over her husband’s hairy, boil-spattered shoulder.
So that was why they were out back of Lester’s, smoking and spitting, with Grady staring off into the woods, raging silently, and Teddy beside him, keeping him company, waiting for Grady to make a decision about what to do next, just the way that it had always been. Teddy had already paved the way for a possible departure from Lester’s, and the memory of Kathleen Cover, by telling Grady about a party at Darryl Shiff’s place, and Darryl knew how to throw a good party. He had a nice sideline in distilling his own alcohol using a pair of five-gallon oil cans, two pressure cookers, and some scavenged plastic and copper tubing. Darryl was classy too: he oak-aged the alcohol by adding to it a little wood, smoked and charred so that the natural sugars caramelized. It lent his moonshine a distinctive color and taste, and the batch he was offering for tasting tonight had been aging for over a year.
So there’d be free booze at the party and, it was rumored, some out-of-town women too. Grady needed a woman even more than Teddy did, which was saying something given that Teddy perpetually walked around town with something in his pants resembling the state of Florida in miniature.
Grady blew a smoke ring, then another and another, trying to fit each between the dissipating dream of the last. Teddy slapped at a bug on his neck, then wiped the smeared remains of it on his pants. It looked like a big bitch too. If this went on any longer, they’d find his withered remains beside this bench in the morning, every drop of his blood now residing in the digestive systems of half the female mosquitoes in Maine. Overwintering mosquitoes were rare this far north, and the rest should all have been dead. Teddy wondered if there might not be something in all of this global warming shit after all, although he kept it to himself: in Falls End, coming out with pronouncements like that was tantamount to Communism.
‘How much longer we going to stay out here, Grady?’ he asked. ‘I just squashed a bug looked like a jet plane.’
‘You want to go back inside?’ said Grady. ‘You do, you can just go right ahead.’
‘I don’t unless you want to. Do you? Want to go back in, I mean.’
‘Not so much.’
Teddy nodded.
‘I guess there’s no point in telling you she ain’t worth it.’
‘Ain’t worth what?’
‘All this mooning, all this aggravation.’
‘You ever been with her?’
‘God, no.’ Teddy said it with some feeling, and Grady seemed to take it as meaning that Kathleen Cover was out of Teddy’s league, which was true. On the other hand, Teddy wouldn’t have climbed into the sack with Kathleen Cover if God Himself had sent the Archangel Michael down with entry instructions and a diagram. The woman was such bad news she should have arrived with a pastor in tow and a letter of condolence from the government. Teddy would rather take his chances with the mosquitoes. At least with them he had a chance of not being sucked completely dry.
‘She was fine,’ said Grady. ‘Very fine.’
Teddy wasn’t about to argue, so he let a couple of beats go by, and another bite. Damn, but he’d be swollen in the morning. It really was beyond understanding.
‘How is your sister doing?’ asked Teddy. Teddy thought that Marielle Vetters was fine, very fine; not that he’d ever done anything about it, not with Grady still living and breathing, and assuming Marielle might even be willing to consider him, which Teddy doubted. Teddy had been around the Vetters family for so long that he almost counted as blood, but it wasn’t just his longstanding proximity that might have given Marielle pause. Teddy wasn’t an attractive man: he was short, and overweight, and had started balding almost as soon as adolescence hit. He lived in his childhood home, left to him by his mother in her will along with $525 and a fourth generation Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. His garage and yard were littered with bike and automobile parts, some acquired legally and some not so legally. He did custom jobs when asked, and regular repairs to keep the roof above his head. Teddy was good enough at his work that some of the bikers had been known to use him, paying him hard cash along with a little weed or blow, and sometimes one of the hookers they ran as a sweetener if they were