Someone left the back entrance open, he tells himself, and Eva’s the only one with the keys. He steps back from the window, starts to head for the main doors to take another look at the car. Then he notices something on the floor. Something spilled. A line of liquid. A trail of something dripped, leading to the front entrance.
He keeps himself from bending and touching it, from bringing a sample dab up near his nose for a smell. Instead, he follows the runny line. It breaks here and there, leaves small gaps, then disappears completely in the small vestibule to the right of the entranceway, the small antechamber of post office boxes. Three walls lined with rented cubbyholes with brass faces and individual combination locks.
There are two hundred rental boxes. They come in three sizes — the small letter drawers, the slightly larger “flats” drawers, and the big, deep boxes, usually used by businesses. Only one of the two hundred is ajar. It’s a deep box, positioned at floor level. Ike starts to shake his head as soon as he sees it is open just a half an inch.
And then the smell hits him. Like biology lab in high school. Like a dentist’s office. That chemical smell, formaldehyde-like, something like a mask for the odor of decay. Only it doesn’t mask, it blends, so that a new smell is formed.
His feet pull him to the wall of boxes and his stomach starts to tighten. He squats down, takes the weight of his body in his knees and thighs. He’s sweating everywhere. The back of his throat has taken on a deep burn, an ache. His eyes squint and there’s a pain in both his lungs and his temples that seems to alternate perfectly, one asserting as the other recedes.
His hand extends, fingers come up into the underside groove of the box handle. He draws it out, pulls it to him, and at the same time looks at the label on the face. Of course. It’s box nine.
The smell hits him full now and he gags. He brings his head forward, makes himself look.
It’s Eva’s head, independent of the neck, shoulders, the rest of the body. It’s severed clean. The eyes slightly open. The eyes are almost squinting at him and he has a slightly subconscious, instantaneous idea that, like some novelty pictures of dogs and clowns that he’s seen for sale on roadsides, the eyes might follow him if he moved, changed position. But they’re still Eva’s eyes, the taut lids he brought his tongue to just hours ago.
It is Eva’s head. He’s looking down at Eva’s head. The hair is matted down to the skull with blood. It’s sitting in a round pan, a cooking pan, lined with aluminum foil. The pan is filled, filling, with a mixture of blood and a syrupy green liquid, like a heavy shampoo. Some of the green syrup has splashed onto the inside walls of the box.
It’s Eva’s head.
And then there’s the sound of the double doors swinging open and closed.
Chapter Thirty-Two
St. James Cemetery is on the south side of the city. It lies in a shallow valley off Richer Avenue. It’s a large cemetery, stretches out almost to the city line. It’s bisected, almost perfectly, into two separate areas by the last skinny traces of the Benchley River as it begins to peter out.
The bisection by the river creates a division that seems too beautifully instructional to be coincidental. The section closest to Richer Ave, called the old section, was the whole of the original cemetery. It’s been filled to capacity for decades and holds the remains of the oldest of the Catholic families in Quinsigamond who butt heads with the Yankee founders of the city. When the last available grave in the old section was filled, new ground was broken on the opposite shore of the ten-foot riverbed. The new section was an immigrant neighborhood for the dead. The gravestones became ornate, bordered on the superstitious and maudlin, and the names on the stones were often long and blatantly non-Anglo-European.
At the western edge of both sections lies a stretch of tracks owned by the Providence-Quinsigamond Railroad Company. The tracks are part of a route that, like many in the P&Q system, are no longer operational. Rather than expend the cash to rip up the tracks, the railroad has simply ignored them, let them rust and fall under the cover of ten years’ worth of debris, fallen and dead trees and branches, supermarket carts and old tires. Along with the track, they left several antiquated freight cars, common, cheap rigs for industrial scrap and odds and ends. The cars have been home to squads of derelicts and drifters over the past ten years. About five years back, some old nomad’s body was found in February, dead of exposure, and there was some mayoral talk about petitioning the railroad to remove the public nuisance. But the talk faded and the cars still sit in a mini-forest of scrappy trees and beggar trash.
Lenore sits a quarter mile away in the new section. She’s seated on the frozen ground, inside a newly opened grave. Most likely, the burial is tomorrow and they brought a backhoe in today to carve out a hole for the vault. She’s roughly twelve feet down and she doesn’t know if this is a standard depth these days or if this is a double grave, purchased by someone thinking of the future, making room for the family.
She’s lowered herself down by a black nylon climbing rope tied to a neighboring gravestone, a granite number, a simple greyish rectangle that rises vertical out of the earth and is cut with names and dates. She’s dressed in the requisite black and she’s done all the necessary prep work — planted a mike in the abandoned railroad car labeled “Pachinko Brothers Bale Wire,” oiled and slapped a fresh cartridge in the Uzi, popped a megadose of crank.
Now she’s humming. She’s got her two index fingers extended like drumsticks and she’s flailing away at her knees in perfect syncopation. There isn’t a missed beat, a balked strike. She’s keeping a countertime with both her feet. And her teeth are doing a continual bite, grab, and release, over and over on her upper lip.
Images keep passing through her mind, not thoughts, but random flashes, synaptic snapshots of faces and landscapes, lighting for a millisecond, vanishing, being replaced by the next picture. She can’t really get a fix on any of them, but it’s not like she’s making a legendary attempt. She lets them come and go, tries to grab what she can. It’s like trying to stare at a series of unconnected billboards set on the side of an interstate that she’s burning up in some supercharged Porsche.
Her mother’s face. The whiteness of Woo’s belly. Cortez’s book trunk. Ike’s post office shirt, freshly washed and pressed and draped over a coat hanger suspended from the hinge of his bedroom door. Zarelli’s plate of manicotti the last time they had lunch at Fiorello’s. Her father’s arm, slung awkwardly over his face, blocking his eyes, as he lay on the bed, on top of the covers, for an after-supper nap, 1972. Her own body, naked, reflected back at her from the bathroom mirror, her skin looking suddenly grey, dry to the point of flaking away, dissolving into a granular pile on the cold tiles below her feet.
She brings her hands away from her knees, looks at them, turning them over and over, front to back to front. Then she brings her right hand up to her ear, resecuring the small receiver that never fits very well. She hears a ghostlike undercurrent, not static, but more likely the wind pushing through the cavity of the bugged boxcar.
She thinks that there are people, maybe the majority of people, who would be tentative about sitting alone, inside an open grave, in a deserted cemetery, after midnight. Ike, for one. Ike would be going over the edge about now, she thinks. Ike’s nerve would have started slipping as he came through the wrought-iron gates.