which reminded me of the folder he’d given me on the night he died. I laid it on his desk, opened it, and found pages of clippings from newspaper articles, some photocopies, and a few glossy magazine cuttings. None of the material was about Jerry, or even from the local paper. Jerry had collected articles about strange archeological findings, especially burial sites, around the world, and he’d filled the margins with scribbled notes. I surmised his love for history started early, and made nothing else of it at the time.
Travis called up the stairs as I was engrossed in a piece about funerary mounds on an island south of Sumatra. I glanced at the stack of LPs I’d collected, buried the folder inside the pile, and left Jerry’s room with my contraband in hand. We said our goodbyes to his mother, but I stopped before climbing into Travis’s car.
“Mrs. Larson?”
“Yes?”
“I notice your house is sort of recessed. Do you have a basement?”
She scratched the side of her face. “Well…we have a crawl space. Just dirt and enough room to crouch down.”
“Can I see it?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Travis whispered.
“It would mean a lot. Jerry talked about it—he said I should take a look if I ever had the chance. Said it was like something out of one of the stories I teach the kids at school.”
She nodded, slowly. “I…I suppose so.”
The trip under Jerry’s childhood home lasted all of two minutes—dust and the overwhelming staleness of the air kept me from deeper investigation. At the time, I wasn’t sure what possessed me or what I was looking for, exactly. Perhaps a mound of dirt, like Jerry described under Heather’s place. A burial mound, maybe, thinking of the folder I’d taken almost unconsciously from his bedroom. I found nothing, but didn’t stay long enough for a thorough investigation. The air was heavy down there, heavy and thick as though it was alive.
The dead reign there alone.
Riding home, I ruminated a little on Jerry’s odd collection of article clippings, and started to feel more uncomfortable about his death. Not just sad. Uneasy. Healthy thirty-year-olds just don’t die.
The uneasiness began to eat away at the edges of my consciousness, to nibble on my imagination, even at school, over the next few days. For the first time, I opened the folder he’d given me the night he died and found more article clippings, similar to the folder I’d taken from his house, but the articles were more recent, some printed from the internet. At night, I found myself poring over Jerry’s scrapbooks, searching, I suppose for an answer to a question I didn’t know. Several long gone civilizations, a veritable who’s who of buried cities—Çatal Hüyük, Skara Brae, Copan, Chichen Itza—with references to human sacrifices, rituals in which victim’s bodies were mutilated and eviscerated, entrails offered to the gods. Jerry left notes about how each civilization disposed of their dead. The ancient residents of Çatal Hüyük left their loved ones on the roofs of their homes until the vultures pecked away the flesh, and then they buried the bones under their floors. Mass pits of suspected human sacrifices were found in China…Italy…elsewhere. This was the stuff of nightmares, dark speculations of ancient religions. From the article dates in the folder I found in his room, Jerry had been collecting them since he was nine or ten years old.
I called an old college buddy, Chris Steiner, a few days after the funeral. He wrote for the Journal-World on the police beat, a thankless job which kept him running at all hours, often late into the night. But he knew some contacts at the hospital where the police took Jerry’s body. He had friends in the morgue.
“Look, I’ll see what I can do. No promises,” Steiner said after I explained the reason for my call.
Maybe I nabbed an hour or two of sleep a night that week, most of it with the lights glaring because of a healthy dose of childish fear of the dark. Reading Jerry’s macabre research hadn’t helped my overactive imagination. My work suffered. Students found all the right buttons and pushed without mercy. I handed out more detentions in five days than I had in the five years prior. Heather came down to my room on Friday after school.