somebody dig up a few more graves. There’s your more.
The law. Seems like we never had much luck with the law. Daddy never did.
Bootleggers hardly ever do. It’s an occupational hazard.
Well. You know so much about it. I doubt a bootlegger’s son would, either. Anyway, don’t start on Daddy. He’s dead and gone and you hated him anyway. I never hated him.
You hated him because he beat you. You hated me because he never hit me.
No. That’s the one thing I was grateful for. If he had ever beat you, I’d have had to fight back. Or kill him. The way it was, I could take it and go on. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Like you say, he’s dead and gone.
I never understood how you did that. How you just took it and went on, as you say.
Because it all balanced out. Because I knew something that he didn’t know.
What?
I knew he was going to die and I’d still be alive.
She was silent for a time studying him. She shook her head. You’ve got a hell of a way of looking at things, she finally said. But let’s get back to Fenton Breece. I’ve been thinking about this, and I know how to make him pay where it’ll hurt him the worst. In the pocketbook.
How long have you been thinking about this?
I guess from the minute you saw him hauling that vault back to the funeral home that was supposed to be in Daddy’s grave. From the time I seen the way he done Daddy when he was past doing anything to help himself.
Tyler was wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. This is crazy and you know it, and whatever you’ve got in mind, you can include me out.
This time it’s not that easy for you You can’t be included out of a family. It’s not that easy. Once you’re in one, you’re in it for life. You can’t turn away from blood. Will you help me?
No. Not only no but hell no. This mess is too crazy for me
The first time Fenton Breece saw Corrie Tyler had been in the spring of that year. She was walking past the cafe as he had his nine o’clock coffee. She was wearing a tight black skirt, and he was watching the side-to-side movement of her hips when the man next to him said, I wouldn’t kick that out of bed.
Breece turned on the off-chance the man might be speaking to him, but he wasn’t. He was talking to the man on the other stool. Unless there was more room on the floor, he added.
Who is that, anyway? the man two stools down asked.
Old Moose Tyler’s daughter. Don’t know who she got her looks from, but she damn sure never got em from Moose.
Breece watched her out of sight. He felt the weight of eyes and when he turned the man was watching him with sardonic amusement, as if he had looked not at Breece but into him and read his thoughts. Breece flushed and looked away.
A bootlegger’s daughter, he had thought. White trash who had probably done it with every man in town save him. He remembered a phrase his mother had used long ago in some old cautionary fable. He had forgotten the fable and disregarded the caution but the phrase was with him still: anybody’s dog who wants to go hunting. It seemed applicable here.
But back at his desk he closed his eyes and let her body drift in his mind like the remnant of a dream that will not fade. He had already decided to learn what there was to know about her.
He found she worked in the garment factory, and he used to cruise by sometimes in the afternoons and watch for her coming out of the plant. She drove an old primerspottedpickup truck that seemed held together with baling wire and blind luck. She never came out in the groups of girls that strung across the parking lot laughing and talking. She didn’t seem to have any friends. He was encouraged by this. Half a dozen times he had intended to pick her up. He had his lines meticulously rehearsed but when he saw her the spit would dry up in his mouth and the carefully chosen words roil like leaves in the wind.
The day he finally did speak to her he was in the white Lincoln. It was the first warm day in May and he had the top down. The Lincoln had a beautiful red interior it still held that newcar smell of money and he thought that would get her if all else failed. His cheeks were shiny and freshly shaved and he was redolent of some special pheronomic aftershave he’d mailordered from California that was supposed to be made from the glands of male hogs and possess aphrodisiac properties. He was wearing one of the new seethrough nylon shirts that were just beginning to catch on and he didn’t see how he could fail.
Apparently the truck wouldn’t start for she had the hood aloft and was standing hipslung before it staring into the engine.
He stopped the Lincoln.
Car trouble? he called. Can I help?
She turned and glanced briefly at him. Her face was harried and irritated. I was just about to send for you, she said. I believe this thing is deader than hell.
I’m not mechanically inclined, but I can give you a ride somewhere, he said. He was listening to his own calm voice say these things, and he was thinking: Mechanically inclined. That wasn’t half bad.
If it’s not too much trouble, she said. She turned toward him again.
The voice he could manage, but he couldn’t make his eyes behave. They kept darting about as if they had independent wills of their own. One wanted to go up, the other down. They’d lock onto her sharp breasts, then drop to her crotch, then back up to the breasts, and he thought if he could just grasp his eyes with his hands and point them into her face he’d be all right, but he could not.
It’s a little ways out there, she said. Where I have to go. My brother’s the only one who can keep this thing running.
That’s fine, that’s fine, he told her crotch, and she fell silent watching him. She shook her head and looked away toward town. She didn’t make any move to get into the car.
He reached across and opened the door on the passenger side. Just jump right in here, he told her. It took an enormous effort to raise his eyes to the level where her navel would be could he have seen it.
I guess I’ll just walk, she said. She turned and struck out for the street.
He was cranking the car. Wait a minute, he called in confusion. He didn’t know if he was coming on too hard or too easy. He’d had it and thrown it all away. He slipped the car into gear and followed a little way behind her, riding the brake.
Come on and get in, he called. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.
She just waved him away onehanded and didn’t look back.
We could drive over to Columbia for dinner, he called, and sure enough his eyes dropped to the tight denim between her legs and he could have clawed his eyes from their bloody sockets.
Fuck off, she said.
He just stared. What? What?
You heard me.
No, I didn’t. Say it again.
You sick bastard.
This time she kept on walking and he didn’t follow. He just sat in the white Lincoln watching her form diminish down the street. He kept thinking about how she’d looked. The way her eyes had snapped and the way her fall of straight blonde hair had tossed when she said Fuck off.
Sooner or later, he promised himself. One way or another.
It is told by Squire Robnett at the Bellystretcher Cafe:
I never cared for undertakers in general and Fenton Breece in particular. There was just always something about him. I done some work for him out there when he was buildin that mansion he built, but times was hard and I’d of worked for Hitler if he’d of been hirin.
Whatever it was, he was born with it because I knowed him when he was a boy, and he was just as peculiar then as he is now. Fenton was a rich kid, and that’s when I first begun to suspect rich ain’t all it’s made out to be.
Fenton’s daddy was a undertaker, too, but they had plenty of money besides. That’s one reason why I never understood him takin up undertakin. Why not medicine, or the law? Now I don’t know if you choose your trade or the trade chooses you, but at the very least you’ve got to have an inclination for it. I’ve always believed that Fenton
