He pulled everything out of the secondhand trunk, resisting an almost overpowering urge to look into the notebooks. He couldn’t do that, no matter how much he wanted to, because once he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop. Later, he thought. Must postpone your gratifications, Morrie. Good advice, but spoken in his mother’s voice, and that started his head throbbing again. At least he wouldn’t have to postpone his gratifications for long; if three weeks went by with no visits from the police—a month at most—he would be able to relax and begin his researches.
He lined the trunk with plastic to make sure the contents would stay dry, and put the notebooks, including the one he’d taken to show Andy, back inside. He dumped the money envelopes on top. He closed the trunk, considered, and opened it again. He pawed the plastic aside and took a couple of hundred dollars from one of the bank envelopes. Surely no cop would think that an excessive amount, even if he were searched. He could tell them it was his severance pay, or something.
The sound of the rain on the garage roof was not soothing. To Morris it sounded like skeletal tapping fingers, and made his headache worse. He froze every time a car went by, waiting for headlights and pulsing blue strobes to splash up the driveway. Fuck Andy Halliday for putting all these pointless worries in my head, he thought. Fuck him and the homo horse he rode in on.
Only the worries might not be pointless. As afternoon wound down toward twilight, the idea that the cops could put Curtis and Freddy together with Morris Bellamy seemed more and more likely. That fucking rest area! Why hadn’t he dragged the bodies into the woods, at least? Not that it would have slowed the cops down much once someone pulled in, saw all the blood, and called 911. The cops would have dogs . . .
“Besides,” he told the trunk, “I was in a hurry. Wasn’t I?”
His father’s hand dolly was still standing in the corner, along with a rusty pick and two rusty shovels. Morris tipped the trunk endwise onto the dolly, secured the straps, and peered out of the garage window. Still too much light. Now that he was so close to getting rid of the notebooks and the money—Temporarily, he soothed himself, this is just a temporary measure—he became more and more sure that the cops would be here soon. Suppose Mrs. Muller had reported him as acting suspicious? It didn’t seem likely, she was thicker than an oak plank, but who really knew?
He forced himself to stuff down another frozen dinner, thinking it might soothe his head. It made the headache worse, instead. He looked in his mother’s medicine cabinet for aspirin or Advil, and found . . . nothing. Fuck you, Mom, he thought. Really. Sincerely. Fuck . . . you.
He saw her smile. Thin as a hook, that smile.
It was still light at seven o’clock—goddam daylight saving time, what genius thought that up?—but the windows next door were still dark. That was good, but Morris knew the Mullers might be back at any time. Besides, he was too nervous to wait any longer. He rooted around in the front hall closet until he found a poncho.
He used the garage’s rear door and yanked the dolly across the back lawn. The grass was wet, the ground underneath spongy, and it was hard going. The path he had used so many times as a kid—usually going to the Birch Street Rec—was sheltered by overhanging trees, and he was able to make better progress. By the time he got to the little stream that flowed diagonally across this block-sized square of waste ground, full dark had arrived.
He had brought a flashlight and used it in brief winks to pick out a likely location on the embankment of the stream, a safe distance from the path. The dirt was soft, and it was easy digging until he got to the tangle of roots from an overhanging tree. He thought about trying a different spot, but the hole was almost big enough for the trunk already, and he was damned if he was going to start all over again, especially when this was just a temporary precaution. He laid the flashlight in the hole, propping it on a rock so the beam shone on the roots, and chopped through them with the pick.
He slid the trunk into the hole and shoveled the dirt back around it and over it quickly. He finished by tamping it down with the flat of the shovel. He thought it would be okay. The bank wasn’t particularly grassy, so the bald spot wouldn’t stand out. The important thing was that it was out of the house, right?
Right?
He felt no relief as he dragged the dolly back along the path. Nothing was working out the way it was supposed to, nothing. It was as if malignant fate had come between him and the notebooks, just as fate had come between Romeo and Juliet. That comparison seemed both ludicrous and perfectly apt. He was a lover. Goddam Rothstein had jilted him with The Runner Slows Down, but that didn’t change the fact.
His love was true.
???
When he got back to the house, he went immediately to the shower, as a boy named Pete Saubers would do many years later in this very same bathroom, after visiting that very same embankment and overhanging tree. Morris stayed in until his fingers were pruney and the hot water was gone, then dried off and dressed in fresh clothes from his bedroom closet. They looked childish and out of fashion to him, but they still fit (more or less). He put his dirt-smeared jeans and sweatshirt in the washer, an act that would also be replicated by Pete Saubers years later.
Morris turned on the TV, sat in his father’s old easy chair—his mother said she kept it as a reminder, should she ever be tempted into stupidity again—and saw the usual helping of ad-driven inanity. He thought that any of those ads (jumping laxative bottles, primping moms, singing hamburgers) could have been written by Jimmy Gold, and that made his headache worse than ever. He decided to go down to Zoney’s and get some Anacin. Maybe even a beer or two. Beer wouldn’t hurt. It was the hard stuff that caused trouble, and he’d learned his lesson on that score.
He did get the Anacin, but the idea of drinking beer in a house full of books he didn’t want to read and TV he didn’t want to watch made him feel worse than ever. Especially when the stuff he did want to read was so maddeningly close. Morris rarely drank in bars, but all at once he felt that if he didn’t get out and find some company and hear some fast music, he would go completely insane. Somewhere out in this rainy night, he was sure there was a young lady who wanted to dance.
He paid for his aspirin and asked the young guy at the register, almost idly, if there was a bar with live music that he could get to on the bus.
The young guy said there was.
2010
When Linda Saubers got home that Friday afternoon at three thirty, Pete was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of cocoa. His hair was still damp from the shower. She hung her coat on one of the hooks by the back door, and placed the inside of her wrist against his forehead again. “Cool as a cucumber,” she pronounced. “Do you feel better?”
“Yeah,” he said. “When Tina came home, I made her peanut butter crackers.”
“You’re a good brother. Where is she now?”
“Ellen’s, where else?”
Linda rolled her eyes and Pete laughed.
“Mother of Mercy, is that the dryer I hear?”
“Yeah. There were a bunch of clothes in the basket, so I washed em. Don’t worry, I followed the directions on the door, and they came out okay.”
She bent down and kissed his temple. “Aren’t you the little do-bee?”
“I try,” Pete said. He closed his right hand to hide the blister on his palm.