” SHUT up!” Elaine screamed at him, so-loudly and so powerfully that he backed away a step, the smile slipping off his face. “GETOUT OF HERE! GET OUT OR YOU’LL NEVER WORK ANOTHER DAY
HERE! NOT ANOTHER HOUR! I SWEAR IT!”
“You won’t be able to get so much as a slice of bread on a breadline,” I said, but so low neither of them heard me. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mr. Jingles, lying on Elaine’s palm like the world’s smallest bearskin rug.
Brad thought about coming back at her, calling her bluff he was right, the shed wasn’t exactly approved territory for the Georgia Pines inmates, even I knew that much – and then didn’t. He was, at heart, a coward, just like Percy. And he might have checked on her claim that her grandson was Somebody
Important and had discovered it was a true claim. Most of all, perhaps, his curiosity had been satisfied, his thirst to know slaked. And after all his wondering, the mystery had turned out not to be such of a much. An old man’s pet mouse had apparently been living in the shed. Now it had croaked, had a heart attack or something while pushing a colored spool.
“Don’t know why you’re getting so het up,” he said. “Either of you. You act like it was a dog, or something.”
“Get out,” she spat. “Get out, you ignorant man. What little mind you have is ugly and misdirected.”
He flushed dully, the spots where his high school pimples had been filling in a darker red. There had been a lot of them, by the look. “I’ll go,” he said, “but when you come down here tomorrow… Paulie …
you’re going to find a new lock on this door. This place is off-limits to the residents, no matter what bad-tempered things old Mrs. My Shit Don’t Stink has to say about me. Look at the floor! Boards all warped and rotted! If you was to go through, your scrawny old leg’d be apt to snap like a piece of kindling. So just take that dead mouse, if you want it, and get gone. The Love Shack is hereby closed.”
He turned and strode away, looking like a man who believes he’s earned at least a draw. I waited until he was gone, and then gently took Mr. Jingles from Elaine. My eyes happened on the bag with the peppermint candies in it, and that did it – the tears began to come. I don’t know, I just cry easier somehow these days.
“Would you help me to bury an old friend?” I asked Elaine when Brad Dolan’s heavy footsteps had faded away.
“Yes, Paul.” She put her arm around my waist and laid her head against my shoulder. With one old and twisted finger, she stroked Mr. Jingles’s moveless side. “I would be happy to do that.”
And so we borrowed a trowel from the gardening shed and we buried Del’s pet mouse as the afternoon shadows drew long through the trees, and then we walked back to get our supper and take up what remained of our lives. And it was Del I found myself thinking of, Del kneeling on the green carpet of my office with his hands folded and his bald pate gleaming in the lamplight, Del who had asked us to take care of Mr. Jingles, to make sure the bad ‘un wouldn’t hurt him anymore. Except the bad ‘un hurts us all in the end, doesn’t he?
“Paul?” Elaine asked. Her voice was both kind and exhausted. Even digging a grave with a trowel and laying a mouse to rest in it is a lot of excitement for old sweeties like us, I guess. “Are you all right?”
My arm was around her waist. I squeezed it. “I’m fine,” I said.
“Look,” she said. “It’s going to be a beautiful sunset. Shall we stay out and watch it?”
“All right,” I said, and we stayed there on the lawn is for quite awhile, arms around each other’s waists, first watching the bright colors come up in the sky, then watching them fade to ashes of gray.
Sainte Marie, Mere de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pecheurs, maintenant et a l’heure de notre mort.