We worked, then, in silence. By four in the morning, the touch of our fingers told us it was done. We dragged the garbage bags, heavy from the rubber content, over to the trash receptacles and were gone.
We’d agreed we’d wait until noon, but he was outside the turret, in the Porsche, idling, at quarter to eleven. I knew him well enough to know he’d show up an hour early. He knew me well enough to know I’d be ready and waiting. Juvenile minds, no matter what their ages, often think in perfect synchrony.
Word had traveled fast. The dirt and gravel lot under the overpass was filled, and cars were parked all the way back up the road. We left the Porsche a half mile away and hobbled down.
I counted twenty-eight people ahead of us in line, chirping like larks at the wonder in front of them.
“Six hot dogs, one cheese fries, and two lates,” Leo said an hour later, when we finally got to the window.
“Not lates, jerk weed; it’s lah-tays,” Kutz snarled from behind the little opening.
“Whatever, Mr. Kutz.”
Kutz bent down to the window. “You shits are here awful early.” Lack of a formal education had never inhibited Kutz from communicating clearly and directly.
“We heard you were renovating,” Leo said, without a hint of a smile. “Looks so much better.”
Kutz’s ferretlike eyes glistened, but that could have been from the grease.
Both Leo and I stepped back a foot to make a show of admiring the old wood trailer. It was once again its peeling, graying white, except for the hundreds of bits of purple latex that still clung to the wood like lavender corn plasters pasted on old skin. I hoped the wind would blow them off soon, so that the restoration would be complete.
Kutz pushed the plastic tray through the opening. Leo frowned at the not-steaming coffee and took a sip.
“Careful of that; it’s lukewarm,” Kutz said, through the window.
“This is your regular coffee, Kutz,” Leo said. “Weak and burned as always.”
“That whip cream shit was too expensive; I cut it out. It’s still a lahtay, just without the cream.”
“You charged us eight bucks for two cups of your same old dishwater?”
“I figure you shits are just after the caffeine, being as you might not have gotten much sleep last night.” His beady eyes moved from Leo’s face to mine. “And I figure you want everything the way it used to be, right down to the lousy coffee.”
Leo gave him the barest of smiles and took the tray from the counter.
The picnic tables around back were full. Fifty more people were eating standing up, like guests at a large garden party. It might have been my need for self-congratulation, but they all looked like they were enjoying a world once again made right.
We found an open place by the back of the trailer, set our tray on the ground-genetically imprinted to survive, most ants seem to avoid Kutz’s hot dogs-and began to eat. Ten feet away, a dozen shiny black garbage bags, the exact kind I use, sat neatly twisted shut next to the oil barrel garbage cans. A thirteenth bag had been opened by some disbeliever, its contents made visible. For a time, we enjoyed the expressions of the people who stopped by the open bag as they were leaving, to smile and sometimes finger the torn sheets of rubberized lavender paint that should never have been applied to such a landmark.
I took the last bite of my hot dog. Finally, I let my eyes find the familiar spot on the back of the trailer, visible now, once again.
And saw.
I brushed at my eyes with the back of my free hand, worked my throat to swallow the last of a hot dog instantly turned to a greasy lump.
“Leo.”
He moved closer, to look where I was looking.
“Your heart, another reason why this edifice should never have been painted-” He stopped then, seeing everything. Then he pointed, his voice now hushed. “Wasn’t there just the one…?” He let the question die, because he knew the answer-and the meaning. He dropped his hand.
I moved my fingertips to touch the heart she’d cut in the wood that August day, enclosing her initials and mine. For forever, we’d said, when wonder was new.
But there was a new carving now, cut deeper and much later, too much later. It was a larger heart, surrounding, as though protecting, the outline of the old.
“She was here,” Leo said.
I saw her in my mind, the ghost of a girl on a winter’s day, standing in the snow, cutting with the point of a key, or maybe, like the last time, with an ivory-handled knife that she’d brought along.
I looked away when my imagination began drawing another picture of her, standing outside the turret, thinking, wondering, if she should knock on the door.
She hadn’t. She’d gone away. Like the last time.
Forty-two
I can see the First Bank of Rivertown from the roof of the turret. It is a squat, triangular-shaped stucco building, set on an oblique plot where two crooked roads meet just off Thompson Avenue.
Its name, First Bank, is unnecessarily distinguishing, for there has never been, and probably never will be, a second bank in Rivertown. The lizards who run the town have no need for another. The First Bank has never advertised for new customers, never given away toasters or coasters or calendars. It serves as an appliance of city hall, that municipal black hole, to suds away any such fingerprints and palm grease as might have stuck to cash payments for zoning changes, building permits, and business licenses.
I was up on the roof at six that morning, sipping coffee, looking at that bank. It was later in April, and it was good to be on the roof, riding the webbed lawn chair that I keep up there for nights when I cannot sleep. The roof is where I think best, when everything is closed and the only sounds come from the trucks and the trains hurrying past Rivertown.
That morning, though, I wasn’t up there thinking. I was done thinking, done wondering. It was time.
Lieutenant Dillard had called four days before. “I’ve got Sergeant Patterson conferenced in with us, Elstrom.”
Dillard went on before I could ask what he’d been doing. Or not. “There was a little shootout this morning, in the northern part of our wonderful state. Seems one of the local constables up there came across two boys named Kovacs, digging holes on a hobby farm. Being neighborly, and knowing that the owner of that hobby farm was a lawyer named Aggert, the officer inquired as to why they were digging holes on Mr. Aggert’s land. Neither of the Kovacs brothers thought to respond verbally. Instead, they drew handguns. The constable, himself a hunter and marksman, shot them both, several times. Since the brothers are no longer able to answer questions, the constable called the state lab team. After some digging, they discovered Mr. Aggert, buried in a field of recently dug holes.”
“The brothers were looking for the bank proceeds,” I said, because it was reasonable to say.
“No doubt,” Dillard said. “It’s a fair guess that Aggert was not forthcoming about whatever he knew, so the brothers killed him and began digging up the property.”
“What did Aggert know?” Again, I was being reasonable.
“We’re not completely sure, but we have uncovered some tantalizing leads.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“You hear that, Sergeant Patterson? I told you he’d be ecstatic.”
Dillard paused, to let Patterson express his own delight. When Patterson didn’t, Dillard went on. “The Kovacs brothers had been living in their automobile for some time. First off, we learned they discovered that Severs was living in an inexpensive motel in Benton Harbor.”
“How did they learn that?”
“We’re guessing through some mutual contact back in Iowa, but we’ll never know. Anyway, we got to that motel too late; the manager said he’d thrown away all of Severs’s stuff. We think it likely that the Kovacs brothers, from information they either beat out of Severs or found in his motel room, traced his activities backward, to Florida.”