Harnett offered an indulgent half-smile. “That’s not exactly true.”
“You’ve never seen it!”
“That’s not how you’ve told it in the past.”
“Well, that’s how I’m telling it now!”
Harnett shot me a look. “Take one guess why he calls her the Befouler.”
I looked at the sleeping hound. Her paws twitched.
Crying John pulled at his beard and looked out at the cemetery. “Okay, so sometimes she poops.” He raised a defiant finger. “But if she poops, then we’re really in business! Anything in Foulie’s poop zone is A-one material. Pee zone somewhat less so.”
“So,” I said, gauging the distance between the men. “You two are friends?”
The word made both men fidget and stare even harder through the window. With a shiver I remembered C-A-S: Remain Calm, Conserve Air, Shallow Grave. As amiable as Crying John seemed, he belonged to a group that held to a grisly code. Harnett and I were both risking something by being here, I had to remember that.
Harnett cleared his throat. “Haven’t seen John in, what?”
“Four years?”
“Four. Or five. The relocation in, where was it?”
“Texas.” Crying John sighed and flexed his fingers. “It’s been some time.”
In the cemetery, workers were breaking for lunch, some moving in groups toward the diner.
“Why does he call you Crying John?” I asked.
Crying John shrugged. “I’m not sure it’s something to talk about.”
“Indulge him,” Harnett said.
The man toyed with his cardboard cup. “It comes from a method. A method I haven’t used in years. I don’t need to, not with Foulie. But back in the day, you know, I’d do what I had to do. I don’t know if I’m really proud of it.”
“You should be,” Harnett said. “It was genius.”
Crying John shook his head. “Don’t be dumb. I just ended up being good at it. I’ve got, I don’t know, overactive tear ducts or something. Always been kind of a crybaby. When I was small I’d cry if there were too many clouds in the sky. Even in high school, when—Well, hell, I don’t have to tell you this. You’re a boy in high school and start crying, you got about ten seconds before the beatings begin, right? But the slightest provocation and bang, the waterworks.”
“You turned a negative into a positive,” Harnett said.
“Hey, I’m learning the trade and I’ve got these eyes that run like wild, so I just put two and two together. I remember the first time, I was scoping out a belly just outside of Glacier National Park, beautiful country, with these snowcapped mountains and pure, crystal lakes and skies so clear they hurt to look at.… ” His eyes began to shine.
“John’s got the Upper Mountain territory,” Harnett said. “Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, some of the Dakotas.”
“Anyway.” Crying John wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m up there and it’s gorgeous and there’s a little funeral going on in the same cemetery where I’m walkin’. Just your standard deal: people in black standing around a coffin looking serious, but for some reason I keep walking toward it, closer and closer, until I’m right there standing next to them like I belong, like I know the dead person, too. Look, maybe it was the mountain air. It’s so cold and sharp sometimes it feels like it just gets inside you and cleans you out, and then you feel all new like you’re kind of reborn. And so I’m standing there feeling reborn and looking at this casket that doesn’t mean anything to me, not a damn thing, and I blink my eyes and sure enough I’m crying, and no one takes it as weird because everyone else is crying, too—and then I think about how my whole life I been crying and how people always get so weird with it and back away like I got a knife, but for once I’m crying and people don’t mind. Not only that, but some of them even reach out and tell me it’s okay. And so I start crying more. It’s not like I can even look away—it’s beautiful country up there, beautiful, every single thing that you see. Now I’m crying louder than anyone, and no one, not a single person questions it. I’m right beside the casket when it hits me.”
“You get to see everything,” I whispered in awe. “I bet you don’t even need newspapers.”
“I do. These days I do. I haven’t used that method since I got Fouler trained. But yeah. It was good work. And there’s no secret