Good idea, 0 Great Swami Louis. . . and in the meantime, what do I do about that great big bundle of stuff 1 threw over the wall?
Pick, shovel, flashlight . . . you might as well stamp GRAVE-ROBBING EQUIPMENT on every damn piece of it.
It landed in the bushes. Who’s going to find it, for Chrissake?
On measure that made sense. But this was no sensible errand he was on, and his heart told him quietly and absolutely that he couldn’t come back tomorrow. If he didn’t do it tonight, he would never do it. He would never be able to screw himself up to this crazy pitch again. This was the moment, the only time for it he was ever going to have.
There were fewer houses up this way—an occasional square of yellow light gleamed on the other side of the street, and once he saw the gray-blue flicker of a black-and-white TV—and looking through the fence he saw that the graves were older here, more rounded, sometimes leaning forward or backward with the freezes and thaws of many seasons. There was another stop sign up ahead, and another right turn would put him on a street roughly parallel to Mason Street, where he had begun. And when he got back to the beginning, what did he do? Collect two hundred dollars and go around again? Admit defeat?
Car headlights turned down the street. Louis stepped behind another tree, waiting for it to pass. This car was moving very slowly, and after a moment a white spotlight stabbed out from the passenger side and ran flickering along the wrought-iron fence. His heart squeezed painfully in his chest. It was a police car, checking the cemetery.
He pressed himself tight against the tree, the rough bark against his cheek, hoping madly that it was big enough to shield him. The spotlight ran toward him. Louis put his head down, trying to shield the white blur of his face. The spotlight reached the tree, disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared on Louis’s right.
He slipped around the tree a little. He had a momentary glimpse of the dark bubbles on the cruiser’s roof. He waited for the taillights to flare a brighter red, for the doors to open, for the spotlight to suddenly turn back on its ball joint, hunting for him like a big
white finger. Hey, you! You behind that tree! Come on out where we can see you, and we want to see both hands empty! Come out NOW!
The police car kept on going. It reached the corner, signaled with sedate propriety, and turned left. Louis collapsed back against the tree, breathing fast, his mouth sour and dry. He supposed they would cruise past his parked Honda, but that didn’t really matter.
Parking from 6 P.M. to 7 A.M. was legal on Mason Street. There were plenty of other cars parked along it. Their owners would belong to the scattering of apartment buildings on the other side of the street.
Louis found himself glancing up at the tree he had hidden behind.
Just above his head, the tree forked. He supposed he could—
Without allowing himself to think about it further, he reached into the fork and pulled himself up, scrambling with his tennis shoes for purchase, sending a little shower of bark down to the sidewalk. He got a knee up and a moment later he had one foot planted solidly in the crotch of the elm. If the police car should happen to come back, their spotlight would find an extremely peculiar bird in this tree.
He ought to move quickly.
He pulled himself up onto a higher branch, one which overhung the very top of the fence. He felt absurdly like the twelve-year-old he supposed he had once been. The tree was not still; it rocked easily, almost soothingly, in the steady wind. Its leaves rustled and murmured. Louis assessed the situation and then, before he could get cold feet, he dropped off into space, holding on to the branch with his hands laced together over it. The branch was perhaps a little thicker than a brawny man’s forearm.
With his sneakers dangling about eight feet over the sidewalk, he pulled himself hand for hand toward the fence. The branch dipped but showed no sign of breaking. He was faintly aware of his shadow following along on the cement sidewalk below him, an
amorphous black ape-shape. The wind chilled his hot armpits, and he found himself shivering in spite of the sweat running down his face and neck. The branch dipped and swayed with his movements.
The farther out he moved, the more pronounced the dip became.
His hands and wrists were getting tired now, and he was afraid that his sweat-greasy palms might slip.
He reached the fence. His tennis shoes dangled perhaps a foot below the arrow tips. The tips did not look blunt at all from this angle. They looked very sharp. Sharp or not, he suddenly realized it was not just his balls that were at risk here. If he fell and hit one of those things dead on, his weight would be enough to drive it all the way up into his lungs. The returning cops would find an early and extremely grisly Halloween decoration on the Pleasant-view fence.
Breathing fast, not quite gasping, he groped for the fence points with his feet, needing a moment’s rest. For a moment he hung there, his feet moving in an air dance, searching but not finding.
Light touched him and grew.
Oh Christ, that’s a car, there’s a car coming—!
He tried to shuffle his hands forward, but his palms slipped. His interlaced fingers were coming apart.
Still groping for purchase, he turned his head to the left, looking under his straining arm. It was a car, but it shot through the intersection up the street without slowing. Lucky. If it had— His hands slipped again. He felt bark sift down onto his hair. One foot found purchase, but now his other pants leg had caught on one of the arrow points. And Christ, he wasn’t going to be able to hang on much longer. Desperately, Louis jerked his leg. The branch dipped.
His hands slipped again. There was a mutter of tearing cloth, and then he was standing on two of the arrow points. They dug into the
soles of his tennis shoes, and the pressure quickly became painful, but Louis stood on them any-
way. The relief in his hands and arms was greater than the pain in his feet.
What a figure I must cut, Louis thought with dim and dismal amusement. Holding the branch with his left hand, he wiped his right hand across his jacket. Then he wiped off the left while he held with the right.
He stood on the points for a moment longer and then slipped his hands forward along the branch. It was slim enough for him to be able to lace his fingers together comfortably now. He swung forward like Tarzan, feet leaving the arrow points. The branch dipped alarmingly, and he heard an ominous cracking sound. He let go, dropping on faith.
He landed badly. One knee thudded against a gravestone, sending a lance of pain up his thigh. He rolled over on the grass, holding the knee, lips skinned back in something like a grin, hoping that he hadn’t shattered his kneecap. At last the pain began to fade a little, and he found that he could flex the joint. It would be all right if he kept moving and didn’t allow it to stiffen up on him. Maybe.
He got to his feet and started to walk along the fence back toward Mason Street and his equipment. His knee was bad at first, and he limped, but the pain smoothed out to a dull ache as he went. There was aspirin in the Honda’s first-aid kit. He should have remembered to bring that with him. Too late now. He kept an eye out for cars and faded back deeper into the cemetery when one came.
On the Mason Street side, which was apt to be better traveled, he kept well back from the fence until he was opposite the Civic. He was about to trot down to the fence and pull his bundle out of the
bushes when he heard footfalls on the sidewalk and a woman’s low laughter. He sat down behind a large grave marker
—it hurt his knee too much to squat—and watched a couple walk up the far side of Mason Street. They were walking with their arms about each other’s waists, and something about their movement from one white pool of light to the next made Louis think of some old TV show. In a moment he had it: “The Jimmy Durante Hour.”
What would they do if he rose up now, a wavering shadow in this silent city of the dead, and cried hollowly across to them: