Recapitulation: Barry and Jenna, partners in grave robbing, have set about to rob Gertrude Wilborough, a wealthy dowager. In preparation, they made a dry run at the funeral of Jimmy Engles, a boy too old for his body. Jenna took offense at Barry’s seriousness, and Barry took offense at Jenna’s frivolity. Now they come together to make a grab at the brass ring.
The first rays of gentle sunshine brushed Barry’s wrinkled brow, stirring him from his uneasy slumber. Another night on the lumpy couch, another night tossing and turning and shifting as the clock ticked each second away. That constant metronome set rhythm to his life, but now it kept him from enjoying one night’s sleep. Well, that and Jenna.
Six fifty. The funeral would start at ten. Lots of time. He crept into his bedroom. Jenna lay sprawled all over his bed, as if dropped from a height of fifteen feet and left to rot. Her head lolled towards the mirror while her arms pointed towards the window. Her legs had curled beneath her in a pseudo-fetal form, but they twitched as if she was taking slight shocks to her spine. Whatever clothes remained on the bed when she’d fell asleep, they’d now tangled beneath her, through her limbs, a black sock wrapped up in her brown hair, coal unearthed on a plowed farm. How could anyone this innocent looking be so bitchy while awake?
Barry entered the bathroom, leaving the door askew and placing a cinder block just behind it. How she managed to find a cinder block in fifteen minutes yesterday, he couldn’t figure out. Why he hadn’t tried to lock her out for good, he wasn’t sure. Probably because she’d accuse him of stealing all her stuff, all her remaindered clothing and rejected cast-offs and whatever intangibles she kept in the purse that got hidden somewhere. Strange that she’d hide her purse and never take it anywhere. It was a nice purse, some dark black designer thing, Coach? Nice deep sheen to the leather, deep pouch, thick straps. Never saw it again. Strange that she’d take such good care of something, anything. Everything else she’d owned or controlled exuded an air of disrepair about it.
Including him. Barry stared at himself in the mirror. His hair, what remained, drifted off his head, like smoke frozen in time. The bald scalp shone. He felt it, smooth as a watermelon rind. Closed his eyes, felt the lines across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes and reaching from his nose to his mouth, and all the little wrinkles in between. Like a football pre-curing process. Moved his hands down to his belly, hefted it. A mighty strong child, if he’d been pregnant, which he wasn’t. Hell, when was the last time he could look down and see his toes or his dick? He looked down, and added one to whatever number that was. Then, he reached around behind him, lifted his buttocks up inside his boxers. They felt round and full and saggy in his palms. If only he’d been cupping someone’s breasts.
He left the bathroom after brushing his teeth. Jenna’s head now rested at the foot of the bed, while her feet had propped themselves on the headboard. Her arms twisted up beneath her body. It was cute in a way.
Then, to the kitchen. Whole milk. Chocolate kids’ cereal. Much heavier that skim milk and bran flakes. Each spoonful he dredged up from the bowl turned more and more chocolatey, the milk turning as if left next to a trashcan, or a rendering plant. That brown pollution infused him; he tapped the table to some unheard symphony from downstairs, likely keeping beat as
Post breakfast, he opened up the several stained sheets that contained their plan. They were really going to do this. Nothing he’d said, nothing he’d done had turned Jenna away from this plan of action. He looked down and read it one more time, the first of many times that morning he’d read it.
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