The Juliet Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer see the red taillights of the station wagon. Centenary was an imperfect stage. He knew his audience had missed the nuances in his performance, like the double middle finger salute as he stretched out his blanket wings. And they’d fled too soon to truly appreciate the glow of his greenstone.
    He liked to take the greenstone out when he could. She was a good girl with a bad reputation. They called her The Juliet.
    He folded the dog blanket and started back up the hill. At the halfway point he found the tooth on the side of the road. Budge always had an eye for detail. The tooth seemed big with its bloody roots and all, and the clean part glowed; bone always acted strange under starlight.
    He put the tooth in the breast pocket of his shirt. He didn’t keep a lot of things, but a tooth from a pretty girl deserved consideration. Maybe it was lucky.
    When he reached the path that used to be known as Penance Lane, he hiked down to Lily’s to see what the kids left behind this time. He shined the flashlight on her so-called grave and poked through the leavings with his stick. Most of it was trash, but he did manage to pick up a cigar, still wrapped in cellophane. The English guy had had the decency to leave a few slugs in the Jameson’s bottle. Budge drained it as he stood behind the white cross that he himself had re-painted and re-stenciled, as he always did, on New Year’s Day.
    Sometimes he wished he had friends. Most times he didn’t, so this was an ideal job even if he wasn’t that good at it. Centenary was cleared, for a little while anyway. The locals paid him in food and privileges commensurate with their relief. The sixties and its maniacs may have been long gone, but the fear lingered. Suspiciously, like an unfulfilled wish.
    The night was fading, and Budge watched the ghostly shape of the Opera House become more certain. His acting days were over, but he still liked to rattle around in there, sometimes giving the great speeches of the great characters he had never been asked to play. The citizens of Centenary must have felt they’d achieved preeminence with their incongruous desert theater. Perhaps they thought the Opera House would defeat the savage landscape and domesticate the dreams of men.
    Which differed from the dreams of women. Budge left the letters alone these days. Sometimes there’d be a card or an envelope dropped on the grave, a special message for Lily. He used to open them, but there was never any money inside, just a load of what Budge called the Dirty Sadness. Girls had a strange feeling about Lily Joy.
    He picked his way back to the cottage just before sunup. As he put away his belt, he noticed that another prong had broken off the cheap buckle, leaving only two to hold the greenstone in place. “No more nights on the town for you, old girl.” He took a knife to the remaining prongs to liberate the gem before stashing it in the safest place he could think of. Budge cherished that stone and regretted giving away its smaller twin, but at the time he had been sentimental.
    He extinguished the lantern and sat down at the card table with a box of pale blue stationery that had belonged to his Aunt. The envelope glue didn’t stick any more, but the color was still pretty. He wrote in block letters because his hand shook too much for cursive: FOR MANDY.
    Budge patted his shirt pocket and felt for the sharp bump of the wild girl’s tooth. She sure was some kind of crazy. He’d been watching her act out all night. He’d been keeping an eye (and ear) on all of them, in fact. And if what that Indian guy said was true, she was local. He took a sheet of the pale blue paper and wrote LOVE, LILY JOY. Then he dropped the tooth on top and folded it into thirds before stuffing the envelope.
    He licked the envelope and mashed it closed. Good enough. Come evening he’d go on down to Penance Lane and drop it on Lily’s grave. A test of nature. If that Mandy girl came back, he wanted her to have a