Free The Uninnocent by Bradford Morrow Page A

mater, that sad old shrew, real guzzler. Like a barn, that one was. Me sitting on the Mule’s shoulders, moonless night, peeking in at her naked as an elephant, bottle in one hand and fag in the other, sunk back in her armchair watching the black-and-white set. No husband from the word go. Poor old bastard Mueller. There she was, always alone, always the curtains undrawn. She must’ve known, might have put the Mule up to it. Nuts. Here’s the photo albums, won’t look. Des. All of them. The old man, won’t look. So sour smelling, not sweet like mothballs, but this paper, these books, the mildew. Roof must leak. Somebody’s nest, tickertape, little mouse. What we need here is a piece of sharp cheddar, a trap, and ping! Who was it we made eat the mothball soaked in his own piddle? Phineas, was it? Omaha, schoolteacher now. Wouldn’t his wife love to know about—
    Wake up, wake up, wake up .
    Goddamn little bitch … it’s not as if … it’s got to be here somewhere. It never happened, that’s what happened.
    â€œWhy don’t we leave him be?” Jenny advised Georgia.
    They had left the kitchen, carrying their sherry glasses back through the vagaries of rooms, windows shrouded in damask and undusted lace, through the staleness of deathly still air, for the deep veranda that ran the length of the front of the house. Two phoebes shot like feathery bullets from their mud nest lodged in the rafters. The dense, earthy air had begun to move. Miles out to the horizon, a black bank gusted eastward, diligently following the columns of rain that preceded it, released from its nearest edges. They could see the storm through the vined screen at the west end of the porch, out over the plumes of big-leafed oaks and cottonwoods, as it descended toward town.
    â€œFeel how quick this heat is breaking?”
    But Georgia said nothing. She watched her sister-in-law’s inscrutable face—severe, childish, intent—and marveled at how few features she shared with her brother Cutts. It seemed to Georgia as if this face were wrapped in a transparent gauze, occlusive, separated from the rest of the world, its desecrations, its filth. Jenny forbore, thought Georgia. That was the right word for it.
    Rocking lightly in the porch swing, Jenny finally asked her sister-in-law, “So, you have it with you, I guess?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œGo ahead and let me see it, then.”
    Georgia set her glass on the wicker stand. She pulled the envelope from her blouse cuff. “Here.”
    Jenny removed the folded piece of browned paper from the envelope, leveled her eyes at Georgia, who sat again in a chair that faced the swing. She unfolded it and read without any expression what was written.
    What we done with Jenny was law , it began.
    With decisive, nimble movements, she then refolded the sheet and set it beside her on the swing. “What we done with Jenny was law,” she quoted, low-voiced.
    Georgia could hear her own strained breathing. The answers to the questions she wanted to ask had already come through Jenny’s few gestures and by the distant penciled injunction. She felt she already knew the answers, but had to pose the questions that would precede them in any case. “Jenny? What was it?”
    Abruptly, disconcertingly, Jenny laughed. “It was their precinct, their holy little … well, wasn’t it?”
    â€œNo, I mean what happened?”
    And as abruptly the laughter stopped.
    â€œMy dear ridiculous Georgia, please. What do you want from me? It was a lifetime ago.”
    â€œBut then what are those other names?”
    â€œJesus,” she said, and her eyes ran the length of the rain gutter. “They all just, they all—”
    Somewhere down the block two dogs began barking.
    â€œCutts, he?”
    Jenny’s lips closed into a fine, straight line.
    â€œDesmond too?”
    â€œNo, not Desmond.”
    Softly the rain began