Read The Orchard Keeper (1965) for Free Online Page B

staggerfooted, reeled at the rear bumper and collapsed into the trunk whacking his brokenshoulder against the spare tire. There he sat for some minutes dazed and his mind threatening unconsciousness again.
    Got to get the hell out of here, he said, shaking his head and wobbling to his feet. He steadied himself with one hand against the cool skin of the coupe, worked his way to the other side and squatted there above the brogans. He cursed them for a while, then took hold of one worn heel and bracing a foot against the runningboard began to pull the man out. He tried not to look when the head emerged, then gave up and had a good look. The eyes were leaping from their sockets, an expression of ghastly surprise, the tongue still poking out. Sylder pulled him to the back of the car, got his hand in the shirt collar, lifting him bodily, and jerked him into the trunk. Only the legs dangled over the bumper and these he folded in after. Then he collected the jack and threw it in, dropped the lid, went to the switch for the keys and locked the trunk.
    Night. The coombs of the mountain fluted with hound voices, a threnody on the cooling air. Flying squirrels looped in feathery silence from tree to tree above the old man sitting on a punk log, his feet restless trampling down the poison ivy, listening to Scout and Buster flowing through the dark of the flats below him, a swift slap slap of water where they ghosted through the creek, pop of twig or leaf-scuttle brought to his ear arcanely—they were a quarter mile down—and the long bag-throated trail-call again.
    When Sylder turned the key, the handle, and swung the lid up, he didn’t expect the stench that followed, poured out upon him in a seething putrid breath. He didn’t even have time to step back. The spume of vomit roiled up from the pit of his stomach and he staggeredaway through the brush and saplings, retching, finally falling to his knees and heaving in dry and tortured paroxysms. After a while it stopped. He sat there for a long time with the sour green taste of bile in his mouth, lightheaded, trying to make himself believe that he could go back and do what he had to. He stood up and smoked a cigarette.
    A smell of honeysuckle came up the mountain, wafted on the cooling updrafts, Treefrogs and crickets called. A whippoorwill. Abruptly the yap of hounds treeing. His shoulder was pounding again and the cast had begun to cut into his armpit. He still couldn’t take a full breath. He started back, the Ford outlined through the silhouettes of trunks and branches like a night animal feeding, a shape massive and bovine. At the rear bumper he sniffed tentatively, then resolutely reached into the foul darkness and clamped his hand over one leg. Turning his head he stepped away, hearing the rasp and slide of it following and the thump and jar when it fell to the ground. Past the car, edging along the screen of brush he dragged it, thirty yards or better before stopping to rest. It felt lighter. He pulled it the rest of the way to the pit without stopping and then he couldn’t breathe any more. He lay in the grass very quietly, waiting for the shoulder to stop, and held on to the leg, afraid if he turned loose he would not touch it again. His breath came back and he sat up a little, not hurting, conscious only of his hand hooked around the suppurant flesh. Then he got to his feet, jerked the body to the edge of the pit in three long steps, talking in a voice skirting hysteria: You son of a bitch. You rotten son of a bitch.
    Dropping the leg he planted one foot in the man’s side and shoved him violently over the rim, the arms flapping briefly in some simulation of protest before crashing into the moldery water below.
    Going back down the mountain he left the ruts twice,cutting a swath the second time through a stand of sumac one of which caught in the bumper and rode there like a guidon. A limb whipped in the window and laid open his cheek. He didn’t even know the trunk was