“Riley,” Aunt Cary said to her husband, “reach there behind the stove, see if you can find some cobwebs.”
Uncle Riley went to the cookstove, looked behind it, scooped up a batch as if he were gathering the strands of a weave. He brought them back and Aunt Cary wadded them up and pushed them on the punctures. They turned dark red and clotted up.
“Stops the blood from runnin’,” Aunt Cary said. “I don’t never clean behind the stove. Don’t never know when you’ll need the webs.”
Lee reached out and touched Goose’s hand gently.
“I’ll be damned,” Lee said. “Fever’s near gone.”
“Cause the poison is out of him,” Aunt Cary said. “And we’ll all be damned, we don’t change our ways.”
18
A little later that day, Henry, already feeling slaphappy from having found out something that would make Sunset look like a killer, got another bit of news that was like fine egg-white icing on a double-layer chocolate cake, even if in retrospect, he had been forced to spread the icing a bit himself.
He had gone to work, and bored of it, sitting in his office with nothing really to do, decided to get out of there, drive over to Holiday and look up a little honey he knew who would do the dirty deed for five dollars and two bits. It was an odd price, but it was her price, and she was worth every bit of it. Blond and buxom with enough ass for two, but tight and nice just the same, prone to heat rash pimples on her inner thigh.
Driving over, passing the drugstore, he noted, as always, the apartment above it. It was a curious place. Painted bright red with only two little windows facing the street, looking like square eyes in a heatstroked face. At the back of the place were a lot of windows. They looked out at a wall of dirt and grass that was part of a huge wooded overlook that hung above the drugstore and the apartment. Up there lived John McBride. Henry did business with McBride, but when he wasn’t doing business with him, he tried not to think about him. He wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to think about you didn’t have to. He had come from Houston by way of Chicago, at Henry’s request, and sometimes he wished he had never taken that step, because McBride, he was a guy started out working for you, then after a time, you got the feeling you were working for him, that you couldn’t get rid of him. He was suddenly all over your business and a part of it. Then you wished you didn’t know him, even if he could be handy about some things, because he seemed to have come from a place much more South than Houston, or Mexico, for that matter. Way South.
And with him came the other one. The black one. The one who said little and talked as if he were speaking to someone unseen standing just to your left and behind you. Yeah. The black one. Looked like a big beetle in his hat and Prince Albert coat. McBride’s bad shadow.
Henry didn’t like to think about that one at all. Didn’t even like to think his name for fear it might bring him around. If McBride was from far South, the other one, he came from deeper down than that.
Henry turned his attention back to the whore he had come to see, but when he arrived on Dodge Street, he was disappointed to find she had an appointment elsewhere.
It looked liked the beginning of a bad day. Henry wasn’t interested in going back to the mill, and he wasn’t really all that interested in going home to watch his wife drink, but it struck him that he had a little black book hidden in a panel inside his desk drawer at home, and in that book were the addresses and a few numbers of whores with telephones or some connection to someone who had a phone. They were women he had not used but knew about, had been given their information by associates. He had not really planned to use them because of already having the blond honey he liked, but that hadn’t worked out, and he still had the urge to clean out his pipes, and now, disappointed, he wanted to see if there was someone else he might contact, so he drove home on a mission for that little black book.
As he went in the house, Henry didn’t call out for his wife. That was never profitable, as she might appear at any moment, a big stack of flesh, looking like heaped-up mashed potatoes moving about on their own accord, topped by hair as greasy as a leaky oil filter.
As he entered the house, he saw, sticking up over the sofa, a fat white foot. He eased over there, called his wife’s name, but she didn’t answer.
He peeked over the couch. She was naked, as usual, and her other leg was on the couch and turned awkward, and he had a bird’s-eye view of the thing that made her a woman and not mashed potatoes, and the sight of it, like some kind of hair-lined wound, made him jump.
Then he noticed the rest of her wasn’t looking too good either. Her breasts, thick with fat, had fallen back to cover her face-mercifully, he thought-and the fat that made up the rest of her flowed over the couch and floor in heaps.
He called her name a couple of times.
No answer. He went around and took a look. Not much to see. He started to reach out and move one of her breasts so he could see her face, but the thought of it gave him a shiver. He hadn’t touched one of those things in years, and he wasn’t excited about starting now.
He went to the fireplace, got a poker, used it to lift the breast up, held it there for a moment, like some kind of vicious animal he had shot but feared might still be alive. Under her tit was an arm, bent across her face, and in her fist was a glass and the open end of the glass was pressed against her face.
And then he got it.
She had been standing on the other side of the couch, and in her usual drunken stupor she had thrown her head back to toss down a drink, and the movement had caused her to go over backwards. She had fallen over the couch, gaining momentum when her breasts hit her in the face like sacks of flour, then the rest of her got going and she hit the floor hard.
Or maybe she had a heart attack.
It didn’t matter. She was dead.
Or was she?
She had fooled him before. To the point where he thought he might talk to McBride about some business, but he didn’t want to push his luck, not with the mayor gone and McBride the reason and hired by him.
Henry looked at his wife carefully. There was vomit all around her mouth and on the floor, and her mouth was wide open, the glass halfway in it.
Henry lowered her breast with the poker, then used it to jab her in the side a couple of times, just to make sure. He gave her pretty good pokes, but she didn’t get up or move or make any noise.
He laughed. He hadn’t expected to laugh. It just came out of nowhere, like a summer storm. He started and couldn’t stop. He jigged around in a circle.
Lately he had begun to doubt the existence of God, but now he knew he was wrong. Not only was there a God, but the sonofabitch was on his side.
He put the poker back, found a glass and her bottle on the fireplace, poured himself a strong shot of whisky, drank it, drank another. It had no effect on him.
He was giddier than whisky could make him. He couldn’t have been happier than if a fairy godmother had granted him six more inches on his dick.
In the bedroom he got a quilt, brought it back and tossed it over her.
She moaned.
It wasn’t much, but it was a noise.
Henry stopped, listened, looked. Hoped he had heard nothing more than the growling of his own stomach, an unexpected passing of gas. But no, she was moaning again.
Henry went over, lifted up the quilt. Her eyes fluttered weakly, closed. Her hand with the glass still in it flapped away from her mouth and slapped against the floor.
He had been wrong about God.
He bent down and pulled the quilt back over her face, then he took hold of the quilt and pressed it down so that it fit tight over her nose, and he leaned forward, so that he was putting all his weight on her, and weak as she was, she didn’t struggle much. Her foot sticking over the couch waved a few times like a flag of surrender, then went still.