When he told me how he killed her, I didn’t react at first. He said it so casually, and his face didn’t contort in the way it should’ve. It was the same face I remembered, skinnier maybe, but his. The hands were what made me realise what he said, the way they picked at irritated scabs on his arms. They weren’t there before.
July 20th, 1989.
I was sprung awake by the shrill rattling of the phone. I picked up in a half-awake state, hazy and unsure if I was still dreaming. I knew who he was before he told me. Just like when someone you know pranks calls you and puts on a ridiculous voice, you always recognise them immediately because it is still laced with pieces of them. But the edges of his words were cracking, like there was something urgent behind them that was trying to claw its way out. He told me to meet him at a certain diner, the last of a failed chain. I knew the one, just off the highway on the edge of the county. I didn’t even get to force in a question before the line clicked silent.
Two days later, I drove out there. The place was empty aside from a couple of older waitresses chatting in the kitchen. They hadn’t even noticed me come in. It was a sweltering evening when I finally found a spot in a dusty corner next to a large window. The stagnant air didn’t help, and it gave the place a soured smell. As time rolled on, I sank lower and lower into the sticky seats. I had to keep peeling the damp back of my neck off the leather, and my face was itchy from shaving. I was still sporting my grey, sweat-stained shirt and loosened work tie. Sleep hadn’t come easily since he called.
The realisation that he wasn’t coming arrived suddenly, my body jolting to attention with a mixture of embarrassment and shame. But as I was preparing myself for an awkward getaway, a man sat down across from me at the booth. He was a taller man, face and neck covered in unkempt stubble.
“Hello Peter,” he said, smirking.
Unlike our phone call, he sounded almost exactly how I remembered. The mature, jazz-singer voice they have when they flirt with the crowd in between songs. My squeaky speech had always made his sound even lower and cracklier, especially when he’d just woken. It was the first voice I’d hear on any given day, and the last too. Everyone liked Brady, but he was among the few who talked to me at all, and for some reason, he and I spent a lot of time together. Not because I would ask, over time we just naturally sought out each other’s company because it felt effortless.
I’d pick him up before school, that beaming face in my passenger window would wipe the sleep out of his eyes and mutter a sarcastic greeting. He’d slam a cassette into my stereo, some obscure band he was into that week, then spend the rest of the trip raving about them. He’d say that when they inevitably went intergalactic on the charts, he could tell everyone that he’d been there since the start, when they were nobodies, when they were nothing. I’d chuckle in the right places and absorb energy from this charming lunatic headbanging in the seat next to me.
“Brady,” I replied dumbly, “h-how are you?”
“Oh, you know me,” he answered. Widening that warm smile of his.
He pulled up his dusty, red baseball cap slightly. It matched the tattered, maroon flannel he wore, a few sizes too big with the sleeves torn off just above the elbows. He looked absolutely terrible. The pores on his nose and cheeks were so clogged with dirt and grime that his skin looked grainy. He reeked of gasoline and whisky, and was covered in fiery, purple sores that snaked their way from his wrists up to his neck.
I pointed to his mangled forearms, “And this, what happened?”
He made no attempt to hide them.
“Brady have you been…using?” I asked gently. I’d dealt with plenty of addicts in Bottineau.
“Of course not,” he scoffed, “What do you think I am, some kind of junkie?”
I decided not to prod the subject further.
His voice was one of the only things that hadn’t changed. He was much thinner, that translucent kind of thinness that made his skin look ghostly and paper-like, as if it might dissolve in water. I inspected him for any remnants of the barrel-chested, confident boy I once knew, but all that teenage muscle had withered away. His body seemed to have shrunk away from itself in those 13 years, and if there was any part of him still there, at least physically, it was surely dwindling.
“Why did you ask me here, after all this time?” I sounded more accusatory than I intended.
He dislodged a scab on the back of his hand.
“Can’t this just be two old friends catching up? You never visited,” he said. A bead of sweat meandered nervously down the side of his nose.
“Never visited? You and Judith were the ones who left.”
Judith was his girlfriend towards the end of school. I saw much less of him when they got together. She had a car and a beautiful face that looked like it was made of porcelain. One day, neither of them showed up to first period, or the second. They were both gone, permanently. I heard they escaped to some city where she had an estranged aunt, and I hadn’t seen either of them since.
The comment struck something in Brady.
“You’re the one who stayed!” he scowled, “In case you forgot, you were the one that wanted to be a cop so badly!”
A plump waitress appeared at the table with a notepad. Brady hurriedly ordered two coffees. Beneath the table, I thumbed the outline of my badge through my jean pocket. Neither of us said a word until she came back a while later with the tinkling mugs. I hated coffee, but didn’t protest. Brady heaped a mound of sugar into his as he gazed out into the bleak darkness. He had never liked it either.
“Hey, isn’t that field around here somewhere?” he said suddenly, severing the hum of silence.
“What?” I mumbled.
“Don’t tell me you forgot about that.”
“I…ugh…I dunno” I sputtered.
But of course I knew.
How could I forget the afternoons we spent out there? Speeding in my dad’s truck, cackling like hounds at the petty thrill of skipping last period. I would drive us to the outskirts of town where the grass shot up through the potholes, and the rooves of houses sagged a little deeper. Brady was right, it wasn’t far from the diner where we sat - a vast, abandoned wheat field. Our aim was to get to a small clearing we had stamped out in the middle. Occasionally Brady would reveal two warm, stolen beers, and we would pretend to enjoy them. But most times were spent just laying like two starfish on a rock at the bottom of the ocean, staring up at the sky like it was the surface, until our chatter died down to a comfortable silence. For a few intoxicating moments, in that field flattening in the wind, we were remote. Perhaps a subconscious part of us figured that if we focused skyward with enough purpose, the yellow in our peripherals might start to fade out of view. Eventually, it would all be replaced by that blue mass, trancelike in its unbrokenness, and we’d be pulled through its membrane to somewhere else.
But laying with all our limbs spread out like that, itching with wheat fibres, Brady’s proximity felt like the warmth of a fire. The temptation to peek sideways always won. I liked how abstract his face looked from there, a jumble of features at right angles to the world. I’d watch his eyes, always open and strangely unblinking, and wonder if they felt me watching them. Sometimes his hand ended up near mine, palm probably warm from the mild afternoon sun, so close that the distance could be bridged by a simple extension of a finger. And then it was always over. One of us would inevitably yell in surprise at the time and we’d run wordlessly back to the truck.
Brady’s left hand rested loosely around his mug. I realised my own hand was hovering just above my lap under the table, and for a horrifying second, I thought I’d placed it on top of his. He tapped the side to get my attention. The sharp sound came from a scuffed golden band on his ring finger. My hand retracted.
“So, you’re still with Judith?” I asked, trying my best to sound conversational.
Bloodshot eyes widened. There was pain in them, that hopeless kind of pain that you see in aged animals right before they are euthanised.
“Brady?” I began, but his eyes had flickered to the window again. He sucked in a controlled breath and as he huffed it out, he seemed to deflate himself.
“Brady,” I repeated.
And then he told me.
He told me about the argument he couldn’t remember the start of. He told me how she threatened to kick him out and change the locks. He told me about the kitchen knife, and how impossible it was to wash the burgundy stains out of his clothes when it was over. He told me that even in his eye-watering state of panic, he couldn’t bring himself to light the gasoline. The flame would be too big, too much attention, he said. Eventually he just put her in the car, grabbed a bottle and drove to the first payphone he saw.
There was a long, heavy silence, like a thick blanket draped over us.
“But you can help me, right?” he said, smiling and suddenly animated, “You know people now.”
“Are you referring to my job?”
He nodded suggestively.
“Who is it that you think I know?” I said, taken aback.
I would be surprised if there was a single person in Bottineau Sheriff’s Office that knew a soul outside the County lines. Brady lived there for most of his life, he should have known that.
“It’s not just that,” he said, “You’re the only one that can help me. You’re the only one that would help me, right?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know the answer myself.
“Where’d you put her,” I asked, picturing that white porcelain face shattered like a vase. His smile quickly faded as he weighed up how much he should give away. My heart banged on the walls of my throat. Every pat on the back, every light-hearted punch on the shoulder when we were boys felt different now. Seething potential in those hands that I was too preoccupied to notice.
His head gestured towards the window and into the street, “She’s out there.”
I looked out to where he nodded, as if she was going to be propped up next to a lamppost or crumpled beside some nearby garbage cans, indistinguishable from the local drunks. Brady noticed my perplexed gaze.
“In the car.” he clarified.
“In the car,” I echoed in disbelief.
Two days had passed since he called me. Two sweltering, late-July days spent rotting, liquifying in the backseat of his car.
“But see, I have a plan. We just gotta go back to the field,” he was becoming skittish with adrenaline, but spoke in that same calming tone, “We’ll get some shovels from your house, and we’ll bury her. No-one will ever look there.”
“No,” I replied calmly, “We can’t.”
“What do you mean, why not?” he prodded, trying to stay hushed in the empty diner.
“Cause the field isn’t there anymore,” I said, “They turned it into a highway years ago.”
