Midnight Haul (3 page)

She seemed so out of place here. Even more so than him. At least he was wearing a suit, wrinkled as it was from being stuffed in his one small suitcase. But among all these people in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, wearing their Sunday best, this blonde girl, woman, whatever, with jeans and an old plaid shirt…

He’d watched when she came in, a little late, and he was watching her now, the back of her head, side of her face. Good-looking girl. Woman. Cute face, no makeup. Nice body, no bra.

Jesus: he was getting a hard-on.

He crossed his legs. Tried to cross his legs. Folded his hands in his lap, feeling uncomfortable and ashamed. But he could hear an amused Mary Beth saying, “A hard-on at my funeral? Very classy behavior, asshole.” At least that’s how
his
Mary Beth would’ve reacted; he didn’t know how the Mary Beth who killed herself would react. He didn’t know that Mary Beth at all.

The moment passed, and so did the casket, brought up the aisle by the pallbearers, men in their forties and fifties, nameless relatives all, and now the only thing Crane felt was empty.

It was good to get outside, in the sunshine. Cool, crisp, early fall day. Football weather soon. Iowa City. It would be nice to get back to Iowa City… if Mary Beth were there…

They were putting Mary Beth into the hearse. That is, the pallbearers were, with the guiding hand of someone from the funeral home, putting the casket in the back of the black Cadillac.

This isn’t happening
, he thought.

“I suppose you don’t have a car.”

He turned. The blonde girl—woman—in the plaid shirt and jeans was standing there. He felt a rush of embarrassment.

“Do you always blush at funerals?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t particularly friendly. It was, in fact, coldly sarcastic.

“I… don’t know you…” Crane stammered.

“You’re Crane. You’d have to be. I’m Boone.”

“Boone?”

“It’s my last name. My first name is Anne, but let’s just keep it Crane and Boone, okay? I got a car.”

“Huh?”

“A car. I got a car. You want to be in the funeral procession or what?”

“I’d like to be at the graveside, yes, when they…”

“Then come on.”

She had a little yellow Datsun, a couple years old, and she opened the door on the rider’s side for him and he got in.

“You were a friend of Mary Beth’s?” he asked her.

“I still am.”

“Nobody else her age was there.”

“I wasn’t her age. I’m older than she was. And I’m older than you, too.”

“Oh.”

They found a place in the line of cars. Boone switched her lights on. A five-minute drive brought them to Greenwood Cemetery in the country, amidst more Grant Wood scenery.

Crane stood near the grave as a few more words were spoken and the casket was lowered into the ground. Boone stayed back by her car.

Mary Beth’s mother approached Crane and said, “Please stop by the house before you leave town,” and turned away, a male relative in his forties or fifties guiding her by the arm toward a waiting car.

When everyone had gone, Crane was still there. Standing. Staring. At the arrangements of flowers near the hole in the ground where Mary Beth was. And would be.

Boone was still back by the car. She called out to him.

“Are you about done?” she said. Cold as stone.

“Hey—fuck you. I can walk back to town.”

“Suit yourself.”

A few minutes later he realized she was standing beside him, now, and she said, “Look. You better come with me. Come on.”

Crane rubbed some wetness away from his eyes and he and Boone walked to the Datsun.

“You got a place to crash?” she asked him.

“Motel.”

“Leaving tonight?”

“I guess.”

They got in the car and drove out of the cemetery.

“You’ll be starting back to school, then,” Boone said, suddenly, after several minutes of silence.

“Uh. Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

“Fine. That’s just dandy.”

“What’s your problem?”

“My problem?”

“You don’t know me. I don’t know you. But the hostility in here’s so thick I’m choking.”

“Yeah. Well. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

“Take
what
out?”

“I liked Mary Beth. That’s all.”

“
I
loved her.” His eyes were getting wet again.

“I’m sorry. Sorry, Crane. She never said a bad word about you. She loved you. She did.”

They were at the motel now.

Crane got out.

“If she loved me,” he said, “why’d she kill herself?”

“Who says she did?” Boone said.

And drove away.

Mary Beth’s mother lived in one of the new houses in the development on the edge of town, a split-level that differed from the pale yellow house on its left and the pale pink house on its right by being pale green. There were a lot of cars parked in front of the place and in its driveway. Crane walked across the lawn, with its couple of sad-looking scrawny trees, and past a trio of men with their coats off and beers in hand, talking loud. He didn’t hear Mary Beth’s name mentioned in their conversation.

He knocked on the screen door (the front door stood open) and a middle-aged woman with a floral print dress and a haggard look greeted him with a suitably sad smile, saying, “We’re so glad you stopped by.” He had never seen her before.

He said, “Thank you,” and was inside the living room with a dozen other people, who stood in small groups, talking in hushed voices, plates of food and cups of coffee in hand. All the chairs were taken. On the couch, flanked by elderly female relatives, was Mary Beth’s mother. He went over to her.

It took her a moment to recognize him.

“This is Mary Beth’s fiancé,” she said, with a weak smile, nodding to the woman on her left and to her right.

They were all pleased to meet him and he took each offered hand and returned it.

He looked down at Mary Beth’s mother and again saw Mary Beth’s eyes in the plump face, and impulsively, leaned over and kissed her cheek. It surprised her. She touched her face where he’d kissed her and said, “There’s food in the kitchen.”

There was food in the kitchen. A table of it: hors d’oeuvre plates, plates of cold cuts, white bread, rye bread, nut bread, banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies, pecan pie, lemon meringue pie, angel food cake. Food. People were eating it.

There were more men than women in the kitchen. Though it was serve-yourself, a woman in an apron stood behind the table of food, offering help that was never needed. Another woman in an apron was doing dishes: apparently some of the mourners had eaten and run, or perhaps some people were onto a second plate. The men stood with beers in hand, talking softer than the men out on the lawn but louder than the people in the living room.

Crane took some coffee, sipped at it occasionally, leaned against a wall in the kitchen. No one spoke to him. The bits and pieces of conversation that drifted his way didn’t include Mary Beth’s name.

He wandered off, unnoticed, into the other part of the house, the upper level of the split-level.

He looked in at Mary Beth’s room. It was a small room, four cold pale pink swirled plaster walls, a dresser with mirror, a chest of drawers, a double bed with a dark pink spread. There was a stuffed toy, a tiger, on the bed, a childhood keepsake she’d had with her in their apartment. Little else in the room suggested Mary Beth’s personality. This summer was the only time in her life she’d lived in this room. Her mother and father had moved into this house after she’d left home for college. So this was not a room she’d lived in, really.

But there were some books on the chest of drawers: Kurt Vonnegut, some science fiction, a couple of non-fiction paperbacks on ecology and such.

And his picture, that stupid U of I senior picture, was framed on her dresser. And a couple snaps of them together were stuck in the mirror frame. He removed them. Put them in his billfold.

“That’s stealing,” a voice said.

He turned and saw a plump woman in her late twenties in jeans and sweater. Her hair was dark and long and she looked very much like Mary Beth, but with a wider face, which made her not quite as pretty.

“Hi Laurie,” he said. He’d never met Mary Beth’s sister before, but he felt he knew her.

“Hi there, Crane,” she said, and smiled and came across the room and hugged him hard.

They looked at each other with wet eyes and then sat down on Mary Beth’s bed. She took his hand in both of hers.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

“I didn’t see you at the funeral.”

“I wasn’t there, I had to stay with Brucie.” She gestured toward the doorway.

“Brucie? Your husband?”

“No. You’re thinking of Bruce. He was my husband. Emphasis on was. We split up.”

“Mary Beth never mentioned…”

“It wasn’t too long ago. Two months.”

“Brucie is Bruce, Jr., then.”

“Right. Ten months old yesterday.”

“I’d love to see him.”

“He’s next door, in my room. I live here, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Since the divorce, I live here. I’m not surprised Mary Beth didn’t tell you about it, because it’s all a little bit of a downer. And talking with you on the phone once a week, well, it was something she looked forward to. She didn’t want to talk about depressing stuff, I’m sure.”

“Depressing stuff. Just how depressed
was
she, Laurie? She never gave me any indication…”

“Like I said, your phone calls were a bright spot in her week. She didn’t want to spoil ’em, I guess.”

For a while Laurie sat silently and so did Crane; her hands felt cold around his.

“What happened, Laurie?” he asked her.

She looked at him with a face that was much too much like Mary Beth’s and said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Laurie, Mary Beth wasn’t depressed one day in the two years I knew her.”

“She wasn’t all that depressed this summer, either. Just kind of blue.”

“Kind of blue.”

“Worse, I guess, the last week or so.”

“What happened the last week?”

“Crane, I was close to my sister, growing up. But we didn’t talk much this summer. Something was bothering her, that much I know. What it was, exactly, I
don’t
know.”

“It had to be
something
…”

“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought. Never depressed a day while you knew her, huh? Well, a week after she got home I found her up in the middle of the night, sitting in the bathroom, bawling.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. Her period, maybe, who can know? Only it was more often than that… I found her bawling like that four or five times.”

“And she never said what was troubling her?”

“Once she admitted to me that she was thinking about Dad. He died of cancer about three years ago, you know. They were close. Being in this house reminded her of him, and that got to her.”

“Got to her enough to make her do what she did, Laurie?”

“Who can say?”

“You mean you can understand it? You can understand somebody going into a bathroom and… and…”

“Slashing their wrists? I don’t understand it, exactly. But I can see it. Haven’t you ever thought about killing yourself, Crane? Hasn’t everybody?”

“Maybe everybody else has.
I
haven’t. It’s a fucking waste, Laurie! It’s the biggest fucking waste I can imagine.”

“Why? Because life is so wonderful? What’s wonderful about it?”

He pulled his hand away from hers. He didn’t like what he was hearing coming out of this face that was so much like Mary Beth’s. He didn’t like the sickness that Laurie seemed to have, in a small way, that Mary Beth must’ve had in a larger way.

She must’ve sensed it, because she seemed to soften, reaching out and touching his shoulder as she said, “She loved you, Crane. I know she did. You were the most important thing in her life.”

“A life that meant so little to her she flushed it down the goddamn toilet.”

He stared at the wall. Laurie wasn’t saying anything. When he looked over at her, she was crying into her hands.

“Laurie,” he said, putting an arm around her, “it’s been rough on you, too. I know that.”

“I… I do know one thing that depressed her.”

“Yes?”

“Brucie.”

“Brucie?”

“Brucie. My little Brucie. She was unhappy for him.”

He didn’t understand that. He let it pass.

“Laurie, who found her?”

“Mom. In the morning. Mom came and got me up. Mary Beth had been gone for hours by the time we found her.”

“Can I see where it was?”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging.

She led him there.

He hesitated a moment.

Then he looked in and saw a bathroom, shining clean, guest towels hanging.

“I don’t know what I expected,” he said.

“I know,” Laurie said. “It should be more dramatic than just a bathroom. But it’s just a bathroom. It’s the only one in the house, too, so both Mom and I were forced to use it, and that helped us, in a weird way. It helped make it just a bathroom. I use it sometimes and don’t even think about her lying there.”

He looked at Laurie. She was looking at the bathroom floor, blankly.

“Laurie,” he said, guiding her back into the hallway. “Are you okay? I mean… are you really okay?”

“You mean, am I gonna be next?” She smiled a little. “I don’t think so. I’m depressed. My sister just killed herself. I got a right to be. And, anyway, I got Brucie. I still got little Brucie. I live for that kid. You want to see him?”

“I sure do.”

She took him into her room, a blue room with a bed with ruffled blue spread, and a Jenny Lind crib with a blue blanket nearby. She peeked in the crib and began playing with the well-behaved child, who made cooing, gurgling noises back at her.

Crane looked in at the child.

Brucie was adorable, but it wasn’t hard to see why Mary Beth had been disturbed about the boy.

He didn’t have any hands.

The street light on her block was out, but there were lights on in the downstairs of the big white two-story house. It was a gothic-looking structure with no porch and paint just beginning to peel. There were trees on either side of the place and the overall effect was rather gloomy. He knocked on the door.