He was one of those lightweight alcoholics, she realized. Three drinks and he was toast. Either of her parents could have six martinis and still drive her to a friend’s house.
“And without a weapon. It’s priceless,” he cackled. “A weapon is necessary to the triad. Don’t you even know that? The killer, the body, the weapon. They interact. They interchange. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for Christ’s sake. After a murder, the murderer is really the murdered, killed by his own lack of humanity. It’s his death that is significant. The weapon stands as the judge and jury, the object that casts him out of the dream back into reality. Without it, you simply don’t have murder.”
She never stood up to the drunks when she was young. Not to her father or her mother, not to any of their friends on Friday and Saturday nights, their heavy hands on her hair, their strange, unchecked thoughts spoken aloud. She still remembered Mrs. Crile finding her in the TV room, stroking her, putting a hand up the back of her shirt and clucking with pity, declaring that no one ever recovers from being an only child. Look at Richard Nixon, she’d snorted before turning away.
“I think you’re full of shit.” She didn’t even know what he was talking about, who could possibly die at the end of her book.
He glared at her. She was not surprised to see Nixon’s small eyes and bulging jowls. “It is wrong on every level: schematically, thematically. You are meant to feel at the end of a book that what has gone on is completely unimaginable and yet inevitable. Do we feel that? No. Not to mention that no woman could bury a grown man’s body in an hour. And in the backyard? In January?” He thrust out his arm toward her windows, as if this were the house of her novel. “The whole thing is an atrocity.” Without asking, he headed to the kitchen for a refill.
“No,” she said.
The bite in her voice jerked him like a rope. “One more, then I’ll go.”
“No. No more. You need to leave now.”
“I’m not leaving until I get another drink,” he said from the pantry, his hands having reached safety, “and you come up with a better ending.”
“Get out of my house.” She grabbed at his arm but only caught his coat sleeve; glass and ice shattered across the countertop.
He locked his fingers through a bottle opener fixed to the wall and she couldn’t yank him out of the tiny room. With his free hand he began to make another drink. She reached behind him and shoved his arm. Another highball shattered. He took down a third and she did the same thing. He paused then, staring at all the broken shards.
“I have never understood why a person who is not a genius bothers with art. What’s the point? You’ll never have the satisfaction of having created something indispensable. You’ve got your little scenes, your pretty images, but that desperate exhilaration of blowing past all the fixed boundaries of art, of life—that will forever elude you.” He took down another glass, waited for her to smash it, and when she didn’t he quickly made his drink. His eyes wandered over her as he drank. Then he said, the liquid still glistening on his lips and tongue, “And why don’t you tighten up that robe. I’m done looking at those things.”
Matty was fascinated by her work, the new movements of her arms, the strange tool and its wonderful noise as she thrust it again and again into the earth, and the spray of dirt and rocks that came up over her back onto the grass, sometimes landing on the thick rubber lip of his red sneaker. He sat and watched her with more interest even than he watched the backhoes on Spring Street, digging up an old septic system. She worked hard and fast and the sweat began to mix with the milk and the tears inside her robe. She was surprised, given the season, how soft the earth was, how relenting. Soon she’d dug deep enough to step down into it. She felt its warmth curl around her ankles. Its smell was intoxicating. She’d paid so little attention to the earth in her life.
When she was done digging, she scooped Matty up and brought him into the house, fed him a small bowl of rice cereal mixed with applesauce （they were back in their regular spots on the wonderful wobbly shelves）， and put him in his crib. He cried briefly, but by the time she came back downstairs and listened for him through the monitor, there was only the loud tide of his breath in sleep. She dragged the man from where he’d fallen across the pantry’s narrow threshold out the back door. His feet bounced carefree down the steps. He was light and fell into the hole gracefully, like a piece of cloth, so she didn’t have to get in there and rearrange him. There was no mound when she’d finished; every scoop of dirt had fit perfectly back in. She replaced the sod she’d carefully cut out and went inside. According to the clock on the stove, her work had taken forty-nine minutes.