The Darkest Evening of the Year

occurs to him that Piggy, plain simple Piggy, may be the only person he has ever known who is only and exactly who she appears to be, which may be why she seems mysterious.
    And here, unexpectedly, is the Look that Harrow has lately seen subtly transform the child’s features, the quality that is not beauty but that might be akin to it. The defining word for the Look still eludes him.
    Outside, the wounded day issues a bloody glow that lacks the strength to press through the cracks in the shutters. Only the desk lamp illuminates the room.
    Yet elfin lights persist in the crystal beads of the lampshade in the darkest corner, in the glass doorknob far from the desk, in a gold-leaf detail of a picture frame, in window glass that is not at an angle to reflect the desk lamp.
    Harrow has the peculiar feeling that he and the child are not alone in the room, though of course they are.
    Piggy will not clean up the mess her mother made as long as Harrow remains to watch her. She stoops to such tasks only when she is alone.
    He rises from the arm of the chair, stands watching her for a moment, walks to the door, turns, and looks at her again.
    Rarely does he say anything to the child. More rarely still does she speak to him.
    Suddenly the expression on her face so infuriates him that if he were a man without absolute control of his emotions, he would knock it off her with one hard punch.
    Without looking at Harrow, she says, “Good-bye,” and he finds himself outside the room, closing the door.
    “You’ll burn like pig fat,” he mutters as he turns the deadbolt lock, and he feels his face flush because this juvenile threat, while worthy of Moongirl, is beneath him.

 
    Chapter
36
    T he man known as Eliot Rosewater to Vernon Lesley was known as Billy Pilgrim to the associate who had flown the two-engine aircraft to the abandoned military facility in the Mojave.
    The pilot, who had worked with Billy on many occasions, called himself Gunther Schloss, and was Gunny to his friends. Billy thought Gunther Schloss sounded like a true name, a born name, but he would not have bet a penny on it.
    Gunny looked like a Gunther Schloss ought to look: tall, thick-necked, muscular, with white-blond hair and blue eyes and a face made for the cover of White Supremacist Monthly.
    In fact he was married to a lovely black woman in Costa Rica and to a charming Chinese woman in San Francisco. He wasn’t a fascist but an anarchist, and during one bizarre week in Havana, he had smoked a lot of ganja with Fidel Castro. You could hire Gunny Schloss to kill just about anyone, if it was someone you for some reason didn’t want to kill yourself, but he cried every time he watched Steel Magnolias, which he did once a year.
    After Gunny killed Bobby Onions and Vernon Lesley, he and Billy stripped the bodies of ID and dragged them to the intersection of the two cracked blacktop roads that served the surrounding cluster of abandoned Quonset huts. They pried a manhole out of the weed-choked pavement and dumped the dead men into the long-unused septic tank.
    Even the desert got some rain, and the service-road gutters fed this tank, so the darkness below still stank, if not as bad as it had when the facility had been open twenty years ago, and both bodies splashed into something best not contemplated.
    Billy heard movement below, before and after the dropping of the cadavers: maybe rats, maybe lizards, maybe desert beetles as big as bread plates.
    When he had been a young man, he would have lowered a flashlight or torch down there, to satisfy his curiosity. He was old enough now to know that curiosity usually got you a bullet in the face.
    They worked fast, and after they wrestled the cover onto the manhole, Gunny said, “See you in Santa Barbara.”
    “Pretty place. I like Santa Barbara,” Billy said. “I hope nobody ever blows it up.”
    “Somebody will,” Gunny said, not because he had any proprietary knowledge of a forthcoming event, but because he was an anarchist and always hopeful.
    Gunny flew out in the twin-engine Cessna, and Billy walked the scene, kicking sand over the drag marks from the dead men’s heels, picking up what shell casings he spotted in the late sun, and making sure they had gathered up all of the major pieces of Bobby Onions’s skull.
    When the woman disappeared, no one would care as long as she was a nobody named Redwing, living in a modest bungalow, doing nothing with her life except rescuing dogs.
    Every week, so many