“He just says what is, and you know it’s true. I come see you or I’m dead. And not dead easy, either, but very hard.”
“Do you know what he’s done?” Billy asked.
“No, sir. And don’t you tell me.”
“There’s two of us now who know he’s real. We can corroborate each other’s story.”
“Don’t even talk that way.”
“Don’t you see, he’s made a mistake.”
“I wish I could be his mistake,” Cottle said, “but I’m not. You think too much of me, and shouldn’t.”
“But he’s got to be stopped,” Billy said.
“Not by me. I’m nobody’s hero. Don’t you tell me what he’s done. Don’t you dare.”
“Why shouldn’t I tell you?”
“That’s your world. It isn’t mine.”
“There’s just one world.”
“No, sir. There’s a billion of them. Mine’s different from yours, and that’s the way it’s gonna stay.”
“We’re sitting here on the same porch.”
“No, sir. It looks like one porch, but it’s two, all right. You know that’s true. I see it in you.”
“See what?”
96
“I see the way you’re a little like me.”
Chilled, Billy said, “You can’t see anything. You won’t even look at me.”
Ralph Cottle met Billy’s eyes again. “Have you seen the woman’s face in the jar like a jellyfish?”
The conversation had suddenly switched from the main track to a strange spur line.
“What woman?” Billy asked.
Cottle knocked back another slug from the pint. “He says he’s had her in the jar three years.”
“Jar? Better stop pouring down that nose paint, Ralph. You’re not making much sense.”
Cottle closed his eyes and grimaced, as if he could see what he now described. “It’s a two-quart jar, maybe bigger, with a wide-mouth lid. He changes the formaldehyde regularly to keep it from clouding.”
Beyond the porch, the sky was crystalline. High in the clear light, a lone hawk circled, as clean as a shadow.
“The face tends to fold into itself,” Cottle continued, “so you don’t at first see a face. It’s like something from the sea, clenched yet billowy. So he gently shakes the jar, gently swirls the contents, and the face… it blossoms.”
The grass is sweet and green across the lawn, then taller and golden where nature alone tends to it. The two grasses produce distinct fragrances, each crisp and pleasant in its own way.
“You recognize an ear first,” said Ralph Cottle. “The ears are attached, and the cartilage gives them shape. There’s cartilage in the nose, too, but it hasn’t held its shape very well. The nose is just a lump.”
From the shining heights, the hawk descended in a narrowing gyre, describing silent and harmonious curves.
“The lips are full, but the mouth is just a hole, and the eyes are holes. There’s no hair, ‘cause he cut only from one ear to the other, from the top of the brow to the bottom of the chin. You can’t tell it’s a woman’s face, and not a man’s. He says she was beautiful, but there’s no beauty in the jar.”
Billy said, “It’s just a mask, latex, a trick.”
“Oh, it’s real. It’s as real as terminal cancer. He says it was the second act in one of his best performances.”
“Performances?”
97
“He has four photos of her face. In the first, she’s alive. Then dead. In the third, the face is partly peeled back. In the fourth, her head is there, her hair, but the soft tissue of her face is gone, nothing but bone, the grinning skull.”
From graceful gyre to sudden plunge, the hawk knifed toward the tall grass.
The pint told Ralph Cottle that he needed fortification, and he drank a new foundation for his crumbling courage.
Following a fumy exhalation, he said, “The first photo, when she was alive, maybe she was pretty like he says. You can’t tell because… she’s all terror. She’s ugly with terror.”
The tall grass, previously motionless in the fixative heat, stirred briefly in a single place, where feathers thrashed the stalks.
“The face in that first picture,” Cottle said, “is worse than the one in the jar. It’s a lot worse.”
