I saw the man in the fedora and long black coat for the first time outside our house at night.
Initially asleep, Bandit’s growling woke me up slowly. At first I thought it was part of the dream I was having. High up with Tara at the top of the Ferris wheel, she was leaning forward for another kiss. That’s when I heard the growling, and in the dream the growling was juxtaposed with the groaning of the Ferris wheel. It was falling apart around us, bolts and screws and beams falling away, until it was just our bucket seat in the night sky. Then that was falling, too, like an elevator cab cut loose of its cable.
The ground rose up quickly to meet us.
As we plummeted, I screamed and Tara laughed, saying: “Come on, kiss me!” I turned to her and it wasn’t Tara, it was Dillon and his dad, Sheriff Glover, and they were both stuffed inside the dress Tara had been wearing. Packed in there together like Siamese twins, Dillon had his knife, and his dad had his gun. Both were leaning towards me saying: “Kiss me! Kiss me!” over and over. The glint of the knife in the moonlight was like an eye; the dark tunnel of the barrel of the gun, a mouth.
The Ferris wheel bucket seat slammed into the ground.
I woke up with a start, pushed the blankets aside, and saw Bandit at the window, growling. I called him softly to me but he wouldn’t come. I stood and walked quietly to the window, avoiding the areas of the carpeted floor that I knew squeaked, not wanting to wake my parents.
At the window I pushed the curtains aside and there he was, down there on the road in front of our house. The wide-brimmed fedora hat cast shadow over his face like a veil. His long trench coat billowed out behind him like a cape as he walked. His hands were in the pockets and shuffling about in there, as if he was idly rattling change.
He looked like someone without a care in the world, just out for a stroll.
Maybe if I opened the window I’d hear him whistling.
The man in the fedora and coat walked briskly but casually by our house, turning his shadowed face and looking up once as he passed. I knew he saw me framed in the window and I wanted to back away, draw the curtains shut, but I didn’t. Then he was down the street and gone in the night.
Tired, the webs of sleep still strewn across my mind, I told myself he was just a guy out for a walk. I climbed back in bed, motioned for Bandit to follow. But I pulled the covers up high, nearly to my chin, which I hadn’t done since I was a small child, watching with dread the shadowed corners of my room.
I got to go to the fair again the day before it left town, though my parents insisted I do it during the daytime, and the whole Outsiders’ Club went with me. Because it was daytime, the Haunted House was closed, which none of us really minded, but so were some of the other attractions that depended on night for their appeal. Among these was the Observatory, a darkened walk-through attraction that took you through a pitch-black building with the walls and ceiling lit by stars and planetary effects. Big-headed aliens that glowed green and tinfoil spaceships were placed in strategic positions in unsuspecting corners, so you’d turn and there, right in front of you, was one of the butt-probing, cow-mutilating Roswell creatures. Also closed was the Laser Maze, in which kids ran around with light guns and dorky-looking, clunky vests and got to shoot each other.
I’d been looking forward to both of those, along with other attractions, and was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to do them and that this was probably my last visit to the fair. But I got to go on the coaster, and the ups and downs and quick turns made me feel sick, though I was smiling when it was over. We hit the Ferris wheel, too, and like in my dream it paused at the top so that I was alone in the sky with Tara. But Jim and Fat Bobby were in the bucket seat immediately in front of us, and they constantly turned and waved at us or called to us, so we didn’t kiss.
But I held her hand, and it was warm and smooth. Just that simple touch, up there in the sky, all the world seemingly below us, was good enough for me.
We did the water guns again, shooting at the John Wayne Gacy faces and popping the balloons. I chose a Captain America plush from the prize wall, which I thought appropriately patriotic with the Fourth of July just around the corner. Before we left, Tara turned her gun on me and soaked my face and the front of my shirt. Jim thought this was funny and turned his on me too, so I called him by his Outsiders’ Club code name and shot him back. Then Fat Bobby was soaking all three of us, and when he got to Tara he aimed at her chest instead of her face. Pretty soon breasts tipped with hard nipples were poking out against her blouse like missiles.
I thought, Whoa, good job Fat Bobby, and Tara saw me looking, gave me a mighty slug in the ribs, turned and gave Jim and Bobby one also. We three quickly put our guns down, but by that time the game booth attendant was shouting at us about the mess we were making and we ran off laughing.
We left the fair soon after, but it was only early afternoon, so instead of calling my mom as had been the plan when we were ready to leave, we started walking. None of us had eaten at the fair, not even Fat Bobby, so we stopped at a sandwich place and we all chipped in and bought lunch. We ate on the patio, at a little table with an umbrella over it. The walk and the sun had dried Tara’s blouse pretty quick, and I was disappointed at this, having been enjoying discreet peeks since we’d left the fair.
Then she spoke and my mind was immediately occupied by other things:
“So, when are we going to open the car?”
And with that one sentence we knew where we were going next.
* * *
At the Connolly yard Jim’s dad greeted us, clapping each of us on the back. He stooped to give Bandit a rubdown, whom I insisted we stop at my house to pick up, not wanting a repeat of the last excursion to the woods when a certain sheriff had pulled a gun on us. Mr. Connolly looked to be in the same or similar grease-stained shirt and pants that he’d been in the day I met him.
When I had the chance I leaned close to Fat Bobby and said: “Seems like he’s always here. Jim too.”
Bobby nodded and said: “They live here.”
I blinked, mildly surprised, and so was about to ask where they slept and used the bathroom, when Fat Bobby pointed at a couple doors near the rear of the garage in one corner. One said “RESTROOM” and so that part of my unspoken question was answered easily enough. Next to this door was another that said “EMPLOYEES ONLY” and Bobby nodded at that one.
“That’s where the living room and bedroom are.”
To some people I guess this would be a sign of poverty, people living in the same place they worked out of, but to me it was kind of cool and I didn’t think much about it after that.
Jim told his dad what we wanted to do, and Mr. Connolly walked away and rummaged through a couple drawers in a shelf on one wall. He came back with something that looked like a corkscrew and a length of flat metal notched at one end. Handing these items over to his son, Mr. Connolly saw my questioning look and the puzzled expressions from Tara and Bobby as well.
“Lock pick,” he said, Jim holding up the corkscrew device to punctuate his dad’s words. “Slim Jim,” he added, and Jim held up the notched length of metal, giving a reproachful look at me, Bobby, and Tara to head off any would-be jokes. “Be surprised how often doors get jammed or the lock just doesn’t work or someone’s locked their keys inside the car. These suckers will pop just about anything open.”
“Thanks, Mr. Connolly,” I said, again surprised at the things he was letting us do, like he knew that abandoned car had been out there just waiting for kids to find it. Like that was how things were supposed to be.
He smiled at us and then gave us a cautionary wag of one long, dark finger.
“Now, if you kids find anything dangerous or … well … just plain weird, I guess, and you think you need to tell an adult … you come to me first. And we’ll see what’s what.”
We all nodded our understanding and appreciation for his help. Then we were out the rear of the garage, over, under or around the barricade like scurrying monkeys, and onto the access road and into the forest.
Jim tried the driver’s door first, inserting the notched end of the Slim Jim beneath the lip of the rubber trim lining the window. Scraping sounds of metal on metal issued from inside the lining of the Buick’s door. Kneeling, hunching, leaning, Jim tried applying the Slim Jim at different angles, yet the lock didn’t pop and the driver’s door didn’t budge.
“Why don’t we just break the windows?” Fat Bobby said.
“No!” Jim and I said in unison, turning on him with vicious glares. Again, it was that unspoken feeling, like we were at work on something sacred here, something that deserved respect and maybe a little reverence. Busting the windows of this beat-up old car would be like desecrating a church and the mere suggestion offended our sensibilities.
Jim tried once more on the driver’s side door, pushing and sliding the length of metal around. His grip on the Slim Jim slipped, his hand struck the car, and he cried out and stuck his thumb in his mouth.
He stepped away from the window, leaving the Slim Jim inserted there like a surgeon’s implement left sticking out of a body on a gurney.
“You give it a try,” he said, nodding to me and getting out of the way. “Dad never showed me how to do this. Looks easier than it is, I guess.”
I walked up to the door, aware of Tara and Bobby leaning on the hood, watching. Bending for a better angle, I grabbed the haft of the Slim Jim with both hands, wiggled it, pushed it, slid it back and forth.
There was a pop and a rattle, and then that familiar little click of a car door unlocking. I looked up, and everyone was staring at me expectantly. Jim moved up close again beside me. Tara and Bobby pushed off of the hood and stepped closer.
I reached out, grasped the door handle, lifted up, and with another click the door swung open. There was a silence for a spell, as we tried to register what it was we were seeing.
Do you remember an old Disney cartoon called Duck Tales? In the cartoon there’s an old, miserly character appropriately named Scrooge McDuck. McDuck had a huge bank vault hidden beneath his massive mansion, and an enormous lock and door that protected what was in the vault. What was in the vault?
Money. Jewels. Treasure.
Tons of it. Bills and gold coins and gold bars and statues of gold, seemingly yards deep, piled wall to wall. In almost every episode, Scrooge McDuck would dive off a perch above the vault room and its treasure, and he’d splash into the precious stones and gems and gold bars and bills like he was diving into a swimming pool or the ocean. He’d kick his feet and swing his arms, and it was an ocean, an ocean of riches.
In the front seat of the old Buick, and spilling into the backseat, were sacks of money. No gold or jewels or gems, but lots of green, green money. Rubber-banded stacks of hundreds spilled out of the open sacks like an afterbirth. On the seats, on the floors, a few on the dashboard. Everywhere, money, and I wondered if I could dive into it like Scrooge McDuck, jump into it all like it was a pile of autumn leaves.
My thirteen-year-old imagination took mere seconds to begin considering the possibilities of so much money. What I could do with it; what I could buy. Books and comics, by the hundreds, the thousands. Within days my room could be wall-to-wall books. Hell, I’d need a second bedroom, maybe a third. Shit, I could buy a whole house just for the purpose of holding all my shelves of books.
Somehow, Tara, Jim, and Bobby squeezed in that little open door with me. Seeing what I saw, I was nudged this way and that as they each strained and craned to see what was in there.
“Move over, Joey the Dork,” Jim said, jostling me, and then, “Holy shit,” when he saw how the stacks and piles spilled over into the backseat of the Buick.
He picked up a banded stack of hundreds from the nearest open bag, riffled through it like you’d see gangsters do in movies. He was making little sounds under his breath, soft little huffs and puffs, and I wondered what was happening. Was he going into some sort of seizure or fit? Then I realized he was counting the stack. When he came to the end of the stack, he started again and riffled through it once more before looking up at us.
“That’s ten thousand dollars,” he said, his voice hushed and tremulous, like he was afraid, even out here, someone would hear him.
“Just that one stack?” Tara said, her tone also betraying her excitement.
“Just this one stack,” Jim confirmed.
“There must be hundreds of stacks in there,” Fat Bobby said, his head and face real close to mine, so that when he spoke he sprayed me like a sprinkler. I pushed him away and backed out of the car door.
“Which could mean …” I said, trying to do the math in my head, carrying zeroes and cussing when those fucking zeroes got all crowded and got me confused, so that I had to start over. “Millions of dollars …” I finally whispered, giving up on an exact figure and settling for an estimate.
“Millions …” Jim repeated, pushing his butt side to side to brush the seat free of its stacks and bags, sending them in a small avalanche down to the footrest area so he could sit.
“Hey,” I said, and for a moment no one looked at me, everyone’s eyes still on the interior of the car and the mountains of green paper. “Let’s check out the trunk.”
Three heads swung my way in near unison, and three smiles grew wider.
Jim stood, reluctantly dropping the banded stack of hundreds on the passenger seat. Together, the four of us walked around to the rear of the Buick. We lined up there, and as if knighting me, Jim passed over the corkscrew-like lock pick. He described briefly how to work it, how to feel for the actuator that controlled the rod that pops the lock, and I felt very important, entrusted with some vital task.
I inserted the lock pick into the trunk’s keyhole, turned it. Leaning close, I heard the tap and rattle of the actuator. I turned the pick some more.
The lock popped easily. The trunk sprung open an inch or two.
Grasping it under the latch, I swung the trunk lid up.
The head seemed to be looking back at us from the confines of the trunk: the sockets empty, strings of hair still attached like frayed threads to the skull, the teeth in a rictus-grin as if ready to bite.
Screaming, we jumped back in near unison, the sudden sounds in the still forest sending birds from the trees aflutter. Branches and leaves rustled at their departure like a crowd whispering among themselves. The echoes of our screams came back to us, and in the otherwise quietude it could have been the skull talking, returned from the land of the dead, finding its voice, and eager to share its secrets.
* * *
A few moments passed before I gathered my wits and stepped back towards the rear of the car. To me, the open trunk lid looked like a mouth, and I had little desire to see again the morsel inside. But no one else was moving, and it seemed someone had to do something.
Bandit had run up to us when we’d shouted, abandoning whatever other scents had previously occupied him. Now he followed me as I moved towards the car trunk, his body low, his legs tense, his tail straight out, reading my fear.
I held the corkscrew-like lock pick out in front of me, like it was a Star Trek phase pistol and I’d use it to vaporize the skull if it suddenly chose to spring up at me, its teeth clacking as it sought my throat. At the bumper, I realized my gaze was moving rapidly in all other directions, taking in the sky, the trees, the ground, keeping the trunk and its contents in the periphery. Now, there, I had to look, and I lowered my eyes and saw again the nearly fleshless skull looking up at me. Its strings of hair looked like little insectile feelers prodding the air.
I felt my heart thudding, my stomach churning with my recent lunch. Fighting the urge to retreat again, I stayed where I was, tried to be clinical about the whole thing. Like Mom when me and Sarah had been younger, and we’d cut ourselves or smash a toe or finger, and she’d doctor us. Whispering, consoling us, she’d tell us it was no big deal, the pain would pass. I tried that with myself, consoled myself, told myself it was dead. It was a person, but now that person was dead. It really shouldn’t be any worse than looking at road kill on the side of the road, or a bird dropped dead in the front yard.
But it was different.
This was a person, not road kill. What I was seeing was what I was underneath, what I was made of beneath the flesh. It was what my friends were made of, my family, and it was what we’d all be someday, every last one of us.
That made it different.
As I examined the trunk and what was in the trunk, I realized it wasn’t just a skull nestled among the spare tire and the tire jack. It was just that the skull was more prominent, tilted upward leaning against the long deflated spare tire.
The rest of the body was there as well, poking out from faded and holey clothes little more than scraps of cloth. The arms were atop the chest, bound at the wrists. I leaned closer, pinching my nose against a smell I expected but, tentatively, discovered wasn’t there. I guessed all the parts that stunk had long ago flaked away. A black powder and mush coating the lining of the trunk put meaning to a word I’d only read about in horror novels and comics: decomposition. I choked back a rising surge of vomit, and leaned forward a few dreadful inches nearer.
Closer, I saw that what bound the wrists was fishing wire, its thin filaments catching the sunlight like a silky spider’s web. I scanned down the length of the body, the bones, and saw that the feet were bound as well at the ankles.
Bandit hopped up on his hind legs, forepaws over the edge of the trunk, and leaned in for a sniff. He whined and jumped down.
I knew how he felt and started to back away myself.
Then I looked at the head again, that skull with the pits for eyes looking back at me, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed at first. Leaning in once more, this time I noticed there was a smell, faint but stale and pungent. An old smell that I was glad was long faded to this vague remnant. My attention was on the top of the skull, and I leaned in even closer. Some of those wiry strands of hair were dangerously close to my mouth and nostrils. I wondered if I was breathing in corpse dust, if right at that moment little microscopic pieces of the dead thing were finding their way inside me, invading me.
On the top of the head was a hole. Cracks radiated from the hole, as if the head had been struck by something.
Stuffed in the trunk.
Money in the car.
A picture was forming in my head, of possibilities, of likelihoods, and I didn’t like it, didn’t like the picture and the pieces coming together, what it all meant. I turned on spaghetti-legs to my friends, and I saw that all of them had drawn closer as I’d been inspecting the skeleton. I hadn’t heard them, and their nearness, when I’d last been aware of them farther away, was unsettling. I stepped back and struck my head on the open trunk lid.
“Shit,” I muttered and rubbed my head.
“Is that a hole in its head?” Jim said.
I nodded.
“What does it mean?” Tara asked, now moving past me to look back into the trunk, nearly as close as I’d been. Tomboy indeed.
Fat Bobby raised his hand as if he were in a classroom, and we all turned to him, knowing maybe what he was going to say, not wanting to say it ourselves.
“Murder?”
That one word seemed loud out there on that old road with just us and that car, alone, and the rest of the world a world away.
“Nothing there, huh?” Mr. Connolly asked when Jim and I arrived back at the car yard.
We’d decided that Tara and Fat Bobby would go on home instead of coming back with us. Between the four of us we’d decided that they were the weakest liars. For Fat Bobby it was a unanimous decision. I guess we all felt that because of his all-around nervous and awkward presence, he wouldn’t be able to tell a lie convincingly. He protested, almost whining. But we didn’t give, and eventually he agreed to go home and let me and Jim talk to Mr. Connolly. Tara outright told us she sucked at lying, had problems even telling her mom dinner was good if she thought it really blew the big one. So she went home as well.
We agreed to get together again the following day, at noon, on Lookout Mountain, to talk about what we were going to do next.
“No, sir,” Jim said in response to his dad’s question. I gave something of a noncommittal shake of my head, like I was showing how disappointed I was that that was the case.
We stood in the doorway to one of the side rooms in the garage that served as Mr. Connolly’s office. He had a phone clasped to his ear between his shoulder and cheek, one hand over the mouthpiece. It was the first time I’d seen this room, and I took a moment to look around, mildly surprised at what I saw.
A high-end-looking computer sat on the big oak desk in the center of the room, with a printer and fax and big speakers and a widescreen monitor. Bookshelves filled with automotive volumes lined the walls end to end. Filing cabinets tall and wide sat in two corners. It was all really sophisticated and professional-like. Not what I’d expected from seeing the orderly mess of the car yard itself and the garage.
“Nothing at all?” Mr. Connolly said, as if genuinely interested. When we shook our heads again he said: “Bummer”, and went back to his phone call.
“That was easy,” I said to Jim when we closed the door to his dad’s office.
“Yeah,” Jim said, but his tone didn’t seem as upbeat as mine.
* * *
I lay in bed early that evening, Bandit draped across my feet warming them for me, arms behind my head, worried, restless, and excited. Part of me was thinking about all that money, an amount, a number, that was almost beyond my comprehension. I thought about all the comics and books and other stuff I could buy with it.
The other part of me was thinking of that long dead person, nothing but bones now, and that hole in its head. I was young, and the idea of all that money to spend was exciting and fun to think about. But I was old enough that I knew about death, had seen some violence, and knew that what had happened to that person stuffed in the trunk was real, and could happen to me.
I was thinking how I should probably tell my parents, and they’d call the police. How maybe despite our agreement to meet tomorrow and talk about it, one of my friends had possibly already told their parents, and then the money would be gone. Probably forever. I was smart enough to know we had probably been looking at drug money, or a big bank heist, or maybe something altogether different and infinitely worse. Cars full of money didn’t just happen by accident.
Neither did dead people in trunks.
I didn’t know what to do, and the minutes crawled by like I was in some sort of temporal anomaly.
The bedroom door opened and something white sailed through the air to land on my face. I took it off and held it up. A pair of my jockey shorts.
“Your stupid underwear was in my laundry again,” Sarah said from the doorway, a laundry basket cradled under one arm. “So many skid marks, maybe we should put you back in diapers. If you’re not going to wash your stuff, at least keep it out of mine.”
She reached into the basket again and came out with a pair of my socks also. She threw those too. They landed on Bandit’s head and hung there like rabbit ears. He opened his eyes, yawned, seemed bored, and went back to sleep.
“Stop trying my clothes on then, perv,” I said. “Cross-dressing went out of style with Silence of the Lambs.”
She flipped me off.
I flipped her off back, raised her a double.
“You’re so mature,” she said with this haughty tone, as if she’d already forgotten she’d thrown dirty underwear and socks at me and my dog.
“You’re so ugly,” I said, and shielded my face with a forearm, as if hiding from Medusa.
She gave me this scowl and a sigh like I was such a headache and bore to deal with. She started to turn around to leave, but then I thought of something and called her back. Sarah gave this long-suffering sigh again and at first I didn’t think she’d stay, but she turned around and put her free fist to her hip, like she was a queen entertaining a court jester more idiotic than entertaining.
“What?” she said. The look in her eyes told me noogies and a proper wedgie were in my future if I said the wrong thing.
“You still thinking of taking those journalism electives next year?”
She stood there silent for a moment, eyes squinty, suspicious, like she was waiting for the punch line. When I didn’t follow with anything smart, she said: “Yeah. Why?”
“You think you got what it takes to investigate something?” I tried to throw in a little note of challenge, like maybe I didn’t think she was.
“What do you mean?” she said, and though she still held that high and mighty queen look, she set her laundry basket down and took a step into the room.
“Close the door first,” I said, and she did. “And you got to swear not to tell anyone else what I tell you.”
“Oh, give me a break—”
I sat up and cut her off.
“I’m serious. This might be something big.”
You could tell she was still doubtful, but her interest was piqued. Probably imagining herself as a future Lois Lane going for a Pulitzer. Seeing that I wasn’t going to say anything else until she swore, she raised her hand and, in a melodramatic voice, like a bad actor, said: “I swear upon my heart and soul and the love of baby Jesus.”
I thought her acting voice sucked, thought about saying so, that she should stick to journalism, plus the added benefit that the audience wouldn’t go blind from looking at her hideous mug, but thought better of it and gestured for her to sit down at my desk. She did, scooting the chair a little closer to my bed and, in the moonlight coming through my window, I told her about the car and the money and the body. Again there was that sense of things moving, gears turning, of events rolling forward and gaining momentum.
When I was done, I could see she doubted me some, but maybe not enough that she thought I was completely off my gourd, maybe just exaggerating a bit. She tapped the armrest of the chair with one hand, twirled a strand of hair with the other.
“Show me,” she finally said. “Then I’ll see what I think we should do.”
“Fine,” I said and told her how tomorrow I was meeting Tara, Jim, and Bobby at noon.
“No. Show me tonight.”