Adam’s apple bobbing as his apparently constant pain exits through his eyes. “Did you know, John, that poor little Obadiah was raised by about eight different people because his parents didn’t want a thing to do with him, and one of them—an aunt, I believe—used an electric cattle prod on him and, when she caught him eating in bed, made him sleep in a cage with live rats?”
“I know he sliced up Molly and Ira Hollenbach.”
“… He was ten—cutest little fella you ever saw—when the court first assigned me to represent him.”
“You drunk again, Pitt?”
“Just tired, John.” The lawyer sounds like he’s about to cry. John thinks he’s made a mistake calling him. “I’m not a very good lawyer, John. All my clients lie to me. I allow them to play on my good graces.”
“How’s Abbie?”
“Recovering well, I’m told. And wondering about you.”
“I made a mistake ’bout a week ago, Pitt. Don’t seem to be any end to it.”
“… And did you know our good friend Simon Breedlove is also gone?”
“Was how he wanted it,” says John.
“A few years ago—five, to be precise, right after… well, you know—he had me draw up a will. He’s left everything he owned to some Vietnamese immigrant family in San Francisco.”
“I din’ know him so good,” says John.
Pitt clears his throat again. “There’s lots of dead bodies, John, and you’re still alive. My guess is, the police aren’t sure what to think.”
“How many, ’xactly?”
“How many what?”
“Bodies.”
“Well, John—they count three. If you include Simon and Obadiah.”
“They ain’t lookin’ for no others?”
“Bodies?”
“Whatevers.”
John hears a slurping sound on the other end of the line and guesses Pitt’s emboldening himself. He glances over at the dead girl, touching her toes, and thinks if lives could back up, the world would soon be out of room. “Maybe you ought to call a real lawyer, John. One of those ex-football types. I know you’ve got the money to pay for it.”
“That’s good as buried.”
“Are you sure you want to do that, John? Even gullible old Daggard Pitt requires a substantial retainer for a mess like yours.”
“How much?”
“Ten to start, I’d think.”
“Thousand?”
“I’d guess, yes.”
“Would it keep me out a’ jail?”
“Well, John, I’d feel more comfortable about that if the arithmetic didn’t keep changing.”
“Whadda ya mean?”
“I’m afraid one more body would push credulity beyond its limits.”
John thanks him for the advice, then hangs up the phone.
He walks down the hallway into his bedroom, yanks open the top drawer of his bureau, and reaches beneath his underwear. He pulls out the envelope there, then goes back to the kitchen and from cold tap water makes a thick cup of instant coffee. He sits down with it at the table and pictures a southward winding road that never ends, just gets narrower and narrower. Outside the window, darting swallows filch flies from the air. Perspiration drops from John’s brow onto the tabletop. His scent is gamy. As they thaw, the dead girl’s bones creak and groan. “Must be you figured Waylon as your best chance for somethin’,” he tells her, “even if he weren’t much a’ one. That it?”
She doesn’t answer.
From the envelope John takes the Polaroids he snapped of her and aimlessly shuffles through them. He envisions the world as a populous plain interwoven by a network of tiny creases in which man’s evil little secrets hide. He imagines the worst retribution as a self-inflicted paralysis. He thinks of the physical aspects of being incarcerated—prodding hands and clubs, restraining iron bars, the close smell of so many people, even sunlight rationed like a scarce commodity. He finds himself shivering. Tears mix with the sweat exiting his body.
Falteringly he stands up, walks over to the dead girl, and runs a hand through her hair, which is cold, with an oily texture. He bends forward and hugs her frozen, soulful torso. His field of vision starts to blur. He feels like he’s looking down through a haze of smoke at the imagined life of Ingrid Banes. What if it were possible to alter history—even emotions—with only words? To manipulate talk into facts and verbalize facts into dreams? Even for those—like John and the dead girl—born on the wrong end of it, this would be a world worth living in. “You’re gon’ make it Hawaii, Ingrid,” he says, kissing her on the cheek. “Ya lucky girl, ya.”
Fearing someone might drive up the road and spot him, he takes the same route back up the mountain as he did coming down. Fueled by adrenaline and a belief that from fate his own feebleness cannot swerve him, he pulls the heavy toboggan with his good hand, allowing the other to swing loosely by his side. Over the grassy field leading to the woods, the sled’s slick bottom passes unrestrainedly. The pollen is thick in the air. Several times, John stops to catch his breath or sneeze.
Entering the forest, he is struck by the unusually large number of crows and grackles perched or circling above him. Or else he is suddenly more attuned to their presence. There are seemingly hundreds of the birds, all of them black as night. Their cacophony grates on his ears. Though the toboggan still slides with relative ease over the needle-and-leaf floor, the going is slower. In the eighty-plus-degree heat, the cadaver, beneath its tarpaulin, melts more rapidly. Soon the increasingly flaccid flesh begins shifting side to side, making the job of tugging it harder. Thawed some, the half-rotten corpse again exhales its gone smell. John temporarily engages himself in searching for a nonblack bird.
At the start of the steep grade leading to the pines, the number and size of rocks multiply. John’s upward course becomes more serpentine, and the work intensely taxing. He has trouble keeping his feet beneath him. Every five yards or so, he falls to his knees. Finally, instead of standing up again, he loops the lead rope around his shoulders and, with his three functional limbs, scratches and crawls his way toward the top.
His hand lands on a nest of fire ants. Abruptly rearing back from their bites, he hears behind him a distinct crack. He turns around and the cadaver, now half unveiled beneath the tarpaulin, is sitting upright. John watches its upper torso, the spine completely severed, creakily ease backward until the dead girl is supine on the sled, staring straight up at the sky. A crow drops down and hovers above the body. John shoos it away. He thinks what awful things happen to flesh once it’s dead. More awful even than when it’s alive.
It takes him another half an hour to reach the scrub pasture where the money is stashed. Gasping for air, the rope still circling him like a cinch, he sits down on the rock concealing the sack. Hanging half off the sled, the cadaver, where it has banged against impediments on its upward journey, is scuffed and bruised. One of its eyes, half-dislodged, peers at an impossible angle behind it where two of its teeth must lie. In a way that he can’t describe, John, while eyeing the body, is struck by the irony in mankind’s vaingloriousness, that day-to-day conceit which, like air from a puffball, is instantly expunged by death.
After retrieving the sack, he tucks it, alongside the shovel, between the dead girl’s legs, then once more pulls her upper torso forward, folding her like a wallet over the money. He loops the rope twice around the corpse so it won’t flop backward again, re-covers it with the tarpaulin, and heads into the pines. On the flat terrain, he doesn’t have to work so hard. He has more time to think and feel his pain, now more like a general sickness infecting his body. One minute he is hot. The next, cold. In between, he has surges of energy.
He begins to suspect that he is being followed by the birds. Perched high in the canopy, they chatter among themselves as if making plans. One will occasionally swoop a few feet above his head, stridently squawking. To avoid thinking about them, John converses with the dead girl. He tells her in these woods is where their paths began to coincide. He points to the thistle patch behind which he first saw the dead buck’s antlers as the spot
