“Take it easy, kid,” she said, setting her purse, hat, and gloves down. “I got shovels in the car. Just get dressed. Wear something discreet.”
I just stared at her. I half wondered if she expected me to pull out some kind of grave robber’s getup. I wanted to laugh. And then I did. I started to laugh. It was terrible laugh, like out of some kids’ cartoon, loud and rhythmless and shrill.
The slap that came was hard. It radiated through me. And it was so fast that by the time I finished blinking, her hand was at her side again.
“Don’t give me a hysterical scene, sugar,” she said. “Nothing’s underfoot. It’s just easier if we move it.”
“Easier because the cops know where the body is?” I followed her as she headed toward her bedroom and the closet.
“You used to be so much smarter, kid,” she said, pulling out a pair of low-heel pumps. “No one knows a goddamned thing except another heel grifter blew town. No one’s going to hang black crepe
for your boy, honey. When you gonna get that through your head?”
“So why do we have to—”
“I decided only we should know where the body is “ she said, sliding on the shoes. “Now are you gonna get out of that nightgown yourself or do I have to unpeel you like a grape?”
We were in the car when I started in again. My days of flying blind were over.
“I told you,” I said. “I told you Mackey was gonna put the screws in.”
“Mackey’s fine,” she said, punching the cigarette lighter. She didn’t usually smoke. I took this as a bad sign. “It’s Upstairs,” she continued. “Mackey’s doing a little poaching, buying up their land, building a new track to compete with Casa Mar. They think he’s moving in on them. I don’t want us to be Mackey’s cat’s-paw.”
I was surprised she told me that much. She lit the cigarette. Her hands were still. She was edgy but under control. She was doing business, cleaning up.
“I told you,” I repeated, not too wisely.
“Don’t mouth me, little girl,” she said, sharply but quietly. “Mackey served his purpose and this is just insurance. And it gives us a tip-off. If Mackey tries to parlay our situation with Upstairs, we’ll know it because he’ll come up empty-handed.”
It was the biggest glimpse behind the curtain she’d ever given me and it was quite an eye-opener. In the end, we were so much grease to work bigger deals, to oil the gears for setups we couldn’t even
see, couldn’t even catch a glimmer of.
“Has Mackey got a shot? Could he—”
“No,” she replied, then sealed herself up. I could see her face close before my eyes and I knew I’d gotten the most I could. She looked at me. “Now let’s can the big noise and get this done.”
We drove about fifteen miles out of town, her talking the whole way about how I needed to shape up, get wise, stop being such a rabbit, and get my steel back. What good was all her work if, on the first big test, I turned back into some tiddlywink? She laid it on me hard.
But I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about what we were going to be doing. I was thinking about what we would be moving. I didn’t want to feel that weight, didn’t want to go through it all again. I’d finally started distracting myself from the blood and gristle of it, the terrifying red-on-bone pictures in my head. And now I had to sink right back into it. My lily whites would really be in it this time.
We drove up a long, windy bluff until we reached a tangle of dark trees. She stopped the car and stepped out. I thought I wouldn’t be able to move. My teeth were grinding together, my whole body felt like dry wood, stiff and brittle. But I did move. There was something in me that made me move. I opened the door, felt a rush of mist collapse down my throat.
She opened the trunk and handed me a flashlight and shovel and took a pair for herself too. I didn’t ask where she’d gotten them. Instead, I was eyeing a mound of wet leaves under one of the swooping trees. My beam rested on it. With the air so unsettled, the whole mound seemed to be moving, shivering.
“A long way away,” a voice, my voice, shuddered out.
“Mackey doesn’t want ‘em too close to home anymore,” she said, and I thought I caught a little relief in her voice, like she hadn’t been so sure the body was where they’d told her it would be.
She walked over to the knot of low-hanging trees and set her flashlight down. She stopped right in front of the pile and kicked her foot straight in, sending leaves everywhere. Swinging the shovel around her like a sword, she plunged it in.
As I walked slowly, carefully toward her, I thought I could smell it already. I knew that smell. When I was little, my sister’s tabby disappeared. We thought she’d run away until the musty, meaty odor started from under the porch. I remember my old man holding a washcloth to his face as he dug the thing out, my sister bawling in our bedroom. The next year, the lady down the street, the one who wore leg braces, put a bullet into her brain. She lived alone in her half of the duplex and no one knew until the stench started coming through the walls. The stench, just like now.
I was right behind her, the smell hot and close in my face. I was holding the shovel and standing behind her.
“You gonna stand there like a clothes rack or start digging?” She didn’t seem to notice the smell at all. She just kept shoveling.
So I started shoveling too.
And the smell got stronger and there were blowflies and the smell was like a living thing thick in the air as we dug deeper.
It didn’t take long. Mackey’s boys hadn’t bothered to go too deep. Seeing the first piece of the canvas there, lit by the flashlights resting on the ground, I felt my mouth go dry. I didn’t dare inhale. I didn’t dare look at her even as I could hear her breathing.
“Here we go,” she said, as we cleared away the last shovelfuls of wet dirt.
I looked down at the long duffel bag, so sure it would be open and I’d have to see. What would it be like to see, to see that?
I pictured him curled up in there, like a baby in the womb, curling upon himself. And I could picture the bag opening, loosening, dilating out. And then I would see him, and that careless smile. He’d still be smiling at me.
“Let’s go,” I heard her say. I looked over and saw she’d already opened the trunk. She was ready. She was ready. She was so easy. It was like she was about to move sacks of jewels, like any swag. Was that how it could get? Could it get like that?
And she was tugging the bag, heaving her shoulders.
And there I was lifting it with her, my breath short, my arms straining, the wet, heavy air filling my half-open mouth, the wind lifting bits of dirt and grime into it. My whole body feeling coated with the stench, the sumpy thickness that had been covering him, all that had been slipping from him, seeping into everything that I was
now ankle deep in, everything I was taking in with each foul breath. It was all Vic and it was all what we’d done and it was in my skin, my lungs, everything.
She was strong and she carried the heavier end and then we were heaving it into the trunk and it was Vic in our hands. And I thought about it as the canvas burned my fingers, as my nails dug in. It was Vic.
Oh, Vic, even you deserved better than this. Even a lousy snake like you.
She slammed the trunk shut.
“Not bad, kid,” she said, and it was that near-smile of hers. “Halfway there.”
We drove about ten miles back towards town, stopping at a salvage yard. She navigated it with such ease I figured she’d been there a hundred times or more, weaving through the towering piles of rotting fenders and crushed car doors, twisted steering columns, rusted engines, and burned-out sleeper cars.
She pulled up beside a long stretch of oil drums stacked fat for twenty yards or more. We got out and I followed her, the headlights hitting her like a spotlight.
She was ahead of me and I was watching her walk in that swaying fishtail way of hers, the cool, precise undulations that nearly hypnotized. The walk was so easy, so measured, and those legs, even streaked with dirt, were worthy of any spotlight.
And it was like she wasn’t even real, a shimmer-struck illusion, a hard flash of glamour against the creaking stacks of drums, rolling against each other, furry with rust, grimy with oil and soot, perfumed with old gasoline and singing emptily as each gust of air whistled through every rutted hole and crevice.
She, lit all through, filled with light, sparking with it … even in her spattered pumps, even with that shovel in her ungloved hand, she was a star. And I cursed her for it. Because she was solid gold, fourteen-carat, barely burnished despite twenty years of hard moiling. But beneath it, I knew, beneath that gold and Stardust, she was all grit and sharp teeth gnashing, head twisting, talons out, tearing flesh. She was all open mouth, tunneling into an awful nothing.
I hated her.
And I felt closer to her than ever.
Goddamn her.
We dragged the body to the newly dug grave, shallow but wedged between the tightly packed drums and a fifteen-foot-high barbed wire fence. It didn’t have to be deep. No one would find him.
In the car driving home, I looked down at my hands, cold, scraped, nails torn to red ribbons fluttering loose.
I’d had him in my hands one last time. My hands on him through thick canvas. My hands on him. Even after everything—how ashamed I was to feel this now—because even after everything I still felt my hips burning at the memory of him, what he’d done to me in that dark room. In his dark room in the middle of the night. Hands moving, making my eyelids flutter back. Feeling it now, remembering it, all I could think of was knees on hard floors and this is what sin is all about.
“You really redeemed yourself, kid boots,” she was saying as the waiter brought us our strip steaks leaking red over the plate’s edge. It was nearly three A.M., but Googie’s stayed open for her.
She lifted her highball glass to her mouth and took a long, snug sip. Then, leaning back in her chair, she nodded at me, which was her version of beaming with pride.
I realized she thought this whole thing had brought us together. And sure, it did. Goddammit, it did. Our hands on Vic together. Our hands in that dirt, that dirt under our nails, the wetness in the air lifting that dirt onto our skin—like some ancient ritual, like it was before anything, before words, even.
It hit me: she thought we were celebrating.
Hell, maybe we were.
∞◊∞
When we got back to her place, I took some of the Tuinal the doc had given me and slept dreamlessly for ten hours. She’d left me a note, listing my stops for that day. I was back on the circuit.
I’d made three pickups around town when I started to get the itchy feeling. At first, I thought it was my head playing tricks on me, but enough looks in the rearview told me different.
I didn’t recognize the car and it was too far away for me to see the driver’s face, but I knew I’d seen it before. I thought maybe it’d been idling outside the betting parlor I’d hit earlier that day, but I wasn’t sure.
My first thought was Gloria put a tail on me. Well, let her. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to. She had a lot of brass after what we’d done together the night before. But it was kind of a bum-looking Dodge Coronet, nothing one of her boys would be caught dead in. Which is when I started thinking about the cops. It sure looked like the kind of car a cop might drive.
Then I began imagining bad scenarios again. Had we been followed the night before? Nah. If we had, they’d’ve just hauled us in on the spot with the dirt still on our hands, in every line of our palms.
It wasn’t long before the driver of the Coronet stopped bothering to pretend. He was right behind me, close enough for a second date. I even got a look at the guy and he sure had a lawman’s face, weathery and saggy with a thick edge of meanness.
It wasn’t a situation that left me a lot of choices. I couldn’t make any more drops or pickups with him on my tail. And I was only going to give myself more heebie-jeebies if I kept wondering what the real story was.
Still half bent on the blues I’d popped at four A.M., I let myself take it casual, like she would. Then I figured what she’d do next and I did it. I drove to the far end of town, picked an empty side street, and pulled over, stopping the car. The Coronet driver stopped too.
I got out and walked to the Coronet, sauntering over to the driver’s-side door.
“Can’t say I’m not flattered, boss,” I said, doing my best side-of
the-mouth sneer. Wasn’t that what he expected, what they all did? “But I already got an old man.”
He looked up at me with that cop look: half bored and half ready to billy club me at the same time.
“You want to follow me to the station, smart girl?” he said, looking straight ahead. Not even looking at me, like I was so much trash on the curb.
“That’s how it’s gonna be, huh?”
“That’s how it’s gonna be.”
Turned out, the cop in the Coronet was just the delivery man. I was supposed to see a Detective Clancy. I’d never heard of him, figured he must be new.
Waiting in the common area, I let the tooies keep my edges numb and pretended this was just the boys looking for some behind-thehand talk. Or maybe Clancy was taking the long way around to getting his name on the pad. Play it nice and easy, I told myself. Bing Crosby on a hammock.
“I don’t like how this plays out,” a voice rustled in front of me, gruff but lilting.
I looked up to see Mackey’s boy, tweed cap low on his forehead and dark with sweat.
“What they drug you in for?” he said, leaning down and speaking softly.
I looked up at him. “Dancing with boys.”
He shook his head. “You don’t get it. You don’t see the contraption. Honey, it’s all wired and you make one wrong move—” He stopped suddenly and stood up straight, head turning this way and that way like a cartoon robber looking for his getaway car.
“One wrong move?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level, trying not to let his nerves rub off on me.
He shook his head and, hands in pockets, gestured with his eyes, with a shift in his torso, toward the stairwell door.
I followed him down one floor to the morgue, its glazed green walls chilly and glistening. I’d only been down there once before and then I was only in the hallway, waiting with a beat cop while my old man ID’ed my mother, burnt half to char in the big county hospital blaze fifteen years back. They got her from dental records and the metal name tag seared into her chest.