Read Online A Stranger in This World by Kevin Canty - Free Book Online

closed.
    “No, it’s OK,” Bobby says.
    “I’m just so fucking stupid,” she says, and he doesn’t disagree. Lyle’s in the trunk, morning is coming.
    Bobby’s Volvo waits in the safety of the turnaround at the end of the road. She can almost see it.
    “We’ll just have to carry him, then,” Bobby says. “Give me a hand. Hurry, before it gets too light.”
THE BODY OF AN ASSHOLE
    Curled like damp laundry into the irregular spaces of the trunk, Lyle doesn’t want to come out. Tina’s nerves are sanded raw, and every approaching minute of daylight makes them worse, but nothing seems to work: he’s too heavy, too cumbersome, too floppy. He has a loose-limbed grace in death that he never had in life.
    Finally they pry him over the lip of the trunk, and he falls in slow motion onto the sand, one joint at a time. They each take a leg, and drag him toward the surf. Lyle’s heavy. He leaves a smooth furrow of sand behind, a trail from the Monte Carlo. Every few yards they have to stop and rest; the sand is so soft and heavy that Tina feels like she may just bog down completely, collapse weeping in the sand and just wait for the cops. Not that Bobby would let her.
    They reach the water and they keep walking, out into the skirts of white foam. Lyle seems to float, or maybe it’s onlythat the water eases his slide—either way, he gets easier to pull, and they drag him out until they’re both waist-deep and then let him go. The next wave carries him back to shore. Tina begins to cry.
    “Shut the fuck up!” Bobby shouts over the wind and the roar of the waves. “Give me a hand.”
    “I just want to go home,” she says. The machine is starting to break down, nerves, no sleep, no food, the poisons of last night’s vodka coursing through her blood. And Lyle, looking strangely whole and clean and rested, on his side in the sand. The water is bone-deep cold, cold as a headache. The air feels warm by comparison.
    They drag him deeper into the water, out beyond the breaking waves, and for a moment it seems like he’ll go: he floats nine-tenths submerged, only the tips of his shoes and the moon of his belly and the soft outlines of his face above the water. Slowly, like a movie of a shipwreck, he rolls onto his side, and then face-down, drifting parallel to the shore. But then the ninth wave, the big one, catches him and sends his bones tumbling toward the sand again. Tina and Bobby watch from the shallows, weeping. Bobby’s weeping too, she can see it.
    Again, and again, and a fifth time they try it, each time deeper, until Tina’s losing her own footing, until they are both bone-chilled with the cold Atlantic water. Bobby shoves the soft body out as far as he can; it seems to catch an undertow, and as they retreat to the shallows they can see it drifting, a little farther out with every wave.
Good-bye, Lyle
, Tina thinks.
You deserved it
. She takes the little chrome pistol from her overcoat pocket and sails it out as far as she can, where it lands with a small splash. They watch the body out of sight, shivering,then trudge the long yards back across the sand toward the Volvo past the Monte Carlo, not touching, not talking, not seeing each other.
    A solitary gull stands on the edge of the open trunk of Lyle’s car, pecking diligently at a dark bloodstain. Tina reaches in through the window to get the pack of cigarettes, and the gull flies off.
THE SWIMMERS
    A solitary gray shark, working the shallows at daybreak, tastes blood in the water and approaches the passive floating body. Slowly, cautiously, it circles closer and closer, watching for a sign of life. No hurry for him, not this fish.
    At long last he takes a fast, plunging dive at the thing, hooks the pant-leg in his razoring teeth and then lets go as Lyle’s shoe jerks up and clips him under the jaw.
    The shark retreats. But he doesn’t surrender: he watches closely, carefully, waiting for another angle of attack, another chance—until Lyle drifts into a