Grist 04 - Incinerator Read Online Free PDF Page A

parents. He made a ceremony of telling Mommy and me about it the next morning. Christmas morning. He’d drink his eggnog with cognac and tell us about Christmas Eve. That was our Christmas. Hearing Daddy talk about what happened after they knocked on the doors in their red suits and their white beards, and what the people said and how the kids acted. It was the kids who got to him. Sometimes he cried like a baby. They really killed him. Oh, Lord,” she said, getting up again. “Oh, Lord. Just sit there and don’t say anything.”
    She had her back turned to me, her shoulders stiff and high. I tried not to say anything and failed. “You never got anything for Christmas?”
    “My whole life was Christmas,” she said without turning around. “I was Santa’s daughter. I was one of the elves.” She lowered her head, and her shoulders began to shake.
    She needed something to do. “I’d like another beer,” I said.
    Annabelle caught her breath with a rasping sound. “Easily arranged,” she said. She was herself again, or close enough to fool someone who wasn’t paying attention. “This is the last, I think. Shall I call down for more?” She went to the bar and opened the door of the refrigerator.
    “This is it. I’ve got an evening in front of me.”
    “Lucky you,” she said. “I’ve got a sleeping pill.” I would have traded my evening for her sleeping pill. It was nothing I looked forward to. She uncapped the beer, reached for a glass, dropped the cap into the wastebasket with a metallic ping of precision, blinked, and said, “So we got Harvey, and Harvey took him to the store every morning. That was Harvey’s whole job. Not such a hard job, would you think? And one day Harvey didn’t come back, and neither did Daddy. We hired the world to find him. Hundreds of people. Then I got the call from L.A. saying some bum has been burned half to death and he’s got a MedicAlert bracelet, the bracelet Daddy wore because of the Alzheimer’s, identifying him as Abraham Winston. Do I think the bracelet might have been stolen? Well, I don’t know where Daddy is, so my first impulse was to believe that the bracelet was wherever he was. And I came here, and it took me an hour to recognize him. He didn’t look like Santa Claus any more.”
    She sat down on the couch, and both she and the upholstery sighed. The bottle trembled in her hand. “Will you help me?”
    “I thought we’d settled that,” I said. “I’m going to try.”
    “Oh,” she said, and she leaned forward until her forehead touched her knees. “Oh.”
    I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Was his face burned?”
    “No,” Baby Winston said, without straightening. “Only the lower two thirds of his body. But they were third-degree burns.” She was talking to her lap.
    “Then why did it take you an hour to recognize him?”
    She remained folded forward, tighter than a jackknife. “Let’s hope you never have to find out,” she said.

3
    Al the Red
     
    That evening I had a prearranged date with Hammond. The bar called the Red Dog glares out onto a block of Hollywood Boulevard that only the most foolhardy walk at night—the most foolhardy and cops. Not that the two categories are mutually exclusive.
    The Red Dog has a corny sawdust floor and a sixties jukebox, recycling hits from the Summer of Love at numbing volume. The latest hits reach cops last, and it’s probably a good thing. Otherwise they’d be able to figure out what the rest of us are up to.
    Hammond had a red kerchief tied crookedly around his head when I walked in. It wasn’t a good sign. His broad face, shadowed with a day’s worth of whiskers, gleamed with sweat and malice, and he had a drink in each of his ham-sized hands.
    “God damn,” he said. He darted a glance at me and missed by about a yard. “I was afraid I’d have to drink both of these.”
    “What a fate,” I said, taking the nearer of the two. It was sweating more heavily than Hammond. After all the