“Daddy, leave Ray alone. You’ll have time to get to know each other and find out what Ray enjoys eating.”
When Morsel brought Ray some canned pineapple slices, he looked up at her with what David took to be genuine affection.
She turned to David and said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment he stuck his fork back in his food she put a hand in his face and said, “That’s all you can eat!” and laughed. David noticed her cold blue eyes and thought he was beginning to understand her.
To Weldon, she said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’im the trick?”
Weldon stopped his rhythmic lip-pursing. “Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly.
“C’mon, Daddy. Give you a dollar.”
“Okay, Mor, put on the music,” he said with a sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard next to the pie safe and pulled out a small plastic record player and a 45-rpm record, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool Water,” by the Sons of the Pioneers. Weldon swayed to the mournful tune and then seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began: “Keep a-movin’, Dan,/Don’t you listen to him, Dan./He’s a devil not a man.” Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest combover across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the peanut and, with sinuous movements, balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record — “Dan, can you see,/That big green tree,/Where the water’s runnin’ free” — when the peanut fell to the table and Weldon’s chin dropped to stare at it. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and left the room. For a moment it was quiet, and then came the sound of Weldon’s plane cranking up.
“Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record,” Morsel said glumly as she cleared the dishes. Heading for the living room, she added, “Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It don’t look good and it’s expensive.”
David had taken care to copy out the information from Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and put inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed off to the cage fights. David used his cell phone and 411 Connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she claimed to be, his widow. It took two calls, a couple of hours apart. The first try, he got her answering machine: “You know the drilclass="underline" leave it at the beep.” On the second try, he got Ray’s wife. David identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service and Ray’s wife listened only briefly before stating in a firm, clear, and seemingly ungrieving voice that Ray was dead: “That’s what I told the last guy and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said that he had been embezzling from a credit union, left a suicide note, and disappeared.
“I’m doing home health care. Whatever he stole he kept. Killing himself was the one good idea he come up with in the last thirty years. At least it’s kept the government from garnisheeing my wages, what little they are. I been through all this with the other guy that called, and we have to wait for his death to be confirmed before I get no benefits. If I know Ray, he’s on the bottom of the Tuolumne River, just to fuck with my head. I wish I could have seen him one more time to tell him I gave his water skis and croquet set to Goodwill. If the bank hadn’t taken back his airplane, I would have lost my house and been sleeping in my car. Too bad you didn’t meet Ray. He was an A-to-Z crumb bum.”
“I’m terribly sorry to hear about your husband,” David said mechanically.
“I don’t think the government is ‘terribly sorry’ to hear about anything. You reading this off a card?”
“No, this is just a follow-up to make sure your file stays intact until you receive the benefits you’re entitled to.”
“I already have the big one: picturing Ray in hell with his ass en fuego.”
“Ah, you speak a bit of Spanish, Mrs. Coelho?”
“Everybody in Modesto ‘speaks a bit of Spanish.’ Where you been all your life?”
“Washington, D.C.,” David said indignantly.
“That explains it,” Mrs. Coelho said, and hung up.
Of course he had no car when we met, David thought. No need to leave a paper trail by renting cars or buying tickets on airplanes. He’d got done all he needed to get done on the Modesto library computers, where he and Morsel, two crooks, had found each other and gone into business without ever laying eyes on each other.
Before heading to Billings, Morsel had told David how to get to the Indian smallpox burial ground to look for beads. Otherwise, there was nothing to do around here. He wasn’t interested until he discovered the liquor cabinet and by then it was early evening. He found a bottle marked Hoopoe Schnapps, with a picture of a bird on its label, and gave it a try: “Bottoms up.” It went straight to his head. After several swigs, he was unable to identify the bird but he was very happy. The label said that the drink contained “mirabelles,” and David thought, Hey, I’m totally into mirabelles.
As he headed for the burial ground, David was tottering a bit. Rounding the equipment shed, he nearly ran into Weldon Case, who walked by without speaking or apparently seeing him. Behind the ranch buildings, a cow trail led into the prairie, then wound toward a hillside spring that didn’t quite reach the surface, visible only by the greenery above it. Just below that was the place that Morsel had told him about, pockmarked with anthills. The ants, Morsel claimed, carried the beads to the surface, but you had to hunt for them.
David sat down among the mounds and was soon bitten through his pants. He jumped to his feet and swept the ants away, then crouched, peering and picking at the anthills. His thighs soon ached from squatting, but then he found a speck of sky blue in the dirt, a bead. He clasped it tightly in one hand while stirring with the other and flicking away ants. He didn’t think about the bodies in the ground beneath him. By the time it was too dark to see, his palm was filled with Indian beads and he felt elevated and still drunk.
As he passed the equipment shed, he made out first the silhouette of Weldon Case’s Stetson and then, very close, the face of Weldon himself, who gazed at him before speaking in a low voice. “You been in the graves, ain’t you?”
“Yes, to look for beads.”
“You ought not to have done that, feller.”
“Oh? But Morsel said—”
“Look up there at the stars.”
“I don’t understand.”
Weldon reached high over his head. “That’s the crow riding the water snake,” he said, and turned back into the dark.
David was frightened. He went to the house and got into bed as quickly as he could, anxious for the alcohol to fade. He pulled the blanket up under his chin, despite the warmth of the night, and watched a moth batting against an image of the moon in the window. When he was nearly asleep, he saw Morsel’s headlights wheel across the ceiling, then turn off. He listened for the car doors, but it was nearly ten minutes before they opened and closed. He rolled close to the wall and pretended to be asleep, while the front door opened quietly. Once the reverberation of the screen-door spring had died down, there was whispering that came into the bedroom. He felt a shadow cross his face as someone peered down at him. Soon the sound of muffled copulation filled the room, stopped for the time it took to raise a window, then resumed. David listened more and more intently, until Ray said, in a clear voice, “Dave, you want some of this?”
David stuck to his feigned sleep until Morsel laughed, got up, and walked out with her clothes under her arm. “Night, Ray. Sweet dreams.”