Aligned so and staring at the uncaring sky they are beyond any commiseration you might have for them and you’d be hard put to come up with a sin they might have committed enormous enough to have brought them to so shoddy an end.

The fat man in faded Duck Heads shuffled his feet awkwardly. Behind him the malign sun had burned away the last of the morning mist and the falsefront stores and tacky houses assembled themselves almost apologetically, dimensionless and makeshift props for the darker tableau that has playedbeyond the curtain.

There are some sorry son of a bitches in this world, the fat man said inadequately.

I believe about half of em are runnin wild in the Harrikin, Sandy said.

Who’s runnin wild? Who done this mess, anyway?

God knows. Or more likely the devil. Old man Bookbinder got jumped by Granville Sutter and faced him down with a horse pistol. There’s a Tyler boy lost in there wanderin around with a rifle and some story about a dead sister and Fenton Breece misburyin dead folks. Turned up at my house two or three o’clock in the morning half out of his head. Said we might ought to open some graves. I ain’t much for graverobbin but after this I’d believe most anything.

Well, I’ll be goddamned, the fat man said suddenly. I never noticed that. He pointed. A bloody mound of curly hair. A dog in there.

He brought out a taffycolored dog. Some breed of terrier. The dog’s eyes were open and its distended tongue as purple as a chow’s. Strangest of all, the dog’s ears had been pierced and it wore a gaudy pair of dimestore earrings.

Well, I’ll be damned. I don’t believe I ever seen a dog wearin earbobs.

Reckon why whoever it was killed the dog anyway?

I’ve thought about that some, Sandy said. I believe it was just all there was left to kill.



They came up through the stand of cypress that shrouded the graveyard, the pickup hidden off the road in a chertpit clottedwith inkblot bowers of honeysuckle. There were two of them, a young woman and a gangling youth who appeared to be younger still. A leaden rain out of the first slow days of winter had begun some time after midnight and the cypresses wept as they passed beneath them, the tools the pair slung along in their hands refracting away such light as there was and the pair pausing momentarily when the first milkwhite stones rose bleakly out of the dark. Behind and below them the church loomed, a pale outraged shape, no more, and only the impotent dead kept its watch.

The girl moved ahead amongst the gravestones with a sense of purpose but the boy hung back as if he’d had second thoughts or had other places to be. She turned a flashlight on and off again immediately though in truth she hadn’t needed it.

Here, she said. This one here.

Yeah, the boy said. Rain ran out of his hair and down his face. His clothing was already soaked and you could hear the water in his boots as he walked. This is crazy as shit, he said.

This seemed so selfevident she didn’t even reply. He drove the spade into the earth mounded atop the grave and leaning his weight into the work began to remound the earth in a pile next the grave. She seated herself on a gravestone and crossing her legs at the ankles and shielding her lighter from the rain with her body lit a cigarette and smoked and watched this curious midnight shift at work. A car passed once below them snaking the curves, the lit cypresses rearing out of the windy rain and subsiding and there was a fragment of girl’s laughter and a flung bottle broke on macadam. Gone in a roar of gutted mufflers and dark fell final and absolute and she could hear his breathing and the steady implacable work of thespade. She was on her third cigarette when metal scraped on metal and when it did, something she couldn’t put a name to twisted in her like a knife.

The scraping ceased.