Between the Dark and the Daylight Page 10

  Mark held up a hand to stop Jackson from approaching, hunkered down in the tall grass, and took stock. Five small tents stood in a circle, a campfire in the center. Nine men sat around the campfire. Six wore sidearms and three cradled machetes on their laps, but Mark saw no long guns.

  And then came the soft breeze. It blew gently across the campsite, and the fire crackled and threw off more light. But it blew the smoke straight toward Mark, and his eyes began to sting and water, and his nose tickled.

  Mark Tindall sneezed. The night shattered.

  Gravedigger stood in the rain and, using a spade, separated the grass from the earth below. The area around the head grounds-keeper’s residence was taken up mostly by old mausoleums, but he wanted to bury Walter Jackson nearby, so he commandeered this spot, about ten yards from his front door. Once he’d placed the sod to one side, he used a small backhoe to dig the hole, dumping the wet soil on a tarp to the other side.

  The casket arrived, and the crew lowered it into the hole. Because of the persistent rain, the ground was waterlogged and there were a couple of feet of standing water below. The sealed casket floated aimlessly in the grave.

  Gravedigger sent Sam off to get the sump pump, and then retreated to his residence, where he rummaged through an old shoebox and found a photograph of Mark Tindall and Walter Jackson. It was the only thing he had kept from his former life. He’d thrown everything else away when he killed Mark Tindall and became Gravedigger Peace, but Jackson had saved his life and he could never bring himself to get rid of it. Now he would lay it to rest with his old friend.

  He left the photo on the kitchen table and, in the bedroom, stripped off his sodden clothes. Walter Jackson would have no funeral, only a burial. But at least he would have one mourner. Maybe it was a useless gesture, but Gravedigger didn’t care. He opened the closet, and put on his only suit.

  He tied his tie in front of the bathroom mirror, and tried not to look beyond the knot. But he couldn’t help himself. Avoiding his own eyes, he examined the thin white scar that ran from his left cheek down to his jaw. The scar made by a machete in Nigeria. And when he made eye contact, Mark Tindall stared back at him. Shit! Fuck! He swung open the door of the medicine cabinet, displacing the mirror, and fled the bathroom, thinking I know who I am. I know who I am. I know who I am…

  Photograph in hand, Gravedigger headed back out into the hot summer rain. Fuck the poncho, he would stand in his suit in the rain and give Walter Jackson a proper sendoff. It was coming down harder now, blowing in his face, forcing him to look at the ground as he walked to the graveside. He looked up, and dropped the photograph.

  They were coffin-surfing. Tweedledum stood on top of the casket, rocking it with his legs, creating a wave beneath. He struck a surfer’s pose, and sang the theme from Hawaii Five-O. Tweedledee stood off to one side, laughing.

  Gravedigger screamed and lunged forward, then caught himself. He trembled as adrenaline coursed through his veins.

  Tweedledee stopped laughing and said, “Oh, shit.”

  Tweedledum jumped off the casket and out of the grave. “We were just having some fun, man.”

  “You’re fired. Both of you.”

  “What difference does it make,” said Tweedledee, “dude’s already dead.”

  It took all of Gravedigger’s willpower to keep his voice from breaking. “Get the fuck out of my graveyard. Now. Before I hurt you.

  Nigeria is a very bad place to do prison time, especially for a white man. Walter Jackson endured his share of torture, but his cell had a cot, and a hole in the floor served as a toilet. Mark Tindall did harder time. The guards beat him daily, sometimes breaking ribs and once breaking his left arm. He was given just enough food and water to keep him alive, and days would sometimes pass between meals. His cell had nothing in it at all, not even a drain in the concrete floor, so he lived in his own filth.

  Sometime around the fourth month, the guards took Mark Tindall’s boots away and whipped him on the soles of his feet. His feet soon became infected, purple and swollen and oozing puss. He was given no medical attention and his fever soared. Hallucinations came regularly, and he started to lose himself. Some days he would be lucid, but other days he was stark raving mad, smearing himself with his own shit, howling at the walls and twitching like an epileptic having a seizure. Then he would pass out, and wake up relatively sane again. Until the next time.

  On the six-month anniversary of their capture, the guards hauled Mark Tindall from his cell and hosed him down and put him in the cell with Walter Jackson. A man in a crisp military uniform came into the cell.

  “Tomorrow morning,” the man said, “one of you will be sent back to America. It is for you to decide which one.” The man handed a pack of Marlboros and a book of matches to Walter Jackson, and left.

  Jackson lit a cigarette and put it between Mark Tindall’s lips, then lit one for himself. They smoked in silence for a few minutes.

  “You don’t look so good, Golden Boy,” said Jackson.

  Mark Tindall let out a crooked smile. “You’re lookin’ a little skinny yourself, Sarge.”

  “Hey, I’m livin’ high on the hog. This is the fuckin’ Ritz Carleton compared to your crib.”

  “Yeah. It’s pretty nice. I could stay here awhile.”

  Walter Jackson stubbed his cigarette out on the floor and lit another. “Shit. You gonna lose those feet if we don’t get you out of here.”

  “Might lose ‘em anyway.” The two men nodded at each other, and silent tears began to stream down Mark Tindall’s face.

  Jackson slid over and put his arms around the younger man’s shoulders, holding him like a protective father. “When you get out of here tomorrow, put it behind you, Mark. Don’t look back.”

  Mark didn’t even try to argue.

  Gravedigger Peace woke to the sound of his own voice. “Sorry I sneezed, Sarge.” Sorry I sneezed. Shit. Sorry I left you behind. Sorry I lived.

  The bedside clock said it was just past midnight. He had slept only three hours. After the stoners had left, he’d sumped the water out of Walter Jackson’s grave and covered it with earth by hand, using the spade. He needed to work off the adrenaline. Once the grave was filled, he went home, tossed his ruined suit into the trash, and lay in the bathtub with a long drink. He tried to make himself cry a little, but he hadn’t cried in years and he couldn’t summon the tears. Finally he gave up, finished his drink and went to bed.

  Now he was up again, and his nerves felt raw, exposed. He tried to read, couldn’t. He got a beer from the fridge, but didn’t open it. Sat in front of the television, but didn’t turn it on. The rain had stopped at last, and the silence rang in his ears.

  Then he heard it. A sound from outside. Voices.

  He opened the coat closet and reached for the Mossberg shotgun that he kept there, then reached deeper into the closet and pulled out a machete instead.

  The moon was almost full, and Gravedigger’s eyes adjusted to the light as he walked toward Walter Jackson’s grave, holding the machete in his right hand and a flashlight in his left. Tweedledee stood pissing on the grave, then put his dick back in his pants. Beside a nearby mausoleum, Tweedledum stood with a can of spray-paint in his hand. Painted on the wall was, I rode Gravedigger’s bitch!

  Gravedigger flicked the flashlight on, and both boys froze. They should have run away. But instead, they charged.

  And Mark Tindall cut them to pieces.

  Formerly a private investigator in Chicago and New Orleans, SEAN CHERCOVER now writes full-time. His debut novel, Big City Bad Blood, won the Shamus, Gumshoe, Crimespree, and Lovey awards for best first novel, and was shortlisted for the ITW Thriller, Arthur Ellis, Barry, and Anthony awards. His short story, “A Sleep Not Unlike Death” is an Edgar Award nominee. His latest novel is Trigger City. When Sean’s not on the road, you can find him in Chicago or Toronto.

  The First Husband

  BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  1.

  It began innocently: he
was searching for his wife’s passport.

  The Chases were planning their first trip to Italy together. To celebrate their tenth anniversary. Leonard’s own much-worn passport was exactly where he always kept it but Valerie’s less frequently used passport didn’t appear to be with it so Leonard looked through drawers designated as hers, bureau drawers, desk drawers, the single shallow drawer of the cherrywood table in a corner of their bedroom which Valerie sometimes used as a desk, and there, in a manila folder, with a facsimile of her birth certificate and other documents, he found the passport. And pushed to the back of the drawer, a packet of photographs held together with a frayed rubber band.

  Polaroids. Judging by their slightly faded colors, old Polaroids.

  Leonard shuffled through the photographs, like cards. He was staring at a young couple: Valerie and a man whom Leonard didn’t recognize. Here was Valerie astonishingly young, and more beautiful than Leonard had ever known her. Her hair was coppery-red and fell in a cascade to her bare shoulders, she was wearing a red bikini top, white shorts. The darkly handsome young man close beside her had slung a tanned arm around her shoulders in a playful intimate gesture, a gesture of blatant sexual possession. Very likely, this man was Valerie’s first husband, whom Leonard had never met. The young lovers were photographed seated at a white wrought iron table in an outdoor cafe, or on the balcony of a hotel room. In several photos, you could see in the near distance a curving stretch of wide, white sand, a glimpse of aqua water. Beyond the couple on the terrace were royal court palm trees, crimson bouvainvillea like flame. The sky was a vivid tropical blue. The five or six photographs must have been taken by a third party, a waiter or hotel employee perhaps. Leonard stared, transfixed.

  The first husband. Here was the first husband. Yardman? — was that the name? Leonard felt a stab of sexual jealousy. Not wanting to think But I am the second husband.

  On the reverse of one of the Polaroids, in Valerie’s handwriting, was Oliver & Val, Key West, December 1985.

  Oliver. This was Yardman’s first name, Leonard vaguely remembered now. In 1985, Val had been twenty-two, nearly half her lifetime ago, and she hadn’t yet married Oliver Yardman, but would be marrying him in another year. At this time they were very possibly new lovers, this trip to Key West had been a kind of honeymoon. Such sensual, unabashed happiness in the lovers’ faces! Leonard was sure that Valerie had told him she hadn’t kept any photographs of her first husband.

  “The least we can do with our mistakes,” Valerie had said, with a droll downturn of her mouth, “is not keep a record of them.”

  Leonard, who’d met Valerie when she was thirty-one, several years after her divorce from Yardman, had been allowed to think that the first husband had been older than Valerie, not very attractive and not very interesting. Valerie claimed that she’d married “too young” and their divorce just five years later had been “amicable” for they had no children and had not shared much of a past. Yardman’s work had been with a family — owned business in a Denver suburb, “dull, money — grubbing work.” Valerie, who’d grown up in Rye, Connecticut, had not liked Colorado and spoke of that part of the country, and of that phase of her life, with an expression of distaste.

  Yet here was glaring evidence that Valerie had been very happy with Oliver Yardman in December 1985. Clearly Yardman was no more than a few years older than Valerie and, far from being unattractive, Yardman was extremely attractive: dark, avid eyes, sharply defined features, something sulky and petulant about the mouth, the mouth of a spoiled child; the kind of child a woman might wish to spoil to see that mouth curve upward in pleasure. There was a revealing Polaroid in which Yardman pulled Valerie playfully toward him, a hand gripping her shoulder and the other hand beneath the table, very likely gripping her thigh. His hair was dark, thick, damply touseled. Faint stubble showed on his jaws. He wore a white T — shirt that fitted his muscled, solid torso tightly, and what appeared to be swimming trunks; his legs were thickly muscled, covered in dark hairs. He was barefoot, his toes curling upward in delight. So this was Oliver Yardman: the first husband. Not at all the man Valerie had suggested to Leonard.

  He’d thought it was strange, but attributed it to Valerie’s natural reticence, that, in the early months of their relationship Valerie had rarely asked Leonard about his past. She hadn’t even asked him if he had been married, Leonard had volunteered the information: No.

  And no children, either. He’d been careful about that.

  It had been something of a relief, to meet a woman without a trace of sexual jealousy. Now Leonard saw that Valerie hadn’t wanted to be questioned about her own sexual past.

  Leonard stared at the Polaroids. He supposed he should simply laugh and replace them in the drawer where he’d found them, taking care not to snap the frayed rubber band, for certainly he wasn’t the kind of man to riffle through his wife’s private things. Nor was he the kind of man who is prone to jealousy.

  Of all the ignoble emotions, jealousy had to be the worst! And envy.

  And yet: he brought the photos closer to the window, where a faint November sun glowered behind banks of clouds above the Hudson River, seeing how the table at which the young couple sat was crowded with glasses, a bottle of (red, dark) wine that appeared to be nearly depleted, napkins crumpled onto dirtied plates like discarded clothing. A ring on Valerie’s left hand, silver studs glittering in her ear lobes that looked flushed, rosy. In several of the photos, Valerie was clutching at her energetic young lover as he was clutching at her, in playful possessiveness. You could see that Valerie was giddy from wine, and love. Here was an amorous couple who’d wakened late after a night of love, this heavy lunch with wine would be their first meal of the day; very likely, they’d return to bed, collapsing in one another’s arms for an afternoon siesta. In the most blatant photo, Valerie lay sprawled against Yardman, glossy coppery hair spilling across his chest, one of her arms around his waist and the other part hidden beneath the table, her hand very likely in Yardman’s lap. In Yardman’s groin. Valerie, who now disliked vulgarity, who stiffened if Leonard swore and claimed to hate “overly explicit” films, had been provocatively touching Yardman in the very presence of the third party with the camera. Her little-girl mock-innocent expression was familiar to Leonard: Not me! Not me! I’m not a naughty girl, not me!

  Leonard stared, his heart beat in resentment. Here was a Valerie he hadn’t known: mouth swollen from being kissed, and from kissing; young, full breasts straining against the red fabric of the bikini top and in the crescent of shadowy flesh between her breasts something coin-sized gleaming like oily sweat; her skin suffused with a warm, sensual radiance. Leonard understood that this young woman must be contained within the other, the elder who was his wife: as a secret, rapturous memory, inaccessible to him, the merely second husband.

  Leonard was forty-five. Young for his age but that age wasn’t young.

  When he’d been the age of Yardman in the photos, early or mid-twenties, he hadn’t been young like Yardman, either. Painful to concede but it was so.

  If he, Leonard Chase, had approached the young woman in the photos, if he’d managed to enter Valerie’s life in 1985, Valerie would not have given him a second glance. Not as a man. Not as a sexual partner. He knew this.

  After lunch, the young couple would return to their hotel room and draw the blinds. Laughing and kissing, stumbling, like drunken dancers. They were naked together, beautiful smooth bodies coiled together, greedily kissing, caressing, thrusting together with the abandon of copulating animals. He saw them sprawled on the bed that would be a large jangly brass bed, and the room dimly-lit, a fan turning indolently overhead, through slats in the blinds a glimpse of tropical sky, the graceful curve of a palm tree, a patch of bougainvillea moistly crimson as a woman’s mouth … Leonard felt an unwelcome sexual stirring, in his groin.

  “She lied. That’s the insult.”

  Misrepresenting the first husband, the first marriage. Why?

  Leonard kn
ew why: Yardman had been Valerie’s first serious love. Yardman was the standard of masculine sexuality in Valerie’s life. No love like your first. Was this so? (In Leonard’s case also, probably it was. But Leonard’s first love had not been a sexual love and his memory of the girl, the older sister of a school friend had long since faded.) The cache of Polaroid’s was Valerie’s secret, a link to her private, erotic life.

  Hurriedly he replaced the Polaroids in the drawer. The frayed rubber band had snapped, Leonard took no notice. He went away shaken, devastated. He thought I’ve never existed for her. It has all been a farce.

  In Rockland County, New York. In Salthill Landing on the western bank of the Hudson River. Twenty miles north of the George Washington Bridge.

  In one of the old stone houses overlooking the river: “historic” — ”landmark.” Expensive.

  Early that evening as Valerie was preparing one of her gourmet meals in the kitchen there was Leonard leaning in the doorway, a drink in hand. Asking, “D’you ever hear of him, Val? What was his name, ‘Yardman’…” casually as one who has only been struck by a wayward thought, and Valerie, frowning at a recipe, murmured no, but in so distracted a way Leonard wasn’t sure that she’d heard, so he asked again, “D’you ever hear of Yardman? Or from him?” and now Valerie glanced over at Leonard with a faint, perplexed smile, “Yardman? No,” and Leonard said, “Really? Never? In all these years?” and Valerie said, “In all these years, darling, no.”

  Valerie was peering at a recipe in a large, sumptuously illustrated cookbook propped up on a counter, pages clipped open. The cookbook was Caribbean Kitchen, an expensive book that had been a Christmas gift from friends in Salthill Landing with whom the Chases often dined, both in their homes and in selected restaurants in Manhattan. Valerie was preparing flank steak, to be marinated and stuffed with sausage, hard-boiled eggs, and vegetables, an ambitious meal that would involve an elaborate marinade, and a yet more elaborate stuffing, and at this moment involved the almost surgical “butterflying” of the blood-oozing slab of meat. This was a meal Valerie hoped to prepare for a dinner party later in the month, she was determined to perfect it. A coincidence, Leonard thought, that only a few hours after he’d discovered the secret cache of Polaroids, Valerie was preparing an exotic Caribbean meal of the kind she might have first sampled in Key West with the first husband twenty years ago, but Leonard, who was a reasonable man, a tax lawyer who specialized in litigation in federal appellate courts, knew it could only be a coincidence. Asking, in a tone of mild inquiry, “What was Yardman’s first name, Val? — I don’t think you ever mentioned it,” and Valerie said, with an impatient little laugh, having taken up a steak knife to cut the meat horizontally, “What does it matter what the name is?” Leonard noted that, though he’d said was, Valerie had said is. The first husband was present to her, no time had passed. Leonard recalled an ominous remark of Freud’s that, in the unconscious, all time is present tense and so what has come to dwell most powerfully in the unconscious is felt to be immortal, unkillable. Valerie added, as if in rebuke, “Of course I’ve mentioned his name, Leonard. Only just not in a long time.” She was having difficulty with the flank steak, skidding about on the wooden block, so Leonard quickly set down his drink and held it secure, while Valerie, biting her lower lip, pursing her face like Caravaggio’s Judith sawing off the head of the wicked king Holofernes, managed to inset the sharp blade, make the necessary incisions, complete the cut so that the meat could now be opened like the pages of a book. As Leonard watched, fascinated, yet with a sensation of revulsion, Valerie then covered the meat with a strip of plastic wrap and pounded at it with a meat mallet, short deft blows to reduce it to a uniform quarter-inch thickness. Leonard winced a little with the blows. He said, “Did he — I mean Yardman — ever re-marry?” and Valerie made an impatient gesture to signal that she didn’t want to be distracted, not just now. This was important! This was to be their dinner! Carefully she slid the butterflied steak into a large, shallow dish and poured the marinade (sherry vinegar, olive oil, fresh sage, cumin, garlic, salt and fresh-ground black pepper) over it. Leonard saw that Valerie’s face had thickened, since she’d been Oliver Yardman’s lover; her body had thickened, gravity was tugging at her breasts, thighs. At the corners of her eyes and mouth were fine white lines and the coppery — red hair had faded, yet still Valerie was a striking woman, a rich man’s daughter whose sense of her self-worth shone in her eyes, in her lustrous teeth, in her sharp dismissive laughter like the sheen of the expensive kitchen utensils hanging overhead. There was something sensual and languorous in Valerie’s face when she concentrated on food, an almost childlike bliss, an air of happy expectation. Leonard thought Food is Eros without the risk of heartbreak. Unlike a lover, food will never reject you.