Redeye Read Online Free Page B

there.”
    â€œYes. Okay. Watch this, Zack, Bumpy.” He tears off a little piece of cigarette paper and places it right on the Chinaman’s eyeball and pulls his eyelid down over it and the eyelid sticks—stays down right in place. “Another thing, boys,” he says while he works on the other eye, “little trick Mr. Darless taught us. If you ever need what they call a internal cosmetic to give a healthy lifelike glow, then just brew up a pot of coffee and pour that into your arterial mixture.”
    â€œ
Who
said that?” said Mr. Copeland.
    â€œDarless. Falton Darless. The one running the school. That was not in the book. But he did say it. I heard him.” He took a stepback from the body. “Now see, boys, you start with this form, in our case, Mr. Ching Chung here, once a young man of promise who got in with the wrong crowd, a crowd of opium fiends. Mr. Chung was out of his element, and penniless, and nothing to look forward to but more hot seasons and freezing seasons swinging that pick, and he had no way to escape except by the tried and true method. And at the point the soul left the body”—Mr. Blankenship stepped back up to the corpse, hooked his thumbs together, and fluttered his hands up from the body like a bird—“you have left here then a mere form, void of all life. You have a sack of clay and your job as master artisan of mortuary science is to make what you have—that is dead, and appears dead—into something so lifelike that you can’t help but remember the days when life was there, thriving. You form. You color. You create. You do unto this piece of mere clay. You become a artist.
Artiste
. Of the deceased. Artiste of the deceased. You do this for the friends and relatives of those whose time has come. This is our calling!”
    One of the Chinaman’s eyes had come back open.
    â€œOne of his eyes is open,” says Zack.
    Mr. Blankenship started fishing through the grip. “This is our calling,” he said, “to ease bereavement, to help transform the Wild West into the new tame west.”
    â€œOne of his eyes is open.”
    â€œI know that. I’ve got the solution to that problem right here, somewhere.”
    â€œI thought I was doing this,” said Mr. Copeland.
    â€œRight here,” said Mr. Blankenship. “Eye caps. The cigarette paper is just for emergencies anyway.”
    There was a knock on the door. Mr. Copeland cracked it just enough to see out. It was Sister.
    â€œWhat you want?” said Mr. Copeland.
    â€œIt’s getting hot out here. Grandma is getting hot. I can tell.”
    â€œPut her in the cooler. And don’t bother us no more. Tell your mama to put her down in the cooler and give her some jelly water.”
    Mr. Copeland invented the cooler. Or at least I ain’t ever seen another one like it. He’s invented right many things. But I wouldn’t say you could call him an inventor. The cooler is a dug-out room, a tiny room like a closet, dug out like a cellar. It’s got ceiling beams underneath a cloth ceiling that keeps dirt out, and steps that go down in there, with runner-boards to roll Grandma down there when she gets hot. He’s got layered burlap covered with a board roof and tarpaper. On top of that he puts a barrel of water and hangs down strips of burlap through the roof from the barrel and the little room cools while the water evaporates. He’s got oats and grass seed all through the burlap sack and that keeps the water cold. It takes one barrel on regular days and two on hot days to run it in the summer and he can keep two or three muttons in there at a time.
    â€œIf the eye
cap
don’t hold,” said Mr. Blankenship, “you can use this: Form-All. A little dab works like glue . . .”
    â€œCan I come in?” says Sister.
    â€œNo,” says Mr. Copeland.
    â€œ. . . or you could use flour and water, but a big hunk of this