Funeral Hotdish (13 page)

Another guttural noise that was supposed to be “Why?”

How many mothers in the world faced the task ahead of her? How do you explain what’s happened? How do you tell your child that he might get out of this bed, but things are never really going to be okay again? How do you account for sixty-eight lost days, and the horrible night that started it? Carefully. Slowly. Prudently. She’d practiced it a million times as she sat here at his bedside, how she’d parse out the information. He didn’t need to know much at first. First he had to get strong. Then they’d tell him. Then he could grieve. Lois planned to have the minister here when she finally told him the last awful truth he had to know. But that was way down the line. Right now, he didn’t need to know any of that.

“Johnny, you overdosed at the barn dance, but the doctors say you’re going to be alright. You’ll be okay, son. Just stay quiet.”

Lois finally remembered she was supposed to alert the medical staff, and she tried to pull away to go to the hall and call for help, but Johnny’s grip tightened.

“Am I going to die?”

“No, sweetheart. No. No. No. You’ll be okay. Don’t worry. Just stay calm. I have to go get the nurses. Just stay quiet and I’ll be right back.”

Johnny hung on even tighter. “Am…Am….Amber?” he stammered as though a memory had been pricked.

Lois went from her joyful crying to anguish in a second.

“Oh, honey,” she whispered. “Don’t think about that now. Just think of waking up. Please, just wake up all the way. I’ll get the nurses.”

And that’s when Paul Roth walked into the room.

Lois didn’t know what she feared most, having to tell her son that Amber was dead or watching her volatile husband do it. Her worst fears were standing there, his fists clutched and his jaw working in anger. In her dreams, Lois had prayed this brush with death would touch Paul enough to show compassion, but one look and she knew she’d fooled herself again. Still, she tried her best.

“Look, Johnny’s woke up, Dad. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Paul never once looked at his wife.

“Well, you did it this time, you no-good, son of a bitch,” Paul started, and even men more hard-assed than Paul would have flinched at the attack.

“I shoulda known you were into drugs. Anything to get in trouble. You’ve been trouble all your life. You had to be a smart ass, didn’t you? You had to mess with stuff that could kill you. Bet you thought you were something. A big man! Well, it didn’t kill you. But it sure as hell killed Amber. What that pretty little girl saw in you, I’ll never know. But you know what it got her? It got her buried six feet under. And it got your whole family tarred like we were some no-goods. You should see how the men in town look at me now. And your brother. Like we’re dirt! All because of you. Now how the hell you going to live with yourself?”

Lois was flailing her arms at Paul, trying to push away the words, trying to use her body to shield her son from this diatribe, but it did no good.

The monitors hooked up to Johnny’s body went crazy.

Paul paced the room, continuing his verbal assault, as nurses and orderlies and doctors came rushing in, panicked by what they were seeing.

For once in her life, Lois raised her voice to her husband. She screamed at him with a force that astonished them both. “Stop it! Stop it! He just came out of a coma. My God, he’s your son and he’s alive. How in God’s name can you be so damn cruel?”

Paul was stupefied that his wife would challenge him. He was so stunned, he didn’t have an instant retort. He wouldn’t get another chance this day, as the room filled with people in white who pushed him and Lois aside.

To a trained eye, the heart rate and blood pressure inside Johnny Roth’s body were heading toward a stroke. Nobody could even interpret what the brain monitor was showing. But you didn’t need medical training to see this boy was in utter agony.

He didn’t so much scream as burst with a sound both frightening and pitiful. One hand was making a slow journey toward his face. The other was stretching forward, like he was warding off a knife attack. All ten of his fingers were frozen in a curl that reminded one of the nurses of her spastic patient down the hall. He tried to pull his knees up to his chest, as though it were imperative that he return to the fetal position. While all the time his vocal chords made the scream-moan of a dying animal.

Lois feared she was watching her son die.

Paul turned away, finding the sight and the sound unbearable.

“What happened?” the doctor demanded in his sharpest tone. “What the hell happened?”

“I told him his girlfriend was dead,” Paul Roth said, as though that benign explanation characterized the words he’d just uttered.

As an orderly held Johnny’s convulsing body, the doctor jabbed him with a hypo that sent him back into that gray world where unconsciousness and comas are first cousins.

Lois slumped against the wall, making herself as small as possible, determined to stay put. Paul turned, and left without a word to his wife. She didn’t see him go because she wouldn’t take her eyes off Johnny. But she was relieved when she finally realized he was gone. She knew she’d never share a loving moment with Paul Roth again.

***

This place is familiar.

It isn’t quite the same, but it’s close.

Lighter. Airier. Is that a fog machine kicking up all this mist? Is it smoke? Why doesn’t it smell?

I can move more now. Have I lost weight? Was I unshackled? It’s better here. No wait. No wait!

As Johnny rethought the situation he realized that before, there was nothing. He couldn’t remember thinking a single thing in all that time when he didn’t even wonder where he was. But now lots of thoughts swirled around like the fog.

I’m not dead. I’m not going to die. My mom is here. She’s by me. This is going to end. This isn’t permanent. My dad…I’m not going to die. My dad…OH HOLY GOD, MY DAD SAID AMBER IS DEAD.

Johnny Roth tried to go back to that heavy, dark place where such a thing wasn’t possible. But no matter how fast he ran, or which direction he turned, he couldn’t find the entrance to the tunnel of that place. His dad’s angry words kept ringing out over the loudspeaker hidden in the fog. The man wasn’t lying. The man was a lot of things, but he never lied. And his mom’s face—for a brief moment as he heard the words, he looked to that kind woman and saw in her eyes that truth was being told.

He said I killed Amber. I didn’t. I didn’t. That’s a damn lie. I wouldn’t have done that. I couldn’t have done that. I didn’t mean to do that. We were just going to try it. She didn’t want to, but I thought it would be fun just to try it. Everybody did. Just a little. To see what the big deal was all about. How can you die from that stuff? You’re not supposed to die. It’s supposed to be fun. It was our senior prank. It was just for fun. I didn’t kill her. Oh, God, Amber. I didn’t mean it. I love you. I love you more than anything. I’d never hurt you. Never.

As this pitiful confession broadcast through the fog, Johnny knew only one thing. He never wanted to come back.

Chapter Twelve

Thursday, December 16, 1999

Alice Peters started another pot of coffee and smiled to herself that things were finally going back to normal. Any minute now, the men would come into her bakery for their afternoon card game.

It was December 16, 1999. There was a healthy mound of snow outside, left behind by the city’s snowplow, but the temperature was kind—forty-six degrees, what passes for balmy in North Dakota in December. The bakery felt especially cozy today and the smell of cupcakes baking for tomorrow’s baby shower made it inviting and homey. She looked around the free-standing two-room building with only two more years of mortgage payments, pleased that she was a businesswoman in a town with the slogan, “Kindness is Our Way of Life.”

Officially, this was the City of Northville—an honorific the state conferred on every community, no matter how big or small. Some thought that helped compensate for the bad self-image North Dakota was supposed to have. Alice thought it was an acknowledgment that every settlement in the thirty-ninth state was important.

Some might think of Northville as the middle of nowhere, but here, folks saw themselves in the middle of everything. Alice often heard, “We know when we have it good,” and the nine hundred forty-seven residents—especially the six hundred seventy-eight who got Social Security checks every month—knew what good looked like.

You wouldn’t call it a quaint town. The gingerbread of New England never made it to the plains of Dakota Territory, where German practicality outscored English fussiness. But it was a pretty little town on the prairie of the Red River Valley, founded over a hundred years ago to serve the homesteads that made North Dakota part of the breadbasket of America. It never grew much bigger than it was today and never attracted many outsiders. Farms or the railroad brought people here and kept people here. The only real growth now was the farmers who retired and left the family farm to their sons—the Mrs. especially thrilled because she got a dream house in town as reward for all those years making due in that old farmhouse.

Alice heard it every day—wouldn’t it be nice if the town could hold onto more of the young ones, like it had hung onto her?

But the jobs were elsewhere, the excitement was elsewhere, the world was elsewhere and most of the kids who graduated every May were anxious to be elsewhere. They came back only for a visit. This town held onto your heart, if not your hide.

Her own cousin, Joya, was a good example. She was home every year to spend part of her three-week vacation with her folks. Alice loved visiting with her big-city cousin over a cup of strong, black coffee.

“Girl, you make me tired just telling me what you do every week,” Alice chided. “You must think we’re as dull as dishwater.”

“I do not,” Joya always objected. “No, this isn’t like Phoenix, but it’s nice. I wouldn’t come back if I didn’t like being here. Mom and Dad come out to visit me, you know, so I don’t have to come here to see them. But I like it here. Sometimes I wished I’d stayed.”

Alice laughed. “You’d have died of boredom. No, you belong in Phoenix. But glad we’re a nice break for you!”

Over the last two weeks, the cousins had burned up the phone lines. Alice reassured her cousin more than once that what her parents reported was all talk and bluster. There was nothing to worry about. Yeah, everyone was riled up, but Crabapple had split, and he had to be smart enough to know he could never come back. Alice promised Joya that by the time she came home for her next visit, all this would be history.

Alice prayed at night that she was telling the truth. Not just to cover her promise, but to quell the butterflies in her stomach. The town needed to put all this behind it and get back to being the safe, secure place it had always been.

Alice Peters was as invested in Northville as anyone—had been since she graduated high school in 1959 and got married that summer. The marriage didn’t last and he split, but she raised her three kids here. One daughter stayed on and had Alice’s two grandchildren, hardening the cement. At forty—still pretty, with a taste for tight jeans—she was happy with her decisions.

Alice wiped off the large table in the middle of the front room and passed the sign her dad made when she opened this business eight years ago: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” Right on cue, the bell on the front door jingled and the men walked in.

“There you are,” she announced. “You know, we could set a clock on you guys!”

The men laughed. Of all the regular-as-clockwork routines in this town, the men’s Monday and Thursday card game topped the list. The group fluctuated, with some guys showing up now and then, but it always included the unofficial leaders of this town—Ralph Bonner, Bernard Stine, and Earl Krump.

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the Senior Citizen Center served a hot noon meal that was usually above par, and these men and their wives ate there. This was the meal called “dinner”—a nod at how important it was to fuel up at noon for the afternoon’s work in a farming community. The evening meal that was called dinner elsewhere was “supper” in these parts. Before any meal in Northville was a prayer, and at the Senior Citizen Center, it was sung.

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise Him all creatures here below. Praise Him above the heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

They all stayed to spend the afternoon playing cards or dominoes with the widows who dominated the center’s membership, and after “lunch” at four—coffee, a sweet—they went home to spend the night in front of the television.

But Monday and Thursday afternoons were devoted to the men’s-only game at the bakery—poker or smear—where the coffeepot was never empty, and there always was a gooey treat handy.

If she were pushed, and the day was fast coming when Alice Peters was pushed plenty, she’d give chapter and verse about what fine men these were.

Ralph is “my favorite uncle, and he was on the City Council for four years,” she bragged, mimicking the admiration of her mother. “Bernard is Santa Claus at Christmas, for God’s sake! And Earl practically built the city park by himself. These are good, honest, honorable men.”

The three had been friends since grade school—none actually finished high school. Bernard was an orphan and had to work to help support himself; Earl was a farmer’s son—ducks don’t take to water like Earl Krump took to farming—and Ralph got a railroad job through his dad. The only time they’d ever been separated was during World War II. All three had gone to Wahpeton to sign up to fight Japs the day after Pearl Harbor. Bernard and Earl went into the Army, but by the time Ralph got to the front of the line, the recruiter said the country needed Marines and so that’s where he ended up. He went to the Pacific Theater while Bernard was sent to Germany. Earl’s eyes were so bad he couldn’t go into battle, but spent his hitch doing office work in Minneapolis.

All three came home to marry their sweethearts, raise their children, and take care of their hometown. They joined the American Legion—their wives belonged to the Women’s Auxiliary and Maggie Bonner was president for eight years. Most of the scars of the war were inside their heads, although Bernard had frozen his feet in Germany and suffered for the rest of his life.

Ralph ended up selling farm equipment. Bernard bought the grocery store. Earl farmed until he retired and moved into town. They were so active in the church—each one tithed—that whenever a new priest came to town, these three filled him in on the lay of the land.

The question wasn’t if these men belonged to the NRA but how long they’d been card-carrying members, and the first time Ralph voted for a Democrat the other men made him buy a round at Jerry’s Bar as penance.

If you wanted something done in Northville, the short list included these three men. All were retired now, enjoying their mid-seventies with pensions and Social Security and the respect of the community.

These were men who knew they’d someday have a big funeral in the Catholic church where they’d worshiped all their lives. After all, in a town where everybody knows everybody, it’s only decent to say goodbye when it’s your time to go. They knew their families would eat funeral hotdish after they came back from that pretty cemetery outside town, where they laid near their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents.

Alice could recite chapter and verse about these fine men, and except for Earl’s temper, there was little to list as faults. Stubborn, sure, but then, they were Germans and you expect that of German men. “You know what they say,” Alice often joked out of their earshot: “You can tell a German, but you can’t tell him much.”

So Alice kept the coffeepot full and welcomed them every Monday and Thursday, blending into the background as they played their games, gossiped and told their silly jokes.

For some reason, Alice would always remember the groaner joke on this particular day—an Ole and Lena joke that poked fun at Swedes: “Ole left Lena at home one day and went fishing with Sven when he caught a magic walleye. The fish looked up at him and said, ‘I can give you anything you want,’ and Ole said, ‘By jimminy, I want a million dollars,’ and the boat filled up with hundred-dollar bills. Sven’s eyes were as big as saucers and he jumped right in, ‘Well, I want the lake to be all beer,’ and wham, the water turned to Schlitz. Ole glared at his friend: ‘Oh, Sven, how could you do that? Now we’ve got to pee in the boat.’”

Alice’s eavesdropping on this December day paid particular attention to the key phrases that signaled a serious topic: “You know what a guy could do” or “A guy wouldn’t be wrong if…” or “It wouldn’t be right for a guy…”

It was normally just conjecture and thinking out loud, but since Amber died, those words often had a sinister tone. “This was not Amber Schlener’s time to go—not by seventy or eighty years. Not her. Not like that. Not here.
Got im Himmel, not here!”
She heard oaths of vengeance that scared her and pledges of retribution that she prayed were just big talk.

But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was what she couldn’t hear when the voices got so soft, she knew the words were private. Or when the men decided to take a break from cards and walk outside and huddle in a little group. Through the big picture window she could see they sometimes got animated, their arms flying. That never lasted and before they came back in, she’d see heads bobbing in unison as a great agreement was reached.

“You guys have a secret?” she dared ask one day.

Ralph said, “No, just a medical problem that’s personal.”

Alice wished she believed he was telling the truth. Underneath it all, she saw the guilt. Three men around that card table felt a responsibility for Amber’s death. One day she tried to relieve their remorse.

“You know, you guys tried your best to get rid of that kid. A lot of people would have just turned away and not done anything. But you guys went to the sheriff. You went to the school board. You alerted everyone. I’m proud of you for that. The whole town is. Everyone knows how hard you tried. That’s a lot more than most people would do. None of this is your fault. Uncle Ralph. Bernard. Earl. You hear me? Jelly donuts on the house today.”

Of course, she thanked the Lord that Crabapple had left town the night Amber died—was it really two months ago already? She prayed every day she’d never see him again.

After the funeral, Alice had waited for the wound to start healing. But then, Sheriff Potter showed up and it got ugly.

Like everyone else, the sheriff knew exactly where to find the men who held sway in this town. A week after the funeral, there he was, adjusting his holster belt and swaggering into the bakery with his usual air of authority.

“I knew I’d find you boys here.” He pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards. “I’m sure you’re aware I’m in town investigating the death of that girl…”

“Amber,” Earl spit out. “Her name was Amber.”

“Ya, sure, Amber. Sorry. I’ve had two deputies going around collecting evidence. We’re talking to everybody and I knew you guys would be here so I am here to personally get what you know.”

“We know that Darryl “Crabapple” Harding sold the drugs that killed Amber,” Earl declared, like he was on the witness stand.

“Did you personally see this man sell drugs?” The sheriff asked in a tone that told everyone he already knew the answer.

“No, but everyone knows,” Earl shot back.

“Well, then it must be true,” the sheriff dripped sarcasm, and Alice could imagine Earl decking the SOB.

“Well, boys, I’ll tell you. We searched his house and we didn’t find any drugs. And we talked to the kids at the high school and none of them know a thing. Funny how that happens. Not one of them says they saw him sell the drugs. Not one. Of course, none of them admit to taking any drugs, either. Isn’t it amazing? Must have been only Amber and the boy, that’s all.”

“Johnny Roth,” Bernard injected. “He’s not just the boy. His name is Johnny Roth.” Alice was proud they stood up for Johnny, even though they all cursed him for buying drugs in the first place.

The sheriff ignored the scolding and waded into the weeds.

“Well, it looks like this Crabapple kid skipped town. Or disappeared. Or something. Any of you know anything about that?”

“Now what do you think we would know about that?” Ralph Bonner asked in his most incredulous voice, his brown eyes flashing. “Sheriff, you have a tendency to look everywhere except at what’s in front of your face. Now you’re asking about
us
? What the hell are you thinking? We came to you with this problem and you couldn’t be bothered. Now, look what happened. We told you so. I’ll tell you this—we don’t know where he is but he better not come back to this town.”

“Now, son, don’t get riled. We’re doing everything we can to find out the facts in this case, I can assure you. You need proof, boys, not just gut instincts. Proof. Now, if you have any proof to give me, I’d sure like to hear it.”

Nobody said a word. The sheriff hoisted himself up real slow. He adjusted his holster belt again and stood over the men like he was the king on the hill.