"Deal."
Jeremy tossed his sleeping bag in the back of the van and closed the tailgate. None of them were buggers or touchy feely kinds of guys, but this seemed to call for more than a mere wave and a quick "Good-bye,"
and they stood around awkwardly, not ready to part but not willing to make that leap and share a genuinely emotional moment.
"Well," Chuck said, shuffling his feet, "I guess we'd better shove off."
"Yeah," Jeremy said.
Dylan nodded.
"Thanks again, guys. I really appreciate it." Barry looked back at Maureen, still standing in the doorway. "Both of us do."
Jeremy smiled. "What are friends for?"
Friends.
Barry realized that he would have to start from scratch and make new friends here. Neither he nor Maureen knew anyone within a five-hundred-mile radius or had relatives in any of the Four Corners states.
Jeremy and Dylan got into the van, and Chuck climbed into the U-Haul's cab. Barry had given Chuck the track's keys last night, as well as the rental paperwork, and he poked his head into the window of the cab.
"It's not due back until Thursday, and it's unlimited mileage, so if there's anything you need to haul or you need a truck for anything, feel free to keep it."
Chuck grinned. "Don't worry. I will."
"Call and let me know when it's back safe. And send me the receipt so I can double-check and make sure they're not ripping me off."
"You got it, chief."
Jeremy started the van, stuck his head out the window, and waved. "Good luck!"
"You're going to need it!" Dylan shouted and cackled.
Barry glanced over at the mailbox, and thought of the dead cat still shoved in there. He walked out to the edge of the driveway, waving, as Maureen yelled "Goodbye!" from the porch.
He watched the truck and van head down the hill, and he continued to stare down the street long after Jeremy's van was gone and the whine of the U-Haul's engine had faded into nothingness.
They held their garage sale the next weekend, taking out an ad in the local newspaper, the Corban Weekly Standard, and spending all day Friday pricing furniture and household items stored in the small bedrooms. They kept a few things--a clock radio, a punch bowl, a kerosene lamp--but most of the stuff that had come with the house was ugly as sin, and they were happy to clear it out. Barry had originally wanted to wait a little longer, so they'd have a better chance to sift through it all and see if there was anything they could use, but Maureen correctly pointed out that they had no room in either their house or the storage unit for all this crap, and the sooner they dumped it the sooner they could start fixing the place up.
"Nothing over ten dollars," she said as Barry placed a strip of masking tape on a hideous formica table and wrote down the price. "Our goal is to get rid of this junk, not make money."
"Yes sir," he said.
Saturday morning, they got up before dawn and started setting things up, laying out some of the smaller junk on metal folding tables that were also for sale, displaying the rest flat on the asphalt of the driveway. The furniture they arranged in such a way as to block off access to the lower deck and the steps that led up to the front door.
The classified ad clearly stated that the garage sale did not start until seven, but cars and trucks were parked on the road in front of the house two hours beforehand, hunched shapes visible in the half-light of the dawning morning, looking at street maps, reading newspapers, sipping thermos coffee. One obese woman, smoking an ash-heavy cigarette and carrying a huge canvas sack, actually got out of her car and walked up the driveway, intending to look over the sale items, but Maureen, putting last-minute prices on an old mop and bucket she'd found in the kitchen closet, told the woman firmly that the garage sale was scheduled to start at seven and it would not open a minute earlier. She could either leave and come back later or go to her car and wait.
It wasn't a garage sale really--they had no garage, not even a carport--but they were putting out quite a bit of stuff, and neither the woman nor any of the other early arrivals left. Instead, they waited patiently. Barry found it hard to believe that all of the ugly furniture and useless household goods that they wanted out of their home, this junk that they were willing to give away for free if necessary, could be of such interest to people.
There was the sound of a high-pitched meow, and Barry looked down to see a black cat bumping against his leg, looking up at him.
"Hey, Barney." He reached down to pet the cat. "How're you doing?"
The animal purred.
Barney had shown up on their lower deck midweek, yowling loudly, and Maureen had fed the cat milk and a can of tuna. The animal looked as though it was starving, and it was so grateful for the food that it had remained even after feeding, hanging around the porch, rubbing against their legs, purring whenever either of them walked out. Since then, it had spent each day hanging around, using the juniper tree next to the house as a ladder to climb from the lower to upper deck, sleeping on the welcome mat outside the front door. Barry had named it Barney, after Fred's best Mend in The Flintstones--a name to which it seemed to be responding.
He guessed that meant the cat was their pet.
He looked over at the mailbox, its metal glinting in the pink rays of the rising sun, and thought of the other cat.
The dead one.
He'd disposed of the body while Maureen was taking her shower last Sunday evening. Jeremy, Chuck, and Dylan had departed in the early morning, and he'd assumed he'd have time to himself during the day when he could take care of the problem, but he and Maureen had been together all morning and afternoon, and it wasn't until she took her shower before dinner that he had the opportunity to sneak out by himself.
Necessity, as they said, was the mother of invention, and for all his worrying about how he was going to get the animal's body out of the mailbox, when the time came and he realized that he would have maybe ten minutes at most to solve the problem, he wrapped his hands in a Hefty garbage bag, shoved them in the mailbox, yanked out the dead cat and turned the bag inside out. He quickly scrubbed out the inside of the mailbox with a sponge drenched in Lysol, and tossed the sponge into the bag as well, leaving the mailbox door open to air out. He quickly tied the Hefty bag shut and dumped it in the metal garbage can beneath the bottom deck before hurrying back inside, washing his hands in the upstairs bathroom and sitting down on the couch. He turned on the TV
just as Maureen emerged from downstairs to make dinner.
Two days later, the new cat showed up.
There was nothing connecting the two. The dead one had been white, this one was black. But their new pet was a constant reminder to him, and when the mail started midweek and he began going out to collect it every afternoon, he found himself thinking about that bloody carcass, about the ants crawling in the empty eyesocket .
He also found himself wondering why he hadn't told his wife about the dead animal. She wasn't a dainty flower, it wasn't anything she couldn't handle. Hell, she was the bug buster of the family, the one who killed every insect that crept into their house. She was the one who chopped up chicken fryers and gutted fish. She probably had a stronger constitution than he did.
So why had he kept it from her?
Why was he still keeping it from her?
He didn't know.
Barry sat down on a metal folding chair behind one of the tables and broke open the rolls of quarters, dimes, and nickels that he'd gotten Thursday from the bank, putting them in his cleaned-out tackle box.
Barney curled around his feet, purring.
Maureen went inside and made some coffee while he made last-minute adjustments, and she soon brought him out a doughnut and a cup of decaf.