J. C. trembled as he finished the wine.
“Useful,” he swallowed, “idiot.”
“Now, listen,” he said, for it was hitting him now. “I won’t tell you again. If you stay with me, you’re squashed. If you knew what I knew, they’d bury you in ten different graves across the wall. Cut you up in neat sections, one to a plot. If your mom and dad were alive, they’d burn them. And your wife—”
I grabbed my elbows. J. C. pulled back.
“Sorry. But you are vulnerable. God, I’m still sober. I said ‘nulverable.’ Your wife is back when?”
“Soon.”
And it was like a funeral gong sounding at high noon.
Soon.
“Then hear the last book of Job. It’s over. They won’t stop until they kill everyone. Things got out of hand this week. That body on the wall you saw. It was put there to—”
“Blackmail the studio?” I quoted Crumley. “They afraid of Arbuthnot, this late in time?”
“Scared gutless! Sometimes dead folks in graves have more power than live folks above. Look at Napoleon, dead a hundred and fifty years, still alive in two hundred books! Streets and babies named for him! Lost everything, gained in losing! Hitler? Will be around ten thousand years. Mussolini? Will be hanging upside down in that gas station the rest of our lives! Even Jesus.” He studied his stigmata. “I haven’t done bad. But now I got to die again. But I’ll be screwed six ways from Sunday if I take a sweet sap like you along. Now, shut up. Is there another bottle?”
I displayed the gin.
He grabbed it. “Now help me up on my cross and get the hell out!”
“I can’t leave you here, J. C.”
“There’s nowhere else to leave me.”
He drank most of the pint.
“That’ll kill you!” I protested.
“It’s painkiller, kid. When they come to get me, I won’t even be here.”
J. C. began to climb.
I clawed at the worn wood of the cross, then hit it with my fists, my face pointed up.
“Dammit, J. C. Hell! If this is your last night on earth—are you clean!”
He slowed in his climb. “What?”
It exploded from my mouth: “When did you last confess!? When, when?”
His head jerked from south to north so his face was toward the cemetery wall and beyond.
I surprised myself: “Where? Where did you confess?”
His face was fixed rigidly, hypnotically, to the north, which made me leap to scramble up, seizing the climb pegs, groping with my feet.
“What are you doing?” J. C. shouted. “This is my place!”
“Not anymore, there, there, and here!”
I swung around behind him so he had to turn to yell: “Get down!”
“Where did you confess, J. C.?”