But the trunk is too light.
He stares at it, a small exhumed coffin tilted on the bank in the moonlight. Behind it is the hole, gaping like a mouth that has just vomited something up. Morris reaches for the trunk again, hesitates, then lunges forward and snaps the latches up, praying to a God he knows cares nothing for the likes of him.
He looks in.
The trunk is not quite empty. The plastic he lined it with is still there. He pulls it out in a crackling cloud, hoping that a few of the notebooks are left underneath – two or three, or oh please God even just one – but there are just a few small trickles of dirt caught in the corners.
Morris puts his filthy hands to his face – once young, now deeply lined – and begins to cry in the moonlight.
28
He promised to return the truck by ten, but it’s after midnight when he parks it behind Statewide Motorcycle and puts the keys back under the right front tire. He doesn’t bother with the tools or the empty Tuff Totes that were supposed to be full; let Charlie Roberson have them if he wants them.
The lights of the minor league field four blocks over have been turned off an hour ago. The stadium buses have stopped running, but the bars – in this neighborhood there are a lot of them – are roaring away with live bands and jukebox music, their doors open, men and women in Groundhogs tee-shirts and caps standing out on the sidewalks, smoking cigarettes and drinking from plastic cups. Morris plods past them without looking, ignoring a couple of friendly yells from inebriated baseball fans, high on beer and a home team win, asking him if he wants a drink. Soon the bars are behind him.
He has stopped obsessing about McFarland, and the thought of the three mile walk back to Bugshit Manor never crosses his mind. He doesn’t care about his aching legs, either. It’s as if they belong to someone else. He feels as empty as that old trunk in the moonlight. Everything he’s lived for during the last thirty-six years has been swept away like a shack in a flood.
He comes to Government Square, and that’s where his legs finally give out. He doesn’t so much sit on one of the benches as collapse there. He glances around dully at the empty expanse of concrete, realizing that he’d probably look mighty suspicious to any cops passing in a squad car. He’s not supposed to be out this late anyway (like a teenager, he has a curfew), but what does that matter? Shit don’t mean shit. Let them send him back to Waynesville. Why not? At least there he won’t have to deal with his fat fuck boss anymore. Or pee while Ellis McFarland watches.
Across the street is the Happy Cup, where he had so many pleasant conversations about books with Andrew Halliday. Not to mention their last conversation, which was far from pleasant. Stay clear of me, Andy had said. That was how the last conversation had ended.
Morris’s brains, which have been idling in neutral, suddenly engage again and the dazed look in his eyes begins to clear. Stay clear of me or I’ll call the police myself, Andy had said … but that wasn’t all he said that day. His old pal had also given him some advice.
Hide them somewhere. Bury them.
Had Andy Halliday really said that, or was it only his imagination?
‘He said it,’ Morris whispers. He looks at his hands and sees they have rolled themselves into grimy fists. ‘He said it, all right. Hide them, he said. Bury them.’ Which leads to certain questions.
Like who was the only person who knew he had the Rothstein notebooks?
Like who was the only person who had actually seen one of the Rothstein notebooks?
Like who knew where he had lived in the old days?
And – here was a big one – who knew about that stretch of undeveloped land, an overgrown couple of acres caught in an endless lawsuit and used only by kids cutting across to the Birch Street Rec?
The answer to all these questions is the same.
Maybe we can revisit this in ten years, his old pal had said. Maybe in twenty.
Well, it had been a fuck of a lot longer than ten or twenty, hadn’t it? Time had gone slip-sliding away. Enough for his old pal to meditate on those valuable notebooks, which had never turned up – not when Morris was arrested for rape and not later on, when the house was sold.
Had his old pal at some point decided to visit Morris’s old neighborhood? Perhaps to stroll any number of times along the path between Sycamore Street and Birch? Had he perhaps made those strolls with a metal detector, hoping it would sense the trunk’s metal fittings and start to beep?