Out on the Cutting Edge

I took a sip of my coffee. For a moment I tasted bourbon in it, and I thought he might have added it to my cup while I was away from the table. But of course that was nonsense, I'd had the cup with me, and the bottle on the table held Irish whiskey, not bourbon. But I used to take my coffee that way, and my memory was pitching me curves and sliders, showing me blood on the sawdust underfoot, putting a bourbon taste in my coffee.

He said, "Every year there are farmers who pass out drunk in the hog pen, or fall and knock themselves out, and do you know what happens to them?"

"Tell me."

"The hogs eat them. Hogs will do that. There's men in the country who advertise that they'll pick up dead cows and horses, dispose of them for you. A hog needs a certain amount of animal matter in his diet, you see. He craves it, thrives better if he has it."

"And Paula—"

"Ah, Jesus," he said.

I wanted a drink. There are a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed the drink, that I couldn't bear it without it.

But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.

"I believe he wanted to do it," Mickey Ballou said. "To kill her with his knife and hoist her into the pen, to stand with his arms against the rail fence and watch the swine go at her. He had no call to do it. She would have gone home where she belonged and nobody would ever have heard of her again. He might have thrown a scare into her if he had to, but he never had any call to kill her. So I have to think he did it to take delight in it."

"He's not the first."

"No," he said fervently, "and sometimes there's joy to be found in it. Have you known that joy?"

"No."

"I have," he said. He turned the bottle so that he could read the label. Without looking up he said, "But you don't kill for no good reason. You don't make up reasons to give yourself an excuse to shed blood.

And you don't fucking lie about it to them you shouldn't lie to. He killed her on my fucking farm and fed her to my fucking hogs, and then he let me go on thinking she was baking cookies in her mother's kitchen in fucking Muncie, Indiana."

"You picked him up at the bar last night."

"I did."

"And drove up to Ulster County, I think you said. To the farm."

"Yes."

"And you were up all night."

"I was. It's a long drive there and a long drive back, and I wanted to get to mass this morning."

"The butchers' mass."

"The butchers' mass," he agreed.

"It must have been tiring," I said. "Driving all the way there and back, and I suppose you'd been drinking."

"I had for a fact, and it's true it was a tiring drive. But, you know, there's no traffic at that hour."

"That's true."

"And on the way up," he said, "I had him along for company."

"And on the way back?"

"I played the radio."

"I suppose that helped."

"It did," he said. "It's a wonderful radio they put in a Cadillac.

Speakers front and back, the sound as clear as good whiskey. You know, hers wasn't the first body ever went in that hog pen."

"Nor the last?"

He nodded, lips set, eyes like green flint. "Nor the last," he said.

We left the meat market bar and walked over Thirteenth to Greenwich Street, then up to Fourteenth and east to where he'd left the car. He wanted to give me a ride uptown but I wasn't going that way, and I told him it was easier for me to take the subway than for him to fight the traffic in lower Manhattan. We stood there for a moment. Then he clapped me on the shoulder and walked around his car to the driv-er's side, and I headed off toward Eighth Avenue and the subway.

I rode downtown, and after I got off the first thing I did was look for a telephone. I didn't want to call from a booth on the street. I found one in the lobby of an office building. It even had a door you could draw shut, unlike the open-air booths they have outside.

I called Willa first. We went through the hellos and the how are yous, and I cut into the middle of a sentence of hers and said, "Paula Hoeldtke's dead."

"Oh. You suspected that."

"And now I've confirmed it."

"Do you know how it happened?"

"I know more than I want to know. I don't want to go into it over the phone. Anyway, I have to call her father."

"I don't envy you that."

"No," I said. "And I have other things to do, but I'd like to see you later. I don't know how long I'll be.

Suppose I come by around five or six?"

"I'll be here."

I hung up and sat in the booth for a few minutes. The air got close and I cracked the door. Then after a while I closed it again and the little light came on overhead and I lifted the receiver and dialed 0 and 317

and the rest of his number, and when the operator came on I gave her his name and my name and told her I wanted to make a collect call.