A few weeks after Kate had died, a check for twenty thousand dollars had come in the mail from an insurance company. The amount was a pittance, what seemed like an insult. I hadn’t any mind to pursue the matter, though, and had mailed half of it to Susan in Minnesota and cashed the other half for myself, which I kept in a shoebox under the couch. Before I went looking for Frankie, I counted out two thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties and crammed the nut of bills into the inside pocket of my jacket.
Frankie was just where I thought he’d be, sitting on a stool next to the waitress’s serving station, smoking a cigarette and scratching at a lottery ticket with a nickel. There was a beer glass with a couple sips of beer left in it, an empty shot glass, and a red plastic ashtray in front of him. He wore a heavy green army coat over a frayed plaid flannel shirt, white carpenter’s pants, and tan work boots. He was covered in plaster dust. It was in his hair and on his arms and all over his boots and pants and shirt.
When I sat next to him and said, “Hey, Frank,” he recognized me but didn’t use my name when he said hello. I realized again that although he’d been on my painting crew, I was an outsider to him and the other guys I’d hired those summers. I suddenly felt humiliated asking him if he could still get drugs.
I said to him, “Hey, Frank, do you still ever, ah, make those trips anymore like you used to?” He looked at me and didn’t answer and went back to scratching the ticket. It struck me how suspicious it might be to him, me coming into this bar after not having seen him in probably ten years and asking him to score. He probably thinks I’m a cop now, I thought.
Before I said anything stupid, like No, man, I’m not undercover; it’s cool, I just told him, “Frank, my kid died and my wife left me and I busted my hand and I’m stretched out pretty thin and I thought that maybe you might still be around and know something.”
He stopped scratching the ticket and took a pull on his cigarette and asked me what I had in mind. I told him and he told me an amount of money and when to come back to the bar. The money seemed exorbitant and I got angry for a minute that he’d fleece me in the condition I was in. But I had the amount he asked for, and I looked at him, sitting there alone, covered in dust, covered in ashes, just like me and just as worn out and worn down and as baffled at this life as everyone else and, really, I thought, worse off than me, and I thought, God help us all, and agreed to what he said. He’d told me to come back in a couple hours, so I wandered around the tightly huddled old captains’ houses by the water and watched snow begin to fall over the harbor. I returned and Frankie had what I’d ordered and I gave him the money, right at the bar because no one but the bartender was there and he did not care. I bought Frank and myself a round of boilermakers and swallowed four pills with the whiskey.
“You got to get the aspirin stuff out of those before you take them,” Frankie said.
“The aspirin?”
“It’s not aspirin. It’s some other stuff, some headache stuff. It’ll fuck up your liver. They put it in there so you can’t take too much of it and get high.”
“How do you get it out?”
“You grind up the pills and put a little water in the powder and make like a paste. Then you put it in the freezer for like half an hour or a little more, just so it almost freezes. All the aspirin junk turns into crystal. Then you put it all into a coffee filter and squeeze out the liquid and chuck the crystal stuff. The liquid is the stuff you take. Best way to do it is get one of those syringes they use to give little kids medicine and stick it up your ass and shoot the liquid up there. You get way more fucked up.”
“Up your ass, huh?” I said. “That’s pretty weird.”
“Works every time.”
I talked with Frankie for twenty minutes about the town and who was still around and who had gone. I barely remembered any of the names he mentioned. As the pills started to work I shook Frank’s hand and said how much he’d helped me out and thanks so much and could I come back again if I needed to. He said I could come back but that he was out of town a lot these days.
I said to him, “Okay, Frank, thanks again and I’ll try here again if I need to.”
I left the bar and walked the six miles back to Enon in a heavy snowfall that kept traffic off the road and quieted the world.
7
LATE ONE WINTER NIGHT, AFTER THE NEW YEAR, WHICH CAME and went without my being aware of it for two weeks, after I had lost track of how much whiskey I had drunk and how many pills I had crushed and snorted, I lapsed into a blackout and awoke nearly frozen in the cemetery six hours later. I was laid out on my side, stopped up against the backs of three closely laid headstones, for three sisters, who had all died on December 12, 1839, at eight, seven, and five years old. I was sure that my toes and fingers had frostbite. By the wind and the barest light in the east, I could tell that it must be after five in the morning. The sky was still full of stars, but they were not the limpid, tame stars of an early summer evening. They were cold, wild, staring, and ferocious. They were stars that had arrived in Enon’s sky from the deepest trenches of space, from terrible, unimaginable beginnings, their light democratized by the present moment, but in fact a vast, tangled thicket of times, of ghosted universes haunting the hillside with their artifacted light. Their light unsettled me the way the open eyes of a dead person would — because it is impossible to believe that open eyes do not see. Their light blazed in the eyes of Enon’s dead for a moment in false resurrection.
I rose and convulsed from the cold and retched from the poison. I looked over at the snow-covered golf course, where kids sledded every winter, and imagined the dead having sledding parties at midnight, on the back slope of the hill, warming their finger bones in blue fires that they kindled in granite urns, laughing when they held their hands inside the flames. I imagined them melting clumps of dirty ice in a tin bucket over the fire and drinking the hot muddy brew and cackling with glee as it ran off the backs of their jawbones and spattered down their ribs. I imagined them using headstones for sleds. The idea made me nauseated and I repented of it. I had the urge to go to Kate’s stone and kneel in front of it and say, I’m sorry, over and over again, because no matter how much I knew better, I could not stop myself from stepping over the same dark threshold, night after night, trying to follow her into the country of the dead in order to fetch her back, even though she visited me in dreams and never left my waking thoughts. Memories of her feeding the birds and practicing running and playing cribbage were not enough. I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant — step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.
8
KATE WAS WITH HER BEST FRIEND, CARRIE LEWIS, WHEN SHE was killed. They were riding their bikes, in tandem, along the curve the road made around Enon Lake. Carrie had been in front of Kate. The last time I had seen Carrie was at Kate’s funeral. She was with her mother, Helen, and her dad, whose name I did not remember. She wore a black dress with her hair pulled back and no jewelry and no makeup. She cried so much and so hard that her parents took her away from the ceremony behind a tree a few dozen yards from the grave site to try to calm her. Her grief undid me all the more, because she, unlike me, had seen Kate underneath the car, mixed up with the wrecked bike. It was impossible for me to get the image of Kate’s shoulders and the split helmet covering the top of her head, framed in bent metal, underneath the front of the car — what I imagined Carrie would have seen — out of my mind. I did not see Carrie at the reception after the funeral. I am not even sure that she came. I did see her mother, though, so maybe her father had taken her home.