13

In what seems like necrophilia, Thompson sheds his work pants—in the semidark—thinking, as he does so, of Irene’s lithe body swinging softly beneath her overalls. She’s coming over later. He gave the secret sign at the tobacco store. He broke the airtight seal of the packet of Captain Black. If I break the seal then it’s a sign, okay, we’ll agree on that, it means you’ve got to come out to the farm and see me, as soon as you finish up work. In his crotch he feels the imminent twang of her arrival. But he’s also thinking of Isaiah, of those words imparted by the great prophet, “Enter into the rock, hide thee in the dust, from before the terror of the Lord, from the splendor of his majesty.” He’s down in the hole with his palm cupped gently around my jaw, feeling the glossy skin beneath my chin.

14

We killed her, Thompson’s admitting to me. Years back, back when I was just a kid and Jason and I were playing around, it got out of hand, I guess that’s the best way to put it, and one thing led to another; that’s how it felt, at least, but I don’t remember much, just the rope, the bright yellow rope. We were tripping and it was like, wow, check out that yellow rope. We stole it off her father’s boat, the line and the water skis, too. A fine pair of wooden skis. He had a hell of a boat, an old Chris Craft with those deep, dark wooden sideboards that used to tear up and down Walloon Lake. Jason was wild on the skis, kicking one off, leaping the wake. Then she went out, I remember. We opened it up full-throttle. Then she went down and Jason swung back around to find her and tore right over her. A messed-up, drug-induced error was all it was, the kind of thing that happened all the time back then. We didn’t know that. We didn’t know a thing. And she was a rich girl with a Chicago lawyer father. All the tow ropes were bright yellow back then. Later, in the seventies, they were blue, then orange in the eighties.

His breath touches my ears. The drums tingle, the words of his confession swing against the tympanic membrane—we bog folk have well-preserved tympanic membranes—all the way round the semicircular canal, that glorious spiral formation.

15

Thompson comes out into the field with a large shovel, glances around in all four directions, and then begins covering me up, starting first with my legs, then working up to my gut, and eventually, somewhat reluctantly, covering my neck. Finally, after smoking a bowl of Captain Black, he covers my eyes. Then he packs the dirt down over my eye sockets, tamping gently with the flat of the blade. Admittedly, the rush I feel being buried again and relieved of my own earthly burdens is somewhat, but not exactly, sexual in nature. In an oversexed climate one might describe the sensation as orgasmic. That would be a failure of my descriptive powers. But they fail me now.