Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
I see him alive, not just that night before the bullets tore into him, but the way he was when he had the power. Big man, bigger than life, bigger than death everybody thought, shouting words and slogans, promises and lies in his giant’s voice. King of Labor, King of the Long Labor Con. The job action. The sit-down strike. The secondary boycott. The sick-in. All of that and so much more until they threw him in the slammer for jury-tampering.
James Hoffa, that’s right.
And then came the Nixon pardon that set him up for another run at the union presidency. He should’ve known it wasn’t going to happen. No one was stupid enough other than Brother James himself to think he’d get the deal past his successors, as hardnosed a bunch as they were. Should’ve known they’d take him out by any means necessary.
I was the means.
I picked him up that night in my car. Just me and him, nobody else. He thought we were going to a secret hush-hush meeting with some bigwigs in Rutherford—
Sure, I know he was last seen in the Detroit area, but that was the day
before
.
They set him up by calling him back to Jersey on the QT. Nobody but Big Billy and me and a couple of others knew that the only meeting he was going to was with God or the Devil.
So anyhow, I drove him to the closed-up garage I owned. That’s where I emptied my Colt automatic into him, six shots grouped in his chest like it was a bull’s-eye target.
Then I put on overalls and gloves, dragged his body down into the grease pit, and dismembered it with a hatchet and a hacksaw. Awful job. Awful. But that was the way the big boys uptown wanted it done, don’t ask me why.
I can still see him lying there dead after I put those six rounds into his chest. Still see the pieces of him after the butchering was done, all the bloody pieces, all the King’s parts: legs, arms, torso, head—my last view of the Great Man before I stuffed the pieces into six separate plastic bags and put them into the trunk of my Buick.
Jimmy H. alive, Jimmy H. dead, Jimmy H. in pieces. Nothing left but chopped-up clay, the torso weighted with lead pellets, bouncing and thudding in the trunk as I raced along the Turnpike to the new Meadowlands stadium.
That’s what I said, the Meadowlands.
How did I get in? I had a key to the gate, that’s how. Back then I had connections, guys who’d do me a favor without asking questions and then keep their mouths shut. The refineries five miles to the south would have made quicker work of the remains, but butchering him was bad enough, I couldn’t burn him up too. The Meadowlands was better. Home base. Burial instead of cremation.
The state of New Jersey is where America comes to die. You don’t think so? Remember Paul Simon? The cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, each filled with people in search of America. I was one of them that night, in a Buick with a dismembered slab of America in my trunk and the rising yellow clouds from the refineries staining the night around me.
Oh, I remember, all right. Every detail after three and a half decades. Arriving at the deserted stadium site. Opening the Buick’s trunk in the moonlit dark to get the shovel. Digging six holes all across the south end zone—
Don’t laugh. It’s not funny. I’m telling you just what I did: dug six holes, six graves for the six pieces of Jimmy H.
If New Jersey is where America comes to die, then the end zone was the perfect burial spot for Brother James. Hell, it would have been perfect for the Wobblies, Mother Jones, the ’37 Ford strikers, hundreds of others like them. You see what I mean?
Once the bags were planted, the holes covered up and smoothed out, I stood leaning on the shovel, gasping in the cold, like an exhausted actor taking a crooked bow after a command performance. Thinking that the whole business hadn’t been so bad, that I’d gotten it all done pretty quick. A speed run from the killing to the cutting up to the driving to the burying. Thinking that was the end of it.
But it wasn’t. Not for me. I should have known it wouldn’t be because even then I could see the pieces spread out deep under the end zone turf, as if I had X-ray vision. The flesh that would decay in summer heat and winter ice. The scattered bones that would crumble to dust.
I didn’t stay there long. It was almost dawn and the almost-finished stadium was glowing in the restless early light. Soon there’d be workers, traffic. I couldn’t afford to be seen in the area.
I drove the Buick straight back to the garage, backed it inside, and took care of the cleanup. Washed the blood down the grease pit drain with a hose. Used some solvent to remove a couple of stains in the trunk. Burned the overalls and gloves and my filthy clothes in the incinerator out back. When I was done, there wasn’t a trace left.
My house was half a mile from the station. Jane was waiting for me when I got there.
Where were you all night? she said.
Never mind, I said. It’s none of your business.
You look terrible, she said. What have you been doing?
Nothing, I said. What else could I have said to her? Oh, nothing much, babe, just out murdering the boss, cutting up the boss, burying the boss.
I walked past her, heading toward the shower. This is a filthy place, I said then. It’s always filthy. Why don’t you ever clean it up?
She didn’t like that. She hadn’t liked anything about me for a long time. Even thirty-five years later I can feel her contempt, her suspicion. I guess I can’t blame her. Living jammed close together in that little house, not just her and me but the kid too, none of us getting along with each other, fearing Big Billy and the uptown boys, torn apart by secrets. She left me not long after that night, you know, just as soon as the kid got out of high school, and for all I know she’s dead now. The kid too—I haven’t seen or heard from him in twenty years.
But I’m getting off track. After I had my shower and put on some of my better threads, I drove into the city to report to Big Billy.
Disposing of Jimmy H. was the nasty part of the assignment, but facing Big Billy wasn’t much better. You remember him? Sure. He’s long gone now, most of the uptown boys are long gone, but back then he was a force. I did a lot of jobs for him before that night, but none like the one with Brother James. None that was even close.
An hour later I was standing in Big Billy’s office, surrounded by concrete, his hard little eyes boring into mine.
I dumped him, I said. It’s finished business.
Don’t tell me dumped, Big Billy said. Don’t tell me finished business. Where did you put the sucker?
You really want to know? I said. You told me handle it any way I want, just make him disappear. So that’s what I did.
I got to know, he said, so I can tell them uptown.
Well, they didn’t want to know uptown, he’d told me that before. He wanted the information only for himself. But if you didn’t want to end up like Jimmy H., you did what Big Billy told you to. And you never lied to him.
So I told him the truth. I put him where they’ll never find him, I said. The Meadowlands Stadium. Under the south end zone.
I thought he’d say that was a perfect spot, I couldn’t have come up with a better one. I thought he’d say, Good job, you’ll get a bonus.
Get the fuck out of here, he said, and don’t come around no more.
That was the last I ever saw of him. But that was all right with me. I didn’t want any part of his operation after that night, any more than he wanted me to be part of it. I’m still above ground, so he must not have talked to the boys uptown. Or if he did, they decided I’d done the job right even if Big Billy didn’t think so. Nothing ever happened to me because I was right: they never found Jimmy H.
It seems simple when you look at it that way. But it’s not simple. New Jersey is not a state of simplicity, the sinkhole town of Rutherford not a site of easy answers. New Jersey is a place of secrets, complex, rotten with tangled branching vines and rivers of ancient, heaving blood. Somebody said that to me once, I don’t remember who.
Well, anyhow, that’s about it. They tore the stadium down after thirty-some years and still they didn’t find what was left of Brother James, that’s how good a planting job I did. I don’t know how they could’ve missed finding the skull, some of the bones, but I guess they were in a hurry and careless with the demolition.
If it didn’t make me sick now, thinking about it, I’d have to laugh about the turf wars between the Giants and all those other teams right there in the shadow of that end zone, in the end zone itself, players after they scored a touchdown spiking the ball down right above where the boss’s head was buried—
What’s that you said?
No, I sure as hell didn’t make all of this up. You got no right to say that. I told you before, it’s the gospel truth. Give me a Bible and I’ll swear on it—
What do you mean, New Jersey is full of mooks like me, little guys with big ideas? I was never a little guy, I had connections, I knew secrets. That’s how I got the job to take out the boss. One of the biggest jobs ever, horrible as it was, and my disposal idea was just as big. Smart. I couldn’t have got away with it for thirty-five years if it wasn’t big and smart.
Yeah, I got away with it, but I couldn’t get away
from
it. You cops can’t imagine what a burden it’s been on me all that time—not the Meadowlands part, the killing and butchering part. How much of a toll it’s taken. That’s why I’m here now, that’s what I been trying to get across to you. I can’t live with it anymore. The nightmares, the awful bloody images—
What? No! This isn’t another false confession. It’s my one true confession. Don’t you see, don’t you get it? Those previous confessions of mine … substitutes, surrogates. I couldn’t make myself tell what I did to the boss, so I copped to other murders, other crimes instead.
I was trying to pay my debt with phony claims so I could finally have some peace. But now I know the only way to stop the haunting and the hurting is to reveal my secret, New Jersey’s secret, America’s secret—
What’re you doing, lieutenant? Who’re you calling?
Oh Christ, no, you can’t send me back to the Pines. I don’t belong in that place. I’m not crazy any more than John the Baptist was crazy.
Please, you have to believe me! I shot Jimmy H., I dismembered his body, I buried the pieces in the end zone at the Meadowlands Stadium. I did, I did!
E
rnie passes through the living room on his way to the kitchen. His father lies on the sofa, his head on the armrest, his hair that hasn’t been combed in weeks, his hand balancing a breakfast beer on the sofa back. How carefully he holds it. “Hey, Pops.”
“Hey youself.”
A girl in a gold leotard tumbles over a blue floor on TV. “What you watching?”
“Olympics.”
“Olympics are over.”
“Then reruns.”
He sees the bottle of rum his father finished last night on the kitchen table. Ernie pinches three cigarettes from the Marlboro box and grabs his backpack. “See ya later, Pops.”
He drives. Boxy brown Buick Skylark, his father’s car. The only advantage to the move is that Ernie drives. In Florida the age was sixteen but in Jersey it’s seventeen, so he is ahead of his class. He drives to school, drives Pervert home, and drives his father around. Too many DWIs.
He stops by A&P for breakfast: Donut Gems and OJ. At the edge of the parking lot he squeezes the tobacco from one of the Marlboros onto the back of Kevin Klausen’s algebra homework. He cracks the door to let the shreds fly away in the wind and looks to make sure there’s nobody near the Buick, then pulls a baggie from his jacket pocket and unzips the top. The fragrance hits him and he crumbles a bud onto the sheet, making a crease and funneling the shake down into the empty paper tube. He twists the tip and flicks the rattail against his thigh until the grass is tamped down to the filter, then he gives the end one more twist and yanks off the paper wick.
He starts the car, pulls out of the lot, pushes in the lighter knob, and puts the joint in his mouth. Just the filter between his lips gets him in the right state of mind. By the time the lighter is hot he is going thirty-five on Springdale Road. He smokes, cracking the window to keep air circulating so the smell doesn’t get in his hair, and flips on the radio to The Apple instead of ’PLJ because they play Twisted Sister and he’s sick of hearing “Born in the USA” all day.
Ernie drives into Cherry Hill and picks up Pervert. It’s a warm autumn morning and the windows are rolled down on Kresson Road when they breeze by the sign for Cherry Hill East High. “Hey, you just passed the school.” He shows Pervert the baggie. “Where’d you get that!”
“I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”
“You fucker! I knew I smelled something. You already smoked one without me.”
“You want to blaze or not?”
“Hell yeah! Let’s go back to that old Girl Scout camp.”
“There’s two more cigs in the glove compartment. Get to work.”
They roll up the windows and drive up the long, steep hill on the outskirts of town while Pervert twists a couple of rattails. They turn on Kettle Run, pass Tull’s place, and on into the pines, the pines, the pines. Ernie pulls onto the dirt road to the abandoned Girl Scout camp and weaves between the junk and the trees. He parks in front of the old bunkhouse and they smoke, Pervert alternating hits of pot with blasts from his inhaler.
They get out of the Buick and take turns firing rocks at bottles. “Hey, Ernie! Look at that fish!”
“This river is full of them.”
“How do they swim when it’s so shallow?”
“They skip.”
“I gotta take a shit.”
“Again? Jesus Christ, Pervert, why don’t you tell your mom to buy a fuckin’ toilet?”
Ernie sits cross-legged by the river. Sunlight reflected makes wavery projections on the rocks. His mouth is dry and cottony like the fake-sheepskin lining of his jacket. This water here is cleaner than any ditch in Miami, but still there are cows that graze upriver so he knows he better not drink.
When he first got to Cherry Hill, before he was labeled a loser, it had almost looked like Ernie might become a cool kid. Tío Tony told him: “No es como Miami where everyone Cubano and live outside. Aquí te dan pequeñas pruebitas:
Joo comuniss o American? Joo like Coca-Cola o guava juice? Hambooger o taco? Bruce Espringsteen o Julio Iglesias?
En Miami la gente knows the difference entre los Marielitos y los Cubanos de buena familia, pero aquí no. No en this estate. Aquí en Nueva Jersey joo gotta get esimilation.”