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  “Yeah. I know.”

  We carefully folded and pulled the tarp off the mattress. I put it out in the yard by the side of the house. Back inside, I fished the car keys out of his front pants pocket, then I walked out to the garage and put the fishing gear into the car, in the back seat, opened one of the windows so the poles would poke out of it. I put his box of hooks and sinkers and the like on the floorboard behind the front passenger seat.

  I pulled the car around behind the house, opened the front passenger door. Nancy helped me carry Frank out, me holding him under the shoulders, her holding his legs. He was a load. She dropped her end a couple of times, but we finally got him through the passenger door and into the seat. I had to put his hat on him again because it had fallen off. I set him up in the seat so if someone did see us, he’d look like he was riding.

  It was still dark, but with the porch light on, I could see his face was really beat up. His nose was broken and his lip was busted.

  “All right, make a sandwich,” I said. “You got a thermos, make some coffee and fill it.”

  “So you’re going to have a snack? Right now?”

  “Going fishing, I figure he might take his lunch with him. We’ll put it in the car, they look it over, they’ll find the sandwich, the thermos.”

  “Of course. I get it. Sorry.”

  We went inside and she made the sandwich and I started some coffee. She found a thermos, and I filled it when the coffee was ready. She put the sandwich in a paper bag and I took the bag and thermos out to the car, put them on the floorboard behind the driver’s seat.

  “Now the beer cans.”

  Nancy went inside and came out with a large sack of them.

  “Too many,” I said. “I’ll pour some on the floorboard.”

  I did that, and when I felt it was enough, I gave her the bag with the rest in it to take back inside.

  When she came out again, she took hold of my arm. She had quite a grip.

  “Now we do the other part,” I said. “We get that done, I think we’re home-free. After that, wait a month, and you ask about the insurance.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “But it’s a smart time. Listen, this creek, it’s in the woods, but it’s not a long way from here as the crow flies, so it shouldn’t take any time at all. Just drive careful.”

  “I understand, Ed, don’t wear me out with details.”

  “Sorry. Yeah, you’re right. I’m nervous.”

  “So am I. I never helped kill a man before.”

  “We were better at it than we should be,” I said.

  I got in Frank’s car, and Nancy went up to the garage to get the one I had sold her. She pulled out and I started for the highway, going at what I thought was the right speed.

  It was still dark out.

  I looked in my rearview. I could see the lights from Nancy’s car. She was following at just the right distance.

  With the back window open, the wind whistled in, and it seemed pretty chill, though I might have felt that way because I had just beat a man with a crowbar and smothered him with a plastic bag. You don’t do that and not feel anything. I comforted myself with the notion he wasn’t someone that needed to be living, that he might have killed Nancy eventually.

  I turned down a blacktop and drove for a bit, and then I took a clay road. I used to fish there, back when I fished. I had done a lot of that when I had first moved here with Mama and Melinda, after the war, before I started working at the car lot. It was a nice, quiet place, and I had never been there and had someone else show up. Not early mornings, anyway, which was when I liked to fish, getting out there just before daylight. Like today.

  A short time later, I came to the bridge. It wasn’t very long, and it was even more precarious than I remembered it. There were spots on the sides of the bridge where parts of the railing was missing. I parked in the middle of the bridge, left the lights on, got out, looked over the side. There was a bit of moonlight on the water, and I could see pretty well.

  It was about twenty feet down. The water was deep there. There was a natural depression and there were bits of leaves and sticks floating in it, being carried along by a brisk current.

  Nancy parked behind me, left her lights on. She got out and came around and looked down at the water. “Is it deep enough?”

  “Deep enough he could drown in it, and shallow enough someone can see the car, which is what we want.”

  “What now?”

  I didn’t answer. I got back in his car and pointed it so that the nose was against the bridge, then I put it in park, got out, reached across the seat, and pulled Frank in front of the steering wheel. The slick upholstery made it pretty easy to move him. I rolled down the driver’s-side window. I closed the door. Nancy came over and took my arm.

  “I’m going to reach in, pop the gear into drive, and it’ll be enough to send it over. That railing would break if a butterfly flew into it. Best stand back.”

  I leaned in the window, got hold of the shift, and worked it into drive. The car rolled gently and then stopped against the railing.

  Nancy put her hands on her hips. “You meant a big fucking butterfly, right?”

  “I got it.”

  I went to the back of the car and pushed. This time it went through the rail, and it went quickly, and when it got to the rear wheels, it dropped, and hung on the bridge for a moment, then vibrated off. The car went into the water hood-first.

  I looked at it. Its nose was on the bottom, and the rear end was sticking up in such a way you could clearly read the license plate.

  I lifted my head and took a deep gulp of air.

  Nancy said, “Oh, shit, Ed.”

  I looked down.

  Frank was thrashing around in the water. He had come out of the window, and he was still alive, the cold water having rejuvenated what we thought was a dead body.

  (34)

  He’s fucking Rasputin,” I said.

  I didn’t have the crowbar with me, but I edged down the end of the bridge, along the sloping dirt there, and when I got near the creek, I saw Frank had managed to put both hands on the bank and was trying to pull himself onto land. He wasn’t moving so good, but I was surprised he was moving at all.

  I found a large rock and picked that up. I went over and bent down over him and hit him in the head a couple of times so hard, my whole body vibrated. He let go of the dirt and slid back into the water, turning on his side, then on his back, and the current moved him. He went past the car and sailed like a big boat along the creek until it grew shallow, and then he washed up in a gravel bed next to the creek on the far side and lay there, his feet floating in the water where his legs stuck off into it.

  I climbed back up the bank.

  Nancy said, “Is he dead?”

  “He’s got to be,” I said.

  “How will it look now? He was already pretty beat up. Is anyone going to think he was killed by running off the bridge?”

  “Banged around by the car, floated out the window, knocked around by the rocks in the creek. A few days go by and they don’t find him, well, birds and animals, what have you, will have been at work on him. Bunch of yokel cops and the like around here, I don’t think they’re going to think much about it. They like to solve their cases quick. They’ll put ‘accidental death’ down fast so they can maybe go out and get to beating someone with a rubber hose.”

  Nancy drove us back, and inside we set to work cleaning again. It took several hours, and I found what had hit me in the cheek: one of Frank’s teeth.

  I put that in the commode and flushed it down. We bagged the bloody clean-up rags, and I took them outside and wrapped them up in the tarp. I would separate those, burn them somewhere, drop the tarp in the trash can, let it go to the dump.

  When it was all done, we took a shower together, made love in the shower, and then we dried and dressed, me in the spare clothes I’d brought with me in the grip, Nancy in shorts and a sweatshirt. I had even cleaned the bloo
d off the bottoms of my shoes.

  I felt good about things.

  We kissed, and I went to my car, carrying the crowbar, the tarp with the rags inside, and my grip with the bloody clothes in it.

  I put all of that in the trunk of the Cadillac and was about to leave when I saw something stumbling around in the dark, carrying what looked like a small tree that had been pulled up by the roots, using it like a crude crutch. It was coming down the little road I had driven on, and as I watched, it cut away from that and crossed a patch of grass in front of the cemetery, heading toward Nancy’s house.

  It was Frank.

  He wasn’t Rasputin. He was the goddamn Frankenstein monster.

  I got the pistol out of the glove box and decided I had no choice, that the whole plan had gone to hell, and I had to shoot him. And then I decided against it. I put my pistol in my waistband and got the crowbar out of the trunk again and hurried to Nancy’s house.

  I heard Nancy scream as she was standing at the back door, the screen closed. She’d been watching me from there, and now Frank had shown up. He was on the back steps, tugging at the screen door.

  I ran up behind him, and when I was almost on him, he turned. His face was swollen and black in spots. One eye was closed, his nose was splayed sideways on his face, and part of his lip was dangling.

  He made a grunting noise, opening his mouth enough I could see his tongue was black and he was missing some teeth.

  He swung at me with that small tree, which actually proved to be a large limb. But he was weak. Why wouldn’t he be? He had been hit repeatedly with a crowbar, smothered, run off a bridge into water, cracked on the head with a rock, and left to die, and still he had enough in him to find a stick and make it home to even the score.

  He was so weak that the limb hit me and it was like being brushed with a feather. But I was doing all right. I hit him hard right in the center of the head. He fell down face-first in the yard. I thought I might get a saw and cut his head off, just to make sure, but I still believed the plan might work.

  I lifted his head and peered into his one open eye. It had a glaze over it, and the pupil was as still as a thumbtack in a white board.

  Nancy came outside. “Is he…finally dead?”

  “Goddamn, I hope so. I don’t know how much more I got in me. I’m going to change clothes and take him back to the creek.”

  I did just that, putting on the bloody ones again. Nancy rode out there with me. The sun was coming up when I dragged him out of the trunk and flipped his big ass over the side of the bridge. He hit the back of the car and fell into the water and went under. We watched for a while to see if he would swim up.

  He didn’t.

  “Finally,” Nancy said.

  We went back to the house and I changed quickly, gave Nancy a kiss, told her to call me when she could, and drove home.

  (35)

  When I got home, I separated the rags from the tarp and put them in the grip with my bloody clothes. I put the tarp in the trash can and put it out on the curb. That very morning was trash day.

  I kept the grip. I was going to burn that or maybe take it out in the country and bury it. I washed the crowbar off in the tub. It was caked with dried blood and brains. I watched the blood run down the drain. I barely made it to the toilet. I threw up everything inside of me, and then it was the dry heaves. I thought it would never stop.

  I was so tired I almost called in sick to work, but I didn’t think that was a good idea, so I spruced up a little more, combed my hair, brushed my teeth, used a lot of mouthwash to get the vomit smell out of my mouth, put some eye water in my eyes, and decided that I had better have breakfast and some coffee.

  I hardly ate any of it, and the coffee made my stomach churn.

  I took the crowbar out with me and unlocked the shed under the stairs and put the crowbar in it.

  At work, I came into the office, and Dave looked up. “Man, son, you look like you been wrestling a bear.”

  I kind of had been. “Slept bad. One of those nights.”

  “I’d tell you to go home, but I need you here because I have a doctor’s appointment today.”

  I decided I’d try coffee again, so I poured some from the pot setting on the hot plate and put more sugar in it than I usually did.

  I sat down at my desk and Dave talked the way he always talked, but today I didn’t want to hear it. I pretended things couldn’t be better, smiled and nodded a lot.

  I managed to drink the coffee, and he got up to go to his appointment.

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Doctor just likes to check me over once a year. Had a few heart episodes. No attacks, but some episodes. Mostly, though, it’s just a general look-over. Between you and me, I think he likes to poke his finger up my ass.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  Dave cackled and left.

  I sat there and sipped the coffee and it managed to rest comfortably enough in my stomach. I replayed last night over and over in my head. The way the crowbar made that sound against his skull, him with his pants down and me swinging away, crawling under the bed. The way he came out of the water and I had to use the rock on him. The way he came walking back to the house, probably with only a brain cell or two left, and then us taking him out there again and dropping him over the bridge and him landing on his car and rolling off in the water and sinking under.

  He had to have come up by now and started floating a bit, though the creek got shallow beyond the deep hole, so he would be visible in the water. I hoped the buzzards would do their work. But then again, for Nancy to get the money, they had to find enough of him to know who he was.

  No one drove onto the lot for even a look that morning, and around noon, I locked up the office and went over to a hamburger place and had a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke. I could eat the burger, but I wasn’t ready for the greasy fries. The Coke seemed to help settle my stomach.

  Jesus Christ, what had I done?

  I had to take comfort in knowing he wouldn’t be hitting Nancy and raping her anymore. I had to take comfort in that, but right then, sitting there in the booth with half a hamburger and a pile of oily fries in front of me, there wasn’t a lot of comfort to be had.

  To make myself feel better, I thought about the insurance money, the drive-in, the animal cemetery, and I thought about Nancy, how soft and warm she was. I thought about that as much as I could so as not to think about the other.

  Mama wouldn’t like what I’d had to do to get that money, but the idea of me owning a business, even partly owning it, would be something that would impress her. In a year, I’d be doing better than my brother.

  When I got back to work, Dave was still out, and I’d no sooner unlocked the office than a car drove onto the lot. It was a colored couple.

  There was an unwritten Dave rule that you didn’t sell to colored because they couldn’t get financing because they were colored, and the idea behind that was they wouldn’t or couldn’t pay their bills.

  That had never stopped us from selling to white people who couldn’t pay their bills. That’s why I repossessed cars or we had someone else do it.

  I went out and talked to them, and by day’s end, I had their Ford and they had a newer one. I sold them one of the better ones on the lot. On the form I wrote in W for “white” in the section that wanted to know their race. They had been able to pay half of it, raw bills the man pulled out of his fat wallet. They had been saving for four years, he said.

  I had them come into the office and I filled out the paperwork with them. The woman set silent, as if she thought she ought to, being in the presence of a white man and sitting in an office they might not normally be allowed into.

  I hoped Dave wouldn’t come back during that process, but I didn’t really give a shit, because right then, I didn’t give a shit about how things were supposed to be. I had already violated how things were, and in a big way. What I was doing at that moment was nothing.

  When I got off that
afternoon, I didn’t go home. I drove out to see Dash. I knew he wouldn’t have the birth certificate ready, but I wanted some company, and the thing was, I didn’t really have any friends. Dash wasn’t exactly a friend; I don’t know what he was, but we could talk and drink beer and I felt good at his place.

  When I got out there, I saw his car parked in the yard, and I went straight to the building out back, which was where I figured I’d find him, because, like last time, I could hear the air conditioner out there and none in the house.

  I was right. He answered with his usual smile, flashing that gold tooth with the silver star, offered me a beer. I sat on the couch while he sat in his chair facing me.

  “You looking rough, my friend.”

  “Didn’t sleep well.”

  “You look like someone that’s done something wrong.”

  It was just a saying, but he had no idea.

  “You know that certificate ain’t ready yet. Only work a bit on it a day. Too much of a rush, I’ll fuck it up.”

  “I know. Just thought I’d like a free beer.”

  He grinned at me. “You know, you’re a weird cat, playing all white and stuff, and you’re out here with the niggers.”

  “Just one. You. And I’ll just say ‘colored.’”

  “Try saying ‘human.’”

  “Oh, now you’re going to get all political on me, and I’m the one correcting you.”

  “No, but you don’t make a very good white person, Ed.”

  “I don’t fit anywhere.”

  “You all right here.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I figure you ain’t seen any more of Cecil.”

  “Course not.”

  “Well, don’t think he’s forgot. He’s kind that will let something stew until it boils over. You might think he’s done let it go, but he ain’t.”

  “Guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  “Another beer?”

  “Yeah. That would be great.”

  I don’t really remember what else we talked about that day, but when I left it was nearly eight at night. I was parked out in front of Dash’s house in my Cadillac and had been for hours, and right then I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t give a shit about a lot of things.