Dead Floating Lovers by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Page A

saved them both if I’d raised a stink when I should’ve.”
    “Yup, all your fault, Dolly.”
    She turned my way. One eye wandered just far enough off center to give her a disoriented look. “Shut up,” she said, and fell to thinking and muttering all the way back to my house, and her car. She grabbed her backpack and was gone.
    It was a relief to see that Sorrow had been a good boy. Only one screen busted out on the porch, one rope chewed through, one pile of poop, one water dish overturned onto the bare boards, and only one garden clog chewed to a mass of rubber worms.
    I rewarded him with kisses for all that good behavior.

I wasn’t happy when we got home from Detroit. I was made no happier by a call from Jackson, wondering how far I’d gotten on the chapters of his book. Going through the mail did nothing to lift my spirits: house insurance due, huge electric bill. Double because I hadn’t paid the last one. And the phone bill. The Sears bill for the tires the Jeep had required. Two more rejections of Dead Dancing Women .
    I gave myself an hour away from everything, first going down to the lake to throw a stick for Sorrow, who joyously leaped and loped until he lay wet and exhausted at my feet with his long pink tongue hanging out. Not once, in sixty minutes, did I let myself think about the awful Dolly business. Then, with a sigh, I went back in the house and got to work. I called the Michigan State Police post at Gaylord. When I had what they would tell me, I wrote the story of the second skeleton and e-mailed it to Bill. After that I figured I had done my duty. I was going over to Crazy Harry’s to see if he wanted to play in the woods, chasing mushrooms and other edibles. I dug my mesh mushroom bag out of the pantry, put on an old denim jacket, and left, leaving Sorrow home. I was afraid Harry’s weird dogs might attack him. His indignant barking followed me up the drive to Willow Lake Road.
    Harry was in the middle of skinning another of those raccoons he told me walked up to his door and died of old age. Not a pretty sight.
    “Give me a couple minutes, Emily,” he said, sticking his long knife into the tall tree stump where he worked and wiping his hands carefully on the rag sticking from his pocket. He went into the house while I kept my back turned to the dogs throwing their bodies at the chainlink fence around the kennel. In a few minutes Harry came out, unfolding his huge, mesh mushroom bag so it dragged along behind him. It always threw me for a couple of minutes that Harry could wear his burying suit every day and half live in the woods but never get the suit dirty; never lose the crease in the long, skinny pants that skimmed his legs. I had the feeling Harry had more than one suit but it wasn’t the kind of thing you came out and asked. There was a dignity, and privacy, about Harry that I knew better than to try and get around. The man had lived alone most of his life. Talking didn’t come easy to him, nor telling strangers truths that could come back to haunt him.
    ___
    Last year’s leaves didn’t crunch under our feet as I followed Harry through the woods. The ground was soft, with an old leather feel, kneaded into decomposition by heavy winter snows. All of it—the thick bed of leaves—going to feed the earth. This stuff still amazed me. Cycles. Cycles. Cycles. Big wheel keeps on turning . I ran it through my head, like clearing out old cobwebs. So good to be where things were dependable.
    I’d never had a clue about nature before coming to live in the woods. Never saw the huge canvas around me. How could I know that such a wondrous, slow-moving security existed back when I ran too fast day after day, rarely lifted my head as I hurried to the next story, the next dinner party, or faced the next infidelity from Jackson Rinaldi. Like everyone, I’d wondered what life was about, why I was here, but I never wondered deeply enough to think there might be answers, or at least tiny signposts