Shallow Graves

they walked along the road, Janine said, “Tell me more about the film.”
    “That’s it for now.”
    She gave him a pout with her full lips. “Maybe I won’t be your guide if you’re not nice to me.”
    “Aw, I need a guide. I may never get back to civilization without one.”
    She grimaced dramatically and waved her armaround downtown. “Bad news, Charlie. This is civilization. It don’t get no better than this.”
    THEY WALKED FOR a half hour and found themselves in the cemetery.
    His reaction to the place was the same as on the day they’d arrived in Cleary, the day Marty had spotted the cemetery from the highway; it was perfect for the film. Tall black trees bordering a small clearing in which battered tombstones tilted at exotic angles. No big monuments, no mausoleums. Just hunks of stone, spilling right out of the forest.
    Pellam pulled the camera out of his pocket, took three or four pictures. The cemetery was filled with an odd, shadowy light, which seemed to come from the underbelly of the low wispy clouds. The light accentuated contrasts: bark was blacker than in bright sun, grass and milkweed stalks paler, stone more bleached; it was white like old bones. Many of the tombstones were badly eroded. Pellam and Janine wove through the grass, toward the woods. A rusty barbed-wire fence of taut strands separated the cemetery from the underbrush.
    Wait . . . What was that? Pellam stopped suddenly, stared into the trees. He was sure someone was watching him, but as he stepped to one side, the voyeur, if it was anybody at all, vanished.
    Janine said, “All I’ll say is, if it has Redford or Newman in it and you don’t tell me I’ll never speak to you again.”
    “It doesn’t.”
    “I saw Butch Cassidy twelve times. I only saw Let It Be eight.
    “Were you at Woodstock?”
    She smiled, surprised. “Yeah, were you?”
    “No. But I wanted to go. Tell me about the cemetery.”
    “What’s to tell? Dead people buried here.”
    “What sort of dead people? Rich, poor, smugglers, farmers?”
    She couldn’t quite get a handle on what he was asking. “You mean, like what does it say about the history of the town?”
    Pellam was looking at a grave.
    Adam Gottlieb
    1846–1899
    A sailor on your ocean, Lord.
    He said, “Man missed the century. Bummer. Yeah, that’s basically it. The history of the place, the atmosphere.”
    She danced over a grave, girlish. “Can you imagine what Cleary was like a hundred years ago? Probably only five, six hundred people here, if that.”
    He snapped several Polaroids.
    Janine took his arm and hooked it through hers. He felt the heavy pressure of her breast against his elbow. He wondered what her chest looked like. Was it dotted with freckles? Pellam really liked freckles.
    They walked for a few minutes. He said, “I don’t see any recent tombstones.”
    “Is that bad?”
    “No. I’m just curious.”
    Janine said, “There’s a new cemetery outside oftown. But that’s not the answer. The answer is that nobody ever dies in Cleary. They’re dead already.”
    She now grew serious and started playing with the top of her tea carton. “First, there’s something I have to tell you. I’m sort of married.” She looked up. “But we’re separated. We still get along okay, my old man and me, but it’s not like on a physical level, you know? He’s living with a bimbo runs a motorcycle repair shop near Fishkill. Her husband split too. He comes back now and then but mostly he’s split.”
    Pellam tried to sort it out. There were two husbands, was that it? One of them kept coming back? To who?
    Janine said, “Just want the facts out, you know. Like, in case you heard something. . . . Well, you know how it is.” She was looking at him. He felt the weight of her eyes on him, as heavy as her breasts. A response was in order.
    “Sure do,” he said.
    This seemed to satisfy her. She kicked at some leaves. Pellam hoped she didn’t want to go for a leaf fight. There was nothing worse than somebody on the threshold of middle age going zany.
    “Tell me about Hollywood. The parties are pretty wild, huh?”
    “I don’t go to Hollywood very often.”
    “Isn’t that where the studio’s at?”
    “Century City.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “Now it’s office buildings. It used to be the Twentieth Century Fox back lot.”
    “How ’bout that! Super.”
    They walked back to the town square. Pellam reloaded his camera. He looked up. From three different windows,