بخش 02 - فصل 28

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?

Did Morris even mention the trunk that day?

Maybe not, but what else could it be? What else made sense? Even a large strongbox would be too small. Paper or canvas bags would have rotted. Morris wonders how many holes Andy had to dig before he finally hit paydirt. A dozen? Four dozen? Four dozen was a lot, but back in the seventies, Andy had been fairly trim, not a waddling fat fuck like he was now. And the motivation would have been there. Or maybe he didn’t have to dig any holes at all. Maybe there had been a spring flood or something, and the bank had eroded enough to reveal the trunk in its cradle of roots. Wasn’t that possible?

Morris gets up and walks on, now thinking about McFarland again and occasionally glancing around to make sure he isn’t there. It matters again now, because now he has something to live for again. A goal. It’s possible that his old pal has sold the notebooks, selling is his business as sure as it was Jimmy Gold’s in The Runner Slows Down, but it’s just as possible that he’s still sitting on some or all of them. There’s only one sure way to find out, and only one way to find out if the old wolf still has some teeth. He has to pay his homie a visit.

His old pal.