The Executor (29 page)

Now you duct tape like it’s going out of style, resulting in something that resembles a silver cocoon or, more accurately, a chrysalis.

You unpack the second duvet and repeat the process with her.

She is noticeably larger. The lack of symmetry bothers you. Nevertheless you regard your chrysalises as things of beauty. A vision comes to you: they erupt, two new creatures formed from the soup of what used to be him and what used to be her, winged, magnificent, ethereal, flapping off into the sky, taking your troubles away.

While you linger in this fantasy, her phone goes off with a mighty blast of trumpets. Scrape yourself off the ceiling and look at the screen: ANDREI. Her husband? Son? Pimp? Who knows. You wait until it stops ringing, then check the missed calls.

There are six.

This concerns you. Has she mentioned the name of the man who pays her sixty dollars to clean house? (Does she even know your name?) Does she keep her schedule written down? In an accessible place? As you cannot answer the questions, nor hope to alter the actualities underlying those answers, you set them aside and concentrate on what you can control. You turn their phones off.

Ten thirty-two P.M., and you’re behind schedule. It’s a good thing you slept three hours instead of four or five. You’ve needed the extra time. Constant activity has prevented you from confronting what you have done; nor have you given much consideration to the alternative, which now stands before you as you go to the kitchen to start assembling cardboard boxes: the phone. Look at it. It is still possible to pick it up and dial. But is it? No. Not anymore. Or perhaps they would understand, if you explained to them the expression on his face, the pressure of the gun against your throat. The gun wasn’t loaded, but he could have jumped you from behind and strangled you or—or—or what about this: he could have hit
you
with the bookend. Or the poker. Anything was possible, and you can talk, you have always been able to talk; pick up the phone; it would be so easy, wouldn’t it; would obviate all this effort, free you of so many burdens. If you do not, your night has only just begun.

Go on.

Two by two you carry the assembled boxes to the library, where you fill each with ruined books, not all the way to the top but enough so that they won’t go flying everywhere or feel unnaturally light, should anyone want to pick them up—not that that will happen. Why would it? You must believe it won’t. Sealing the boxes with packing tape, you label each one either BOOKS LIVING ROOM or BOOKS MASTER BEDROOM.

You jog through the streets, through the gentle snow.

Her car is right where you left it and your heart stops: a parking ticket. How is that possible? You checked the signs.
You read for content.
Then you see that it isn’t a ticket but a leaflet advertising a two-for-one tapas brunch. Angrily you tear it into bits, resolving to never, ever eat at that restaurant.

For someone who cleans for a living, her car is a hellacious mess. Standing beneath a gas station overhang, surrounded by curtains of snow, you rid it of everything belonging to her: unopened soda cans, smeared newspapers. A bit of jiggering gets the second row of seats down, leaving the cargo area empty and flat. You pay for your gas and ask for two tree-shaped air fresheners, both in Royal Pine.

Despite your bang-up mummification job, the stench in the library seems to have worsened. You gag as you crouch down beside her. Slip your hands under her. It’s hard to get purchase, because the tape is so taut and smooth. It’s your own fault for being thorough. What you need is a handle; and so you use duct tape to fashion one, drawing inspiration from the bookstore bag’s twisted paper handles. Gingerly you raise her up—she bends a little, but less than you expected—and give her a test jounce. Solid.

Go.

Deep breath and open the library door and drag her down the hall and into the living room and down the hall again and across the kitchen and into the service porch, the linoleum helping you along, outside and thudding down the frosted wooden steps and drop her in the snow with a powdery
whup.
Butterfingered, you fumble out the keys to the station wagon and raise the rear hatch. Sit on the bumper, then bend over and pick up the handle and row backward, scooting yourself into the cargo area with your neck and body bent over sideways, you’re too damned tall but you do it, you get her mostly up, and when she is half in and stable, you climb carefully out the passenger door and hurry around to the back and push her the rest of the way in. You would never have guessed how awkward this is. She won’t move like you want her to; she is heavy and stiff. You lower the hatch without closing it and go back for round two.

With him everything’s chugalugging along dandily until you get to the top of the exterior steps and the handle rips loose and you go tail over teakettle into the snow. There’s no time to fix it; scramble back up and pull him bodily until he’s on the ground, then squat down and slip your arms underneath him and the cold burns and your lower back yodels and you get up, staggering around. The hatch is closed. Why couldn’t you have
left it up.
And so you have to drop him again. When the hatch is open, you squat and lift again, ignoring the pain. You get him in semi-straight but this isn’t the time to be concerned about aesthetics; you’re out there in the open and you glance at the windows of the neighboring house, miraculously still unlit. Run back to the library and grab the third duvet. It hides them both with room to spare, although to your eye it’s more than obvious what’s underneath. To solve this problem you go back into the house and collect the pillows from the downstairs bedroom. They do nicely to fill in the gaps, smoothing the two lumps into a solid mass, sort of like an air mattress. Why you would be transporting an air mattress, you have no idea. If pressed, you would use the excuse that you needed padding to cushion the boxes of books that you intend to put on top of them, or else the boxes would bounce around, damaging their contents. In your head you practice delivering this explanation.

The first box fits, though you have to wedge it in, and you realize that if you fill up the entire cargo area, you’ll have obstructed your rearview mirror. Under normal circumstances that’s bad enough; in this case, it might be a fatal error. Recalibrating feverishly, you go inside and collect all the plastic bags from your long day of shopping. Indian-style on the kitchen floor, you use a chef’s knife to slice open all your nice, neat boxes, transferring the ruined books from the boxes to the bags, tying the bag handles twice so the contents won’t spill out. You use up all nineteen bags—exclusive of the paper bag from the bookstore, which still holds the map—and take them outside to place them atop the duvet. Now you’re talking. Now it looks like an amateur moving job, the exact impression you’re shooting for. You give yourself a mental high-five.

You’re still going to have to do something about the ruined carpet.

But not right now. The stove clock says one ten in the morning. You shower again, don your new cold-weather gear, and pack your (her) duffel with a change of clothes, including one pair of new shoes still in their soft drawstring bag.

The shovel. The bag with the map, to which you add their phones and both sets of identification. Lighter fluid and matches. Trash bags. Backpack. Soda. Fishing magazine. (Why not?) A flashlight. The knife, seems like a good idea. Put on your eleventh pair of latex gloves for the day and load up the car. The wind throws down snow from the branches. You zip up your parka. The shovel goes under the edge of the duvet, the garbage in back, everything else on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Road trip ready, you get behind the wheel and head north.

 

 

EARLY ON you glance at the speedometer and are surprised to see the needle touching eighty. This is idiotic, given the road conditions. Not to mention the danger of getting pulled over. So you police yourself (hahaha) closely, with the result that the trip drags. Radio stations surface, then sink, all holiday favorites. A cassette sticks halfway out of the tape deck. With some hesitation you push it in, but what pours from the speakers stands your hair on end, a tune you’ve heard her singing before. You eject the tape and throw it out the window. You will have to live with silence. You’ve done it enough.

The rubbery beat of the windshield wipers.

Tiny explosions of snow.

It seems that the air fresheners are making the stench worse, calling attention to what they are intended to conceal. You toss them out, too. But you can’t drive with the smell building up like that, so you lower one of the rear windows an inch. Cold air rushes in behind you, a noise like a pursuing tornado. It keeps you alert, and the smell dwindles to a tolerable level.

At least the car has four-wheel drive—something you didn’t think about in advance. Luck or fate has saved you there.

I-95 runs all the way to New Brunswick, but you don’t go nearly that far, stopping north of Portland for food and fuel. The gas station is strung with tinsel. In the bathroom you remove the battery from his cell phone, dropping the phone itself in the trash. The battery you pocket.

The clerk wears a floppy Santa hat and a look of existential despair. You buy another green soda. So much caffeine must be unhealthy. It sure feels bad. Try not to look jittery as you take out more twenties. Gas alone will cost you several hundred dollars over the course of this trip, and it occurs to you that criminals, just like everyone else, must be feeling the recent increases at the pump. Everybody hurts during tough times, even the wicked. You almost giggle, right there in the middle of the mini-mart, to imagine mafiosi complaining of shrinking profit margins.

Before leaving town, you place the trash bags in an alley.

Alone on the road, with nothing to do but stare into the surging snow, you bury or shed or at least suspend the klaxon thought that you, too, are among the wicked.

For a while you hug the shoreline, running a string of quaint towns whose wreathed wooden homes evoke visions of ruddy-faced lobstermen and plump, jolly wives, everyone gathered round the fire, glugging eggnog, swapping presents, intoxicated with good cheer. Turning inland, you pass a sign for Kennebec County, population 117,114. In the last two hours you’ve seen three other cars, all going in the opposite direction. You toss his cell phone battery clattering onto the blacktop.

North again, a narrow road unspooling through the forest. The sun has started to send up shoots; iced-over ponds glimmer. That’s okay. You anticipated this. Your goal is a location remote enough that you won’t have to worry about operating in broad daylight. Consulting the map, another westward turn. The forest closes around you like a hand. Stop the car and get out and stand on the shoulder, playing the flashlight through the trees, your breath rising in great white balloons.

The snow is deep and inviting.

You should have sprung for the hand warmers.

Strap the shovel to your new backpack, tighten the laces on your boots. Put the high-tech gloves over your latex gloves. Open the hatch and push aside the books.

You have your doubts about the strength of her handle. On the fly, you decide to use the duvet as a kind of stretcher or sling by which to drag her.

This idea fails, spectacularly. After crashing down the embankment (much steeper than it looked; plus you land awkwardly on the shovel handle) you have to spend time digging her out and repositioning her. Even then, she won’t keep straight. The duvet grows heavy, starts to tear. This will never work. You overestimated yourself. You scramble up the embankment with the ruined duvet and exchange it for the knife.

She has sunk into the powder. You kneel beside her, cutting slits in the tape wide enough to work your gloved fingers into. Lean back and pull and walk backward. She comes. Slowly, but she comes. Okay. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Your fingers hurt and your back hurts, but you are moving, and that’s enough to power you on through the trees, smearing a trail that anyone could follow. Fifty feet. Your nylon pants make a swishing sound. A hundred feet. Owls low. Hundred fifty. Complexly woven branches render the sky a vast gray rosace. Smell the evergreens, dense stands of eastern white pine. Much better than your air fresheners. You wish you could chop down one of these tall soldiers and hang him from the rearview mirror. There’s less snow on the ground now, most of it clumped in needles overhead, like cotton bolls. Brown needles on the ground. Patches of ice; you slip and right yourself and pull on. Swish swish. Two hundred feet. That’s what they call Maine, isn’t it? “The Pine Tree State.” Your fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Yawkey made your social studies class memorize the state capitals and flowers and so forth. To keep your mind off the difficulty of the task at hand, you run through nicknames. Massachusetts: the Bay State. Vermont: the Green Mountain State. Swish swish. Three hundred feet; four. The only state without “state” in its nickname is New Mexico: Land of Enchantment. Focus on warm places. Florida: the Sunshine State. California: the Golden State. Hawaii: the Aloha State. Five. After Arizona: the Grand Canyon State, you set her down and catch your breath (it comes sharp and clean and electric), unstrap your shovel, and bend to dig.

Except you can’t. The earth is frozen. You strike at what feels like solid rock, and for the first time all day and night and day, frustration wells up to the point where you cannot contain it. With an animal howl you slam the shovel into the ground, the mud cracking into poker chips. You do this again and again, but nothing. It would take hours to clear even a few feet. What you need is a pickax, and since you don’t have one, you’re going to have to leave her here or else bring her all the way back through the forest, back through the snow, back up the embankment, the thought of which makes you want to surrender. You cast about for salvation and it comes, literally, in a ray of light: there: a hollow log. Go to it. You test it by getting down and crawling halfway in. Yes, it will work. You drag her to it, then cut off the duct tape, heeding the (unsubstantiated but intuitive) notion that she will decay faster this way. You unroll the duvet and out she comes, not reshaped and winged but the same as before, perhaps a little grayer.