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Bass struggled to sit up out of the coffin.
“You could give me a hand up,” he said.
“I’ve only got one hand to spare,” Grimes replied. “You already blasted the other one off of my arm at the elbow bone, in case you forgot.”
Bass braced both hands on the sides of the coffin and leaned himself upright. He wanted out of that goddamn box more than he wanted a drink right now – but he still needed a moment to gather his strength.
“Have you ACTUALLY been dragging that girl’s body around with you for two whole years?”
“That girl has a name,” Grimes said. “Her name is Helen.”
“I know what her name is,” Bass said. “I know what she tastes like too – and not in a good way.”
Grimes smiled bitterly.
“So did I,” he said. “I just wanted to make certain you did too, is all.”
“You loved her, didn’t you?”
“Sure I did,” Grimes answered. “Didn’t you ever love anybody?”
Bass thought about Sally Jezebel.
He wondered if what he felt for her was anything like what Silver Grimes must have felt for that...must have felt for Helen.
“I can’t say that I’ve ever really fallen for anyone like that,” Bass admitted, right before someone hit him hard on the side of his head.
Bass hit the dirt like a dropped turd.
He lay there blinking away the pain.
Then he saw her.
Sally Jezebel was standing above him, holding the shotgun that she had just brained him with.
“Consider yourself fallen, asshole,” Sally said.
Bass could hear the bitterness in Sally’s voice. He could hear the anger and he could see the pain burning in her eyes as she stared at him lying there next to the coffin of the woman that he had killed so very long ago.
In that brief instant he could not tell the difference between Sally Jezebel and the woman that he had shotgunned to death two long years ago.
“I thought you were dead,” Bass told her.
“Did it matter to you?” she asked.
“Damn it,” he swore. “I thought he had killed you.”
“He didn’t,” Sally said. “You did, two years ago.”
Things were finally making sense.
Bass felt the pieces falling together.
“Oh hell,” Bass said. “She was your sister, wasn’t she?”
“Worse than that,” Sally said, pointing the shotgun straight at him. “She was my friend.”
Bass looked at her coldly.
“So all of that feeling you said you had for me,” Bass said. “That was all just a lie.”
“It was worse than a lie,” Sally said.
Bass just kept on looking, waiting for the truth to fall.
“It was God’s simple honest truth,” she said. “I fell for you and I felt for you – only I felt for her a whole lot more, is all.”
Bass felt what he’d had, what might have been – all washing away from the tips of his fingers and gone. She had really loved him and he had been too damned busy feeling sorry for himself to ever really notice.
Damn it.
“Get it over with then,” Bass said.
He still couldn’t wash his memory clean of the truths that Helen’s maggots had told him.
“You’ve got the shotgun,” he went on. “Why don’t you just finish what I started?”
Sally looked at him.
Her knuckles knotted about the shotgun, one finger hooked into the trigger.
“Just dig,” Sally said.
“I don’t have a shovel.”
“Then dig with the nails that God gave you,”
Bass started digging.
“Dig it deep enough for two,” she told him.
Bass kept on digging.
He figured he would wind up in China or Hell or maybe somewhere deeper still and it didn’t really matter which.