Larry put his head on his knees and closed his eyes. He told himself he wouldn't cry. He hated to cry almost as bad as he hated to puke.
In the end he was chicken. He couldn't bury her. He summoned up the worst thoughts he could - maggots and beetles, the woodchucks that would smell her and come in for a munch, the unfairness of one human being leaving another like a candy wrapper or a discarded Pepsi can. But there also seemed to be something vaguely illegal about burying her and to tell the truth (and he was telling the truth now, wasn't he?), that was just a cheap rationalization. He could face going down to Bennington and breaking into the Ever Popular hardware store, taking the Ever Popular spade and a matching Ever Popular pick; he could even face coming back up here where it was still and beautiful and digging the Ever Popular grave near the Ever Popular Twelve-Mile Point. But to go back into that tent (which would now smell very much like the comfort station on Transverse Number One in Central Park, where the Ever Popular dark sweet treat would be sitting for eternity) and unzip her side of the sleeping bag the rest of the way and pull out her stiff and baggy body and drag it up to the hole by the armpits and tumble it in and then shovel the dirt over it, watching the earth patter on her white legs with their bulging nodules of varicose veins and stick in her hair...
Uh-uh, buddy. Guess I'll sit this one out. If I'm a chicken, so be it. Plucka-plucka-plucka.
He went back to where the tent was pitched and turned back the flap. He found a long stick. He took a deep breath of fresh air, held it, and hooked his clothes out with the stick. Backed away with them, put them on. Took another deep breath, held it, and used the stick to fish out his boots. He sat on a fallen tree and put them on, too.
The smell was in his clothes.
"Bullshit," he whispered.
He could see her, half in and half out of the sleeping bag, her stiff hand held out and still curled around the pill bottle that was no longer there. Her half-lidded eyes seemed to be staring at him accusingly. It made him think of the tunnel again, and his visions of the walking dead. Quickly he used the stick to close the tent-flap.
But he could still smell her on him.
So he made Bennington his first stop after all, and in the Bennington Men's Shop he stripped off all his clothes and got new ones, three changes plus four pairs of socks and shorts. He even found a new pair of boots. Looking at himself in the three-way mirror he could see the empty store spread out behind him and the Harley leaning raffishly at the curb.
"Sharp threads," he murmured. "Heavy-heavy." But there was no one to admire his taste.
He left the store and gunned the Harley into life. He supposed he should stop at the hardware store and see if they had a tent and another sleeping bag, but all he wanted now was to get out of Bennington. He would stop farther up the line.
He looked up toward where the land made its slow rise as he guided the Harley out of town, and he could see Twelve-Mile Point, but not where they had pitched the tent. That was really all for the best, it was -
Larry looked back at the road and terror jumped nimbly down his throat. An International-Harvester pickup towing a horsetrailer had swerved to avoid a car and the horsetrailer had overturned. He was going to drive the Harley right into it because he hadn't been looking where he was going.
He turned hard right, his new boot dragging on the road, and he almost got around. But the left footrest clipped the trailer's rear bumper and yanked the bike out from under him. Larry came to rest on the highway's verge with a bone-rattling thump. The Harley chattered on for a moment behind him and then stalled out.
"You all right?" he asked aloud. Thank God he'd only been doing twenty or so. Thank God Rita wasn't with him, she'd be bullshit out of her mind with hysterics. Of course if Rita had been with him he wouldn't have been looking up there in the first place, he would have been TCB, taking care of business to the cubistic among you.
"I'm all right," he answered himself, but he still wasn't sure he was. He sat up. The quiet impressed itself upon him as it did from time to time - it was so quiet that if you thought about it you could go crazy. Even Rita bawling would have been a relief at this point. Everything seemed suddenly full of bright twinkles, and with sudden horror he thought he was going to pass out. He thought, I really am hurt, in just a minute I'll feel it, when the shock wears off, that's when I'll feel it, I'm cut bad or something, and who's going to put on a tourniquet?