Where the Summer Ends

Where the Summer Ends



•I•

Along Grand Avenue they’ve torn the houses down, and left emptiness in their place. On one side a tangle of viaducts, railroad yards and expressways—a scar of concrete and cinder and iron that divides black slum from student ghetto in downtown Knoxville. On the other side, ascending the ridge, shabby relics of Victorian and Edwardian elegance, slowly decaying beneath too many layers of cheap paint and soot and squalor. Most were broken into tawdry apartments—housing for the students at the university that sprawled across the next ridge. Closer to the university, sections had been razed to make room for featureless emplacements of asphalt and imitation used-brick apartments for the wealthier students. But along Grand Avenue they tore the houses down and left only vacant weed-lots in their place.

Shouldered by the encroaching kudzu, the sidewalks still ran along one side of Grand Avenue, passing beside the tracks and the decrepit shells of disused warehouses. Across the street, against the foot of the ridge, the long blocks of empty lots rotted beneath a jungle of rampant vine— the buried house sites marked by ragged stumps of blackened timbers and low depressions of tumbled-in cellars. Discarded refrigerators and gutted hulks of television sets rusted amidst the weeds and omnipresent litter of beer cans and broken bottles. A green pall over the dismal ruin, the relentless tide of kudzu claimed Grand Avenue.

Once it had been a “grand avenue,” Mercer reflected, although those years had passed long before his time. He paused on the cracked pavement to consider the forlorn row of electroliers with their antique lozenge-paned lamps that still lined this block of Grand Avenue. Only the sidewalk and the forgotten electroliers—curiously spared by vandals—remained as evidence that this kudzu-festooned wasteland had ever been an elegant downtown neighborhood.

Mercer wiped his perspiring face and shifted the half-gallon jug of cheap burgundy to his other hand. Cold beer would go better today, but Gradie liked wine. The late afternoon sun struck a shimmering haze from the expanses of black pavement and riotous weed-lots, reminding Mercer of the whorled distortions viewed through antique windowpanes. The air was heavy with the hot stench of asphalt and decaying refuse and Knoxville’s greasy smog. Like the murmur of fretful surf, afternoon traffic grumbled along the nearby expressway.

As he trudged along the skewed paving, he could smell a breath of magnolia through the urban miasma. That would be the sickly tree in the vacant lot across from Gradie’s—somehow overlooked when the house there had been pulled down and the shrubbery uprooted—now poisoned by smog and strangled beneath the consuming masses of kudzu. Increasing his pace as he neared Gradie’s refuge, Mercer reminded himself that he had less than twenty bucks for the rest of this month, and that there was a matter of groceries.

Traffic on the Western Avenue Viaduct snarled overhead, as he passed in the gloom beneath—watchful for the winos who often huddled beneath the concrete arches. He kept his free hand stuffed in his jeans pockets over the double-barrelled .357 magnum derringer—carried habitually since a mugging a year ago. The area was deserted at this time of day, and Mercer climbed unchallenged past the rail yards and along the unfrequented street to Gradie’s house. Here, as well, the weeds buried abandoned lots, and the kudzu was denser than he remembered from his previous visit. Trailing vines and smothered trees arcaded the sidewalk, forcing him into the street. Mercer heard a sudden rustle deep beneath the verdant tangle as he crossed to Gradie’s gate, and he thought unpleasantly of the gargantuan rats he had glimpsed lying dead in gutters near here.

Gradie’s house was one of the last few dwellings left standing in this waste—certainly it was the only one to be regularly inhabited. The other sagging shells of gaping windows and rotting board were almost too dilapidated even to shelter the winos and vagrants who squatted hereabouts.

The gate resisted his hand for an instant—mired over with the fast-growing kudzu that had so overwhelmed the low fence, until Mercer had no impression whether it was of wire or pickets. Chickens flopped and scattered as he shoved past the gate. A brown-and-yellow dog, whose ancestry might once have contained a trace of German shepherd, growled from his post beneath the wooden porch steps. A cluster of silver maples threw a moth-eaten blanket of shade over the yard. Eyes still dazzled from the glare of the pavement, Mercer needed a moment to adjust his vision to the sooty gloom within. By then Gradie was leaning the shotgun back amidst the deeper shadows of the doorway, stepping onto the low porch to greet him.

“Goddamn winos,” Gradie muttered, watching Mercer’s eyes.

“Much trouble with stealing?” the younger man asked.

“Some,” Gradie grunted. “And the goddamn kids. Hush up that growling, Sheriff!”

He glanced protectively across the enclosed yard and its ramshackle dwelling. Beneath the trees, in crates and barrels, crude stands and disordered heaps, lying against the flimsy walls of the house, stuffed into the outbuildings: the plunder of the junk piles of another era.

It was a private junk yard of the sort found throughout any urban slum, smaller than some, perhaps a fraction more tawdry. Certainly it was as out-of-the-way as any. Mercer, who lived in the nearby student quarter, had stumbled upon it quite by accident only a few months before—during an afternoon’s hike along the railroad tracks. He had gleaned two rather nice blue-green insulators and a brown-glass coke bottle by the time he caught sight of Gradie’s patch of stunted vegetables between the tracks and the house that Mercer had never noticed from the street. A closer look had disclosed the yard with its moraine of cast-off salvage, and a badly weathered sign that evidently had once read “Red’s Second Hand” before a later hand had overpainted “Antiques.”

A few purchases—very minor, but then Mercer had never seen another customer here—and several afternoons of digging through Gradies’s trove, had spurred that sort of casual friendship that exists between collector and dealer. Mercer’s interest in “collectibles” far outstripped his budget; Gradie seemed lonely, liked to talk, very much liked to drink wine. Mercer had hopes of talking the older man down to a reasonable figure on the mahogany mantel he coveted.

“I’ll get some glasses,” Gradie said, acknowledging the jug of burgundy. He disappeared into the cluttered interior. From the direction of the kitchen came a clatter and sputter of the tap.

Mercer was examining a stand of old bottles, arrayed on their warped and unpainted shelves like a row of targets balanced on a fence for execution by boys, and a new .22. Gradie, two jelly glasses sloshing with burgundy, reappeared at the murkiness of the doorway, squinting blindly against the sun’s glare. Mercer thought of a greying groundhog, or a narrow-eyed pack rat, crawling out of its burrow—an image tinted grey and green through the shimmering curvatures of the bottles, iridescently filmed with a patina of age and cinder.

He had the thin, worn features that would have been thin and watchful as a child, would only get thinner and more watchful with the years. The limp, sandy hair might have been red before the sun bleached it and the years leeched it to a yellow-grey. Gradie was tall, probably had been taller than Mercer before his stance froze into a slouch and then into a stoop, and had a dirty sparseness to his frame that called to mind the scarred mongrel dog that growled from beneath the steps. Mercer guessed he was probably no younger than fifty and probably not much older than eighty.

Reaching between two opalescent-sheened whiskey bottles, Mercer accepted a glass of wine. Distorted through the rows of bottles, Gradie’s face was watchful. His bright slits of colorless eyes flicked to follow the other’s every motion—this through force of habit: Gradie trusted the student well enough.

“Got some more of those over by the fence.” Gradie pointed. “In that box there. Got some good ones. This old boy dug them, some place in Vestal, traded the whole lot to me for that R.C. Cola thermometer you was looking at once before.” The last with a slight sly smile, flicked lizard-quick across his thin lips; Mercer had argued that the price on the thermometer was too high.

Mercer grunted noncommittally, dutifully followed Gradie’s gesture. There might be something in the half-collapsed box. It was a mistake to show interest in any item you really wanted, he had learned—as he had learned that Gradie’s eyes were quick to discern the faintest show of interest. The too-quick reach for a certain item, the wrong inflection in a casual “How much?” might make the difference between two bits and two bucks for a dusty book or a rusted skillet. The matter of the mahogany mantelpiece wanted careful handling.

Mercer squatted beside the carton, stirring the bottles gingerly. He was heavy-set, too young and too well-muscled to be called beefy. Sporadic employment on construction jobs and a more or less adhered-to program of workouts kept any beer gut from spilling over his wide belt, and his jeans and tank top fitted him as snugly as the older man’s faded work clothes hung shapelessly Mercer had a neatly trimmed beard and subtly receding hairline to his longish black hair that suggested an older grad student as he walked across campus, although he was still working for his bachelor’s—in a major that had started out in psychology and eventually meandered into fine arts.

The bottles had been hastily washed. Crusts of cinder and dirt obscured the cracked and chipped exteriors, and within were mats of spider web and moldy moss. A cobalt-blue bitters bottle might clean up nicely, catch the sun on the hallway window ledge, if Gradie would take less than a buck.

Mercer nudged a lavender-hued whiskey bottle. “How much for these?”

“I’ll sell you those big ones for two, those little ones for one-fifty.”

“I could dig them myself for free,” Mercer scoffed. “These weedlots along Grand are full of old junk heaps.”

“Take anything in the box for a buck then,” Gradie urged him.

“Only don’t go poking around those goddamn weedlots. Under that kudzu. I wouldn’t crawl into that goddamn vine for any money! ”

“Snakes? ” Mercer inquired politely.

Gradie shrugged, gulped the rest of his wine. “Snakes or worse. It was in the kudzu they found old Morny.”

Mercer tilted his glass. In the afternoon sun the burgundy had a heady reek of hot alcohol, glinted like bright blood. “The cops ever find out who killed him?”

Gradie spat. “Who gives a damn what happens to old winos?”

“When they start slicing each other up like that, the cops had damn well better do something.”

“Shit!” Gradie contemplated his empty glass, glanced toward the bottle on the porch. “What do they know about knives? You cut a man if you’re just fighting; you stab him if you want him dead. You don’t slice a man up so there’s not a whole strip of skin left on him.”



•II•

“But it had to have been a gang of winos,” Linda decided. She selected another yellow flower from the dried bouquet, inserted it into the bitters bottle.

“I think that red one,” Mercer suggested.

“Don’t you remember that poor old man they found last spring? All beaten to death in an abandoned house. And they caught the creeps who did it to him—they were a couple of his old drinking buddies, and they never did find out why.”

“That was over in Lonsdale,” Mercer told her. “Around here the pigs decided it was the work of hippie dope fiends, hassled a few street people, forgot the whole deal.”

Linda trimmed an inch from the dried stalk, jabbed the red strawflower into the narrow neck. Stretching from her bare toes, she lifted the bitters bottle to the window shelf. The morning sun, spilling into the foyer of the old house, pierced the cobalt-blue glass in an azure star.

“How much did you say it cost, Jon?” She had spent an hour scrubbing at the bottle with test tube brushes a former roommate had left behind.

“Fifty cents,” Mercer lied. “I think what probably happened was that old Morny got mugged, and the rats got to him before they found his body.”

“That’s really nice,” Linda judged. “I mean the bottle.” Freckled arms akimbo, sleeves rolled up on an old blue workshirt, faded blue jeans, morning sun a nimbus through her whiskey-colored close curls, eyes two shades darker than the azure star.

Mercer remembered the half-smoked joint on the hall balustrade, struck a match. “God knows there are rats big enough to do that to a body down under the kudzu. I’m sure it was rats that killed Midnight last spring.”

“Poor old tomcat,” Linda mourned. She had moved in with Mercer about a month before it happened, remembered his stony grief when their search had turned up the mutilated cat. “The city ought to clear off these weed-lots.”

“All they ever do is knock down the houses,” Mercer got out, between puffs. “Condemn them so you can’t fix them up again. Tear them down so the winos can’t crash inside.”

“Wasn’t that what Morny was doing? Tearing them down, I mean?”

“Sort of.” Mercer coughed. “He and Gradie were partners. Gradie used to run a second-hand store back before the neighborhood had rotted much past the edges. He used to buy and sell salvage from the old houses when they started to go to seed. The last ten years or so, after the neighborhood had completely deteriorated, he started working the condemned houses. Once a house is condemned, you pretty well have to pull it down, and that costs a bundle—either to the owner, or, since usually it’s abandoned property, to the city. Gradie would work a deal where they’d pay him something to pull a house down—not very much, but he could have whatever he could salvage.

“Gradie would go over the place with Morny, haul off anything Gradie figured was worth saving—and by the time he got the place, there usually wasn’t much. Then Gradie would pay Morny maybe five or ten bucks a day to pull the place down— taking it out of whatever he’d been paid to do the job. Morny would make a show of it, spend a couple weeks tearing out scrap timber and the like.

Then, when they figured they’d done enough, Morny would set fire to the shell. By the time the fire trucks got there, there’d just be a basement full of coals. Firemen would spray some water, blame it on the winos, forget about it. The house would be down, so Gradie was clear of the deal— and the kudzu would spread over the empty lot in another year.”

Linda considered the roach, snuffed it out and swallowed it. Waste not, want not. “Lucky they never burned the whole neighborhood down. Is that how Gradie got that mantel you’ve been talking about?”

“Probably.” Mercer followed her into the front parlor. The mantel had reminded Linda that she wanted to listen to a record.

The parlor—they used it as a living room—was heavy with stale smoke and flat beer and the pungent odor of Brother Jack’s barbecue. Mercer scowled at the litter of empty Rolling Rock bottles, crumpled napkins and sauce-stained rinds of bread. He ought to clean up the house today, while Linda was in a domestic mood—but that meant they’d have to tackle the kitchen, and that was an all-day job—and he’d wanted to get her to pose while the sun was right in his upstairs studio.

Linda was having problems deciding on a record. It would be one of hers, Mercer knew, and hoped it wouldn’t be Dylan again. She had called his own record library one of the wildest collections of curiosa ever put on vinyl. After half a year of living together, Linda still thought resurrected radio broadcasts of “The Shadow” were a camp joke, Mercer continued to argue that Dylan couldn’t sing a note. Withal, she always paid her half of the rent on time. Mercer reflected that he got along with her better than with any previous roommate, and while the house was subdivided into a three-bedroom apartment, they never advertised for a third party.

The speakers, bunched on either side of the hearth, came to life with a scratchy Fleetwood Mac album. It drew Mercer’s attention once more to the ravaged fireplace. Some Philistine landlord, in the process of remodelling the dilapidated Edwardian mansion into student apartments, had ripped out the mantel and boarded over the grate with a panel of cheap plywood. In defiance of landlord and fire laws, Mercer had torn away the panel and unblocked the chimney. The fireplace was small with a grate designed for coal fires, but Mercer found it pleasant on winter nights. The hearth was of chipped ceramic tiles of a blue-and-white pattern—someone had told him they were Dresden. Mercer had scraped away the grime from the tiles, found an ornate brass grille in a flea market near Seymour. It remained to replace the mantel. Behind the plywood panel, where the original mantel had stood, was an ugly smear of bare brick and lathing. And Gradie had such a mantel.

“We ought to straighten up in here,” Linda told him. She was doing a sort of half-dance around the room, scoopingup debris and singing a line to the record every now and then.

“I was wondering if I could get you to pose for me this morning? ”

“Hell, it’s too nice a day to stand around your messy old studio.”

“Just for a while. While the sun’s right. If I don’t get my figure studies handed in by the end of the month, I’ll lose my incomplete.”

“Christ, you’ve only had all spring to finish them.”

“We can run down to Gradie’s afterward. You’ve been wanting to see the place.”

“And the famous mantel.”

“Perhaps if the two of us work on him?”



The studio—so Mercer dignified it—was an upstairs front room, thrust outward from the face of the house and onto the roof of the veranda, as a sort of cold weather porch. Three-quarter-length casement windows with diamond panes had at one time swung outward on three sides, giving access onto the tiled porch roof. An enterprising landlord had blocked over the windows on either side, converting it into a small bedroom. The front wall remained a latticed expanse through which the morning sun flooded the room. Mercer had adopted it for his studio, and now Linda’s houseplants bunched through his litter of canvases and drawing tables.

“Jesus, it’s a nice day!”

Mercer halted his charcoal, scowled at the sheet. “You moved your shoulder again,” he accused her.

“Lord, can’t you hurry it?”

“Genius can never be hurried.”

“Genius my ass.” Linda resumed her pose. She was lean, high-breasted and thin-hipped, with a suggestion of freckles under her light tan. A bit taller and she would have had a career as a fashion model. She had taken enough dance to pose quite well—did accept an occasional modelling assignment at the art school when cash was short.

“Going to be a good summer.” It was that sort of morning.

“Of course.” Mercer studied his drawing. Not particularly inspired, but then he never did like to work in charcoal. The sun picked bronze highlights through her helmet of curls, the feathery patches of her mons and axillae. Mercer’s charcoal poked dark blotches at his sketch’s crotch and armpits. He resisted the impulse to crumple it and start over.

Part of the problem was that she persisted in twitching to the beat of the music that echoed lazily from downstairs. She was playing that Fleetwood Mac album to death— had left the changer arm askew so that the record would repeat until someone changed it. It didn’t help him concentrate—although he’d memorized the record to the point he no longer needed listen to the words:

I been alone

All the years

So many ways to count the tears

I never change I never will

I’m so afraid the way I feel

Days when the rain and the sun are gone

Black as night

Agony’s torn at my heart too long

So afraid

Slip and I fall and I die

When he glanced at her again, something was wrong. Linda’s pose was no longer relaxed. Her body was rigid, her expression tense.

“What is it?”

She twisted her face toward the windows, brought one arm across her breasts. “Someone’s watching me.”

With an angry grunt, Mercer tossed aside the charcoal, shouldered through the open casement to glare down at the street.

The sidewalks were deserted. Only the usual trickle of Saturday morning traffic drifted past. Mercer continued to scowl balefully as he studied the parked cars, the vacant weed-lot across the street, the tangle of kudzu in his front yard. Nothing.

“There’s nothing out there.”

Linda had shrugged into a paint-flecked fatigue jacket. Her eyes were worried as she joined him at the window.

“There’s something. I felt all crawly all of a sudden.”

The roof of the veranda cut off view on the windows from the near sidewalk, and from the far sidewalk it was impossible to see into the studio by day. Across the street, the houses directly opposite had been pulled down. The kudzu-covered lots pitched steeply across more kudzu-covered slope, to the roofs of warehouses along the rail yard a block below. If Linda were standing directly at the window, someone on the far sidewalk might look up to see her; otherwise there was no vantage from which a curious eye could peer into the room. It was one of the room’s attractions as a studio.

“See. No one’s out there.”

Linda made a squirming motion with her shoulders. “They walked on, then,” she insisted.

Mercer snorted, suspected an excuse to cut short the session. “They’d have had to run. Don’t see anyone hiding out there in the weeds, do you?”

She stared out across the tangled heaps of kudzu, waving faintly in the last of the morning’s breeze. “Well, there might be someone hiding under all that tangle.” Mercer’s levity annoyed her. “Why can’t the city clear off those damn jungles!”

“When enough people raise a stink, they sometimes do—or make the owners clear away the weeds. The trouble is that you can’t kill kudzu once the damn vines take over a lot. Gradie and Morny used to try. The stuff grows back as fast as you cut it—impossible to get all the roots and runners. Morny used to try to burn it out—crawl under and set fire to the dead vines and debris underneath the growing surface. But he could never keep a fire going under all that green stuff, and after a few spectacular failures using gasoline on the weed-lots, they made him stick to grubbing it out by hand.”

“Awful stuff!” Linda grimaced. “Some of it’s started growing up the back of the house.”

“I’ll have to get to it before it gets started. There’s islands in the TVA lakes where nothing grows but kudzu. Stuff ran wild after the reservoir was filled, smothered out everything else.”

“I’m surprised it hasn’t covered the whole world.”

“Dies down after the frost. Besides it’s not a native vine. It’s from Japan. Some genius came up with the idea of using it as an ornamental ground cover on highway cuts and such. You’ve seen old highway embankments where the stuff has taken over the woods behind. It’s spread all over the Southeast.”

“Hmm, yeah? So who’s the genius who plants the crap all over the city then?”

“Get dressed, wise-ass.”



•III•

The afternoon was hot and sodden. The sun made the air above the pavement scintillant with heat and the thick odor of tar. In the vacant lots, the kudzu leaves drooped like half-furled umbrellas. The vines stirred somnolently in the musky haze, although the air was stagnant.

Linda had changed into a halter top and a pair of patched cutoffs. “Bet I’ll get some tan today.”

“And maybe get soaked,” Mercer remarked. “Air’s got the feel of a thunderstorm.”

“Where’s the clouds?”

“Just feels heavy.”

“That’s just the goddamn pollution.”

The kudzu vines had overrun the sidewalk, forcing them into the street. Tattered strands of vine crept across the gutter into the street, their tips crushed by the infrequent traffic. Vines along Gradie’s fence completely obscured the yard beyond, waved curling tendrils aimlessly upward. In weather like this, Mercer reflected, you could just about see the stuff grow.

The gate hung again at first push. Mercer shoved harder, tore through the coils of vine that clung there.

“Who’s that?” The tone was harsh as a saw blade hitting a nail. “Jon Mercer, Mr Gradie. I’ve brought a friend along.”

He led the way into the yard. Linda, who had heard him talk about the place, followed with eyes bright for adventure. “This is Linda Wentworth, Mr Gradie.”

Mercer’s voice trailed off as Gradie stumbled out onto the porch. He had the rolling slouch of a man who could carry a lot of liquor and was carrying more liquor than he could. His khakis were the same he’d had on when Mercer last saw him, and had the stains and wrinkles that clothes get when they’re slept in by someone who hasn’t slept well.

Red-rimmed eyes focused on the half-gallon of burgundy Mercer carried. “Guess I was taking a little nap.” Gradie’s tongue was muddy. “Come on up.”

“Where’s Sheriff?” Mercer asked. The dog usually warned his master of trespassers.

“Run off,” Gradie told him gruffly. “Let me get you a glass.” He lurched back into the darkness.

“Owow!” breathed Linda in one syllable. “He looked like something you see sitting hunched over on a bench talking to a bottle in a bag.”

“Old Gradie has been hitting the sauce pretty hard last few times I’ve been by,” Mercer allowed.

“I don’t think I care for any wine just now,” Linda decided, as Gradie reappeared, fingers speared into three damp glasses like a bunch of mismatched bananas. “Too hot.”

“Had some beer in the Frigidaire, but it’s all gone.”

“That’s all right.” She was still fascinated with the enclosed yard. “What a lovely garden!” Linda was into organic foods.

Gradie frowned at the patch of anemic vegetables, beleaguered by encroaching walls of kudzu. “It’s not much, but I get a little from it. Damn kudzu is just about to take it all. It’s took the whole damn neighborhood—everything but me. Guess they figure to starve me out once the vines crawl over my little garden patch.”

“Can’t you keep it hoed?”

“Hoe kudzu, miss? No damn way. The vines grow a foot between breakfast and dinner. Can’t get to the roots, and it just keeps spreading till the frost; then come spring it starts all over again where the frost left it. I used to keep it back by spraying it regular with 2.4-D. But then the government took 2.4-D off the market, and I can’t find nothing else to touch it.”

“Herbicides kill other things than weeds,” Linda told him righteously.

Gradies’s laugh was bitter. “Well, you folks just look all around as you like.”

“Do you have any old clothes?” Linda was fond of creating costumes.

“Got some inside there with the books.” Gradie indicated a shed that shouldered against his house. “I’ll unlock it.”

Mercer raised a mental eyebrow as Gradie dragged open the door of the shed, then shuffled back onto the porch. The old man was more interested in punishing the half-gallon than in watching his customers. He left Linda to poke through the dusty jumble of warped books and faded clothes, stacked and shelved and hung and heaped within the tin-roofed musty darkness.

Instead, he made a desultory tour about the yard—pausing now and again to examine a heap of old hubcaps, a stack of salvaged window frames or a clutter of plumbing and porcelain fixtures. His deviousness seemed wasted on Gradie today. The old man remained slumped in a broken-down rocker on his porch, staring at nothing. It occurred to Mercer that the loss of Sheriff was bothering Gradie. The old yellow watchdog was about his only companion after Morny’s death. Mercer reminded himself to look for the dog around campus.

He ambled back to the porch. A glance into the shed caught Linda trying on an oversized slouch hat. Mercer refilled his glass, noted that Gradie had gone through half the jug in his absence. “All right if I look at some of the stuff inside?”

Gradie nodded, rocked carefully to his feet, followed him in. The doorway opened into the living room of the small frame house. The living room had long since become a warehouse and museum for all of Gradie’s choice items. There were a few chairs left to sit on, but the rest of the room had been totally taken over by the treasures of a lifetime of scavenging. Gradie himself had long ago been reduced to the kitchen and back bedroom for his own living quarters.

China closets crouched on lion paws against the wall, showing their treasures behind curved glass bellies. Paintings and prints in ornate frames crowded the spider webs for space along the walls. Mounted deer’s heads and stuffed owls gazed fixedly from their moth-eaten poses. Threadbare oriental carpets lay in a great mound of bright-colored sausages. Mahogany dinner chairs were stacked atop oak and walnut tables. An extravagant brass bed reared from behind a gigantic Victorian buffet. A walnut bookcase displayed choice volumes and bric-a-brac beneath a signed Tiffany lamp. Another bedroom and the dining room were virtually impenetrable with similar storage.

Not everything was for sale. Mercer studied the magnificent walnut china cabinet that Gradie reserved as a showcase for his personal museum. Surrounded by the curving glass sides, the mementos of the junk dealer’s lost years of glory reposed in dustless grandeur. Faded photographs of men in uniforms, inscribed snapshots of girls with pompadours and padded-shoulder dresses. Odd items of military uniform, medals and insignia, a brittle silk square emblazoned with the Rising Sun. Gradie was proud of his wartime service in the Pacific.

There were several hara-kiri knives—so Gradie said they were—a Nambu automatic and holster, and a Samurai sword that Gradie swore was five hundred years old. Clippings and souvenirs and odd bits of memorabilia of the Pacific theatre, most bearing yellowed labels with painstakingly typed legends. A fist-sized skull—obviously some species of monkey—bore the label: “Jap General’s Skull.”

“That general would have had a muzzle like a possum,” Mercer laughed. “Did you find it in Japan?”

“Bought it during the Occupation,” Gradie muttered. “From one little Nip, said it come from a mountain-devil.”

Despite the heroic-sounding labels throughout the display—“Flag Taken from Captured Jap Officer”—Mercer guessed that most of the mementos had indeed been purchased while Gradie was stationed in Japan during the Occupation.

Mercer sipped his wine and let his eyes drift about the room. Against one wall leaned the mahogany mantel, and he must have let his interest flicker in his eyes.

“I see you’re still interested in the mantel,” Gradie slurred, mercantile instincts rising through his alcoholic lethargy.

“Well, I see you haven’t sold it yet.”

Gradie wiped a trickle of wine from his stubbled chin. “I’ll get me a hundred-fifty for that, or I’ll keep it until I can get me more. Seen one like it, not half as nice, going for two hundred, place off Chapman Pike.”

“They catch the tourists from Gatlinburg,” Mercer sneered.

The mantel was of African mahogany, Mercer judged—darker than the reddish Philippine variety. For a miracle only a film of age-blackened lacquer obscured the natural grain—Mercer had spent untold hours stripping layers of cheap paint from the mahogany panel doors of his house.

It was solid mahogany, not a veneer. The broad panels that framed the fireplace were matched from the same log so that their grains formed a mirror image. The mantelpiece itself was wide and sturdy, bordered by a tiny balustrade. Above that stretched a fine bevelled mirror, still perfectly silvered, flanked by lozenge-shaped mirrors on either side. Ornately carved mahogany candlesticks jutted from either side of the mantelpiece, so that a candle flame would reflect against the bevelled lozenges. More matched-grain panels continued ceilingward above the mirrors, framed by a second balustraded mantelshelf across the top. Mercer could just about touch it at fullest stretch.

Exquisite, and easily worth Gradie’s price. Mercer might raise a hundred of it—if he gave up eating and quit paying rent for a month or three.

“Well, I won’t argue it’s a beauty,” he said. “But a mantel isn’t just something you can buy and take home under your arm, brush it off and stick it in your china closet—that’s furniture. Thing like this mantel is only useful if you got a fireplace to match it with.”

“You think so,” Gradie scoffed. “Had a lady in here last spring, fine big house out in west Knoxville. Said she’d like to antique it with one on those paint kits, fasten it against a wall for a stand to display her plants. Wanted to talk me down to one-twenty-five, though, and I said ‘no ma’am.’”

Linda’s scream ripped like tearing glass.

Mercer spun, was out the door and off the porch before he quite knew he was moving. “Linda!”

She was scrambling backward from the shed, silent now, but her face ugly with panic. Stumbling, she tore a wrinkled flannel jacket from her shoulders, with revulsion threw it back into the shed.

“Rats! ” she shuddered, wiping her hands on her shorts. “In there under the clothes! A great big one! Oh, Jesus!”

But Gradie had already burst out of his house, shoved past Mercer—who had pulled short to laugh. The shotgun was a rust-and-blue blur as he lunged past Linda. The shed door slammed to behind him.

“Oh, Jesus!”

The boom of each barrel, megaphoned by the confines of the shed, and, in the finger-twitch between each blast, the shrill chitter of pain.

“Jon!”

Then the hysterical cursing from within, and a muffled stomping.

Linda, who had never gotten used to Mercer’s guns, was clawing free of his reassuring arm. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” She was kicking at the gate, as Gradie slid back out of the shed, closing the door on his heel.

“Goddamn big rat, miss,” he grinned crookedly “But I sure done for him.”

“Jon, I’m going!”

“Catch you later, Mr Gradie,” Mercer yelled, grimacing in embarrassment. “Linda’s just a bit freaked.”

If Gradie called after him, Mercer didn’t hear. Linda was walking as fast as anyone could without breaking into a run, as close to panic as need be. He loped after her.

“Hey, Linda! Everything’s cool! Wait up!”

She didn’t seem to hear. Mercer cut across the corner of a weedlot to intercept her. “Hey! Wait!”

A vine tangled his feet. With a curse, he sprawled headlong. Flinching at the fear of broken glass, he dropped to his hands and knees in the tangle of kudzu. His flailing hands slid on something bulky and foul, and a great swarm of flies choked him.

“Jon!” At his yell, Linda turned about. As he dove into the knee-deep kudzu, she forgot her own near-panic and started toward him. “I’m okay! “ he shouted. “Just stay there. Wait for me.”

Wiping his hands on the leaves, he heaved himself to his feet, hid the revulsion from his face. He swallowed the rush of bile and grinned.

Let her see Sheriff’s flayed carcass just now, and she would flip out.