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“Nah.”
“Why?”
“I just didn’t.”
We fell into silence. “Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you,” I said after a while. “Did you really go out with Sissy? That seems kind of strange to me.”
“What a bitch.” He made a noise, half laugh, half grunt.
“I thought you liked her.”
“She liked me, you mean. She wanted it.”
“Don’t be crude. Anyway, she was a religious fanatic.”
“That don’t mean she don’t get urges. Everybody does. My brother used to mow the lawn out at the convent, and he says they won’t even let the nuns order bananas there.”
“Ugh! Shut up.”
“It’s true.”
This was hopeless. Elro started humming to himself and drumming with his fingers on the whiskey bottle.
“But still,” I said, more to get him to stop humming than to keep up the conversation, “her mind was so full of Jesus that she wouldn’t have had time to think about things like that.”
“A lot you know.”
For some reason, hearing him talk that way, I felt offended for Sissy. “You really ought to be more considerate, Elro,” I said. “After all she went through—dying and everything.”
“Hah!” he took another drink.
“Why’d you laugh?”
“I didn’t laugh. I said, ‘Hah!’ ”
“Why’d you do that? That’s cruel.”
“She didn’t die. She drowned.”
“I know that. I was there. It was awful.”
“I was there, too. I drowned her.”
I waited a few seconds. “What are you saying?” I asked. “That’s crazy.”
“I drowned her. She was botherin’ me, so I drowned her. Tough.” He drank again from the bottle. “Tough, tough, tough.”
“How can you say that? How can you even think to say it? That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s true.”
I turned to get a better look at him, shifting until the door handle pressed into my back. He kept his eyes straight ahead, locked on the path of the pickup’s headlights. For a second, I imagined his eyes were the headlights.
“You’re just drunk,” I said, though he seemed more sober than he’d been for miles.
He shrugged. I watched his face for a while. The whiskey had covered his lips with a moist film that gave off a glinty shine in the darkened truck. “You know what a cock-tease is?” he asked.
“Of course.”
