that he could think he could burn Granville Sutter’s house for no more than the price of amatch and then go about his business with impunity.
He was at war with himself. A part of him wanted to just kill him now and have done with it. On the other side of the scale, he had nothing else to do and no home to go to, and he was looking any day for more papers to come down. Son of a bitches in courthouses whose sole function was to prepare and serve papers with his name affixed to them.
A sense of the power he held over Tyler washed over him. He was ever the gambler. Fuck it, he decided. He lowered the rifle and just watched Tyler go. Eating his candy bar. Drinking his dope.
I’ll get you where folks ain’t so thick, he said. If I got you once, I can damn sure get you again. Who knows, I may even let you walk again. If it ain’t out of my reach. Like the cat told the mouse.
All day Tyler moved in the woods and all day the winds blew. He moved in a steady shifting of the depths of leaves that roiled and lifted and spun in whirlwinds and all he could hear was the rushing in the trees above him as if he moved through some convergence of all the world’s winds.
The perpetual winds grated on his nerves and he hoped they would abate with nightfall but they did not. He went on bearing what he judged was northeast well into the night by what moonlight there was and he moved through a world that was eerie and strange all black shadow and silver light. When he wearied he slept in a stumphole covered with dry leaves and even in his dreams he listened to the creaking of the branches bowering him and he dreamed stormtossed shipson perilous seas. He awoke once and the wind blew still, and he could hear the soft clashing of dry leaves and from somewhere in the night the faroff and faint chimes of belled goats or cattle, and he drew comfort that beyond all this dark there was somewhere a world of lights and men.
In his hushed world of locked doors and drawn shades Breece went dragging the radio across the hardwood floor. Its feet left little skidmarks on the waxed oak. This radio was a huge wooden Crosley console he could barely get his arms around and it was heavier than he’d expected. He ended up with a shoulder against it sliding it toward the double door that opened onto what had become the heart of Breece’s home, what he considered the business end of the embalming business, the parlor that held his worktable and pumps and chemicals and all the tools of his trade.
In other more social days Breece had told folks he listened to symphonies and concertos but in truth he had become addicted to a series of soap operas that divided his afternoons into fifteen minute increments. Our Gal Sunday, Young Widder Brown, Stella Dallas. Pepper Young’s Family. Tales of women jerked from obscurity into improbable adventures. Young girls from tiny Colorado mining towns who married rich and titled Englishmen, backstage wives who wondered in their more fatalistic moments if there was romance and happiness at the age of thirty-five, and beyond.
This was a baffling world that had become as tactile and real as his day-to-day existence. Yet a comforting limbo where it took forever for anything to be resolved, a vast slowmoving pageantry of incremental crisis, tales of folk who never developed an immunity to amnesia so that they caught it with bewildering regularity, who were constantly being framed and standing trial for murder, folks whose very identities seemed in constant flux because other folks were always stealing their identities and pretending to be them. Doppelgangers posing as wastrel scions of wealthy families rumored long lost in the Mateo Grosso were always turning up for the reading of the wills. Homespun philosophers ruminated and spat and shuffled and passed on shopworn homilies to descendents who didn’t want to hear them anyway and were black sheep forever wandering away from the flock.
He propped the doors wide with a hassock and a magazine rack and dragged the radio onto the tiled floor of the workroom. He stood for a moment breathing hard and perspiring almost audibly. He’d had a thought for one of the plastic tabletop radios that would have been more transportable but he’d tried one in the store and didn’t care for the tinny tone of it and thought of it as vastly inferior to the rich bass pronouncements and organ music that rolled authoritatively through the velvetcovered speakers of the Crosley. The Crosley’s words had the gravity of carved stone handed down ceremoniously from the mountain and a solemnity that dwarfed the tentative whinings of the tabletops. Anyway this room more and more was becoming his Badger’s den and he kept moving more of his favorite things into it until it had become living room and bedroom and above all his refuge from the world and its puzzling doings that transpired just outside his walls.
He was no more than inside the room before he halted his radio ministrations and closed the doors behind him. This doorhad a heavy lock that clicked to in an oiled reassuring manner and a solid deadbolt that he trusted and immediately shoved home. He felt suddenly lighter, cares lifted from him, he felt he could waltz the radio across the room to the wallplug, and humming to himself he slid it across the tile and plugged it in.
He turned it on and wound the dial around for WLAC and when he heard the organ theme music he turned his attention to the girl.
She lay on the table, her arms alongside her torso, hands open and palms up. Reclining so in her enforced and outraged placidity she looked like something you’d offer up from an altar for a dark god’s consideration.
He hadn’t decided where to keep her. His first thought had been to store her in his most expensive Eternalrest casket and keep her nearby but to Breece eternity was a relative term and he perhaps more than most men was aware of the perishability of the flesh. Already signs of her inherited mortality had been showing up and he’d been hard put to keep them at bay.
What am I going to do with you? he asked her.
She just lay with her sunken eyes and the teasing smirk of her painted hoyden’s face with its lacquered cupid’s bow mouth. He took up a spray bottle filled with glycerin and rosewater and misted her face so that it glowed as if it had been touched by the faintest of morning dew. The air smelled like spring, like butterflies and fresh green leaves. We’ll get you all fixed up, he told her. He stood looking down at her with his chin cupped in a palm and his face furrowed in an attitude of deep concentration. He’d read books on the ancient Egyptian embalmers and necromancers he considered part of his ancestry and already some of her more perishable organsresided in cambric jars awaiting resurrection and with her more delicate female organs he was experimenting with a more pliable and permanent contrivance of plastic and rubber.
Hush now, he told her. Stella Dallas is coming on.
He sat in an armchair listening. His face flickered like roiled waters, reflecting the emotions of the tale, the movement of the drama. Things had been building for days to a crisis stage. Stella and her daughter Lolly were in New York. Lolly had married a rich New Yorker from high society and Stella and her daughter were visiting Lolly’s inlaws. Then someone had stolen a priceless Egyptian mummy from a museum and framed Stella for the theft. This created all sorts of interfamilial discord and now Lolly’s mother-in-law was trying to get Stella jailed and prosecuted.
But Mommy, Lolly said, surely Mrs. Templeton can’t believe you stole her precious mummy.
Someone began to pound on the double doors and Breece’s world shifted instantaneously from the New York world of plundered museums to the workroom of his funeral parlor. He looked wildly about. The reassuring austerity of a room painted battleship gray, gray enameled appurtenances and equipment. Yet the pounding went on.
Breece didn’t get much walk-in trade but the door opening onto the street was left unlocked during the day so that folks could drop in and make their burial insurance payments or arrange funerals for their dead relatives. But now someone not easily discouraged had wandered in and actually begun to pound on his private door.
Lately he’d begun to let the business slide. He was even thinking about letting it go entirely and going away somewhere with the girl. Let them bury their own dead or let the dead rot and stink above ground until it sucked the carrion crows out of the trees like songbirds. Let all those freed souls burrow toward Hell on their own or scamper up ropeladders dropped from Heaven.
The pounding went on. Hey. Hey, a voice began to call. Hey undertaker man. Hey undertaker man.
Oh God, Breece thought. It’s Granville Sutter.
He leapt up and shut off the radio. Oh Lolly, sometimes I just don’t know about people, Stella was saying. He draped a sheet he kept handy over the girl and looked about to see if there were clues left about to snare him. No, there was nothing out of place. He unlocked the door and shouldered Sutter aside. Sutter was trying to see over Breece into the room but Breece managed to close the door and lock it behind him.
What are you up to, undertaker man?
What?
What are you up to? You’re sweatin and you’re red as a beet. You look like a kid his daddy caught him jackin off out behind the barn. What are you up to in there?
I was working.
