Midnight Haul (2 page)

“You don’t have to be depressed your whole life to commit suicide,” Roger said. “Just one day. Or night, or afternoon. But it only takes once.”

“Roger,” Crane said. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“You got to, sooner or later.”

“Make it later.”

Now it was later, on the plane, and he still didn’t want to talk—or think—about it. But there it was: Mary Beth, twenty, dead. Mary Beth, long brown hair, wide brown eyes, wry little smile, supple little body, gone.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead and sat forward in his seat.

“You okay, man?”

Crane turned and looked at the passenger in the next seat. Actually, there was an empty seat between them, here in second class, and that was okay with Crane: he didn’t care to make conversation, particularly not with another college student, this one a bearded longhaired throwback to the’60s, in jeans and gray T-shirt, some jerk who thought Kent State happened last week.

“Need an aspirin or something?” the guy was saying. “I can go get the flight attendant for you.”

“No. That’s okay.” Why was he thinking this guy was a jerk? He was nice enough. The jerk.

“My name’s Phil Stanley,” the guy said, and held out his hand.

After just a moment, Crane took the hand, got caught in a sideways “soul” shake, and said, “My name’s Crane.”

“You a student, too?”

“Yes.”

“Headed back to school, huh? Where d’you go?”

“Actually, no. I go to Iowa. Graduate student—fall semester starts in a few weeks and I’m, uh…”

“Taking advantage of your last few weeks’ vacation. For sure. Don’t blame ya.”

“Right.”

“What you taking?”

“I’m a journalism major.”

“No shit? Me too. Or anyway, sort of—I’m into broadcast journalism.”

The guy would have to clean up his image if he wanted to go on camera, Crane thought, then, noticing the guy was expecting him to report back, said, “I’m in print media.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s your specialty?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe investigative.”

“One thing this country’ll never run out of,” the guy said, shaking his mangy head, “is Watergates.”

Crane hated it when people invoked Watergate after he told them he was interested in investigative reporting. Maybe he could remember to quit telling people that. Maybe he should say he was interested in writing sports or something.

“That’s the ticket,” the guy was saying. “Keep the fuckin’ government on its toes.”

“And big business,” Crane said. “Don’t forget big business.”

“Right on,” the guy said.

Right on? Did that guy
really
say “right on”? Why do people like this always assume you’re liberal? And if you tell them you believe in the system, that you don’t see anything wrong with capitalism, why do they make you out as some sort of right-wing lunatic?

“Because,” Mary Beth used to say, “you
are
one. You think you’re middle-of-the road, mainstream America. A political moderate. Sure you are. Compared to the Ku Klux Klan. How many black folks you got in Wilton Junction? You never called anybody nigger ’cause you never saw one, except on TV. You’re just a reactionary hick, Crane, and I’m gonna educate you if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it…”

“Are you
sure
you’re okay?” the bearded guy was asking.

“Maybe I will take that aspirin,” Crane said.

The guy rose to go find a flight attendant.

Crane sat back in his seat and thought about the fight he and Mary Beth had had their first night together. He was living in an apartment that was actually half a house, a duplex, sharing it with three other guys who were gone for the weekend. He’d only known Mary Beth for a few weeks; he was a senior and she was a sophomore, and both had been at the University for over a year, Crane having transferred from Port City Community College just as she was enrolling as a freshman. But it was a big campus with a lot of students, and until some mutual friends introduced them they’d never even seen each other. He liked her sense of humor, and (one of the mutual friends told him) she liked his sandy brown hair and freckles; thought he had a nice, innocent look.

Which was what the fight was about, really.

He’d planned to seduce her, and that was a major step for him, requiring a lot of strategy, and making him very nervous, because he was less experienced than he supposed most other twenty-year-old males in this country to be. So he had cooked an Italian dinner for her (her favorite, and his), bought a Phoebe Snow album (her favorite—
hardly
his), dimmed the lights prior to her arrival, and found himself naked on the couch with her before the first course of the meal and without even taking the plastic wrapper off the goddamn Phoebe Snow album.

He was proud of himself, though—he didn’t come right away, like he thought he would; after all, it was his first time, and most people, on their first time, come right away. Not him. Which was something, anyway.

Of course it clearly wasn’t
her
first time, and that was part of what the fight was about, too.

“It was your first time, wasn’t it?” she said later, nibbling her lasagna.

“You weren’t supposed to know that,” he said, smiling a little.

“Hey, you did fine. Most guys come right away, their first time. You didn’t.”

“Neither did you.”

“Well I did in the long run, and that’s something, anyway.”

And they’d both smiled and finished their lasagna and wine and listened to Phoebe Snow (which he even sort of liked, at this point) and made love another time. Finally they watched a late movie about vampires—one of those sexy British ones from the ’60s—and that’s when the fight started.

“It sure wasn’t
your
first time,” he said. Out of nowhere. Surprised by the petulance in his own voice.

“I never said it was,” she said, still smiling, but on the edge of not.

“No big deal.”

“I’m glad you see it that way.”

“I do. It’s no big fucking deal.”

“Hey, ain’t
we
profane all of a sudden. ‘Farm boy says fuck.’ Stop the presses!”

“Don’t you make fun of me.”

“Then don’t
you
insult
me
.”

“All I said was—”

“Hey. Make you a deal.”

“What?”

“Don’t give me a bad time about not being a virgin, and I won’t give you a bad time about being one.”

“Well fuck you!”

She smiled again. “That’s the general idea, yes.”

And the fight was over.

When he woke the next morning she was playing with his hair.

“I like playing with your hair,” she said.

“You like my freckles, too.”

“I suppose Fran told you that.”

Fran was one of the mutual friends.

“Yeah, she did.”

She smiled, crinkling her chin. “I’d like to get my hands on the little bitch…”

“Me, too.”

She hit him with a pillow. Not hard.

“Don’t,” she said. Kidding on the square.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t be with anybody else. Not Fran or anybody.”

“I wasn’t serious…”

“I know. But I am. I won’t be with anybody else from now on, and you just be with me. Understand?”

He’d understood. They’d been together since then. Lived together, starting last school year. They’d had the normal squabbles any couple has, but nothing serious; Mary Beth had been loving and sarcastically cheerful throughout. Though they’d never met, Mary Beth’s mother (her father died a few years before) seemed to approve of him and of the relationship—which had become an engagement; his parents loved Mary Beth and even seemed resigned to the wedding being held in New Jersey.

But the need for both Crane and Mary Beth to work had separated them this summer. He’d been working construction, and she’d gone home, to Greenwood, NJ, where she had a summer job lined up. They’d spoken on the phone at least once a week, usually more often…

“Here’s that aspirin,” the bearded guy was saying. He was handing a paper cup of water and two packaged tablets to Crane, who said, “Thank you very much,” and meant it.

“Listen,” the guy said. “If I’m out of line, say so: but I can tell something’s bothering you, and it’s an hour and a half yet to New Jersey, so if you want to talk, it’s fine with me. And if not, that’s fine too…”

“Thanks, no,” Crane said. Then felt compelled—perhaps out of guilt for calling somebody this considerate a jerk, even to himself—to
add, “I’m not on a vacation. Someone close to me died recently. I’m going East for the funeral.”

“Hey, man. I’m very sorry. Really.”

“It’s okay. I just need to sit here quietly—if you don’t mind.”

“You got it. Why not put on the ’phones and just relax?” The guy was referring to the headsets they’d been given that could be plugged into the armrest for a dozen channels of music and such.

“Maybe I will,” Crane said, taking the headset out of its plastic wrapper.

“There ya go,” the guy said, smiling, nodding.

It had been a week since he’d talked to her last, when she killed herself; razor blades… Jesus, razor blades.

She was still wearing his engagement ring; she’d be buried with it, tomorrow. No note. Nothing. No reason.

But there had to be. A reason. He had to know what it was. He wouldn’t leave that goddamn town till he knew what it was.

He put the headphones on and heard “You Light Up My Life,” as arranged for elevators. He switched channels, thinking, just my luck, I’ll get Phoebe Snow. He hit the comedy station and heard Rodney Dangerfield.

He began to weep.

At the funeral, he didn’t weep.

Crane just sat there, feeling out of place. The people in the pews around him were strangers, and almost all of them old. He’d never met Mary Beth’s mother before, and she was as much a stranger as any of them; the fact that Mary Beth’s eyes were in the face of this plump, fiftyish woman seemed somehow nothing more than an odd coincidence. He was alone in a church full of people, none of whom he knew, except for Mary Beth. And she was dead.

Yesterday, he’d walked two miles into town from the truck stop where the bus from the airport had deposited him. He’d come to New Jersey expecting a landscape cluttered with fast-food restaurants, gas stations, billboards, one big sprawling city with no houses, just industries belching smoke, highways intersecting at crazy angles, traffic endless in all directions.

What he found was green, rolling farmland that could’ve been Iowa.

He’d come down over a hill, walking along a blacktop road, and there, in the midst of a Grant Wood landscape, was Greenwood. Or so the water tower said. He saw one gas station (Fred’s Mobil) and one fast-food restaurant (Frigid Queen) and a John Deere dealership, before reaching a single, modest billboard that welcomed him to “New Jersey’s Cleanest Little City,” courtesy
of the Chamber of Commerce, three churches and two fraternal lodges. Just past the billboard was a power and water facility and a sign that gave the population: 6000.

Still on the outskirts, he passed twenty or so modern homes, off to the left; the land was very flat here, the only trees looking small and recently planted and underfed. The lack of foliage was emphasized by the homes being spread further apart than they’d be in a similar development in a larger city. Crane’s parents lived in a house like that, on the outskirts of Wilton Junction.

None of this made him feel at home; rather, he felt an uneasiness, and had retreated to a motel, barely within the Greenwood city limits, without even phoning Mary Beth’s mother to let her know he was in town. There he watched television till his eyes burned, none of it registering, but helping keep his mind empty of what had brought him here.

He even managed to sleep. Eventually.

The next morning,
this
morning, he woke at eleven and called Mary Beth’s house. He knew the funeral was at one, but he didn’t know how to get there. An aunt answered the phone and gave him directions. He showered, shaved, got dressed for the occasion, and sat in a chair and stared at a motel wall for nearly two hours. The wall was yellow—painted, not papered—and there was a window with an air conditioner and green drapes in the middle of the wall. There was also a crooked picture, a print, of a small girl sitting beside a lake under a tree in summer. It was a pleasant enough picture, but it bothered him it was crooked. He straightened it before he left to walk into town to the church for the funeral.

The casket was open, and he’d overheard several people saying how pretty Mary Beth looked, and, inevitably, that she looked like she was sleeping. But Crane had seen dead people before and none of them had looked asleep to him. The father of a close friend of his in high school had died in a terrible fiery car crash, and his casket had been open at the funeral, displayed up by the door as you exited, so you couldn’t avoid looking at the admirable
but futile attempt the mortician had made at making his friend’s father look like his friend’s father.

He and his friend and his friend’s father had spent two weeks three summers in a row at a lodge in the Ozarks; the lodge was more an elaborate hotel posing as a lodge than a lodge, and his friend’s father, who had money from a construction business, the same construction business Crane worked for this and other summers, was generous and fun to be with. Crane had spent many hours with the man. But now, whenever he thought of his friend’s father, he saw the face of the car crash victim in the open casket.

So he did not go up to the front of the church to see Mary Beth one last time. In the future, when he thought of Mary Beth, he wanted to think of Mary Beth.

The wood in the long narrow Presbyterian church was dark; the stained-glass windows, with their stilted scenes, let in little light. Even the minister, a thin, middle-aged man, was making his innocuous comments about this young woman, with whom he’d barely been acquainted, in a deep, resonant voice, its tones as dark as the woodwork.

Right now he was saying something—“a gentle person, thoughtful, kind”—that might have pertained to anyone, outside of Adolf Hitler or Mike Wallace. And Crane’s mind began wandering, and he glanced down toward the left, three rows up from him, at the back of the head of the blonde girl. Or woman. Crane had a hunch she was the type who’d consider “girl” a sexist word. That was okay. He didn’t consider “sexist” a word.