INTO STONE

By Keith Snyder

             

Fifty feet above the cemetery, tires moan against expressway grooves. The travelway deck thrums. Down at street level, dirty rain glistens black on pavement, gray on tombstones, red on the armored truck’s crumpled hood.

The four-lane street cuts straight between two sections of cemetery. The elevated expressway curves gently over it. A deluge of deck runoff splatters from a ragged, open-throated hole overhead. At the foot of the cobblestone cemetery wall, a large drainpipe lies crushed on the sidewalk.

The brake lights glow red. The dead driver’s foot is on the pedal. The headlight that didn’t shatter against the column illuminates the wall and the tops of crypts.

Distant red reflections on the asphalt switch to green.

*  *  *

Dark gray morning rush hour, dirty rain. Traffic’s been cleared from a full mile of expressway, half a mile of road. Cops in yellow slickers divert cars and wait for the all-clear from the Department of Transportation so they can go in and look.

A DOT cherry-picker carries Aiata Mabee and her morning mochaccino up from the tombstones and mausoleums, over the dirty wet roof of the armored truck. It stops at the head of the column so she can see the cold gray deck runoff splattering without its drainpipe. Icy water sprinkles her face, and in her memory she smells warm gardenia and hears dog tags.

She aims the thumb of her tan work glove upward. The basket shudders and moves up toward the side of the elevated travelway, the truck perched on its jacks down in the cemetery, one of her guys at the controls in its cab. Perk of management. Running it herself with the basket controls wouldn’t leave a hand free for her coffee.

She raises a hand and makes a fist. The basket stops. Mocha sloshes over her glove. She’s at the flank of the elevated expressway, where three old welds converge in one place, a textbook don’t. One of them has cracked.

Well, there’s your problem.

*  *  *

“A vehicle lighter than an armored car probably wouldn’t have made enough of an impact to break a weld,” Aiata says to the pretty reporter. In her peripheral vision she sees the camera lenses rotate as the cameraman zooms in slowly on her face. “Anything heavier and this whole section of expressway could have been more seriously compromised.”

The steel-haired DOT public affairs flack who just let her talk nods. The camera and the reporter turn toward each other as one. It looks like eighteenth-century nobility dancing.

“So what you’re saying is a tragedy barely averted,” the pretty reporter says. “A tragedy just waiting to happen, outside the grim stone walls of these old cemeteries in Queens. This is—”

“What I’m saying,” Aiata speaks over her softly, leaning in, “is force equals mass times acceleration.”

She feels the flack tense up and grin. The reporter lets the microphone drop in her hand.

“Cut.”

*  *  *

She gives the cops the OK to come in and get their corpse, as long as they do it fast and stay out of her hair. It’s gone in an hour, and then there’s just a frayed duct tape patch on the sagging vinyl seat.

Her guys are off eating lunch at the public works garage on Maurice when a grubby fool in an NYPD tow truck bangs the armored truck into the weakened column. The column moves. The expressway groans. Cops yell and scatter. They’re over the cemetery walls and tripping over footstones.

Aiata stands in the middle of the closed street. She can’t scale a wall, and she knows how the expressway’s built. She doesn’t move, just watches the cops and doesn’t let her face change. The street is built in a cut, so the cemetery grass is almost at the top of the cobblestone wall, much higher than the street. The bodies behind the walls repose above street level, maybe chest-high to people on the sidewalk. The cops slip on sodden grass, jogging backward to see what will happen next. They look down at her like she’s crazy.

She waves solemnly.

A cop points at something up high and says something to another cop, who points at her and gives her the come-along beckon.

She shakes her head. Men in uniforms.

Gardenia. Warm spray.

“You wanna get up here and look at this?” the cop yells.

“I’ll go around,” she says, with just enough force to carry. “I’m not frightened enough to jump over a wall.”

*  *  *

All three old welds have split now. Behind the jagged angles, inside the deck, a concrete box cavity has cracked apart. Some kind of utility vault, maybe. Possibly big enough for a person or two, but it might go deeper.

The cops point at the torn welds like they’re the important thing. Aiata’s got eighteen years’ DOT experience. She’s looking at the vault itself and thinking What the heck’s that?

*  *  *

Her boss drives down from Vermont in his vacation rental car. The city closes a mile of expressway, pending further examination. Half a mile of street lies unused, guarded by orange cones. The death-wish motorcyclists who hotdog here, even in rain, go elsewhere. Nights, the dead rest in peace for the first time in seventy years.

*  *  *

Original drawings long gone, original engineers all dead. Blueprints only entered into the computer system back to 1977.

No wires or pipes protrude from the cracked vault. Just dimness inside. DOT says it’s too dangerous for anyone to climb in and see what’s in there. Maybe cast-iron conduits, maybe green-tarnished valves from some lost city project. Maybe it’s a construction locker. Half a dozen DOT utility trucks boast vintage tools and girlie calendars their drivers found in weird places.

The pretty reporter swings by in the newsvan, but there’s no story. One of Aiata’s guys, a semi-clever goof named Cork, cracks wise about the “mystery vault.”

*  *  *

Aiata always watches the news while she makes dinner. The camera zooms in on the cracks. The reporter tries to act serious and important, but she’s too young and stupid to pull it off. And there’s no story.

“Which even the Department of Transportation,” she confides gravely, “now calls the Mystery Vault.”

*  *  *

The newsvan is gone. The cops are gone. The armored truck is gone—just a broken column, some pieces of glass, and a high spurt and low splatter. Traffic continues to detour, off beyond the distant formations of orange cones.

Aiata spends the day in the office. She has employee reviews to sign, and the upcoming week’s shift schedule isn’t finished. Her ancestors tattooed themselves with sharks’ teeth, pounded their dead enemies flat and wore them like cloaks. Aiata eats a baloney sandwich with mustard and shuffles file folders.

Her boss calls from Vermont. She brings him up to date on budget stuff.

“Anything new on the Mystery Vault?” he asks at the end.

“No,” she says, and makes a note on Cork’s review.

*  *  *

The fireman takes up most of the fire truck’s aerial bucket and smells like liquid concentrate of cigarette butts. His bulk shields Aita from backspray, but it’s still unpleasant.

This sustained blast from the bucket-mounted fire hose is to clear whatever rubble might be in the vault. Then the broken travelway will be trued and its underside affixed with steel plates, and concrete pumped into the vault to improve structural integrity.

Below her yellow ski goggles, Aiata’s cheeks are stung by the frigid spray, and she recalls warm fine mist.

The camcorder makes her wrist hurt. It’s in a Ziploc gallon bag. She’s documenting for the city. Black dirt streams out of secondary cracks, dirty whitewater lunges rhythmically back toward its source in the hose, arcs down to hit the street. No big chunks; it’s pretty clean in there already.

Something sky-blue whisks out and snags on a jut of broken concrete, hangs shuddering in the onslaught, dives and flutters to the street. Its plummet doesn’t carry it into the cemetery; it pastes itself to the cobblestone wall. Aiata watches it down there, peeling away and falling despondently to the sidewalk.

The camcorder sags in her hand. Instead of truing up the frame and documenting the rest of the procedure, she turns it down toward the sidewalk and zooms in. The sodden fabric is a Shirley Temple dress, blue with a wide white collar. An obliterating prickle flashes up the backs of her legs, floods her muscles, extinguishes her vision.

She stops her breath and makes her face not change. When she can see again she frames the dress carefully, pressed against the bucket by the fireman’s smoky bulk.

*  *  *

She’s eating a grilled cheese sandwich and a very large brownie in the public works lunchroom when there’s a newsbreak.

“A new twist in the bizarre mystery,” intones the pretty reporter, furrowing her smooth forehead, “of the Queens Expressway Mystery Vault.”

She turns in her seat and stares.

But it’s not the dress. The TV picture tracks slowly over brittle, yellowed blueprints.

They’re of the expressway, the reporter says, but no comment yet from the Department of Transportation. The mailing tube came to the TV station, postmarked Islandia, Long Island, the day after the first story. No return address.

On a Post-It, in the same spidery hand as the station’s address:

My late father was one of the construction chiefs. He kept this as a souvenir of his life’s work.

*  *  *

The Post runs with both items the next morning. Aiata sees the headline across the aisle on the train:

MYSTERY VAULT PEDO’S NEST?

There’s a frame capture of the dress from her documentation video and a photo of the Post-It with its old-lady spidery handwriting: a souvenir of his life’s work. And an official nonstatement from the DOT that ends with “at this time.”

At the office, she gets her copy of the old plans. The vault is the only element in pencil, not blueprint. It’s not labeled. Just precisely drafted.

No wonder the welds were all wrong, she thinks. The vault was an improvisation.

Someone else says it. All the male heads nod.

*  *  *

Con Edison is the last utility to roll up their copies of the dead man’s souvenir, peer up at the black cracks in the travelway, and say It’s not ours.

The city brings in a set of hundred-ton jacks. Rainwater spits through the blue-white jets of welding torches.

*  *  *

Dead news week. The story doesn’t go away.

Repair plans are halted. Three massive steel plates are bolted to the underside of the travelway to keep everything stabilized in its current off-kilter state. The DOT issues more statements. The rush autopsy of the driver comes back natural causes. A massive stroke. Dead before the empty armored truck even began its drift toward the mausoleums.

Aiata’s on an ad-hoc committee that looks attentive while the steel-haired PR flack sermonizes about community perception and how to speak to reporters. She used to work with the flack, back before she made supervisor and got him transferred where he couldn’t drop any more air hammers on pedestrians.

*  *  *

The cops come back in rain slickers, gingerly venture up and in.

*  *  *

The police press conference gets about five seconds of air time: No skeleton, no body, no DNA, no evidence of foul play, no case. Case closed.

Aiata takes her low-carb shrimp bisque into the living room as the news anchor delivers a choreographed question.

The pretty reporter delivers the choreographed answer. “DNA evidence usually won’t survive that long in such a harsh—”

She switches to The Simpsons. It’s not funny tonight. She’s not following the jokes. She’s thinking how that woman must feel, the one who sent her father’s blueprints. She must feel a cycle’s been completed.

She throws away the microwaveable paper cup, washes the spoon, puts it in the dishrack, goes to bed with a paperback, which she can’t concentrate on.

She turns off the light. Her heart won’t slow. She tucks the edge of the blanket under her ear, rocks her head against her pillow. The satin skims in the notch between ear and jaw.

Like a cycle’s been completed.

How that must feel.

*  *  *

Monsters behind waterfalls. Smoky bulk pressing her. Warm spray and splashes and gardenia. Gray stone, red rage, hacks and tugs and smashes. Blood sloshes over her hand.

The sobs mix with the dream. She stops them. The blanket’s edge lies soft against her cheek. She doesn’t move.

Her fingertips repose on the bedsheet.

Breath laps shallowly into her chest, gentle water into mossy Tahitian tidepools.

Eventually she tucks the satin beneath her ear and rocks against the pillow; eventually she gets up and makes hot chocolate. She’d rather have chamomile tea, but it would put her back to sleep. She likes stirring the warm chocolate in the round steel pot and the friendly scrape of the spoon.

The black between the miniblind slats goes medium-blue. The infomercials end. Blue’s Clues starts. Blue has a little puppy brother now to take care of.

She goes to the coat closet, doesn’t turn the hall light on. Stands on tiptoe. Can’t see anything.

Takes the trophies and candles off the top shelf. Stands on tiptoe again.

Old khaki shirt collar poking up, way in the back. Rust-brown stains long dried and crusted, shirt bundled, small.

Now she wants to call her little brother, but the thought rekindles the old dream and she’s very still, doesn’t breathe, one fingertip just touching the doorknob.

*  *  *

On the morning train she reads the entire newspaper to keep her mind focused. The story about the vault is a lot of blather. The blue Shirley Temple dress dates from the late 1930s, when expressway construction began; the old blueprints aren’t signed; the old cardboard tube they were mailed in can’t be traced. No record of the construction chiefs of the time. No fingerprints on the Post-It adhesive. No evidence of a crime, just some clothing, up there where you wouldn’t expect any.

The accompanying historical photo shows bristly unfinished expressway with scaffolding all around it. There’s a ladder in the approximate location of the vault.

*  *  *

The steel plates come down. The night crew jacks and levels the travelway. Tomorrow the vault will be filled with concrete. The plates will go back up. The expressway will reopen.

She stays away. There’s plenty to do at the office. One of her guys documents each step and sends digital photos. She emails the final shift schedule to the crew. Thinks about calling Teina.

*  *  *

Dinner, TV, dreams.

Hot chocolate. Infomercials.

Three in the morning.

Four in the morning.

Like a cycle’s been completed. How that must feel.

She starts her laptop, moves Cork onto the second shift, emails the changes to her crew.

Teina’s voicemail says “This is Teddy Mabee. Leave me a message and maybe I’ll call you back. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

*  *  *

The concrete pumper truck hulks diagonally in the street under the expressway. Its outrigger jacks extend all the way to each opposing cobblestone wall. The blue-gray pumper boom juts seventy feet out, over wall and tombstones. Rainwater drips off it onto the grass.

A slender section angles up from there, rises eighty feet to drop an articulated black proboscis to the crew up on the travelway.

Teina’s car is parked at a jaunty angle in the middle of the street. Aiata’s up on the back of the pumper truck, watching thick concrete circulate clockwise in the hopper. She sees her brother’s peroxided head nodding as Cork explains truck parts to him. Two men squatting, one pointing, one nodding. Teina’s shoulders are so broad. He doesn’t need her to rescue him anymore.

Concrete flows from the hopper, through the pump, up the boom, down between the hands of her crew, into the vault. The boom wobbles with the pulse of the pump.

Concrete extrudes. Space vanishes.

She hears Teina say, “How do they keep it from, you know, just spurting out of the shaft?” and both men stand and turn their backs to her as the pointing and the explanations start. Her little brother’s good at distracting people. He always has been—though she doesn’t think Cork knows Teina’s flirting with him. Cork’s not her brightest guy. He doesn’t usually work this shift, either, so he’s a little sleep-deprived. Last-minute shift changes will do that to you.

She drops the small, stained khaki bundle into the hopper, pushes it down with the concrete-encrusted broom handle they keep up here for breaking up clogs. Gray concrete engulfs it.

The heft of gray stone in her hand. Force equals mass times acceleration. The fall of a body, the jingle of dog tags. Rage and blood, hacks and tugs. The unexpected gristle under the blade. Her mother’s ancestors wore their flattened enemies as cloaks, he was fond of reminding her. But Aiata couldn’t flatten a whole body with a rock.

And had no argument with most of the body anyway.

She guides the limp, crushed thing into the sucking mouth of the intake.

*  *  *

She lets her eyes track slowly across the shuddering boom, out over the crypts and tombstones, up to where it disappears over the travelway.

She sees she’s gripping the broom handle and drops it. It clatters.

*  *  *

When the vault is filled, retardant and water are made to backflow through the boom, into the hopper. Aiata chats over the noise, yelling down at the two men. Let Cork think she’s showing off for her little brother. She’ll never show off for Teina. He already knows what she’ll do for him.

Nothing substantial backflows into the hopper. Just thin gray slurry, that’s all there is.

*  *  *

Her little brother puts his arm around her paternally and they watch the pumper truck leave. No more work tonight. The cemetery and expressway are silent.

New steel plates, reinforced welds, the big heads of foot-wide bolts. The hundred-ton jacks will come down soon. The bolts will be painted.

“I should have--”

“You couldn't,” Aiata says, “You were eight.”

“Someone--”

“Who?”

Teina doesn't answer. He knows there was no one to do for her what she did for him. Eventually he squeezes her waist.

“You always were good at hiding things.”

The dead lie in their graves, somewhere near chest level.

“I put it where God could find it,” she says. “If he wants it, he'll send an armored car.”

 

Copyright 2008 by Keith Snyder

---

After four books in his Jason Keltner series, Keith was uncomfortable still having money left, so he went into short-filmmaking and twin-toddler-rearing. He made his debut as a short story writer with “Dead Gray” in the March/April ’07 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and is now in development on a feature-length musical with divas, bikers, and thugs. His blog and links to his short films are at www.journalscape.com/keithsnyder.