Cadillac Cathedral Read Online Free PDF Page B

them set in New Orleans. If the stories were to be believed, every minute he’d wandered those streets his innocent tourist life had been in danger — from gunshots, speeding cars, escaped convicts, vicious drug runners, and carloads of demented killers. It was a miracle he’d survived.
    As he worked, he was aware of traffic racing by on the Old Highway. Occasionally an automobile turned onto the side road to pass by in front of his workshop. Tires on pavement hummed today, though sometimes after a light rain they could sound like adhesive bandages being ripped from skin. Whenever someone turned too wide, tires crackled in shoulder gravel.
    He held the dipstick high. Oil was clean and shiny to the “full” line. That woman’s sons had taken pretty good care of the hearse, even while treating it like some sort of tractor. He had good reason to believe that by the time the sun had started to rise above the firs tomorrow he’d have her ready for the journey south.
    Until the age of thirteen, when his parents moved up here to Portuguese Creek, he had lived in the city where Martin Glass had died in hospital and where Charlie Birdsong had been the undertaker who’d owned this hearse — also the father of a pretty blonde-haired daughter. Of course it had been a surprise the first time he’d seen a classmate behind the wheel at the head of a funeral procession.
    In order not to lose sight of her then, he had walked beside the hearse up the main street, across an intersection and the railroad tracks and the river bridge, and then through the downtown area to the stone-pillared entrance to the grassy cemetery. Perhaps her father had installed a governor, maybe he’d kept his own foot on the gas pedal, since the hearse, so far as Arvo could tell, had maintained precisely the same speed throughout the entire route.
    Though he had been aware of her presence every day in the Grade Five classroom, it wasn’t until he’d seen her driving her father’shearse — her golden curls and pretty face a contrast to all that sober black — that he’d become fascinated with this girl. Of course he hadn’t suspected then that he would be thinking of her for much of the rest of his life.
    Throughout the years that followed, he had tried to forget her — and of course it was ridiculous, an adult man still captivated by a childhood memory. Even during his travels he’d continued to wonder what had become of Myrtle Birdsong. They might very well have come upon one another in Oslo, say, or Baton Rouge. He still subscribed to the city newspaper and had now and then come across her name. Recently, her photo had been alongside an account of the opening of a new theatre named for her father, who had apparently been a generous supporter of local drama clubs.
    So she was still alive and living in the city of his birth.
    Though he was not sure he had the courage to return her father’s hearse to Myrtle himself — after all, he couldn’t know for sure that she would welcome it — this was no reason to turn down a chance to get this beautiful vehicle back in good running order for Martin’s funeral. Once he’d accomplished that much, he might feel brave enough to deliver it to its original owner’s daughter — though of course he had serious doubts.
    He could not be slow about it. Martin Glass’s death was a reminder that your life could go flying by more quickly than you’d ever imagined. Martin had often talked of his plan to look up his son in Saskatchewan one day and — despite the son’s politics, his rejection of his father, his eccentric lifestyle in some remote northern town — try to establish some sort of peaceful relationship. But he had put off making the journey until “another day.” He could not have imagined his life could run out so soon.
    Arvo flushed out the radiator and filled it with water from his well. He tested the hoses — brittle but still secure. He checked thewheel nuts — all tight. This was important,