There had been cuts on her forehead and cheek he’d worked on earlier and now he leant and touched them delicately with a forefinger. He unpocketed from the limegreen smock he wore a tube of tinted cream and carefully daubed the wounds. Studied the effect and wiped away a minuscule amount with a tissue and seemed satisfied.
Within a few minutes he had her dressed in black underwear and a pink evening gown, and he caught her up in his arms and went with her to another room. A great amphitheater of a room with sloping ceilings and dark wooden beams and a hardwood floor of oak pegged with cherry. An orchestra played softly from concealed speakers.
He placed her on the divan with a grunt and stood for a moment breathing hard. He watched her. Her head stayed erect for a moment, held by the divan at the back; then it tiltedforward and lolled loosely sideways. He leant and straightened it, and it lolled the other way, and he stayed it with a pillow.
He seated himself beside her and clasped her hand. For a time they just sat there listening to the music. He chatted away at her, and her face wore a slightly quizzical look, as if she couldn’t quite fathom what he was talking about.
Brandy? he asked her. He got up and from a sideboard brought a bottle of brandy and two snifters. He moved a small table near her knees and set her snifter atop it and sat with his own cupped in his small white hands. After a time he drank it, and then he drank hers as well.
The sourceless music wafted about the room. That’s Mahler, he told her. I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Mahler. His voice gently chided her lack of erudition.
Gustav Mahler was an Austrian composer from around the turn of the century. This is a cycle of songs called the Kindertotenlieder. Translated, that means ‘Songs of Dead Children.’ Don’t you think that’s a nice touch of irony?
He went on lecturing the dead girl for some time about classical music and various composers and then he seemed stricken by some emotion. Overcome perhaps by the music or the brandy or her perfumed presence. The room swam, veered like a warping world with its supports suddenly jerked away. He placed her hand on his thigh and when it slid away replaced it. He already had an arm about her shoulders, and now he dropped a hand to cup her breast. He drew her to him with a stricken urgency and buried his face in the soft white curve of her throat. Across his shoulder the dead girl with her unfocused eyes stared out across the great empty room as if she watched something from across a vast gulf of distance orwas straining to hear some faint and faroff sound.
The clapboard house sat in a clearing surrounded by dense trees. Unlit, silent. A pale moon clocking through ragged clouds wrought his shadow a twisted dwarf beckoning Tyler on. He didn’t know to where. When he came into the yard, the first thing he saw was a German shepherd watchdog chained to a clothesline. The dog was lying at the farthest reach of its tether. Tyler stopped. He stared at the dog in bemused wonder. It was lying in a pool of blood that looked black in the moonlight and its eyes were open and its lips drawn back over its teeth in a perpetual snarl. He stood hesitantly, then glanced toward the dark house and stepped around the dog and up a stoop of stacked rocks and hammered at the door.
Just silence answered him.
I need help, Tyler called.
The voice, when it came, came instantly, muffled but alert. You’ll by God need some shortly if you don’t get off my porch. Get away from that door.
I’m lost. I just need to talk to you a minute.
I was just sittin here thinkin about blowin a hole in my front door with this shotgun. You standin on the steps there, you liable to get hit.
Tyler stepped to the side of the door. Open up a minute.
There was silence within. A flare of dim light. Then a covert stirring.
The door sprang inward as if under the onslaught of enormous winds and an overalled figure stood above him clutching the door in one hand and a doublebarreled shotgun in theother. Tyler could smell kerosene, and behind the man a yellow light dished and wavered in its globe of glass. The man’s face was florid and unshaven and he looked halfdemented. How is it all you crazy son of a bitches always know how to find me? Out of all the people in this round world and half of it covered in trees, why is it you fools keep wanderin up out of the same goddamn woods into my front yard?
Put your gun up. I don’t aim to hurt anybody.
Put up yourn. And I shore can’t say the same about myself.
Tyler glanced down. He’d forgotten the useless rifle. It don’t shoot, he said. I jammed it somehow.
How many of you crazy sons of bitches is it out here?
Tyler considered. Just one, he said.
It’s folks has to work for a livin. Has to sleep. All of us can’t get by runnin crazy in the woods all night long.
Who else was here? Somebody’s killed your watchdog.
No shit.
Granville Sutter’s after me. I think he’s crazy.
You think he’s crazy? I know for a fact he is. I can guarangoddamntee he’s crazy as a shithouse mouse and getting farther into the territories all the time. And it’s a thousand wonders I ain’t layin here dead as my dog is yonder. If Sutter hadn’t of had the sense to stay away from the winders, Fenton Breece would be tyin a necktie around his neck.
He aims to kill me if he can.
You need to get the hell on away from here. As long as you’re somewhere else I’m thinking he’ll be too. I’ve just about had my bait of this crazy mess.
Who are you?
I’m Sandy Barnett. I know who you are. Sutter told me andthat’s all I need to know about you.
I’m trying to get to Sheriff Bellwether. Have you got a car?
I got one but it’s broke. All I got is a team and wagon.
Take me to Ackerman’s Field.
Not likely. I’m a Godfearin man. I ain’t messed up with you two and don’t plan to be. I know for a fact he shot my dog in cold blood, and no tellin what you done. Diggin up graves and everthing else from what he was ravin. And aside from all that I don’t believe this is the night I want blowed off a wagonseat with a 30-06.
Then let me in awhile. I’m about wore out. You want to talk about graverobbing, somebody needs to check out Fenton Breece. He’s crazy, sick somehow, the things he’s doing to dead folks. Open a few graves and you’ll see what I mean.
Tyler could hear him breathing. Wind caught in the glass globe of the lamb and behind Barnett the room seemed to be in motion.
The man did not speak, nor did he move to unblock the door.
All right then. At least show me the way the railroad tracks are.
The man just pointed mutely into the night and when Tyler looked the way he pointed there was only darkness.
That way? Hellfire. That’s the way I came.
I can’t help that. They’ve always been there, and unless they moved em they’re there still. Now head out. And the next man prowls into my yard tonight they goin to have to drag him out.
He stepped backward and the door slammed to in Tyler’s face. A wooden latch fell with a sound of finality. Through the cracks faint yellow light, remote, tantalizing, inaccessible. Tyler turned and trudged back down the stone steps into the yard. The light was blown out and the windows went secret and still and black and there was only the moonlight foreign and oblique. He went on toward the woods. Halfway across the yard he turned.
How far is it?
Nothing.
How far?
The house seemed vacant, some old place with newspapered walls and caving roof he’d stumbled across in the Harrikin long ago.
Tyler seemed suddenly taken by a fit of rage. He was fairly screaming. Goddamn you, he shouted. I never made these crazy sons of bitches. None of it’s my doing. They’re just put here for me to contend with. They’ve killed my sister and tried to kill me, and I don’t even know if she’s buried or not.
He could feel the wet earth of the yard through his jeans. He’d fallen to his knees. He was almost sobbing. As if in prayer or remonstration with whatever gods held dominion over these territories no one wanted. He kept thinking about Corrie but the face that kept coming to mind was her freckled child’s face as if her life had stopped at this innocent point and none of this had yet happened.