Installment #13
Chapters 20, 21, 22 & 23
20
Walt ran his hand over the jagged surface of the limestone wall. The wall was actually the heart of a hill that had been cleaved by explosives and cut away with jackhammers and hauled off by bulldozers to make room for a two-lane highway.
The face of the wall was rough and dusty and scored from the flames where Geri’s Camaro had collided with the limestone and exploded. With his hand, Walt followed the scoring down to the ground. He let his eyes follow the ground down into the ditch and out to the road.
“Where’s the skid marks?”
Vern began digging at his cuticle.
“Yeah that is odd, ain’t it,“ he said. “You know, Joni’s wasn’t the first wreck I’ve hauled away from out here.”
As Walt backed away from the wall to the road, he tripped over a cross about knee-high. It was made of wood wrapped in chicken wire that had been decorated with pink and white plastic flowers. Someone had jammed the cross in the dirt shoulder of the highway.
Walt tried to right it, stabbing it back in the ground, but the cross fell over each time he tried. He glanced up and in the distance saw a truck coming toward them.
“That memorial you just trampled there marks the spot where Bud Harris’s boy ran his Mustang off the road,” Vern said. “Up the road a bit, a school bus flipped. It was empty and the driver was okay so nobody bothered to put up a memorial cross. Every couple of years or so somebody wrecks out here. It’s the way the road curves sharp and all.”
Walt pushed his cowboy hat back on his head as he watched the truck coming up fast on them. He shook his head.
“It just don’t make sense. Did she even try to stop?”
Vern shrugged, joining Walt on the side of the road. Uncomfortably close, Walt though. The truck’s engine grew louder as it traveled closer.
Vern lifted his hands with his elbows cocked, like he was getting ready to push something or someone, Walt thought.
“Like I said, I’ve towed many a wreck out here. Curve comes up on you quick. No time to even think about stopping. Jus pow!”
The truck whizzed by and Walt flew backward into the ditch. At first, Walt thought the truck had swiped him. But as he lay in the ditch feeling no pain, he remembered feeling hands on his shoulders a half-second before the truck went by, hands jerking him backward, sending him flying. Walt squinted up at Vern.
“You better watch out, friend,” Vern said. “It’s awful dangerous out here.”
“I thought you were going to push me into that truck,” Walt said.
The midday sun was just over Vern’s shoulder, turning him into a silhouette and making it tough for Walt to see his face. But Walt could tell there was a grin on Vern’s face. He could hear in Vern’s voice.
“Now why would I go and do a thing like that?” Vern said.
21
Geri didn’t feel up to searching the whole barn. It was too big, and she was growing tired of the hunt.
“Think as if you were the man himself.”
She wiped her hands on a rag, vigorously like Vern always did after the many times a day he washed his hands. She cracked up laughing.
“Hell if that’s working for me,” she said.
She stood alone in the old barn. The air was cool and musty. Hay was spread over the barn’s dirt floor. Rays of sunlight slanted in through the gaps in the wallboards, catching the meandering dust motes in its beams.
Barefoot, Geri walked over to the workbench. Its top was cleared, all the tools hanging in their outlined shapes on a pegboard above the workspace. Geri twirled the handle of a vise mounted on the corner of the worktable, tightening it. She realized there weren’t too many places to hide such a large amount of cash. Unless it was hidden somewhere up in the loft, the money wasn’t in the barn.
Certainly, it wasn’t on the shelves with the paint cans or under the workbench with the gas cans. She turned to go back into the house, then stopped.
Bending down, frowning, she concentrated on the gas cans under the workbench. She hoped that looking at them would help her remember—had she wiped her prints from the gas cans the night they torched her car?
If Vern kept acting squirrelly, the last things she wanted were her prints on the gas cans. She grabbed the rag and, reaching awkwardly under the workbench, wiped at the handle and sides of each can.
When she had finished, she refolded the rag and returned it to the neat pile of rags on the tabletop. Walking back to the house, she tried to figure Vern’s angle. Going into this scam, she had him pegged—predictable, needy, an odd duck looking for a nest.
But lately, Vern had surprised her with some backbone. Much more of that personal growth bullshit, she thought, and it’ll be time to snap him. She reminded herself it was good, in a way, that she still hadn’t found the money.
Still, she had no interest in seeing how far Vern might go with his newfound independence. Or, if he did, how deep into the ground he might go.
“Geri girl, there’s a grave with one of your names on it,” she said, talking to herself. “And six feet under it lays a burned up dead woman.”
Ducking down into the root cellar beneath the house, Geri laughed, saying to herself, “Aw, but it sure as shit ain’t me, babe.”
22
“Makes it real, don’t it?” Vern said.
Vern turned to look at Walt standing motionless under his cowboy hat. Walt peering down at the fresh grave. Walt ignored the headstone, a small granite plate set in the ground that listed the first name of the deceased, the buried, as Joni.
Instead, Walt tried to imagine Geri in her lacey coffin six feet below the mound of dirt. He thought about when he used to kiss her and how long ago that seemed.
The sun burned straight up in the sky over the rural cemetery. The matrix of gravestones soaked up the heat, then gave it right back double.
“Noon,” Vern said. “I could eat.”
Walt shot a look in Vern’s direction.
“You can cry, you know that,” Vern said. “I mean, it’s okay.”
Walt heard a farm truck in the distance out on the highway downshifting, gears grinding.
“It would be understandable,” Vern said.
Vern rubbed the back of his neck. His skin was burning.
“Tell you what—I’m heading back to the truck. Take whatever time you need. Then we’ll head back into town. I’ll buy you a chicken-fried steak for lunch, all right? Take your time, no rush.”
Walt said nothing, just kept his head bowed as if praying. Then he snuck a peek at Vern. Watched him cut a path through the headstones back to his pickup truck. Vern unconcerned walking over the dead.
23
Geri’s bare knee banged against something jagged and hard. She wanted to cuss but remembered her tender jaw. Instead, she grimaced silently, rubbing her kneecap.
Down in the root cellar it was too dark to make out just what she’d stumbled into at the bottom of the steps. The only light was the warm square of daylight in the open doorway above her. She stood still, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
Dark. Underground. It all made her think again of the woman in the grave with her name. Her fake name.
Geri’s first day in Eden, when the waitress at the café had asked her her name, the name Joni just flew out of Geri’s mouth. At the time Geri couldn’t say why she’d adopted a fake name but now it would make for a cleaner break. Especially now that she was ready to say goodbye to Eden.
Slowly, her eyes made out the dark, dank cellar. Geri panned the room, thinking, money, money, money.
Up against the far wall there were handmade wooden shelves filled with mason jars, empty and covered in dust. She knew right then Vern hadn’t been down in the root cellar recently; he never could have passed the jars without dusting them.
Still, she was down here already and had a skinned knee for her efforts. She figured she might as well keep on searching. She saw that she’d smacked her knee against a large box that rattled. The box contained tin lids and collars for the two-piece screw tops to the glass jars.
“Granny did some canning,” Geri said. “Used every part of the corncob and tomato plant, she did. Very efficient. Efficient, bored old broad.”
Like the barn, there weren’t many places in the root cellar to hide a fat pile of cash. Geri ran her hand over the walls, searching in vain for the loose limestones of a secret hiding place in the foundation of the house. She wanted her money because it was her money, of course, and because she had started up her own business, illegal as it was, to earn it.
She also wanted it because of all the risk she’d taken. She was most proud that she had set everything up so she would get away with it and wouldn’t be hounded all her life. After all, they don’t hound you when they think you’re dead.
The young woman in the grave, that was more than Geri had ever bitten off before. Geri had surprised herself in how easy it was for her to swallow. The thought of the fresh grave gave Geri an idea.
She began running her bare feet lightly over the dirt floor of the cellar, seeking a small mound of backfill in a recently dug hole.
Honestly, Vern taking her money was the first real hitch in her plan. Nothing ever goes the way you want, for crying out loud, she thought. Got to be able to improvise.
In case someone hides your money.
Or an old boyfriend shows up.
Just what in the hell was that about anyway, Walt showing up out of nowhere? Another hitch, just what she needed: Vern going goofy on her and sad-eyed Walt mooning around asking questions.
As she was searching the cellar floor with the soles of her feet, Geri lost her balance. She shot a hand out, catching herself against the shelves. The wood pulp was old, soft from years of underground moisture. She took a splinter in her hand, a large sliver slicing up under the heel of her thumb. Geri swore loudly, setting off flames in her jaw. The fresh cut on her knee stung.
With a cleansing breath, she simply stopped moving. She held still, closing her eyes, absorbing all of her pains until they subsided. Walt’s face drifted across her mind. It might be nice to see him. He might even be useful.
Slowly she opened her eyes. Raised her hand to the daylight shining in through the cellar doorway. The end of the splinter was sticking out. Gently, she eased it out from under her skin.