Twilight (16 page)

In his hushed world of locked doors and drawn shades Breece went dragging the radio across the hardwood floor. Its feet left little skidmarks on the waxed oak. This radio was a huge wooden Crosley console he could barely get his arms around and it was heavier than he’d expected. He ended up with a shoulder against it sliding it toward the double door that opened onto what had become the heart of Breece’s home, what he considered the business end of the embalming business, the parlor that held his worktable and pumps and chemicals and all the tools of his trade.

In other more social days Breece had told folks he listened to symphonies and concertos but in truth he had become
addicted to a series of soap operas that divided his afternoons into fifteen minute increments. Our Gal Sunday, Young Widder Brown, Stella Dallas. Pepper Young’s Family. Tales of women jerked from obscurity into improbable adventures. Young girls from tiny Colorado mining towns who married rich and titled Englishmen, backstage wives who wondered in their more fatalistic moments if there was romance and happiness at the age of thirty-five, and beyond.

This was a baffling world that had become as tactile and real as his day-to-day existence. Yet a comforting limbo where it took forever for anything to be resolved, a vast slowmoving pageantry of incremental crisis, tales of folk who never developed an immunity to amnesia so that they caught it with bewildering regularity, who were constantly being framed and standing trial for murder, folks whose very identities seemed in constant flux because other folks were always stealing their identities and pretending to be them. Doppelgangers posing as wastrel scions of wealthy families rumored long lost in the Mateo Grosso were always turning up for the reading of the wills. Homespun philosophers ruminated and spat and shuffled and passed on shopworn homilies to descendents who didn’t want to hear them anyway and were black sheep forever wandering away from the flock.

He propped the doors wide with a hassock and a magazine rack and dragged the radio onto the tiled floor of the workroom. He stood for a moment breathing hard and perspiring almost audibly. He’d had a thought for one of the plastic tabletop radios that would have been more transportable but he’d tried one in the store and didn’t care for the tinny tone of it and thought of it as vastly inferior to the rich bass pronouncements and organ
music that rolled authoritatively through the velvetcovered speakers of the Crosley. The Crosley’s words had the gravity of carved stone handed down ceremoniously from the mountain and a solemnity that dwarfed the tentative whinings of the tabletops. Anyway this room more and more was becoming his Badger’s den and he kept moving more of his favorite things into it until it had become living room and bedroom and above all his refuge from the world and its puzzling doings that transpired just outside his walls.

He was no more than inside the room before he halted his radio ministrations and closed the doors behind him. This doorhad a heavy lock that clicked to in an oiled reassuring manner and a solid deadbolt that he trusted and immediately shoved home. He felt suddenly lighter, cares lifted from him, he felt he could waltz the radio across the room to the wallplug, and humming to himself he slid it across the tile and plugged it in.

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.

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.