“Why are you talking like that? You’re not Jewish.”
“What should I do in Armenian? Starve?”
“Kitty-”
“Oh, God, Evan, how could you be anybody’s husband? How? You’re all these different people all at once. You couldn’t be a husband, Evan. I couldn’t marry you.”
She ran out of words, and I started to say something but nothing came out. We sat there for awhile and looked now and then at each other and now and then at the walls. I had some wine. She had some wine. I opened another bottle. She opened the window. I went to see if Minna was sleeping. Minna was sleeping. I came back and sat down and had another glass of wine.
I said, “I thought you wanted to get married.”
“So did I.”
“Are you going to marry him? That dishwasher?”
“He’s an assistant cook.”
“Whatever he is.”
“I said no. He asked me again, and I said no, that I couldn’t marry him. He wanted to know why. I almost told him. You’re a very boring person, you’re sweet but you’re boring. That is what I almost told him, but I thought, oh, why be cruel to him? It wasn’t his fault that he was boring. I told him I was sterile. You would have thought I told him I had syphilis or something. Do you remember Rima? You used to call her the Bird Girl?”
“I remember.”
“They’re seeing each other now. He’ll propose and I know she’ll say yes, she’s really desperate. And I’m sure they’ll have fifteen children all with their noses running and they’ll be very happy together.”
“I don’t understand, Kitty.”
She looked at me, shrugged. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t know. I couldn’t marry him because he was too dull and I can’t marry you because you’re not dull enough. And I’m twenty-five years old, and that’s one of those dumb ages that seems as though something major is due to happen to you. Sometimes it seems young and sometimes late at night it seems very old, and, well, my mind does weird things.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Twenty-five isn’t so goddamned old, is it?”
“It’s a hell of a lot older than fourteen.”
“You crazy son of a bitch,” she said, and I laughed, and she laughed, and I reached for her and she only hesitated for a minute.
A little later she said, “Hey, you nut. You would make the worst husband in the world.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“I know I’m right. You’d get up in the middle of dinner and go halfway around the world to start a revolution. The worst husband in the world. But you know something else?”
“What?”
“You make a pretty groovy lover.”
“And that’s just as good?”
“Well, it’s not as permanent. It isn’t what my mother has been wishing would turn up for me for the past twenty-five years. But there are times,” she said, burrowing close, “when it is very nice indeed.”
That about covers it. The Chief turned up within a week, and as usual he wasn’t wearing a plaid hat. I told him that Samuel Lonestar Bowman and Knanda Ndoro were both irretrievably dead. He was sorry to hear it, but said it was as he had anticipated.
“Never should have sent you in the first place,” he said. “Good money after bad. Damned foolishness. Wasting you on a mission like that one.”
He asked about Sheena, said he’d had reports that the terrorist band had been dispersed. I let him draw the facts out of me – that Bowman and Knanda Ndoro had died at Sheena’s hands, that I had been captured by the cannibals, and that I had put Sheena and her crew out of commission in the process of escaping. If I had just come out and said this it would have sounded like something Hercules did after he cleaned out those stables, but instead I let the Chief say it, and I sort of nodded in agreement from time to time.
“Capital,” he said finally. “Those terrorists were a threat, you know. To the stability of the present regime. So you might say that you’ve helped keep the Modonoland government in business.”
“Er,” I said.
“And Lord knows,” he said, refilling our glasses, “that they need all the help they can get. As a matter of fact they may be a lost cause. There’s been a heavy run of arms into the country in the last week or so. The liberal opposition is looking stronger than ever. A new influx of funds, it seems. From Moscow or Peking, you would think, but our so-called experts admit they don’t know the source.”
I did, though.
Oh.
I almost forgot.
Back in the cemetery, with me standing there like a dead tree and Knanda Ndoro ready to chop me down. With the shovel whistling through the air at me.
I ducked. Just barely, and with no room to spare, but this was one of those instances in which a miss and a mile are of equal value. The Glorious Retriever missed, and I guess he hadn’t expected to miss – humility, as he himself had attested, was not his long suit. Anyway, his momentum sent him stumbling, and perhaps the opium in his system had an effect and perhaps it didn’t, but in any case he took a series of shuffling steps and wound up in the grave.
The shovel landed on top of him.
More precisely, the business end of the shovel conked him on the top of the head. I don’t know if he was unconscious when he fell into the pit or no, but he was certainly out colder than a refrigerator-freezer after the shovel got him.
We couldn’t wake him up. Plum didn’t see why we ought to, and I could see her point, but oddly enough I couldn’t work up much of a hate for the Retriever. He had saved our lives, whether or not he had intended to do so permanently. I couldn’t completely shirk a feeling of obligation to him. And, on a more pragmatic level, his presence in Modonoland could only be awkward.
So what I wanted to do was get him out of the grave and onto his feet and away from there.
None of which I managed. He simply wouldn’t wake up. I called his name and slapped his face and did everything I could think of. Nothing had any discernible effect whatsoever. He was out and he stayed out.
And it was getting light.
I tried lifting him, and that didn’t work either. He was too big and too heavy and too limp to budge. So I lifted the strongbox instead, which was easier, and Plum and I got out of the cemetery and carried the loot and the shotgun and the flashlight and the shovel back to the Penner house.
I bought smelling salts at a chemist’s shop, and we went back to the cemetery around ten in the morning. But we couldn’t get close to the grave, because somebody was already there.
The gravediggers. The three drunken gravediggers, passing a pint bottle back and forth, and laughing inanely, and staggering. And filling in that empty grave all the way to the top.
When they left, finally, arms linked and voices raised in song, I walked over to the grave. In the daylight I could read the little headstone. Gerhard Herdig, it said, and the year he was born and the year he died. I subtracted the one from the other and established that Herdig had lived to be eighty-two, which was more than the years of Bowman and the Retriever added together.
“May he rest in peace,” Plum said. “Can we go now, Evan?”
I couldn’t write on Gerhard Herdig’s stone. But I knew what the Retriever would want, because he had come right out and told me. I stood at his graveside and bowed my head and spoke Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph into the still morning air.
Under a wide and starry sky,
Dig my grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.