and another to slowly thread a leg into the pants. It takes him close to half an hour. All the while, the cadaver makes noises and jumps. The smell starts to make him nauseous. He rolls up the jeans, slightly long on the dead girl, then snaps them. He puts her old socks and sneakers back on, then props the body in a mostly sitting position against the headboard. He pushes with his fingers at the corners of her mouth, removing some of its slackness.
Afterwards, he stands back to appraise her. He thinks she looks almost alive and that if she were, she’d be beautiful. He tells her so. Then he runs and gets the Polaroid. Eight shots remain in the camera. He uses them all in a dull light, taking her portrait from midchest up at three different angles. He lays the photographs on the bureau. Now he’s not sure what to do with the body. What would make things worse or better? And for which of them? A part of him feels as dead as the girl. He’s tired enough to fall over. He wonders if in the morning the sun will shine everywhere but on the trailer, and in that sliver of darkness the world will see what awful secrets he is hiding.
He crouches down, puts his arms beneath the girl’s knees and chest, and lifts her off the bed. Her unbending weight is staggering. That close to his nose, the smell nearly gags him. He labors with her over to the bedroom door, then down the corridor to the top of the basement stairs, where, after leaning her against the wall to switch on the light, he carts her down-cellar and over to the stand-up freezer, the door to which is open, its melting contents scattered on the floor. The compartment is just five feet high. To get the cadaver inside, he vigorously bends and twists it for several minutes, until finally there is the sharp snap of breaking bone and the body folds half-inward from the waist. John pushes it to the back wall, then stacks around and in front of it pieces of the butchered deer and snake so that, when he’s done, what is visible of the cadaver is nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the meat.
Upstairs, he wraps the girl’s old clothes, the bloody sheets and towels, the note, and the rubber gloves in the plastic strip, then takes the plastic out to the incinerator and burns it. He hurls the slug deep into the woods. He enters the woodshed. His tools are on the floor among garden mulch and fertilizer from several sliced-open sacks and rock salt from a tipped-over fifty-pound barrel. He shovels the mulch and fertilizer into trash bins and the rock salt back into the barrel, then rearranges the tools exactly as they had been.
He goes back outside and crawls beneath the shed, where the sack is still attached to the fourth beam. He unties it, carries it into the trailer, dumps the money on the floor, and tries to count it, but after reaching eighty thousand dollars loses his place. He is too tired to start over. He thinks that even if he were to give the money back to the thieves, they would kill him, especially if it came from Ira Hollenbach’s. And if he handed it over to the law, he would implicate himself in at least one death. He puts the money back in the sack, carries it outside, and ties it beneath the truck bed, between the axle and one wheel.
He spends over two hours cleaning up the trailer, repairing what he can, and putting most of his and Moira’s belongings back where they had been. With the dead girl there, he thinks he won’t sleep, but he does. He turns on the television set, lies on the couch, and for less than five minutes watches the horizontally distorted images of a man shooting a pistol at a giant fly.
THURSDAY
HE WAKES, in a cold sweat, to the sound of shattering glass. Sensing another’s presence, he lies there in the still-dark morning anticipating a gunshot, a black shadow, or the touch of cold steel against his neck, but hears only the tick of the living-room clock and, through the screened windows, a light wind moving the trees.
Had he been hallucinating? Or dreaming? If he hadn’t, and in a second was killed, would he come face-to-face with the dead girl? Would she forgive him? Would her soul in the afterlife be as beautiful as her body in death? He pictures a place following life—a wood-paneled bar maybe, playing soft country music—where souls, good and bad, dance a few slow ones and reminisce before receiving their permanent assignments to heaven or hell. A place where life’s hatchet is buried and all drink to eternity. He remembers his father, reduced to skin and bones, after wordless weeks, rousing himself to scream at the visiting Pastor McLean, “Weren’t never your call, Reverend! Was mine! Now it’s His!”
An engine roars to life outside.
In one motion, he rolls off the couch and fumbles beneath it for the .45. Powerful lights intrude through the trailer’s back windows. The engine exhorts a labored whine. The lights get brighter. John grasps the gun, cocks it, and jumps up. The engine’s pitch ascends to a high-revved torque. “Son of a bitch’ll ram the trailer!” thinks John.
He dashes away from the sound toward the front deck door. He’s three-quarters there when the bottom of his bare foot feels as if it’s been shot. He goes down. Behind him, the lights blink off. The engine upshifts, reaches a crescendo, then slowly recedes.
Through the broken glass of the deck door, John watches the outline of the vehicle, darker even than the surrounding dark, vanish down the hollow road.
Panting heavily, he gets to his knees. He fumbles for the wall switch and turns on the light. Glass from the door’s middle panel lies in fragments on the linoleum floor. A piece of it has lodged in his foot, which is bleeding.
He stands up, then, trailing blood, tiptoes through the glass and down the hall to the bathroom, where he gets a towel, tweezers, gauze, waterproof tape, and a bottle of peroxide. He brings everything back to the couch, sits down, and, mumbling a string of pained curses, with the tweezers pokes around in the wound for the glass. His foot trembles. So do his hands. He laughs giddily from pain and at his shaking extremities, then loudly commands himself to shut up and act like a man. Soon he finds the glass, a half-a-peanut-sized chunk, and pulls it out. He pours peroxide on the towel and, wincing, cleans the wound, which is not very deep, then tapes gauze around it.
Afterwards, he is drenched in sweat. His heart beats loud in his ears. He pinches the glass chunk in the tweezers, holds it up to the light, and stares at it. He imagines himself as the glass, the dead girl his wound, and Waylon, Obadiah Cornish—and maybe Simon Breedlove—the tweezers. Aloud, he asks the girl how she had ever fallen for a guy like Waylon, who obviously grieved more for his lost money than for her. He gets mad thinking about it and tells her so. “Look how he disrespected your body and even when you was alive made you throw out your history like it didn’t matter!”
He places the glass chunk on the coffee table, then leans back against the couch, and, gazing at the blank television set, remembers it playing when he fell asleep. He leans forward and sees that the set is still turned on and plugged in. “Ain’t that great? Along with the rest of it, the fuckin’ tube is shot!” Then, lowering his voice, he tells the girl, “This Waylon guy’s a loser. You should never a’ run off with him in the first place, then you w’udn’t a’ been in the quarry and ’id still be alive and I w’udn’t be respons’ble for ya!”
He straightens up, leans forward, puts on his socks and boots, then gets up, goes into the kitchen, and makes a pot of coffee. He turns on the deck light. The sky is starting to lighten some. The fog is still thick. In places, it’s as high as the trees. From the upper pasture comes the invisible mooing and bell-jangling of Nobie’s herd. Any minute will sound his hollow shout. John thinks of Abbie Nobie and her empowerment theory. “I’d guess she’s about the same age as you,” he tells the dead girl. “She worries after me. Reckon she thinks I’ve become like a hermit without Moira. When Nolan was here, she used to come up and beg Moira to hold him and sometimes Moira would call her ’count of Nolan was colicky and Abbie was so good at gettin’ him to stop crying. Moira said she’s got a love in her heart and the kid could feel it.”
From the kitchen closet he takes the broom and dustpan, then carries them over to the deck doorway, lays the dustpan on the counter, and starts sweeping up the glass. “Long’s we got the money,” he tells the girl, “I guess
