Cadillac Cathedral Read Online Free Page B

he’d seen before.
    He was not aware of the woman until she was nearly upon him. “What do you think you’re doing? Get away from there you !”
    Arvo stepped onto the running board with both arms high, as he might if she’d confronted him with a gun. But he couldn’t keep the grin from his face. He had found himself a beauty here, in need of very little attention. Martin would be pleased.
    The woman stooped to take up a long slice of broken lumber off the ground and came at him as though ready to swat him with it. “Get down off of there right now!” Her large hips and powerful thighs were encased in faded jeans worn through at the knees. Her yellow woolly slippers were no strangers to this dirt.
    “I meant no harm,” he said. “Any damage I can see has been done already by someone else.”
    She came still closer and put a hand against the hood. “My boys don’t like strangers poking around.”
    “I can understand that.”
    “So you can get back in your truck and leave.”
    Peterson and Herbie Brewer had got out of the Henry J and were now doing their own inspection of the hearse.
    “You take good care of this vehicle?” Arvo asked. Still standing on the running board, he kept a hand on the steering wheel. “Somebody’s kept her motor in pretty good shape, though that rear corner looks as though you might’ve backed into a tree.”
    “My boys depend on it,” she admitted, nodding her head more times than was necessary. “It hauls the smaller logs, and sometimes drags the hand plough through my garden when I need it. And the harrows.”
    Herbie Brewer opened the door at the rear. “There’s a sleeping bag in here,” he said.
    The woman seemed to find this an additional indignity. “You see the two-bit shack I got to live in? I got three sons, all big noisy louts.Sometimes they snore so bad the windows rattle. A person can’t sleep . You see a guest house anywhere, or even a tool shed? This has to be my bedroom now and then if I’m to get any rest at all.” Perhaps sensing she had a good audience here, she allowed herself to grin. “I figure if I die in my sleep it’ll be a convenience for the boys.”
    Herbie snickered. Peterson cleared his throat and turned away to examine the ground behind him. Arvo buttoned up the top button on his shirt and then unbuttoned it. It was not possible to know whether she was joking, though her scowl did seem to be daring them to laugh.
    “It makes a pretty good tractor,” she added. “If you came to make me an offer it better be a good one. The boys depend on this thing and would need to find another.”
    “Madam,” Arvo said. “You and your sons have committed something like a sacrilege here! But we will forgive you if you’ll let us borrow this hearse for a day or two.”
    “Can’t,” she said. “The boys’ll kill me if they find her gone.” She cocked her head to one side to add: “Especially since I know you’re lying and won’t never bring ’er back.”
    Peterson said, “We’ll return it just as soon as we’ve done the best we can for a good friend of ours who died.”
    We will return it, Arvo did not say, but not to you or your sons. He was imagining the look on Myrtle Birdsong’s face when she discovered he’d driven her father’s hearse up to her door. “But in order to return it we have to borrow it first,” he said. “And before we borrow it with the intention of returning it, we will need to see your ownership papers.”
    “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “We found this thing where somebody ditched it in the bush. There weren’t no papers in it. We never take it near a public road.”
    “My friend Herbie here is good friends with the RCMP .”
    Though obviously a little startled by Arvo’s way of putting it, Herbie Brewer grimly nodded his head. It was true that he spent a little time in the police station in town now and then, though only when he’d forgotten where he was supposed to meet up with Peterson for a ride