“Listen, Sheriff, you got to do what’s right, but my husband bought that thing from another carnival. He’s had it for a long time. It’s just an exhibit. If it was ever anybody it was somebody long ago and ain’t nobody to anyone now.”
“We ought to take fingerprints.”
“I know. And you can. But I’m telling you. It ain’t nothing to nobody but me. If it gets confiscated, I wouldn’t have any way to make a living.”
“Then you’re going to keep the carnival?”
“No. Just the exhibit, if you’ll let me.”
Gidget moved her shoulder slightly and the blanket slid off and showed not only her nipples against the shirt but more of her long legs and the bottoms of her buttocks.
“I’d do almost anything to keep from the red tape, Sheriff.”
“Yeah?” the sheriff said.
“Yeah,” Gidget said, and pushed the blanket completely off and let it rest on the back of the chair.
The sheriff went over and locked the door.
Thirty-eight
Bill’s house wasn’t hard to find, even by moonlight. He had given her a good description. Across from it was a clapboard shack that had once housed a firecracker stand.
Gidget parked the van she had bought in the backyard. She had purchased it with savings Frost had kept in a bank in Enid, Oklahoma. The freezer sat in the rear of the minivan, housing the Ice Man without electricity.
Gidget slipped on gloves, got out with a crowbar, and worked up the back window of the house. When she slid the window open a smell came out that made her swoon. She took deep breaths and went back to the car and got a handkerchief, put it over her nose, and climbed through the window.
Inside, Gidget moved her flashlight around. The bed in there was black with something greasy. She moved over closer and the smell got worse. It was not only a dead smell, but a sweet smell, like decay and sugar boiled together.
In the light of the flash Gidget could see there was a skull bathed in the black goo. Gray hairs were twisted about at the top of the skull. The corpse had been wrapped in trash bags at one point, but rats had gotten into it and ripped them open and exposed the body and eaten parts of it.
Gidget went into the living room. She poked around for thirty minutes before finding a desk drawer with the old woman’s checks in it. She poked around some more until she found an old checkbook and some things with Bill’s mother’s signature on them.
She put the copies of the signature and the checks in the coat pocket and went out the way she had come, closed the window.
She checked the mailbox for grins. Someone had stuck a phone book in there.
She tossed the phone book back inside the mailbox and drove away.
Thirty-nine
After a few months the weather got good and warm and the insurance policies Frost had taken out on himself naming her the beneficiary came through. She cashed the checks at a bank in Tyler, Texas, on a hot day in July. She had already forged the old lady’s name and managed to get those checks cashed at a pawn shop in Beaumont. She hadn’t gotten the full of the money, but the pawn shop hadn’t asked questions. She had worn a black wig during the process and had glued some small, but obvious, black hairs to her upper lip. Under her dress she had slipped her slim waist through a couple of old rubber inner tubes she had purchased at a junkyard. The pawnbroker might remember her, but he would remember a fat black-haired lady with a light mustache, not a blond bombshell.
A few days later she drove by a place in Nacogdoches where she had seen some wetbacks sitting on a curb waiting for gringos to offer them work. There was a nice-looking young Mexican there when she drove up.
“Job?” she said.
“Si.”
She motioned for the young man to get in. He did.
He rode in the passenger seat, stealing looks at her legs, which were long and brown in khaki short-shorts. Her hair was so blond he wondered how it matched the other spot.
He looked back over his shoulder and saw the freezer in the back where the rear seat used to be. He assumed she needed help unloading it. She drove him out in the country to a little house she had rented. She had the young man help her slide a piece of plywood up to the back of the van, then slide the freezer down the plywood into the yard. The young man started when he saw what was inside.
“Okay,” she said. “You understand okay?”
“Si… But not okay.”
“Sure it is.” She reached in the pocket of her shorts and took out a hundred dollar bill and gave it to him. “Okay?”
He thought maybe it was okay.
She went in the house and came out with a hammer. She broke the glass on the freezer. The smell inside was wet, but not foul. It smelled like damp straw. She pointed to the Ice Man and made some motions. The young man swallowed, thought about the hundred, looked at those long legs of hers and that big smile. He took the hammer and tapped out the rest of the glass, got hold of the Ice Man. The body was like a log. It was very heavy. He pulled it out and it didn’t flex or move.
He followed her, carried the log of a body to the falling-down garage. Inside were two sawhorses. She had him get the plywood and put it over the sawhorses for a table. She gave him an electric saw and strung some extension wire from the garage to the house.
She came back and picked up the saw and made a sound with her tongue that was worth watching her make and was meant to sound like a saw. She waved the saw at the Ice Man.
“No,” the Mexican said, and shook his head.
Gidget pulled another hundred from her pocket. The Mexican looked at the hundred hungrily, sighed, relaxed.
He took the hundred and put it with the other and took the saw and cut off the petrified man’s right foot. There was a thing in the corner with a chute on it and it was already plugged up with an extension cord. She pointed that he should put the foot in that. She turned on the switch and he put the foot inside and there was a mechanical gnawing. The foot came out in chips and dust on the ground. The woman stood back as he did it, as if she might accidentally touch the thing and somehow be poisoned.
“It was made by an artist in Cisco, Arkansas,” she said.
The Mexican, not understanding, gave her a quizzical look. She laughed and showed her nice teeth.
He smiled.
“If you spoke English,” she said, “I would give you a bit of advice. Insurance money is better than a wooden man any day. A real man for that matter. Do you hear me, handsome?”
The Mexican looked at her and smiled.
“You’re so polite. You want some pussy, don’t you?”
He grinned some more and went back to work.
When the Mexican was finished, Gidget had him shovel up the chips and dust into a black plastic bag and twist it closed with a wire tie. She invited him in the house and gave him a drink. Before the day was through she had him in the shower, then the bed. For the rest of the day the Mexican wore an expression that said he thought he had fallen into the most wonderful gold mine in existence.
Next morning they left out of there, abandoning the house, the freezer, the chipper, and sawhorses. She
