The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (28 page)

Clete tapped my shoulder, waking me. It seemed like he had just left, and he had. Stu had woken up before they reached town.

“Lila’s staying with him in case he doesn’t remember where he’s going,” Clete said. “You think we could wake this one?”

Barnett’s body sprawled unnaturally on the sand, one arm trapped beneath his back and the other crooked over his neck, his face as white as porcelain, his mouth spread wide, the tongue not pink but the red of hard candy.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said.

I was inspired by the need to pee. I unzipped and pissed on Barnett’s face. His head rocked to one side and he puckered his lips expressively, but he didn’t come to. After a while, it got pretty redundant but I hadn’t peed all night.

“You could damage your bladder holding it so long,” Clete said.

“Now what?” I asked.

“You were on the right track,” Clete said. “Just thinking too small.”

He grabbed Barnett’s hands and I took hold of his feet. We rocked him back and forth a few times to get some distance and hurled him into the river. He made a big splash. His body dipped below the surface, then bobbed back up.

But he didn’t stand. The current pushed him downstream. The reflection of the moon played over his body.

Clete and I scrambled after him along the river’s edge, and then we each waded out into the icy water after him.

Barnett eddied briefly near a wide spot, twirling facedown, but the water was deeper there and Clete and I each fell trying to reach him. By the time we were on our feet again, the current had reclaimed him. We tromped through the water, high stepping and flailing. Clete dived for him, but the river kept him just out of our reach.

I gave up at the footbridge, climbing up to watch his form slide away, shivering in the night air, not at all sure I had the strength or warmth to make it up the hill to the house.

Clete, though, kept on, ducking under the bridge and skipping down a little rapids, somehow remaining vertical. I heaved myself off the bridge and trotted along the river’s edge, my legs aching and beginning to wobble.

At a bend in the river, Clete fell and when he got up the current knocked him down again. I went in after him and dragged him out. Barnett was out of sight.

“I don’t feel so good about this,” I said.

“It’s some consolation that he was an asshole,” Clete said, “but we really shouldn’t have killed him.”

That was the full extent of our eulogy for Barnett. How and whether we were going to make it home was playing with our minds. We crawled along the riverbank, debating whether it might be warmer to remove our wet clothing.

“I don’t see how it could be colder,” I said.

“Point taken.”

Clete laid himself flat on the high river grass to undo his belt and jeans. The river had taken his shoes and one sock. I had both my shoes but only one sock, which was puzzling.

“You’re not a careful dresser,” Clete said.

We left our clothes in a pile, and worked our way across town and home. A few people pointed. They were the only people on the streets. Fortunately, Lila was on the back porch with Val when we came in. We dried off and dressed and were standing beside the open and roaring kitchen oven by the time she realized we were home.

“Stu’s fine.” She offered me her hand and I took it. “Where’s the jerk?”

“He slipped off,” Clete said somberly, stepping away from us. He left the kitchen.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

I kissed her and shut off the oven.

“I need to lie down,” I said.

We kept kissing and holding each other, bumping through the house. It sounds heartless and insensitive to say I forgot about Barnett drowning and drifting downstream like a log, but kissing Lila combined with my own near-drowning incident to erase it from my head. I sank back into the night as it had been before we killed him. Lila and I rambled through the house holding hands so deliriously that we became one creature and stumbled together into the bathroom to pee.

Stu was on the toilet, wholly conscious and masturbating by candlelight.

“Don’t you ever knock?” he said, turning the page of a comic book:
Daredevil.

That was the last little push we needed. Lila followed me to my bedroom and climbed between the sheets of my car.

“Promise me…, ” she said.

I waited for the rest of it a long while. Finally I just said, “I promise.”

The same night that Clete and I killed Barnett, Lila and I became lovers. The next day she retreated a little. I found her in the kitchen writing in a notebook—her diary. She glanced at me and went back to her penmanship. I said good morning in an overly jolly voice. She lifted a hand without looking up. When I went to the faucet to get a drink of water, she hunched over the journal. All I could read were the words
my right mind.

Clete and I worked the slope that day with the metal detector, but he was not his usual self. We discussed what he called “the slaying” in undertones.

“Stu remembers almost nothing,” Clete said.

“We should have told Lila.”

I waved the metal detector, and Clete searched wherever it beeped.

Clete shook his head. “Then she’d be a party to it. She’d have to turn us in or accept a portion of the blame. I went this morning and got our clothes. They’re on the back porch drying.”

A couple on the ski lift called out to us and threw down coins. We waved to them and walked to the spot where the change had fallen.

“I went back to where we tossed him in,” Clete said. “I wanted to look for footprints and so on, but people were camping there. They must have come in the middle of the night.”

“My pee is there,” I said. “Can they use that to convict me?”

Clete didn’t think so. “I’m more concerned with what Lila will want to do once the body is found. She’s the only one who can point a finger.”

“She may be having second thoughts about being my girlfriend. She wasn’t what I’d call affectionate this morning.”

“She’s not a morning person,” he said. The detector beeped, and he fingered the grass. “The other thing is the coyote. We were given an omen, and we still screwed up.”

“I guess I really shouldn’t have pissed on his face.”

“Look at this.” Clete lifted a hotel key from the grass. “This is another sign.”

“The guy just emptied his pocket,” I said.

Clete straightened and held the key up above his head.

“We’re being given another chance. We aren’t lost yet.”

We showed the key to the lift operator, and he let us ride to the top of the slope. It was not the top of the mountain but a ridge several hundred feet above the town. Clete spotted our couple standing at the overlook. I let him talk to them. I hadn’t been up this high before and wanted to take in the view. I located our house and the library, the bakery, the hardware store, the diner, the piece of road where I’d first held Lila’s hand, and the sandy spot by the river where we’d killed Barnett. It seemed to me that I was getting to know this place.

Clete took his time returning the key. For a terrible moment I thought he might be confessing. I decided to sweep the area near the lift’s exit. I found a nickel right off. Then nothing for a long time. The platform was wooden and slatted, and I got a beep at the edge. It could have been a nail, but I got on my knees and worked my fingers between the slats. I came up with a gold band—a wedding ring.

Clete returned waving a twenty-dollar bill. “I told him good deeds were their own reward, but he tossed the bill on the ground. He goes, ‘You scavenge for coins, don’t you?’ I figured he had me.”

I showed him the gold ring.

“There’s
your
omen,” he said. “Figure out what to do with it.”

That evening, Lila sat beside me at the kitchen table while we ate the frozen pizza that we had brought home the day before. It had thawed and it cooked funny, but we ate it. A fly fisherman had found Barnett’s body two miles downstream. The news was all over town.

Lila asked us exactly what happened.

“Don’t lie to me,” she warned.

We told her the truth, although I left out the part about pissing on his face.

“How hard did you try to save him?” she demanded.

Clete led her outside where our ravaged clothes were draped across the porch railing.

“If Keen hadn’t saved me, I would have wound up in a liquid grave myself.”

“The current took him,” I said. “We couldn’t catch up.”

She squinted thoughtfully. “He had the kind of body that looked like it would float.”

I understood this was meant to corroborate our story.

“We couldn’t just leave him there,” I said.

She considered this calmly, which reminded me that she’d hated Barnett and had tried to kill her ex-boyfriend for whistling. But when we returned to kitchen table, she said, “Why didn’t you just carry him up the hill?”

Clete and I sat on that one for a while.

Finally I said, “Given the advantage of hindsight, that does seem the better plan.”

“There it is,” Clete said sadly. “What it would take for us to kill a man. We didn’t want to carry the little weasel up the hill.”

Lila said, “He didn’t have the kind of body that looked like it weighed much.”

“We’re guilty of something,” Clete said.

“Something
ugly.
” She stood abruptly, knocking over her chair. “Don’t tell Stu,” she said. “Or Val.”

We agreed. She took my hand and led me up to my bed.

“Human life,” she said.

I didn’t know whether she was talking about us or Barnett dying. We crawled onto the single mattress together. We fucked and fucked and fucked.

I wish I could say Barnett’s drowning was the end of our association with death. Clete would later argue that tossing him in the drink had pried open mortality’s door. That’s maybe why we both felt responsible a few days later when Val woke up dead. She let out an otherworldly grunt that somehow each of us heard—Clete on his mat in the hallway, and Lila and I in our narrow convertible. We all jumped up, me in nothing but a T-shirt and the morning erection, Lila in my boxer shorts, one of her pale arms across her breasts. Clete was fully dressed. We followed him to the master bedroom. The smell was identifiable and unpleasant—excrement on flesh. Val’s mouth and eyes were open. I thought of the first night I met Lila, seeing her dead on the stairs, which made me unsure.

“Anything we can do?” I said.

Lila cried, “She’s dead, you moron!”

Clete touched Val’s cheek, and then said, “It’s up to us to care for the dogs.”

No one wanted to redeem the sheets. We wrapped her in them and toted her down the stairs and out to the porch, where we ran into Stu, who had been up all night smoking dope and watching the backyard. He was wearing my coat.

“Is that real?” he said, meaning the body.

“It’s Val,” Clete said. “Help us get her over the rail.”

I wound up with Val’s head. Stray hair sticking out from the wrap bothered me in a way I can’t describe. Clete hefted her midsection, seemingly oblivious to the damp, unhappy odor. Lila and Stu carried her legs and feet. When we stopped to rest, I tucked Val’s curls inside the sheet, careful not to glimpse her face.

Clete guided us up a difficult makeshift path in the hazy light of dawn. We switchbacked through an aspen grove and found an actual trail, which guided us up above the trees. We left the path and scrambled to Clete’s mushroom patch. He had a shovel stashed there, and while he retrieved it we set Val down carefully. It seemed almost inconceivable that this unpleasant-smelling lump was our friend.

We took our time picking a spot with a good view of town and the rim of mountains on the other side of the box canyon. Clete had each of us lie there to get a feel for it. We huddled together on the ground and stared at the cloudless sky, the entire world busily getting on with creation all about us.

Perhaps, here, I should mention that our burying Val without an official ceremony or license or even a coffin is a crime I have not, technically speaking, confessed to. I’m leaning on your (legally binding) pledge of confidentiality, and acting on your encouragement to be frank. The truth is, none of us even considered calling the authorities. A heroin overdose encourages questions and inquiries and search warrants, which would have opened our lives up to a form of scrutiny we did not covet.

The digging was hard. At one point, I threw the shovel back like an ax to swing it down against the unforgiving earth, and I hit Clete in the forehead. He staggered backward.

“Sister Christ,” he said. A moment later, he added, “I’m all right.”

I apologized and kept digging. The hole did not look like a grave. Its sides were jagged, the walls far from perpendicular. But Val’s body was small and fit nicely. We filled in around the body and patted down the dirt. She didn’t make much of a mound. We dug up some plugs of grass and tossed them on the grave to combat erosion.

“One of us should say a few words,” Lila suggested.

The job fell to Clete. “Val,” he began and hesitated. None of us knew her last name. He was bleeding. The shovel blade had opened a wound directly above his nose. Blood and black earth marked it. “Dog sitter, landlady to the lost, junkie, snorer, a former honor student. A woman who fed dogs. Who gave them their heartworm pills.”

The list was long. Spread out beneath us lay one of the wealthiest small towns in America, peaked roofs covered in real shingles, rambling condominium compounds, satellite dishes, green lawns, and the shining windows of Main Street, which looked like forgotten pockets of brilliance, the spare change of some lazy god glistening in dawn’s slanting light. Those windows radiated intelligence, a careless and irreplaceable genius among the ordinary stucco and frame. They made me think of the discontinuous luster of Clete’s splendid brain.

“Lover of sadness,” he was saying, “keeper of the damned.”

I was so grateful to have him with us.

Thunder sounded, which seemed appropriate but didn’t please us. The rain began. We stalled, feeling we ought to say or do more and yet eager to make our way down the mountain. We were united in the essential embarrassment of needing to go on living.