The Bleeding Season (16 page)

I felt bad for Bernard.  I’d lost my cat a few years before, and I knew even though we were fifteen and at a stage where maintaining our level of cool was paramount, he was in a lot of pain.  He’d had Curly since he’d been a toddler, and we’d all known and loved the dog too.  “What kind of asshole hits a dog and keeps going?”  I said, standing behind him while doing my best to look anywhere but at the field.

“I should’ve got him in before I went to bed,” he mumbled.  “It must’ve happened in the middle of the night.  He was probably across the street digging through Mrs. Petrillo’s garbage like he used to.”  Bernard chuckled.  “Fucking dog always ate her garbage.  He was probably on his way home when he got hit.”

“Still, the fucker should’ve stopped.”

“Maybe he did.  It was late, and I found Curly in the backyard.  He probably crawled back there and it was dark and shit and whoever hit him probably couldn’t find him, figured he was all right and ran off.  I don’t know.  Maybe it was just some prick who mowed him down and kept going, never gave it a fucking thought.”  He pulled the piece of grass from his mouth, studied the small chewed section a moment then looked up at me.  “Curly didn’t move as fast as he used to, he was old.  Maybe he tried to make it but didn’t.  He was bleeding out of his ears, and Mr. McIntyre said that was probably because he got hit in the head by the car.”

I stood there, unsure of what to say.

“I’m gonna miss that fucking dog, man.”

“Me too,” I said.  “Curly was cool.”

Bernard turned back to the field.  “Thanks for taking off school with me.”

“No prob.”  I kicked a stone from the slope.  It bounced, clicked along the tracks.  “You going to that party over at Michele Brannon’s house tonight?”

“Nah.”

“Might get your mind off shit.”

The blade of grass was back between his lips, bouncing again with the breeze.  “You ever seen anything dead, Al?”

I shrugged.  “I guess so, yeah.”

“Have you?”

“My cat Doc died.”

“I remember.  He got cancer.”

“Yeah.  Doctor Halstrom said he couldn’t do anything to save him, he had this big tumor.”

“So he killed him for you.”

“He put him to sleep.”

“Yeah, he killed him.”

“I didn’t want Doc to suffer, man.  He was real sick.”

“Did you see him do it or did you leave before?”

I walked around near the tracks, not wanting to think about such things.  “We left the room before he actually did it.  Doc was out of it though; he didn’t know what was happening.  My mom let me take him when it was over, and we buried him in the yard.”

“I remember,” Bernard said.  “It’s fucked up, seeing something that’s dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Especially something you knew when it was alive.”  Bernard nodded, as if agreeing with himself.  “Like, if you see something that’s dead on the side of the road or something—something you never knew or gave a shit about or even saw when it was alive and walking around—it doesn’t really mean anything.  It’s gross and all and you might think it’s sad or whatever, maybe even kind of interesting in a way, but it’s just dead.  This dead…
thing
.  But when you knew it before, when you’re used to seeing it alive and then it’s dead it—it’s fucked up.”

“You ever seen a dead person?” I asked.

He nodded.  “Been to a couple wakes.”

“I saw my grandmother after she was dead,” I told him.  “She looked so weird in the casket, all powdery-faced and everything—shit, didn’t even look like her, not really.”

“Because it wasn’t her,” Bernard said.  “Not anymore.”

“Everybody kept saying how good she looked—how peaceful she looked—and I was just a kid and even I knew it was a crock of shit.  She looked awful, man.  She looked fucking dead, that’s what she looked.”

“What do you think they look like out there?”  Bernard motioned to the field with his chin.  “What do you think it looks like under all that dirt and dead grass?”

“Probably mostly bones.”

Bernard plucked the blade of grass from his mouth and tossed it in the direction of the field below.  The breeze caught it, and it spiraled and danced away, riding the wind.  He pulled his glasses off, wiped the thick lenses with his shirttail then replaced them.  “Worst thing is, we’re all gonna end up the same way.  No matter what you do in your life—or what you don’t do—no matter where you go or who you are everybody croaks; everybody ends up dead and buried.  Unless they torch you, spread your ashes all over. My mother had a cousin they did that to, sprinkled his ashes on the ocean.”

“Guess it won’t matter once you’re dead.”

“Guess not,” he agreed.  “But still, it’s fucked up.  We live our whole life knowing sooner or later, we’re going in the ground.  One day’s gonna be the last.”

“Nobody, nothing lives forever, Bernard.”

He nodded absently.  “We should though.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s cruel not to.  It’s like, from the minute you’re born, you start getting older, right?  So it’s like, you’re kind of dying right from the minute you’re born.  What’s the point of life if it just ends and you’re gone and the world keeps going like you were never even there?  Yesterday Curly was playing in the yard, chewing his tennis ball, having his dinner, drinking out of the toilet—being a dog.  Then
bang
, gone.  Just like that.  Like he was never here at all.”

“That’s why we have memories,” I told him.

“Memories aren’t worth shit.”

I hopped off the tracks and sat down next to him.  A cool breeze blew through the distant trees and across the field.  The sky had turned ashen; a storm was brewing, rolling in off the ocean.  We sat quietly, listened to our thoughts.

“You believe in God, Al?”  Bernard asked.

“Sure, don’t you?”

“Yeah.  You ever wonder about Him?”

“Like what He looks like and shit?”

“No, like why He does what He does.”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“I wonder why God hates me.”

“Bernard, God doesn’t hate anybody.  He’s God.”

Bernard drew his knees up close, rested his chin on them and wrapped his arms around his legs.  “You believe in the Devil?”

“I don’t know, man.  I guess so.”

“If there’s a God there has to be a Devil too.”

“OK.”

“Well, it’s true.  Everything has an opposite, right?”

“Sure.”

“Sometimes I get so fucking pissed, man, I just want to go crazy, you know?”  Bernard looked at me and shook his head, as if the words bothered him more than they ever could me.  “I want to say fuck it and just smash everything, smash everybody because none of it matters anyway.  You do what you do and the world keeps going, nothing stops.  If it mattered—if there was a point, it would—it would stop.  It’d stop and take fucking notice.  But it doesn’t.”

I put a hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze then shook him gently, playfully, and let him go.  “Everybody feels like that sometimes, dude, don’t worry about it.”

Bernard’s eyes blinked slowly, slightly distorted behind thick glass.  “I’m
not
worried,” he said.  “One of these days I’m gonna snap, Al, and when that happens somebody’s gonna get hurt.”

Normally I would’ve teased him for making such a statement, but I let it pass and remained quiet, like I believed him.

“Hurt bad,” he muttered.

Just Bernard being Bernard.  Couldn’t fight a lick, intimidated no one.  Talking tough but never able to back it up.  He was angry and frustrated and missed his dog, so I let him be.  I let him be whatever he said he was.

“You ever think that maybe God’s just fucking with us?”

“He definitely has a twisted sense of humor.”  I laughed dutifully.

“I’m serious.”

“Life sucks sometimes, that’s just how it is.”

“I think I like the Devil better.”

“You shouldn’t say shit like that, man.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“No it’s not.”

Bernard shrugged.  “At least with him you know where you stand.”

“Oh yeah?”  I elbowed him, doing my best to lighten the mood.  “You been talking to him lately?”

“Sometimes I think I hear him talking to me.”

“Shut up!”  I chased away a chill with another forced laugh.  “Fucking whacko.”

Bernard offered a glimmer of a smile and pushed himself to his feet.  “It’s gonna storm.”

I stood up, brushed the dirt from the seat of my pants.

“You think when you die you get to see other people who died first?” he asked.

“I think you do, yeah.”

“How about animals?”

“Sure.  God made them the same as people, why wouldn’t they have a soul too?”

Bernard thought about what I’d said for a moment, his eyes again focused on the fresh dirt in the field.  “I think you’re right.”

“I’ll bet you anything Curly’s running around in Heaven right now, knocking over garbage cans and eating everybody’s trash.”

“Maybe we got it all backwards,” he said softly.  “Maybe none of us really start living…until we’re dead.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“Come on,” I said.  “Let’s get out of here.”

As we left, a gentle rain began to fall.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ventured to that part of the tracks, and now, all these years later I sat in my car across the street from the animal burial ground and watched the goings on up to and beyond the yellow police tape.  On the seat next to me was the newspaper from the evening before, the headline of which described the grisly discovery a town worker had made in the early morning hours.  A body—nude, mutilated and partially decomposed—had been left amidst the field containing the bones of generations of animals in a shallow grave that had given way with the change of season.  The worker had noticed something he could not immediately identify protruding from the earth, and upon closer inspection, realized it was the foot and calf of a human being.  The article and subsequent television reports revealed that the body was that of a young woman who had been dead for a number of weeks, but her identity had not yet been established.  State police investigators, who were scouring the field and surrounding areas, had joined the local police force, and a flood of media people had converged on Potter’s Cove to cover the event.

There had only been three murders in town in the last two decades.  A teenager had shot his former best friend with his father’s handgun.  A woman who had endured years of physical abuse took a hammer to her husband’s head one night after he’d passed out drunk, and a man known by police to be a drug dealer had been executed gangland style in an alley downtown.  Those had been the most infamous killings Potter’s Cove had ever seen, until now, and those cases were cut and dry, easy to close.  This was different.

And it was only the beginning.

Although the body had already been removed, a throng of people still filled the surrounding streets, milling about behind the police tape like fans huddled near a stage door awaiting a glimpse of a rock star.  At the far end of one group, standing near the curb, arms folded and brow knit, stood Donald.  In the past two weeks I hadn’t seen much of him or Rick, had only spoken to them on the phone a few times, in fact, as being apart was somehow easier for the time being.

Even though a few capsules remained on the anti-anxiety prescription, I’d stopped taking the pills several days before, and my head felt clearer, my senses sharper.  Toni had retreated into a distant mode, and I honestly couldn’t blame her, as I’d not even attempted to look for work and had refused to discuss counseling or anything that had happened that night.  Lately, I’d spent most of my waking hours thinking, remembering; searching my mind for anything that might lead me in the right direction.  And I spent a lot of time driving aimlessly around town, as if hoping to find answers on the side of the road.  Now I wondered how many times in the last few weeks I’d driven within a few dozen yards of where the body had been found.  Cruel, really, the irony.

The frequency of the recurring nightmare had decreased somewhat, but the dark thoughts and strobe-like memory flashes of the night in the abandoned factory continued to haunt me with vicious consistency.  I got out of the car, leaned against the side of the hood and stared at Donald until he noticed me.  He was dressed for work, in a suit, but his tie was undone and hung loosely, giving him an unusually tousled look.  The moment he saw me he walked across the street to my car.

“How are you?” he asked.

“How are
you
?”

It was a clear and pleasant day, but not terribly sunny.  Donald removed his sunglasses long enough to paw at the dark bags under his eyes, then replaced them, concealing himself behind black lenses.  “I got up, shaved, took a shower, got dressed for work as usual then called in sick and came here instead.  I don’t even know why, exactly.”

“Sure you do.”

He joined me against the side of the car, pulled cigarettes and a lighter from his shirt pocket.  “They haven’t released much about the victim yet.”

“Only that it’s a young woman.”

He rolled a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, left it there and returned the pack to his pocket.  “Yes.”  Cupping the flame, he lit the cigarette then snapped shut the lighter, his actions emphasized.   “And that she’s been dead for weeks.”

“Are you still having the nightmare?” I asked.

His nod was barely detectable.  “You?”

“Not as often as before.”

“Heard from Rick?” he asked.

“Not in a while.”

“He wants to get together at Brannigan’s later this afternoon.  Four o’clock.”

I wished I could see his eyes.  “I’ll be there.”

He took a few drags before he spoke again, the smoke slowly releasing through his nostrils.  “Things are going to get worse, Alan.”

“Of course they are,” I said.  “We’re damned.”

Face expressionless, he flicked his cigarette away.  “Think so?”

“Don’t you?”

Without answering, Donald gave my arm a reassuring pat, moved back across the street and faded into the crowd.

CHAPTER 11

I drove down Main Street, left the festivities behind and turned onto Sycamore Way, a quiet tree-lined street that acted as a kind of palisade between Potter’s Cove’s largely commercially zoned working-class downtown and the beginnings of the middle and upper-class, exclusively residential neighborhoods to the north.  The buildings on either side of the street were original town structures—historical landmarks all—restored but constructed in colonial times not long after the town itself was founded.  Only a few were residences, the rest housed the town’s historical society, an art center and several small medical and law offices.  Unlike the area I lived in, this part of town was clean and manicured and quaint.  Here, Potter’s Cove was still more a small town than the burgeoning city it had become in the less affluent districts.