Jack (Gilead #4)(40)

Jack said, “I—” and Bradshaw said, “I don’t have time for this,” and handed him another one. He turned to look behind him. “Just wear this damn uniform for a few days! Is that so hard?” He gave Jack another bill. “And don’t say nothing.” He said, “Don’t kill yourself over them bulbs, either. Dump ’em in a corner somewhere.” And he strode away before Jack could think through his new situation. He had nothing against dead people or flower bulbs. He could put on the uniform of an honest workingman with that solid name, Bradshaw. He had money, three dollars, he supposed, though there wasn’t light enough for him to see the denominations. If perfection ever stooped to consider the likes of Jack Boughton, to deal, so to speak, in such small coin, then he could call his surprising new circumstances perfect, or so he thought at the time.

He had fallen asleep thinking how to put an end to himself. There was the lake, and, in a virtual forest of low-hanging boughs, he had his necktie. Grotesque in either case. Sure to break his father’s heart, once and for all, if word got back to him. He imagined Teddy there, somehow first to know, plumbing his gentle, practical wits for a way to make things seem other than they were. Then he woke up with that boot in his ribs, but on the undamaged side, and Bradshaw struggling out of his uniform and laying out a hectic plan for Jack’s immediate future, which meant that that other decision could be postponed.

Perhaps. Jack put on the enormous overall, which fit over his jacket with room to spare, solving the problem of what to do with it, at least till the day warmed up. The cuffs dragged and the sleeves had to be rolled, but he was ready to give this Bradshaw business a try, in the absence of other options than those two he really hated to consider. Clothes make the man. He could see up the hill a big burlap sack. It did have bulbs in it. He found a spade lying in the grass nearby. Off to work.

Walking along a path, looking for a place where he might reasonably plant something, he passed a man who rather pointedly paused to read the patch on his pocket. The man said, “I’m surprised you’d even show your face around here!” His obvious disgust meant he would not take it well if Jack asked him to clarify.

So, something else to consider. What had Bradshaw been doing in the cemetery in his work clothes in the middle of the night? And he had been in too great a hurry to ask Jack why he was sleeping on a grave with a wilted bouquet on his chest. Other people spent nights in the cemetery, but the flowers would have given pause, under normal circumstances. Self-parody can be hard to explain. But no small talk, just that prodding boot. And the hasty handing over of money, to overwhelm possible reluctance, Jack thought. And the hurried exit into the near-night. That man had shed Bradshaw to make himself anonymous, with good reason, no doubt, and had left another Bradshaw behind for when the cops came.

Short of that, if the man had done something obnoxious and reprehensible by the code of the brotherhood of cemetery gardeners and punishable by their contempt and ostracism only, this would suit Jack’s purposes, such as they were. He had thought at first that the man on the path was noting the mismatch of the name on the pocket and the battered face under the cap, and so he was relieved by the thought that, though the name might be locally notorious, the man it belonged to was a stranger somehow, successfully furtive. A remarkable thing in a giant, true. Worthy of emulation, and made easier in Jack’s case by the repugnance Bradshaw had left in his wake.

Dear Jesus. Jack’s mind ran over the very long list of possible offenses, saw himself accused and convicted, favored drowning as less judicial than hanging, as less likely to be seen as an implied confession, and wondered for the millionth time how he had trapped himself in such a ridiculous life. Harmlessness is not for the faint of heart.

If he had decided on drowning, it might be better to take care of it before he was embroiled in l’affaire Bradshaw. But if Bradshaw’s transgressions were truly grievous, maybe he should wait around to defend himself, with all the futility that would involve, rather than seem to confess to it and let it cast whatever shadow it might over that rigorous pulpit, that upright house, that unoffending town, that earnest state—here he was sweating and trembling over an unspecified crime that might not have happened and that in any case was not his crime. He couldn’t even think of Della.

But what if someone saw him pulling a bloodstained shirt out of the lake? Then again, what if he left it there to be found in the inevitable search of the area? Was it worse to be seen retrieving the shirt at night? Though night would diminish the chance that he would be seen doing it, which, of course, is what made doing anything at night presumptively incriminating. The thought occurred to him suddenly that he had not looked over these gabardines Bradshaw was so desperate to climb out of. Blood? Hair? So he also climbed out of them. There were a hundred stains, impossible to interpret. Dried sweat, of course, which could testify to the desperations of guilt and concealment. He was studying the cap when a man with an official air called to him, “Seen Bradshaw?”

Jack called back, “Not today,” standing there with the flayed giant crumpled at his feet, implicating himself pointlessly in whatever it was, because that was just the kind of thing he did.

Why did he want that damn shirt, anyway? He imagined the cuffs floating up like some last supplication. A necktie on a bare neck looks ridiculous. Forget the damn necktie. A suit jacket over a bare chest looks ridiculous. He wasn’t thinking clearly. Did he owe Bradshaw anything? Had there been some sort of agreement? A few bucks, or their equivalent in time spent abetting a crime. If the crime was truly grave, that time would have expired already in light of the risks involved. He had spent the morning as near guilt and humiliation if not death as an imaginative man could come without actually passing through them, and he had money in his pocket, which seemed fair. For one sick instant he thought he had put the money in the pocket of the uniform, and that he would have to go back and rifle its pockets in what was now broad daylight, workers everywhere, but no. He took the bills out and looked at them. Three twenties. More amazing still, they were absolutely new, the newest money he had ever seen in his life. This was exhausting. A bank heist, an armored car. Counterfeiting. This last would account for his readiness to pull bills off that roll he had, to silence objections Jack had been too sleepy to come up with. Suddenly he was thinking about cops again. Where did you get this money, pal? Somebody paid you? For what? In the dark? In the cemetery? The name Bradshaw mean anything to you?