That too.
Crosswaithe lit a cigarette he didn’t want. There was already a blue shifting haze to the room like battlefield smoke and the air had become hot and close.
Just what month are we talking about here?
The thirtieth of June, Carmie said.
Crosswaithe was silent a time. He sat staring out the window past the gravel parking lot. Bare winter trees, bleak fading horizons folding away to blue transparency. It had begun to snow, a few flakes then more, drifting toward the window almost horizontally in the heavy wind. He rose and dropped the cigarette into an empty beer bottle and started pulling on his coat.
Billy, she said.
What?
It’s not what you think.
Probably not, Crosswaithe said.
He went out the front door and stood with his hands in his pockets. The day had turned very cold. Snow snaked across the parking lot in shifting windrows. He felt a little drunk. He’d had a few beers and more of the old holethroated alchemist’s potion than he wanted to think about and he wasn’t used to it.
He was standing on the doorstep staring at a dead deer in the bed of someone’s pickup truck when she came out the door behind him. The deer had blood matted in its hair and its eyes were open. The eyes had gone dull and snowflakes lay on them without melting and when they reminded him of Claire’s eyes behind their blue bird’s lids he was seized with a sourceless dread, an almost palpable malaise that cut to the core of his being. The Grim Reaper had leaned to him face to face and laid a hand to each of his shoulders and kissed him hard on the mouth, he could smell the carrion breath and taste graveyard dirt on his tongue. He suddenly saw that all his youthful optimism was long gone, that his time had come and gone to waste. That things were not all right and would probably not be all right again.
I’ve had days when I could have raised that deer from the dead like Lazarus, he told the girl.
She linked an arm through his and stood hunched in her thin coat. The wind spun snow into her dark hair. She looked very young. Crosswaithe abruptly realized that she might be the very last one, the last young girl who would stand arm in arm with him with her head leaned against his shoulder. He could smell her hair.
Have you ever drank a strawberry daiquiri? she asked him.
I don’t think so. His breath smoked in the cold air.
What’s in them?
Probably strawberries and some ofthat stuff your daddy made out of old car radiators.
We could be in Key West lying on the hot sand drinking them, she said.
We could be up at Brushy Mountain cranking out Tennessee license plates on a punch press, Crosswaithe said. I know where this conversation is going and you can just forget it.
When I was fourteen or fifteen Daddy used to make me go sit with these old men he was playing poker with. Fat old men in overalls with their tobacco money folded up in the bib pockets and their gut full of beer and Daddy’s whiskey. They stank, I can still smell them. They smelled like snuff and sweat and they all had black greasy dirt under their fingernails. I’d sit and play up to them while Daddy dealt himself aces off the bottom of the deck. When I was sixteen he sold me to a cattle farmer from Flatwoods. I was supposed to be a cherry but Daddy had the last laugh there. What do you think about that?
I don’t think about it at all, Crosswaithe said. I’m not a social worker. And I’m for goddamned sure not an undertaker.
But you do begin to see why I’m not all tore up about his dying, don’t you? They owed me that money for taking care of him. Somebody did. For changing all those dirty bedclothes and putting up with him till he died. I was owed. Do you see?
I might if I believed any of it, he said.
A pickup truck pulled into the parking lot and a short pudgy man in a denim jumper got out of it. He stood for a time behind Crosswaithe’s truck staring at the lashed-down television set. Finally he turned and came on toward the steps.
Hey Carmie.
Hey Chessor.
Whose big TV is that? The man had on a checked cap with huge earflaps and the flaps stood out to the side like a dog’s ears. He seemed a little drunk.
It’s mine, Crosswaithe said.
I need me one like that. Where’d you get it?
I found it where it lost off a truck, Crosswaithe said.
Was there just the one?
Crosswaithe stood and listened to the buzz of alcohol in his head. To the remorseless ticking of a clock that had commenced somewhere inside him, and to a voice that whispered Let’s go, let’s go, what are we wasting time here for? He’d already decided to call Robin but the time wasn’t yet right.
There was just the one, he said.
I need me one. You wouldn’t want to sell it, would you?
It might not even work, Crosswaithe said.
Chessor turned to study it. Hell, I’d make a stock feeder out of it if it didn’t. Use it for something. My dope crop come in pretty well and I need to buy something.
To Crosswaithe the conversation seemed to have turned surreal. He stood looking at his truck. It would probably start, he could just drive away, drive all the way across the country to San Francisco where Robin was.
I better hang on to it, he said.
When Chessor shrugged and went into Big Mama’s Carmie shoved a hand into his pocket and laced her fingers into his. Nobody would ever know, she said. Nobody would even think anything about it. Daddy was always just walking off and staying gone for weeks at a time. Everybody knew he had the cancer, he could just have died somewhere. All we’d have to do is get him up that hollow behind the house and bury him.
Why the hell haven’t you already done it, then? If you needed help any one of these good old boys would have been glad to furnish it.
I was waiting on you, she said.
Like fate.
What?
You were just lying in wait for me like fate. All the time I was going to work and going home and living my dull little life all this was up around a bend. You were just killing time and waiting for me to come along and tote a dead man up a hollow and bury him.
I guess. That’s a funny way to look at it.
How would you look at it?
I never really thought about it. It sort of happened a little at a time.
Well where have you got him?
She leaned her mouth closer to Crosswaithe’s ear though there was no one else around. Her breath was warm. He’s in the freezer, she said.
Of course he is, Crosswaithe said. Í don’t know why I even bothered to ask.
THE PICK WHEN IT STRUCK the frozen earth rang hollowly like steel on stone and sent a shock up Crosswaithe’s arms like high-voltage electricity. Hellfire, he said. He slung the pick off into the scrub brush the hollow was grown up with and took up the shovel. Beneath the black leaves the earth was just whorls of frozen stone and the shovel skittered across it. He leaned on the shovel a moment just feeling the cold and listening to the silence then hurled it into the woods after the pick and turned and walked back down the hollow.
You can forget this digging business. The ground’s frozen hard as a rock.
The girl seemed to be sorting through clothing, packing her choices and discarding the rest, occasionally drinking from a pint of orange vodka. Is there not any way you can get a hole dug? she asked. He’s not very big.
Not unless you’ve got a stick or two of dynamite. Do you?
No.
You had this all planned out so well I thought you might have laid a few sticks by.
No.
I guess we could just burn the goddamned house, Crosswaithe said. At least we’d get warm.
He fell silent a time, thinking. Finally he said, Did he have a gun, did he ever go hunting?
He had a rifle he used to squirrel hunt with. Stillhunt. He’d sit right still under a tree until a squirrel came out.