Gravewriter (2 page)

The gun fired twice more. It sounded far away.

Garrett made for the river. It came unsteadily toward him.

He reached for the railing at the river's edge to brace himself, and then heard the gunfire again; it sounded muffled to Garrett, like it was underwater. He heard the crack of splintering bone, and then suddenly Garrett went blind and deaf, as if deep beneath a silent black sea.
Don't be afraid of the water,
he told himself. He remembered his Scripture.

What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?

He felt himself roll over the rail.

Fearing nothing, Garrett plunged into the river.

“I
f you're going to get me killed, at least you can let me watch.”

Billy Povich smacked the twelve-inch television. The silverware on the table jumped. The TV's vertical hold snapped awake, grabbed the picture and held it steady, though for some reason every object on the field was now being shadowed by an identical twin. Billy had forty-four players and two footballs to worry about.

“Who's getting killed, Billy?” asked Bo brightly. He was seven.

“Eat your cereal.”

“I don't like this kinda milk,” Bo said. “Who's getting killed?”

“Michigan State, by the looks of it,” sniped the old man. “What kind of line did you get, boy?”

Billy reached both arms to the TV. His fingertips lightly touched the sides of the television as if it were a lover's face. He gazed into the screen. Down by eleven with four minutes to play, this was no time for a lecture from his father.

Billy lied: “Seven points.”

The Las Vegas line in the paper had been seven; Billy's bookie had offered only six and a half, and Billy had taken the bet.

“Christ Almighty, boy,” the old man scoffed. “Just seven goddamn points?”

“Don't swear in front of Bo.”

“State's defense is banged up—they ain't stopped nobody in a month. How much is riding on these seven points?”

“Two hundred,” Billy said, lying again.

“Billy!” cried Bo. “The milk is gone bad.” He whapped his spoon three times on his milk-logged Count Chocula. And then he pointed his toy pistol at the bowl. “Pow! Pow!”

“What do you think you are?” the old man asked. “A cereal killer?”

Billy was too busy to commit parenting. “Pa?” he said, passing the buck.

“It ain't spoiled,” the old man gently informed his grandson. “It's skim—it's just a different kind of milk. They took the fat out.”

“Can we put it back in?” Bo asked.

“Huh,” the old man said. “I don't see why not. Add some butter if you don't like it.”

“Jesus Christ!” Billy screamed. He clutched his head in disbelief. “That pass was right in your hands!”

“Jesus Christ!” Bo echoed happily as he crunched a breakfast carrot and stirred a tablespoon of margarine into his cereal.

“Hush that language, boy,” the old man said sharply. “Save it for church.”

Bo drew an invisible zipper over his mouth. The kid respected his grandfather. On rare occasions, it seemed like the old man
could
raise the boy, if Billy wasn't around.

State's offense trotted off the field as the kicker trotted on.

Billy closed his eyes, exhaled some stress. Then he looked at the old man.

His father had parked his wheelchair at a short side of the rectangular kitchen table. Billy watched the old man peering over his glasses
as his quaking hand reached a knife to the margarine. The glasses had heavy black frames, as they did in Billy's childhood recollections of his father. He remembered his father wearing those glasses at parties—there had always been a party when William Povich, Sr., visited the Providence flat where Billy grew up. Only in adulthood did Billy realize his father had come only on the holidays.

Now, the old man reminded Billy of a dehydrated version of himself—sunken chest, shriveled cheeks. The muscles over his shoulders had long ago evaporated to the bone. What was left of his hair was oily and limp. He wore three days' worth of white whiskers.

How does he shave without slicing off his wrinkles?

His coffee-stained teeth had drifted slightly apart. He had a bulbous, swollen, old-man nose with immense dark pores, and oversized ears, through which the sunlight shone red. He was just seventy-one, but the stroke had aged him. His worthless legs were like bone china wrapped in rice paper; he could walk on his own no more than a step or two.

The old man looked ancient all over—except his eyes, still a pellucid pale blue on immaculate white. Back when William Povich, Sr., was a young man, the women who peered into those eyes would see their reflections undressing for him.

Billy's mother had been one of those women, though not nearly the last.

The old man's mind was younger than his body, though his attitudes had not aged at all; his worldview was forty years out of date.

Could the old man raise Bo?

If he had to?

Michigan State had too many men on the field and called time-out.

Billy smacked the TV again to clear up the picture—and to punish State for wasting their last time-out. The blow knocked out the color, and Billy stopped hitting before he made it worse. The network went to a commercial.

Billy grabbed an open bottle of aspirin from the table and shook four tablets into his mouth. He chewed them like candy. Billy liked the taste of aspirin. He didn't mind the smell of skunks and was never bothered by fingernails on a blackboard.

He grabbed a breakfast carrot from the table and crunched it. Then he rested his head lightly on the TV screen, chewed the carrot, and looked at his son.

For thirteen months, the boy had been living in Providence with Billy and the old man. The kid still mystified Billy.

Why does he like me so much?

Bo's birth certificate said that he was legally William Roger Povich III, though Billy wasn't sure if the kid even knew his full name. He had been born with thick brown hair, like monkey fur, which a nurse had tied atop his head with a little green bow, so that he had looked like an onion.

The new mom had loved that green bow. The boy became “Bo” before he came home from the hospital.

Has it really been seven years?

The boy's dark mane had quickly fallen out; in its place was a golden patch of cowlicks, like misbehaved yellow crabgrass, which Billy, wielding kitchen shears, had unevenly mowed into a long crew cut. The blue eyes had skipped a generation after the old man—Billy had been stuck with brown; Bo had the blue. The eyes were unusually big for a little face, and they made him look smart and curious and sad. The boy was skinny—all three Williams in the Povich household were slim. Bo had his mother's fair skin and button nose, and Billy's pointed chin and long, lean limbs. Bo's bottom jaw was missing a tooth, which he kept on the table in a shot glass from the Bellagio hotel and casino. The tooth was soaking in Windex, which Bo believed might polish it and increase its value.

Since Bo had moved in with Billy, he had saved every dime he earned. The kid was good with money.

He's nothing like me.

In addition to the name, Billy could think of just one trait shared by the three generations of Povich men living in his three-bedroom apartment in an old Victorian: They all loved breakfast. They ate breakfast food all day: waffles for lunch, johnnycakes and scrambled egg for dinner, bacon and orange juice during
The Tonight Show.
Bo had never touched vegetables before Billy had invented the “breakfast carrot.”

Michigan State lined up for a field goal, but then Wisconsin called time-out to jinx the kicker.

Billy muttered under his breath, “Up by eleven, can't you just give them the fucking points?”

“Whachu say?” the old man asked.

“I said I have an ulcer the size of France.”

Organ music—slow, low, and somber—suddenly rose through the kitchen's red-flecked black linoleum.

“Funeral today?” the old man said, incredulous. “It's three o'clock.”

Billy stepped to the window. Outside, the vast green parade field across the street was dotted with sunbathers and families unpacking picnic baskets. Joggers shared a walkway around the field with kids on bikes and people pushing strollers. At the far end of the green, the Cranston Street Armory sat like King Arthur's summer palace, a gigantic castle of walls and turrets, trimmed with rough-cut granite and tarnished copper. The armory was a pale pottery color in bright sun, and it turned golden when the light softened near sunset. It had been built for the National Guard a hundred years ago, but the guard had left and the armory had become Rhode Island's largest and most attractive pigeon coop.

The city's well-to-do, and its funky cool people, lived on the East Side of Providence; Billy, the old man, and the boy lived on the West Side. Their neighborhood was a cluster of Victorian apartment houses
along the squared-off blocks surrounding the armory, populated by people who couldn't afford East Side rents, and by those who wouldn't pay East Side prices on principle. The Armory District had gentrified over the past twenty years, though it remained a little rough. The neighborhood would never live down the time the police came upon a man shot dead in his car, somehow missed seeing the body—and wrote him a parking ticket.

Two dozen parked cars jammed the street below Billy's window. Couples dressed in black hugged and murmured and clung to one another on the sidewalk, on their way to Metts & Son Funeral Home, on the first floor of Billy's building.

“It's a funeral,” Billy confirmed. “Not on the schedule, far as I remember.”

“You got time to get the mail?” the old man asked.

“Once the music starts, it's too late.”

“Awww,” the old man moaned, “I got something coming in the mail today. Why do we gotta stay out of sight?”

“Because that's what it says on the lease,” Billy said, grimly looking down on the mourners. “We can't use the stairs during a funeral unless the building's on fire. They'll be done in an hour.”

“I'll be napping in an hour.”

“Then you won't be missing the mail.”

“I can get the mail,” Bo offered. He pointed down a narrow hallway, toward his bedroom. “Out the window and down the tree.”

The old man raised his eyebrows and looked with hope at Billy. “The boy can go down the tree!” he echoed.

Billy looked from his father to his son. They both had the same pleading look, waiting for Billy's permission. Some vague paternal instinct told Billy not to allow his seven-year-old to climb out the second-floor window, into the skinny upper branches of the red maple in the backyard, then down to the mailbox. But Billy never
gave edicts without reasons, and he couldn't think of
why not—
the boy was the best climber of the three of them.

Billy shook a finger at Bo. “Stay out of sight.”

“Yay!” cheered the old man. He saluted Billy with a breakfast carrot.

Bo pushed his cereal away and shot from the table. “Thanks, Billy!” he called out, pattering down the hall. “I won't let you down.”

“Mm-hm,” Billy said, his attention back to the game.

The old man waited until Bo was out of sight. He scolded, “You're
his father.
The boy shouldn't be calling you ‘Billy.' ”

Billy watched Michigan State break its huddle. Sarcasm was his favorite weapon against his father's nagging—the old man had no ear for it. Billy deadpanned, “Wouldn't ‘William' be too formal between father and son?”

“That would be worse!” the old man cried.

“Yes!” Billy shouted as the football tumbled through the uprights. He pumped his fist. “Time for one of those fantastic finishes. It's comeback time!”

The old man stared slack-jawed at Billy.

“What?” Billy said. He sighed. “Bo has
always
called me ‘Billy.' I couldn't change that now if I wanted to, which I don't. ‘Pa' and ‘Dad' make me nervous—those are names for
you.”

“You're forty years old,” the old man said. “And still going by ‘Billy.' ”

“My byline in the paper was ‘William,'“ Billy reminded him.

The old man scrunched his face, like he had just inhaled sewer gas. “Now you write more than anybody and you never have a byline.”

“They don't byline obituaries,” Billy said. “That's the paper's policy.”

“Why can't you go back to real writing?”

Michigan State kicked off to a pipsqueak return man, who
squirted through the first wave of tacklers. Billy screamed, “Get him! Get him! GET HIM!” Somebody finally did. “Thank you!” he called sarcastically to the television. “Somebody on kick coverage needs to have his scholarship yanked.”

“When are you going to get back to real news reporting?” he father nagged

“Eh,” Billy said.

“I was in newspapers all my life—it's in my blood, and your blood, too.”

“You were a printer, not a reporter.”

The old man set his jaw. “The best goddamn printer they ever had.” He passed a hand over the newspaper on the table. “I touch this and I still smell hot lead.” He smiled, losing himself for a moment in old memories. “You can stay off the police beat and go back to covering politics, if you don't want to write about any accidents.”

“Angie didn't die in an
accident,”
Billy told him sharply. “It was a crash—and a crime.”

The old man held up quivering palms. “I didn't mean that she did,” he said, suddenly retreating to a gentler tone. “It's been thirteen months, Billy.” He fidgeted in his chair, grunted, and wheezed—old man noises that hinted of an inner struggle. Finally, he said what he was thinking. “She wasn't even your wife when she died.”

Billy would not look at him. “That was just temporary.”