Coronado

Running out of dog

This thing with Blue and the dogs and Elgin Bern happened a while back, a few years after some of our boys — like Elgin Bern and Cal Sears — came back from Vietnam, and a lot of others — like Eddie Vorey and Carl Joe Carol, the Stewart cousins — didn’t. We don’t know how it worked in other towns, but that war put something secret in our boys who returned. Something quiet and untouchable. You sensed they knew things they’d never say, did things on the sly you’d never discover. Great cardplayers, those boys, able to bluff with the best, let no joy show in their face no matter what they were holding.

A small town is a hard place to keep a secret, and a small southern town with all that heat and all those open windows is an even harder place than most. But those boys who came back from overseas, they seemed to have mastered the trick of privacy. And the way it’s always been in this town, you get a sizeable crop of young, hard men coming up at the same time, they sort of set the tone.

So, not long after the war, we were a quieter town, a less trusting one (or so some seemed to think), and that’s right when tobacco money and textile money reached a sort of critical mass and created construction money and pretty soon there was talk that our small town should maybe get a little bigger, maybe build something that would bring in more tourist dollars than we’d been getting from fireworks and pecans.

That’s when some folks came up with this Eden Falls idea — a big carnival-type park with roller coasters and water slides and such. Why should all those Yankees spend all their money in Florida? South Carolina had sun too. Had golf courses and grapefruit and no end of KOA campgrounds.

So now a little town called Eden was going to have Eden Falls. We were going to be on the map, people said. We were going to be in all the brochures. We were small now, people said, but just you wait. Just you wait.

And that’s how things stood back then, the year Perkin and Jewel Lut’s marriage hit a few bumps and Elgin Bern took up with Shelley Briggs and no one seemed able to hold onto their dogs.

The problem with dogs in Eden, South Carolina, was that the owners who bred them bred a lot of them. Or they allowed them to run free where they met up with other dogs of opposite gender and achieved the same result. This wouldn’t have been so bad if Eden weren’t so close to I-95, and if the dogs weren’t in the habit of bolting into traffic and fucking up the bumpers of potential tourists.

The mayor, Big Bobby Vargas, went to a mayoral conference up in Beaufort, where the governor made a surprise appearance to tell everyone how pissed off he was about this dog thing. Lot of money being poured into Eden these days, the governor said, lot of steps being taken to change her image, and he for one would be goddamned if a bunch of misbehaving canines was going to mess all that up.

“Boys,” he’d said, looking Big Bobby Vargas dead in the eye, “they’re starting to call this state the Devil’s Kennel ’cause of them pooch corpses along the interstate. And I don’t know about you-all, but I don’t think that’s a real pretty name.”

Big Bobby told Elgin and Blue he’d never heard anyone call it the Devil’s Kennel in his life. Heard a lot worse, sure, but never that. Big Bobby said the governor was full of shit. But, being the governor and all, he was sort of entitled.

The dogs in Eden had been a problem going back to the twenties and a part-time breeder named J. Mallon Ellenburg who, if his arms weren’t up to their elbows in the guts of the tractors and combines he repaired for a living, was usually lashing out at something — his family when they weren’t quick enough, his dogs when the family was. J. Mallon Ellenburg’s dogs were mixed breeds and mongrels and they ran in packs, as did their offspring, and several generations later, those packs still moved through the Eden night like wolves, their bodies stripped to muscle and gristle, tense and angry, growling in the dark at J. Mallon Ellenburg’s ghost.

Big Bobby went to the trouble of measuring exactly how much of 95 crossed through Eden, and he came up with 2.8 miles. Not much really, but still an average of.74 dog a day or 4.9 dogs a week. Big Bobby wanted the rest of the state funds the governor was going to be doling out at year’s end, and if that meant getting rid of five dogs a week, give or take, then that’s what was going to get done.

“On the QT,” he said to Elgin and Blue, “on the QT, what we going to do, boys, is set up in some trees and shoot every canine who gets within barking distance of that interstate.”

Elgin didn’t much like this “we” stuff. First place, Big Bobby’d said “we” that time in Double O’s four years ago. This was before he’d become mayor, when he was nothing more than a county tax assessor who shot pool at Double O’s every other night, same as Elgin and Blue. But one night, after Harlan and Chub Uke had roughed him up over a matter of some pocket change, and knowing that neither Elgin nor Blue was too fond of the Uke family either, Big Bobby’d said, “We going to settle those boys’ asses tonight,” and started running his mouth the minute the brothers entered the bar.

Time the smoke cleared, Blue had a broken hand, Harlan and Chub were curled up on the floor, and Elgin’s lip was busted. Big Bobby, meanwhile, was hiding under the pool table, and Cal Sears was asking who was going to pay for the pool stick Elgin had snapped across the back of Chub’s head.

So Elgin heard Mayor Big Bobby saying “we” and remembered the ten dollars it had cost him for that pool stick, and he said, “No, sir, you can count me out this particular enterprise.”

Big Bobby looked disappointed. Elgin was a veteran of a foreign war, former Marine, a marksman. “Shit,” Big Bobby said, “what good are you, you don’t use the skills Uncle Sam spent good money teaching you?”

Elgin shrugged. “Damn, Bobby. I guess not much.”

But Blue kept his hand in, as both Big Bobby and Elgin knew he would. All the job required was a guy didn’t mind sitting in a tree who liked to shoot things. Hell, Blue was home.

ELGIN DIDN’T HAVE the time to be sitting up in a tree anyway. The past few months, he’d been working like crazy after they’d broke ground at Eden Falls — mixing cement, digging postholes, draining swamp water to shore up the foundation — with the real work still to come. There’d be several more months of drilling and bilging, spreading cement like cake icing, and erecting scaffolding to erect walls to erect facades. There’d be the hump-and-grind of rolling along in the dump trucks and drill trucks, the forklifts and cranes and industrial diggers, until the constant heave and jerk of them drove up his spine or into his kidneys like a corkscrew.

Time to sit up in a tree shooting dogs? Shit. Elgin didn’t have time to take a piss some days.

And then on top of all the work, he’d been seeing Drew Briggs’s ex-wife, Shelley, lately. Shelley was the receptionist at Perkin Lut’s Auto Emporium, and one day Elgin had brought his Impala in for a tire rotation and they’d got to talking. She’d been divorced from Drew over a year, and they waited a couple of months to show respect, but after a while they began showing up at Double O’s and down at the IHOP together.

Once they drove clear to Myrtle Beach together for the weekend. People asked them what it was like, and they said, “Just like the postcards.” Since the postcards never mentioned the price of a room at the Hilton, Elgin and Shelley didn’t mention that all they’d done was drive up and down the beach twice before settling in a motel a bit west in Conway. Nice, though; had a color TV and one of those switches turned the bathroom into a sauna if you let the shower run. They’d started making love in the sauna, finished up on the bed with steam coiling out from the bathroom and brushing their heels. Afterward, he pushed her hair back off her forehead and looked in her eyes and told her he could get used to this.

She said, “But wouldn’t it cost a lot to install a sauna in your trailer?” then waited a full thirty seconds before she smiled.

Elgin liked that about her, the way she let him know he was still just a man after all, always would take himself too seriously, part of his nature. Letting him know she might be around to keep him apprised of that fact every time he did. Keep him from pushing a bullet into the breech of a thirty-aught-six, slamming the bolt home, firing into the flank of some wild dog.

Sometimes, when they’d shut down the site early for the day — if it had rained real heavy and the soil loosened near a foundation, or if supplies were running late — he’d drop by Lut’s to see her. She’d smile as if he’d brought her flowers, say, “Caught boozing on the job again?” or some other smart-ass thing, but it made him feel good, as if something in his chest suddenly realized it was free to breathe.

Before Shelley, Elgin had spent a long time without a woman he could publicly acknowledge as his. He’d gone with Mae Shiller from fifteen to nineteen, but she’d gotten lonely while he was overseas, and he’d returned to find her gone from Eden, married to a boy up in South of the Border, the two of them working a corn-dog concession stand, making a tidy profit, folks said. Elgin dated some, but it took him a while to get over Mae, to get over the loss of something he’d always expected to have, the sound of her laugh and an image of her stepping naked from Cooper’s Lake, her pale flesh beaded with water, having been the things that got Elgin through the jungle, through the heat, through the ticking of his own death he’d heard in his ears every night he’d been over there.

About a year after he’d come home, Jewel Lut had come to visit her mother, who still lived in the trailer park where Jewel had grown up with Elgin and Blue, where Elgin still lived. On her way out, she’d dropped by Elgin’s and they’d sat out front of his trailer in some folding chairs, had a few drinks, talked about old times. He told her a bit about Vietnam, and she told him a bit about marriage. How it wasn’t what you expected, how Perkin Lut might know a lot of things but he didn’t know a damn sight about having fun.

There was something about Jewel Lut that sank into men’s flesh the way heat did. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, had a beautiful body, moved in a loose, languid way that made you picture her naked no matter what she was wearing. No, there was more to it. Jewel, never the brightest girl in town and not even the most charming, had something in her eyes that none of the women Elgin ever met had; it was a capacity for living, for taking moments — no matter how small or inconsequential — and squeezing every last thing you could out of them. Jewel gobbled up life, dove into it like it was a cool pond cut in the shade of a mountain on the hottest day of the year.

That look in her eyes — the one that never left — said, Let’s have fun, goddammit. Let’s eat. Now.

She and Elgin hadn’t been stupid enough to do anything that night, not even after Elgin caught that look in her eyes, saw it was directed at him, saw she wanted to eat.

Elgin knew how small Eden was, how people loved to insinuate and pry and talk. So he and Jewel worked it out, a once-a-week thing mostly that happened down in Carlyle, at a small cabin had been in Elgin’s family since before the War Between the States. There, Elgin and Jewel were free to partake of each other, squeeze and bite and swallow and inhale each other, to make love in the lake, on the porch, in the tiny kitchen.

They hardly ever talked, and when they did, it was about nothing at all, really — the decline in the quality of the meat at Billy’s Butcher Shop, rumors that parking meters were going to be installed in front of the courthouse, if McGarrett and the rest of Five-O would ever put the cuffs on Wo Fat.

There was an unspoken understanding that he was free to date any woman he chose and that she’d never leave Perkin Lut. And that was just fine. This wasn’t about love; it was about appetite.

Sometimes, Elgin would see her in town or hear Blue speak about her in that puppy-dog-love way he’d been speaking about her since high school, and he’d find himself surprised by the realization that he slept with this woman. That no one knew. That it could go on forever, if both of them remained careful, vigilant against the wrong look, the wrong tone in their voices when they spoke in public.

He couldn’t entirely put his finger on what need she satisfied, only that he needed her in that lakefront cabin once a week, that it had something to do with walking out of the jungle alive, with the ticking of his own death he’d heard for a full year. Jewel was somehow reward for that, a fringe benefit. To be naked and spent with her atop him and seeing that look in her eyes that said she was ready to go again, ready to gobble him up like oxygen. He’d earned that by shooting at shapes in the night, pressed against those damp foxhole walls that never stayed shored up for long, only to come home to a woman who couldn’t wait, who’d discarded him as easily as she would a once-favored doll she’d grown beyond, looked back upon with a wistful mix of nostalgia and disdain.

He’d always told himself that when he found the right woman, his passion for Jewel, his need for those nights at the lake, would disappear. And, truth was, since he’d been with Shelley Briggs, he and Jewel had cooled it. Shelley wasn’t Perkin, he told Jewel; she’d figure it out soon enough if he left town once a week, came back with bite marks on his abdomen.

Jewel said, “Fine. We’ll get back to it whenever you’re ready.”

Knowing there’d be a next time, even if Elgin wouldn’t admit it to himself.

So Elgin, who’d been so lonely in the year after his discharge, now had two women. Sometimes, he didn’t know what to think of that. When you were alone, the happiness of others boiled your insides. Beauty seemed ugly. Laughter seemed evil. The casual grazing of one lover’s hand into another was enough to make you want to cut them off at the wrist. I will never be loved, you said. I will never know joy.

He wondered sometimes how Blue made it through. Blue, who’d never had a girlfriend he hadn’t rented by the half hour. Who was too ugly and small and just plain weird to evoke anything in women but fear or pity. Blue, who’d been carrying a torch for Jewel Lut since long before she married Perkin and kept carrying it with a quiet fever Elgin could only occasionally identify with. Blue, he knew, saw Jewel Lut as a queen, as the only woman who existed for him in Eden, South Carolina. All because she’d been nice to him, pals with him and Elgin, back about a thousand years ago, before sex, before breasts, before Elgin or Blue had even the smallest clue what that thing between their legs was for, before Perkin Lut had come along with his daddy’s money and his nice smile and his bullshit stories about how many men he’d have killed in the war if only the draft board had seen fit to let him go.

Blue figured if he was nice enough, kind enough, waited long enough — then one day Jewel would see his decency, need to cling to it.

Elgin never bothered telling Blue that some women didn’t want decency. Some women didn’t want a nice guy. Some women, and some men too, wanted to get into a bed, turn out the lights, and feast on each other like animals until it hurt to move.

Blue would never guess that Jewel was that kind of woman, because she was always so sweet to him, treated him like a child really, and with every friendly hello she gave him, every pat on the shoulder, every “What you been up to, old bud?” Blue pushed her further and further up the pedestal he’d built in his mind.

“I seen him at the Emporium one time,” Shelley told Elgin. “He just come in for no reason anyone understood and sat reading magazines until Jewel came in to see Perkin about something. And Blue, he just stared at her. Just stared at her talking to Perkin in the showroom. When she finally looked back, he stood up and left.”

Elgin hated hearing about, talking about, or thinking about Jewel when he was with Shelley. It made him feel unclean.

“Crazy love,” he said to end the subject.

“Crazy something, babe.”

Nights sometimes, Elgin would sit with Shelley in front of his trailer, listen to the cicadas hum through the scrawny pine, smell the night and the rock salt mixed with gravel; the piña colada shampoo Shelley used made him think of Hawaii, though he’d never been, and he’d think how their love wasn’t crazy love, wasn’t burning so fast and furious it’d burn itself out they weren’t careful. And that was fine with him. If he could just get his head around this Jewel thing, stop seeing her naked and waiting and looking back over her shoulder at him in the cabin, then he could make something with Shelley. She was worth it. She might not be able to fuck like Jewel, and, truth be told, he didn’t laugh as much with her, but Shelley was what you aspired to. A good woman, who’d be a good mother, who’d stick by you when times got tough. Sometimes he’d take her hand in his and hold it for no other reason but the doing of it. She caught him one night, some look in his eyes, maybe the way he tilted his head to look at her small white hand in his big brown one.

She said, “Damn, Elgin, if you ain’t simple sometimes.” Then she came out of her chair in a rush and straddled him, kissed him as if she were trying to take a piece of him back with her. She said, “Baby, we ain’t getting any younger. You know?”

And he knew, somehow, at that moment why some men build families and others shoot dogs. He just wasn’t sure where he fit in the equation.

He said, “We ain’t, are we?”

Blue had been Elgin’s best buddy since either of them could remember, but Elgin had been wondering about it lately. Blue’d always been a little different, something Elgin liked, sure, but there was more to it now. Blue was the kind of guy you never knew if he was quiet because he didn’t have anything to say or, because what he had to say was so horrible, he knew enough not to send it out into the atmosphere.

When they’d been kids, growing up in the trailer park, Blue used to be out at all hours because his mother was either entertaining a man or had gone out and forgotten to leave him the key. Back then, Blue had this thing for cockroaches. He’d collect them in a jar, then drop bricks on them to test their resiliency. He told Elgin once, “That’s what they are — resilient. Every generation, we have to come up with new ways to kill ’em because they get immune to the poisons we had before.” After a while, Blue took to dousing them in gasoline, lighting them up, seeing how resilient they were then.

Elgin’s folks told him to stay away from the strange, dirty kid with the white-trash mother, but Elgin felt sorry for Blue. He was half Elgin’s size even though they were the same age; you could place your thumb and forefinger around Blue’s biceps and meet them on the other side. Elgin hated how Blue seemed to have only two pairs of clothes, both usually dirty, and how sometimes they’d pass his trailer together and hear the animal sounds coming from inside, the grunts and moans, the slapping of flesh. Half the time you couldn’t tell if Blue’s old lady was in there fucking or fighting. And always the sound of country music mingled in with all that animal noise, Blue’s mother and her man of the moment listening to it on the transistor radio she’d given Blue one Christmas.

“On my fucking radio,” Blue said once and shook his small head, the only time Elgin ever saw him react to what went on in that trailer.

Blue was a reader — knew more about science and ecology, about anatomy and blue whales and conversion tables than anyone Elgin knew. Most everyone figured the kid for a mute — hell, he’d been held back twice in fourth grade — but with Elgin he’d sometimes chat up a storm while they puffed smokes together down at the drainage ditch behind the park. He’d talk about whales, how they bore only one child, who they were fiercely protective of, but how if another child was orphaned, a mother whale would take it as her own, protect it as fiercely as she did the one she gave birth to. He told Elgin that sharks never slept, how electrical currents worked, what a depth charge was. Elgin, never much of a talker, just sat and listened, ate it up and waited for more.

The older they got, the more Elgin became Blue’s protector, till finally, the year Blue’s face exploded with acne, Elgin got in about two fights a day until there was no one left to fight. Everyone knew — they were brothers. And if Elgin didn’t get you from the front, Blue was sure to take care of you from behind, like that time a can of acid fell on Roy Hubrist’s arm in shop, or the time someone hit Carnell Lewis from behind with a brick, then cut his Achilles tendon with a razor while he lay out cold. Everyone knew it was Blue, even if no one actually saw him do it.

Elgin figured with Roy and Carnell, they’d had it coming. No great loss. It was since Elgin’d come back from Vietnam, though, that he’d noticed some things and kept them to himself, wondered what he was going to do the day he’d know he had to do something.

There was the owl someone had set afire and hung upside down from a telephone wire, the cats who turned up missing in the blocks that surrounded Blue’s shack off Route 11. There were the small pink panties Elgin had seen sticking out from under Blue’s bed one morning when he’d come to get him for some cleanup work at a site. He’d checked the missing-persons reports for days, but it hadn’t come to anything, so he’d just decided Blue had picked them up himself, fed a fantasy or two. He didn’t forget, though, couldn’t shake the way those panties had curled upward out of the brown dust under Blue’s bed, seemed to be pleading for something.

He’d never bothered asking Blue about any of this. That never worked. Blue just shut down at times like that, stared off somewhere, as if something you couldn’t hear was drowning out your words, something you couldn’t see was taking up his line of vision. Blue, floating away on you, until you stopped cluttering up his mind with useless talk.

Elgin went into town with Shelley so she could get her hair done at Martha’s Unisex on Main. In Martha’s, as Dottie Leeds gave Shelley a shampoo and rinse, Elgin felt like he’d stumbled into a chapel of womanhood. There was Jim Hayder’s teenage daughter Sonny, getting one of those feathered cuts was growing popular these days, and several older women who still wore beehives, getting them reset or plastered or whatever they did to keep them up like that. There was Joylene Covens and Lila Sims having their nails done while their husbands golfed and the black maids watched their kids, and Martha and Dottie and Esther and Gertrude and Hayley dancing and flitting, laughing and chattering among the chairs, calling everyone “honey,” and all of them — the young, the old, the rich, and Shelley — kicking back like they did this every day, knew each other more intimately than they did their husbands or children or boyfriends.

When Dottie Leeds looked up from Shelley’s head and said, “Elgin, honey, can we get you a sports page or something?” the whole place burst out laughing, Shelley included. Elgin smiled, though he didn’t feel like it, and gave them all a sheepish wave that got a bigger laugh, and he told Shelley he’d be back in a bit and left.

He headed up Main toward the town square, wondering what it was those women seemed to know so effortlessly that completely escaped him, and saw Perkin Lut walking in a circle outside Dexter Isley’s Five & Dime. It was one of those days when the wet, white heat was so overpowering that unless you were in Martha’s, the one place in town with central air-conditioning, most people stayed inside with their shades down and tried not to move much.

And there was Perkin Lut walking the soles of his shoes into the ground, turning in circles like a little kid trying to make himself dizzy.

Perkin and Elgin had known each other since kindergarten, but Elgin could never remember liking the man much. Perkin’s old man, Mance Lut, had pretty much built Eden, and he’d spent a lot of money keeping Perkin out of the war, hid his son up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for so many semesters even Perkin couldn’t remember what he’d majored in. A lot of men who’d gone overseas and come back hated Perkin for that, as did the families of the men who hadn’t come back, but that wasn’t Elgin’s problem with Perkin. Hell, if Elgin’d had the money, he’d have stayed out of that shitty war too. What Elgin couldn’t abide was that there was something in Perkin that not only protected him from consequences but that made him look down on people who paid for their sins, who fell without a safety net to catch them.

It had happened more than once that Elgin had found himself thrusting in and out of Perkin’s wife and thinking, Take that, Perkin. Take that.

But this afternoon, Perkin didn’t have his salesman’s smile or aloof glance. When Elgin stopped by him and said, “Hey, Perkin, how are you?” Perkin looked up at him with eyes so wild they seemed about to jump out of their sockets.

“I’m not good, Elgin. Not good.”

“What’s the matter?”

Perkin nodded to himself several times, looked over Elgin’s shoulder. “I’m fixing to do something about that.”

“About what?”

“About that.” Perkin’s jaw gestured over Elgin’s shoulder.

Elgin turned around, looked across Main and through the windows of Miller’s Laundromat, saw Jewel Lut pulling her clothes from the dryer, saw Blue standing beside her, taking a pair of jeans from the pile and starting to fold. If either of them had looked up and over they’d have seen Elgin and Perkin Lut easily enough, but Elgin knew they wouldn’t. There was an air to the two of them that seemed to block out the rest of the world in that bright Laundromat as easily as it would in a dark bedroom. Blue’s lips moved and Jewel laughed, flipped a T-shirt on his head.

“I’m fixing to do something right now,” Perkin said.

Elgin looked at him, could see that was a lie, something Perkin was repeating to himself in hopes it would come true. Perkin was successful in business, and for more reasons than just his daddy’s money, but he wasn’t the kind of man who did things; he was the kind of man who had things done.

Elgin looked across the street again. Blue still had the T-shirt sitting atop his head. He said something else and Jewel covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed.

“Don’t you have a washer and dryer at your house, Perkin?”

Perkin rocked back on his heels. “Washer broke. Jewel decides to come in town.” He looked at Elgin. “We ain’t getting along so well these days. She keeps reading those magazines, Elgin. You know the ones? Talking about liberation, leaving your bra at home, shit like that.” He pointed across the street. “Your friend’s a problem.”

Your friend.

Elgin looked at Perkin, felt a sudden anger he couldn’t completely understand, and with it a desire to say, That’s my friend and he’s talking to my fuck-buddy. Get it, Perkin?

Instead, he just shook his head and left Perkin there, walked across the street to the Laundromat.

Blue took the T-shirt off his head when he saw Elgin enter. A smile, half frozen on his pitted face, died as he blinked into the sunlight blaring through the windows.

Jewel said, “Hey, we got another helper!” She tossed a pair of men’s briefs over Blue’s head, hit Elgin in the chest with them.

“Hey, Jewel.”

“Hey, Elgin. Long time.” Her eyes dropped from his, settled on a towel.

Didn’t seem like it at the moment to Elgin. Seemed almost as if he’d been out at the lake with her as recently as last night. He could taste her in his mouth, smell her skin damp with a light sweat.

And standing there with Blue, it also seemed like they were all three back in that trailer park, and Jewel hadn’t aged a bit. Still wore her red hair long and messy, still dressed in clothes seemed to have been picked up, wrinkled, off her closet floor and nothing fancy about them in the first place, but draped over her body, they were sexier than clothes other rich women bought in New York once a year.

This afternoon, she wore a crinkly, paisley dress that might have been on the pink side once but had faded to a pasty newspaper color after years of washing. Nothing special about it, not too high up her thigh or down her chest, and loose — but something about her body made it appear like she might just ripen right out of it any second.

Elgin handed the briefs to Blue as he joined them at the folding table. For a while, none of them said anything. They picked clothes from the large pile and folded, and the only sound was Jewel whistling.

Then Jewel laughed.

“What?” Blue said.

“Aw, nothing.” She shook her head. “Seems like we’re just one happy family here, though, don’t it?”

Blue looked stunned. He looked at Elgin. He looked at Jewel. He looked at the pair of small, light-blue socks he held in his hands, the monogram JL stitched in the cotton. He looked at Jewel again.

“Yeah,” he said eventually, and Elgin heard a tremor in his voice he’d never heard before. “Yeah, it does.”

Elgin looked up at one of the upper dryer doors. It had swung out at eye level when the dryer had been emptied. The center of the door was a circle of glass, and Elgin could see Main Street reflected in it, the white posts that supported the wood awning over the Five & Dime, Perkin Lut walking in circles, his head down, the heat shimmering in waves up and down Main.

The dog was green.

Blue had used some of the money Big Bobby’d paid him over the past few weeks to upgrade his target scope. The new scope was huge, twice the width of the rifle barrel, and because the days were getting shorter, it was outfitted with a light-amplification device. Elgin had used similar scopes in the jungle, and he’d never liked them, even when they’d saved his life and those of his platoon, picked up Charlie coming through the dense flora like icy gray ghosts. Night scopes — or LADs as they’d called them over there — were just plain unnatural, and Elgin always felt like he was looking through a telescope from the bottom of a lake. He had no idea where Blue would have gotten one, but hunters in Eden had been showing up with all sorts of weird marine or army surplus shit these last few years; Elgin had even heard of a hunting party using grenades to scare up fish — blowing ’em up into the boat already half cooked, all you had to do was scale ’em.

The dog was green, the highway was beige, the top of the tree line was yellow, and the trunks were the color of army fatigues.

Blue said, “What you think?”

They were up in the tree house Blue’d built. Nice wood, two lawn chairs, a tarp hanging from the branch overhead, a cooler filled with Coors. Blue’d built a railing across the front, perfect for resting your elbows when you took aim. Along the tree trunk, he’d mounted a huge klieg light plugged to a portable generator, because while it was illegal to “shine” deer, nobody’d ever said anything about shining wild dogs. Blue was definitely home.

Elgin shrugged. Just like in the jungle, he wasn’t sure he was meant to see the world this way — faded to the shades and textures of old photographs. The dog too seemed to sense that it had stepped out of time somehow, into this seaweed circle punched through the landscape. It sniffed the air with a misshapen snout, but the rest of its body was tensed into one tight muscle, leaning forward as if it smelled prey.

Blue said, “You wanna do it?”

The stock felt hard against Elgin’s shoulder. The trigger, curled under his index finger, was cold and thick, something about it that itched his finger and the back of his head simultaneously, a voice back there with the itch in his head saying, “Fire.”

What you could never talk about down at the bar to people who hadn’t been there, to people who wanted to know, was what it had been like firing on human beings, on those icy gray ghosts in the dark jungle. Elgin had been in fourteen battles over the course of his twelve-month tour, and he couldn’t say with certainty that he’d ever killed anyone. He’d shot some of those shapes, seen them go down, but never the blood, never their eyes when the bullets hit. It had all been a cluster-fuck of swift and sudden noise and color, an explosion of white lights and tracers, green bush, red fire, screams in the night. And afterward, if it was clear, you walked into the jungle and saw the corpses, wondered if you’d hit this body or that one or any at all.

And the only thing you were sure of was that you were too fucking hot and still — this was the terrible thing, but oddly exhilarating too — deeply afraid.

Elgin lowered Blue’s rifle, stared across the interstate, now the color of seashell, at the dark mint tree line. The dog was barely noticeable, a soft dark shape amid other soft dark shapes.

He said, “No, Blue, thanks,” and handed him the rifle.

Blue said, “Suit yourself, buddy.” He reached behind them and pulled the beaded string on the klieg light. As the white light erupted across the highway and the dog froze, blinking in the brightness, Elgin found himself wondering what the fucking point of a LAD scope was when you were just going to shine the animal anyway.

Blue swung the rifle around, leaned into the railing, and put a round in the center of the animal, right by its rib cage. The dog jerked inward, as if someone had whacked it with a bat, and as it teetered on wobbly legs, Blue pulled back on the bolt, drove it home again, and shot the dog in the head. The dog flipped over on its side, most of its skull gone, back leg kicking at the road like it was trying to ride a bicycle.

“You think Jewel Lut might, I dunno, like me?” Blue said.

Elgin cleared his throat. “Sure. She’s always liked you.”

“But I mean…” Blue shrugged, seemed embarrassed suddenly. “How about this: You think a girl like that could take to Australia?”

“Australia?”

Blue smiled at Elgin. “Australia.”

“Australia?” he said again.

Blue reached back and shut off the light. “Australia. They got some wild dingoes there, buddy. Could make some real money. Jewel told me the other day how they got real nice beaches. But dingoes too. Big Bobby said people’re starting to bitch about what’s happening here, asking where Rover is and such, and anyway, ain’t too many dogs left dumb enough to come this way anymore. Australia,” he said, “they never run out of dog. Sooner or later, here, I’m gonna run out of dog.”

Elgin nodded. Sooner or later, Blue would run out of dog. He wondered if Big Bobby’d thought that one through, if he had a contingency plan, if he had access to the National Guard.

“The boy’s just, what you call it, zealous,” Big Bobby told Elgin.

They were sitting in Phil’s Barbershop on Main. Phil had gone to lunch, and Big Bobby’d drawn the shades so people’d think he was making some important decision of state.

Elgin said, “He ain’t zealous, Big Bobby. He’s losing it. Thinks he’s in love with Jewel Lut.”

“He’s always thought that.”

“Yeah, but now maybe he’s thinking she might like him a bit too.”

Big Bobby said, “How come you never call me Mayor?”

Elgin sighed.

“All right, all right. Look,” Big Bobby said, picking up one of the hair-tonic bottles on Phil’s counter and sniffing it, “so Blue likes his job a little bit.”

Elgin said, “There’s more to it and you know it.”

Playing with combs now. “I do?”

“Bobby, he’s got a taste for shooting things now.”

“Wait.” He held up a pair of fat, stubby hands. “Blue always liked to shoot things. Everyone knows that. Shit, if he wasn’t so short and didn’t have six or seven million little health problems, he’d a been the first guy in this town to go to The ’Nam. ’Stead, he had to sit back here while you boys had all the fun.”

Calling it The ’Nam. Like Big Bobby had any idea. Calling it fun. Shit.

“Dingoes,” Elgin said.

“Dingoes?”

“Dingoes. He’s saying he’s going to Australia to shoot dingoes.”

“Do him a world of good too.” Big Bobby sat back down in the barber’s chair beside Elgin. “He can see the sights, that sort of thing.”

“Bobby, he ain’t going to Australia and you know it. Hell, Blue ain’t never stepped over the county line in his life.”

Big Bobby polished his belt buckle with the cuff of his sleeve. “Well, what you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t know. I’m just telling you. Next time you see him, Bobby, you look in his fucking eyes.”

“Yeah. What’ll I see?”

Elgin turned his head, looked at him. “Nothing.”

Bobby said, “He’s your buddy.”

Elgin thought of the small panties curling out of the dust under Blue’s bed. “Yeah, but he’s your problem.”

Big Bobby put his hands behind his head, stretched in the chair. “Well, people getting suspicious about all the dogs disappearing, so I’m going to have to shut this operation down immediately anyway.”

He wasn’t getting it. “Bobby, you shut this operation down, someone’s gonna get a world’s worth of that nothing in Blue’s eyes.”

Big Bobby shrugged, a man who’d made a career out of knowing what was beyond him.

The first time Perkin Lut struck Jewel in public was at Chuck’s Diner.

Elgin and Shelley were sitting just three booths away when they heard a racket of falling glasses and plates, and by the time they came out of their booth, Jewel was lying on the tile floor with shattered glass and chunks of bone china by her elbows and Perkin standing over her, his arms shaking, a look in his eyes that said he’d surprised himself as much as anyone else.

Elgin looked at Jewel, on her knees, the hem of her dress getting stained by the spilled food, and he looked away before she caught his eye, because if that happened he just might do something stupid, fuck Perkin up a couple-three ways.

“Aw, Perkin,” Chuck Blade said, coming from behind the counter to help Jewel up, wiping gravy off his hands against his apron.

“We don’t respect that kind of behavior ’round here, Mr. Lut,” Clara Blade said. “Won’t have it neither.”

Chuck Blade helped Jewel to her feet, his eyes cast down at his broken plates, the half a steak lying in a soup of beans by his shoe. Jewel had a welt growing on her right cheek, turning a bright red as she placed her hand on the table for support.

“I didn’t mean it,” Perkin said.

Clara Blade snorted and pulled the pen from behind her ear, began itemizing the damage on a cocktail napkin.

“I didn’t.” Perkin noticed Elgin and Shelley. He locked eyes with Elgin, held out his hands. “I swear.”

Elgin turned away and that’s when he saw Blue coming through the door. He had no idea where he’d come from, though it ran through his head that Blue could have just been standing outside looking in, could have been standing there for an hour.

Like a lot of small guys, Blue had speed, and he never seemed to walk in a straight line. He moved as if he were constantly sidestepping tackles or land mines — with sudden, unpredictable pivots that left you watching the space where he’d been, instead of the place he’d ended up.

Blue didn’t say anything, but Elgin could see the homicide in his eyes and Perkin saw it too, backed up, and slipped on the mess on the floor and stumbled back, trying to regain his balance as Blue came past Shelley and tried to lunge past Elgin.

Elgin caught him at the waist, lifted him off the ground, and held on tight because he knew how slippery Blue could be in these situations. You’d think you had him and he’d just squirm away from you, hit somebody with a glass.

Elgin tucked his head down and headed for the door, Blue flopped over his shoulder like a bag of cement mix, Blue screaming, “You see me, Perkin? You see me? I’m a last face you see, Perkin! Real soon.”

Elgin hit the open doorway, felt the night heat on his face as Blue screamed, “Jewel! You all right? Jewel?”

Blue didn’t say much back at Elgin’s trailer.

He tried to explain to Shelley how pure Jewel was, how hitting something that innocent was like spitting on the Bible.

Shelley didn’t say anything, and after a while Blue shut up too.

Elgin just kept plying him with Beam, knowing Blue’s lack of tolerance for it, and pretty soon Blue passed out on the couch, his pitted face still red with rage.

“He’s never been exactly right in the head, has he?” Shelley said.

Elgin ran his hand down her bare arm, pulled her shoulder in tighter against his chest, heard Blue snoring from the front of the trailer. “No, ma’am.”

She rose above him, her dark hair falling to his face, tickling the corners of his eyes. “But you’ve been his friend.”

Elgin nodded.

She touched his cheek with her hand. “Why?”

Elgin thought about it a bit, started talking to her about the little, dirty kid and his cockroach flambés, of the animal sounds that came from his mother’s trailer. The way Blue used to sit by the drainage ditch, all pulled into himself, his body tight. Elgin thought of all those roaches and cats and rabbits and dogs, and he told Shelley that he’d always thought Blue was dying, ever since he’d met him, leaking away in front of his eyes.

“Everyone dies,” she said.

“Yeah.” He rose up on his elbow, rested his free hand on her warm hip. “Yeah, but with most of us it’s like we’re growing toward something and then we die. But with Blue, it’s like he ain’t never grown toward nothing. He’s just been dying real slowly since he was born.”

She shook her head. “I’m not getting you.”

He thought of the mildew that used to soak the walls in Blue’s mother’s trailer, of the mold and dust in Blue’s shack off Route 11, of the rotting smell that had grown out of the drainage ditch when they were kids. The way Blue looked at it all — seemed to be at one with it — as if he felt a bond.

Shelley said, “Babe, what do you think about getting out of here?”

“Where?”

“I dunno. Florida. Georgia. Someplace else.”

“I got a job. You too.”

“You can always get construction jobs other places. Receptionist jobs too.”

“We grew up here.”

She nodded. “But maybe it’s time to start our life somewhere else.”

He said, “Let me think about it.”

She tilted his chin so she was looking in his eyes. “You’ve been thinking about it.”

He nodded. “Maybe I want to think about it some more.”

In the morning, when they woke up, Blue was gone.

Shelley looked at the rumpled couch, over at Elgin. For a good minute they just stood there, looking from the couch to each other, the couch to each other.

An hour later, Shelley called from work, told Elgin that Perkin Lut was in his office as always, no signs of physical damage.

Elgin said, “If you see Blue…”

“Yeah?”

Elgin thought about it. “I dunno. Call the cops. Tell Perkin to bail out a back door. That sound right?”

“Sure.”

Big Bobby came to the site later that morning, said, “I go over to Blue’s place to tell him we got to end this dog thing and—”

“Did you tell him it was over?” Elgin asked.

“Let me finish. Let me explain.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Let me finish.” Bobby wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I was gonna tell him, but—”

“You didn’t tell him.”

“But Jewel Lut was there.”

“What?”

Big Bobby put his hand on Elgin’s elbow, led him away from the other workers. “I said Jewel was there. The two of them sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast.”

“In Blue’s place?”

Big Bobby nodded. “Biggest dump I ever seen. Smells like something I-don’t-know-what. But bad. And there’s Jewel, pretty as can be in her summer dress and soft skin and makeup, eating Eggos and grits with Blue, big brown shiner under her eye. She smiles at me, says, ‘Hey, Big Bobby,’ and goes back to eating.”

“And that was it?”

“How come no one ever calls me Mayor?”

“And that was it?” Elgin repeated.

“Yeah. Blue asks me to take a seat, I say I got business. He says him too.”

“What’s that mean?” Elgin heard his own voice, hard and sharp.

Big Bobby took a step back from it. “Hell do I know? Could mean he’s going out to shoot more dog.”

“So you never told him you were shutting down the operation.”

Big Bobby’s eyes were wide and confused. “You hear what I told you? He was in there with Jewel. Her all doll-pretty and him looking, well, ugly as usual. Whole situation was too weird. I got out.”

“Blue said he had business too.”

“He said he had business too,” Bobby said, and walked away.

The next week, they showed up in town together a couple of times, buying some groceries, toiletries for Jewel, boxes of shells for Blue.

They never held hands or kissed or did anything romantic, but they were together, and people talked. Said, Well, of all things. And I never thought I’d see the day. How do you like that? I guess this is the day the cows actually come home.

Blue called and invited Shelley and Elgin to join them one Sunday afternoon for a late breakfast at the IHOP. Shelley begged off, said something about coming down with the flu, but Elgin went. He was curious to see where this was going, what Jewel was thinking, how she thought her hanging around Blue was going to come to anything but bad.

He could feel the eyes of the whole place on them as they ate.

“See where he hit me?” Jewel tilted her head, tucked her beautiful red hair back behind her ear. The mark on her cheekbone, in the shape of a small rain puddle, was faded yellow now, its edges roped by a sallow beige.

Elgin nodded.

“Still can’t believe the son of a bitch hit me,” she said, but there was no rage in her voice anymore, just a mild sense of drama, as if she’d pushed the words out of her mouth the way she believed she should say them. But the emotion she must have felt when Perkin’s hand hit her face, when she fell to the floor in front of people she’d known all her life — that seemed to have faded with the mark on her cheekbone.

“Perkin Lut,” she said with a snort, then laughed.

Elgin looked at Blue. He’d never seemed so… fluid in all the time Elgin had known him. The way he cut into his pancakes, swept them off his plate with a smooth dip of the fork tines; the swift dab of the napkin against his lips after every bite; the attentive swivel of his head whenever Jewel spoke, usually in tandem with the lifting of his coffee mug to his mouth.

This was not a Blue Elgin recognized. Except when he was handling weapons, Blue moved in jerks and spasms. Tremors rippled through his limbs and caused his fingers to drop things, his elbows and knees to move too fast, crack against solid objects. Blue’s blood seemed to move too quickly through his veins, made his muscles obey his brain after a quarter-second delay and then too rapidly, as if to catch up on lost time.

But now he moved in concert, like an athlete or a jungle cat.

That’s what you do to men, Jewel: You give them a confidence so total it finds their limbs.

“Perkin,” Blue said, and rolled his eyes at Jewel and they both laughed.

She not as hard as he did, though.

Elgin could see the root of doubt in her eyes, could feel her loneliness in the way she fiddled with the menu, touched her cheekbone, spoke too loudly, as if she wasn’t just telling Elgin and Blue how Perkin had mistreated her, but the whole IHOP as well, so people could get it straight that she wasn’t the villain, and if after she returned to Perkin she had to leave him again, they’d know why.

Of course she was going back to Perkin.

Elgin could tell by the glances she gave Blue — unsure, slightly embarrassed, maybe a bit repulsed. What had begun as a nighttime ride into the unknown had turned cold and stale during the hard yellow lurch into morning.

Blue wiped his mouth, said, “Be right back,” and walked to the bathroom with surer strides than Elgin had ever seen on the man.

Elgin looked at Jewel.

She gripped the handle of her coffee cup between the tips of her thumb and index finger and turned the cup in slow revolutions around the saucer, made a soft scraping noise that climbed up Elgin’s spine like a termite trapped under the skin.

“You ain’t sleeping with him, are you?” Elgin said quietly.

Jewel’s head jerked up and she looked over her shoulder, then back at Elgin. “What? God, no. We’re just… He’s my pal. That’s all. Like when we were kids.”

“We ain’t kids.”

“I know. Don’t you think I know?” She fingered the coffee cup again. “I miss you,” she said softly. “I miss you. When you coming back?”

Elgin kept his voice low. “Me and Shelley, we’re getting pretty serious.”

She gave him a small smile that he instantly hated. It seemed to know him; it seemed like everything he was and everything he wasn’t was caught in the curl of her lips. “You miss the lake, Elgin. Don’t lie.”

He shrugged.

“You ain’t ever going to marry Shelley Briggs, have babies, be an upstanding citizen.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because you got too many demons in you, boy. And they need me. They need the lake. They need to cry out every now and then.”

Elgin looked down at his own coffee cup. “You going back to Perkin?”

She shook her head hard. “No way. Uh-uh. No way.”

Elgin nodded, even though he knew she was lying. If Elgin’s demons needed the lake, needed to be unbridled, Jewel’s needed Perkin. They needed security. They needed to know the money’d never run out, that she’d never go two full days without a solid meal like she had so many times as a child in the trailer park.

Perkin was what she saw when she looked down at her empty coffee cup, when she touched her cheek. Perkin was at their nice home with his feet up, watching a game, petting the dog, and she was in the IHOP in the middle of a Sunday when the food was at its oldest and coldest, with one guy who loved her and one who fucked her, wondering how she got there.

Blue came back to the table, moving with that new sure stride, a broad smile in the wide swing of his arms.

“How we doing?” Blue said. “Huh? How we doing?” And his lips burst into a grin so huge Elgin expected it to keep going right off the sides of his face.

Jewel left Blue’s place two days later, walked into Perkin Lut’s Auto Emporium and into Perkin’s office, and by the time anyone went to check, they’d left through the back door, gone home for the day.

Elgin tried to get ahold of Blue for three days — called constantly, went by his shack and knocked on the door, even staked out the tree house along I-95 where he fired on the dogs.

He’d decided to break into Blue’s place, was fixing to do just that, when he tried one last call from his trailer that third night and Blue answered with a strangled “Hello.”

“It’s me. How you doing?”

“Can’t talk now.”

“Come on, Blue. It’s me. You okay?”

“All alone,” Blue said.

“I know. I’ll come by.”

“You do, I’ll leave.”

“Blue.”

“Leave me alone for a spell, Elgin. Okay?”

That night Elgin sat alone in his trailer, smoking cigarettes, staring at the walls.

Blue’d never had much of anything his whole life — not a job he enjoyed, not a woman he could consider his — and then between the dogs and Jewel Lut he’d probably thought he’d got it all at once. Hit pay dirt.

Elgin remembered the dirty little kid sitting down by the drainage ditch, hugging himself. Six, maybe seven years old, waiting to die.

You had to wonder sometimes why some people were even born. You had to wonder what kind of creature threw bodies into the world, expected them to get along when they’d been given no tools, no capacity to get any either.

In Vietnam, this fat boy, name of Woodson from South Dakota, had been the least popular guy in the platoon. He wasn’t smart, he wasn’t athletic, he wasn’t funny, he wasn’t even personable. He just was. Elgin had been running beside him one day through a sea of rice paddies, their boots making sucking sounds every step they took, and someone fired a hell of a round from the other side of the paddies, ripped Woodson’s head in half so completely all Elgin saw running beside him for a few seconds was the lower half of Woodson’s face. No hair, no forehead, no eyes. Just half the nose, a mouth, a chin.

Thing was, Woodson kept running, kept plunging his feet in and out of the water, making those sucking sounds, M-16 hugged to his chest, for a good eight or ten steps. Kid was dead, he’s still running. Kid had no reason to hold on, but he don’t know it, he keeps running.

What spark of memory, hope, or dream had kept him going?

You had to wonder.

IN ELGIN’S DREAM that night, a platoon of ice-gray Vietcong rose in a straight line from the center of Cooper’s Lake while Elgin was inside the cabin with Shelley and Jewel. He penetrated them both somehow, their separate torsos branching out from the same pair of hips, their four legs clamping at the small of his back, this Shelley-Jewel creature crying out for more, more, more.

And Elgin could see the VC platoon drifting in formation toward the shore, their guns pointed, their faces hidden behind thin wisps of green fog.

The Shelley-Jewel creature arched her backs on the bed below him, and Woodson and Blue stood in the corner of the room, watching as their dogs padded across the floor, letting out low growls and drooling.

Shelley dissolved into Jewel as the VC platoon reached the porch steps and released their safeties all at once, the sound like the ratcheting of a thousand shotguns. Sweat exploded in Elgin’s hair, poured down his body like warm rain, and the VC fired in concert, the bullets shearing the walls of the cabin, lifting the roof off into the night. Elgin looked above him at the naked night sky, the stars zipping by like tracers, the yellow moon full and mean, the shivering branches of birch trees. Jewel rose and straddled him, bit his lip, and dug her nails into his back, and the bullets danced through his hair, and then Jewel was gone, her writhing flesh having dissolved into his own.

Elgin sat naked on the bed, his arms stretched wide, waiting for the bullets to find his back, to shear his head from his body the way they’d sheared the roof from the cabin, and the yellow moon burned above him as the dogs howled and Blue and Woodson held each other in the corner of the room and wept like children as the bullets drilled holes in their faces.

Big Bobby came by the trailer late the next morning, a Sunday, and said, “Blue’s a bit put out about losing his job.”

“What?” Elgin sat on the edge of his bed, pulled on his socks. “You picked now — now, Bobby — to fire him?”

“It’s in his eyes,” Big Bobby said. “Like you said. You can see it.”

Elgin had seen Big Bobby scared before, plenty of times, but now the man was trembling.

Elgin said, “Where is he?”

Blue’s front door was open, hanging half down the steps from a busted hinge. Elgin said, “Blue.”

“Kitchen.”

He sat in his Jockeys at the table, cleaning his rifle, each shiny black piece spread in front of him on the table. Elgin’s eyes watered a bit because there was a stench coming from the back of the house that he felt might strip his nostrils bare. He realized then that he’d never asked Big Bobby or Blue what they’d done with all those dead dogs.

Blue said, “Have a seat, bud. Beer in the fridge if you’re thirsty.”

Elgin wasn’t looking in that fridge. “Lost your job, huh?”

Blue wiped the bolt with a shammy cloth. “Happens.” He looked at Elgin. “Where you been lately?”

“I called you last night.”

“I mean in general.”

“Working.”

“No, I mean at night.”

“Blue, you been” — he almost said “playing house with Jewel Lut” but caught himself — “up in a fucking tree, how do you know where I been at night?”

“I don’t,” Blue said. “Why I’m asking.”

Elgin said, “I’ve been at my trailer or down at Doubles, same as usual.”

“With Shelley Briggs, right?”

Slowly, Elgin said, “Yeah.”

“I’m just asking, buddy. I mean, when we all going to go out? You, me, your new girl.”

The pits that covered Blue’s face like a layer of bad meat had faded some from all those nights in the tree.

Elgin said, “Anytime you want.”

Blue put down the bolt. “How ’bout right now?” He stood and walked into the bedroom just off the kitchen. “Let me just throw on some duds.”

“She’s working now, Blue.”

“At Perkin Lut’s? Hell, it’s almost noon. I’ll talk to Perkin about that Dodge he sold me last year, and when she’s ready we’ll take her out someplace nice.” He came back into the kitchen wearing a soiled brown T-shirt and jeans.

“Hell,” Elgin said, “I don’t want the girl thinking I’ve got some serious love for her or something. We come by for lunch, next thing she’ll expect me to drop her off in the mornings, pick her up at night.”

Blue was reassembling the rifle, snapping all those shiny pieces together so fast Elgin figured he could do it blind. He said, “Elgin, you got to show them some affection sometimes. I mean, Jesus.” He pulled a thin brass bullet from his T-shirt pocket and slipped it in the breech, followed it with four more, then slid the bolt home.

“Yeah, but you know what I’m saying, bud?” Elgin watched Blue nestle the stock in the space between his left hip and ribs, let the barrel point out into the kitchen.

“I know what you’re saying,” Blue said. “I know. But I got to talk to Perkin about my Dodge.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Blue turned to look at him, and the barrel swung level with Elgin’s belt buckle. “What’s wrong with it, it’s a piece of shit, what’s wrong with it, Elgin. Hell, you know that. Perkin sold me a lemon. This is the situation.” He blinked. “Beer for the ride?”

Elgin had a pistol in his glove compartment. A .32. He considered it.

“Elgin?”

“Yeah?”

“Why you looking at me funny?”

“You got a rifle pointed at me, Blue. You realize that?”

Blue looked at the rifle, and its presence seemed to surprise him. He dipped it toward the floor. “Shit, man, I’m sorry. I wasn’t even thinking. It feels like my arm sometimes. I forget. Man, I am sorry.” He held his arms out wide, the rifle rising with them.

“Lotta things deserve to die, don’t they?”

Blue smiled. “Well, I wasn’t quite thinking along those lines, but now you bring it up…”

Elgin said, “Who deserves to die, buddy?”

Blue laughed. “You got something on your mind, don’t you?” He hoisted himself up on the table, cradled the rifle in his lap. “Hell, boy, who you got? Let’s start with people who take two parking spaces.”

“Okay.” Elgin moved the chair by the table to a position slightly behind Blue, sat in it. “Let’s.”

“Then there’s DJs talk through the first minute of a song. Fucking Guatos coming down here these days to pick tobacco, showing no respect. Women wearing all those tight clothes, look at you like you’re a pervert when you stare at what they’re advertising.” He wiped his forehead with his arm. “Shit.”

“Who else?” Elgin said quietly.

“Okay. Okay. You got people like the ones let their dogs run wild into the highway, get themselves killed. And you got dishonest people, people who lie and sell insurance and cars and bad food. You got a lot of things. Jane Fonda.”

“Sure.” Elgin nodded.

Blue’s face was drawn, gray. He crossed his legs over each other like he used to down at the drainage ditch. “It’s all out there.” He nodded and his eyelids drooped.

“Perkin Lut?” Elgin said. “He deserve to die?”

“Not just Perkin,” Blue said. “Not just. Lots of people. I mean, how many you kill over in the war?”

Elgin shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“But some. Some. Right? Had to. I mean, that’s war — someone gets on your bad side, you kill them and all their friends till they stop bothering you.” His eyelids drooped again, and he yawned so deeply he shuddered when he finished.

“Maybe you should get some sleep.”

Blue looked over his shoulder at him. “You think? It’s been a while.”

A breeze rattled the thin walls at the back of the house, pushed that thick dank smell into the kitchen again, a rotting stench that found the back of Elgin’s throat and stuck there. He said, “When’s the last time?”

“I slept? Hell, a while. Days maybe.” Blue twisted his body so he was facing Elgin. “You ever feel like you spend your whole life waiting for it to get going?”

Elgin nodded, not positive what Blue was saying, but knowing he should agree with him. “Sure.”

“It’s hard,” Blue said. “Hard.” He leaned back on the table, stared at the brown water marks in his ceiling.

Elgin took in a long stream of that stench through his nostrils. He kept his eyes open, felt that air entering his nostrils creep past into his corneas, tear at them. The urge to close his eyes and wish it all away was as strong an urge as he’d ever felt, but he knew now was that time he’d always known was coming.

He leaned in toward Blue, reached across him, and pulled the rifle off his lap.

Blue turned his head, looked at him.

“Go to sleep,” Elgin said. “I’ll take care of this a while. We’ll go see Shelley tomorrow. Perkin Lut too.”

Blue blinked. “What if I can’t sleep? Huh? I’ve been having that problem, you know. I put my head on the pillow and I try to sleep and it won’t come and soon I’m just bawling like a fucking child till I got to get up and do something.”

Elgin looked at the tears that had sprung into Blue’s eyes, the red veins split across the whites, the desperate, savage need in his face that had always been there if anyone had looked close enough, and would never, Elgin knew, be satisfied.

“I’ll stick right here, buddy. I’ll sit here in the kitchen and you go in and sleep.”

Blue turned his head and stared up at the ceiling again. Then he slid off the table, peeled off his T-shirt, and tossed it on top of the fridge. “All right. All right. I’m gonna try.” He stopped at the bedroom doorway. “’Member — there’s beer in the fridge. You be here when I wake up?”

Elgin looked at him. He was still so small, probably so thin you could still wrap your hand around his biceps, meet the fingers on the other side. He was still ugly and stupid-looking, still dying right in front of Elgin’s eyes.

“I’ll be here, Blue. Don’t you worry.”

“Good enough. Yes, sir.”

Blue shut the door and Elgin heard the bedsprings grind, the rustle of pillows being arranged. He sat in the chair, with the smell of whatever decayed in the back of the house swirling around his head. The sun had hit the cheap tin roof now, and after a while he realized the buzzing he’d thought was in his head came from somewhere back in the house too.

He wondered if he had the strength to open the fridge. He wondered if he should call Perkin Lut’s and tell Perkin to get the hell out of Eden for a bit. Maybe he’d just ask for Shelley, tell her to meet him tonight with her suitcases. They’d drive down 95 where the dogs wouldn’t disturb them, drive clear to Jacksonville, Florida, before the sun came up again. See if they could outrun Blue and his tiny, dangerous wants, his dog corpses, and his smell; outrun people who took two parking spaces and telephone solicitors and Jane Fonda.

Jewel flashed through his mind then, an image of her sitting atop him, arching her back and shaking that long red hair, a look in her green eyes that said this was it, this was why we live.

He could stand up right now with this rifle in his hands, scratch the itch in the back of his head, and fire straight through the door, end what should never have been started.

He sat there staring at the door for quite a while, until he knew the exact number of places the paint had peeled in teardrop spots, and eventually he stood, went to the phone on the wall by the fridge, and dialed Perkin Lut’s.

“Auto Emporium,” Shelley said, and Elgin thanked God that in his present mood he hadn’t gotten Glynnis Verdon, who snapped her gum and always placed him on hold, left him listening to Muzak versions of the Shirelles.

“Shelley?”

“People gonna talk, you keep calling me at work, boy.”

He smiled, cradled the rifle like a baby, leaned against the wall. “How you doing?”

“Just fine, handsome. How ’bout yourself?”

Elgin turned his head, looked at the bedroom door. “I’m okay.”

“Still like me?”

Elgin heard the springs creak in the bedroom, heard weight drop on the old floorboards. “Still like you.”

“Well, then, it’s all fine then, isn’t it?”

Blue’s footfalls crossed toward the bedroom door, and Elgin used his hip to push himself off the wall.

“It’s all fine,” he said. “I gotta go. I’ll talk to you soon.”

He hung up and stepped away from the wall.

“Elgin,” Blue said from the other side of the door.

“Yeah, Blue?”

“I can’t sleep. I just can’t.”

Elgin saw Woodson sloshing through the paddy, the top of his head gone. He saw the pink panties curling up from underneath Blue’s bed and a shaft of sunlight hitting Shelley’s face as she looked up from behind her desk at Perkin Lut’s and smiled. He saw Jewel Lut dancing in the night rain by the lake and that dog lying dead on the shoulder of the interstate, kicking its leg like it was trying to ride a bicycle.

“Elgin,” Blue said. “I just can’t sleep. I got to do something.”

“Try,” Elgin said and cleared his throat.

“I just can’t. I got to… do something. I got to go…” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “I can’t sleep.”

The doorknob turned and Elgin raised the rifle, stared down the barrel.

“Sure, you can, Blue.” He curled his finger around the trigger as the door opened. “Sure you can,” he repeated and took a breath, held it in.

The skeleton of Eden Falls still sits on twenty-two acres of land just east of Brimmer’s Point, covered in rust thick as flesh. Some say it was the levels of iodine an environmental inspector found in the groundwater that scared off the original investors. Others said it was the downswing of the state economy or the governor’s failed reelection bid. Some say Eden Falls was just plain a dumb name, too biblical. And then, of course, there were plenty who claimed it was Jewel Lut’s ghost scared off all the workers.

They found her body hanging from the scaffolding they’d erected by the shell of the roller coaster. She was naked and hung upside down from a rope tied around her ankles. Her throat had been cut so deep the coroner said it was a miracle her head was still attached when they found her. The coroner’s assistant, man by the name of Chris Gleason, would claim when he was in his cups that the head had fallen off in the hearse as they drove down Main toward the morgue. Said he heard it cry out.

This was the same day Elgin Bern called the sheriff’s office, told them he’d shot his buddy Blue, fired two rounds into him at close range, the little guy dead before he hit his kitchen floor. Elgin told the deputy he was still sitting in the kitchen, right where he’d done it a few hours before. Said to send the hearse.

Due to the fact that Perkin Lut had no real alibi for his whereabouts when Jewel passed on and owing to the fact there’d been some very recent and very public discord in their marriage, Perkin was arrested and brought before a grand jury, but that jury decided not to indict. Perkin and Jewel had been patching things up, after all; he’d bought her a car (at cost, but still…).

Besides, we all knew it was Blue had killed Jewel. Hell, the Simmons boy, a retard ate paint and tree bark, could have told you that. Once all that stuff came out about what Blue and Big Bobby’d been doing with the dogs around here, well, that just sealed it. And everyone remembered how that week she’d been separated from Perkin, you could see the dream come alive in Blue’s eyes, see him allow hope into his heart for the first time in his sorry life.

And when hope comes late to a man, it’s a dangerous thing. Hope is for the young, the children. Hope in a full-grown man — particularly one with as little acquaintanceship with it or prospect for it as Blue — well, that kind of hope burns as it dies, boils blood white, and leaves something mean behind when it’s done.

Blue killed Jewel Lut.

And Elgin Bern killed Blue. And ended up doing time. Not much, due to his war record and the circumstances of who Blue was, but time just the same. Everyone knew Blue probably had it coming, was probably on his way back into town to do to Perkin or some other poor soul what he’d done to Jewel. Once a man gets that look in his eyes — that boiled look, like a dog searching out a bone who’s not going to stop until he finds it — well, sometimes he has to be put down like a dog. Don’t he?

And it was sad how Elgin came out of prison to find Shelley Briggs gone, moved up North with Perkin Lut of all people, who’d lost his heart for the car business after Jewel died, took to selling home electronics imported from Japan and Germany, made himself a fortune. Not long after he got out of prison, Elgin left too, no one knows where, just gone, drifting.

See, the thing is — no one wanted to convict Elgin. We all understood. We did. Blue had to go. But he’d had no weapon in his hand when Elgin, standing just nine feet away, pulled that trigger. Twice. Once we might have been able to overlook, but twice, that’s something else again. Elgin offered no defense, even refused a fancy lawyer’s attempt to get him to claim he’d suffered something called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which we’re hearing a lot more about these days.

“I don’t have that,” Elgin said. “I shot a defenseless man. That’s the long and the short of it, and that’s a sin.”

And he was right:

In the world, ’case you haven’t noticed, you usually pay for your sins.

And in the South, always.