Shades of Eva (47 page)

“He had to have.”

“I’d remember that. It was four, maybe five
minutes and he came out.”

“I know, with a toolbox. But he went
somewhere to get her baby! He had to have!”

 “He said he was just going to talk to
her. He came out. He didn’t say what was in the box. I thought he
stole it. He said it had his fingerprints on it. He just wanted to
bury it and get out of there.”

“He just wanted to bury a toolbox? You
didn’t ask him why, or what was in the damn thing? I’m talking
about a baby, and you keep talking about a fucking toolbox. If he
never went anywhere else, then how in the hell did he get Elmer and
what in the hell are you talking about?”

“Because Elmer was in the god damned room
with your mother!”

I took another step back. “What?”

“Haven’t you read anything? Damn kids! He
was taken right out of her arms! From here. From this very room! Do
you think Anna put me in my sister’s fucking room by accident?
Elmer and your mother were in this room—together! But I didn’t know
that that night. He never told me that, and he never told me he
killed that baby! I swear to you.”

“You’re lying!”

“It’s the truth, Mitchell. He must have put
Elmer in the toolbox, and we fucking buried it. That’s it. There’s
nothing more to tell. Eva looked out and saw Fred carrying the box
out back, and that was it. If Elmer was in that toolbox, then he’s
under the black oak tree.”

I stood up and looked over his shoulder and
out the window. The rain was steadily falling. The light was faint,
just enough to bathe the perimeter of the yard and the edge of the
ravine in a soft glow. I had seen it earlier, that black oak tree.
It seemed out of place then—now I knew it was out of place.

“Your mother planted that tree. It was the
last place she ever saw Elmer. It was the last tree she planted
before her memory was erased.”

I knew then exactly where my brother’s bones
were—somewhere tangled and twisted in the roots of that giant black
oak tree. “She knew he was dead. She asked them to erase her
memory. But it just won’t go away.”

“She asked them to?”

“She couldn’t deal with what happened. They
gave her a few rounds of ECT with some chemical cocktail
enhancement. After about a half year, she forgot. She forgot about
the postcard and pushing Dad. She forgot about Fred, and the rapes,
and she forgot about the numbers.”

“So she made it up? That Elmer was alive?
She always said that—

“Yes she made it up. She created that
fantasy after she got out of here to be able to have something to
hope for, I guess. I’m sorry, Mitchell. It’s not going to work.
He’s gone.”

I thought back to Neah Bay, to the trees
that lay scattered in the groves and the stumps scattered across
that abused land. It wasn’t easy to fall an oak that size, much
less extract its stump or its roots without practically destroying
the earth beneath it and anything delicate thereabouts, like bones
or a likely-disintegrated toolbox.

I sat down and gave Ully a disappointed
stare.

He must have known what I was thinking. I
was thinking that Elmer was gone, that finding him was impossible.
I was also thinking of more ways to punish Ully for that
impossibility. He was supposed to point the way to Elmer’s remains,
and now all I saw was a noose hanging from that tree, and Ully’s
body hanging from that noose. I saw my uncle tied to that oak with
a gag in his mouth, and me flogging him for what he had done. I saw
scars rising from beneath his skin; snakelike scars, like those on
Amelia’s back, but deeper.

I stood up and put the postcard back in my
pocket, trying to visualize—trying not to visualize—the picture
Ully had just painted. Then he asked me what I was going to with
him. I didn’t know how to answer him, but Amelia did. So I reminded
him of her message.

“Right Mom’s record. Pay whatever fines they
impose on you, and retire…far way from here. Keep this to yourself
and you walk out of here with your life and your freedom, and
ninety percent of your fucking money in three days. Can you do
that?”

“Or else what?” Ully looked me square in the
eyes, brazenly. “You’ll blow my head off? Steal my fortune? Ruin
the remainder of my golden years? I mean, look at you. Eva’s son
playing detective!” He shook his head and laughed. “I’m not sure I
much care about any of those things anymore, Mitchell. I’m not sure
I care about much anything anymore.”

I remained quiet.

“You know something about that, don’t you?
About not caring?”

I didn’t answer him.

Ully nodded. “You know, you have a family,
Mitchell. Up here.” He put an index finger to his head. “And one in
here.” He tapped his chest. “That’s the difference between me and
you. You have a heart, but what you don’t have is the heart to kill
a man. You might think your bitch friend’s threats mean something
to me, but they don’t. I don’t care about my freedom; I don’t care
about my money; and I don’t care if I die. I’m going to get what I
deserve, but in the end, you’ll get what you deserve, too…little
Mitchell!”

I raised my chin, unsure of what to say.
Ully wasn’t cooperating thus far out of any sense of respect for
Amelia or I, or out of fear. He had an ulterior motive. Maybe he
was simply curious about what I looked like after all those years.
Maybe he was finding some amusement in the charade we were engaged
in. Maybe his cooperation was nothing more than a trap he was
laying.

“I’m going to cut that tree down, and I’m
going to find my brother.”

Ully said nothing.

“I’m going to find him, and I’m going to
find Fred Levantle, with or without your help.”

And then he spoke. “I’m sure you will,
Mitchell. You always were a dreamer. Always consumed with the dead.
Why do you pine so? Why do you hang on the way you do?”

Again I said nothing.

“We’ll all get what we have coming to us.
We’re all good at death. You can’t argue with that. None of the men
in our family have ever known how to save a life. We take them.
Didn’t you know that? Hell, I had the chance to save a life. I
could have stopped Fred from doing what he did! I could have done
something to save your mother.”

I remained silent.

“And you could have done something, too. You
could have done CPR on her. But you didn’t! I always wondered about
that. Why didn’t you do CPR that morning?”

“Because she was dead.”

Ully laughed. “That’s sort of the point
isn’t it? She was dead.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“The answer to my question, Mitchell, is
that you were just a boy. It’s the same answer as to why you’ve
been running for so long, and to why I didn’t stop Fred from doing
any of this. We were both just boys.”

“Why’d you come here if you weren’t going to
help me?”

“I am helping you, Mitchell. I’m going to
help you come to terms with what the fuck it is that you’re doing,
and what you and this bitch friend of yours have become. I’m here
to help you and her find what you’ve really been looking for.”

He turned and pulled the blinds back down
and took a seat in his chair again. He reached a hand up and
started massaging his forehead.

“You know where Fred is, don’t you?”

There was a long pause. “That’s not a
question for me,” Ully said, finally. “That’s a question for your
doctors here.”

“What are you talking about? My
doctors?”

“It’s not Fred you’re looking for. You need
to wake up and open your fucking eyes, boy! You’re looking for
someone else. They’ll tell you…when you’re ready to know.”

Before I left Ully’s room, I turned
to him one last time. He was sitting as alone as I’d ever seen a
man sit, yet he didn’t seem concerned. I almost felt sorry for him,
but then I thought of the little girl shivering in her bedroom in
my river house dream. I thought of the laughing that she endured
from the attic and the subsequent rapes that seemed to have gone
unnumbered under Ully’s heartless watch. I thought of the beatings
I used to take from him, and all of his admonishments. Don’t poke a
bear in a cage, and the bear won’t poke back!—and still boys are
sick boys!

He couldn’t blame everything on the
ignorance of youth. If he was going to take some pleasure in
watching me unearth the remains of my dead brother, then he could
watch. If he thought I was searching for a ghost, and found
amusement in watching me sift endlessly through pockets that held
no gifts, then he could watch.

The fact that I felt a bit of pity for my
uncle made me wonder how much of a fool I truly was. It also made
me consider how much I had grown in the last few days. I was, at
least, searching, and he was right: there was a difference between
him and me. I did have a heart, and I didn’t have the heart to
kill. That would require some other substance.

I pitied Ully when I could have shot him. I
pitied him and I spared him, because for all that he’d done to
torment me and to forget his sister, I’d done the same thing in a
way. I forgot Mom, and I almost killed myself. I had denied my
mother the only thing she ever wanted for me—ever truly
wanted—which was for me to be happy.

But could I be happy not knowing where Fred
was? If he was? And who he was?

Amelia had asked me once in Neah Bay if I
had ever considered Mom’s wishes—if I had ever considered her
dreams. There in that insane asylum staring at my uncle, I felt
quite clearly that I’d just taken those dreams and stomped them
into a thousand pieces by confronting Ully. This was her wish, not
mine. It was her teenage desire. Elmer’s fate was her baby’s
fate—but he was my brother. And that teenage girl was my mother. I
couldn’t disconnect from her—not just yet.

I had to know.

I wasn’t happy. I wouldn’t be until I did
know. I was obsessed! And Ully just might be right on another
account. I might not get away with any of this. I might be reaching
into an empty pocket again. And then again, I might just find all
I’d been looking for.

***

Wednesday, April 24: 12:17 a.m.

The quietest way to fall a black oak tree is
with a two-person strap saw in a raging thunderstorm in the dark.
That’s exactly what Amelia and I did that night, with Ully in
presumed audience. He allowed us to saw away, I imagine laughing
all the while as we did so. I don’t think he ever thought we’d find
what we came to find.

Around one in the morning, Amelia whispered
timber just about the time a bolt of lightning shot the ground
somewhere to our south. We ran to the west along the steep bank of
the ravine doing our best to remain out of sight as the tree began
to topple. We were beneath ground level, and well away from the
giant root ball that slowly, with an almost unearthly terror, began
ripping its way from the wet earth.

The tree began to crack. I’d heard that
awe-inspiring and bittersweet cracking sound hundreds of times
before, and it never got old. It also never quit hurting. It was
loud, the type of noise that gets your attention in a visceral
way.

The oak fell down the ravine and into the
pines in a thunderous series of crunches and snaps as the root ball
seemed to catapult high into the air. Amelia and I watched the
remainder of the roots tear themselves from the earth. Some of them
snapped free as if the earth were clinging to them; others merely
snaked out of the soil as if they had never belonged there at
all.

As the tree slipped down the slope and
finally came to a slow halt, as what dust there was settled within
the rain-dropped earth around the root crater, something gave form
near the crater’s rim. Something rectangular and small began to
shine in the moonlight like a coin glistening beneath a
streetlight. Whatever it was, the rain was rinsing the mud from
around it and it was shining.

I looked to Amelia in near disbelief, and
she looked to me with the excitement of a child on Christmas
morning. She was the first to run to it. I trailed after her. She
reached it, knelt down and collected it, then handed it to me. It
was a toolbox, indeed, the toolbox, shed from the earth like a
sliver from ancient flesh.

I took it up. I looked back into the yard
toward the halfway house, toward Ully’s window, and if I couldn’t
quite see him there, I could somehow sense him watching us. I felt
his presence, and I felt something like remorse emanating from his
window, and something else that felt like hatred. I thought I heard
crying, too, and then I thought I heard laughter, an evil, ominous
laughter I couldn’t quite place.

I knew then that my freedom was only a
matter of time.

I ran down the hill trailing Amelia,
listening to the emerging voices of alarmed staff approaching the
ravine behind us, alarmed by the enormous cracking sound and the
tree’s fall, wondering, I’m sure, why the lightning cut such a
straight line through an otherwise healthy oak tree.

And then I remembered. “The strap saw!” I
whispered.

“Leave it!” Amelia said, and she grabbed my
hand.

“But our prints are on it!”

“The rain will wash them out! Come on!”

We ran away from the saw and the stump and
the tree, carrying the tiny coffin of my little brother into the
woods, laughing and running like two school-kids who’d just pulled
a fire alarm.

We stopped at the base of the slope at
Cascadia Creek and looked back toward the Asylum high up into the
night sky above us, toward the excitement, toward the water tower
standing guard in the rain, and then turned to one another. I
kissed Amelia. She didn’t pull back. She didn’t fight me. She
returned a rain-soaked kiss in the night with lightning bolts
blasting the earth around us.

Things were the way they ought to be. My
head quit hurting for a moment. My body quit shaking. Elmer’s long
wait was over. He had been reborn in a way, and now we were going
to give him a last name and a proper burial, and I was one step
closer to my proper station at my family table.