“I’ll do my best, Mr. Case, but I will eat nothing with a central nervous system.”
“Daddy, leave Ray alone. There’ll be plenty of time to get acquainted and find out what Ray enjoys eating.”
Weldon continued to eat without seeming to hear Morsel. Meanwhile, Dave was making a hog of himself and hoping he could finish Ray’s breakfast, though Ray by now had seen the light and was eating the biscuits from which he had skimmed the gravy with the edge of his fork. He looked like he was under orders to clean his plate until Morsel brought him some canned pineapple slices. Ray looked up at her with what Dave thought was genuine affection. She said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment Dave stuck his fork back in the food, she raised a hand in his face and said, “I mean: that’s all you can eat!” and laughed. Dave noticed her cold blue eyes, and for the first time he thought he understood her.
She smiled at Ray and said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’em the trick.” Weldon ceased his rhythmic lip pursing.
“Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.
“C’mon, Daddy, give you a dollar.”
“Okay Mor’, put on the music.” A huge sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard next to the pie safe and pulled out a small plastic record player and a 45, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool, Clear Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers. At first gently swaying to the mournful dehydration tune, Weldon seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began, luring a poor desert rat named Dan to an imaginary spring. Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest comb-over across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the peanut and with sinuous movements balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record, when Dan the desert rat hallucinates green water and trees, whereupon the peanut dropped to the table, and Weldon just stared at it in disappointment. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and, dropping his napkin on his chair, left the room. For a moment it was quiet. Dave felt he’d never seen anything like it.
“Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record. But,” she said glumly, thumbing hair off her forehead as she cleared the dishes and went into the living room to straighten up, “me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It ain’t pretty and it’s expensive.” Soon they heard Weldon’s airplane cranking up, and Morsel called from the living room, “Daddy’s always looking for them cows.”
Dave had taken care to copy the information in Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and stashed inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed to Billings for the cage fights. She’d left Dave directions to the Indian small-pox burials, in case he wanted to pass the time hunting for beads. But at this point, by failing to flee in his own car, Dave admitted to himself that he had become fully invested in Ray’s scheme. So he seized the chance to use his cell phone and 411 connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she presently claimed to be, his widow. It took two tries a couple of hours apart. On the first, he got her answering machine, “You know the drilclass="underline" leave it at the beep.” On the second, he got Mrs. Ray. He had hardly identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service when she interrupted him to state in a voice firm, clear, and untouched by grief that Ray was dead. “That’s what I told the last guy, and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said he had been embezzling from a credit union before he left a suicide note and disappeared.
“I’m doing home health care. Whatever he stole he kept. Killing himself was the one good idea he come up with in the last thirty years. At least it’s prevented the government from garnishing my wages, what little they are. I been all through this with the other guy that called. Have to wait for his death to be confirmed or else I can’t get benefits. If I know Ray, he’s on the bottom of the Tuolumne River just to fuck with me. I wish I could have seen him one last time to tell him his water skis and croquet set went to Goodwill. If the bank hadn’t taken back his airplane, there wouldn’t have been even that little bit of equity I got to keep me from losing my house and sleeping in my motherfuckin’ car. Too bad you didn’t meet Ray. He was an A-to-Z crumb bum.”
“I’m terribly sorry to hear about your husband,” said Dave mechanically.
“I don’t think the government is ‘terribly sorry’ to hear about anything. You reading this off a card?”
“No, this is just a follow-up to make sure your file stays active until you receive the benefits you’re entitled to.”
“I already have the big one: picturing Ray in hell with his ass enfuego.”
“Ah, speak a bit of Spanish, Mrs. Coelho?” said Dave, who would have rather heard mention of some oro y plata.
“Everybody in Modesto speaks ‘a bit of Spanish.’ Where you been all your life?”
“Washington, D.C., ma’am,” said Dave indignantly.
“That explains it,” said Mrs. Ray Coelho, and hung up.
Dave could now see why Ray was without transportation when they met. Wouldn’t want to leave a paper trail renting cars or riding on airplanes. He got all he needed done on the library computers in Modesto, where he and Morsel, two crooks, had found each other and planned a merger.
Apart from the burial grounds there was nothing to do around there. He wasn’t interested in that option until he discovered the liquor cabinet, and by then it was almost early evening. He found a bottle labeled HOOPOE SCHNAPPS with a picture of a bird, and he gave it a try. It went straight to his head. After several swigs, he failed to figure out the bird, but that didn’t keep him from getting very happy. The label said the stuff was made from mirabelles, and Dave thought, Fuck, I hope that’s good. Then as his confidence built, he reflected, Hey, I’m totally into mirabelles.
As he headed for the burial grounds, Dave, tottering a bit, decided he was glad to have left the Hoopoe schnapps back at the house. Rounding the equipment shed, he nearly ran into Weldon, who walked by without speaking or even seeing him, it seemed. Right behind the ranch buildings a cow trail led into the prairie, then wound toward a hillside spring that didn’t quite reach the surface, evident only from the patch of greenery. Just below that was the spot Morsel had told him about, pockmarked with anthills. The ants, she’d claimed, would bring the beads to the surface, but still you had to hunt for them. Dave muttered, “I want some beads.”
He sat down among the mounds and was soon bitten through his pants. He jumped to his feet and swept the ants away, then crouched, peering and picking at the hills. This soon seemed futile, and his thighs ached from squatting; but then he found a speck of sky blue in the dirt, a bead. He clasped it tightly while stirring with his free hand and flicking away ants. He gave no thought to the bodies in the ground beneath him and continued this until dark, by which time his palm was full of Indian beads, and his head of drunken exaltation.
As he crossed the equipment shed, barely able to see his way, he was startled by the silhouette of Weldon’s Stetson and then of the old man’s face very near his own, gazing at him before speaking in a low voice. “You been in the graves, ain’t you?”
“Yes, just looking for beads.”
“You ought not to have done that, feller.”
“Oh? But Morsel said—”
“Look up there at the stars.”