Free Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman Page A

on her quickly, wrapping the sheet around her head and shoulders. I threw her down on the bed while she squealed protestations that turned to softer noises when I set my mouth to the middle of her, her own mouth a damp indentation in the sheet.
    At length, we breakfasted and took coffee. Dora cleaned up and put on a summer dress, as well as the hat with the dried rose, while I selected a tawny vest and my favorite sky-blue tie.
    “I hope the old sawbones knows what he’s doing. It would be a shame to bleed on this fine summer outfit,” I said.
    “Bleed all you want, as long as you pass,” she said, adjusting a garter.
    “Me? What about as long as you pass?”
    “Oh, I’ll do just fine.”
    “Of course. I forgot that you took one of these before.”
    “That was unkind, sir,” she said, smiling, then reapplying lipstick. “I will remind you that one of us was rolling around Paris and London in the most undesirable company while the other was still drawing hopscotch squares on the sidewalk.”
    “Yes, and one of us put down her hopscotch chalk and marched straight for the altar.”
    “A frightful mistake. I insist on a civil ceremony this time.”
    “A pity you weren’t a Catholic. You could have gotten it annulled. You could have said you showed up in your confirmation dress and this mean priest changed all the words around.”
    “My point, sir. You used that one before.”
    “No, I didn’t! When?”
    “On a whiskey roar at your brother’s in May. The same evening in which you told everyone what a good teacher I would make because the perfection of my bottom would stun the class into silence when I turned my back to write on the blackboard.”
    “Forty-love,” I conceded. “Now, if your face is sufficiently painted, I suggest we get that blood test before my syphilis finds my forwarding address.”
     
     
     
    WE TOOK THE measly and petty dirt roads that surrounded Whitbrow until they joined up with the highway that led to the mill town. Fat splats of rain hit the windshield about halfway there, but the sky withheld the deluge that farmers across six counties had been concocting strange prayers and even writing letters to the president to bring. One dispossessed family walking down the road was glad the rain had not come yet. The father carried a mattress on his back and looked only where he was going, but the wife and the older children watched our car pass them as if we might have the deed to their new house rolled up in the glove box.
    By two o’clock the blood was sitting in vials at the clinic waiting to be sniffed for corruption. Eudora found a telephone and rang her lawyer in Michigan, who confirmed that her divorce was settled and the papers would be in her hands within days, provided the post office did its job.
    We decided to celebrate, so we went to a little family joint called the Victoria Café. Our roast beef, rich and fatty, would have tasted better without the image of the starving family marching down the road.
    “I wonder if they have a soup kitchen here,” she said.
    “I suppose. Why?”
    “I should like to work in it.”
    I said nothing, just looked at her and kept chewing.
    She continued.
    “I know it’s not practical, or perhaps even possible, it’s just that it’s so damned dismal here, and it’s hard to eat roast beef.”
    “You want to work in a soup kitchen so you’ll feel better about eating roast beef?”
    “Do you think things are worse here than in Whitbrow?”
    “A mill town with two out of three mills boarded up is a hard place to scratch up a nickel. I suppose it is worse. At least in Whitbrow they can grow enough to eat. I mean, nobody there is starving, but they haven’t got things .”
    “I know they haven’t,” she said. “Do you know that the teacher of the lower grades makes a present of a bar of soap to her best pupil every month, and the kids fight over it. A bar of soap.”
    She looked out the window at a freckled old man who stopped on the