The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed Read Online Free PDF Page A

on, I thought. Bill still met the trains, but he’d been dazed and withdrawn since his wife’s accident. Nobody knew him well and if he had any suspicions about his wife’s death he wasn’t saying anything. He’d locked up his house and taken a room in own; he’d put his place up for sale and asked for a transfer, so it was clear he had no love for the city of Sherman.
    Across the street I saw that the old men had moved from the inside of the pool hall to the slatted bench outside. Harbinger of spring…. Old watery eyes trailing the young girls drifting in threes and fours toward the schoolhouse. Twenty years ago I’d made the same walk; there’d been different faces but the same ragged Mackinaws, same speckled hands on gnarled canes, blue smoke puffing up from corncob pipes. The town didn’t change much; it dried up and got smaller, and each Saturday night a few less people came to town. When I was young, Saturday night had brought clusters of men in faded overalls, faces sunburned up to the middle of their foreheads, dead-white from there to the hairline where their hats had held off the sun. Women in wrinkled stockings lined the benches before the stores, talking in tired murmurs while babies fed from white breasts spilled out through flowered print dresses. There were brawls in the alley behind Cott’s dance hall (closed during the war and never reopened) and once there was a shooting. (The date was July 4, 1936, a year of drought and despair and desperate gaiety, free government flour with Dad on the WPA and brother in the CCC. I was sitting on the fender of our old Model-? feeling sick because I’d just seen a boy stick a firecracker in a toad’s mouth and light it. I saw the man running up the street with the sheriff behind him. Sheriff Wade was young then but heavy; he was falling behind. Then his forty-five roared twice and echoes thundered through the summer night. The locusts stopped chirring and the dogs slopped barking. In the sudden hush the running man spread his arms in a swan dive and fell on his face. He kicked while blood gushed from his month. It was the first time I’d ever seen a man die, and I realized that in death man has no more dignity than a dog kicked by a mule. The dead man had left another man in the alley behind Cott’s with his stomach slashed open. The man got his stomach sewed up and was talking and smoking a cigaret an hour later. But the dead man was a dead-broke drifter and nobody grieved.)
    That was the depression in Sherman. During the war boys in khaki staggered in the street and fought in the alley; afterward they loafed around wearing ruptured ducks and pieces of old uniforms. When their unemployment payments ran out, they drifted to Kansas City to pack meat or to California to build airplanes. Sometimes when their parents die they come back and try to farm the old place, but they usually sell out and Lou has another listing.
    That night I asked Lou over supper: “Sell anything?”
    “Umm … not yet.”
    Lou had a private rule never to discuss a transaction until it was finished, the deed signed and the money deposited. There was no point in trying to discuss Curt with him even if I’d wanted to; he’d have turned cagey and talked around the subject. When it comes to business, Lou seems to forget I’m his wife.
    But the next day I knew the deal had gone through and that Cart Friedland was settling in Sherman. His wife came into the store just before noon. I knew it had to be her; we don’t get two unrelated strangers in a single week. She wore no makeup. Her short, thick-curled hair spilled from the front of her white woolen cap like glossy purple grapes. Her tanned face was narrow; her eyes large and hazel, with an element of softness. They made her look surprised and bewildered, and I wanted to help her.
    But I didn’t. I watched her push her cart around the store picking up the things you need to restock a house: condiments, spices, flour and canned staples.