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“Well there went another day shot straight through the back of the skull,” Silver Grimes said thoughtfully to himself, laying there on top of the coffin in the back of the bone wagon staring up at the night sky through the worn-out hole in the hearse’s roof.
There was nothing left to do but to bury what was left of the day with all of the rest of those other days that he had left behind along the way. The stars peeked down at him looking just a little as if somebody had shot the hell out of the heavenly darkness one night on a long drunken spree.
Grimes wondered just what would happen if he fired a bullet straight up at one of them stars. Might be he might knock himself down an angel, accidentally. Might be the bullet might shoot up just as far as it could and then drop straight back down through his skull bone and introduce him to an angel – up close and personal.
Even that was pretty damned unlikely.
Grimes hadn’t exactly lived what you would call an honest upstanding life. If he was to be shot it was more likely that he would wind up downstairs in the furnace room, stoking the boiler with the old head horned devil poking a barbed wire pitchfork into the chewy leather pucker-hole of his ass every time he leaned too long or too easy upon the shaft of his coal shovel.
Grimes sniffed at the ghost of a breeze that snuck down through the hole in the hearse’s roof. Death was what was out there, Grimes decided. Death was riding somewhere just behind the wind and the lonely – maybe looking for him.
Or maybe not.
His damned missing arm itched.
It always did right before bedtime. He could never figure out just how in hell a shot-off arm could itch so much when it just wasn’t there anymore. Some nights he figured that maybe pieces of Helen had been blasted into his wound and they were nagging at him just the way she used to nag.
Women will do that to a fellow if you let them get away with it.
Some nights Silver Grimes could hear her calling on the wind – her voice wearing over and into him like salt rubbed into a badly healed wound. He tried to make out just what she was saying to him but she sounded too damn much like a coyote or a whippoorwill or even a lonely midnight owl for him to trust any shape of translation that his tired mind might offer.