Over Tumbled Graves: A Novel

by Jess Walter

The river cleansed the city, carried away its debris, its sump and its suicides. The river irrigated the long, gray wound of civilization.

Everyone was either in the process of leaving or apologizing for not leaving yet. Caroline found herself hoping it was the same in other mid-sized cities, that there were some places that could only be left, cities just barely boldfaced on road maps—Dayton, Des Moines, and Decatur; Springfield, Stockton, and any city with “Fort” in its name—places that spark none of that romantic quality that young people believe will keep them from growing old.

First of all, it was against policy to shoot a guy in the leg. For better or worse, if you shot someone, it was to “stop” him, to fire until he no longer posed a threat, which was, of course, when the subject was dead.

“Guy gives this much blood,” he said to no one in particular, “he should at least get a donut and a glass of juice.”

Small, orange, numbered evidence flags—eighteen of them so far—were laid out on the coffee table and the floor around the body, each one marking a potential piece of evidence for the corporal taking photographs: a blood spatter, a deep indentation in the carpet, a bloody fingerprint on the coffee table, a pipe wrench. Dupree grabbed an orange-flagged pylon. “It’s clear to me now, Mrs. Stanhouse.” He held it up. “Your husband was killed by a very tiny slalom skier.”

The man with the tattoos

Only one tattoo was visible in the photo

Someone had taped a pacifier onto his mouth but he had gotten it partway off and it hung from his cheek by a square of duct tape. His crying was steady and throbbing, like a record that’s finished playing, but keeps spinning under the needle. Caroline doubted the cry was for attention anymore. This baby didn’t know what other sound to make.

critical mass, of black holes, areas with so much density and gravity they cave in on themselves, warp time and space, alter physical laws, create their own energy. People tend to look at violence as an aberration, as something wrong, unnatural. But what could be more natural than violence? And like any law of nature, couldn’t violence be factored out to its extreme, a state in which it was capable of sustaining itself, increasing in weight and density and speed, spinning off into itself?

Dupree thought about the last two days, imagining a thing that traveled like a wave or a current, invisible until it rolled across your path, when it raised the hair on your neck or made you shiver, its wind pooling with other winds, drawing into streams into branches into rivers that bulged and ran over their banks. He imagined the thing picking up momentum and curling back on itself, doubling and tripling its density and gravity as it spun faster and faster around itself. A whirlpool. A black hole. Fly into a black hole, the theory went, and you emerged on the other side of the universe. Dupree imagined he was standing at the point of a great funnel that could spew dead people forever.

A few cars trickled along the freeway and the streets of downtown, people going home from bars, trudging off with strangers, going to bay at the windows of old flames. Traffic at two-thirty in the morning is the flow of desperation.

death did have a specific feeling and why she hadn’t recognized it before. It was actually familiar, something revealed every day in glimpses of strangers, in solitary walks along the river, in moments of quiet, the realization that, for all the people we surround ourselves with, in the end, we go over alone.

Find a suspect within the first twenty-four hours, you had a ninety percent chance of getting a conviction. Seventy-two hours? Probably sixty percent. Then the curve fell quickly. And now, three weeks since the last body? Dupree put their chances at about one in twenty of ever getting a suspect strong enough to stand trial.

This was a business set up to give the client anonymity, in which all customers were known by the brand name of saints and Baptists, Waynes and Kennedys, the most Christian, most American of names. Johns. Or “dates,” which the women simply called the men, or, if you preferred magic, “tricks.” Anyway, through anonymity or deceptive casualness or magical disappearance, the men remained hard to find, and the women…well, to Caroline, they were all dead or dying.

That was another movie misconception—the deal itself. The movie john drives up, rolls his car window down, and asks, “How much?” In fact, the deal was more often a sad, empty flirtation, the man maybe trying to convince himself that she really likes him, the woman convincing herself she isn’t what she is, the money sometimes an afterthought, other deals made in dope or booze or a ride somewhere or the offer of a roof to sleep under. This barter was another form of denial, the lie that the intimacy of this transaction was no different than the transactions of straight lives, the trading of years for a ring, sex for stability, the factoring into the deal of babies and houses and comfort and meals and entire lives. Caroline felt a kind of mocking dare from these women during these interviews, an accusation from them that a deal was inherent in any relationship, whether the woman charged forty bucks for a blow job or got forty years for a lifetime of them. What is a marriage but a contract, the recording of a deal? Is eliminating loneliness a better motivation than greed?

She was going crazy, looking for significance in every movement, every utterance, drawing lines between things that weren’t connected. And worst of all, she’d begun to expect reasons and patterns beneath the behavior of people. That could be dangerous for a police officer, to start thinking the world was like a children’s book, to start believing that good would be rewarded and evil punished.

she was living up here, it was fairly common to have the police looking for her about this or that.” Mr. Nordling laughed bitterly. “Speaking of which, you guys should communicate better with the cops up here.

If Nordling is in the Bay Area, he'd say "down here" in reference to a call from the Northwest as that's "up there" not reverse in American casual lingo.

She could imagine the feeling, a cheapness, the flat emptiness of being someone else’s infidelity, existing most strongly in that person’s betrayal to his wife and his better self.

When he moved out he told Marc it was temporary, that as soon as he and Mom “worked through some things” he’d come back. But Marc hadn’t seen them working at all, just avoiding each other. When he came back from his dad’s apartment—which wasn’t so awful except it had only basic cable—Marc didn’t know whether to say anything about it to his mom. It was like a giant game where they pretended with their mother that their father was dead. His dad sometimes asked about his mom, but like you’d ask about a sick person, like you don’t really want an answer. “How’s your mom doing?” “Fine.” “That’s good.”

The street surged with men, the young and the old marked by their inability to handle alcohol, the rest blurring into one type, something between twenty-five and fifty, shuffling along with the same look of buzzed horniness, joints lubricated, eyes glazed, but their ability to function at least still arguable.

She walked until she reached a park bench overlooking the Mississippi. From here, the river didn’t seem so different from the Spokane. All waters are connected, of course. Burn might as well be in this river as in the Spokane, or the Nile or the Indian Ocean for that matter. And her mother too. Eventually, the water rises up and claims us all and we float away. That fact was inescapable in a city like New Orleans, a city built below the sea. In a city like that, you can’t bury people in the ground and so you shove the bodies into family crypts, two-hundred-year-old marble and granite casings that might hold the remains of a hundred people. They just open the crypt, slide the old dust and bones to the back, and put in the next body. The oldest cemetery in New Orleans was called the City of the Dead and from a distance, that’s what a person saw, a skyline of crypts and statuary that became, up close, a rough assemblage of exposed brick and chipped granite. The cemetery had been full for years and was useful now only as a tourist attraction and a place for muggers to hide in the shadows of the crypts. Let the criminals have it, Caroline thought. It doesn’t matter. Eventually, the water prevails, even in cities of the dead. Eventually, the water comes for us all, washes over the statues and through the crypts, topples the headstones and tumbles the graves.

the river dropped to reveal rocks as white and shiny as cleaned bone—rounded boulders and fingered slabs picked up ten thousand years earlier by glacier and deposited dumbly along the gravel and dirt riverbed. A few miles downstream, the receding water brought three old men with metal detectors to a calm stretch of midriver, where there were rumors of a sunken ferry boat and lost mining treasure. The old men combed the newly exposed banks, each listening to his own progress through headphones, each playing in his mind some version of the story of old coins and silver nuggets, each willing to settle for a narrative of old plows and car parts—for anything containing mystery, really, since that’s what their lives lacked. Like all people, they realized too late that mystery was the key to staying interested in the whole business, to distracting themselves from the surety of what came next; that a man strives and settles and strives and settles and this pattern eventually kills him. But the old men didn’t acknowledge the affliction, not to one another. Instead, they passed on the glistening riverbed with nods and raised eyebrows, sweeping their metal detectors before them like blind men with canes, oblivious to the deep water at their backs, where life goes on—swimmers and fishers and boats carving the river into sheets and beads that explode in tiny prisms and rain back on the river.

a city that in its heart was more used car than computer, more mobile home than condo. Spokane was what some people used to mean when they said “old-fashioned,” which was what some people said when they meant “unsophisticated,” which was what some people said when they meant “lower middle class,” which was what some people said when they meant “white trash.”

“He does talk a lot about the offender’s parents moving and being an outsider in school. Torturing pets, stuff like that.” “I always thought McDaniel would be a great help if the killer was nine.”

Mostly life is an ascension, it seemed to him, and he wondered what happened when you stopped climbing, when your progress began to be measured in the other direction and the best a person had to look forward to is retirement, the loss of responsibility and opportunity, the loss of function and friends.

Once it’s over, the fact that it was a good time meant nothing, no different from having a picture of your birthday party.

Dupree had even invented a name for what she felt—Yearbook Syndrome. Whenever they interviewed the relative of a suspect, invariably that person dragged out a yearbook, pointed to the picture of a shy, pimple-covered kid, and said emphatically, “See. He didn’t do it.”

Money. People who had it were happier and better-looking. He didn’t care what anyone said. He hardly ever responded to rapes or murders or child molestations in neighborhoods like this. The root of all evil? My ass. From what he’d seen, methamphetamine was the root of all evil. That and booze.