“Blue. Now.”
“Where’re the kids?”
“Out,” she said. Blue wasn’t sure if she was referring to the children or issuing him another order. He breathed deeply through his mouth, having forgotten again, in the confusion of the moment, that this was the only way he could breathe. Dizziness seemed ready to engulf him.
“Come with me, Mr. Simpson,” Fortney said nervously. “I’ll help you load your things.”
“Loretta,” Blue said. He could hear a whine in his own voice, which surprised and embarrassed him.
“Go, Blue,” she said, quieter now. He detected a trace of pity, a tenderness that he thought he might leverage to his advantage.
“Let’s just you and me have a glass of tea and talk about it.” He sat down in the chair closest to the door.
“No, Blue. You have to go.”
“I don’t feel so good, you know. It’s been a hard day, Loretta. I need to rest.”
“Sir,” Fortney said, “I’m afraid you have to leave. I’ll help you.”
“You’ll be hearing from Hef Givens in the morning,” Loretta said.
“Hef Givens?”
“My lawyer.”
“Hef? What do you mean Hef Givens is your lawyer? Hef is my friend.”
He remembered suddenly, vividly, the last time he and Hef had gone hunting, both of them squatting in the bushes, the predawn light shrouding them, their breaths misting in the November air, both of them waiting, waiting, waiting for the bucks to appear on the meadow by the lake. He loved such moments, rare though they were, when he and another man, who also understood the dignity and beauty and suspense of such stillness, crouched together, watching and waiting patiently.
“It’s over,” she said.
“Come along, sir,” the deputy said, his voice rising again in a way that reminded Blue of Tildon. Where was Tildon? Where were the girls?
Fortney put his hand on Blue’s arm, a place where Blue had blistered himself that very day when he dropped the torch as he fell to the concrete floor. Blue knocked the boy’s hand away and stood up.
“Mr. Simpson,” the deputy said, unsnapping the button on his holster. Later he would swear under oath that he didn’t aim for the man’s back but for the fireplace, though after the trial he would sometimes remember or, in a feverish night sweat, dream it differently, would see his revolver pointed at a spot just below Blue Simpson’s left shoulder blade, would feel again his finger squeezing the slightly oily steel of the trigger. But right now Fortney only saw Blue glance down at the front of his pants. A small dark circle growing wider and wider. The man’s swollen lips seemed to curl with the dismissive contempt Fortney had put up with his whole damn existence. Blue shoved him aside and took two long strides toward his wife.
It was now dusk, and the lights were not yet on in the house. Loretta was surprised when her husband moved toward her, suddenly blocking the window. The shadowy outline of him suddenly reminded her of the young man-not even twenty, with a thin fuzz of reddish blond scruff on his chin and jaw-who had charmed her when she was at college in Denton. The night they’d met, Blue was standing on the edge of the dance floor. He’d offered his hand. She’d taken it, and he twirled her quickly through a double-time waltz, and she’d smiled, thanked him for the dance, and started away, but then the next song began-a slow melancholy number, evocative, lovely-and he’d pulled her close, held her against him, and they’d moved in slow, swaying circles, and just like that he’d kissed her on the lips, a feather touch, then leaned back and smiled.
As he crossed their living room now, Blue seemed impossibly young again and determined to claim Loretta’s last dance. But then she saw his face clearly. That left eye disfigured. She could see again the filament of steel lodged in the iris-like a tiny jagged flower. There it was, and then gone. She heard the sound of the shot, which echoed in the small room and kept ringing in her ears days later. Then she no longer saw Blue’s features, just his distinct silhouette falling toward her, eclipsing the fading sun.
The Funeral Bill by Jason Deyoung
FROM New Orleans Review
AT ONE TIME the landlord Jeffers had been a busy person, but not anymore. Now he had time to think, and he had recently decided that he was going to die. His stomach was no longer the taut paunch it had been. Food passed his tongue joylessly. He no longer lusted. His feet and legs often went numb, and he’d taken to massaging isopropyl alcohol on them to regain some feeling. The smoke from his pipe remained one of the only things that seemed right-perhaps the craving for vice was the last thing to leave a person. Just before his mother passed away she would only eat soft candies. Jeffers’s death wouldn’t be immediate: he wouldn’t pass away today or tomorrow. It just landed upon him, pressed upon him, that his own passing was imminent, and he had no idea what to expect in the afterward.
Alone on the front porch in a frayed and stretched lawn chair, eyes closed, he imagined funerals. His tenant’s wife had died a few days ago. He pictured her supine like all bodies he’d seen in a coffin-clenched eyes, somewhat enlarged nostrils, mouth gently closed as if asleep. Peaceful rest. He remembered the summer evening years before when he’d had a body removed from Ashcross. The renter’s daughter draped across her father’s swollen body, weeping “Daddy… Daddy.” Her little fists sinking into her father’s stomach, her fingers groping at his shirt. The mortician’s assistant, grinding his teeth, pulled the little girl off the body, rending the moist stitching around the shirt’s collar. The renter didn’t appear as if he slept. In the near-subterraneous light, gape-jawed with eyes half closed and unfocused, his waxy face was constricted into a rictus articulating the ineffable of the beyond. Or perhaps the lack thereof. He didn’t look heaven-bound. If Jeffers had not gone when the rent stopped coming in, he wondered how long the kid would have stayed there, caring for her father’s decomposing body.
Jeffers envied those who had seen a person die. He believed they understood what he didn’t-what death brought. He asked the renter’s little girl what had happened when her father passed. Without a tear in her eye, she said she didn’t know. She hadn’t seen it.
This envy had taken root when his son, James, witnessed his mother pass away while Jeffers was out making a deal with a man named White who was ignorant enough to believe a handshake was still as good as a notarized contract. For James, watching his mother’s passing had been such a powerful thing he’d gone into the seminary. He now ran a church out of the storefront of an old third-rate grocery in the lower part of the state; its sanctuary still smelled of hoop cheese and day laborers. (Jeffers thought his son would have been better off reopening the grocery.) But James had witnessed many of his parishioners die, some of old age, others from disease. Each time his son told him of another death, Jeffers’s resentment grew. He never asked his son what it was like, afraid he’d get an earful of capricious religious nonsense, a tangle of words that would make him feel stupid.
He opened his eyes to stop the images and looked at the clear plastic freezer bags filled with water and four pennies hanging from the upper porch railings. Craziest thing he’d ever heard-a suggestion from James, an article he’d sent Jeffers on how to ward off flies. It said to hang plastic freezer bags with pennies and water outside to keep flies away. It worked. But as the sunlight shot through them, casting a liquid-copper glow, he thought of the coins once used to cover the eyes of the deceased. He spat over the porch railing. He put his unlighted pipe in his mouth.