The Life We Bury (5 page)

Janet, the receptionist at Hillview Manor, smiled at me this time when I walked through the front door. It helped that I had called ahead to get Mr. Iverson's eating and napping schedule. She told me to show up around two o'clock, which I did on the dot, anticipating the wall of Mentholatum odor that hit me as I stepped through the door. The old woman with the crooked wig still kept her vigil at the entrance, paying no attention to me as I walked by her. Before I left my apartment, I settled Jeremy on the couch, started his movie, and showed him again which buttons to push on the remote and which ones to avoid. If all went well—and Iverson agreed to be my subject—I might have just enough time to get some background for my assignment.

“Hi, Joe.” Janet stood up and walked out from behind her reception desk.

“Is my timing good?” I asked.

“As good as it's going to be. Mr. Iverson had a rough night last night. Pancreatic cancer is a terrible thing.”

“Is he okay to…”

“He's fine now. Probably a little tired. The pain in his belly flairs up sometimes and we have to sedate him just to give him a few hours rest.”

“Isn't he getting radiation, or chemo, or something?”

“He could, I guess, but it won't do any good at this point. The most that chemo might do is prolong the inevitable. He said he doesn't want that. I don't blame him.”

Janet walked with me to the lounge area, pointing to a man in a wheelchair sitting alone in front of one of the large windows that lined the back of the building. “He sits there every day staring out that window, looking at God knows what, since there ain't nothin' to see.
He just sits there. Mrs. Lorngren thinks he's mesmerized by a view with no metal bars blocking the way.”

I half expected Carl Iverson to be a monster strapped to his wheelchair with leather belts for the protection of the residents around him, or to have the cold piercing eyes of a madman capable of doing great evil, or to have the demanding presence of an infamous villain; but I found none of that. Carl Iverson should have been in his mid-sixties, if I did the math right. But as I looked at this man, I thought that Janet made a mistake and brought me to the wrong person. A few thin wisps of long, gray hair dangled from the crown of his head; sharp bones poked against gaunt cheeks; thin skin, tinted yellow with jaundice, covered a neck so skinny and shriveled that I was sure I could have closed a single hand completely around it. He had a serious scar crossing the carotid artery on his neck and cadaverous forearms, their tendons prominent against the bone in the absence of any muscle or fat. I half believed that I could hold his arm up, like a child might hold a leaf up to the sunlight, and see every vein and capillary that ran through it. If I had not known better, I would have put his age closer to eighty.

“Stage four,” Janet said. “It's about as bad as it gets. We'll try to make him comfortable, but there's only so much we can do. He can have morphine, but he fights it. Says he'd rather have the pain and be able to think clearly.”

“How long's he got?”

“If he makes it to Christmas, I'll lose a bet,” she said. “I sometimes feel sorry for him, but then I remember who he is—what he did. And I think about that girl he killed and everything she missed out on: boyfriends, love, getting married and having a family of her own. Her kids would've been about your age if he hadn't killed her. I think about those things whenever I start feeling sorry for him.”

The phone rang, pulling Janet back to the reception desk. I waited for a minute or two, hoping she would come back and provide the introduction. When she didn't return, I cautiously approached what little remained of the murderer Carl Iverson.

“Mr. Iverson?” I said.

“Yes?” He turned his attention away from a nuthatch he'd been watching scamper down the trunk of a dead jack pine outside the window.

“I'm Joe Talbert,” I said. “I think Mrs. Lorngren told you I was coming?”

“Ah, my visitor…has arrived,” Carl said, speaking in a half whisper, breaking his sentence in half with a wheezing inhale. He nodded his head toward an armchair nearby. I sat. “So you're the scholar.”

“Nah,” I said, “not a scholar, just a student.”

“Lorngren tells me…” He shut his eyes tightly to let a wave of pain pass. “She tells me…you want to write my story.”

“I have to write a biography for my English class.”

“So,” he said, raising an eyebrow, leaning toward me, his face dead serious, “the most obvious question is…why me? How do I come to receive…such an honor?”

“I find your story compelling.” I said the first thing that came to my mind, the words echoing with insincerity.

“Compelling? In what way?”

“It's not every day you meet a…” I stopped myself, looking for a polite way to end the sentence: a murderer, a rapist of children? That was way too harsh. “…a person who's been to prison,” I said.

“You're pulling your punches, Joe,” he said, sowing his words in a careful steady pace so as to avoid having to stop to catch his breath.

“Sir?”

“You're not interested in me because I spent time in prison. You're interested because of the Hagen murder. That's why you're talking to me. You can say it. It's gonna help with the grade, right?”

“The thought did cross my mind,” I said. “That kind of thing…killing someone, I mean, well, you don't come across that every day.”

“Probably more often than you think,” he said. “There're probably ten or fifteen people in this very building who have killed.”

“You think that there're ten other murderers in this building besides you?” I said.

“Are you talking about killing or murdering?”

“Is there a difference?”

Mr. Iverson looked out the window as he pondered the question, not so much looking for the answer as contemplating whether to tell it to me. I watched the tiny muscles in his jaw tighten a couple times before he answered. “Yes,” he said. “There is a difference. I've done both. I've killed…and I've murdered.”

“What's the difference?”

“It's the difference between hoping that the sun rises and hoping that it doesn't.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “What's that mean?”

“Of course you don't understand,” he said. “How could you? You're just a kid, a college pup blowing his daddy's money on beer and girls, trying to keep a passing grade so you can avoid getting a job for another few years. You probably have no greater care in the world than whether you'll have a date by Saturday.”

The vigor of this emaciated old man caught me off guard; and frankly, it pissed me off. I thought about Jeremy back at my apartment, a TV remote click away from crisis. I thought about my mother, in jail, begging for my help on the inhale and cursing my birth on the exhale. I thought about the thin edge that I walked between being able to afford college and not, and I wanted to dump that dusty, judgmental prick out of his wheelchair. I felt anger rising in my chest, but I took a deep breath, as I had learned to do whenever I became frustrated with Jeremy, and I let it pass.

“You know nothing about me,” I said. “You don't know where I've been, or what I have to deal with. You don't know the shit I've had to wade through to get here. Whether or not you tell me your story is up to you. That's your prerogative. But don't presume to judge me.” I fought against the urge to stand up and walk out, holding on to the arm of the chair to keep me in my seat.

Iverson glanced down at my white-knuckled grip, then at my eyes. A hint of a smile, more subtle than a single flake of snow, crossed his face, and his eyes nodded approval. “That's good,” he said.

“What's good?”

“That you understand how wrong it is to judge someone before you know their whole story.”

I saw the lesson he wanted me to learn, but I was far too angry to respond.

He continued. “I could have told my story to any number of people. I used to get letters in prison from people wanting to turn my life into something they could make money from. I never responded because I knew that I could give a hundred authors the same information and they would write a hundred different stories. So if I'm going to tell you my story, if I tell you the truth about everything, then I need to know who you are, that you're not just some punk in this for an easy grade, that you will be honest with me and be fair about how you tell my story.”

“You understand,” I said, “this is just a homework assignment. No one's gonna read it except my teacher.”

“Do you know how many hours are in a month?” Carl asked, apropos of nothing.

“I'm sure I could figure it out.”

“There's 720 hours in the month of November. October and December each have 744.”

“Okay,” I said, hoping he would explain his tangent.

“You see, Joe, I can count my life in hours. If I'm going to spend some of those hours on you, I need to know that you're worth my time.”

I hadn't considered that point. Janet thought Carl would be dead by Christmas. With just a week remaining in September, that would give Carl three months to live. I did the rough math in my head and understood. If Janet was right, then Carl Iverson had less than three thousand hours of life left to live. “I guess that makes sense,” I said.

“So what I'm saying is this: I'll be truthful with you. I'll answer any question you put to me. I'll be that proverbial open book, but I need to know that you are not wasting my limited time. You have to be honest with me as well. That's all that I ask. Can you do that?”

I thought about it for a moment. “You'll be absolutely honest? About everything?”

“Absolutely honest.” Carl held out his hand to shake mine, to seal the agreement, and I took it. I could feel the bones of Carl's hand knocking around under his thin skin as if I were gripping a bag of marbles. “So,” Carl asked, “why aren't you doing a story on your mom or dad?”

“Let's just say my mom is less than reliable.”

Carl stared, waiting for me to continue. “Honesty, remember?” he said.

“Okay. Honestly? Right now my mother is in a detox center in Austin. She should be getting out tomorrow, and then she'll sit in jail until her first appearance in court on DUI charges.”

“Well she sounds like she has a story to tell.”

“I won't be telling it,” I said.

Mr. Iverson nodded his understanding. “What about your dad?”

“Never met him.”

“Grandparents?”

“My grandma on my mom's side died when Mom was a teenager; my grandpa died when I was eleven.”

“How'd he die?” Carl asked the question with no more forethought than you give to a yawn; but he had stumbled onto my deepest wound. He had opened the door to a conversation that I refused to have, even with myself.

“This isn't about me,” I said, the sharp tone in my voice cutting a swath between Mr. Iverson and me. “And this isn't about my grandpa. This is about you. I'm here to get your story. Remember?”

Carl leaned back in his chair and considered me while I tried to wash my face of all expression. I didn't want him to see the guilt in my eyes or the anger in my clenched jaw. “Okay,” he said. “I didn't mean to touch a nerve.”

“No nerve,” I said. “You didn't touch any nerve.” I tried to act as if my reaction had been nothing more than mild impatience. Then I lobbed a question at him to change the subject. “So, Mr. Iverson, let me ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Because you only have a few months to live, why would you agree to spend it talking to me?”

Carl adjusted himself in his chair, gazing out the window at the drying towels and the barbeque grills littering the apartment balconies across the way. I could see his index finger stroking the arm of his wheelchair. It reminded me of how Jeremy strokes his knuckles when he is anxious. “Joe,” he said finally, “do you know what a dying declaration is?”

I didn't, although I gave it a shot. “It's a declaration made by someone who is dying?”

“It is a term of law,” he said. “If a man whispers the name of his killer and then dies, it's considered good evidence because there's a belief—an understanding—that a person who is dying would not want to die with a lie upon his lips. No sin could be greater than a sin that cannot be rectified, the sin you never get to confess. So this…this conversation with you…this is my dying declaration. I don't care if anybody reads what you write. I don't even care if you write it down at all.” Carl pursed his lips, his stare searching for something far beyond the immediate scenery, a slight quiver in his words. “I have to say the words out loud. I have to tell someone the truth about what happened all those years ago. I have to tell someone the truth about what I did.”

That evening, my head pulsed with waves of excitement. I had secured a tragic subject for my biography assignment, and, to top the evening off, I had a dinner date with Lila Nash. Okay, not a date. But I had a girl coming over to my home to share a meal with me. This had never happened before. When it came to dating, I always stuck to restaurants. I had never cooked for a girl or served a girl a meal in my home. I had come close once, but, like many of my plans back in my high-school days, it came to ruin.

Somewhere in my adolescence, I discovered that I was neither handsome nor ugly. I fell in that vast ocean of so-so guys that made up the background of the picture. I was the guy that you agree to go to homecoming with after you found out that the guy you really wanted had already asked another girl. I was okay with that. In fact, I think that good looks would have been wasted on me. Don't get me wrong, I had my share of dates in high school, but, by design, I never dated anyone for more than a couple months—except Phyllis.

Phyllis was my first girlfriend. She had curly brown hair that sprayed out from her head like the tentacles of a sea anemone. I thought she looked peculiar until the day we shared our first kiss. After that her hair struck me as daring and avant-garde. We were high-school freshmen, following the well-worn path of juvenile courtship, testing boundaries, hiding behind corners to steal a kiss, holding hands under the table in the cafeteria, all the things that seemed so wonderfully exciting to me. Then one day, she insisted that I introduce her to my mother.

“Are you ashamed of me?” Phyllis asked. “Am I just someone you mess around with when it's convenient?” Try as I might, I could not convince her that my intentions were honorable unless I brought her to
my house for a formal introduction. Looking back now, I should have simply broken up with her and let her think I was a jerk.

I told my mother that I would be bringing Phyllis by after school that day. I talked about the visit as often as I could that morning, hoping to get across to my mother that she needed to be on her best behavior for that one hour of that one day. All she had to do was be cordial, sober, and normal for one hour. Sometimes I ask too much.

As we strolled up the front walk, I could smell food, or the remains of food, burning in the kitchen. Phyllis had been smiling for the entire walk from school to my house, nervously folding her fingers together as we got closer. I stopped at the front door, hearing my mother scream at some guy named Kevin. I didn't know any Kevin.

“God dammit, Kevin, I can't pay you right now.” I could hear the slur in her words.

“That's just great,” a male voice hollered back. “I bend over backward to help you out and when I need the money you fuck me over.”

“It's not my fault you can't keep a job,” Mom yelled. “Don't be blamin' me.”

“No, but it's your fault I got no money,” he said. “I ain't got no retard kid to pay my bills like you do. You owe me a hunnerd dollars. I know you get welfare or some shit for that kid. Just pay me outta that.”

“Fuck you! You piece of shit. Get outta my house.”

“Where's my money?”

“You'll get your fuckin' money. Now get out.”

“When? When do I get the money?”

“Get out. My kid's coming home with some little skank, and I need to get ready.”

“When do I get my money?”

“Get out before I call the cops and tell 'em you're driving without a license again.”

“You fucking bitch.”

Kevin slammed his way out the back door about the same time that the smoke detector shrieked to life, fed by the burning food in the kitchen. I looked at Phyllis and saw that she had folded close the
shutters of her brain, albeit too late to block out the experience that would surely be the focus of some future therapy sessions. I wanted to apologize, to explain, or better yet, to disappear, slip through the cracks between the porch planks. Instead, I turned Phyllis around by her shoulders, walked her to the corner, and said my last goodbye to her. The following day at school, she made a point of avoiding me in the halls, which was fine by me because I would have avoided her anyway. After that, I never dated any girl for more than two months. I couldn't endure the humiliation of bringing another girl home to my mother.

I thought of Phyllis as I cooked the noodles for my dinner with Lila. For the first time in my life, I would bring a girl home and not worry about what would meet me at the door. But then again, I wasn't bringing a girl home. This wasn't a date, despite the amount of time I spent getting ready, combing my hair just so, applying a little extra deodorant and a tiny hint of cologne, picking out clothes that said both “look at me” and “I don't care.” I even made Jeremy take a shower in my bathroom across the hall. All this effort for a girl who threw a cold shoulder at me with the force of a middle linebacker. But damn, she was cute.

Lila arrived at seven, wearing the same jeans and sweater that she'd worn that morning when she left for class. She said hello, glanced around the kitchen to see that I had started the water boiling, and then went to Jeremy, who was sitting on the couch.

“What's the movie tonight, handsome?” she said.

Jeremy blushed slightly. “Maybe
Pirates of the Caribbean
,” he said.

“Perfect.” She smiled. “I love that movie.” Jeremy smiled his best goofy smile as he pointed the remote at the television, and Lila pushed the button to start the movie.

I felt a strange jealousy watching Jeremy and Lila on my couch, but that was exactly what I had asked for. I used Jeremy to coax Lila to my home, and she came to see him, not me. I turned back to my spaghetti noodles, glancing over at Lila every now and again to see her attention split between the television and a stack of my homework papers on the coffee table.

“Are you researching the war in El Salvador?” she asked.

“The war in El Salvador?” I said, looking over my shoulder. She was reading the newspaper article I'd copied at the library. “You have an article about the signing of a peace treaty between El Salvador and Honduras.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “No. Look at the column below that.”

“The one about the girl?” she said.

“Yeah, I'm interviewing the guy who killed her.”

She went silent for a moment as she read each of the articles I had copied at the library. I watched her face wince as she covered those parts of the story that expounded upon the more gruesome details of Crystal Hagen's death. I stirred the pasta and waited patiently for her response. Then she said, “You're kidding, right?”

“What?”

She flipped through the articles again. “You're interviewing this psychopath?”

“What's wrong with that?” I asked.

“Everything,” Lila said. “It amazes me how prison scumbags can sucker people into paying them attention. I knew this girl who got engaged to some creep in prison. She swore he was innocent—wrongfully convicted, waited for him for two years until he got released. Six months later he was back in prison after he beat the crap out of her.”

“Carl's not in prison,” I said with a sheepish shrug.

“He's not in prison? How could he not be in prison after what he did to that girl?”

“He's dying of cancer at a nursing home. He only has a few months,” I said.

“And you're interviewing him because…”

“I'm writing his biography.”

“You're writing his story?” she said, with more than a hint of condemnation.

“It's for my English class,” I said, almost as an apology.

“You're giving him notoriety.”

“It's an English class,” I said. “One teacher and maybe twenty-five students. I'd hardly call that notoriety.”

Lila put the papers back down on my table. She looked at Jeremy and lowered her voice. “It doesn't matter that it's only a college class. You should do a story on the girl he killed, or the girls he would have killed if he hadn't gone to prison. They deserve the attention, not him. He should be disposed of quietly, no grave marker, no eulogy, no memory of the man. When you write down his life's story, you're creating a marker that shouldn't exist.”

“Don't hold back,” I said. “Tell me what you really think.” I pulled a thread of spaghetti from the boiling water and threw it at the refrigerator. It bounced off the fridge door and fell to the floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, looking at the noodle on the floor.

“Testing the spaghetti,” I said, glad to be on a different topic.

“By flinging it around the kitchen?”

“If it sticks to the refrigerator, it's done.” I bent down and picked the spaghetti strand off the floor and tossed it into the garbage. “And this spaghetti isn't quite done yet.”

When I left Hillview earlier that day, I felt good about my project. Iverson had promised to tell me the truth about the death of Crystal Hagen. I would be his confessor. I couldn't wait for my dinner with Lila, to tell her about Carl. In my imagination at least, Lila would be riveted by what I was doing, sharing my excitement, wanting to know all about Carl. After seeing her reaction now, all I wanted to do was avoid that subject for the rest of the evening.

“Did he tell you what he did, or is he telling you he was framed?” she asked.

“He hasn't said a thing about it yet.” I pulled three plates from the cupboard and walked them to the coffee table in the living room where we would be eating. Lila got up and grabbed some glasses from the same cupboard and followed me. I cleaned my backpack, my notes, and the newspaper articles off the coffee table. “We haven't gotten to that point yet,” I said. “So far, he's told me about growing up in South St. Paul, an only child. Um…let's see…his father managed a hardware store and his mom…” I paged through my memory, “worked at a deli in downtown St. Paul.”

“So when you write this guy's story, you're simply gonna write down whatever he tells you to?” Lila placed the glasses on the table by the plates.

“I also have to get a couple of secondary sources,” I said, walking back to the kitchen. “But, when it comes to what he did—”

“And by ‘what he did' you mean raping and killing a fourteen-year-old girl and burning her dead body,” Lila added.

“Yeah…that. When it comes to that, there are no other sources. I have to write what he tells me.”

“So he can feed you a line of bull, and you'd tell that story?”

“He's already done his time. Why would he lie?”

“Why wouldn't he lie?” Lila said with an edge of incredulity. She stood at the end of the kitchen counter, her hands flat on the Formica, her arms stiff, her fingers spread. “Put yourself in his shoes. He rapes some poor girl, murders her, spends his time in prison telling every cellmate, guard, and lawyer who cares to listen to him that he's innocent. He's not gonna quit now. Do you really think that he's gonna admit that he killed that girl?”

“But he's dying,” I said, flinging another spaghetti strand at the refrigerator—it stuck.

“That proves my point, not yours,” Lila said, with the air of a practiced debater. “He gets you to write your little article—”

“Biography—”

“Whatever. And now he has a written account out there in academia, painting him as the victim.”

“He wants to give me his dying declaration,” I said, pouring the spaghetti into the strainer to rinse it.

“He wants to give you his what?”

“His dying declaration…that's what he called it. It's a statement that's true because you don't want to die with a lie on your lips.”

“As opposed to dying with a murder under your belt?” she said. “You see the irony, don't you?”

“It's not the same thing,” I said. I had no argument as to why it wasn't the same thing. I couldn't hack my way past her logic. Every turn
presented another blocked path, so I signaled my defeat by carrying the noodles to the coffee table and dishing them onto the plates. Lila picked up the pan of marinara sauce and followed me. As she started to pour the sauce, she stood up and grinned like the Grinch on Christmas Eve. “Oh, do I have an idea,” she said.

“I'm almost afraid to ask.”

“A jury convicted him, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Which means he had a trial.”

“I assume so,” I said.

“You can look at his file from the trial. That'll tell you exactly what happened. It'll have all the evidence, not just his version.”

“His file? Can I do that?”

“My aunt's a paralegal at a law firm in St. Cloud. She'll know.” Lila pulled her cell phone from her pocket and scrolled through her contacts until she found her aunt's number. I handed Jeremy a paper towel to use as a napkin so that he could start eating, and then I listened to Lila's end of the conversation.

“So the file belongs to the client not the lawyer?” she said. “How do I find that out?—Will they still have it?—Can you e-mail that to me?—Perfect. Thanks a bunch. I gotta run.—I will. Bye-bye.” Lila hung up her phone. “It's easy,” Lila said, turning to me. “His old attorney will have the file.”