[Phyllis is a UT graduate, presently getting her Masters degree in English at Austin PeayState University. She teaches creative writing at Nashville Tech.  "Tellico" has been accepted by a literary magazine called Zone 3.]

 The Loudon County Messenger ran a piece about Jill Moscone last week.   Fifteen years ago the seventeenth of May, Jill Moscone parked her red Mazda RX-7 in a weedy spot overlooking Tellico Lake, put a gun to her heart, and pulled the trigger.  You would think people might have let it go by now.   I was about to graduate from high school.  Jill Moscone would have finished her junior year if she had lived one more week.
 My dreams are troubled by death and dying at Tellico Lake.   I dream of Jill Moscone’s spirit hovering above the waters and of the bones of my ancestors that the waters cover.  I dream about the contaminated fish.  The lake has lived up to its name.  The Cherokee call it the Lake of Tears.

 Roger Beaumont brought me his newspaper.  “Hey, Danny, you need to see this piece on Jill Moscone,” he said, slapping the paper on the counter in front of me.  The Messenger is one of those weeklies that is so thin on real news, a fiddling contest makes the front page.  It’s big on advice from the agricultural extension agents, and wedding photos and fillers that remind readers to Go to church Sunday or Read a book!!   Roger was surprised I didn’t subscribe.  “It’s how I keep up with everybody from high school,” he said.  Like I give a shit about anybody from high school.  I drove away from Lenoir City after graduation and didn’t look back.  I didn’t come back until last year, except once, to bury my uncle.
 “Remember Susan Pope, Dale’s little sister?”  Roger dug in his wallet for his credit card to pay for gas and a couple of six packs of Bud Light.  “She married Lonnie B. Childress, the all-state quarterback.  Remember Lonnie B.?  He was a couple of years ahead of us.  Susan works for the paper now.  She did the retrospective on Jill Moscone.”   Roger is the kind of guy who can use a word like retrospective with a straight face.
 “Susan and Jill were friends,” he said.
 I was pretty sure they weren’t friends, but I didn’t offer an opinion.
 Roger started coming in the Texaco-Mart a few months ago.  It’s the Texaco-Mart at the Soddy-Daisy Exit.  I work evenings.  I live right down the road in a Red Carpet Inn that’s been converted to efficiency apartments.  Mine is an easy life, as it goes.  I can’t say it’s exciting, but excitement is not always what it’s cracked up to be.  I have traveled all across the country.  Leo, my uncle, always said my spirit was as restless as the air before a rainstorm.  I have been to Spokane, to the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast, up to Bar Harbor, Maine.  Coming back to East Tennessee seemed like a good thing to settle me down.   Though everything has changed in this part of the country, it’s still the land of my ancestors.  I find some comfort in that.  I have no ambitions to see the rest of the world, and the Texaco-Mart is as good as any place to work.
 Roger lives south of here, somewhere off of I-75.  I picture a big-ass house that backs up to a golf course, similar to Tellico Village.  Roger is a lawyer for TVA.  A couple of nights a week he stops in for gas and beer on his way home from Chattanooga.  He’s always recalling high school days like we’re old pals, like we were best buddies then, which is a big joke.  In those days Roger Beaumont wouldn’t have bothered to piss on me if I was on fire.
 In high school Roger was one of those soft-bellied, sloop-shouldered guys with thick glasses who dates girls that want to be librarians.   Somewhere along the way he starts working out with weights, ditches the glasses for contact lenses, and marries Old Money from Knoxville.   I saw his wife in the car once when he stopped for gas on a weekend.  You can’t pay for gas at the pumps here.  We’re not that high-tech.  So Roger was inside paying.  He made a point of telling me he and his wife – name of Bree - were on their way to a big party her parents were throwing up in Knoxville.  Lots of movers and shakers would be there.  Reminded me how he used to lick Mr. Moscone’s boots.  All I could see of Bree in the car was shoulder-length blonde hair.  She sure didn’t look like a librarian.  Seems Old Roger has done all right for himself.
 I didn’t know what to make of it when Roger said I should read the piece on Jill Moscone.  Later, I couldn’t find anything in the article that I needed to know.  Ex-sheriff McGinnis recalled the case, saying he never had any evidence of foul play, but people had to blame somebody for Jill Moscone’s death, so they directed their blame at him in the next election.  He laid out the facts again.  There was a suicide note in Jill’s neat, back-slanted handwriting.  Only one set of fingerprints was found on the weapon.  Then there was the clincher, the motive for suicide.  The ex-sheriff had no trouble believing that a nice girl like Jill Moscone would be desperate in her situation.
 Mrs. Moscone, who was interviewed by phone from Long Island, insisted she never had a clue that her daughter was pregnant until they heard from the autopsy.  She didn’t know of any boyfriend.  The note gave no explanations, just apologies for the pain she was causing her parents by taking her own life.  Mrs. Moscone still believes there was more to the case than a simple suicide.  “Not that you can ever call suicide simple,” she was quoted as saying.  “It’s very, very complicated.”   Mr. Moscone lives in Phoenix now.   Not long after they left Lenoir City, they divorced.   The article made a big deal out of the fact that the Smith & Wesson .357 was part of Mr. Moscone’s gun collection.  Mrs. Moscone never approved of guns.  She believes their daughter might be alive today if she hadn’t had such easy access to a handgun.  It does not seem odd to me that a mother would cling to that idea.
   Roger was still yammering about the article when I gave his Visa a swipe and pushed the credit card slip toward him.  He signed with a big scrawl.  “People still can’t figure who knocked her up,” he said, leaning forward, squinting at me, like he was trying to look through me.  “Y’know, Danny – “ he gave a laugh that was a half-snort – “I always thought it might be you.”
 I met his narrow eyes with a steely look of my own.  “Maybe it was you.”
 He scooped up his Visa and chuckled deep in his throat, like he was amused.  I don’t know what he found amusing about our conversation.  “So the mystery lover remains a mystery,” he said, as if he thought he’d made some profound statement, and he picked up his beer and left.

 The Moscones were from Long Island.  Mr. Moscone was a vice-president for a big real estate company.  After the dam was built and the reservoir filled, TVA sold off twenty-two thousand acres of prime lakefront property to developers.   Lots were going for as much as sixty thousand dollars, Leo said.  That was when Mr. Moscone came down to handle the project for his company.   There were plans for golf courses and even a yacht club.  You’d expect people like the Moscones to settle in a yuppie section of Knoxville, where they could rub noses with other new-money transplants from the Northeast and California, but they didn’t.   They came to Lenoir City and bought an old house that was once in Daniel Boone’s family.  Mrs. Moscone was some kind of history buff.  She set out to make the house a showplace.   Business was mushrooming for Mr. Moscone.   They didn’t notice their daughter was miserable.   Even now, from what I get out of the Messenger piece, Mrs. Moscone doesn’t realize her daughter was miserable from the start.
 Court battles over Tellico had been going on for years when Mr. Moscone moved his family to East Tennessee, but Jill had never heard of the Tellico Dam until she came to Lenoir City.  She had never heard of the snail darter.  Environmentalists fought to protect the three-inch fish that thrived in the Little Tennessee River.  The Cherokee fought to protect the ancient Cherokee burial grounds located in the valley of the Little Tennessee River.  More than three hundred families had been forced to sell their land when TVA claimed the valley.  Not all the families were Cherokee, but enough to weaken any fight with the government.  “Indians have always been fair game,” Leo said.  “Look at our history.  One broken promise after another.”
 My uncle Leo was always proud of his Cherokee blood, no matter that it was watered down through the generations.  The Dawsons are a mix of Cherokee, Scotch-Irish, and Celtic.  The farm that we lost to TVA had been in the Dawson family for a hundred years.
 Leo had the strong square jaw of the Cherokee and straight, raven-black hair that he wore in braids.  My mother’s skin was lighter, her bone structure more delicate, more like my Scotch-Irish grandmother, but her eyes were dark like Leo’s.  In photographs of her as a girl, her eyes were bright with fire.  That fire had gone out by the time I was born.  I am a Williams.  My eyes are blue-gray, after my father, but my face is shaped like Leo’s and my hair is also black.   I never wore braids.   I never saw that braids would get me anywhere.   My skin is the color of weak tea with a drop of milk in it.   Red man, white man, I can go either way, I can’t go either way.
 “Your father was the biggest WASP I ever knew,” Leo told me.  “He never forgave himself for marrying into Cherokee blood.”  My uncle had to tell me everything I know because I was only six years old when my mother washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with a quart of vodka.  Leo even had to tell me about my father, who took off when I was two months old.   “If James Williams ever shows his face to me again, I will put a bullet between his eyes,” Leo said in a dry, level voice.  I am content not knowing all the stories about my parents.
 By the time I met Jill Moscone, Leo and I lived in a shitty rental house on LeConte Street and he had lost all hope.  For Leo, a high point was the first of the month when his government check arrived in the mail.  He had even lost interest in hanging out at Pete One-Eye’s Bar & Grill, where Pete used to call me to come after my uncle and I’d drag him home, stinking drunk.   Finally, he was satisfied to drink and pass out at home.   That was how I found him the night Jill Moscone died.

 A troop of Boy Scouts was hiking around Tellico Lake on Saturday morning.   Some of the boys spotted the red Mazda RX-7 and charged toward it, even though the scoutmaster called to them to wait up.  One of the kids, now twenty-six years old, was interviewed for the Messenger article.   He was the first to peer in the car.  He had to see a shrink for a long time.
 By that afternoon the sheriff was asking anyone who had seen Jill Moscone on Friday night to come forward.  “Possible suicide,” they were calling it, but the big question was Why?  I was cleaning up in the kitchen, washing bad-smelling dishes from several days past, when I heard McGinnis on the local radio station.  Leo came padding in barefooted, droopy-eyed.  He’d been drinking ever since he woke up about eleven o’clock.  He opened the refrigerator and snapped another beer from its plastic ring.
 “Moscone.  Moscone,” he said, scratching his head with a ragged fingernail.  “Didn’t you work for those people last summer?”
 “We did some landscaping at their place,” I said.
 “Same thing.”
 “No, not the same thing.”  We’d had this conversation last summer.  Leo was morally opposed to any connection with the developer of Tellico Village.  I had needed the money and saw no reason to take a big moral stand when I was sent out to do landscaping at the Moscone place.
 “You know the girl?” he asked.
 “We were at the same school.  It’s not a big school.”
 Leo popped the top and took a long thirsty drink from the can.   I looked into the sudsy dishwater, felt him staring at my back.
 “You didn’t mess with her did you?” he said.
 I jammed a plate in the dish drainer.   “What do you mean by that, Leo?”  He grunted.   I turned around, glared at him.  “They’re saying it was suicide.”
 “Nothing wrong with my hearing.   I asked did you ever mess with her.  Didn’t a girl name of Jill call here for you?”
 I went back to my work, rubbing at dried oatmeal on a pan, the last of the dirty dishes.   “You got a good memory, Leo.  I might’ve had a call from her while I was working out at her place.   I don’t know.”
 His hot eyes kept boring into my back as I sprayed the dishes in the drainer.   “Maybe last summer, maybe another time, too, not so long ago,” he said.
 “You drink too much, Leo,” I said.  “You could keep things straight if you didn’t drink so much.”
  He came up behind me.  I could smell his unwashed body and beer on his breath.  His thick hand clapped my shoulder.  He said, “You’re a good boy, Danny.   You can have some kind of life if you don’t mess up.”
 It’s all we ever said about Jill Moscone.   I graduated and left town before the end of the month.   I took Leo’s old Chevy pickup.  I didn’t feel bad taking it because he was hardly ever sober and shouldn’t be driving.  The day I drove away from LeConte Street was the last time I saw my uncle alive.

 I couldn’t shake the dreams for a long time.  There is one dream that is not about the lake.  I’m riding in a white Redding pick-up, with the summer wind in my face, heading out to the Moscone place to put in their landscaping.  This is more like a documentary running through my mind than a dream.  Jamal is driving, telling dirty jokes and laughing he-he-he, jerking at the steering wheel because he’s veering into the gravel.   I’m laughing, too.  Jamal was a real comedian when he cut loose.  It may be the only time in my life I laughed big enough to show all my teeth.  My senior year is ahead of me but a good chunk of summer is left, and I have money to spend.   I’m thinking about Jill in her cutoffs and NYU tee shirt, with her hair pulled up on top of her head like Pebbles Flintstone.  In this dream I am not afraid.
 The white trucks had the landscape contractor’s name on the door:  Redding’s Lawn and Garden.  Each morning I reported to the garden center, brick-box house with a long greenhouse attached, surrounded by an acre of shrubs and trees.  Sprinklers sprayed a fine mist over the bedding plants, begonias and impatiens and pansies.  Stacks of fertilizer and mulch and potting soil and rows of clay pots lined the entrance to the garden center.   The overpowering smell was not of the flowers, but of wet, rotting earth.  I liked it.  The smell seeped into my dreams.
 A big, jolly woman named Trudy managed the garden center.  I answered to her husband, R.J., who was smaller than Trudy, a lightweight with a paunch.   Mornings, R.J. sent out the trucks.  I would ride with Buster or Jamal.   Buster was a skinny old man who didn’t mind watching me haul and spread mulch, dig holes, and carry dogwood saplings from the truck while he hung on the door of the cab, chain-smoking cigarettes he rolled by hand.  Jamal was a stout man with shiny-black skin and flashes of gold in his teeth, a full ten years older than me, husband and father, a full-time employee at Reddings, like Buster.  Unlike Buster, though, Jamal shared the work equally with me.  Jamal and I did the Moscone job, with some direction from R.J.   It’s strange that I never dreamed about any of the other landscaping projects that summer, just the Moscone job.  Digging and sweating and loving the smell of the soil, heaving bags of mulch from the truck, catching a glimpse of Jill hanging around the edges of our work, much as she hung around the edges of things at school.  Not knowing what to make of her, not knowing what to make of my heart thrumming, but sure that something was about to happen.   I wake up then to what is real, the stab of truth, the wash of sorrow that it’s all a dream, all over, all gone.

 Mrs. Moscone favored rhododendrons.  We delivered a truck full of the pink variety and used them to line the long cobblestone walk.  The first day she was in our faces.  Not bossy, she was polite, but everything had to be perfect.  In the Moscones’ world there was no margin of error.
 “Aren’t the holes too close together?   Won’t the bushes be crowded when they grow?”   No matter that R.J. told us thirty-six inches center to center.  Mrs. Moscone wore a green gardener’s apron over khaki pants and a striped knit shirt, with clean, white canvas shoes.   Her long pink nails and lipstick matched the stripes in her shirt.   “Shouldn’t you smooth out the soil?” she wanted to know, hovering like a painted hen.  I told her we built up the dirt a little around the plants so it would hold water.   Jamal gave me a sharp look.  I was supposed to mumble, “Yes ma’am” and do what she said.  Mrs. Moscone considered, tilted her head, then drew her lips into a pink razor slash and nodded.   “Go on with it then.”  She hovered less each day.  She spent more time at the tennis courts or the golf course, or she was dashing off to a luncheon engagement, dressed fit to meet the President.
 Jill hung back, darted glances at us from behind the pages of a paperback or from the Mazda RX-7, vrooming out of the driveway.   One day her car won’t start.  I say to Jamal maybe I can start it for her, but he tells me no, mind my own business, keep working.  We’re setting out monkey grass around the patio.  She looks fresh-scrubbed, hair flying loose, designer jeans and a tight top that shows she’s well-endowed.  Jill is not beautiful but her body has the well-tended look of the wealthy.  She slams the car door, slams the kitchen door.  No one else is home.  Mrs. Moscone is on the golf links.  I tell Jamal I should offer to help.  He says it’s none of our business.
 Twenty minutes later Roger Beaumont drives up in a Kelly green van with Tellico Village painted in white on the side.   Roger has a summer job with Mr. Moscone.  He steps down from the van, pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, glances at the red Mazda and then at Jamal and me.   “I’m supposed to drive Jill somewhere,” he says to us, maybe just to me.   We had Honors English together.   It’s not the first time I have heard the smug note in his voice.
 Jill comes out, flipping her hair, asking Roger, “Can you start my car?”
 Now it’s clear there is a glitch in communication.  Jill wants to drive herself to the mall.  She’s called her father to send out a mechanic and he’s sent a driver.  Roger is no mechanic.  He apologizes for the mix-up.  I can see there’s nothing between him and Jill, though he probably wanted me to think so.  He offers to drop her at the mall, come back for her, whatever.  He’s embarrassed but not rattled.  It’s not hard to believe he will be a lawyer someday.  Jill scrunches her face and shakes her head.  Probably she’s mad at her father but she’s not very nice to Old Roger.
 I stand up and wipe my hands on my jeans.  “You want me to take a look under the hood?” I say.  “If it’s something simple, maybe I can fix it.”
 Jamal is scowling at me.  Roger is scowling at me.  Jill lights up.
 Turns out it’s as simple as you can get, a loose battery cable.  I don’t mention all the times I’ve had to get Leo’s truck running.  Even with the sleek little Mazda, I feel at home with my head under the hood.  Just poke around, that’s what I’ve learned to do.
 The engine’s purring.  Jill flashes me a grateful smile from the driver’s seat.
 “Good job, Red Man,” Roger says.   “You learn that in Auto Shop?”
 “I never took Auto Shop,” I say.
 Roger raises his eyebrows, like I’m the only Indian that ever got through high school without taking Auto Shop.  “Guess it’s just in the blood.”
 Walk away, I tell myself.   Just walk.   I used to fight like a tiger and nobody put me down without getting a bloody nose for it, but Leo taught me I couldn’t win.  I might beat up the guy, but I couldn’t win.  I call on my will-power and walk away.  Roger is laughing.  I don’t look back, so I can’t tell what Jill is thinking.
 But she calls me that night.  She says, “Roger is an asshole, you know.”  I tell her I know it, and we start talking about ourselves, and the next thing I know we’re meeting at Tellico Lake every chance we get.

 Before that summer the only thing I knew about Jill Moscone was that she was a stuck-up Yankee rich bitch.   Maybe somebody said it or maybe I formed an opinion on my own, just seeing her around school.  By the end of the summer I knew she wasn’t like that.  We talked about things I’d never talked about with anybody.  In some ways we were a lot alike.  The difference was, I didn’t give a shit about being in anybody’s clique but it was killing her to be an outsider.   In a dreamy voice, she told about her old high school and her friends back there.  She remembered how it felt to belong.  I gave a snort and told her my family had been in East Tennessee for over a hundred years, and I still didn’t belong.  I was trying to be funny, but her face melted into a dark, sorrowful look.  She made a remark about loneliness.  Later, I  wished I could remember exactly what she said.  Something philosophical, but it was clear she was talking about herself, about the big hole in her own spirit.   I wasn’t lonely anymore, but she was.
 Jill believed she couldn’t break in because people connected her - indirectly - with the Tellico controversy.   The truth was, most of the kids at Lenoir City High School had not been removed from their farms.   Some of the locals actually benefited in the long run from the land development, which created jobs and boosted the economy in the area.   I didn’t get into that with Jill.   I didn’t tell her my gut feeling.   People looked at her and saw what I’d seen. Her clipped Long Island accent made her sound bitchy.  Southern ears were used to slow, sing-songy voices.  Moscone sounded like somebody from The Godfather.   Sometimes your heritage is against you and it has nothing to do with the person you are.  You know it but others don’t, and you just have to live with that.  I should have said it before we got in so deep with each other.   Why did it matter so much, anyway, what the white-breads thought?   What did it matter what anyone else in the world thought of us if we had each other?

 Tellico Lake was where we always met.  Jill and I knew all the secluded spots around the lake.  I drove Leo’s pick-up and left it some distance from where Jill parked.   We took no chances that we’d be discovered.  In the beginning the secrecy was exciting, but it grew tiresome.  Jill persuaded me that her parents would send her back to Long Island if they had a clue what we were doing.  She was barely seventeen.  “You don’t know how they are,” she said, with a crumpled face that was part sadness, part fear.   She was right, I didn’t know anything about up-tight parents.  I didn’t know much about parents.  Leo was no threat to us.  He was drunk by nine o’clock.  I knew that in a small town secrets are hard to keep.  If anyone at school found out about us, everyone in town would know by that evening.   I went along with the cloak-and-dagger bit because I couldn’t imagine my life without her in it now.  I told her I loved her, and she said it back.
 I could believe that Mr. Moscone would whisk her away to a boarding school if he was provoked.  Twice I had met the man during the week I worked at their place.  “Move that vehicle!” he said to Jamal, and Jamal hurried to move the Redding pick-up.  Mr. Moscone had an entourage scurrying along beside him, all wearing suits except Roger Beaumont, who wore a green golf shirt and khakis.   Sunlight glinted off the diamond setting in Mr. Moscone’s gold cuff links.  His name was Robert.  Bob Moscone.  I had to work at not thinking Don Corleone.
 I never considered anything beyond the old story, rich girl and poor boy, the cruel parents that keep them apart.  Ours was an old story all right, but another one.

 I took her clenched fists and kissed the tight fingers when she told me.  We were sitting on the hood of her car, the first warm breeze of spring sailing across Tellico Lake.  I said in a quiet, reasonable voice, “We can get married.”  She told me it was a sweet thing to say, but she didn’t give an answer.   She was worried about her parents.   I said we could go away.  In five weeks I would graduate, and we could go anywhere she wanted to go.  She shook her head as if she couldn’t bear the idea.  “Whatever you want,” I told her.   I reached for her but she drew away.  For a minute we sat there in silence.  My throat was tight, my mouth dry.  This might be the most important moment of my life and I didn’t know what to say.  Tears streaked her face.  Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail but loose strands stuck to her damp cheeks.
 “Don’t act like it’s the end of the world,” I said.
 She stared at me, her eyes wide and wet and panicky, and said, “It is the end of the world, Danny.  Don’t you see it?”  And then the words came gushing, mixed with sobs.  Didn’t I want to go to college? and her parents would hate her, hate her, hate her! and what kind of job was I thinking I could get without a college education?  “What are you thinking?” she cried, hitting at me with useless fists.  I grabbed her wrists and said it back to her, “What are you thinking?  You think I’ll never be somebody?  I’ll always be broke?  All of that can change.  I’ll change, I will.”  And then I felt the fight go out of her and she turned into a limp dishrag.  I folded my arms around her while she cried against my chest, and the words slipped out with the sobs:  “You can’t change your blood.”  Her hands covered her face and she was sorry, sorry, so sorry, but there it was.  She choked back her sobs, trying to say she didn’t mean it, didn’t mean it, but there it was.  The wind had picked up.  It whipped across Tellico Lake and  rustled through the new leaves around us.

 In the weeks to come we act like victims of war, defeated, scared, grasping for any thread of hope until we are sure it’s hopeless, and in the end all we can do is cling to each other.  Every night we meet at Tellico Lake.   We fall into each other’s arms and hold on, hold on, and then we stare into the lake as if an answer might appear on the dark ripples from the long-dead Cherokee or the fish struggling for life in water that each year measures lower in oxygen and minerals.   The Lake of Tears offers no promise.  Mrs. Moscone has made plans for her and Jill to spend the summer in Long Island.   Jill doesn’t resist the idea.  She says it will be better to “fix things” somewhere away from here.  The days are ticking off toward the end of school and we know what is inevitable.   We know what is insurmountable.  Not, in the end, her parents’ disapproval or an unwanted pregnancy or the disparity of rich and poor.   Being in love only makes everything worse.  What is going to come of us?  What can we do?  Nothing.  It’s the end of the world.  And that’s when Jill comes up with the answer.

 Roger Beaumont has been back in the Texaco-Mart twice since he left me the newspaper article.  Once I had a line waiting to pay so he didn’t mention it.  The next time he couldn’t wait to ask, “Did you read the piece about Jill Moscone?”
 “I looked it over.”  His expression was skeptical.  I said, “I’ve been sick.”
 “You don’t look well,” he said.  “You sure don’t.”  He tossed his Visa on the counter, and his expression changed.   He was studying me, but not for the state of my health.   “That story really stirred up memories.  Memories and questions.  People still wonder what the truth is,” he said.  We finished the transaction and he put his hands on the two six-packs but did not pick them up.   “You got any theories, Danny?”
I considered it, and then I told him,  “I think they’ve got all the facts they’re ever going to get.”  I pushed the credit card slip over to him, and as he signed I said,  “Don’t you think it’s sad about the fish dying in Tellico Lake?”

 I’m dreaming again.  Thanks to the retrospective on Jill Moscone, the dreams are back like an avalanche.  One keeps coming back.  It’s our last night together, but Jill says we can be together forever.   I have fortified myself with enough beer so I think it’s possible.   Leo says alcohol is the best anesthetic.  Jill is as calm as the lake, showing me the shiny blue-black gun.  She holds it up to the moonlight, turns it so it picks up a glint of moonbeam.  My heart speeds up.   I am feeling breathless.  I am so sorry for everything, I say, but she tells me no, don’t be sorry, we’ll be together now, and she cradles the gun to her breast with both hands.  Gently, like a baby.  I am not expecting the pop.  It’s just a pop.  Her eyes fix on mine for one last instant and then glaze over but do not close.   I start to cry.  I am hyperventilating.   I know it’s my turn and in a heartbeat we can be together.   The gun has slipped between us.  I start to pick it up.  In my dream, that’s where it goes haywire.  In my dream, I do.

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 “Like ‘is?”
 “No, not like that.  You’re just movin’ the dust around.  Like this.”
 The grocer snatched the feather duster from the boy’s hand and, gripping the plastic handle like a pen, swept it over the cans in short precise strokes.  The grey feathers wafted delicately over the small cylinders of potted meat, like some tattered bird preparing a nest.
 “You got to pull the dust off toward you.  Let it fall down to the floor.  Have a light touch with the little cans, or you’ll send ‘em flyin’.”
 “Ain’t ya thowin’ dust into y’own face?”  The boy wrinkled his pug nose as he asked this.
 The grocer stopped for a few seconds, expressionless.  Thinking.
 “You stand off to the side a bit.  Like so.”  He moved a half step to the right and continued the lesson.  “Always start with the top shelf and work your way down.  Know why?”
 “Huh?”  The boy was picking at a dirty scab on his left arm.  A droplet of blood rounded up at the edge of the abrasion.
 “Why do you start at the top and work down?”
 “Uh...”  This felt more like school than he thought it would.
 The older man took a slow patient breath and continued,  “because if you started at the bottom, you’d be pulling the dust right down onto the shelves you just dusted.  Get it?”  He made some demonstrative gesticulations with the duster then looked hopefully into the flat tan face of the boy.
 “Yeah.”
 “Now, what do you think you do when you finish dusting?”
 “Huh?”  He had licked a finger and was rubbing at the droplet, smearing pink over his freckled arm.
 “Don’t pick at that.  What do you do after you finish the dusting?”
 “Uh...”
 “Sweep.  Sweep the floor.  To get up all the dirt and such you dusted off.”  He searched the young face for some glimmer or spark.  None was forthcoming.  The boy was only twelve and this was just his second day.  Patience, patience, he repeated to himself.
 The bell dangling from the front door jangled briefly.  As it rang, chill dawn air rushed into the small market.  The grocer looked down at his watch.
 “You can set your watch by him.”
 “Huh?”
 “Mornin’ Ballard,”  the grocer called toward the front of the store.
 There was no answer, save for shuffling sounds from the far aisle.  The boy rose to his tiptoes and stretched to peer over the shelves.  He could just see the top of a ragged tan fedora periodically popping into view between the jars of pickles and ketchup.  Its stooped wearer made halting but steady progress through the store.
 “We better get on up to the register.  He don‘t take long,”  the grocer whispered.  The boy shrugged, turning his attention back to the fascinating scab as he slouched after the older man.
 Shortly, the customer appeared at the front of the store.  The grocer and the boy stood behind the long counter, one smiling with stiff propriety, the other gazing listlessly about.  The counter had a weathered strip down its center, the remnant of countless cans and packages slid toward impatient bags.  The customer swung a shopping basket up onto the counter.  He plucked a yellowed sheet of paper from the basket, scanned it briefly, then carefully folded it with one hand, and placed it into the chest pocket of his overalls.  He never looked up.  He began transferring each item from the shopping basket onto the counter with his right hand, methodically, as if in a prearranged order known only to him.  All the while, he maintained a tight grip on a small bundle in the crook of his left arm.
 “Little nip in the air this morning, eh?”  the proprietor asked jovially, chicken-pecking the adding machine with a single plump finger as he slid the items down the counter toward the boy.  Groceries and sundries began to accumulate.
 “You gonna sack them up for Mr. Ames?”  the grocer asked the boy while still facing the customer, the same broad smile pinned across his pink jowls.
 “Huh?”
 With a dramatic sigh and a semi-exasperated wink, he repeated,  “the groceries. Sack them for Mr. Ames here.  He doesn’t have all day.”
 Ballard Ames waited patiently, money in hand, head tilted sharply down.  His eyes were hidden from view by the dusty and grease-smeared brim of the weathered hat.  The boy slowly began placing the purchases into a crisp new paper bag, his former distraction now gradually replaced by a keening interest in the man’s bundle.  As he dropped packages absent-mindedly into the tote with no apparent method, he maintained a steady gaze upon the light brown sack under the man’s left arm.  The paper bag was heavily wrinkled, the size of a grapefruit.  He held it close, like a halfback would a football, as if protecting it.  The open end disappeared up in his armpit.
 “Twelve forty-seven,”  the grocer said.
 The man lay his money down on the counter;  a ten, two ones, a quarter, two dimes, and two pennys.  He pushed it across to the grocer.  The boy’s mouth, perpetually agape, widened.
 “How come he knew...?”  the boy began, but was abruptly shushed by the grocer.
 Ballard Ames leaned over, gathered up the groceries with his right arm, and moved towards the door with his twin burdens.
 “Get the door for Mr. Ames,”  the grocer said.  “We’ll see you next week, Ballard.”
 The boy hopped around the counter quickly now, his attention locked on the curious sack.  He grabbed the metal handle of the glass door and pushed it outward, setting the doorchimes to ringing loudly.  He stood in the morning chill, the door resting against his back, as the old man shuffled close by.
 “What ya’ got in that other sack?”  the boy asked furtively, in half-whisper.
 But Ballard Ames seemingly took no notice of the boy‘s query.  He continued his steady progress down the narrow road and out of sight over the rise.
 “What’s he got in that other sack?”  the boy asked the grocer, back inside the store.
 “None of our business.”
 “Ain’t you curious?”
 “All I’m curious ‘bout is how you can be so interested in a old sack and so disinterested in workin‘.”
 He handed the feather duster to the boy with officious ceremony.  The boy grinned. He bent down and began dusting the sacks of flour on the bottom shelf with wide back and forth sweeps, coughing through the white cloud he raised.  The grocer closed his eyes.  Patience, patience.

 The old man removed the items from the grocery sack and placed them on the dingy table in the corner of the sparse kitchen.  He carefully folded the emptied sack with his right hand and lay it under the sink.  He took the items from the table and put each away in turn.  The two cans of sardines and the jar of peanut butter into the cabinet.  Loaf of bread into a makeshift bread box.  The milk he poured down the sink, refilling the carton with water.  Bar of soap into the bathroom cabinet, on top of a stack of twenty or so identical bars.  All the while he hugged the bag tightly to his left side, working one-handed.

 “I bet he’s carryin’ his money in there.”
 “Who?”
 “That old guy.  It’s his money.  I know it.  That’s why he hugs it so tight.”
 “I don’t think so.”
 “Why ain’t it?”
 “Well, I’ve never seen him take any money out of it.  To pay with.”
 “He don’t want nobody to see how much he’s got in it.  That’s why he’s always got the money ready ahead a time.”  The boy, leaning heavily on the push broom, smiled proudly at his own deductions.
 “I swear, boy,”  the grocer said.
 “What?”
 “You’re gonna make a private eye.”
 “Reckon?”
 “Well, I don’t reckon you’re gonna make a grocer.  You’re bendin’ my broom.”
 The boy grinned and began sweeping aimlessly down the aisle, pushing little bits of dirt and dust up under the lower shelves.
 “Ain’t his money,”  a deep voice came from the back of the store.
 The grocer visibly started.  “I forgot you were in here, Possum.  Like to scared me to death.”
 “Why ain’t it his money,”  the boy demanded, pausing in his labors to lean against the handle again.
 “On account of he ain’t got none.”
 “How’d you know?”
 “He just ain’t.  Collection people got it ever bit.”
 “That’s right, that’s right.  When his wife died a few years ago,”  the grocer joined in.  “She was only sick a few weeks before she passed, but she run up a terrible bill just the same.”
 “County hospital.  They run near ever test in the book on her, I heared,”  Possum said, lumbering around the corner and appearing at the end of the aisle.  He was a large man in a dirty blue work shirt, ‘Possum’ stitched over the left breast pocket.   “Treated her like a spearmint or something.”
 “A labatory rat,”  the boy said.
 “Yep.  One day, and it wadn’t more’n a month after she died, this feller in a suit come ‘round the garage asking after Ballard.  Well, I give him the run-around, but he finds his way out there eventually.”  He fixed the boy with a serious stare.  “They always find ye.”
 The grocer took up the story.  “But Ballard didn’t have any money to amount to anything.  Poor farmer all his life.  Hand to mouth.  So a few days later the collection man comes back with a big truck and the law and cleans out everything in the house, which wasn’t much.  Took everything but the Bible.”
 “Took that, too.  Then, on the way out of town, they stopped off at the bank and pullt out the little dab he had in there, which warn’t much neither,”  Possum searched around for a place to spit and, not finding one, walked past the boy to the front door.  He leaned out and spewed a stream of viscous brown juice onto the street.
 “Can they do that?”
 “If ya’ owe somebody money,”  Possum said, wiping a thick forearm across his mouth as the door rang shut,  “they can do ’bout anything.”

 Ballard fell heavily into the single chair beside the kitchen table to a warning chorus of creaks and groans.  He had found the chair beside the road a year earlier, left for junk.  After dragging it back to the house, he wound it with twine to make it just barely useable.  He pulled his right elbow up onto the table, cradled his head in his hand.  He was weary from the long walk to and from the store.  Every week the trip got a little bit harder, the sacks a little bit heavier.  But Monday was store day.  Always had been.  Head still bent, he slid the list from the pocket of his grimy overalls, unfolded it.  The cursive pencil script was smeared, the paper water-damaged from more than one unexpected rainstorm.  Most of the words were no longer legible, or rather illegible to anyone but Ballard.  He ran his trembling right hand over the surface of the page.  He closed his eyes.  Suddenly the sack felt as if it held an anvil and he hefted it up onto the table, leaning close to keep it in contact with his side.  Goddamn this son of a bitch, he thought.

 “If you just slop it around side to side, you can’t generate any strength.  Push it out then pull it back.  Put your back into it.”  The grocer demonstrated with the mop.   The boy stood just behind the man’s pistoning shoulder, looking up toward the ceiling, not blankly but with eyes thoughtfully narrowed.
 “He ain’t paying you no mind a tall,”  Possum chuckled from where he leaned against the counter, nursing a quart of buttermilk.
 The grocer sighed heavily, looking heavenward,  “Boy, you need to...”
 “If it ain’t money, what’s in it?”
 “What’s in what?”  asked Vada Hawkins, making her way down the aisle with a half-full basket.
 “Be careful of the wet floor, Miss Vada,”  the grocer cautioned.  He gestured to his left,  “walk around this way.”
 “Ballard Ames’ sack,”  Possum answered before the boy could,  “this boy here’s determined to solve the big mystery.”
 “It’s no mystery,”  she said knowingly.
 “You know what’s in it?”  the boy asked, eagerly.
 “Of course.”
 Miss Vada took a can of tuna from the shelf and examined it closely.  “I don’t like this packed-in-water tuna.  Don’t taste near as good.”
 “We’ve got the tuna in oil, too.  Right there,”  the grocer pointed to the shelf below.
 “Seems to me you’d put it right beside.”
 “I did have ‘em next to each other, but folks kept picking up the wrong one by accident, so...”
 “Hey,” the boy cut in, urgency in his voice,  “the sack!”
 “You ought not talk to Miss Vada that way,”  the grocer scolded.
 “Well aren’t you an inquisitive little boy,”  Miss Vada said.
 “He’s ‘bout to pop,”  Possum said.
 “Who’s boy are you,”  she asked.
 “My sister Karen’s boy,”  the grocer said.  “You know Karen and Roy, don’t you?  They want him to learn some responsibility.  But he‘s right resistant to it.”
 The exasperated boy didn’t hear a word.  “I just want to know what’s in that sack.”
 Miss Vada fixed him with a wry expression.  “Well I’ll tell you, since you want to know so bad.”
 The boy leaned in, unblinking.  Possum gathered himself up and peered over the shelf.  The grocer propped his arm on the mop and waited.
 The old woman moved close to the boy‘s eager face.  He could see the fine lines of lipstick radiating from her heavily painted upper lip, the myriad tiny cracks in the drywall of her make-up.  She whispered,  “It’s a sack of gold he found at the end of a rainbow.  He holds it so tight so the leprechauns cain’t take it back.”
 The boy’s face went blank for a moment then squinched up into an exaggerated, child-like frown.  Possum howled.
 “Oh.  Oh.  You shoulda seen yore face,”  he could barely talk from laughing.  A thin rivulet of buttermilk trickled from one nostril.  “You was all set for some big news.”
 Miss Vada continued down the aisle, placing items in the basket with a self-satisfied smile.
 “Let’s see how you mop, now,”  the grocer said, softly patting the fuming boy on the back and passing him the handle.

 His head nodded forward once, twice.  Eyelids glided over muddied globes in reptilian ponder.  He leaned forward to the table, awkwardly positioning the bundle, his right forearm a gristled pillow.  Viewed from behind, he would resemble a dysmorphic siamese twin at rest.  As he progressed into deeper levels of slumber, the left hand slipped from around the sack to the tabletop.  He called a name.  Mildred.  He stirred.  The left hand fell from the table to his side, dangling.  Mildred.  He stirred again and the sack rolled a quarter turn to the edge of the table.  Deep in reverie, he adjusted his head on it’s uncomfortable prop, occiput nudging the sack.  It rolled off the table-edge.  The sack pulled violently at his side as it fell and he jerked awake to blinding white pain.  By God.  He fumbled with both hands to gain control of the bag, kicking over the chair as he lurched to his feet.  He managed to get his arm back around it and pulled it up under his arm, cradling the sack protectively like a baby.  He stood several minutes in the middle of the floor, gulping deep lungfuls of air and grimacing through the lingering pain.  His eyes were moist with tears.  Thought ye had me, didn’t ye?

 The next Monday found the boy peering expectantly out the window of the grocery.
 “Where’d you get to?”  the grocer called from the far aisle.
 “M’up here.”
 “Get back over here.  We aren’t through.”
 “But...”
 “He’s not due for ten more minutes.  Come on.”
 The boy backed reluctantly away from the door, still craning to see up the road.  He sidled over to where his uncle waited patiently.
 “I don’t want you botherin’ him when he does come in, now.”
 “I won’t mess with ‘im.”
 “I don’t want you even talkin’ to him.”
 “Uhnn,”  the boy grunted in protest.  The grocer regarded him witheringly until the boy shrugged in acquiescence.  The morning’s lesson continued.
 “Remember what I told you about rotating the stock?”
 “Yeah.”
 “And what‘s that?”
 “Old in back, new in front.”
 “No,”  the grocer said with calm restraint,  “No.  New stock goes behind... so we can sell all the older items first.”
 “That’s what I meant.  Hey.”
 “What?”
 “Does everybody do it like that?”
 “Everybody that knows what they’re doing.”
 “So, when you go into some other store somewhere, say, on a trip... do you always pull yer stuff outta the back?”
 “I don’t see what...”
 “So’s you get the new stuff.”
 The grocer paused several moments, compulsively smoothing the front of his crisp white apron..  Thinking.
 “No.  No, that’s not right.  You take the first item on the shelf.”
 “I’m reaching in back from now on.”
 They were interrupted by the ringing bell from the front of the store.  The boy spun abruptly and hurried toward the check-out counter.  Rounding the end of the aisle, he came face to face with the merry countenance of Possum, smiling broadly.  Like his namesake.
 “You shore look proud to see me.”
 “What you doin’ here so early, Possum?”  the boy demanded irritably.
 “I come to see you crack the case.”
 “I don’t want y’all botherin’ my customers.  You hear,”  the grocer called out again, raising his voice this time.
 “Aw, we won’t do no botherin’.  Jest figurin’,”  Possum replied, with a wink to the boy.
 “I see ‘im comin’!”  the boy said.  Possum and the boy leaned up to the window and squinted down the road in the morning glare, the wiry lad overshadowed by the hulking figure of the man.  They could barely discern a wraith through the morning mist, making slow progress their way.
 By the time the old man shambled haltingly through the jangling door, the boy was standing at attention behind the counter, stiffly erect, his hands fidgeting in and out of his pockets.  His eyes roamed over the store and ceiling, everywhere but on the sack, then fixating upon it, never strayed.  Possum leaned on the edge of the counter in a deliberate and composed stance of casual disregard.  The grocer walked to the front and surveyed the scene, shaking his head and emitting clucks of dismay.
 “Mornin’ Ballard,”  he said.
 “Mornin’ Mr. Ballard,”  the boy echoed.  Both Possum and the grocer shot him a surprised glance.
 The old man continued in his well-worn path, the salutations unacknowledged, possibly unheard.
 Possum stretched over to whisper to the boy,  “It’s bigger’n last time, by a fur piece.”
 “It’s big as a... as a...”  the boy searched for a size analogy.
 “A volleyball,”  the grocer said quietly.
 “A honeydew,”  Possum said, still at a whisper.  “Let’s keep it with food.”
 “He’s fallen off some,”  the grocer added gravely.
 “You reckon he’s sick?”  the boy asked.
 “Could be.”
 “Maybe it’s medicine.  In the sack.”
 “If it is, it ain’t workin’,”  Possum said.
 Soon enough, Ballard was back at the counter, repeating the ritual from the previous Monday in precise detail.  The boy and Possum eyed the sack hypnotically.  The grocer bagged the purchases himself, despairing of any possibility of gaining the boy’s attention.  As the old man pushed his money across the counter, the boy’s brow furrowed in intense concentration and he tilted his head sharply to the right.  As he did this he bent his knees slightly, searching for a vantage point from which to view something about the sack more clearly.
 “Yore sack’s slick on the bottom.  Wet with somethin’,”  the boy said slowly, from his sidewise vantage.  A single drop of dark liquid hung precipitously from the rounded underside of the bag, surrounded by a dark stain, this in turn encircled by the now tremulous left arm.  The old man looked up blankly at the boy from eyes buried deep within cavernous sockets, twin tunnels guarded by an unruly picket of brow.  The old man’s gaze was not menacing.  Not angry.  The boy’s eyes widened under the unexpected scrutiny.  He slowly raised his head back to vertical.  All was quiet for a full minute, save for the hum of the refrigerated boxes.
 “Ballard.  You need a... paper towel... or something...”  the grocer fumbled for the roll of towels.  The words seemed to snatch the old man back from his fog, and he made for the door in a painful mockery of haste.
 “Don’t ferget yer groceries,”  the boy called after, holding the bag out over the counter to the old man.
 He paused at the door, took two stumbling steps backward and, reaching across his body with his right arm, took the proffered sack from the young boy.  Again his eyes met those of the boy, this time but briefly, for the boy looked quickly away.
 “We‘ll see you next week, Ballard,”  the grocer added, after the door had closed.
 The three of them were quiet for some time.  Possum’s eyes were fixed upon a spot on the floor, between the counter and the door.
 “That drop fell off.  Right there,”  he indicated the small round spot with a squat finger and black-rimmed nail.  They came around the counter, all three, and bent over the place on the concrete floor.  The boy stretched out his finger toward the spot.
 “Don’t touch it,”  the grocer cautioned.  He took a paper towel from the roll he still held in his right hand, and dabbed at the drop.  He held the towel before them.
 “Red,”  the grocer said.
 “Blood,”  the boy whispered, stepping back.
 “Shit,”  said Possum.

 He stopped on the way home, sitting for a spell on the broad stump of a long ago felled poplar.  Unburdening himself of the grocery bag, he felt under the sack, the oily slickness spreading over the bottom.  He held his reddened hand before him, grimaced.  The reverberating throb in his left side peaked to crescendos, like some terrible church bell ringing in the sack.  The pain, the ringing, started a week ago.  Just after the sack had fallen from the table.  Or jumped.   After an hour or more on the stump, he roused himself and continued on his way.  As he disappeared into the hazy distance, the sack of groceries stood a lonely watch over the crimson pool, companioned only by hungry vermin.

 “What’d you say happened to his wife?”  the boy asked later that morning.
 “Died.”
 “I know she died.  How?”
 “Cancer.  Et her up quicker‘n any ever I saw.”  Possum reclined at the edge of the cold drink box as the boy made a show of moving cartons of bottles around.
 “Yeah?”
 “One day she’s doin’ good as ever, feelin’ fine.  Then she gets old Ballard to take her in to Doctor Wheat.  Fer a check up.  Routine.”
 “Wadn’t nothin’ matter with her?”
 “Nope.  Well, ‘fore you know it, old Wheat’s got her up at the County Hospital. Starts to runnin’ all manner of tests.  Says she‘s full of cancer.”
 “But she felt fine,”  the boy said incredulously.
 “Did.  They give her all them cancer poisons and X-ray treatments.  Didn’t feel fine then.”
 The grocer listening quietly from the front counter, cut in,  “They did the best they could for that poor woman.  Best they could.”
 “If that’s the best, I’d hate to see ’em do their worst,”  Possum said, then added, turning to the boy,  “Don’t you never go to no doctor less’n you’re terrible sick.  ’Cause you can damn well bet theys gonna find something wrong, one way or the other.”
 “Same advice applies to auto mechanics,”  the grocer said with a wink to the boy.  Possum smiled broadly.
 “I bet I know what’s in the sack,”  the boy declared suddenly.
 “What?”  Possum asked.
 The boy looked from Possum’s moon face to his uncle’s genial countenance.  He lowered his voice,  “Her heart.”  There was silence.  Then Possum began chuckling softly.
 “What?”  the boy said, sounding hurt.
 “It’d be all dried up by now, boy,”  he managed between sniggers,  “It wouldn’t still be bleeding in that sack.”
 But the boy didn’t seem to hear, and wandered off toward the back muttering to himself,  “It’s her heart.  That’s why he holds it right up next to his’n.”
 “And that don’t explain it growing,”  Possum hollered after him.

 By the time he realized he had forgotten the grocery sack, he had been too tired to go back.  After resting on the table for another hour, for two, he willed himself back out of the shack.  Through the small yard overgrown with all manner of weeds and down the curving dirt path flanked by leaning hills lush with vegetation.   Flies whined past his ears.  He pressed on.  He waved his free hand to shoo the swarming insects.  He quickened his pace, imperceptibly.  They pursued him for his burden, he knew.  When he came to the stump, the sack was in tatters, its contents spread over the grass.  Some foraging creature had beat him there.  A roiling cloud buzzed over the stain on the stump, communed with the insects attending his sack.
 By Thursday, there was no food left in the house.  He rummaged through the deserted cabinets.  Even the mice had moved on to more favorable tenancy.
 Thursday was not store day.

 “Looks like it’s settin’ in,”  Possum complained loudly as he sloshed into the dim grocery.  He wiped his wet boots on the welcome rug and tossed the soaked newspaper umbrella into the trash.
 “Ain’t nothin’ worse’n starting the week off on a bad foot,”  he added, running both hands through his long rain-slicked hair.
 “Well, the farmers been needing this,”  the grocer said.
 “That’s whut ever’body always says.”
 The boy, having heard the conversation, walked to the front.  The feather duster was still in his hand.  He wore a neat white apron now, like his uncle.
 “Hey, Possum.”
 “Hey, squirt.  Ain‘t you a sight.”
 “’sbout time for ’im.”
 “Yep,”  he replied and they both looked up at the Red Man clock behind the counter.
 “Wuz he always so quiet?”  the boy asked his uncle.
 “Quiet?  He used to talk up a blue streak.  He’d set up on the counter here and go on for a hour or more.  Every Monday morning.”
 “I ‘member that,”  Possum said.
 “Did he always get the ‘xact same groceries back then?  From the list?”
 “She’d make out a list for him every week, with what she needed him to get,”  the grocer said,  “but it varied week to week.”
 “Wonder how big that sack’ll be this time?”  Possum wondered aloud.  “...bet it’s big as a watermelon.”
 “Hey.  It’s past time,”  the boy said, and they all looked back up at the clock.  It was past the appointed time.
 “Hmmm,”  the grocer said thoughtfully.
 “Whut?”  the boy asked.
 “Ballard’s never been late that I can recall.”
 “He prob’ly ain’t never toted a watermelon in a flood, neither,”  Possum added, peering hopefully out the front door, beside the boy.
 “It ain’t no watermelon,”  the boy said.
 “Could be.  You don’t know.”
 “You don’t neither.”
 “You two stop that foolishness,”  the grocer cut in,  “let’s get back to work.  He’ll be along soon enough.”
 The boy backed reluctantly away from the door, all the while straining to see through the downpour.  Possum sidled over to the counter and assumed his customary position of repose.  The boy resumed his dusting, this time near the front of the store, always at the end of a row facing the front door.  He only half attended to his chore.  Less than half.  The grocer regarded him for a time, then went off toward the back shaking his head.  After a few minutes, Possum squeaked over to the dairy box and returned to his post with a quart of buttermilk.
 “Reckon he’s comin’?”  the boy asked.
 “Cain’t say.”
 They continued their vigil.  Few customers came, owing to the deluge.  In time, the boy’s leaden dusting slowed further, until finally the feathers rested heavily upon the cans and he stood staring into the haze.
 “Well, you aren‘t doing much good that way,”  the grocer observed.  But neither Possum nor the boy responded, intent as they were at their watch.
 “Some’s wrong,” the boy said darkly.
 “Sure is,”  Possum added with a mouth full of Eat-A-Snacks.
 The grocer pondered this a while, looked back up at the clock.  It was now an hour past the expected time.  He frowned.
 “Somebody oughta check on him,”  the boy said.
 “We oughta,”  Possum added.
 “Well git, then,”  the grocer said, and they were out the door before ‘then’ was out of his mouth.
 They climbed into Possum’s battered truck, already soaked from the short dash in the rain.  The suspect vehicle seemed as eager as they to go, as it started on just the second crank.  On the way out of town they took no notice of the stained stump and the unrecognizable grocery remains.  The road turned to mud as it snaked into the hills, writhing beneath Possum’s oversized tires.  Once he nearly got sideways on a turn, but managed to bring the vehicle around.  The boy seemed not to notice this near-calamity, squinting through the fat drops of water and the violently waving wipers.
 “How fer is it?”  the boy asked after fifteen minutes of driving.
 “Right up here,”  Possum gestured with his left hand.
 “I didn’t know he had to come so fer.”
 The road narrowed to little more than a path.  Possum braked hard, sliding to a stop in the slick mud.  They stepped out and immediately sunk up to their ankles in the red clay.  The boy still wore the apron.  The tires were caked.  They made their way up the path, a quarter mile farther.  It opened on a clearing thick with weeds through which the path was barely visible.  The little house crouched miserably before them, water sheeting off it’s tin roof.  The windows were uncurtained, the exterior completely unadorned.  Possum knocked.
 “Ballard.  You in there?”

 From behind it looked like two heads side by side on the table.   The sack was bigger now, but flatter as well, and it lay in a puddle of purple coagulum that had seeped around the man’s facial features, like murky water about a jagged lakeshore.  The downside eye was obscured in the bracken, the upside eye half open facing the sack, defiant.  An edge of paper jutted up from the pool, faded script barely discernible.  He’s dead, the boy said.  You gonna look in the sack, the other asked.  Hell, no I ain’t, the boy said.

 “Hey, Ray.”
 “What?”
 “Wanna see somethin’?”
 “What?”
 The scrawny man in pale green scrubs guided the identically dressed, younger man over to a shrouded gurney in the chill metal room deep in the basement of the county hospital.  With a flourish, he pulled back the sheet.  The young man shrank back as if struck.
 “Shit.”
 “You ever seen anythin’ like that?”
 “Damn things big as a...”
 “Football.  Or bigger.”
 “Wonder why didn’t he see somebody, get it cut off?  How could he...”
 “Stay on here, you‘ll see worse’n this.”
 “Worse’n this?”  the younger man asked incredulously, eyes still fixed on the huge fleshy mass under the corpse’s left arm.
 “Well, not no worse. But nearly as bad.”
 “I cain’t understand why somebody’d let somethin’ get so bad ‘fore gettin’ help.”
 “They ain’t no understandin’ why.”

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