"Not hard. Alive. And the living drive harder bargains than the dead." Books rinsed his face and dried it with a towel. "I'll have fifty dollars now."
Beckum pinched the tip of his nose. "That's too high. If I deliver a stone and give you fifty, I'm cutting it too thin. I've done some arithmetic, and my guess is no more than three hundred will want to view the remains."
"Three hundred? You underestimate me."
"Shoup and Norton have been a great help, I must say. If you could manage to shoot—"
"I'll see what I can do."
"Thirty's my top, sir."
"Forty. Run an ad in the paper."
Beckum sighed and reached for his wallet. "Very well, forty it is." He handed Books two twenties. "I'll set my stonecutter to work on the inscription at once."
"Two days or sooner," Books repeated. "I am running out of time."
The undertaker put away his wallet and shook a solemn head. "I am grieved to hear it, Mr. Books. I am deeply grieved."
He knew the comings and goings of the house as well by now as the comings and goings of his pain. The boy was out for the evening. He could hear the mother running water in the bathroom down the hall. He gave himself a whore's bath at the washbowl daily, but he would need a real one soon, in a tub, and doubted he could do it by himself.
The salaries paid to the Prince of Wales out of the British treasury add up to $680,000 a year, and he has a private income besides. Nevertheless Andrew Carnegie, the laird of Skibo castle, could buy him out several times over and still have enough left to give away a library or two when he felt like it.
That reminded him. Taking his time, he pulled himself out of the armchair and, working slowly along the brass rail at the foot of the bed, reached the chiffonier, opened the top drawer, and counted his money. There was two hundred dollars from the sale of his horse, and Beckum's forty. And the photographer, Skelly, owed him a portrait and another fifty, plus what he had in his wallet. At this rate he would soon be another Andrew Carnegie.
He closed the drawer, worked his way back to the chair, and taking up the newspaper again, read two filler items:
Rumors that Professor Garner, the monkey talk man, was dangerously ill and in distress in Africa have been denied. He is pursuing his studies in Simian conversation as enthusiastically as ever, and is enduring the deprivations and dangers of life in a savage country with the hope of gleaning from the chatter of the apes some slight addition to the facts of science.
Bishop Potter's proposal to organize a vigilance committee of five thousand to inquire into the causes of New York's rottenness is causing Tammany to tremble in its shoes. Poor old Tammany is having a hard time to bluff through these days.
He was ten years old and riding in a spring wagon behind a team of mules with his grandfather, who was driven occasionally to desperate undertakings. They were making a journey of forty miles and two days across San Saba County to the farm of relatives, cousins. His grandmother had three months previously gone to visit the cousins, and while there had died of a fever and been buried. For the three months of his bereavement his grandfather had brooded. It was not right that his wife should lie in alien soil; he wanted her home again, near him, on the home place. He could not eat, would not rest; he talked to himself. And so, finally, old man and boy set out upon their journey. When they reached the cousins, they dug up the coffin, a plain box of gumwood, and hoisting it into the wagon, started homeward. The sun was hot, the way endless. On the first day the lid and sides of the coffin began to swell. By midmorning of the second day the bloating of the corpse had attained such proportions that nails and gumwood could not contain it. The lid burst open. A great groan escaped, and a stench. They stopped the team and hammered at the lid, in the heat and stench they jumped up and down on it, they danced upon it, ki-yi-ing like crazed Comanches, desperate grandfather and terrified grandson, until they were exhausted, until they vomited, but to no avail. They drove on and, detouring to a village, applied to the blacksmith for help. The smith a mighty man was he, and the coffin was soon sealed tight with iron bands. They took it home then, and reburied her in the shade of a live-oak tree, and put up a simple wooden cross, and his grandfather, whose name was Galen Books, would sit by the grave in the evenings, and chew tobacco, and explain to his wife what they had done, and why.
He burst from dreams and covers, groaning, to sit bolt upright in bed. His longjohns were damp with sweat, but in a moment he was cold, and shivered. He groped for the bottle but could not find it.
With an oath he pulled the lamp chain, blinked in the light, and drinking from the bottle, grimacing at the bitterness, capped it. He looked at his watch, a good gold Elgin with a small diamond centered in the case cover. It was not quite two o'clock in the morning. The last dose had enabled him to sleep for less than an hour.
But this one did not relieve him. Pain grew into agony. The disease was ravaging him now, feeding on its cells to create new cells, extending itself throughout the lower third of his trunk. Pins, needles, scissors, knives stabbed him, were withdrawn, and stabbed again and again. He let himself slide from the bed to the floor and placed his forearms on the arms of the leather chair and rocked his pelvis back and forth as though he were a child riding a hobbyhorse. He yearned to cry out, to wake the house, the town, the world, to the enormity of his suffering.
"Oh Jesus," he whimpered. "Sweet Jesus. What have I done to deserve this? Oh, I can't go on much longer. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ."
The laudanum failed him. Staggering, he stumbled to the closet, swept the curtain aside, found the whiskey on the shelf, uncorked, and poured it down. He put the bottle back and waited, trembling, to be eased.
Suddenly his stomach convulsed. Reeling forward, falling to his knees, he jerked out the slop-jar and vomited, ridding himself not only of the remnants of his supper but the laudanum—he realized too late—as well. And then, emptied, on hands and knees, head hanging over his own spew, teeth chattering with cold, in that animal posture he knew fear for the first time in his adult life.
"Oh God," he whispered. "Oh my God I am afraid to die."
He closed his eyes in fear. Out of nowhere the second line came to him, and in his mind he added it to the first: "Weave a circle round him thrice/ And close your eyes with holy dread…"
He opened them. On the frosted lampshade by the bed, blue, brown, and green birds of paradise seemed to flap contemptuous wings at him.
Fear convulsed to rage. Rage endowed him with a strength he had not felt for days. Erupting up, he snatched the glass compote from the table and hurled it wildly, shattering it against the wall of lilies.
He was unappeased. Lurching to the closet, he tore one of the Remingtons from its holster and, hanging onto the curtain rod, threatened the ceiling with the weapon.
He thought: God! You hear me, God? Maybe I don't believe in you, but you damned well better believe in me! J. B. Books! See this gun? I kill with it! You kill, too, but I make a slicker job of it. I kill bad men, you kill good. I have reason, you don't. You are killing me hellish slow, and I do not deserve such treatment. You wrong me, and I will not be wronged. So let us have it out, God. Face me! Be a man and face me now if you have the guts—stand and draw or back off! God damn you, God, throw down on me and kill me now or let me live!
She did not know him. He did not know her.
To surprise him, she had entered without knocking. He sat in shirt sleeves in a leather armchair on a crimson pillow trimmed with golden tassels.
They haunted each other.
"Johnny?"