A/N: This one's kind of long.
[mathis]
Old Tejano music played on the radio. Busted, spingy beats. The structured whine of the singers. The slurred spice of the brassy, dented notes playing as the patrol car thundered down the road, tires choking on potholes, churning up specters of red dust that settled lightly on the leaves and the hood of the car, like pink face-powder on the scoured cheeks of pretty ladies. The car groaned and shuddered. Stuttering wipers had to be turned on to sweep away the dust on the windshield.
The sky thinly veiled by the cosmetics of pale heat. It was cupped over the red, thirsty earth like cold hands over a fire.
Sheriff Bud Mathis tucked a cigarette between his lips. He was scowling. His hands were tight around the steering wheel. He hated Tejano music. It reminded him of days so hot the asphalt sucked stickily at your shoes. It reminded him of dirt poor neighborhoods and rusty, old cars and little barefoot mexican kids. But it was the only station his patrol car picked up throughout the entire county, and he hated the dead, friendless silence more than he hated the music.
He pulled over to the side of the road where he saw the fallen street sign and two other dusty cars squatted, fat and brown as indian women. Chewing on the end of the cigarette, he turned off the car and stepped out into the tin, ticking heat. He squinted up at the sun, spat on the ground, and walked through the cut hole in the barbed wire fence with his hands in his pockets. A dead man in the river. Just floating there. Two scared kids. Tiny and shaky. Hidden in the reeds with cold pasty hands. Mathis checked his pockets for a match and frowned.
Trees stood unstirred.
Still and gaunt and thin, like gray shell-shocked soldiers.
He came over the hunched slope of the land that drained into the sluggish river where Bill and Schaffer were talking and smoking. They had the body drug up on shore and wrapped in a wool blanket. Mathis could smell it all the way up on the crest of the hill. He came down and shook both of the mens' hands, rough and firm with work.
“How ye doing, Sheriff?” Shaffer asked.
“Alright, I guess. Dying in this godawful weather, though.”
Bill spat. “It's like the devil's decided all the sudden to set up shop here in town or something.”
“I sweat all night long, wake up, go to work, and the sheets are still soaking wet when I get home,” Shaffer said, laughing a little. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and offered it to Mathis.
Mathis lit up.
Bill's cheeks gusted like old, salty schooner sails as he smoked, his knuckles balled up and his thin, lacy hair standing ever so slightly off of his head like busy insect antennas. He was an old man. His breathing squeaked and ratcheted and bubbles of spit formed at the corners of his mouth. Spotted, yellow skin. Shaffer was the county deputy. A hard little man. Stretched, rawhide face with hollow cheeks and gritty lips. Folds of loose skin hanging floppy from his neck. Club-footed. His hobo-tool fingers always working. The simple industry of his hands.
Mathis looked at the body. “So what do we have?”
“Some poor bastard,” said Shaffer.
“Probably homeless. Couldn't find no driver's license or nothing,” said Bill. He squatted down on his haunches and peeled the blanket away from the corpse's face. His peach-pit eyes stared upwards. Soft skin rotting of his face, warped and sun-yellowed, like the pages of a wet book. A sick, soggy grin. Mathis nodded and pulled on the cigarette.
“Alright. Let's drag him up to my car and load him up. I don't recognize him. Probably a drifter. Any signs of foul play?”
“No. Not really. Looks like he just keeled over,” said Shaffer.
“Alright.”
Mathis picked him up by his ankles and Bill hooked his hands through his armpits. An anonymous, shifty breath of wind chaffed through the dry trees, unhinging leaves that fluttered ground-ward, whispering boneless secrets. The corpse was heavy. Bill waddled with the weight of the body at the level of his crotch, breathing heavy and sweat dripping off of his nose. Shaffer offered to switch. Bill swore at him and told that he could handle it, for God's sake.
They came up onto the road, Shaffer opened the backseat door of the patrol car and slid the body in. Bill's breath rattled like bones cast by fortune-tellers. In the distance, the heat grooved – a spangled, hip undulation of horizon and the laboring, slave-back of the road. “Gonna be a helluva stink in there, Sheriff.”
“I'll roll down the windows.”
“You'll get choked out by dust.”
“I'll drive so fast it won't catch up.”
Bill put his hands in his pocket and wiped away the rim of sweat and dirt on his face with a handkerchief. “I need to get home, Mathis. Mother will be setting the table about now.”
“Sure. Thanks for your help, Bill.”
“Luck finding whatever done this.”
“Thanks.”
Bill walked to his car, started it up, and drove onto the road, little spools of dust curling out from the wheel-wells and trailing up behind him. Shaffer kicked the ground and bit his lip.
“Lot of strange things happening lately, Sheriff.”
“Call me Mathis, Shaf. I've got a name.”
“Okay. You noticed that?”
“What?”
“The wild stuff happening in town.”
“You mean what happened with Mrs. Parris?”
“Yeah. Kinda gives me the creeps.”
“Doctor said that her brain was just firing off like crazy because of a stroke.”
“I dunno. Maybe. What about Mel's wife? And Jud's kid. Lots of dead bodies. The guy in the river...”
“Everyone's a little on edge, Shaf, just because of the heat and the lack of rain. Nothing out of the ordinary. People die sometimes.”
“I guess.”
“When it rains, things'll look less dreary.”
“I guess.”
“I better get this poor bastard down to the coroner's.”
“Okay.”
“See you, Shaf.”
“Alright. I guess I'll see you tomorrow, Sheriff.”
Mathis got into his car and turned the ignition. The body in the back rested with its hands on its stomach. Silent and fetid. His presence pressed up against Mathis like a girl sidled up against him in a drive-up movie. Tejano music belted out of the grainy speakers. The world looked bottled and canned through the dusty windshield, preserved. Mathis flicked his cigarette out his window, put the car in reverse, and drove onto the road back towards town.
Behind him, Shaffer twisted and shivered in the hot mirages, like an Old Crow chief dancing for rainfall.
The heat blushed.
[franklin]
The hole gaped red and naked, smelling of earth and slow decomposition. The two men with shovels had gotten it as deep as they could, but the ground held out against them, tough and raw, like the hands of a man who has worked a plow his entire life. The unforgiving lid of the land. Wizened and skinny, receiving the footsteps of men and women silently, allowing their toil against it, but sealed up like a stale, faceless crypt. A famine of soul. Pastor Franklin could feel the despair of the land under his feet. He could feel Mother Earth with her eyes shrunk up into her skull, black wells for sockets, her bony, sheer hands, and shaking slightly, trembling like a bitter old woman in a rockingchair, once beautiful maybe, but now a cheap parody of a timeless shame. He could feel the tired age. And it kind of scared him. It scared him to think that the world was winding down. A few last words. A couple more shuffling rotations around the sun, just for old time's sake, a softshoe dance performed by old lovers. Maybe it was just how it felt now. Things would get better. There were always the dry times, right alongside the good, bountiful times.
But what with Mrs. Parris and all...
Bland wooden crosses stood crookedly in the cemetery.
Pastor Franklin stood in his best suit at the foot of the freshly dug grave with his bible open in his hands. There was a small crowd gathered around the grave. Mrs. Parris rested in a rough-cut pinewood box, nailed shut and heavy, lying next to the grave.
“And so,” he continued, “we stand here deeply grieved and at a loss because of Edith's passing, but we also revel in the chance to strengthen ourselves before our Lord and Maker, God the Father. A chance to praise Jesus's name for the living among us and speak well of the dead and to pray in bitter supplication. That is what I propose we do in the wake of this solemn, unfortunate incident. Pray our hearts out. Pray for Mrs. Parris. Pray for her son in New York. Pray for rain. And pray that you yourself will have a long and fulfilling existence. And I say these things in God's name, amen.”
Amen.
“Does anyone have anything to add,” he asked. He looked up into the faces of the crowd. Dark and worried. Their mouths pulled tight and their hands gripping the brims of their hats tightly. A few children with chapped, flaky lips and squinty eyes. They stood around the grave, dirty and patched and limp, like a bunch of voodoo dolls.
Franklin looked down at the coffin. He could almost feel Mrs. Parris there with them. Her gray, coiled barbed wire hair. Her legs folded neatly. Her dainty hands and cruelly poisoned and papery. A strict hardness. When she was young, her words could work on a man. She could bend and twist his will like a strand of hair coiled around a finger. Her lips always dark. Juicy with a sinful contradiction. Yellow eyes always wide. Back straight. Fingers curled and fragile as snailshells. And smiling, smiling, smiling.
Living and dead, the woman had always made him a little sick.
He was secretly glad she was dead.
“No one?”
Robert Marsh stepped forward creakily. His face used and old, like something you might pick up in a thrift store, with a history of fingertips and spit shine. A humble, slow man. His hat scrunched up in his fists.
“Preacher,” he said. “I ain't got no good words to say for the dead. Don't have no bad ones neither. But I do have something for you to talk to us about.” He licked his lips. Franklin frowned. He'd known this was coming.
“What the hell was she talking about, Preacher? Was that some sort of spell? What the hell she mean by 'sinners have poisoned us all'?”
The crowd kind of shifted and a dry, antique wind charmed some murmurs of agreement. Franklin closed his bible. He looked off. He looked into the stonewashed blueness of the sky, the stitching of the wispy clouds. He licked his lips.
“Doctor Ross said it was a stroke. I believe him.”
“But, godssakes, Franklin, that was a vision if I've ever seen one! Straight from God!”
Someone else spoke, “Or straight out of hell.”
The crowd looked excited and terrified wordless at the same time, like kids watching cheap horror flicks in the dim of a theater.
“Neurons,” he said. “Just a bunch of random neurons making her talk like that.”
Robert Marsh was quiet for a moment, looking down.
And then he said, “No science holds a candle where the word of God is concerned.”
“And what if that wasn't the word of God? What am I saying? Of course it wasn't. God doesn't speak through tight old women.”
“What about reva-lay-shun?”
“God doesn't speak through old women,” Franklin repeated.
“He spoke through a bush, for God's sake!” someone said.
“Who are the sinners among us?” said another.
“And the heat. It all feels like a curse.”
“Dead children. Dead babies.”
“My mother had a stroke and she sure didn't jaw off like that!”
“It's punishment, isn't it, preacher?”
The crowd broke into yelling and squawking and waving their hands. Hot, fervent interjections. Their eyes crazed and wild, twidling like radio dials. They moved forward. Their lips peeling and supplicating. Their hands shoved forward, groping for understanding, for answers. Spooked like horses. Pastor Franklin closed his eyes and chewed on the insides of his cheeks. Then he nodded at the two gravediggers, leaning there on their shovels shirtless and oily, their faces long and vague.
“Bury her.”
They moved forward, picked up the coffin – grunting, their fingers scraping on the fresh, splintery pine – and dropped her into the shallow hole. The crowd was still feverish with questions and speculation. Their poor, upturned faces. Warped yellow, their mouths black and sucking like holes in space. Franklin turned his back and walked back toward the church, stepping among the penitent crosses and the humped earth.
Preacher!
Preacher, what's going on!
But he ignored them.
He was just as scared, but he ignored them.
Someone had to be level-headed.
There was a dexterity in the way the low wind played with the dry treebranches and the dead grass and the weary clothes of the funeral attendants, operating like the fingers of workers on an assembly line, screwing, nailing, creeping, sweeping, and whistling patternless, forgotten tunes.
The heat shoveled.
