Here So Far Away(35)

“I have to work anyway,” I said. “Stop feeling sorry for me.”

Bill was giving me the puppy head tilt. “Doug said there’s going to be a huge shack party out at the Scotch Shore. You should go. You’ll have way more fun than us.”

“We’ll see.”

“You know, the rules state . . .” Bill opened his biology binder, pretending to read. “She who asks first gets priority, but, uh, that should not stop anyone else from taking her nineteen-year-old-looking self into a liquor store to buy the person, uh, herewith and henceforth, some birthday booze. . . .”

“I’m sorry, I think you just accidentally asked me to buy you alcohol for a party I’m not invited to.”

He shoveled a handful of fries into his gob, chewing them with his mouth as wide open as possible.

“Buddy, why don’t you ask . . .” I was about to say Doug, then remembered the old bottle of moonshine at the back of my bedroom closet. Was it still good, like Rupert said it would be? Or I could do a trade with Doug for something less science-projecty. After all, that guy across the table—the charmer with the mouthful of masticated potato that he was letting ooze onto his mock turtleneck—had chosen us over Tracy, and since “us” still included me, it wouldn’t hurt to do him a favor.

Like a wee karmic bounce for my good intentions, a postcard from Sid was waiting for me when I got home from the Grunt. It had a photo of a hang-in-there kitty swinging from a tree with a penis drawn on its fluffy white front. On the back of the card he’d scrawled:

Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.

—Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part III

Unless your enemies are cows.

—Sid Abbott, This Card

PS: Not that I’m taking sides

I dumped wet, heavy leaves out of Rupert’s old wheelbarrow onto the compost pile. My back was aching, and I’d had a minor cardiac event when some variety of rodent had dashed out of the leaves and over my feet. I could handle that in the outdoors, but inside the old house I sometimes still got the heebie-jeebies. One evening I reached under the kitchen sink to grab what I thought was a scouring pad, and a mouse carcass disintegrated in my bare hand.

It had quickly become obvious why Rupert had let things get so bad. For all his talk about wanting to go out of this world swiftly, he seemed awfully afraid of overexerting himself. But he kept busy, always had a little project to work on. While I raked, he sat on the side veranda, taking apart an old radio and watching Shaggy root around in the temporary pen that Francis had set up for him. The earth he’d turn up would become a vegetable garden next year.

“Someone’s going to need a bath tonight,” Rupert said.

“How does that work exactly?” I asked. “One of you holds him and other hoses him off?”

“Hose?” Rupert put down his magnifying glass. “Girl, the hose water’s far too cold, far too cold. No, we do him in the house.”

“You mean in the tub?”

“Sure, in the tub. Where else are you going to take a bath?”

“How do you get him in and out?”

“He steps in, and he steps out. You have to put towels down because he’s feeling uncertain on his feet these days and he gets nervous stepping on the wet tile. Mostly psychological. He’s still spry.”

Shaggy was at that moment sinking to his knees before thudding heavily onto his side and sighing. Nap time. I sat in the grass beside him, reaching into the pen to stroke the bristly fur along his back. “You remind me of my friend Bill,” I whispered.

He farted appreciatively.

“Rupert, what did you put in that moonshine?” I asked.

“You try it?”

“Not yet. I was wondering how you made it.”

“Well, you got to have a still. Matter fact, my still’s still down in the basement, in the cold room. The Constable thinks I’ve lost the key. Suppose we should clear it out before he finds out otherwise.”

Did I care what the Constable would make of the idea that was beginning to take shape? What I could do with a working still? No, I did not. He had been such a prick at dinner that I’d gone back to dodging him again. Every time I found one of his soggy herbal tea bags sitting on the edge of the sink, collapsed into itself like a miniature, moss-scented Jabba the Hutt, I thought again of how he’d baited me. You must be a wellspring of flawless decision making. It hardly made sense, the way he put it. Besides, that was why he’d come here, wasn’t it? To live out a romantic fantasy about living among country people, soaking up their folksy wisdom? Then he got right pissy, as my crazy uncle Burpie would put it, when people turned out to be just like themselves.

“Why don’t we go have a look at it?” I said to Rupert.

It took us two hours to locate the key to the cold room that Rupert insisted he hadn’t lost, eventually finding it in a trunk in his room where he stored old bedding along with some expired lottery tickets worth about twenty bucks, three silver dollars, and a ballpoint pen. “Burying things seems to be your thing,” I said. “What’s with the pen?”

“Must have accidentally set it down when I put away something else,” he said, tucking it into his plastic pocket protector. “Lord knows what we’ll find with all them bodies I buried in the cold room.”