“And Janice?”
“I’m not quite prepared for that today”, I said. “I’ll tell you another time.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” But that was one I never kept. Three months after the day we walked down into the woods together (I would have held her hand, if I hadn’t been afraid of hurting her bunched and swollen fingers), Elaine Connelly died quietly in her bed. As with Melinda Moores, death came as the result of a heart attack. The orderly who found her said she looked peaceful, as if it had come suddenly and without much pain. I hope he was right about that. I loved Elaine. And I miss her. Her and Janice and Brutal and just all of them.
We reached the second shed on the path, the one down by the wall. It stood back in a bower of scrub pines, its sagging roof and boarded-over windows laced and dappled with shadows. I started toward it.
Elaine hung back a moment, looking fearful.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Really. Come on.”
There was no latch on the door – there had been once, but it had been torn away – and so I used a folded-over square of cardboard to wedge it shut. I pulled it free now, and stepped into the shed. I left the door as wide open as it would go, because it was dark inside.
“Paul, what? … Oh. Oh!” That second “oh” was just shy of a scream.
There was a table pushed off to one side. On it was a flashlight and a brown paper bag. On the dirty floor was a Hav-A-Tampa cigar box I’d gotten from the concession man who refills the home’s soft-drink and candy machines. I’d asked him for it special, and since his company also sells tobacco products, it was easy for him to get. I offered to pay him for it – they were valuable commodities when I worked at Cold Mountain, as I may have told you – but he just laughed me off.
Peering over the edge of it were a pair of bright little oilspot eyes.
“Mr. Jingles,” I said in a low voice. “Come over here. Come on over here, old boy, and see this lady.”
I squatted down – it hurt, but I managed – and held out my hand. At first I didn’t think he was going to be able to get over the side of the box this time, but he made it with one final lunge. He landed on his side, then regained his feet, and came over to me. He ran with a hitching limp in one of his back legs; the injury that Percy had inflicted had come back in Mr. Jingles’s old age. His old, old age. Except for the top of his head and the tip of his tail, his fur had gone entirely gray.
He hopped onto the palm of my hand. I raised him up and he stretched his neck out, sniffing at my breath with his ears laid back and his tiny dark eyes avid. I held my hand out toward Elaine, who looked at the mouse with wide-eyed wonder, her lips parted.
“It can’t be”, she said, and raised her eyes to me. “Oh Paul, it isn’t . .. it can’t be!”
“Watch,” I said, “and then tell me that.”
From the bag on the table I took a spool which I had colored myself – not with Crayolas but with Magic Markers, an invention undreamed of in 1932. It came to the same, though. It was as bright as Del’s had been, maybe brighter. Messieurs et mesdames, I thought. Bienvenue au cirque du mousie!
I squatted again, and Mr. Jingles ran off my palm. He was old, but as obsessed as ever. From the moment I had taken the spool out of the bag, he’d had eyes for nothing else. I rolled it across the shed’s uneven, splintery floor, and he was after it at once. He didn’t run with his old speed, and his limp was painful to watch, but why should he have been either fast or surefooted? As I’ve said, he was old, a Methuselah of a mouse. Sixty-four, at least.