A Simple Plan (30 page)

Only gradually did I realize that the phone was ringing. I heard Sarah pick it up downstairs, heard the murmur of her voice. I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

The dog was still whimpering, though he sounded far away now, like he’d been put out in the yard.

I started to drift off, still tired, but I was pulled back by the sound of Sarah climbing the stairs. Half asleep, my eyes just barely slitted open, I watched her come into the room.

I could tell by the way she moved that she thought I was still sleeping. She went first to the window, carrying Amanda to her crib. Then she came up beside the bed and began, very slowly, to undress. I watched her body through my eyelashes as she gradually unveiled it, taking off first her sweatshirt, then her bra, then her socks, then her jeans, then her underwear.

Her breasts were swollen with milk, but she’d already lost much of the weight she’d gained during her pregnancy. Her body was slim, compact, beautiful.

Amanda started to cry again, mimicking the sound of the dog beyond the window, a slow, soft, and melancholy whimpering.

Sarah glanced from me to the crib and back again. She seemed to hesitate; then she took off her earrings one at a time and set them down on the night table. They made a clicking sound when they touched the wood.

Naked, she slipped beneath the covers. She pressed her body tightly against my own, her right leg creeping up across my groin, her arm slipping around my neck. I lay perfectly still. Her skin was soft and powdered, and it made me feel unclean. She kissed me lightly on the cheek, then put her lips up to my ear.

I knew what she was going to whisper before she even began, but I waited for it, tense, as if it were a surprise.

“He’s dead.”

8

I
T TOOK
the media thirty-six hours to locate my house. I suppose they must’ve thought I lived in Ashenville rather than Delphia, or perhaps they held off for a bit out of some archaic sense of decorum, but by Sunday afternoon they’d arrived in full force. There were vans from each of the three Toledo television stations—channels 11, 13, and 24—as well as one from Channel 5 in Detroit. There were reporters and photographers from the Toledo
Blade,
the Detroit
Free Press,
the Cleveland
Plain Dealer.

They were all surprisingly polite. They didn’t knock on our door, didn’t peer through our windows, didn’t harass our neighbors. They simply waited until Sarah or I appeared, as we pulled either into or out of the driveway, then they clustered excitedly around the car taking pictures and shouting questions. We passed them with our heads down. I’m not sure what else they might’ve expected.

Their ranks gradually thinned in the following days. The television crews left first, that very night, then the newspaper reporters, one by one, drifting off to other, more pressing stories, until finally, a week later, the yard was suddenly empty, quiet; the dark oval scars of boot prints in the snow and the crumpled remains of coffee cups and sandwich wrappers along the curb were the only signs to remind us of their presence.

The funerals came and went in quick succession, one right upon the other—Nancy’s on Tuesday, Sonny’s on Wednesday, Lou’s on Saturday, Jacob’s on the following Monday. They were all held at St. Jude’s, and I went to each of them.

The news media came to these, too, and I got to see myself on TV again. Each time I was astonished at how I appeared. I looked somber and mournful, limp with grief—more serious, more dignified than I’d ever felt in real life.

Jacob hadn’t owned a suit, so I had to buy one for him to wear in his coffin. Though it seemed wrong in a way—he never would’ve worn it in real life—I was still pleased with its effect. The suit made him look young, even fit, a brown paisley tie knotted beneath his chin, a handkerchief sticking up crisply from the breast pocket of his jacket. The casket was closed for the funeral—all of them were—but I got to see him before the service. The undertaker had fixed him up; you couldn’t have guessed how he’d died. His eyes were shut, and they’d put his glasses on. I stared down at him for a few seconds, then kissed him on the forehead and stepped back, allowing a young man with a white carnation in his lapel to come forward and screw shut the lid.

Sarah brought Amanda to Jacob’s service, and the baby cried through the whole thing, whimpering softly against her mother’s chest. Occasionally she broke into a sudden, startling wail, and the sound of it would echo off the low dome of the church, stretching itself out like a scream in a dungeon. Sarah jiggled her and rocked her, hummed songs to her and whispered in her ear, but nothing helped. She refused to be consoled.

The church was fairly full, though none of the mourners were Jacob’s friends. They were people who’d known us growing up, people I was associated with through Raikley’s, people who were simply curious. His only real friend had been Lou, and he was already buried, waiting for Jacob in the earth out behind the church.

The priest had asked me if I wanted to say a few words, but I declined. I said that I wasn’t up to it, that I’d break down if I tried, which was probably true. He was understanding and did the eulogy himself, pretending, with a fair amount of success, that he’d known Jacob intimately and thought of him as a son.

After the service we walked out to the cemetery, where the grave was waiting, a rectangular hole in the snow.

The priest said a few more words. “The Lord giveth,” he said. “The Lord taketh away. Blessed is the name of the Lord.”

It started to snow a little as they lowered the coffin into the earth. I threw a handful of frozen clay in on top, and it landed with a hollow thud. A photo of me doing this showed up in the
Blade
that evening—me set off a few feet from the other mourners, dark suited, leaning over the open grave, the dirt falling from my hand, flecks of white drifting down through the air around me. It looked like something from a history book.

Sarah came forward and dropped a single rose on the casket, Amanda weeping in her arms.

As we were leaving, I turned to take one last look at the open grave. An old man with a backhoe was already preparing to fill it in, tinkering at his machine. A half dozen yards beyond him there was a woman playing hide-and-seek with two tiny boys among the tombstones. She jogged off and crouched behind a large marble cross, and the boys, giggling, came stumbling toward her through the snow, shouting with glee when they found her. She stood up to run to the next stone, but then, halfway there, saw me watching and froze. The two boys circled her, giddy with laughter.

I didn’t want her to think that I was insulted by her lack of mourning, so I gave her a little wave. The boys saw me, and they waved back, hands high over their heads, like people departing on a cruise, but the woman whispered something to them, and—instantly—they stopped.

I could sense Sarah behind me, waiting to leave, could hear Amanda mewling in her arms. I didn’t turn, though; I stood perfectly still.

It was the closest all that day I came to weeping. I don’t know what it was—perhaps the two boys reminded me of myself and Jacob as children—but I got a shaking feeling, a tightness in my chest and head, a ringing in my ears. It wasn’t grief, or guilt, or remorse. It was simply confusion: a sudden, nearly overwhelming wave of bewilderment over what I’d done. My crimes spread themselves out before me, and I could find no sense in them. They were inscrutable, foreign; they seemed to belong to someone else.

Sarah brought me back with a touch of her hand.

“Hank?” she said, her voice soft and concerned.

I turned slowly toward her.

“Are you okay?”

I stared at her, and she smiled calmly back at me. She was wearing a long, black woolen coat and a pair of winter boots. Her hands were tucked into thin leather gloves; a white scarf was wrapped around her neck. She looked startlingly pretty.

“Amanda’s getting cold,” she said, taking me by my arm.

I nodded and then, like a senile old man, allowed myself to be led back down the path to the car.

As we climbed inside, I heard the backhoe’s engine rumble to life.

I
N THE
following days the world reached out to us. Neighbors dropped off casseroles on our doorstep, jars of homemade jam, loaves of fresh-baked bread, Pyrex containers full of soup. Acquaintances and coworkers called me up on the telephone, expressing sympathy. Strangers, moved by my story, wrote me letters, quoting psalms and self-help books on grief, offering advice and consolation. It was astonishingly generous, all this unsolicited solicitude, but it had a strangely unsettling effect on me, pointing as it did to an absence in my and Sarah’s life that I hadn’t really been conscious of before: we had no friends.

I couldn’t exactly say how this had happened. We’d had friends in college; Sarah’d had whole troops of them. But somehow, after we’d moved to Delphia, they’d disappeared, and we hadn’t replaced them with new ones. I didn’t feel their lack—I wasn’t lonely—I was simply surprised. It seemed like a bad sign, that we could exist all this time as a closed system, totally satisfying each other’s needs, neither of us desiring any outside connection with the world. It seemed deviant, unhealthy. I could imagine what our neighbors would say if we were ever caught—how they weren’t at all astonished, how we’d been so reclusive, so antisocial, so secretive. It was always loners who you heard about committing murders, and that this label might apply to us led me on to further considerations. Perhaps we weren’t the normal people trapped in extraordinary situations that we’d been pretending to be. Perhaps we’d done something ourselves to create these situations. Perhaps we were responsible for what had happened.

I only half-believed this, if at all. In my mind, I could still go through the long succession of events that had culminated, ultimately, in Jacob’s funeral and logically explain how each one had led inexorably to the next, how there’d been no alternatives, no branches in the path, no opportunities to turn back and undo what we’d already done. I’d shot Jacob because he was going to break down because I’d shot Sonny because I needed to cover up shooting Nancy because she’d been about to shoot me because Jacob had shot Lou because he’d thought Lou was going to shoot me because Lou was threatening me with his shotgun because I’d tricked him into confessing to Dwight Pederson’s murder because Lou’d been blackmailing me because I didn’t want to give him his share of the money till the summer because I wanted to make sure no one was looking for the plane…

It seemed as though I could keep working my way back like that forever, each cause’s existence obviating the need for me to accept responsibility for its effect. But the mere fact that I felt the need to do this—and I was doing it frequently, obsessively, repeating it like a mantra in my head—seemed reason enough for worry. I was starting, just perceptibly, to doubt myself. I was beginning to question our motives.

W
ITHIN
a week of Jacob’s funeral, the public attention suddenly faded.

I returned to work that Monday, and my life immediately resumed its daily routine. Every now and then I’d overhear people in town talking about what had happened, and invariably they used words like
tragedy
and
shocking
and
horrible
and
senseless.
No one seemed to suspect a thing. I was above suspicion: there was no motive; even to speak of the possibility would’ve been cruel, tactless. After all, I’d lost my brother.

They found Nancy’s robe and lipstick in Sonny’s trailer. I saw an interview with one of her coworkers, and she said she thought the affair had been going on for quite some time. She didn’t say why she thought this, and the reporter didn’t ask her; her retroactive suspicion was enough. People talked about how belligerent Lou had been at the Wrangler that night, how he’d accused some kid of trying to trip him. They remembered him as being angry, combative, a drunk teetering on the edge of violence. And finally, to add the last note of credence to our story, the Toledo
Blade
published an article about Lou’s gambling debts. His life had been falling apart, they said, disintegrating. He’d been a time bomb, a calamity waiting to happen.

The baby grew. She learned to roll over, which her mother claimed was precocious. Sarah started her job at the Delphia library again, part-time. She brought Amanda with her and laid her on the floor behind the checkout counter while she worked.

February slowly passed.

I
KEPT
putting off cleaning out Jacob’s apartment. Finally, toward the end of the month, his landlord sent me a note at the feedstore, saying it had to be done by the first of March.

I continued to procrastinate right up to the twenty-ninth. It was a Monday, and I left work an hour early, swinging by the grocery store first to pick up some old boxes. I carried these, along with a thick roll of tape from Raikley’s, over to the hardware store and climbed the steep flight of stairs to Jacob’s room.

Inside, I found things exactly as I’d remembered them. There was the same smell, the same sordidness, the same disarray. The same dust motes floated through the air, the same empty beer bottles studded the floor, the same dirty sheets sat half stripped in a shapeless mound at the foot of the bed.

I began with his clothes, since that seemed the easiest. I didn’t fold them, I simply jammed them into boxes. There wasn’t that much: six pairs of pants—jeans and khaki dungarees—a half dozen flannel shirts, a bright red turtleneck, a large, hooded sweatshirt, a motley assortment of T-shirts, socks, and underwear. There was a single blue tie hanging from a hook, a picture of a bounding deer embroidered across its front; there were two pairs of sneakers and a pair of boots; there were hats and gloves, a black ski mask, a pair of bathing trunks, jackets for the different seasons. There were the gray slacks and the brown leather shoes he’d worn the morning he asked me to help him buy back the farm. Whenever I filled a box, I took it downstairs to my car and loaded it in the back.

From the clothes I moved to the bathroom—toiletries, towel, shaving kit, a plastic squirt gun, a stack of
Mad
magazines—and from the bathroom to the little alcove Jacob had used as a kitchen—two pots, a frying pan, a tray full of mismatched utensils, four glasses, a half dozen plates, a ragged-looking broom, and an empty can of Comet. Everything was greasy, grimy. I threw out the food—a can of ravioli, a box of Frosted Flakes, a putrid carton of milk, an unopened bag of chocolate donuts, a molding loaf of bread, three slices of American cheese, a shriveled apple.

I cleaned out the trash next—the beer bottles and old newspapers, the candy wrappers and empty bags of dog food. Then I moved to his bed. I stripped his sheets, wrapped his clock radio in a pair of thermal underwear, and stuffed it all into a box. I tossed his pillow over toward the door. Everything smelled faintly of Jacob.

The furniture in the apartment belonged to the landlord, so when I’d packed the sheets and pillow, there was nothing left to go through except his trunk. This was an old army footlocker—it’d been our uncle’s during the Second World War, and he’d given it to Jacob on his tenth birthday. I was planning on just taking it downstairs unexamined, but then, at the last moment, I changed my mind, dragged it over to the bed, and swung open its lid.

The trunk’s interior was surprisingly tidy. On the left, neatly folded and stacked, was an extra set of sheets and bath towels. They were from our parents’ house; I recognized them immediately: powder blue towels, worn looking, monogrammed with our mother’s initials. The sheets had little roses on them. On the right-hand side of the trunk there was a red tackle box, an old Bible, a fielder’s glove, a box of bullets for Jacob’s rifle, and a machete. The machete had belonged to the same uncle who’d given my brother the trunk; he’d brought it back from somewhere in the Pacific. It was long and menacing looking, with a thick, delicately curving blade and a light brown, wooden handle. It looked like something you might see in a museum, primitive and deadly.