Skeleton Key(121)

“Damn,” he said. But even he thought he sounded as if he didn’t mean it.

Henry came around the side of the house. Henry had been looking fidgety all morning, but Martin had put that down to the fact that Demarkian and those people had been out here again. Although they’d left the two of them mostly alone this time, Martin had to admit. They’d been out there pacing around on the roads. Martin had thought that Demarkian was going to break his ankle.

“So,” Henry said, looking up as Martin climbed the step-ladder again. “I thought maybe we should talk.”

“Talk about what?” Martin asked. The clog was too tight to be shook loose by a hard stream of water. That was too bad, because blasting the sucker with the hose was definitely the easiest way to take care of a problem like this. Martin was going to need a stick, or the handle of the rake.

“This is a mess up here,” he told Henry. “We’ve got to do something about it.”

“I said maybe we should talk,” Henry said again. “I’ve been thinking.”

“About what?” There was a stick right there on the ground that looked like it might do. Martin got off the ladder and picked it up. It was bent, but thickly round. He broke a little piece off the end of it to make it a more manageable size and started up the ladder again.

“I don’t see why what we have to talk about can’t wait till supper,” he said.

“Martin, for God’s sake.”

Henry put his arm out and on Martin’s arm. Martin looked down on it like it was a large dragonfly that had come out of nowhere and chosen him to roost.

“What the hell,” he said.

“Listen,” Henry said. “It’s about this place. The cemetery. It’s about us being here in the cemetery. Or about me being here in the cemetery.”

“What about it?”

“Well,” Henry said, “the thing is, I don’t want to do it anymore. Do you see that? I mean, we’ve been doing it for years. And I’m sick of it.”

The ladder seemed suddenly very high, much too high to climb. Martin put the stick on the ground and tried to think.

“But you can’t just stop doing it,” he said finally. “They’d kick us out of the house. It isn’t our house. It belongs to the Fairfield Foundation.”

“I meant I was sick of the house, too.”

Martin rubbed his palms against his jeans again. There seemed to be nothing else to do. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “Where would we go? What would we do?”

“We don’t necessarily have to do anything,” Henry said. “You could stay here if you wanted to. I could go on my own.”

“I couldn’t handle this place by myself.”

“You could hire a helper. Get one of those boys who’s always driving us so crazy. One of them would probably be more than happy to have a part-time job.”

“You don’t want me along with you,” Martin said. “Wherever you’re going, you don’t want me to be there, too.”

Henry sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want you to be there, too. I just want you to do what you want to do. That’s all. I just want to stop going along to go along. I’m an old man. I want to do something fun before it’s too late.”

“Fun,” Martin said.

Then he turned around and lifted the ladder off the ground. He snapped it closed and put it under his arm. These were familiar things he was doing, the things he did every day. This was the life he knew. Henry was crazy to be talking about fun.

“I’m going to go put this away in the barn,” he said, keeping his back to his brother. “You go do what you want.”

“Listen,” Henry said. “We can get Social Security in a few years. Do you realize that?”

“So what?”

“So it’s enough to live on, some places. And we wouldn’t have to stop working. We could flip burgers or something. There would be jobs.”

“Where?” Martin demanded. “In Waterbury? Why would I want to flip burgers in Waterbury?”

“Not in Waterbury. In Florida. We could go to Florida. I’ve got some money put by. We could buy a trailer, one of those things, or a little ranch house. They don’t cost much in Florida. Maybe sixty or seventy thousand dollars in some places.”

“Nobody can buy a house for sixty or seventy thousand dollars,” Martin said. “You can’t buy a garage for that.”

“Up here you can’t. Down in Florida you can. I’ve been checking. Down in Palm Harbor, that’s a place. And it’s getting cold, can’t you feel it? It’s going to be cold as hell all winter.”