Keepers (2 page)

I waited. I answered questions, allowed myself to be looked over by EMTs, told my story to at least four police officers, and was finally allowed to go. I was climbing into my car when I remembered the derby...which I was still holding. I replayed the almost comic dance the old man had performed to the derby’s elegant pirouettes as he’d pursued it to the death. If he’d gotten away safe and sound it would have made a funny, slightly absurdist story to tell at work or a party; but there are punchlines, and then there’s
the
punchline. Pardon the decided lack of chuckling here, folks.

I approached one of the officers and handed him the derby. “He was chasing this,” I said, as if it explained everything in excruciating detail.

“Hey, we were wondering what happened to that thing,” said the officer, taking it from me and dropping it into a large, clear plastic bag that contained what I assumed to be the contents of the old man’s impeccably-tailored pockets.

“Who was he?”

The officer didn’t even make eye contact: “We can’t release that information until we’ve contacted the next of kin.”

“But I was with him when he....” My voice trailed off for a moment as I watched two men load the black-bagged body into the coroner’s wagon. “He grabbed my shirt and looked at me. I was the last thing he saw before he died, and you won’t even tell me his name?”

The officer shrugged. “Policy. Sorry, sir.” And left me there.

Standing now in the supposed safety of my home, I realized the blanket I’d selected from the linen closet was far too big for the dog in my yard but just the right size for wrapping an old man’s broken body. I put it back and selected one of more appropriate size, all the while sensing that something in the back of my memory was trying to wake up and get my attention, but I was moving now, moving right along, and it was important that I keep moving at all costs and not stop to think about anything for too long, so I shut the closet door and made my way outside.

The dog had disappeared. I didn’t panic. It had obviously been in a great deal of pain so it couldn’t have gotten very far; altogether I’d been inside no more than six minutes. I was starting around back when a delivery van pulled into the driveway. It was from neither UPS nor FedEx. I didn’t think I’d ever heard of this company—Hicks Worldwide—before, but I wasn’t certain. I went to meet the driver, who handed me a parcel the size of a carry-on shoulder bag and asked me to sign here as he scanned the shipping label.

“Did you happen to see a dog wandering along the road as you drove up here?” I described the dog and her condition. The driver adjusted his wool cap, wiped some sweat from his face, and shook his head.

“Nope, I’d’ve noticed a dog in that kind of shape. You call the pound?”

“Of course,” I said. When it became clear to him that no further details would be forthcoming, the driver thanked me, returned to his van, and left. I carried the package inside and dropped it on the kitchen table and probably would have let it go at that if it hadn’t been for the way it was addressed.

The package had been overnighted at no small expense, had a tracking number, and required a signature on delivery. It had my name and home address, nothing odd there, but the return address was also mine. Someone wanted to make damn sure I got this right away. Evidently this same someone also did not want me to know, until I’d opened the thing, who’d sent it or why.

We live in anxious times; terrorist attacks, mail-order anthrax, letter bombs, all sorts of unspeakable horrors delivered right to your door—or so say the paranoia-mongers who know that a populace kept on edge is a populace easily manipulated. I try not to buy into the fear, because once it’s got a hold on you, it grinds you under its heel until your spirit is mute.

I put down the blanket and opened the package. I only wanted to find out who’d sent it, then I’d take care of the dog. Just a few extra moments without the blood of another living thing on my hands and clothes. I didn’t think that was unreasonable.

Inside was a large, well-taped and -packed cardboard box that revealed two layers of bubble wrap and packing peanuts before finally unveiling the first of its treasures: five record albums, sleeves undamaged, LPs in perfect condition.
Steppenwolf 7,
Yes’s
Fragile,
The Best of Three Dog Night,
Neil Young’s
Harvest,
and the masterpiece of masterpieces, George Harrison’s
All Things Must Pass.

I stared at the albums in wonder. I’d long ago lost my copies of the records, had replaced them (in this order) with reel-to-reel, 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs. Who the hell would be sending me mint-condition copies of albums in a format no one listened to anymore?

Beneath the albums, each in a clear plastic protective sleeve, were several 45 rpm records: “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl),” “Join Together,” “Don’t Want to Live Inside Myself,” “Ode to Billy Joe,” “They’re Coming to Take Me Away (Ha-Ha!),” “Cherry, Cherry,” and at least a dozen others I’d heard on the radio while growing up. God, the memories that were brought back just
seeing
the titles on the old record labels—Decca, Dunhill, RCA, Cotillion and Reprise. A history of long-ago Seventies popular music, here in my shaking, blood-tinged hands. Growing up, I’d become something of an expert on the various changes made to their labels by record companies over the years—the loss of the multicolored lines on the Decca label, the way the Reprise logo got smaller and smaller, how Capital went from black to the coolest green with its circle-within-a-circle to just a boring shade of pea-puke that shamed my turntable’s aesthetic. I was the only person I knew of who noticed or cared about such trivialities—

—except for Beth.

Beth
.

I looked through the LPs and 45s again, my arms shaking more and more as the realization dawned that these records had not been thrown into this box at random; they were selected with a great deal of attention, a private meaning in their arranged order, chosen as
she
would have
choose them.

These had been among Beth’s very,
very
favorite albums and songs. Beth, my first and truest friend; Beth, who I’d loved more than anyone else before or since; Beth, who’d I’d last heard from on a sweltering summer night over twenty years ago; Beth, who’d been missing and presumed (later officially declared) dead for a majority of my adult life.

For a moment her face superimposed itself over the old man’s, and why not? I’d been the last person to see either of them alive.

Over the years I had managed to convince myself that Beth wasn’t really dead, that she’d just run off to some exotic foreign place without telling anyone and was living there under an assumed name, maybe as an artist, or underground writer, or something just as gloriously bohemian. That would suit her—say “Fuck you!” to the world at large and vanish into a new country, a new identity, “finding herself” until she was confident enough to come back and say, “Ha! Fooled those complacent smirks right off your faces, didn’t I? Boy, have I got a story to tell
you!
”

I gently placed the records aside, making sure to stack them so they wouldn’t slide off onto the floor; already I was planning on pulling my Gerard turntable out of its box and hooking it up to the stereo so I could listen to them until I hit the city limits of Sloppy Nostalgia (our motto: “Wax with us or wax the damn car!”).

Underneath another layer of bubble wrap were books, hardcover and paperback; Judy Blume, Kurt Vonnegut, A first edition of Stephen King’s
Carrie
,
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,
a bunch of old comic books—
Spider-Man
,
Prince Namor: The Sub-Mariner
,
Hawk-Man
,
Ghost Rider #1
.

Heaven; I was in heaven.

There was a 9 x 12 clasp envelope sandwiched between two of the comic books. I opened it and dumped the contents onto the coffee table.

The first thing to spill out was a present I’d given Beth for her twenty-first birthday—a thin, gold necklace with a small cameo that opened to reveal a photograph of her and me standing in front of a King’s Island roller coaster, taken at one of our yearly summer outings when we were still young enough to believe such trips were what made living worthwhile. Next were two condoms, still in their sealed packets (an empty third packet was taped to them); a pair of crescent-moon-shaped earrings; a half-empty pack of Benson & Hedges Menthol 100s; a program from a community theatre production of
Pippin
; and, most telling of all, a pair of tattered Valentine’s Day cards—the first one I had given Beth when she was eighteen and I was twelve:
I Love You Best of All
!; the second was one she had given me shortly before I turned eighteen:
Just wait until you’re legal
!

I could smell a trace of the musk oil she’d doused the card with, the same musk she used to daub behind her ears and on her neck. It was the sexiest aroma ever created. At least that’s what memory had me now believing.

If I’d had any doubts about who this package had come from, this card erased them.

Beth was alive.

Not only that, but she’d somehow managed to keep track of my whereabouts. Though I’d lived in Cedar Hill for most of my life, there had been a brief period between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-seven when I’d moved to Topeka, Kansas. I’d originally gone to visit my grandmother and found, to my utter shock, that the women I met there actually found me attractive—the first time in my life that I’d ever had
them
pursuing
me
. Figuring there must be some kind of curse on my head in Ohio, I stayed in Kansas, working as a bartender and part-time
maitre de
at a local country club, where I made good money, met a lot of women, and both slept and
didn’t
sleep in a lot of beds. I was almost as hedonistic as they come, but when you wind up in AA for the second time before twenty-six, you realize that the party has to go on without you.

I’d moved back to Ohio in the late Eighties and, on the day when the package arrived, had moved residence three times. All my business correspondence was handled through my office, and any other mail was sent to a post-office box. Aside from the bank, the utility and credit card companies, and a
very
few friends (none of them particularly close) whom I trusted to keep it to themselves, no one had this address. I have an e-mail account and use the Internet, but am careful to not give out any personal information. I realize that’s no guarantee these days, but still it would have been difficult—though not impossible, I suppose—for Beth to have tracked down my home address.

I shook my head and laughed. If anyone from my past had the ability to become a first-rate hacker and get their hands on confidential information, it would be Beth. I wouldn’t’ve put anything past her, within reason.

I folded the envelope and was about to toss it among the other goodies when I felt something else inside, wedged into a corner at the bottom. I reached in and scritched away with my fingernails until the object came loose.

I opened my hand and looked at what lay nestled in my palm.

At first, nothing registered; there was only a vague—

—grabbing my shirt and pulling me toward him, blood seeping into the cotton of my shirt as I lifted the derby and showed him that it was undamaged, looking into my eyes, his lips squirming in a mockery of communication, sounds that were a burlesque of language, but there was something there, something that drew him to me or me to him, and he turned his head ever so slightly to the right and—

—impression of memory, a needling sense that this thing was supposed
to mean something to me. I felt I should recognize it—perhaps the part of me that did recognize it hadn’t gotten to the light switch yet—but there was nothing.

Wait, scratch that. There
was
something but it was ether for all the good it did.

I stared at it for a few more moments, and then was suddenly so...weary. That’s the only word that even comes close to describing what overtook me. I was at once so exhausted and drained that the idea of making it to a chair or my bed was as fantastic to me as the Fountain of Youth must have seemed to the critics of Ponce de Leon. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to move again. It was the first time in years I’d felt so completely emptied and done.

The stillness in my center was cold and without affection. I felt divided, alone, and dissociated from everything—surroundings, thoughts, sensations; even my body was just so much fodder, a too-fragile, too-temporary, carbon-based cosmic joke of dying cells and memories that would vanish into humus once it was placed into the ground and left as an offering upon which the elements could feast.

Mayday, mayday, we’re losing contact with you
....

What brought me back was the soft, muffled whine of a ghost.

The dog. I’d almost forgotten about the poor thing.

Blanket in hand, I stood in the center of the house and waited for her to make another noise; she did, but there was no way to tell from which direction it was coming, so I went out the back door and began searching around the house, then the bushes which surrounded my back yard, and finally, again, the front.

There was a fresh smear of blood on the bottom step of the front porch. She’d tried to crawl up to the door sometime while I was going through the package from Beth.

I searched the periphery of the house twice more; every so often I’d hear a weak and ragged breath and thought I had zeroed in on her hiding place, but every time I was certain I’d found her there was only a mass of absence with speckles of blood left behind. After nearly thirty minutes of this—and no sounds from her in nearly fifteen—I noticed a few of my neighbors were trying not to be too obvious as they peeked out their windows at my odd behavior and bloody clothes; here I was, Raymond Burr-ing like in
Rear Window
for their puzzled entertainment. It occurred to me—Mr. Slow-On-The-Uptake—that it might be a good idea to change out of these clothes if I was going to continue skulking through the bushes in broad daylight...which was now waning fast, as was my energy and resolve.