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attention.”
    â€œYou ought to have him break into a zoo and eat a camel. Half a camel.”
    â€œSpeaking of—”
    â€œNo. And I won’t buy any more.” Saturday night she’d come home with half a pack of Camels, and we shared it in an orgy of resolution-breaking. I could still feel the narcotic rush.
    â€œYou can’t be virtuous all the time.”
    â€œSo look up something really dirty in your Kama Sutra. Something that doesn’t cause cancer.” She held up the mayonnaise jar. “And doesn’t use condiments.” We’d used mayonnaise once, and she complained it made her smell like a sandwich. So people will know where you hid the salami, I said, and she did have to laugh.
    She didn’t like to talk about sex, but was willing to do anything. Better than the opposite, I knew from experience. Lynette of recent memory. A modern kind of celibacy, I guess; talking dirty and being squeaky clean. All talk and no action, my father would have said.
    I wondered where he and his girlfriend were now. It’s not fair for old people to have so much fun. Or, be honest, it’s creepy to think of your own dad fucking a girl not much older than you. Fucking anybody.
    â€œEarth to Jack.” She set the sandwich in front of me. “You’re daydreaming again. About your novel?”
    â€œNo, nothing.” I drove the image from my mind. “The bike carrier, we might need it. Like if one of the bikes breaks down, one of us could pedal back to pick up the car, then come collect it.”
    â€œOh, right. Good.” She took one bite and got up to punch the little boom box by the fridge. “New Flash Point CD.”
    We shared a lot of musical likes and dislikes, but I didn’t get her passion for Flash Point. Retro wannabes, what a combination. I nodded and concentrated on my sandwich.
    â€œMaybe he’d like them rotten,” she said. “The corpses. Like the French, they hang ducks and geese.”
    â€œWhat did they do?”
    â€œWho do?”
    â€œWhat did the ducks do, the French want to hang them?”
    â€œYou’re kidding.”
    â€œNo, I’m not. Who would hang a fucking duck?”
    She laughed. “They like hang them in a shed. Let them rot to improve their flavor.”
    What an image. “Tell me you just made that up.”
    â€œI swear to God and
Gastronomique
. Go Google it.”
    â€œOh, I believe you. What do they do with fish? Fuck them blind?”
    â€œNot raw.”
    â€œâ€™Course not. The bones.” I put some more mustard on my sandwich. “Maybe he would, you know? He’s got the big freezer, but maybe he’d stack them around for a while at room temperature first. The trailer’d smell like a dead moose, but he’d like it that way.”
    She nodded, munching. “That would make a good penultimate scene. Antepenultimate. The FBI men are closing in on Hunter’s trailer, and they go, ‘What’s that godawful smell?’”
    â€œHe’d remember it from the war,” I said, and had to stop and swallow twice.
    â€œYou all right?”
    I coughed and swallowed again. “Yeah. Nothing.”
    â€œ
You
remember it. Don’t you?”
    â€œSure. But it’s not like a big thing.” The first time, it wasn’t. They’d been dead so long they’d dried out, and we didn’t smell it till we were right on them. But the next was a woman and two babies, bloated up and burst, and as soon as we smelled them we heard the flies, and followed the sound, and if it hadn’t been for the X-rays, the demo squad, we might have snagged a trip wire in the sand and gotten claymored all over the fucking desert.
    â€œJack, you’re pale.” She touched the back of my hand and I jerked it away in reflex.
    I rubbed my face with both hands. “Fucking shit.”
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œNo, really. I’m all right.” I took a