“I bet you would,” Sandy said.
“I’d make him squeal like a goddamn pig, I swear to God!” Carl yelled as she slammed the door behind her.
A few minutes after she left, Carl quit cursing the actor and turned the stove off. He laid his head in his arms at the table and dozed off for a while. The room was dark when he woke up. He was hungry, but all he could find in the refrigerator were two moldy heels of bread and a dab of crusty pimento cheese in a plastic container. Opening the kitchen window, he tossed the bread into the front yard. A few flakes of snow drifted through the ray of light coming from the landlady’s porch. From over in the stockyards across the street, he heard somebody laugh, the metal clang of a gate being slammed shut. He realized that he hadn’t been outside in over a week.
He closed the window and walked into the living room and paced back and forth singing old religious songs and waving his arms in the air like he was leading a choir. “Bringing in the Sheaves” was one of his favorites, and he sang it several times in a row. When he was a boy, his mother used to sing it while doing the wash. She had a certain song for every chore, every heartache, every goddamn thing that happened to them after the old man died. She did laundry for rich people, got cheated half the time by the no-good bastards. Sometimes he would skip school and hide under the rotting porch with the slugs and spiders and the little that remained of the neighbor’s cat, and listen to her all day. Her voice never seemed to tire. He would ration the butter sandwich she’d packed for his lunch, sip dirty water from a rusty soup can he kept stored in the cat’s rib cage. He’d pretend it was vegetable beef or chicken noodle, but no matter how hard he tried, it always tasted like mud. He wished to hell he had bought some soup the last time he went to the store. The memory of that old can made him hungry again.
He sang for several hours, his loud voice booming through the rooms, his face red and sweaty with the effort. Then, just before nine o’clock, the landlady began pounding furiously with the end of a broom handle on her ceiling below. He was in the middle of a rousing version of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Any other time he would have ignored her, but tonight he sputtered to a stop; he was in the mood to move on to other things. But if she didn’t turn the fucking heat up soon, he’d start keeping her up until midnight. He could stand the cold easy enough, but Sandy’s constant shivering and complaining were getting on his nerves.
Going back to the kitchen, he got a flashlight from the spoon drawer and made sure the door was locked. Then he went around closing all the curtains, ended up in the bedroom. He got down on his knees and reached under the bed for a shoe box. He carried the box into the living room and turned off all the lights and settled down on the couch in the darkness. Cold air blew in around the loose windows, and he drew Sandy’s blanket over his shoulders.
With the box on his lap, he closed his eyes and reached a hand under the cardboard lid. There were over two hundred photos inside, but he pulled just one out. He rubbed his thumb slowly over the slick paper, tried to divine which image it might be, a little thing he did to make it all last longer. After making his guess, he opened his eyes and flipped the flashlight on just for a second. Click, click. A tiny taste and he set that photo to the side, closed his eyes again, and took out another. Click, click. Bare backs and bloody holes and Sandy with her legs spread. Sometimes he went through the entire box without guessing a single one of them correctly.
Once he thought he heard a noise, a car door slam, footsteps on the back stairs. He got up and tiptoed from room to room with the pistol, peeking out the windows. Then he checked the door and returned to the couch. Time seemed to shift, speed up, slow down, move back and forth like a crazy dream he kept having over and over. One second he was standing in a muddy soybean field outside of Jasper, Indiana; and the next click of the flashlight took him to the bottom of a rocky ravine north of Sugar City, Colorado. Old voices crawled through his head like worms, some bitter with curses, others still pleading for mercy. By midnight, he’d traveled through a large portion of the Midwest, relived the last moments of twenty-four strange men. He remembered everything. It was as if he resurrected them every time he brought out the box, stirred them awake and allowed them to do their own kind of singing. One last click and he decided to call it a night.
After he returned the box to its hiding place under the bed, he switched the lights back on and wiped off the blanket as best he could with her washcloth. For the next couple of hours, he sat at the kitchen table cleaning the pistol and studying his road maps and waiting on Sandy to get off work. He always felt the need for her company after a bout with the box. She had told him about the paper mill man, and he thought about that for a while, what he’d do with the hook if they ever picked up a hitchhiker like that.
He’d forgotten how hungry he was until she walked in with two cold hamburgers slathered with mustard, three bottles of beer, and the evening newspaper. While he ate, she sat opposite him and carefully added up her tips, stacking the nickels, dimes, and quarters into small, neat piles, and he recalled the way he’d acted earlier about her stupid TV show. “You did pretty good tonight,” he said, when she finally finished counting.
“Not bad for a Wednesday, I guess,” she said with a tired smile. “So what did you do today?”
He shrugged. “Oh, cleaned out the fridge, sang a few songs.”
“You didn’t piss the old lady off again, did you?”
“Just kidding,” he said. “I got some new pictures to show you.”
“Which one is it?” she asked.
“The one had that bandanna tied around his head. They turned out pretty good.”
“Not tonight,” she said. “I’d never get to sleep.” Then she pushed half the change over to him. He scooped it up and dumped it in a coffee can he kept under the sink. They were always saving for the next junker, the next roll of film, the next trip. Opening the last beer, he poured her a glass. Then he got down on his knees in front of her and pulled her shoes off, began rubbing the work out of her feet. “I shouldn’t have said anything about your damn doctor today,” he said. “You watch whatever you want.”
“It’s just something to do, baby,” Sandy said. “Takes my mind off things, you know?” He nodded, gently worked his fingers into the soft soles of her feet. “That’s the spot,” she said, stretching out her legs. Then, after she finished the beer and a last cigarette, he scooped her skinny body up and carried her giggling down the hallway and into the bedroom. He hadn’t heard her laugh in weeks. He would keep her warm tonight, that was the least he could do. It was nearly four in the morning, and somehow, with lots of luck and little regret, they had made it through another long winter day.
26
A FEW DAYS LATER, CARL DROVE SANDY TO WORK, told her he needed to get out of the apartment for a while. It had snowed several inches the night before, and that morning the sun finally managed to break through the thick, gray bank of clouds that had hovered over Ohio like some dismal, unrelenting curse for the past several weeks. Everything in Meade, even the paper mill smokestack, was sparkling and white. “Want to come in for a minute?” she asked when he pulled up in front of the Tecumseh. “I’ll buy you a beer.”