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  I jumped the little creek and went over and looked in the hole. There was dirt not far down in the hole, so that proved the armadillo didn’t live there anymore. Nothing lived there anymore. I raked back the dirt and looked inside. There were several plastic bags.

  I reached in and took them out. They were those sealable bags. I stuffed my coat pockets with them, took the hoe to the barn, and went back to the house. I felt surprisingly casual. Neither the FBI nor the sheriffs department were waiting in the kitchen.

  I sat down at the table and put the money on it. When I reached for one of the packets to open it, I saw the nail hole where Trudy’s hand had been. I put my hand over it and centered it about where I thought the hole was.

  Poor Trudy.

  I opened the bags and poured out the money and counted it.There was a little over three hundred and fifty thousand. Subtract the five thousand the authorities had, and you were still short, but not much. Trudy may have rough-counted that night, or maybe Paco palmed a little. It didn’t matter.

  I put a hundred thousand in one bag. It was a tight fit. I got up and got a big black trash bag out from under Leonard’s sink looked through the drawers till I found a big grocery bag and some package tape and scissors. I went back to the table and sat down. I put the rest of the money in the plastic bags and put all of it, excluding that one hundred thousand, into the trash bag. I folded the bag down and around the money and made a nice compact bundle. I opened the paper bag, put the trash bag in it and folded the paper bag around it, used some package tape and the scissors to make a nice parcel.

  I got up and looked around until I found a black marker. I went over and wrote in big bold letters on the package, GREENPEACE. I’d have to look up the rest of the address later, but seeing it written made me feel pretty good. It wasn’t what Trudy had planned to do with it, but what she had planned had ultimately been in the support of things like that. I like to think she would be proud of me. After all that talk Leonard and I had given about not giving to the seals or whales, I thought there was a certain pleasant irony in it all.

  The hundred thousand was for Leonard. He’d need it when he came home. If the insurance didn’t pay his hospital bills, it wouldn’t do him much good, high as they are, but it could give him eating money until he could go back to work.

  I put the hundred thousand in my coat pocket and stuffed the package under the couch. Not exactly ace hiding places, but I figured they’d do until I got home and could do better. And besides, it had all been laundered. Who was to say it was stolen money? How was it to be proved? Greenpeace could spend that dough good as they could anyone’s.

  I put on Leonard’s Hank Williams album, Greatest Hits, Volume 2, turned it up. I got one of Leonard’s 40 pipes and some spare tobacco off the fireplace mantel, packed the pipe and lit it. I dragged his rocking chair out to the front porch and sat there and puffed the pipe until I remembered why I didn’t smoke. I thumped out the tobacco and continued to sit there in the cold afternoon, listening to Hank Williams, occasionally flipping the record, and feeling the cold get colder.

  It came to me as I sat there that Trudy, for all her blind idealism, had at least been on the right track, heading for the right station, but she got derailed.

  Me, I didn’t even have a station in life anymore. It was like she said, I lived from day to day and thought it was good. But she had shown me something about heart and soul again, and I knew why it was I always went with her. At the bottom of it all, she believed that things could be better than they are. That life wasn’t just a game to get through. I had believed that way once, and lost it, and that’s why, in spite of myself, I had always liked her coming around, no matter what it did to me. She made me believe that human beings could really make a difference. In the end, her way of doing it was as bad or worse than those she was against, but the idealism was there.

  Knowing what I knew now, I could never feel exactly the way I had. I was too experienced and too practical to go back to seeing life through rose-colored glasses, or think you could figure out life’s solutions with paper and a slide rule.

  But to lose my idealism, to quit believing in the ability of human beings to rise above their baser instincts, was to become old and bitter and of no service to anyone, not even myself.

  Idealism was a little like Venus in the daytime. There’d been a time when I could see it. But as time went on and I needed it less and wanted to pass on the responsibility, I had lost my ability to see it, to believe it. But now I thought I might see it again if I made an effort and looked hard enough.

  I went inside and flipped the record for the umpteenth time, turned it all the way up, and went back and moved the rocking chair to the yard, pulled my coat around me and looked up at the sky, tried to pick out Venus before the day gave out and it got dark.

  Newfrom

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  Leather Maiden

  Now available in hardcover from Knopf

  $23.95 • 304 pages • 978-0-375-41452-7

  Coming soon

  Vanilla Ride

  Joe R. Lansdale’s first Hap and Leonard

  novel in eight years.

  Hap Collins and Leonard Pine best friends, freelance vigilantes, complete opposites return in this Texas-sized thriller to take on the Dixie Mafia, and to keep themselves out of jail.

  Available June 2009 in hardcover from Knopf

  $23.95 • 256 pages • 978-0-307-27097-9

  Please visit www.aaknopf.com

  Also available, in Vintage paperback:

  Lost Echoes • 978-0-307-27544-8

  Mucho Mojo • 978-0-307-45539-0

  Sunset and Sawdust • 978-0-375-71922-6