Finders Keepers

No one yet, though.

He got into the Biscayne, legally purchased but now bearing stolen Maine license plates. Curtis Rogers was slithering a slow course down the cement walkway toward the toilets, pulling with his hands and pushing feebly with his feet and leaving a snail-trail of blood behind. It was impossible to know for sure, but Morris thought he might be trying to reach the pay telephone on the wall between the mens’ and the ladies’.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go, he thought, starting the car. It was spur-of-the-moment stupid, and he was probably going to be caught. It made him think of what Rothstein had said at the end. What are you, anyway, twenty-two? Twenty-three? What do you know about life, let alone literature?

‘I know I’m no sellout,’ he said. ‘I know that much.’

He put the Biscayne in drive and rolled slowly forward toward the man eeling his way up the cement walkway. He wanted to get out of here, his brain was yammering at him to get out of here, but this had to be done carefully and with no more mess than was absolutely necessary.

Curtis looked around, his eyes wide and horrified behind the jungle foliage of his dirty hair. He raised one hand in a feeble stop gesture, then Morris couldn’t see him anymore because the hood was in the way. He steered carefully and continued creeping forward. The front of the car bumped up over the curbing. The pine tree air freshener on the rearview mirror swung and bobbed.

There was nothing … and nothing … and then the car bumped up again. There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.

Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis’s head was gone.

Well, no. Not exactly. It was there, but all spread out, mooshed. No loss of talent in that mess, Morrie thought.

He drove toward the exit, and when he was sure the road was empty, he sped up. He would need to stop and examine the front of the car, especially the tire that had run over Curtis’s head, but he wanted to get twenty miles farther down the road first. Twenty at least.

‘I see a car wash in my future,’ he said. This struck him fu

Fifty-fifty odds, he told himself. Maybe better. After all, no one saw the car. Not in New Hampshire and not at that rest area.

He came to an abandoned restaurant, pulled into the side lot, and examined the Biscayne’s front end and right front tire. He thought things looked pretty good, all in all, but there was some blood on the front bumper. He pulled a handful of weeds and wiped it off. He got back in and drove on west. He was prepared for roadblocks, but there were none.

Over the Pe

Morris drove west, headed for the filthy little city residents called the Gem of the Great Lakes. He had to sit tight for awhile, and he had to see an old friend. Also, home was the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in – the gospel according to Robert Frost – and that was especially true when there was no one to bitch about the return of the prodigal son. With dear old Dad in the wind for years now and dear old Mom spending the fall semester at Princeton guest-lecturing on the robber barons, the house on Sycamore Street would be empty. Not much of a house for a fancy-schmancy teacher – not to mention a writer once nominated for the Pulitzer – but blame dear old Dad for that. Besides, Morris had never minded living there; that had been Mother’s resentment, not his.

Morris listened to the news, but there was nothing about the murder of the novelist who, according to that Time cover story, had been ‘a voice shouting at the children of the silent fifties to wake up and raise their own voices.’ This radio silence was good news, but not unexpected; according to Morris’s source in the reformatory, Rothstein’s housekeeper only came in once a week. There was also a handyman, but he only came when called. Morris and his late partners had picked their time accordingly, which meant he could reasonably hope the body might not be discovered for another six days.

That afternoon, in rural Ohio, he passed an antiques barn and made a U-turn. After a bit of browsing, he bought a used trunk for twenty dollars. It was old, but looked sturdy. Morris considered it a steal.

2010

Pete Saubers’s parents had lots of arguments now. Tina called them the arkie-barkies. Pete thought she had something there, because that was what they sounded like when they got going: ark-ark-ark, bark-bark-bark. Sometimes Pete wanted to go to the head of the stairs and scream down at them to quit it, just quit it. You’re scaring the kids, he wanted to yell. There are kids in this house, kids, did you two stupes forget that?

Pete was home because Honor Roll students with nothing but afternoon study hall and activity period after lunch were allowed to cut out early. His door was open and he heard his father go thumping rapidly across the kitchen on his crutches as soon as his mother’s car pulled into the driveway. Pete was pretty sure today’s festivities would start with his dad saying Gosh, she was home early. Mom would say he could never seem to remember that Wednesdays were now her early days. Dad would reply that he still wasn’t used to living in this part of the city, saying it like they’d been forced to relocate into deepest darkest Lowtown instead of just the Tree Streets section of Northfield. Once the preliminaries were taken care of, they could get down to the real arking and barking.

Pete wasn’t crazy about the North Side himself¸ but it wasn’t terrible, and even at thirteen he seemed to understand the economic realities of their situation better than his father. Maybe because he wasn’t swallowing OxyContin pills four times a day like his father.

They were here because Grace Johnson Middle School, where his mother used to teach, had been closed as part of the city council’s cost-cutting initiative. Many of the GJ teachers were now unemployed. Linda, at least, had been hired as a combination librarian and study hall monitor at Northfield Elementary. She got out early on Wednesdays because the library closed at noon that day. All the school libraries did. It was another cost-cutting initiative. Pete’s dad railed at this, pointing out that the council members hadn’t cut their salaries, and calling them a bunch of goddam Tea Party hypocrites.

Pete didn’t know about that. What he knew was that these days Tom Saubers railed at everything.

The Ford Focus, their only car now¸ pulled up in the driveway and Mom slid out, dragging her old scuffed briefcase. She skirted the patch of ice that always formed in the shady spot under the front porch downspout. It had been Tina’s turn to salt that down, but she had forgotten, as usual. Mom climbed the steps slowly, her shoulders low. Pete hated to see her walk that way, as if she had a sack of bricks on her back. Dad’s crutches, meanwhile, thumped a double-time rhythm into the living room.