by William Gay
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.
Workin my ass. Workin some kind of devil’s business with that Tyler girl’d be my guess.
Poor old Mrs. Hull died. I’m preparing her for burial.
That’s a damned shame, Sutter said. About old Mrs. Hull. Although if there’s a Mrs. Hull back there or ever was it’d come as a big surprise to me.
What are you doing here?
We had talked about money.
Oh. Yes, I’d forgotten. Well, I picked it up and it’s in myoffice. Just walk this way.
They crossed the room, Sutter behind and miming Breece’s ducklike waddle. Breece went behind a desk and opened a drawer. He took out a manilla envelope and laid it before Sutter. This is half, he said. Everything is just the way we discussed it.
Sutter withdrew from the envelope a thick sheaf of bills. He licked a thumb and began to count bills onto another stack. He licked his thumb once for each fresh bill and he moved his lips as he counted.
Impatience flickered across Breece’s face. The bank counted it and they were satisfied, he said. I counted it and I was satisfied. It’s seventyfive hundred dollars.
Sutter stopped counting. He looked up. You know, Breece, he said, one of the five or six thousand things I don’t like about you is that you think you’re smart. You think because you went to a college in Memphis and learned how to puncture folk’s insides with Pop-Cola bottles you can run a number on me. Forget that. Put that thought away and don’t look at it no more. Now the bank counted and they were satisfied. You counted and you were satisfied. That’s a load off my mind, that you all were satisfied. But since it’s my money, how about if I count it my damn self? I like to be satisfied as well as the next man.
Breece made a tiny gesture of dismissal. Count by all means, he said. If you don’t trust me.
There’s damn small question about that. I don’t trust you worth a shit. And I pity the fool who does.
He went back to counting the small bills. Breece watched him. Lick the thumb, stack the bill, move the lips. Lick the thumb. Breece looked away, out the window. An old grayhaired lady was coming slowly up the sidewalk. Hobbling laboriously along on a walker. Every now and then she’d halt and lean on the walker to rest, her mouth open and gasping for oxygen like a fish suddenly jerked from water to air. Then when she’d caught her breath she’d come on. Breece thought for a fey moment she’d had some premonition and come to sit on his doorstep and wait.
At length Sutter seemed satisfied. He folded the money once and shoved it into a jean pocket and rose to go. Well I’m burnin daylight, he said. I got places to be.
Have you made any progress?
It depends on what you mean by progress. You’ve seen the result of some of that progress and I expect I could smell her on your fingers if I was a mind to. That playpretty I sent you special delivered in a hearse. That wasn’t supposed to be. That dead girl. If anybody was goin to be dead it was supposed to be that mouthy houseburnin brother of hers. Anyway this was supposed to be all about the pictures. Just get a stack of pictures and bring em to you. It went south too quick for me to stop and that dead playpretty is fixin to cost you some more money.
What do you mean?
Maybe I couldn’t have her talking. Maybe she had a little breath in her and I had to suck it out. Maybe her neck wasn’t twisted just right and I had to retwist it. Maybe I didn’t have as much time as I needed to set that wreck up in a way the law would buy. Or go on buyin. Anyway it’ll all show up on the bill.
Sutter’s air of uncertainty emboldened Breece. Seventy-five hundred dollars seems to buy an awful lot of maybes, he said carefully. I’d like a little more certainty. I explained to you that it’s crucial that I get those pictures back. I’ll get your precious pictures. Maybe when I bring em I’ll bring that boy so you’ll have a matched set of playpretties. Like salt and pepper shakers. How’d that suit you?
Just get those pictures.
Sutter stood up. I’ll leave you and poor old Mrs. Hull to finish your business, he said.
&nbs
p; When he’d gone Breece still sat in his office chair. Hands palm down on the desk before him. He could see no way to return to the previous scene of domesticity when he and Corrie had been listening to his stories. Winter light crept across the windowglass. He closed his eyes against the images that assailed them. Something that he’d set in motion shambled toward him. He’d been strenuously winding the spring of a device that would ultimately impale him. He didn’t know what to do. Sutter was going to become more expensive than he could afford and he was going to run his mouth. Perhaps there was someone he could hire to kill Sutter.
He leaned his face into his hands like one stricken by grief. He envisioned a long line of folks set in motion each one stalking the one set in motion previous but he was all out of exonerated murderers and he didn’t know if he could do it himself.
Tyler was wending up a deep hollow that was a funnel for the winds at his back. He moved in a waisthigh maelstrom of blowing leaves and miniature whirlwinds would dart up the hillside in little dervishes as if they had minds if their own. He went past the remains of a whiskey still whose copper had long been plundered and whose barrels showed the axemarks of old violence.
He was following an eerie keening he’d first heard miles back, and he seemed to be nearing its source. At first he’d thought it the wind but it was not the wind. It seemed the highpitched cry of a child or woman but it went on blowing the same mournful note without ceasing or altering, and when he climbed up the mouth of the hollow to higher ground he found it.
The earth here was stony shale and cleft out of the bluelooking limestone was an irregular opening six or eight feet wide. A crude fence had been constructed around it of split rails and old castoff boards wound with barbed wire, but the wood was rotten and insubstantial-looking. Beyond it a stone bluff rose almost vertically and perpendicular to it with a narrow rock doorway between another wall of stone, and studying this Tyler decided the hills must direct the winds and the hollow funnel them across the pit and play it like some mournful harp of the earth.
He approached the opening with caution, stepping across the juryrigged fence and peering down. There was nothing to see. He could hear the keening, but now it seemed to be issuing out of the earth itself, sad and murmurous voices of the damned pleabargaining for their souls. A cold updraft off subterranean waters came like breath from an ancient tomb, and he dreamed inkblack rivers coursing in the stone veins of the earth where chunks of ice black as obsidian clocked through the dark and where whatever arcane creatures lived there were unsighted and at the mercy of the current. He dropped a stone, and it rolled off the sides as it went, fainter and fainter, then nothing, and it went unremarked by the voices that went on and on in their haunting onenote timbre Somewhere he could hear the bells of animals and he studied the poor excuse for a fence then rearranged it as best he could and went toward the narrow arch of stone. He paused and then looked all about and knelt onto the earth. There was a flat circular stone at the floor of the arch, and he pried it free and scratched out a hole in the earth. He took out the tin of pictures and placed them in the cavity and covered them with the stone. He rose and passed through the arch and the hill began to descend and through the trees he could see tended land and a wooden farmhouse leached gray by the weathers.
The house had a shake roof darkening from melting frost and a tall brick chimney whose shadow was told palely in white hoarfrost on the gable opposing. As he watched the house an old man came out and went with a shuffling hobble toward the barn. He watched awhile and saw nothing further, and after a time he eased down through the shadowed morning trees to the house.
By good daylight Bookbinder had fed and watered the goats and turned them into the lot to graze. There were a nanny and her kids missing, and Bookbinder figured to slip down the hollow and find them. These years Bookbinder moved with care and caution. Arthritis had seized his eighty-year-old knees, and on the steeper hillsides he looked not unlike some gaunt puppet jerked along by an inept or careless puppeteer who’d lost interest in him.
There had been predawn cold and a rime of frost, but the sun when it smoked over the horizon burned it away and aftera while the day warmed. A golden haze like Indian summer hung in the air and the old man could feel sweat beginning under the chambray shirt he wore.
He went farther than he’d planned hunting the goats and after a while he crossed out on a roadbed so densely packed by traffic nothing would yet grow there. Idly he followed the road. The sun had ascended and warmed and sweat darkened the back of his shirt between his sharp shoulder blades. He stopped once and with a big Case pocketknife cut himself a walking stick and then he went hobbling on. After fifty yards or so more the roadway ascended, and he could see all there was left of the El Patio Club beerjoint. He went on up an embankment through sere tilted weeds, then the weeds fell away and there was the old parking lot of cracked paving and the four stucco walls still blackened by ancient smoke beyond a row of Lombardy poplars planted like a curious harp of the winds. Past the walls halflost in saplings two privies still faintly marked His and Hers.
The parking lot was encysted with ancient bottlecaps, arcane and extinct brands of beer like words in a foreign language. He hunkered on the crumbling paving and took out a pipe homecarved from briar root and stuffed the bowl with roughcut tobacco. He struck a match on a thumbnail and lit the pipe. He studied the El Patio through the shifting blue smoke.
All so long ago. The old man from his house used to hear the cries of revelry. Love or what passed for it in these regions, old rivalries brought to fruition. The music from their dances, like dispatches from a world he’d forsaken or it him. Cars coming and going at all hours of the night, fullthroated mufflers breaking on the switchback, motors opening up onthe stretch like racehorses getting their second wind. Laughter sharp and brittle as broken glass used to drift down through the trees. Laughter from women now old as he was, or dead, twenty-five forever and ever.
She came easing into the room with her slippers in her hand. The room dark, all the light there was moonlight, oblique and deceptive through the windowglass. When he spoke, he startled her so she dropped a shoe, then she recovered and her hands were at her hair, taking it down.
I thought I told you to stay away from that place.
Well. Maybe you did. I forget just now.
He could smell whiskey in the room. I meant what I said.
It doesn’t matter anyhow. Nobody gets to say what anybody else can do or can’t do. Nobody owns anybody else. They turned the slaves loose a long time ago.
Then she’d come in later and she’d come in later and one night she didn’t come in at all. Like some wild thing he’d tamed and chanced letting loose and lost a little at a time. He awoke stiff and sore in the rocking chair. As cold and bleak a dawn as he’d ever known washing the windows. He never saw her again. She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look. Her name on his tongue was dry as ashes, bitter as quinine.
He knocked the pipe out and stood up and approached the building. A blackened and unshapen ruin. It was here she’dtaken up with Hankins. Here Hankins had sat on the last day of his life drinking boilermakers and getting up his nerve to come up the hollow and get the bedstead or kill him. He hadn’t known it but he was getting up his nerve to die.
He turned away. Old memories had lost the sting of pain and it was the loss of feeling he mourned more than anything else. It was all so long ago and might have been something that happened to somebody else, might have been some old story in a yellowed newspaper.
He went back down into the woods from the other side of the parking lot. There was a footpath here the old man had worn himself down through the years and he followed it through the woods directly opposing the way he’d followed it a lifetime ago in the dead of a Sunday night, leant slightly with the weight of a five-gallon bucket of kerosene, midnight visitor bearing the gift of fire.
He didn’t find the goats that morning and he decided
to go out again after dinner. When he got back to the house it was approaching midmorning and there was a thin young man sitting on the edge of his porch idly drawing patterns in the dirt between his feet with a riflestock.
Hidy, the boy said.
The old man hadn’t been surprised in a lot of years and finding company on his front porch didn’t surprise him now.
How do, the old man said. Warmin up some, ain’t it?
Aren’t you Mr. Bookbinder?
I’m Hollis Bookbinder. I ain’t never been Mistered too much. Who might you be?
My name’s Tyler. I heard your goatbells in the night. You got a lot of them?
They’s several. I don’t know exactly how many. Ain’t run acensus on em lately. They a right smart of company.
You seen a man named Granville Sutter come through here?
No. Was I supposed to of?
I don’t know. I just wondered.
Was you huntin him?
No. I’m pretty sure he’s hunting me, though. Do you know him?
I know him well enough to stay wide of him. That’s a right nice rifle you got there.
Thanks. My granddaddy gave it to me.
Winchester lever action with that octagon barrel. You don’t see many of em, but what you do generally shoots true.
The old man had climbed the porch steps, and now he opened the screendoor. I ain’t had the rest of my mornin coffee. How about you?
I didn’t have any at all.
Then I reckon you ready for some. He disappeared into the house, and Tyler could hear the rattle of pans somewhere inside. He looked about. The house was set on the side of a hill, and the yard sloped away into the woods. The shadow of a cloud went across the sunlit treetops like smoke. Tyler couldn’t see as far as he would have liked, and he wondered where Sutter was.
The coffee when the old man brought it in a delicate china cup was opaque and dark and so strong it almost required chewing. The boy sipped it cautiously and watched the line of woods where the sun made moving shadows.
