Jacket

Jacket




We were on the Blue Ridge Parkway one night throwing beer bottles down a cliff for fun, and I had cocked my arm to throw one when Richard put his arm on my shoulder and pointed to the man lying at the bottom. He was face up in the dirt and his arm was out to the side and I could tell he was dead. Leaves had fallen on his open coat and his mouth was open. I could see this even though it was night because the moon had risen over the mountains and turned the sky blue and lit up the valley. People think you’re blind at night but if you let your eyes get used to it you can see a lot, like that man’s open mouth at the bottom of the rocks.
Richard swore and I told him to cool it, I’d go down and check him out. “If you break your neck I’m leaving you here,” said Richard, and I said fine to that. Besides, I knew he wouldn’t leave. In those days Richard didn’t have anyone but me. He stayed up by the car while I climbed over the railing and stepped from rock to rock down the cliff. I fell once and scraped up the palms of my hands. The whole time Richard stood up by the railing, tugging at his jacket and saying, “Are you all right?” The man cared for me.
The cliff was at the border of a forest that swept back down the mountain, and the moon at my back cast my shadow over the dead man. The bottles Richard and I had thrown down the rocks had broken and the pieces shined around him under the thorns and the ivy and the young trees. He looked older than me, in a denim jacket and jeans. His face was narrow and his eyes were open and his expression was pained. There was stubble on his face and neck and dirt on his palms and blood on the sleeve of his jacket. I checked his pockets. In his right pocket was thirty-two cents and a receipt from the liquor store for a bottle of Jack’s, and he had a black wallet in his left pocket with three bucks and a driver’s license that said his name was Alexander Parish. I put the cash in my pocket.
Richard yelled down, “Is he dead?”
“Shut it,” I yelled back. “You want the whole world hearing you?”
I took off the man’s jacket. Alexander Parish was stiff but the jacket slipped off and his head turned to the side. His cheek was on the bare ground. I took my handkerchief and wrapped my hand in it and turned his face back toward the sky. It didn’t seem right for a man to be left with his face in the dirt, dead or not.
I put back the wallet and put on his coat and yelled up to Richard, “I’m coming up.” And as an afterthought, “He had a coat.”
The climb was harder on the way up and I made it easy enough and stood panting at the top. Richard took a look at the jacket and said, “That’s a nice coat,” which it was. There was a black patch on the right shoulder with a sun embroidered in gold thread, and a trailing of the same gold thread was worked through the collar. The inside was lined with fur, which was good because it was getting colder. Lately we’d been talking about going east to the coast where it wasn’t so cold. Some nights in winter if we slept in the car I’d wake up with ice crusted on my hat.
Richard rubbed at the blood on the sleeve.
“People will notice,” he said.
“They won’t care.”
“You don’t have to wear it to work,” he said.
“You going to shut up and drink your beer?” I said.
“Sure,” he said, “but not with him down there.”
So we got in our car and drove down to another overlook. It was a Tuesday night but in those days we drank three or four nights a week. Our shift at the station started in at six a.m. but Casely didn’t care if we were drunk as long as we didn’t show it.
I worked my way through another beer and Richard wasn’t saying anything. He drew lines of condensation in the glass. He played with the edge of his coat, and pulled his hat on and pulled it off again. He propped his feet up on the dashboard, and I told him to get those down because he’d ruin the vinyl, and he scowled and said, “It’s my car.”
“What’s got you?” I said.
“We’re really leaving that guy down there?”
I looked at him. He was staring down the neck of his beer. “They’ll get him sooner or later,” I said.
“You’re wearing his coat,” Richard said. He had a developed sense of personal property. We did yard work a couple years after high school and whenever I borrowed a few nails from the client’s garage, or a couple beers from the cooler, Richard always made a point of leaving something in return, say, an old t-shirt, or a two dollar bill he’d found on the ground.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, but I knew I’d already lost. I said, “Another beer.”
We drove back to the cliff where Alexander Parish lay. I went down first, being drunker than Richard and not wanting to trip him up if I fell, and Richard picked his way down after me. We stood over him. By this time clouds had gathered and frost had grown over his cheeks and lips and eyebrows. His hands were stark white.
“I’ll get the legs,” said Richard, and he did, and waited for me to get the shoulders.
“Here we go,” I said.
We stopped several times on the way up. I had to sit down once, and Alexander Parish waited on the rocks, head facing down. It was October, and the rocks were cold, but within the hour we had him up on the asphalt next to Richard’s car. Richard said, “We’ll take him back to the station,” which made a kind of sense because there’s no cell reception on the highway. We laid him in the backseat and covered him with the wool blanket so we wouldn’t get pulled over for having a corpse in the car. Then he drove us back to the station. I didn’t want Casely to know I’d taken the jacket so I rolled it up and put it in a paper bag behind the dumpster next to a Styrofoam box of French-fries, where the concrete was stained black from the trash seepage. He might have made me turn it in.
Casely was behind the counter watching hockey on the fourteen-inch beside the register when we came in. He wore his orange baseball cap and that black polo he insisted made him look professional, and when we came to the counter he said, “You’re a little early.”
Richard said, “Found a dead guy out on the Parkway.”
“At the bottom of a cliff,” I said.
“What?” said Casely. He looked up at Richard from under the orange brim of the cap. He said again, “What?”
I said, “His name’s Alexander Parish.”
“You called the cops?”
“Don’t got reception up there,” said Richard. “He’s in the car. Figured he wouldn’t want to be left at the bottom of a cliff like that. You should have seen him.”
“He’s in the car?” said Casely.
“It wasn’t my idea,” I said.
“We can call the cops now,” said Richard.
Casely took off his hat and covered his eyes with his hand. He said, “Can I take a look?”
We led him out to the parking lot. Richard had parked his car behind the station by the dumpsters. Casely followed us, hands in his coat pockets, to the car. Richard knocked on the window of the back seat.
“Right in here,” he said.
Casely motioned at Richard to unlock the door, and he did, and Casely put his hand to his eyes again when he saw the wool blanket covering the dead man in the back seat. Then he looked over his shoulder at the highway where no cars passed, and back to glare at me.
“I ought to fire you,” he said.
“The hell, Casely,” I said. “I wanted to leave him there. We should have left him there, Rich.”
“Come on,” said Richard.
“Christ,” said Casely. He looked in at the dead man again. “This is really bad.”
“We couldn’t leave him there,” Richard said.
Casely shut the door and leaned against it and pulled out a cigarette. He rolled it between his fingers. The man wasn’t overreacting; he didn’t have much else other than the station. He was forty-three years old and he’d been working at the station since he was seventeen, he liked to tell me when I was late for a shift. His wife Sharon was depressed and some days she stayed in bed until dinner when Casely came home, and then she’d tell him she didn’t understand what he stayed on for. He told us this in confidence, he said, but he also told this in confidence to anybody who walked through that glass door. Some days I’d be restocking the drink cases and I’d look over and see a girl and her beefneck boyfriend standing slack-jawed at the register while Casely held their money and told them, in strictest confidence, how his wife tried to strangle herself one night with a lamp cord. Richard and me watched him while he leaned against the door and smoked his cigarette and thought, and I wasn’t surprised when he dropped the cigarette and smothered it with his heel and said, “You have to take him back.”
“Right,” I said, and Richard said, “No. No Casely, we can’t do that. We just took him out here. We’re going to call the cops.
“They’ll find him eventually,” said Casely.
“Right,” I said.
Richard looked at me like he wished I would burst into flames. I knew before he opened his mouth he was going to say I took the jacket. That man couldn’t drop a subject to save his life so I grabbed his elbow and said, “We can put him back and give the police a tip-off and not say who we are. Okay?”
Richard sighed. “I just don’t think-” he started.
“I can find anyone to do your jobs,” said Casely. “I don’t want the cops involved.”
Richard shook his head. Casely took his hand, said, “Thanks for understanding,” and went back inside.
The door had not even shut when he said, “J.R., you took his jacket.”
“We’ll take him back and it’ll be fine.”
He kept shaking his head. “It doesn’t seem right, does it? You take a man’s jacket and then you dump him back where you found him? It doesn’t seem right.”
“You want a soda?” I said, but Richard didn’t answer so I went into Casely’s station without him. Casely was back behind the counter watching hockey. I went over to the candy aisle and pocketed a pack of spearmint gum.
“Didn’t I tell you to get on?” he said.
I went to the soaps aisle and picked up a green bottle of detergent. “Casely, what gets bloodstains? I got blood on my coat.”
He said, “What coat, J.R.?”
I was in a t-shirt. “None of your business.”
He sneered at the television. “Christ ref, get out of the way.” He sighed and slapped his hand on the counter. “Cold water and dish soap,” he said. “And hydrogen peroxide.”
“Do we have hydrogen peroxide?”
“Next to the band-aids.”
It was in a brown bottle with a white sticker on the cap. I took it to the counter where Casely was and he scanned it and I paid with cash. I didn’t have much so I used the three bucks from Alexander Parish’s wallet. Richard didn’t know or he wouldn’t have let me, I don’t think. But if I died and someone found me at the bottom of a cliff I’d personally like someone to keep what’s on me, cash or clothes or pictures of friends or letters or anything like that. If I didn’t have kids or a wife, I mean, if I didn’t have someone who would take my stuff normally. If I died alone I wouldn’t want my clothes kept in a locker in a funeral home. I’d want someone to look at my pictures every now and then and wonder what kind of person I was. Besides, that was a nice coat.
I went back out to the car where Richard was smoking. He said, “Where’s your drink?”
“I forgot,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The sun started to rise on the drive back up the Parkway. There’s a valley to one side and you can look out over it at the mountains rising ridge after ridge. The shadow of the mountain was still over the valley and I could see the fog gathered there, creeping over the hills. On clear days you can see the small houses and the orange and yellow and red trees and far in the distance the blue smudge of even more mountains. They go on all the way up to Newfoundland in Canada. I always get the loneliest feeling looking out from heights like that. It’s not that everything’s so small, or even that the world is so much bigger than you can tell on the ground. It’s that even if someone is standing next to you looking out over the valley they won’t be seeing the same valley you are. I don’t know. It’s so goddamn pretty, and Richard wasn’t giving it a second look.
I said, “Sun’s coming up,” and he didn’t say a thing. I could hear him grinding his teeth.
There wasn’t anyone at the overlook when we got there, so we worked fast. Like last time I took the feet and Richard took the shoulders and we got him back down the cliff. We laid him face up at the bottom and I arranged the leaves and branches around him so it didn’t look like a couple murderers had left him there. Richard stood with his hands in his pockets and the sun caught his breath and eyelashes. He saw me watching and I said, “Thanks for doing this.”
“Whatever, J.R.”
It was bothering him. “Do you want to leave the blanket?” I said.
And he said, “Yeah, I do.” So he went and got the wool blanket and put it over the man like he’d just fallen asleep drunk amid the broken bottles, and died there from the cold. Which he probably had, after all. And Richard stood and looked at him for a moment with that grim look he got when matters were settled in his mind.
He took us back to the station, because then it was past time for me and Richard’s shift. When we got back, Casely said, “All right then?” On his way out he shook his head at us. I was still shaky on my feet so Richard worked the register while I sat on the inflatable mattress in the back with a bottle of water. Casely kept the mattress next to cold storage and I laid there and listened to the hum of the refrigerator until I felt better. At three in the afternoon when our shift ended I went straight to the dumpster to get the coat, which was still in the paper bag, thank God. I stood by the dumpster in the pale afternoon sunlight and tried it on again. It smelled like leaves and old French fries, and it was snug across the chest when I zipped it all the way up. The stain on the sleeve had darkened to black. I went back in wearing the coat and Richard said, “Look at you.”
So we went back to the apartment. We’d been renting a place north of town for three months, and it wasn’t the nicest possible but at seven-hundred a month we managed. In my room I had a mattress and a space heater and a cardboard box I put my dirty clothes in. Richard did a little better for himself. He tacked up movie posters and set up a floor lamp in the corner and hung cloth patterned with paisley over the window to keep out the light. Sometimes he closed the door and played his guitar. He made sure we had a couch in the living room and a black coffee table in front of it, and he bought a painting of a St. Bernard in a field of snow and had it framed and hung it over the couch. He thought it was funny, which I suppose it was.
When we got back I tried to clean the jacket in the kitchen sink. I filled the sink with cold water and soaked the sleeve and scrubbed it with dish soap and then poured peroxide on the blood stain. I expected the peroxide to hiss like it did on cuts, but nothing happened. The stain just turned a darker black which faded only a little as it dried.
“This isn’t doing shit,” I said.
Richard was watching TV on the couch so I brought the coat over to him. I said again, “Casely doesn’t know shit about blood. Look at this.”
He said, “J.R., I don’t know shit about blood either.”
“What am I supposed to do then?”
“Why are you asking me?” he said. “You took the coat.”
I shrugged and sat down next to him and put the jacket on my lap. Richard was leaning back against the cushions. He was watching a program about a cop whose daughter is kidnapped by a drug-dealer and he has to get to where she is before they kill her. Richard liked those kinds of shows.
“You want to go east soon?” I said. “I’m sick of working at the station.”
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“We’ve been here since August. I’m freezing my ass off up here.”
“Well you got a coat now,” he said. “You want a scarf or something?”
I said, “No,” and got up and put on the jacket and went outside. It was four thirty and the sun was already setting. There was a plastic bag wrapped around the railing, and cigarette butts littered the ground. What I mean is that it was a dirty place, and I’d jump off a cliff before living there again.
I lost the jacket eight or nine years later on a Greyhound bus in east Kentucky. I’d heard a friend could get me a job selling vacuums in West Virginia so I bought a ticket and headed east. I was sitting in the back and looking out the window at the green mountains—it was summer—and in Kenova we stopped at a bus station and I thought I saw Richard sitting on a bench, reading a book. I hadn’t seen him since he went back to live with his grandmother in Arlington, and I grabbed my pack and ran out of the bus and called out, “Richard! Hey Richard!” But it wasn’t him of course, just some old man in a red knitted cap like Richard used to wear. By the time I figured that out though the bus had pulled away and was going down the road with my jacket and left me standing with my hands in my pockets next to that old man who looked like Richard but wasn’t, and that put me in a mood I still haven’t shaken.