David Levien: Where the dead lay

Behr nodded. It meant access. Courtesy. All the things he hadn’t had for the last bunch of years. He also knew what it didn’t mean: that he was back on.

“We’d talked about a spot for me,” Behr said, each word costing him something deep inside him he knew he’d never get back.

“You know how we do it: let’s kiss first, see how it goes,” Pomeroy said. A check, a ring, and a handshake. Pomeroy had worked him like a pro. Behr had threatened, entered, hacked, pushed, bribed, hurt, and even killed for him. And for what? A check, a ring, and a handshake. He still didn’t know how much he didn’t know, and suspected he never would.

Behr looked at Pomeroy’s outstretched hand. Then he shook it. He didn’t see another choice.

Behr drove toward home making a mental list of what he’d need for his trip. He’d gotten his gun back. That was good. He had plenty of rounds for it still. He fingered the money order in his front pocket. Now he had cash. He’d bring his computer. He’d need his peephole viewer. Binoculars. His lock-pick set. His jump-stick for opening security chains. A shotgun and shells. Clothes. He had no idea how long he’d be in Chicago. As long as it took, he supposed, to find the three-Bobby B., Tino, and the quiet one.

He pulled up to his place and parked. He got out of the car and was walking toward the steps when he saw motion inside and stopped. Then he saw who it was. Susan was there, moving about in the living room. She spotted him and came outside and down the steps toward him.

“I’m getting my stuff, Frank,” she said, holding up her backpack. The finality of what she was doing, and what he had done, landed on him.

“Susan,” he said, and she stopped across a strip of grass from him.

“Yes?”

He fought to find more words. This time he wasn’t willing to fail. Finally he spoke, his voice raw. “I’ve gone a long time thinking there are mistakes you can make, that afterward, no matter how you live, you can’t make them right.”

Her face changed, and she crossed to him. “If the past guaranteed the future, we’d all be screwed,” she said. She saw the pain in him and must have seen the doubt in his eyes. “It can be different, Frank. It will be. You’ll see…”

“Yeah,” he said.

They stood in silence as the twilight hardened into darkness around them.

“Are you done?” she asked.

He wasn’t sure what else he owed Aurelio, but he was sure what he owed Susan now, and maybe even himself. He didn’t want to go to Chicago anymore. He wasn’t going. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“I’m done,” he answered. She closed her eyes in relief. His hand waved between them. “You want to do this?”

“I do,” she said.

They found themselves in each other’s arms, shaking.

After some time had passed she went back upstairs, and he stayed outside for another moment drinking in the evening air. There it was. On mats in empty studios, in garbage bags dropped in fetid water-filled ditches, in stubbled cornfields, in empty garages, on raw mattresses in stripped houses, in bleak hospitals and out in the streets and beyond is where the dead lay, waiting, to be found, to be tended by the living, to be solved, to be remembered, and finally to be put down to rest. He’d reached an end in himself, and a new start. It was time for him to lay them down, too. He went up the steps toward his place. Susan had paused at the door, and she swung it open wide for him and smiled as he reached her. They stepped inside.