Unbury Carol(80)

“Carol…dear?”

He reached for the door and gripped the handle. Surely she would be lying on her back. Surely his anxiety had gotten the best of him. Surely no reality could match the paranoid fantasies of his worried mind.

He opened the door.

Carol was still sitting up, eyes open, hands out and up.

Her expression hadn’t changed.

Dwight’s did.

“Carol? Carol! Oh my…oh hell’s heaven…Carol!”

He stepped toward her, as though to embrace her. Then he stopped.

“Carol?”

She wasn’t moving. She did not blink.

“Carol, I thought you were…”

He waved a hand close to her face. Her eyes did not follow his fingers.

“Carol,” Dwight said, exhaling so deeply it felt as if he’d escaped his own body. “You…you’re still in Howltown, aren’t you?”

He pulled from his pocket a mirror and held it under her nose. Looking from her eyes to the glass, he counted.

The mirror fogged up at second twenty-two.

“Still alive,” he said. “Still in that dark city of your own.”

He pocketed the mirror.

“I wonder, Carol, how difficult it was for you to reach a sitting position? I wonder what I look like to you right now.” He smiled for her. Snapped his teeth. “You’ve never moved before…why now?”

Why now, indeed. Why now when Dwight needed less stress than ever?

He placed a fingertip against her chest.

He pushed.

Carol fell back to the coach’s floor. But her fingernail scratched Dwight’s face on the way.

“Hey!”

Dwight brought a hand to his cheek and saw, yes, a thin trickle of blood.

They’re gonna know. It’s a sign of a struggle. THEY’RE GONNA KNOW!

“Stop it!”

His voice, chastising himself, echoed across the open Trail.

He stared at Carol then, flat upon her back in the coach. He imagined Opal asking to check the coach once more, one more time, only to find Carol sitting up as Dwight had seen her.

How? How had it happened? What had changed so that Carol could…move?

“It’s not fair,” he said, kneeling in the dirt by the Trail’s edge. He grabbed handfuls of earth and rock. “You never moved before! It’s not…” He rose and went to the coach. “…fair!”

Then Dwight shoved the stony dirt up Carol’s dress, stuffing it by her waist. He went back to the Trail’s edge and took some more. This he shoved down the dress’s neckline, jamming it under her shoulders.

He got some more.

He stuffed more of it into her dress.

“Try getting up now,” he said. “Try sitting up now!”

Dwight made many trips to the Trail’s edge, bringing more and more earth to the coach. By the time he was done, satisfied that Carol couldn’t possibly rise with the weight he’d added to her dress, he adjusted the mirror so that it reflected the coach, the same way Opal had seen it.

On his quick walk to the driver’s box, he thought it an irresistible image, Carol with rocks in her dress, as if she were drowning without water.

He grabbed rope from the box, brought it to the coach door, and tied the door closed.

“This isn’t fair,” he echoed, his voice shaking enough that, had Opal heard it now, there would be more than suspicion in the lawman’s eyes. “It’s…unjust!”

Dwight climbed up into the driver’s box and clacked the reins. The steeds erupted into motion.

“What, Martha dear? Who? Why, that’s the old friend we’re burying tomorrow. That’s the last thing we’ve got to do.”

He snapped the reins again. His voice, he thought, sounded like a child’s. And it only scared him more.

How would Carol upright have looked to Manders?

To Opal?

To Moxie?

He passed the big homes of Harrows. Passed even his own. Without realizing he’d made a change of plans, he was in the process of carrying them out.

There was one place he needed to go before returning home. In the hope of removing one of the many faces that he still saw upon the head of the stranger he’d woken to.

“One stop, Martha. Trust me.” He thought of Carol on her back, rocks and dirt in her dress. “But you always do trust me, don’t you? Yes, you do.” He touched the new cut on his face. “Where to? Where are we going? Why, her name is Farrah Darrow. And she needs to be reminded who she works for.”

Dwight cried out into the coming night, as blood trickled a thin line across his face. As the steeds crushed pebbles on the rocky Trail, and as his wife, weighed down, did not move with the motion of the coach.





The four of them ate around the small table that greasy-bearded Garr said was more like a stool. They stuffed their faces with rabbit and drank beer that blond Horace had ripped from the cold storage of the town’s only tavern. It was evening, the sun had painted the sky the color purple, but there were no windows in the small wood shack and all four of them liked it that way. Overweight Kent had shot the old man who owned the place; his body lay under a blanket outside, beside the hole they shit in. Lewis, the most stable-minded of the lot, was the cook; tonight he turned the rabbit caught in the big woods and the smoke went through a hole in the roof shot through by Kent, too. Horace stood watch, making sure the smoke or smell didn’t bring any lawmen, but really he just sat on a stump and smoked a pipe himself. There were no beds in the dirty shack. No bedding. Four days Horace had been putting off going into Albert’s Port to get any supplies. He claimed the law in Albert’s Port was “ticky-tacky” and would pick a man up for looking confused. The men argued this topic often. Some were getting stir-crazy. Garr wanted to go into town. He growled about men’s needs and said there was no reason to live like paupers. But Horace was very serious and even threatened once to turn the others in if anyone went.