With his face close to hers he tried to ascertain was she breathing or not. He couldn’t tell for sure but he didn’t think she was. Her pulse was either faint or absent at her throat and his own heart beat too loud and too fast to be sure.
He ran out of the room and down the hall to the open door of Jesse’s room. Jesse lay with his face toward Bender and the sheet rising and falling in measured respiration.
He went back to the bedroom and squatted in the middle of the floor and watched Lynn. After a while he put his face in his hands and sat there swaying soundlessly and trying to think. What to do. It had grown very quiet. He could hear the rain soft and suspirant on the roof and far off beyond the dam the rumble of thunder like something heavy and out of control rolling downhill toward him. He didn’t care if it was. He couldn’t fathom how or why this had happened. Someone he loved lay still and bloody pillowed on the hearth and no hands but his had touched her. He felt strange in his skin, it was light and uncomfortable, like some illfitting costume he had struggled into, and he did not know how to get out of it. He divined that he was somewhere he’d had no intention of going, that he was someone he did not want to be.
He got up and stripped the sheet off the bed and laid it spread out on the carpet and lifting Lynn by the arms he dragged her to the center of it. He lowered her gently onto it. Her head kept lolling back loosely as if it would fold beneath her and he had to adjust her head with a foot while he positioned her. He folded the sheet about her like a shroud and straightened and just stood for a moment staring down at her. He stooped and picked her up and cradled her in his arms and turned her so that she was draped over his left shoulder. He went cautiously past Jesse’s door and out of the house and into the rain.
He’d decided that somehow he had to get her across the garden fence and across the chain-link fence and back to the graveyard. Then he could place her in one of the empty graves and maybe cave the sides in on her. Only one body to a grave, who’d look in an empty grave? He’d tell Ruthie they had had an argument and Lynn had driven off and left him. Nobody was going to buy that story long but maybe it would give him enough time to think of something.
He was halfway across the garden staggering in the mud and vines when he stopped dead-still. He stood in an attitude of listening. Well I’m a son of a bitch, he said. He could hear a car engine toiling up the hill. He turned with her. He stared in disbelief. A slow wash of headlights coming up the hill like the very embodiment of ill luck. His face had an angry, put-upon look as if the world would not leave him alone long enough for him to get on with the things he had to do. Then all at once he came to himself and half ran, half fell, into the nightshade and honeysuckle with her. He pulled vines over her as best he could and struggled up and ran into the shadows keeping the house between himself and the headlights. When he came around the corner of the house the car was sitting parked in his driveway with the door sprung open and a dark silhouette getting out. Rain was falling slant in the headlights and he could hear the disjointed crackling of a police scanner.
What is it? Bender asked. His voice sounded like a harsh rasp and he felt he could not bear just one more thing. Not one more thing. He felt some enormous dark weight settling over him and smothering him. He wondered that he could place left foot in front of right, string one word in a coherent sequence after another.
Of course it was Bellwether. He saw Bender as he closed the door of the cruiser. Bender?
What is it?
Do you not know enough to get in out of the rain?
Bender raked his wet hair out of his eyes. Water coursed down his face. He grinned weakly.
What the hell are you doing out in this mess?
Bender took a deep breath. He forced himself to think. I thought lightning struck something. It came a hell of a clap of thunder and the power went off a second then came back on. I thought it might have hit my pump but I reckon not. A tree over there I guess.
Listen, Bender, I’m sorry as hell to come out here this late, but they want those papers served. I’ve got them right here. You want to go in the house where it’s light and I’ll read them to you?
I think not, Bender said. Leave them and I’ll read the goddamned things myself.
I told you all this before. Sometimes I have to do things I don’t want to do, and this is one of the times. You know I got to read them to you. Now get in the car.
Bender did as he was told. He pulled the door closed and sat clasping the door handle loosely with his right hand. Bellwether turned on the dome light and read the papers. They might have been Sanskrit, Latin, so little did Bender comprehend. He sat staring at Lynn’s face so pale in the wet black honeysuckle and not one coherent word did he hear.
That’s about it. This is where it stops. You are ordered off this property by ten o’clock tomorrow morning or suffer whatever consequences failure to comply entails.
Like getting my ass carried off it?
Like getting your ass carried off if need be. When you roughed that feller up or whatever you done you pissed them off.
Bender opened the door and started to get out. All right, he said.
All right what?
Just all right. Ill be gone.
They’ll give you sufficient time to get your property and personal effects moved. Listen, Bender, you fought and you lost. Let it go. For what it’s worth I’m sorry.
Bender was standing by the car. Sorry is not worth a damn to me, he said. He shoved the door but Bellwether leaned across the seat fast and caught it and pushed it open hard. The edge of the door caught Bender on the hip and he staggered back.
Let me tell you this straight out, Bellwether said. I’ll be here myself to see about your wife and kid. You do what you want. A man wants carried out can damn sure find somebody to carry him. But I’m escortin your family away from any trouble myself. Are we right clear on that?
Bender stood rubbing his hip. He didn’t say anything.
Are we right clear on that?
Yes.
All right then. Bellwether eased the car in gear and pulled the door closed. He had scarcely begun to turn in the drive before Bender was moving rapidly toward the corner of the house. Out of the lights he stood leaning for a minute against the side of the house with the rain from the eaves falling on him until he heard the car going down the hill and then he struck out for the garden.
When he reached both-handed into the honeysuckle and felt nothing he gave a sort of grunt of dismay or disbelief and felt all about the dark vines. He was looking around wildly when lightning bloomed and she was standing by the fence in the rain specterlike in her funeral windings and her hair plastered to her skull and her eyes closed just swaying slightly then gone in abrupt dark and Bender raised his face to the heavens and gave a cry scarcely human, a hoarse unarticulated scream of outrage and horror and such utter despair as should have stitched a caesura in the wheeling of the earth on its axis.
He whirled and ran back toward the house and fell once and got up and went on. When he came to himself he was sitting on the couch in the living room with water dripping out of the cuffs of his jeans and pooling on the floor.
He got up and methodically began to search the kitchen. Cabinet drawer to cabinet drawer leaving each standing open in its turn as he went on to the next and finally the cabinets themselves. In the cabinet over the oven he found a pint of peach brandy three-quarters full and went with it back to the couch and sat down. He drank the brandy while the night drew on and rain blew against the windows and lightning wrought the mimosa in stark relief until finally the storm passed over and the thunder dimmed, away. All this time by an act of sheer will he had not thought of Lynn at all.