“I never knew Dud to drink much,” Virgil said, tossing his empty out the window and pulling another from the brown bag on the floor. He opened it on the door latch, and the beer, crazied up from the bumps, bubbled out over his hand.

“All them hunchbacks do,” Franklin said wisely. He spat out the window, discovered it was closed, and swiped his shirtsleeve across the scratched and cloudy glass. “We’ll go see him. Might be somethin’ in it.”

He backed the truck around in a huge, wandering circle and pulled up with the tailgate hanging over the latest accumulation of the Lot’s accumulated throwaway. He switched off the ignition, and silence pressed in on them suddenly. Except for the restless calling of the gulls, it was complete.

“Ain’t it quiet,” Virgil muttered.

They got out of the truck and went around to the back. Franklin unhooked the S-bolts that held the tailgate and let it drop with a crash. The gulls that had been feeding at the far end of the dump rose in a cloud, squalling and scolding.

The two of them climbed up without a word and began heaving the Crappie off the end. Green plastic bags spun through the clear air and smashed open as they hit. It was an old job for them. They were a part of the town that few tourists ever saw (or cared to)—firstly, because the town ignored them by tacit agreement, and secondly, because they had developed their own protective coloration. If you met Franklin’s pickup on the road, you forgot it the instant it was gone from your rearview mirror. If you happened to see their shack with its tin chimney sending a pencil line of smoke into the white November sky, you overlooked it. If you met Virgil coming out of the Cumberland greenfront with a bottle of welfare vodka in a brown bag, you said hi and then couldn’t quite remember who it was you had spoken to; the face was familiar but the name just slipped your mind. Franklin’s brother was Derek Boddin, father of Richie (lately deposed king of Stanley Street Elementary School), and Derek had nearly forgotten that Franklin was still alive and in town. He had progressed beyond black sheepdom; he was totally gray.

Now, with the truck empty, Franklin kicked out a last can— clink!—and hitched up his green work pants. “Let’s go see Dud,” he said.

They climbed down from the truck and Virgil tripped over one of his own rawhide lacings and sat down hard. “Christ, they don’t make these things half-right,” he muttered obscurely.

They walked across to Dud’s tarpaper shack. The door was closed.

“Dud!” Franklin bawled. “Hey, Dud Rogers!” He thumped the door once, and the whole shack trembled. The small hook-and-eye lock on the inside of the door snapped off, and the door tottered open. The shack was empty but filled with a sickish-sweet odor that made them look at each other and grimace—and they were barroom veterans of a great many fungoid smells. It reminded Franklin fleetingly of pickles that had lain in a dark crock for many years, until the fluid seeping out of them had turned white.

“Son of a whore,” Virgil said. “Worse than gangrene.”

Yet the shack was astringently neat. Dud’s extra shirt was hung on a hook over the bed, the splintery kitchen chair was pushed up to the table, and the cot was made up Army-style. The can of red paint, with fresh drips down the sides, was placed on a fold of newspaper behind the door.

“I’m about to puke if we don’t get out of here,” Virgil said. His face had gone a whitish-green.

Franklin, who felt no better, backed out and shut the door.

They surveyed the dump, which was as deserted and sterile as the mountains of the moon.

“He ain’t here,” Franklin said. “He’s back in the woods someplace, laying up snookered.”

“Frank?”

“What,” Franklin said shortly. He was out of temper.

“That door was latched on the inside. If he ain’t there, how did he get out?”

Startled, Franklin turned around and regarded the shack. Through the window, he started to say, and then didn’t. The window was nothing but a square cut into the tarpaper and buttoned up with all-weather plastic. The window wasn’t large enough for Dud to squirm through, not with the hump on his back.

“Never mind,” Franklin said gruffly. “If he don’t want to share, fuck him. Let’s get out of here.”

They walked back to the truck, and Franklin felt something seeping through the protective membrane of drunkenness—something he would not remember later, or want to: a creeping feeling; a feeling that something here had gone terribly awry. It was as if the dump had gained a heartbeat and that beat was slow yet full of terrible vitality. He suddenly wanted to go away very quickly.

“I don’t see any rats,” Virgil said suddenly.

And there were none to be seen; only the gulls. Franklin tried to remember a time when he had brought the Crappie to the dump and seen no rats. He couldn’t. And he didn’t like that, either.

“He must have put out poison bait, huh, Frank?”

“Come on, let’s go,” Franklin said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

SEVEN

After supper, they let Ben go up and see Matt Burke. It was a short visit; Matt was sleeping. The oxygen tent had been taken away, however, and the head nurse told Ben that Matt would almost certainly be awake tomorrow morning and able to see visitors for a short time.

Ben thought his face looked drawn and cruelly aged, for the first time an old man’s face. Lying still, with the loosened flesh of his neck rising out of the hospital johnny, he seemed vulnerable and defenseless. If it’s all true, Ben thought, these people are doing you no favors, Matt. If it’s all true, then we’re in the citadel of unbelief, where nightmares are dispatched with Lysol and scalpels and chemotherapy rather than with stakes and Bibles and wild mountain thyme. They’re happy with their life support units and hypos and enema bags filled with barium solution. If the column of truth has a hole in it, they neither know nor care.

He walked to the head of the bed and turned Matt’s head with gentle fingers. There were no marks on the skin of his neck; the flesh was blameless.

He hesitated a moment longer, then went to the closet and opened it. Matt’s clothes hung there, and hooked over the closet door’s inside knob was the crucifix he had been wearing when Susan visited him. It hung from a filigreed chain that gleamed softly in the room’s subdued light.

Ben took it back to the bed and put it around Matt’s neck.

“Here, what are you doing?”

A nurse had come in with a pitcher of water and a bedpan with a towel spread decorously over the opening.

“I’m putting his cross around his neck,” Ben said.

“Is he a Catholic?”

“He is now,” Ben said somberly.

EIGHT

Night had fallen when a soft rap came at the kitchen door of the Sawyer house on the Deep Cut Road. Bonnie Sawyer, with a small smile on her lips, went to answer it. She was wearing a short ruffled apron tied at the waist, high heels, and nothing else.

When she opened the door, Corey Bryant’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “Buh,” he said. “Buh…Buh…Bonnie?”

“What’s the matter, Corey?” She put a hand on the doorjamb with light deliberation, pulling her bare breasts up to their sauciest angle. At the same time she crossed her feet demurely, modeling her legs for him.

“Jeez, Bonnie, what if it had been—”

“The man from the telephone company?” she asked, and giggled. She took one of his hands and placed it on the firm flesh of her right breast. “Want to read my meter?”

With a grunt that held a note of desperation (the drowning man going down for the third time, clutching a mammary instead of a straw), he pulled her to him. His hands cupped her buttocks, and the starched apron crackled briskly between them.

“Oh my,” she said, wiggling against him. “Are you going to test my receiver, Mr Telephone Man? I’ve been waiting for an important call all day—”