Gravewriter (14 page)

The leg breakers were in front of him. The five men had fused into one hulk, which was grinning like a madman, at the controls of a steamroller. Except that the
roller
part that flattens the asphalt was not smooth; it was spiked and made of chrome.

Billy stopped running and checked his watch.

The red second hand was turning the wrong way. He hid the watch under his hand for a second and then checked it again. Now his watch was digital. It said 42:42.

“This is a dream,” Billy declared. He felt relief. The leg breakers were gone.

He heard the echo of a suggestion planted by his conscious mind:
Look at your hands.

Immediately, Billy looked at his hands. They were blurry a moment, and then sharpened.

Experts in lucid dreaming recommend focusing on an object at the critical moment when the dreamer, still asleep, becomes aware he is in a dream. Your hands are always with you, so the experts say to look at your hands. For the past three months, Billy had performed lucid-dreaming exercises before bed—reminding himself to watch for dream “cues,” the ridiculous events that happen only in dreams, and then to look at his hands. These were his last thoughts before he fell asleep.

When it worked, Billy could take conscious control of his dreams, usually for a short while before he woke up. He had begun these techniques to fight the random violence he had watched every night as his subconscious indulged in revenge against the crippled cop.

His hands in focus, Billy looked around the dreamscape.

He was in Roger Williams Park, the four-hundred-acre Victorian park of fields, lakes, and woods dedicated to the founder of Providence. It was winter and the ground was white. Lucid dreams are full of sensations, and Billy felt his face tighten against the cold. He could feel the weight of his body on the bottoms of his feet—a subtle detail that perfected the illusion.

Billy was on top of a hill, looking down a long road.

To his left, a broad slope of snow sank lazily away from the street. Hundreds of tracks left by sleds crisscrossed the snowfield. From his vantage point, Billy could see the Temple to Music, a monument of Vermont marble, hollow inside and fronted by stone pillars—looking like the Lincoln Memorial's little brother.

This was where Billy had seen Maddox several months after the crash. The mangled cop had been in a wheelchair that afternoon. Like Billy, he had come to hear jazz. That night, Billy's nightmares began.

In the dream, Billy saw Maddox again.

He saw him because he wanted to. This was Billy's dream. He was in control.

Maddox sat on a plastic lawn chair, alone, looking like he had come to a concert on the wrong day. Behind the stone temple, sunlight glared off the frozen duck pond.

Billy walked toward him. In his right hand, he felt his ice ax—twenty-five inches long, and yet less than eighteen ounces; it had a hardened steel head on an aluminum shaft, for mountaineering in the worst conditions. The hatchetlike head had a serrated blade that could have butchered a buffalo.

Billy had not used the ax in ten years, not since the first year he was with Angie. That winter, they had driven four hours to Mount Washington, in New Hampshire, where they had stayed in a majestic inn at the foot of the mountain. He felt his dream face smiling at the memory. He remembered the hot tub, the second bottle of merlot, and leaving the room at daybreak, while she still slept, to make for the mountain's summit alone.

He recalled little from the climb, just the scrape of his crampons against the ice and his white breath beneath his goggles. The summit that day had been encased in rime ice as sharp as a blade and as dainty as spider silk.

He had enjoyed the peak alone. The highpoint of his climb—the highpoint of his life.

Back then, Billy owed money to no one. He had started work in Rhode Island, covering crime for the paper of record. And in the redroofed lodge far below, Angie waited. She would have been awake and at breakfast, probably, watching the mountain for Billy and drawing the faces around her—those of waiters and other diners—on her sketch pad.

Billy had killed Maddox many times in his lucid dreams. He had thought the dreams would satisfy his need to make Maddox pay for
what he had done. Instead, the dream violence fed his fantasies. He had studied lucid dreaming to control the violence in his nightmares; now his nightmares had become rehearsals.

Billy felt his shoulders roll as he swung the ax. Hot blood splashed his face.

When he was done, he rested, feeling steamy sweat against his skin. The color began to drain from the park, like a Polaroid developing in reverse, and Billy realized he was waking up.

He saw Peter Shadd on the stage of the Temple to Music.

Peter looked at the mess at Billy's feet and frowned. He said, “That's some fucked-up shit.”

Billy glanced down. His feet had churned up the snow and the blood and had spread it all around him. “Is this what you did, Peter?” he asked.

“Shit, man, you know I didn't do that.”

“Everyone else thinks you did. I hear the other jurors talking. They're not supposed to talk about the case, but they do. They want to convict you.”

“Do you believe in arithmetic?” Peter asked.

“I'm no good at it.”

“Add something and then subtract the same. What happens?”

“The universe doesn't notice,” Billy said.

“I didn't kill anyone.”

“That's not you talking,” Billy insisted. “It's not you; it's
me.”

“Save the innocent man, then kill the guilty one. The universe doesn't notice.”

Billy woke into darkness with a little shudder. He was on his back, in bed. His T-shirt was dry. The hot sweat was just part of the dream. His heartbeat was calm, his breathing shallow and regular.

The radioactive clock glowed green. The time was 3:55
A.M.

Billy sat up, put his feet on the carpet, and passed his hands through his hair. His jaw was sore from grinding his teeth, and the foulness in his mouth smelled like sun-dried lizard. He took a BuSpar and swallowed it down.

Gathering his sheet into a ball, he wept silently into the cotton.

Billy cried because he had awakened into a world in which Angie was dead and Maddox alive. The dream had felt so real, as if Billy had really killed him. He wept because he would have to do it again. Billy bit on a mouthful of sheet. He thought of Angie, of the night she had told him she'd miscarried their first child. That night, Billy had locked himself in the bathroom and cried into the mildew on the underside of the bath mat, until Angie picked the lock with a knitting needle, took the bath mat away, and cradled Billy's head against her bare belly.

“Here I am,” she had whispered to him.

With that memory, Billy's shoulders stopped shaking and the fit of tears passed.

He wiped his eyes on the sheet, blew his nose into it, and then tossed it to the corner. Switching on the lamp Angie had given him for his thirty-second birthday, he blinked the sleep away and let his eyes adjust to the twenty-five-watt bulb. Billy's dream journal was on the nightstand. The book was a hardcover binder with a shiny gold crescent moon on the cover. He flipped to the first blank page, wrote the date, the time, and the details of the dream.

The journal seemed radioactive, like the clock. It was a handwritten confession to a crime Billy had not yet committed.

If anything ever happens to Maddox, I must burn this book.

Unless,
Billy thought, I want to be caught. Is that why I keep the journal?

Hmmm, no, that's ridiculous.
Billy tossed the book back on the nightstand. Nobody
wanted
to be caught for anything—not speeding, not stealing cable TV, certainly not murder. But Billy had no doubt he
would be caught. He wasn't a hit man. His revenge would not be done coolly for money; it would be a premeditated act of passion. And if it came to action, passion wouldn't care what clues it left behind.

From the hallway came a clunk. Then the old man mumbling, “… goddamn thing in the goddamn way …”

Billy went to the hall. The old man had steered his wheelchair into the doorjamb on his way to the bathroom and had gotten the footrest hung up on the trim around the door. A night-light low on the wall shone through the old man's wheels and cast a faint spoked shadow on the opposite wall.

“Pop?”

“This goddamn door jumped in my way.”

“Mm-hm,” Billy said, tugging the chair into the hall, and lining it up with the opening. “Why would a door do that?”

“Insurance scam, probably.” The old man wheeled into the bathroom.

“Do you need help?”

“First thing I did out of the womb was piss on the doctor,” the old man said. “If I did it then without help, I can do it now.” He clicked on the light and flung the door shut in Billy's face.

Billy leaned against the wall and waited, listening to his father whimper, grunt, curse, and sigh. The toilet seat fell hard; the wheelchair rattled. Then silence for two minutes. And then the sounds of struggling began again.

The old man emerged from the bathroom more ornery than when he'd gone in. “All that work for ten fucking drops,” he growled. “I tell you, boy, getting old ain't for sissies.”

“Maybe you and I can switch bedrooms, so you'll have a straight drive across the hall.”

The old man made a sour face. “Won't that be swell for you—trying to romance a woman in
my
room, the former cloak closet barely big enough for a twin bed and spare pair of underwear.”

“I'm not doing any romancing.”

The old man mocked him with fake surprise. “Really? You don't say?” He fingered the loose skin under his chin. “I haven't heard your headboard banging the wall recently, but I thought I was just going deaf.”

“You should go back to bed, Pop.”

“So should you—and get somebody in there with you.”

“Can we drop this?”

“Pay her if you have to.”

“I
don't
have to—” Billy caught himself as his voice rose. He glanced to Bo's bedroom door, then whispered calmly, “I don't have to pay to get laid.”

“You're forty years old, son,” the old man reminded him. “You wanna be alone forever? Listen to me—it sucks.”

“You weren't alone often enough, if I recall my family history.”

Anger stirred in the old man's blue eyes. “I played around too much, okay?” he said, a sudden rasp in his voice. “I got a lot of old memories of damp sheets.” He frowned and held up his hands. The loose sleeves of his white T-shirt drooped beneath his wasted arms. “And now I have nobody. Who's gonna want me now? Your mistakes are opposite of mine, but just as bad—and they will turn you into me.”

They stared at each other.

The old man looked close to tears. He had been nagging out of love, Billy realized, expressing his worries as best he could, in his own ham-fisted way. Something inside Billy melted. He said gently, “I hear you, Pop, but it's too soon—Angie's only been gone a year.”

The old man looked away. He spoke down the dark hallway. “She's been dead thirteen months, but she was gone long before that.”

Billy glanced to his bare feet. They were getting cold on the hardwood floor. “I had a plan to get her back,” he said.

“Oh sure, your plan—to quit gambling, write your book, pay off your debts, and win her back. How much time did you think you had?
She shacked up with that asshole cop in the meanwhile. They was getting married.”

“Never would have happened.”

The old man sighed hard, a gasp in reverse. He said, “You and her—you divorced
five years ago.”

Billy's his head snapped up. “No. Five years?”

“Do the math—it's six years come January. That's how long you been alone.”

The old man was right, though it didn't seem possible. Billy absentmindedly rubbed the spot on his rib cage where Walter had belted him. It didn't hurt anymore, but he had gotten used to rubbing it. “I didn't want anyone else,” Billy confessed. “I was afraid it would feel like cheating.”

The old man opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and did a double take down the hall.

Billy looked. A four-foot wraith in Batman pajamas and a Caped Crusader plastic Halloween mask crawled along the wall.

“Bo?”

The kid jumped to attention and whipped off the mask. “Yes, Billy.”

“Look, it's Batman,” the old man said. “Where's Robin? No—to hell with Boy Wonder—where's Catwoman? Remember her, Billy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Eartha Kitt!” the old man cried. “She can climb my scratching post!”

“Pop,” Billy said, gently cutting him off. He asked Bo, “What are you doing out of your room?”

“Nothing.”

“Um, have you been sneaking down to Mr. Metts's funeral parlor dressed as Batman in the middle of the night?”

A pause. “No.”

It amazed Billy that a boy directly descended from a serial adulterer
and a compulsive gambler could be such a rotten liar. Hadn't the kid gotten
any
DNA from Billy?

The boy yawned, big and phony. “I'm so tired! G'night, Billy! G'night, grandpa!” he said cheerily, and then vanished into his room.

“First time the kid hasn't tried to bum a dime off me,” the old man said.

The mood had been broken; the father-son discussion was over. Fine with Billy—he had nothing more to say. “Can I push you back to your room?” he offered.

“Leave me here,” the old man snapped. “Christ Almighty, I gotta piss again.”

T
he witness turned almost sideways, his left ear toward the jury. His peered, cyclopslike, through his left eye toward the prosecutor, who had called him to the stand.

“State you name,” said the clerk.

“Lawrence Home,” said the cyclops. “But I like Larry.” He spoke with a thick tongue, and if he hadn't come to court directly from jail, chained inside the sheriff's van, Billy would have assumed Home was testifying through three vodka tonics.