‘I don’t see any rats,’ Virgil said suddenly.
And there were none to be seen; only the gulls. Franklin tried to remember a time when he had brought the Crappie to the dump and seen no rats. He couldn’t. And he didn’t like that, either.
‘He must have put out poison bait, huh, Frank?’
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Franklin said. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
7
After supper, they let Ben go up and see Matt Burke. It was a short visit; Matt was sleeping. The oxygen tent had been taken away, however, and the head nurse told Ben that Matt would almost certainly be awake tomorrow morning and able to see visitors for a short time.
Ben thought his face looked drawn and cruelly aged, for the first time an old man’s face. Lying still, with the loosened flesh of his neck rising out of the hospital johnny, he seemed vulnerable and defenseless. If it’s all true, Ben thought, these people are doing you no favors, Matt. If it’s all true, then we’re in the citadel of unbelief, where nightmares are dispatched with Lysol and scalpels and chemotherapy rather than with stakes and Bibles and wild mountain thyme. They’re happy with their life support units and hypos and enema bags filled with barium solution. If the column of truth has a hole in it, they neither know nor care.
He walked to the head of the bed and turned Matt’s head with gentle fingers. There were no marks on the skin of his neck; the flesh was blameless.
He hesitated a moment longer, then went to the closet and opened it. Matt’s clothes hung there, and hooked over the closet door’s inside knob was the crucifix he had been wearing when Susan visited him. It hung from a filigreed chain that gleamed softly in the room’s subdued light.
Ben took it back to the bed and put it around Matt’s neck.
‘Here, what are you doing?’
A nurse had come in with a pitcher of water and a bedpan with a towel spread decorously over the opening.
‘I’m putting his cross around his neck,’ Ben said.
‘Is he a Catholic?’
‘He is now,’ Ben said somberly.
8
Night had fallen when a soft rap came at the kitchen door of the Sawyer house on the Deep Cut Road. Bonnie Sawyer, with a small smile on her lips, went to answer it. She was wearing a short ruffled apron tied at the waist, high heels, and nothing else.
When she opened the door, Corey Bryant’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. ‘Buh,’ he said. ‘Buh… Buh… Bonnie?’
‘What’s the matter, Corey?’ She put a hand on the door jamb with light deliberation, pulling her bare breasts up to their sauciest angle. At the same time she crossed her feet demurely, modeling her legs for him.
‘Jeez, Bonnie, what if it had been-’
‘The man from the telephone company?’ she asked, and giggled. She took one of his hands and placed it on the firm flesh of her right breast. ‘Want to read my meter?’
With a grunt that held a note of desperation (the drowning man going down for the third time, clutching a mammary instead of a straw), he pulled her to him. His hands cupped her buttocks, and the starched apron crackled briskly between them.
‘Oh my,’ she said, wiggling against him. ‘Are you going to test my receiver, Mr Telephone Man? I’ve been waiting for an important call all day-’
He picked her up and kicked the door shut behind him. She did not need to direct him to the bedroom. He knew his way.
‘You’re sure he’s not going to be home?’ he asked.
Her eyes gleamed in the darkness. ‘Why, who can you mean, Mr Telephone Man? Not my handsome hubby… he’s in Burlington, Vermont.’
He put her down on the bed crossways with her legs dangling off the side.
‘Turn on the light,’ she said, her voice suddenly slow and heavy. ‘I want to see what you’re doing.’
He turned on the bedside lamp and looked down at her. The apron had been pulled away to one side. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and warm, the pupils large and brilliant.
‘Take that thing off,’ he said, gesturing.
‘You take it off,’ she said. ‘You can figure out the knots, Mr Telephone Man.’
He bent to do it. She always made him feel like a dry-mouth kid stepping up to the plate for the first time, and his hands always trembled when they got near her, as if her very flesh was transmitting a strong current into the air all around her. She never left his mind completely anymore. She was lodged in there like a sore inside the cheek which the tongue keeps poking and testing. She even cavorted through his dreams, golden-skinned, blackly exciting. Her invention knew no bounds.
‘No, on your knees,’ she said. ‘Get on your knees for me.’
He dropped clumsily onto his knees and crawled toward her, reaching for the apron ties. She put one high- heeled foot on each shoulder. He bent to kiss the inside of her thigh, the flesh firm and slightly warm under his
