Gravewriter Page 2

  The new mom had loved that green bow. The boy became “Bo” before he came home from the hospital.

  Has it really been seven years?

  The boy’s dark mane had quickly fallen out; in its place was a golden patch of cowlicks, like misbehaved yellow crabgrass, which Billy, wielding kitchen shears, had unevenly mowed into a long crew cut. The blue eyes had skipped a generation after the old man—Billy had been stuck with brown; Bo had the blue. The eyes were unusually big for a little face, and they made him look smart and curious and sad. The boy was skinny—all three Williams in the Povich household were slim. Bo had his mother’s fair skin and button nose, and Billy’s pointed chin and long, lean limbs. Bo’s bottom jaw was missing a tooth, which he kept on the table in a shot glass from the Bellagio hotel and casino. The tooth was soaking in Windex, which Bo believed might polish it and increase its value.

  Since Bo had moved in with Billy, he had saved every dime he earned. The kid was good with money.

  He’s nothing like me.

  In addition to the name, Billy could think of just one trait shared by the three generations of Povich men living in his three-bedroom apartment in an old Victorian: They all loved breakfast. They ate breakfast food all day: waffles for lunch, johnnycakes and scrambled egg for dinner, bacon and orange juice during The Tonight Show. Bo had never touched vegetables before Billy had invented the “breakfast carrot.”

  Michigan State lined up for a field goal, but then Wisconsin called time-out to jinx the kicker.

  Billy muttered under his breath, “Up by eleven, can’t you just give them the fucking points?”

  “Whachu say?” the old man asked.

  “I said I have an ulcer the size of France.”

  Organ music—slow, low, and somber—suddenly rose through the kitchen’s red-flecked black linoleum.

  “Funeral today?” the old man said, incredulous. “It’s three o’clock.”

  Billy stepped to the window. Outside, the vast green parade field across the street was dotted with sunbathers and families unpacking picnic baskets. Joggers shared a walkway around the field with kids on bikes and people pushing strollers. At the far end of the green, the Cranston Street Armory sat like King Arthur’s summer palace, a gigantic castle of walls and turrets, trimmed with rough-cut granite and tarnished copper. The armory was a pale pottery color in bright sun, and it turned golden when the light softened near sunset. It had been built for the National Guard a hundred years ago, but the guard had left and the armory had become Rhode Island’s largest and most attractive pigeon coop.

  The city’s well-to-do, and its funky cool people, lived on the East Side of Providence; Billy, the old man, and the boy lived on the West Side. Their neighborhood was a cluster of Victorian apartment houses along the squared-off blocks surrounding the armory, populated by people who couldn’t afford East Side rents, and by those who wouldn’t pay East Side prices on principle. The Armory District had gentrified over the past twenty years, though it remained a little rough. The neighborhood would never live down the time the police came upon a man shot dead in his car, somehow missed seeing the body—and wrote him a parking ticket.

  Two dozen parked cars jammed the street below Billy’s window. Couples dressed in black hugged and murmured and clung to one another on the sidewalk, on their way to Metts & Son Funeral Home, on the first floor of Billy’s building.

  “It’s a funeral,” Billy confirmed. “Not on the schedule, far as I remember.”

  “You got time to get the mail?” the old man asked.

  “Once the music starts, it’s too late.”

  “Awww,” the old man moaned, “I got something coming in the mail today. Why do we gotta stay out of sight?”

  “Because that’s what it says on the lease,” Billy said, grimly looking down on the mourners. “We can’t use the stairs during a funeral unless the building’s on fire. They’ll be done in an hour.”

  “I’ll be napping in an hour.”

  “Then you won’t be missing the mail.”

  “I can get the mail,” Bo offered. He pointed down a narrow hallway, toward his bedroom. “Out the window and down the tree.”

  The old man raised his eyebrows and looked with hope at Billy. “The boy can go down the tree!” he echoed.

  Billy looked from his father to his son. They both had the same pleading look, waiting for Billy’s permission. Some vague paternal instinct told Billy not to allow his seven-year-old to climb out the second-floor window, into the skinny upper branches of the red maple in the backyard, then down to the mailbox. But Billy never gave edicts without reasons, and he couldn’t think of why not— the boy was the best climber of the three of them.

  Billy shook a finger at Bo. “Stay out of sight.”

  “Yay!” cheered the old man. He saluted Billy with a breakfast carrot.

  Bo pushed his cereal away and shot from the table. “Thanks, Billy!” he called out, pattering down the hall. “I won’t let you down.”

  “Mm-hm,” Billy said, his attention back to the game.

  The old man waited until Bo was out of sight. He scolded, “You’re his father. The boy shouldn’t be calling you ‘Billy.’ ”

  Billy watched Michigan State break its huddle. Sarcasm was his favorite weapon against his father’s nagging—the old man had no ear for it. Billy deadpanned, “Wouldn’t ‘William’ be too formal between father and son?”

  “That would be worse!” the old man cried.

  “Yes!” Billy shouted as the football tumbled through the uprights. He pumped his fist. “Time for one of those fantastic finishes. It’s comeback time!”

  The old man stared slack-jawed at Billy.

  “What?” Billy said. He sighed. “Bo has always called me ‘Billy.’ I couldn’t change that now if I wanted to, which I don’t. ‘Pa’ and ‘Dad’ make me nervous—those are names for you.”

  “You’re forty years old,” the old man said. “And still going by ‘Billy.’ ”

  “My byline in the paper was ‘William,’“ Billy reminded him.

  The old man scrunched his face, like he had just inhaled sewer gas. “Now you write more than anybody and you never have a byline.”

  “They don’t byline obituaries,” Billy said. “That’s the paper’s policy.”

  “Why can’t you go back to real writing?”

  Michigan State kicked off to a pipsqueak return man, who squirted through the first wave of tacklers. Billy screamed, “Get him! Get him! GET HIM!” Somebody finally did. “Thank you!” he called sarcastically to the television. “Somebody on kick coverage needs to have his scholarship yanked.”

  “When are you going to get back to real news reporting?” he father nagged

  “Eh,” Billy said.

  “I was in newspapers all my life—it’s in my blood, and your blood, too.”

  “You were a printer, not a reporter.”

  The old man set his jaw. “The best goddamn printer they ever had.” He passed a hand over the newspaper on the table. “I touch this and I still smell hot lead.” He smiled, losing himself for a moment in old memories. “You can stay off the police beat and go back to covering politics, if you don’t want to write about any accidents.”

  “Angie didn’t die in an accident,” Billy told him sharply. “It was a crash—and a crime.”

  The old man held up quivering palms. “I didn’t mean that she did,” he said, suddenly retreating to a gentler tone. “It’s been thirteen months, Billy.” He fidgeted in his chair, grunted, and wheezed—old man noises that hinted of an inner struggle. Finally, he said what he was thinking. “She wasn’t even your wife when she died.”

  Billy would not look at him. “That was just temporary.”

  Wisconsin ran up the middle for nine yards. “Come on,” Billy moaned to the Michigan State defense. “You’re gonna get my legs broken.”

  “ ‘Temporary’?” the old man said. “It sounded pretty permanent in divorce court.” He waited for Billy to answer. B
illy said nothing. The old man pleaded, “Why won’t you go back to work?”

  Billy turned to his father. The old man stared, lips slightly parted. He wheezed through his mouth, a downcast cloud about him. Billy looked into the old man’s perfect blue eyes, hunting for some sign of the wisdom that should come with seven decades of living.

  The organ music stopped downstairs; the praying began.

  Billy wanted to confess.

  He wanted to tell his father about the darker part of himself that Angie’s crash had uncovered—it was a new perspective, exposed by Billy’s pain and his guilt, or perhaps created by it. In his ever-more-violent dreams, Billy had seen how an unspeakable act could also be righteous, how sin and justice could intersect. Billy was aware that this dark perspective was pulling him down, moving him closer to action against the man he blamed for Angie’s death, yet he couldn’t do anything to stop himself. It was like one of Billy’s credit-card and casino jags—he knew it could only end badly, yet he could not help but ride the bomb.

  Wisconsin muffed the center snap and the quarterback had to fall on the fumble.

  Billy imagined himself in black and white, straddling a nuke with Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. Could the old man understand any of this? Billy’s father was at the same time a child and a sage.

  “Pop,” he began.

  “Billy! Billy!” came the cry from down the hall. “I got the mail!”

  The old man’s head whirled. “Take your time, boy!”

  Bo pounded down the hall, carrying a brown cardboard cube about one-foot high, bound in packing tape, and half a dozen white envelopes.

  “Anybody see you?” Billy asked.

  The kid beamed, and shouted, “Nobody!”

  The old man reached for the box. Bo pulled it away and said slyly, “Twenty-five cents?”

  “Bo, stop extorting your grandfather,” Billy said. “What are you saving all that money for, anyway?”

  “I’ll give ya a dime,” the old man offered.

  “Fifteen!” Bo countered.

  “Deal,” the old man agreed. “Can you bill me?”

  Bo smiled and handed him the box. The old man could expect an invoice printed in purple crayon by the end of the day. He had a hundred of them.

  Blood oozed from a fresh scrape the size of a postage stamp on Bo’s left elbow. The kid didn’t seem to notice the wound from his adventure out the window; the sight of the boy’s blood weakened Billy’s knees.

  The old man tore at the package like a raccoon trying to open a bag of bread.

  Billy had to look away. His father’s incompetence with the simplest physical task disgusted him. Billy felt shame, too, for the stroke was not the old man’s fault.

  “Help your grandpa,” he ordered Bo.

  On third down, Wisconsin ran around the left end for no gain. Time to punt.

  Together, the old man and the boy sawed the packing tape with a butter knife. They spilled Styrofoam peanuts on the floor and the old man fished out a white ceramic head with a handle. The piece seemed slightly too large to be a coffee mug. He held it to the dangling ceiling lamp for an inspection. “No chips,” he said. “A little glaze crazing around the nose. Not bad. Another treasure of the past from almighty eBay.”

  “I can’t believe the money you blow on junk,” Billy said. Realizing he had just set a trap for himself, he tried to sidestep. “Though I guess you earned your pension and the right to spend it.”

  The old man pounced. “I could blow my dough on junk, or on the greyhounds, like you, but at least I still got the junk.”

  Ouch. Billy smiled. The stroke had taken much from the old man, but not the razor tongue.

  “That’s a big nose on that guy,” Bo said, reaching to feel the smooth ceramic.

  “This is George Washington’s head,” the old man explained. “This is a souvenir from the World’s Fair in New York, way back in 1939. Put some black coffee in there for your grandpa, okay?”

  Bo took the head, looked inside, and frowned. “It’s dusty inside.”

  “Aw, dust can’t hurt an old Polack like me,” the old man said. “Go fill it.”

  The old man flipped through the envelopes that had come in the mail, classifying them: “Overdue bill. Overdue bill. Junk. Junk. Hey, Billy, here’s a bill that ain’t overdue. Somebody has a lot of nerve, sending this. Ha!”

  The Wisconsin punter hit a low line drive, which Michigan State fielded at the twenty-three-yard line, with twenty seconds left in the game. Billy held an open hand over the television, like a faith healer.

  “Billy?” the old man said, sounding grave. “Did you get arrested and not tell me?”

  “Mmmm!” Billy said to silence him. To the TV, he preached, “Block that guy! And that guy! Run! Cut it back! Good!”

  “Because this letter is from the superior court,” the old man said. “Addressed to you.”

  “Hallelujah!” Billy screamed. “He broke it! Run! Run! Yes! Score!”

  Billy threw up his arms, jumped in celebration, and jammed his fingers on the yellowing stucco ceiling. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He stuffed his hands under his armpits and watched the Michigan State players pile onto their kick returner in the end zone. Billy had no joy in victory, only relief: The money he had just won from a Federal Hill bookmaker would cover his debt to a loan shark in South Providence. Michigan State had just saved Billy from another broken nose.

  “Fine, fine—you won,” the old man said, not sounding too happy about it. “What about this letter from the court?”

  Billy snatched the envelope and ripped it open. There was a sheet of blue paper inside.

  “Aw, goddamn,” he said. “I got jury duty.”

  Billy looked up, to see his father sipping from George Washington’s head, and his son, with tight-lipped determination, stirring margarine into his chocolate cereal with the barrel of his toy gun.

  The old man said, “You’ll probably just hang around in the jury pool for a day, and then come home.”

  “Probably,” Billy agreed, barely listening. He felt a quick flutter in his chest. He had never before been called to duty by the court. To sit on a jury would be good, he thought, in case one day he had to face one.

  three

  The frosted glass rattled in the door. From the hallway outside the law office came a muffled muttering, “I’ll sue that goddamn locksmith.”

  Inside the office, Carol dog-eared the page to mark her place in the ten-year-old decision from the first circuit court of appeals, and then called, “Martin? It’s not locked.”

  The door rattled more violently. “I’ll take his house!”

  “Martin?”

  “His car, his boat, his wife, children—and his cocker spaniel!”

  “Turn the knob to the left.”

  The door burst open and Martin Smothers stumbled into the oneroom office, clutching together in one hand a McDonald’s bag, a sheet of white paper, and a battered silver briefcase. The other hand still held the doorknob for balance as Martin’s slippery fake-leather vegan shoes skidded on the buffed tile. With the door open, Carol could read the black stenciling on the glass: MARTIN J. SMOTHERS, ATTORNEY AT LAW. The letters had been painted in a curve, like a giant frown, which seemed right for the moment.

  “What the hell did they do to my goddamn door?” Martin shrieked.

  “They fixed it,” Carol said, but Martin didn’t seem to want an answer. He blew into the office, let the door slam, slapped his briefcase and his lunch on his steel desk, and sent loose papers fluttering.

  Martin Smothers was sixty years old, slim-shouldered, and potbellied, with dark, puffy bags beneath his eyes, a shiny bare forehead, and long, wiry white hair bound by a rubber band into a ponytail, which had been threaded through the back of a Providence Steam Roller cap. The 1928 National Football League champions went out of business before Smothers was born, but he liked their logo, which looked like a drunken border collie sticking out its tongue.

  Mart
in dressed in a tan linen suit, as he did every day, in all seasons. He wore natural-fiber red suspenders and an organic silk necktie blandly colored with vegetable dye—special ordered by his wife.

  “Why is it so goddamn dark in here?” he said, jerking open the blinds to reveal the vista of a brick wall five feet away.

  “Lovely,” Carol cooed. “And if you look down the alley, you can see the gleaming new Dumpster. It’s Caribbean blue.”

  Martin wasn’t listening. “Look at this letter I got,” he shouted. He had a thin voice that cracked when he raised it, like a bad cellphone connection. Why juries would trust that voice had been a mystery to Carol, until she realized that Martin’s desperate voice made him sound like the underdog. And everybody roots for the underdog.

  Carol reached a hand out for the letter, but Martin had decided to perform it.

  “ ‘Dear Attorney Smothers,’ “ Martin called out, reading dramatically from the paper. “ ‘It never fails to amaze me how low some people of your so-called profession will stoop. Congratulations—you have sunk to a record low, either to get rich or to glorify your own ego—I don’t know which.’ ”

  He clapped the letter between his hands and growled.

  “Considering what you’re paying me,” Carol deadpanned, “I’d say it’s for ego.”

  Holding the letter in two fists, Martin read more. “ ‘That animal Garrett Nickel got what he deserved a year ago—a death sentence on the night he escaped. Too bad it happened quickly and relatively painlessly, which is more consideration than Nickel ever gave any of his victims.’ ”

  “If you consider bullets and drowning to be painless,” Carol offered.

  “ ‘That punk Peter Shadd, who escaped prison with Nickel and then shot him, deserves two things,’“ Martin read on, “ ‘a medal for ridding the earth of subhuman scum, and a noose. The only thing he did wrong was not turning the gun on himself after shooting his partner. Why are you trying to get him off? This was a case of scum killing scum. Shadd is a junkie, a thief, an escapee, and a killer. Why are you defending him? Why can’t you just let him rot? You talk in the papers about his rights—don’t you know that nobody cares about his rights?’ ”