Sleigh Bells for the Hayride

The woman who came to pick up the heroin was deaf. Later Glen realized he’d known that from the minute he saw her. There must have been some little clue, a certain darting of the eyes or clench-jawed expression, something he recognized from all the years with his brother, Donald. But there would never be a way to go back and determine.

The Palms was exactly how it sounded—a huge nondescript condo development with pink stucco walls and vaguely Spanish flourishes built around a weedy inner courtyard with too little shade. It was early December and hot, even for Florida, a depressing heat that made you think longingly of those old paintings of places in New England, people harvesting pumpkins and hunting turkeys with blunderbusses, wearing Pilgrim hats and whatnot, getting the sleigh bells out to put on the horses for the Christmas hayride. Here in Jacksonville it was sweaty and humid and eighty-two degrees, and a rank smell blew up into the courtyard from the Saint Johns River half a mile off.

He didn’t know why he’d agreed to bring the stuff for Arturo in the first place, other than that he could use an extra hundred bucks for going five minutes out of his way, which was how Arturo had put it to him. Glen knew there were drugs going around the construction crew, but he generally stayed uninvolved other than smoking the occasional joint in the truck after work with one or two of the other guys. Arturo made himself out to be some big-shot dealer—heroin, morphine, meth, weed, X, any kind of pills, got your Xanax, your OxyContin, you name it. Maybe that’s why he had agreed to do it—just to see to what degree Arturo was full of shit.

So here he was standing in the breezeway of this bullshit condo courtyard in Englewood with a half-ounce bag of brownish powder in his work pants, waiting by the Coke machine where Arturo had told him to. And then this deaf woman comes. When she walked up, he was holding the baggie in his hand, checking out the color and the texture. It seemed totally harmless—some stuff that looked like brown sugar in a plastic bag. How could that possibly lead to trouble? Maybe that was how he knew the woman was deaf—she came toward him frantically waving her hands for him to put the bag away, but she didn’t make a sound.

He was amused a little. A quick scan of the area showed they were all alone there near the stairwell. Yeah, okay, it was a felony, technically, but only if you got caught, and there wasn’t anyone around to catch them. Some old dude with a walker, maybe, scuffling through the crabgrass.

The woman pulled him farther back into the recess past the Coke machine. “Okay, okay,” he said to her, and held up a hand to calm her down. “Where’s the money? Just give it to me, and we’ll get this over quick.” Again he pulled the bag out of his pocket and again she was in quite a hurry to push his hand back. Still hadn’t said anything.

The obvious thing—she was dark skinned, had dark hair, high cheekbones, most likely Latina, but he couldn’t tell for certain—would have been to assume she didn’t speak English, but when he talked to her more slowly now, it was to let her see his lips, like he’d always done with Donnie. “I need money,” he said to her. “Arturo”—he waved his hand vaguely in the air to indicate someone far away—“said you’d have the money ready. I just need to get it from you. Or somebody.” Then he did it automatically, began signing—I need money.

She looked surprised, but pleasantly so. Her hands started moving, but she was going way too fast. He hadn’t seen Donnie face-to-face in years, so he was out of practice. “Slow down,” he mouthed to her.

She swiped a strand of hair from her eyes and nodded. She looked as if she might be on the verge of crying. He really hoped she wouldn’t. His intention had been to get rid of the baggie, collect the thousand dollars, peel off a hundred-dollar bill for himself as Arturo had said to, take the money to Arturo, and go get himself a nice steak dinner for a change, maybe at one of the touristy places down along the waterfront. He hadn’t bargained on complications or anyone crying, much less this woman. She looked like a decent type, not a heroin addict. She was only a little over five feet tall, about a foot shorter than he was. Her dark hair was neatly tied back, and her skin was clear for a woman her age—he guessed she was in her forties—and she wore a modest knee-length dress with white shoes that looked like what you’d wear if you were a nurse or a housekeeper at a hotel. Her eyes were very dark and very large, and he could see how he might be tricked into feeling sorry for her.

For about the past minute she had been signing frantically. He moved his right hand along the back of his left hand, fingers to wrist, to say Slow down. He hadn’t been paying attention to her. The only thing he’d picked up was the sign for dead. If someone was dead, he was out of here. “Slow down,” he said to her out loud. She stood in front of him, breathing heavily. There was sweat on her upper lip and her collar was damp. He looked out across the courtyard again. No one there but a Latino kid riding slow on a bicycle, heading out toward the main street that ran by the complex. Rush of traffic out beyond the parking lot, loud whoosh of the industrial-size air conditioner near the stairwell, buzz of the Coke machine. It seemed like maybe a good idea to leave, but the woman needed someone who knew sign language. He had known it all his life. Donnie, his older brother, lived in some town full of wealthy people up in Connecticut and made his living doing animation for TV. He was fantastic at drawing, could always do anything with a pencil faster than anyone alive, as far back as Glen could remember.

He was about to leave. It wasn’t like he owed that dumbass Arturo anything. He could just take Arturo’s shit back to him and tell him to make sure next time he sent someone on an errand it wasn’t all fucked up, with deaf women signing about dead people. Why was she doing that again?

“Look,” he said, holding out the bag. “Do you want this?” he asked, moving his lips exaggeratedly, like he never used to do with Donnie. But then, when he was little, with Donnie as his most constant companion, signing had seemed almost more natural than speaking.

No, she signed, she didn’t want it. Her husband did.

And where was he?

She motioned for him to follow her. He made the sign for money. Was the husband going to give him money? But the woman didn’t see. She was headed up the stairs.

From the third floor you could look out past the courtyard and the parking lot to some tin-roofed warehouses and barbed-wire fences and a highway with trash floating in the drainage ditch. A few skimpy palm trees, their mop-like tops tossed around by the ocean breeze. And far off there, almost a mirage, the Saint Johns River, a low glitter in the evening sunlight, marked by the twisting shapes of birds.

The apartment was dark and stuffy and smelled like sweat and cigarettes and weed and something that had been cooking on the stove. All the lights were off, but the blinds were open on the window, so it was pretty easy to see the dead guy on the sofa. He lay on his stomach, his face turned in toward the cushions, one hand hanging limply down onto the rug. It had been awhile since Glen had seen a dead person.

The woman seemed unconcerned. She’d seated herself at a small table over by the window and was busy writing something on a legal pad. Clearly, somebody needed to call the police, and maybe the woman couldn’t do it because she didn’t speak. But of course she could text. Back when Glen used to have a cell phone, the flip kind where you had to press the buttons over and over to get the letters you wanted, Donnie would send him texts telling him to get a smartphone so they could communicate more regularly. But he didn’t want a smartphone. The name alone suggested all sorts of judgments and obligations. And he didn’t like to text in the first place because he wasn’t a good speller. Was it possible to text 911? Somebody needed to call the police, and if it was going to be him, it wasn’t going to happen while he was carrying around a baggie of heroin in his pocket. No, the heroin was going to have to go straight back to Arturo, and quickly.

The dead guy rolled over on the sofa. Something hot and dizzy happened in Glen’s brain when he saw that, and he jumped a little. He would have yelled if the apartment hadn’t been so quiet. He looked over at the woman, who was laughing behind one hand. It was the first time he’d seen her look anything other than frantic or exhausted, the two states she seemed to oscillate between. She wagged her finger at the man on the sofa as if to say, No, no, that’s not the dead one, and pointed at the letter she was writing on the legal pad. The previously dead guy started snoring softly and the woman took a minute longer to finish scratching her note on the pad. The air conditioning kicked on. The sun came down lower and shone full through the blinds. The woman signed to ask him if he wanted a glass of water, and he signed back no, and she asked if he wanted a beer—and he did want a beer, actually, but he said out loud, “No,” and the dead guy’s face twitched.

The woman came over and turned on a table lamp and motioned him to sit in a chair and handed him the letter she’d written. She had fine, clear handwriting, and Glen sensed that it was a well-written letter in general, all the way down to the spelling and the commas. It looked like the kind of letter Donnie would write, and her handwriting might have been even more perfect than his . . . prettier, for sure, more feminine. It made him look at the woman again to see if there was anything about her to find attractive. She was staring at him expectantly, though, and she frowned a little, so he started reading.

The upshot of the letter was that her husband’s uncle ran a funeral home, and she and her husband worked for him, picking up and transporting dead bodies. Today they had picked one up but had so far failed to deliver it. This meant they were in trouble. Could he help? She would pay him one hundred dollars to help her get the body to the funeral home. It was the second time today he’d been offered a hundred bucks. Maybe, somehow, there was a future in all of this.

There were several things he wanted to ask. First, he signed to her the best he could, he wanted to know if the man on the couch was supposed to be the dead person or her husband. At that she laughed quietly, once again putting a hand over her mouth, as if she were doing something impolite. When she laughed, her brown eyes glowed. There was something moderately attractive about her, he decided. He wondered what she would sound like if she spoke—would her voice be high or low? He could still remember Donnie’s voice, how it sounded like some weird kind of imitation. You could understand him pretty well, or at least Glen could, who heard him speak most often. But eventually he had quit speaking altogether. When Glen asked him why, Donnie said that speaking was like walking along a strange trail without ever being able to look down at your feet.

She nodded at the man on the couch. Husband, she signed. Not dead. Drunk. She started to sign something more, but he wasn’t following it, and she grabbed the pad from him and wrote for a minute and tore out a page and handed it to him. We picked up the body and he was afraid if we went straight to the funeral home we would miss Arturo, the note said. But when we got here Arturo said no one could come until 5:00 and so he got drunk and passed out. She nodded at the sofa as if to say, Lo and behold, there he is.

OK, he signed back. And then, Where is the dead body? And she told him that it was in the van. Why didn’t she just drive it to the funeral home herself? Because she didn’t have a license.

When they got down to the parking lot, he didn’t ask to see the body, and he made a conscious effort not to turn and look as he got in the driver’s seat and started the engine. The windows had been left rolled down, he noticed. Every time the van slowed you could feel the smell creep up, as if it had tentacles. Four hours, she signed to him, motioning with her head toward the body. Too long. She circled her closed hand over her heart—sorry, that meant.

He remembered most of the language pretty well. Pointing him along the sun-blanched streets and eventually onto I-95, she kept up a brisk conversation, asking questions and telling him about herself— How had he learned sign language? His brother was deaf. Where was his brother now? North. What kind of work did Glen do? Building. Had he grown up here? Yes. She had grown up here too. She lost her hearing after a childhood illness. She could still remember sounds, wind in the trees and car engines and human voices. Glen watched her carefully, glancing back and forth between her eyes and her hands and the traffic. He took his hands off the wheel for a second. Married—he signed to her. How long? One year. Was her husband deaf? Only when he wanted to be. They both smiled at that. Funny, Glen signed.

This was something he also remembered, the easy familiarity of the language. It was more intimate than speech in a way. It was like being with another person in a foreign country, or at least it’s what he imagined such a thing would be like. You understood each other but no one understood you, and even if it was in a van driving along I-95 with no one else around, the feeling was the same. In elementary school he and Donnie used to sit together during lunch hour, at the picnic table next to the monkey bars, and sign about the girls in Donnie’s grade. They used to laugh at him for sitting with Donnie, a kid in the special-needs classes. Most of the kids didn’t know Donnie was his brother. Sometimes Glen would try to ignore Donnie over at the table where he sat all alone watching the kids on the monkey bars, but he could never do it. It was as if he were seeing recess from Donnie’s eyes, experiencing it in a silent whirl of sunlight.

They drove south down I-95 until it was almost fully dark, and then she motioned him to turn off east, onto Racetrack Road, which led toward the ocean. They drove along with only the hum of crickets out the window and the passing cars, and there was no music on the radio. It occurred to him that they hadn’t spoken in a while. He fell into a habit he’d had as a kid, which was to look at the world as if it were a movie screen with the sound turned off, trying to understand it the way Donnie would understand it. The colors and the shapes and the sharp lines between things, depth and perception, height and distance, that would be everything, and for that reason the world would all be alive in the way that made Donnie so good at drawing pictures. He would try just to see, to cut off all the other senses, and to know, for instance, what a leaf looked like as it fell to the sidewalk during a storm, or how a train appeared when it passed, as noiseless and smooth as a fish. He tried to do this now, for the first time in a long time, and the woman sat silently next to him, her arm resting on the console between them.

He considered what it would be like if he and the woman were married, if they did this together every day, if it were his job to drive dead bodies to the funeral home. Would that be better or worse? He had given up on the idea of getting married and having children. There were too many times nowadays when he couldn’t get construction work, and he had no education and he wasn’t particularly responsible or resourceful or motivated. How had it gotten like that? When they were growing up, Glen had assumed that he would be the one to succeed. Now Donnie had a wife and a son and a nice house in a place where it wasn’t so hot, where Glen imagined the air was crisper and cleaner and the visual lines were sharp and regular and strong.

You could smell the dead guy when you stopped at a light. The rest of the time the only reminder was the occasional vibration from the box when the van hit a bump in the road. The box was like a cheaper version of a coffin, clamps on the side, a dull metal finish, dents and scratches that made it look like it had been beaten around some. He tried not to think about the dead guy or how the dead guy might have died and tried to imagine that he and the woman were driving somewhere else on some different type of business. Most work he’d done in his life was like that—something you did while you tried to imagine doing something else.

He wondered if the woman was hungry. He was hungry himself. He signed to ask her if she wanted to stop and eat, and she smiled at him and nodded. It had been years since he’d been on this road in this part of Duval County, and it had changed. When he was a kid, they used to drive out this way to Ponte Vedra, and the road then had mostly been a two-lane strip between palm trees and longleaf pines, the occasional shanty serving cold beer and crab. Now there were strip malls and fast- food joints. The woman motioned him to the drive-through at Wendy’s and signed that she didn’t want to leave the body and go inside. He had foolishly imagined sitting down with her somewhere, realized now that he wanted to get a better look at her. He had started to like the way she looked, despite the dress and shoes that seemed like part of a uniform.

When they got to the window, the woman tried to hand him a ten, and Glen waved her off and handed a twenty over to the Black girl who gave him his Cokes and the bag of food. It seemed like he could go whole days now without seeing another White person. He didn’t mind. It was the White people who generally looked down on him.

The girl counted out his change. Her features drew inward slightly, and she looked at him in a curious way, and he wondered if she could smell the body. It wasn’t that noticeable to him anymore.

He turned back onto the road, and the woman handed him his cheeseburger and fries, and she jabbed a straw in his Coke and put it in the console for him and set two napkins next to the Coke where he could grab them easily while he was driving. It was just like they were two people who were together all the time, and they were going on a trip someplace exciting. He could see how he was getting attached to the idea of this woman even though he had been with her only for an hour or two, and it made him angry at himself, his stupidity and his desperation. So they knew the same language. Did that make him anybody in her life, somebody important? He had taken on this bullshit job for Arturo, and so far he had put himself through a couple additional hours of trouble, and he hadn’t seen any money for it yet, and in fact he was out fifteen dollars for the Wendy’s food, which wasn’t what he’d imagined eating tonight anyway.

The woman waved her small hand slowly out the window, letting the breeze blow through her fingers. She held her chicken sandwich in her left hand and ate it in tiny bites while she stared out the windshield at the line of trees against the purple sky. He reached over and touched her arm to get her attention, and she smiled at him. That made him feel good. He wasn’t such an unattractive person. There was nothing much notable about his appearance, he guessed, but he was in decent shape, and he was a little younger than he supposed she was, and he looked like someone who’d worked all day instead of gotten drunk and high and passed out on a couch.

“Does your husband sign?” he asked her. He could see how quickly her eyes moved to his lips. She shook her head vigorously and looked out the window. Even though it was mostly dark inside the van, she’d known what he was asking almost before he’d finished. His brother, he remembered, had an unsettling way of knowing things. One time he and Donnie had been walking on the railroad tracks, arguing about the new hockey team, the Florida Panthers, about whether you had to like them just because they were from Florida. It was stupid, Glen was saying, a winter sport where there wasn’t any winter, and Donnie had tapped him on the arm, Is there a train coming? And there was—not close enough to be dangerous, just now coming into view, in fact, beyond the bend at Southside Park, but there behind them sure enough. How had Donnie known? Glen asked. Because he could tell, Donnie signed, that Glen was hearing something but not listening. Only then did he register the clanging of the bells at the railroad crossing far away, though it had been in his mind the whole time.

Now the woman directed him off on a narrower road to the right, and he drove the van slowly, enjoying the quiet night out the window and the dark line of pine trees eclipsing the moon. He wanted the drive to last as long as possible. When they got to wherever they were going, there would be unpleasant work to do.

The woman reached in a purse down at her feet, pulled out her cell phone, and started texting. He’d lost his own cell phone at a bar on purpose one night a few weeks ago after work, and he’d avoided replacing it. He didn’t want a cell phone. He hated them. He hated Facebook, seeing his high-school friends and hearing about their dogs and babies and dying grandmothers. He disliked communicating with people in general, and he didn’t want to talk with them any more than was necessary, even if this meant that people from work and his mother and Donnie were constantly frustrated with him for not being available. Arturo, in fact, was very likely freaking out right now. He thought about asking the woman to text Arturo, but he didn’t know his number. It was strange how easy it was to forget you had a thousand dollars’ worth of heroin in your pocket. It didn’t worry him much. He wasn’t particularly scared of Arturo. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been scared of anything.

He fumbled around on the panel and found the dome light and turned it on. She looked up from the phone, startled, and motioned for him to keep going straight, as if there were any other direction. The road was notable only for that one thing, its utter straightness and lack of available turnoffs, and maybe for the constant, unbroken line of trees. He had never been on this road in his entire life, he was sure of it.

Who are you calling? he signed. Husband, she said. He’d be awake now, she hoped. Glen checked the dark road in front of him and took his arms from the wheel for a moment and crossed them over his chest, the sign for love. He hadn’t made that sign in a long, long time. He raised his eyebrows, formed his face into a question. Do you love your husband? he meant. He had no idea why he would ask her that.

It surprised him that she answered so quickly, her fingers opening and snapping shut. No. He looked back at the road and turned off the dome light. In a minute she tapped him on the arm, and he turned the light on again. Life is hard, she signed.

He nodded, although he wasn’t sure he agreed. It wasn’t a subject he considered much, the relative difficulty of existence compared to some presumably less difficult state. But maybe it was hard if you were a deaf woman married to someone you didn’t love, just because that person was the only one who would marry you, possibly, despite your dark brown eyes and quite attractively smooth complexion, and your job was retrieving dead bodies, and your husband couldn’t even manage to do that responsibly, deliver a dead guy in a crate, because he was a drunk and an addict and a fuckup and most likely an asshole too. Maybe then life was hard. But for Glen life wasn’t hard. You got up in the morning, and you shaved or didn’t shave, ate or didn’t eat. Four or five days a week, depending on the weather, you were on the job by 8:00 a.m. and the other days you weren’t, so you slept a little later and went to Waffle House and read the newspaper. Hard? Was that the right word? There wasn’t much hard about it, except on days like today when, for some reason, stupidly, you had saddled yourself with a baggie of heroin and a dead body and someone who needed your help, and the road you were on seemed to stretch forever through the live oaks draped with Spanish moss and the pine trees. Then life got a little hard and it made you tired and you wondered why you were doing things.

He turned on the radio, found the classic rock station he usually listened to. He was watching the road in the headlights, so she had to tap him on the arm before she signed, You like music? He shrugged. He used to like it, but he didn’t pay much attention to it anymore. The songs were the same songs he’d been listening to for twenty or thirty years, so he didn’t really hear them, and when they played a new song he hadn’t heard before, it annoyed him, and he turned off the radio.

You? he signed back. She smiled. Yes, on the one hand it was a dumb question. But he remembered that Donnie liked music, that he claimed he could hear it. It took him a second to remember the sign, but then it came to him. He frowned and put his index finger to his chin and twisted it. I’m serious.

She looked ahead at the road and edged forward on the seat like she was searching for a familiar landmark. I remember it, she signed. Music. And then she swayed back and forth for a moment. The moon rode smoothly along and the dark trees flashed in the purple light. What was she listening to? What did it sound like, a kind of music that only you could hear?

Soon she stopped, and she started texting. Husband? he signed, taking his hands off the wheel. He wasn’t even sure she could see him. She signed back something he didn’t understand. He shook his head and turned on the dome light. She spelled it out. Uncle. He turned off the light, and they drove along in silence under the retreating trees. She looked at the phone and didn’t seem to be seeing anything. It began to bother him for the first time that he didn’t know her name.

The trees on the driver’s side gave way suddenly, and there was a road, then a flashing stoplight, a line of cars, an outlet mall that materialized out of nowhere, the names of the stores blazing garishly. She motioned for him to turn, and he was on an access road with traffic, and there was a sign saying two miles to Ponte Vedra, and then she was motioning him to turn into the funeral home, a place with low palm trees in even rows and clusters of brightly lit glass globes on tall posts.

She signaled him to pull behind the building where there were no trees and only a halogen lamp above the doorway, a few late-season moths flitting strobically in and out of the light. At her direction he backed the van up to a concrete ramp to the doorway. He shoved the gearshift into park. She looked around the parking lot like something was missing. She started texting again. The last of the sun was going down, and he watched car lights swing into the entrance of the outlet mall. A few minutes ago he had thought they were the only people left in the world.

The woman opened the door and got out of the van. He didn’t know what she was doing. He got out himself. She hurried to the back door of the funeral home and pulled on it, but it wouldn’t open and she squatted there on the concrete ramp and cupped both her hands over her mouth and started to cry.

That was the last thing he needed. Even a steak dinner wasn’t worth it. He knelt down next to her, but her eyes were closed and he didn’t want to startle her with his hands. She smelled, when you got this close, like bleach. It wasn’t a bad smell. He hazarded a touch on her shoulder and was surprised to feel her shaking hard under his fingertips. She took one hand from her mouth and wiped tears from her eyes and looked at him with a grateful smile, her eyes big and watery. He took her hand in his. Her trembling fingers were tiny and thin. He hadn’t looked at a woman’s face, into her eyes that way, in longer than he could remember.

Some kind of bug swooped down from the light and buzzed against his forehead, and he swatted at it until it flew off. He thought this would make her laugh but it didn’t. She kept staring at him as if gauging his capacity to save her from something.

Trouble, she signed. Trouble.

A wave of fatigue passed over him. There was a leaden feel to his hands and his feet, as if they were weighted and attached to pulleys. He had spent most of the day in a ditch clearing out rocks and debris for a new water line, and his head was still filled vaguely with the noise of the backhoe. This wasn’t what he wanted to be doing. His apartment would be dark and quiet, and his cat, Rusty, would be waiting for him by the door. Every night when he finished watching TV and went to bed, Rusty curled up on his pillow.

“What’s wrong?” he said to her out loud, making sure she watched him there under the light.

Then there came a long, confused explanation that included spelling things on her phone and signing to him and gesturing. The uncle felt sick and had gone home and wasn’t coming back. He was teaching the nephew a lesson. But there were rules about handling bodies. This meant trouble.

Dull-colored moths batted at the halogen lamp. He questioned his capacity to fix anything. What do I do, he signed.

She stood and walked away a little distance and used the cell phone while he thought of his dark, quiet apartment. She walked back over to him. She signed, Husband, and held the phone out to him.

The text, presumably from the husband, said, He won’t come out there. He’s being a dick. Just dump the fucker.

What? her response said.

Dump the fucking body by the door, the husband said. How’d you get out there?Who’s with you?

Nice man. He’s helping me.

Tell him if he touches you I’ll kill him.

That was the end of the texts. She made a circle over her heart. Sorry, she was telling him. She had called him a nice man. He could knock the husband out with a single punch, he knew it. He could strangle him easily with his bare hands. Dumb fucker passed out on a couch. He’d love to go back there right now.

Not smart, he signed.

What? she signed back.

What he wants.

She shrugged and looked down at the pavement. He reached out and lifted her chin with his fingers, feeling a pang at how she let her eyes be guided to his lips. “What’s your name?” he said to her.

A-l-e-s-a. Alesa.

She stared into his eyes and he didn’t move and she walked off again and started texting. In a minute she came back over to him and held out the screen for him to see.

I said dump the fucker there. Do what I say. Jerry will have to come out there unless he wants to get in trouble too. Tell that asshole to help you get the fucking guy out of the van. Do it. Now.

Circle over the heart again. Sorry again. She smiled at him sheepishly. Yeah.

Tell that fucker I’m coming over to kill him, Glen wanted to sign, but he was tired and it was too hard to figure out how. What do you want? he signed instead.

She motioned with her head to the rear of the van.

“Okay,” he said out loud and went over and pulled up the door handle and swung the doors open wide. The sour smell wafted past him and then he didn’t smell anything. She came and stood next to him and they looked at the cheap metal casket.

How, he signed.

She held one finger up to say wait a second, then she typed on her phone: Jerry and my husband do this part.

He shrugged, and she shook her head slowly to say yes, she understood, she was sorry things were so difficult. He jumped up into the van and held his breath and got to the far end of the box and slid it forward with a grunt. It was about as heavy as he figured it would be. He was trying not to breathe in, but he couldn’t help it and his nostrils filled with the smell. He shoved the box halfway out the door and jumped down and motioned for her to come up next to him. He showed her how to get her arms underneath, and then he pulled a little so that the weight could settle onto both of their arms, but he could tell it was too heavy for her to hold on her own. He held it up by himself and nodded to her to get up in the van. It had cooled off a good deal since the sun went down, but it was still warm, and now that he had no hands, beads of sweat trickled down his forehead and stung his eyes. He shook his head vigorously and squinted to see what she was doing. She was hunched at the box and pushing as he would have told her. He pulled on his end and the box shook loose and started shifting bit by bit out the door.

He wanted to warn her not to push it too close to the edge, but there was no way to do that with his hands occupied, and he watched it happen helplessly, her on her knees and shoving as hard as she could to get the box out. He shouted, “Whoa, hey, whoa!” but it did no good. The box slid forward suddenly as if its path had been greased, and the far end slid with a scraping noise off the bed. He tried to catch it and ease it back, but he only stumbled, and the box twisted and turned sideways and fell on top of him there on the pavement. The box caught on his foot and he could feel his ankle turn and pop under the weight, and he shouted and struggled out from underneath to find the woman standing with her mouth open and her hands holding the sides of her head and the box tipped on its side with the clasp broken and the dead man’s arm splayed on the ground.

He scrambled to his feet. The sight of the arm startled him at first, as if he needed to defend himself against it somehow, but then everything was still except for the moths tapping against the light. He had a vague impression of the woman and her strange moaning sounds, but he was taken for a moment with the idea of the body, with an awareness of its strange, inert integrity, how alone it was, how completely forgotten the person it used to be. He saw himself in his apartment, as immobile as the body in the casket, one arm hanging off the couch, Rusty licking his dead fingertips. No one would know or care.

Except maybe the woman, who came to his aid now, helping to steady him on his feet. OK? OK? OK? she signed to him feverishly. Her arm was around his waist and her shoulder was under his shoulder, supporting him. She looked up at him with her warm brown eyes.

“Okay,” he said. Then she bent to the casket, trying to tip it back right side up.

He wondered later—for years—what might have happened had he not seen the cop car from the corner of his eye. Was there a threshold that could have been crossed, a connection that might have been more than temporary, a future that could have been other than imaginary, something he might not have betrayed. At the traffic light on the road to the outlet mall, the cop car hesitated, not moving forward as the other cars did. That was the first time he’d thought of the heroin in quite a while. He imagined what they looked like, the two of them and the dead body, there in the circle of the halogen light.

The woman, Alesa, was occupied with the business of the casket. The cop car shifted lanes and made the turn in their direction. He looked down at the part in Alesa’s dark hair and her tiny hands fumbling at the clasp on the box. Already, he was trying to remember her face. He hobbled around the van to the passenger door, opened it, shoved the baggie of heroin in the glove box, and stumbled across the parking lot on his swollen ankle toward the road to the outlet mall. He moved out of reach of the halogen light and knew he was swallowed into darkness. This was what came of all your plans. Maybe not for some people, but for him. He saw the cop car turn into the funeral home and Alesa still bent over the casket, unaware. He watched until he saw her turn to where she thought he was standing.

Then he pushed ahead as fast as his leg would carry him. The ankle was badly sprained. He wouldn’t be going back to work, anyway. He was glad Arturo didn’t know where he lived. If he could get to the outlet mall, he could find a ride or take a bus home. He tried to think of something pleasant—how he would go visit Donnie and his family soon, up north where it was cold and snowy, where it was a real holiday. He didn’t turn to look behind him. There was no need to. He could picture even in the midst of his reverie—the frosty wind, the flying snow, he and Donnie and the family under warm blankets in a sleigh, gliding smoothly over the countryside—the moment when she turned to find him gone.

Read more from Issue 18.1.