Actually, Martin could remember a lot of his life before coming to the Fairchild Family Cemetery. He couldn’t have forgotten it if he’d wanted to, because his brother Henry lived at the cemetery with him, and always had. Sometimes it seemed to Martin as if he and Henry had done everything together all his fifty-six years. They had even gotten married together, once, back in 1962, but it hadn’t lasted long for either of them.
“I could understand it if you were twins,” Martin’s wife had told him when she left. “I still wouldn’t like it, but at least I would understand it. But you aren’t even close. There’s three years between the two of you and your sister Esther besides. I don’t understand what it is you think you’re doing.”
It was Henry who was the older. He would be fifty-nine in November. Martin’s wife had been a schoolteacher, and Martin had always thought that that was the real problem there. It was a mistake to get involved with an educated woman. They always wanted to be someplace they weren’t, and they ran a man’s life ragged in the process. Martin’s wife had taken a job in Westport—“where I’ll be halfway close to civilization,” as she put it—and then married a professor at NYU. Martin thought about her sometimes, during all those crazy riots in the late 1960s. He hadn’t been able to decide whether she would like them or hate them. She had liked flowers growing in flower boxes in the spring, and instrumental music with a high twangy sound to it she bought in record albums put out by some outfit in Germany. She liked Christmas at her mother’s, too, which Martin had never been able to stand.
He was standing on his own back porch, trying to listen to any sounds that might be coming from the cemetery. All he heard was his brother Henry, tramping along on the frosted grass and swearing, not quite under his breath. Other than that, the world might as well have been empty. There weren’t even any cars going by on 109.
“Henry?”
“It’s that Dallmer woman,” Henry said. “She’s probably dead in a ditch up there. Her car’s sure as hell about as dead as it can get.”
Martin switched on his flashlight and waved it into the dark. He caught Henry, looking furious.
“Her car’s where?” he asked. “In the cemetery?”
“Of course it’s in the cemetery,” Henry said.
“But how can it be in the cemetery? There aren’t any roads in the cemetery. Nobody’s supposed to drive in there.”
Henry reached the porch and came up the steps. “It’s the Jeep with the wheels, the one she has done up like a damned tank. It went right over the meadow and in where the Gordons are buried.”
“But…” Martin said.
Henry went past him, into the house. Martin heard him pick up the phone and punch the pad. He hated Touch-Tone phones, all those weird beepings they made. If he’d had the money, he would have gone to one of those antique stores and got himself a rotary model. The rotary models always reminded him of his own mother.
Henry came back onto the porch. He looked angrier than he had when he went in.
“I talked to Rita,” he said. “She says the Dallmer woman called the thing in stolen, almost an hour ago. Kids, she says. There were kids in it.”
“How does she know?”
“I’ve got to go back up and look around. I can’t leave some asshole teenager lying in a hole up there with a broken neck and then all the TV stations saying what a bastard I am when he dies. Did I ever tell you all teenagers are assholes?”
“Yes,” Martin said.
Henry walked down the porch steps and into the dark. “If it was that Dallmer woman, I could have left her where she was to rot, and nobody would give a damn. If it’s some kid, everybody will say they care even if they don’t. Assholes.”
Martin shined the flashlight at Henry’s back. He didn’t want to be left here on the porch alone. It was close enough to midnight for him to be getting the heebie-jeebies. He didn’t like the idea of a fresh body out there, never looked over by a funeral parlor. Martin liked his dead men to be really dead, sucked dry of blood, immobile.
“Henry?” he said.
Henry stopped walking. Martin’s flashlight caught the red and black of his checked flannel shirt.
“Come on if you’re going to come,” he said. “Don’t just stand there getting cold.”
“All right,” Martin said.
He came carefully down the porch steps and onto the bed of leaves that made up their backyard every fall. They were going to have to get around to raking it pretty soon. If they didn’t, the snows would come and dump on top of it all. Then, when the spring thaw came, the yard would be nothing but slime.