5
People would say he was downright strange if they ever found out what he did.
But then people found undertaker Stan Thayer strange, anyway.
He slept in a house that usually had a corpse or two on the premises, for one thing. And for another thing—and maybe most suspicious of all—he talked to his corpses and he didn’t care who knew it.
Talked—to his corpses.
A fella could walk in any time during the day and trundle on back to the room where Thayer gussied up the dead folk. And then stand there and listen to him jabber.
Well, you sure picked a nice day to pass, Mrs. Williamson. Rain and cold and fog. That’s the kind of day I hope to pass, myself.
Sure hope you divided your farm equal among those two hotheaded boys of yours, Mr. Englinger. Otherwise those two’ll tear each other apart.
You’re the prettiest gal I ever buried, Ruth. You’re pretty even lyin’ here right now. I always wanted to ask you out but I just never could work up the nerve. Now I sure wish I’d’ve done it. Yes, ma’am, I sure do.
The dead woman Stanley Jerome Thayer was talking to now was the one they’d hauled out of the hotel room. From under the bed. Some man named Fargo was being sought for her murder.
But you and I know a little secret, don’t we, lady? That Fargo, he didn’t kill you, did he? No, sir, he didn’t. Because if you happen to know what you’re looking at, the way I do, you notice things like those bloody footprints over in the corner where you were killed—before you were dragged under the bed. I saw this Fargo’s footprints. They were real plain to see. He didn’t kill you. His footprints weren’t over there in the corner where you were butchered. But the killer’s were. And we know who those footprints belong to, don’t we, lady? Yes, ma’am, they tracked your blood from the corner to the bed. Plain as day. And you know what? The killer knew about those tracks, too; or at least figured it out later. Because the killer came back, my yes, came back bold as brass. But the blood on the floor was still drying so I saw the fresh tracks and compared them to the old tracks. So now Stan Thayer knows who the killer is. I’m not a braggin’ man, but I knew if I waited long enough—Well, lady, there are people in this town who disrespect me, who make fun of me every chance they get. One person in particular. And, well, we’ll see what happens when—
“If you talked to live people as much as you do dead people, you’d have a whole lot more friends, Stan,” Abner Thompson said from the doorway.
Thayer said, “You snuck up on me again, Ab.”
“So who really killed her?”
“Huh?”
“What you said to the dead lady there.”
“Oh.”
“And she had some body, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Thayer said, looking down at the corpse. “Yeah, she sure did.”
“So who killed her?” Ab, who was at least seventy, leaned in the doorway with his corncob pipe, his lurid red suspenders, his filthy clothes handmade from thrown-away feed sacks, and said, “And don’t say you didn’t say it ’cause I heard ya.”
“Don’t count what you say to dead people,” Thayer said.
“Oh? How come?”
“How come? ’Cause they’re dead is how come. They can’t hear anything you say.”
“Then if they can’t hear ya, why do ya talk to ’em in the first place?”
Good old Abe. He could drive a mind crazy, he could.
“You just forget what I said, Ab.”
Ab giggled. “My age, I forget just about everything.”
“Good.”
Ab pushed away from the door frame, stood up straight. “Just wonderin’ if you could use some help today.” Ab never worked for whiskey alone. Several belts of whiskey was more like it.
“Guess you could sweep off the porch and do some dustin’ in the parlor there.”
“Mind if I help myself to a drink first?”
Thayer looked up from the dead woman’s hair, which he’d been pulling a comb through. “One drink. Then afterward you can have more. But no more than one now. You get drunk, your work isn’t worth a damn, Ab, and you know it.”
“I’ll just have one, Thayer.” He grinned his ghoulish old man grin. “A real big one.”
“And you forget anything you heard me say to this here dead woman, Ab,” he said to Ab’s back as the old man set off to take the bottle down from the kitchen cupboard.
Sheriff Henry Burrell was finishing up his first cup of coffee for the day when he heard the footsteps on the back stoop and the door jerk open. Various kinds of weather had warped the door frame over the years so that when you opened it now, you had to use enough force to give the entire small house a jolt that vibrated through the walls.
Burrell’s back was to his son Hap as Hap came through the door. The combined stench of cheap liquor and cheap perfume preceded him into the kitchen. He stood in the doorway, grinning and giving a cocky little salute off his Stetson. Then he sniffed the air. He was always hungry when he came home this way. Nothing a drunk likes better at a time like this than a stomach-filling meal right before he drops down an eight-hour chasm of sleep.
Hap had been coming home this way for the past four years. Always smirky, always with a sense of superiority about him, as if his old man was just one more stranger to be treated with his usual contempt. He’d had innumerable jobs over that period. But inevitably, after a month or two, the new employer would stop by the sheriff’s office looking guilty and say that he was sorry but that, uh—shit, Henry, I hate to say it—but that boy of yours just ain’t gonna work out. The employers would never say why exactly, but later Burrell would hear stories about playing dice or fighting or sneaking corn liquor into the workplace. A couple of employers even got treated to Hap’s hard fists when he was hung over and in no mood to take orders from anybody.
Hap even tried a couple of distant towns—at his old man’s insistence. There was a time that Burrell got so embarrassed by all the jobs that Hap had lost, he shipped him off to Boulder Pass and Junction City, setting him up in advance with employers there. But it was always the same. Hap’d get drunk and get fired. And Hap didn’t like the notion that he was nobody. Here, he was the sheriff’s son and he never let anybody forget it. The old man would defend him no matter what. But in a strange town—who knew or who cared about Hap Burrell? So he’d always come back hangdog and full of promises to behave himself, to get a job and keep it this time, and to help the old man when the old man needed it. Keeping the yard up would be a good start, Burrell said. So Hap, he kept it up a time or two but after that, back to his drinking and fighting and girl-impregnating, he was the old happy Hap and Burrell was just old and sad.
Even hung over, even tired out as he had to be, Hap was still the slick, boyish, handsome lad he always was. Did he ever run out of that so-called charm of his?
Hap never waited for the old man to start in on him. He’d learned young that the best way to deal with Henry was to start right in on him with the charm.
“Saw Tim Perry last night, makin’ his rounds,” Hap said.
“Tim’s the best lawman I got.”
Hap snorted. “You wish he was your son, don’t you?”
Burrell looked at him. “He wouldn’t give me the heartache you do, if that’s what you mean. I made him a deputy a year ago and he’s run things just fine. Never had a deputy I could trust like him.”
Hap said, “Maybe you could adopt him.”
Hap had an unceasing jealousy where Deputy Tim Perry was concerned. Burrell used to try and hide his pride in Tim from Hap. But no more.
Hap decided to try buttering up the old man, change the mood.
“You should’ve been over at the Brass Rail last night, Pa,” Hap said. You could still see where rouge and powder streaked his cheeks. “Some of the boys there started talking about lawmen. And they ended up saying you were the best in the whole territory.”
“They did, huh?”
“They sure did.”
“A lot of them still wearing dresses?”
“Huh?”
“The boys at the Brass Rail. All the rouge you got streaked all over you, I figured the boys there must’ve been got up as girls.”
“Oh.” Hap drew a finger down his cheek, examined it. Rubbed a thumb against it. “Oh. I forgot. I stopped by to see Betty Ward.”
“Think you’ll get her pregnant again, do you?”
“How’d you know—”
Sheriff Henry Burrell then did what Hap always dreaded he would do. Lost his temper. It was a thunderous Old Testament temper. The sort of temper that would send even grizzlies running for cover.
Henry announced his loss of patience—his frustration with his irresponsible son—by bringing down a fist as big as a small pumpkin and smashing it against the wood table. Cracks raced down the surface—fissures of separated wood—joining those that had been put there during previous outbursts.
“How do I know? How the hell do you think I know? Because the time she came over here at three o’clock in the morning and woke you up, she woke me up, too. You think I couldn’t hear her crying? You think I couldn’t hear her threaten to tell her folks? You think I couldn’t hear her screaming that you had to marry her?”
“But Pa, it worked out all right. It—”
“Shut up!”
“Yes, Pa,” he mumbled in that chastised little-boy tone that was almost as aggravating as his contrived charm at its worst.
“I know the rest of it, too. Because she woke me up a week later when she came over to tell you that her ‘monthly visitor’ had finally come and she wasn’t pregnant, after all.”
“I told her she wasn’t. We were careful and—”
“Yeah, real careful, I bet.” He glowered. “In five years, I plan to retire. If things go right, they’ll give me a little pension and I can spend my last years fishing and enjoying myself. There’ll be a new man here and all the headaches’ll be his. There’s only one thing that could put a crimp in my plan.”
“Pa, listen—”
“And that’s you. You could put a crimp in it. You could do somethin’ so stupid and so embarrassing that they’d run us both out of town. They’ve cut me a lot of slack where you’re concerned. They’ve all got kids and they know how kids can be. They know that no matter how good a parent is, a wild one can come along—most of the time it’s a boy, but every once in a while, it’s a girl—a wild one can come along and the parents can’t do anything about it. The wild one does exactly what he wants to and everybody around him tries to be understanding with the parents—they know that the wild one could just as easily have been theirs—but one day this one wild child does something so bad that the town can’t forgive it. And on that day, everybody turns on both him and his parents.”
“Pa, please—”
“And that’s going to happen with us. I can feel it. I have nightmares about it. Three, four times a day I get sick to my stomach—all twisted up and my throat burning with bile—thinking about you and all the trouble you’ve gotten into over the years.”
“You’re not being fair to me, Pa.” Cunning came into his eyes. His voice didn’t change. His posture didn’t change. He sat in the chair across from his old man without moving at all. But still there was this—change. He wiped his paw across his nice, store-bought shirt—he rolled around with some girl last night and the shirt was a wrinkled, stained mess anyway—and then said, “I’m not the only one better be careful, Pa.”
Now that his temper had quelled some, Burrell could hear nuances again, subtle hints you could pick up only if you listened carefully. That was the change. For the first part of the conversation—where Burrell had been tearing into Hap—Hap had assumed the posture of the browbeaten boy. He had taken his father’s insults without any real argument.
“What’s that supposed to mean, Hap? That you’re not the only one better be careful? You talking about me?”
Before Hap could explain himself, a knock came on the front door. Hap practically leapt up from his chair, eager to get away from the table.
He stalked through the small house and jerked open the front door.
Marva Delaney, the middle-aged woman who lived down the street, said, “Well, that mangy mutt’s been at it again.” She sounded ready to cry.
“Oh, Mrs. Delaney, not your roses.” He sounded as sappy-sad as a bad actor. Part of his “charm.”
“My prize roses.”
“You hear that, Pa?” Hap shouted too loudly, as if his old man was in Europe or something. “Mrs. Delaney’s prize roses.”
“I heard.” Burrell sighed. This wasn’t a good time for Marva Delaney to appear. Actually, when he thought about it, there was no good time for Marva Delaney to appear. But despite all the wild and woolly tales of a lawman’s life, most of it was not spent in gunfights and feats of derring-do . . . most of it was spent in dealing with the Marva Delaneys of the world.
Burrell pushed away from the table, rose, worked out a couple of kinks in his back and then walked over to the door.
“It’s King again, Sheriff,” the woman said. She would have been attractive except for the huge mole on her chin. She had more hair growing out of it than could be found on Burrell’s head.
“You sure it was King, Mrs. Delaney?” This particular morning, Burrell didn’t even try to hide his grumpiness.
“Of course it was King, Sheriff. Who else would it be if it wasn’t King? King’s always around our yard, just waiting for us to get busy so he can do something terrible.”
“You know, Mrs. Delaney, there’s always the possibility that it’s not King at all.”
“Oh, no. Don’t even say it, Sheriff. It’s bad enough that you even think it. But to actually say it out loud the way you did that day—”
“It’s just a suggestion.”
“Well, it’s a terrible suggestion.”
Hap had been listening, enjoying the spectacle of his old man trying to be nice to this crazy lady. Now he smirked and said, “I guess I’ll go have some coffee.”
When Hap was gone, Burrell said, “Have you ever actually seen King dig up your roses?”
“You mean with my own eyes?”
He sighed. “Yes, with your own eyes, Mrs. Delaney.”
“With my own eyes, no. But I don’t need my own eyes to know it’s King who’s always doing this. You certainly can’t be suggesting that my own little Princess could possibly—”
“Little dogs can be just as rambunctious as big dogs, Mrs. Delaney.”
“Not Princess,” she said, and started to turn away. “And don’t think I’m going to forget this. There’s an election coming up in November and you have to stand for office.” She shook a scolding finger at him. “And I’m going to tell every citizen of this town the kind of terrible things you said about my sweet little Princess.”
And with that, she left.
Burrell closed the door and went back to the kitchen table.
He sat down and started finishing off the coffee he’d been working on. He said, “So what did that mean when you said that you weren’t the only one who’d better be careful?”
Hap shrugged. “I shouldn’t have said that, Pa. I take it back.”
“You can’t take it back. You already said it.”
Hap said, “Just forget it, Pa. All right?”
“I want to know what you meant by it. And I want to know now.”
They could both feel his temper getting ready to burst wide again so Hap, very carefully, said, and in not much more than a whisper, “Those clothes you buried in the woods. I know about them, Pa. And I know how careful you have to be about them. That’s all I meant.”