"Mile or so. It'll cool off quicker if you open the hood."
"Will it? Thanks."
"And get it a little farther off the road, doc."
He went on. I moved the car farther off the road. I opened the hood. I wondered if he would be bothered by the way I had acted and come back to check my license and look the car over. I wondered if I should make a U-turn and get as far away from him as I could. But it made some sense to risk the outside chance of his coming back and stay right there until I could plan what to do with the body.
The noon sun was warm. There was a subtle, sour odor in the car that sickened me. A dark-red tractor moved back and forth across a distant hillside. Drainage water bubbled in the ditch beside the shoulder. A truck went by at high speed, the blast of its passage shaking my car.
I found that a two-day drunk gives your mind a flavor of unreliability. Memory is shaky and dreams become mixed with reality. I began to wonder if I had imagined the body. When there was no traffic I looked into the back seat again. The tarp was there. The body was covered. It was not covered very well. I saw a thick ankle, a dark green sock, a brown scuffed shoe, cracked across the instep, with laces tied in a double knot, the way my mother used to tie my shoelaces when I was very small to keep them from coming untied. It made Grassman more believable as a person, as the person who had sat on the edge of a bed and tied those laces and then had gone out and become a body, and the laces would eventually be untied by somebody else, somebody with a professional coolness and an unthinking competence. I whirled around when I heard traffic coming. When the road was clear again I pulled the tarp to cover the ankle and shoe, but it pulled clear of his head and my stomach spasmed and I could not look at him.
After a while I fixed the tarp properly. I got out of the car. I did not want to look in again. But I found myself staring in at the side window.
I had to get rid of it somewhere. I had to get rid of it soon. The very nearness of the body kept me from thinking clearly.
The lake? I could find it again. But I could be seen there as readily as Ruth saw Grassman. I could hunt for obscure roads at random and dump the body out when I came to what seemed to be a good place. But the body was going to be found and it was going to be identified and it was going to be in the paper with the right name. And Ruth was going to remember the odd question I had asked the man and remember his telltale response to that question.
The minutes were ticking by and I was getting nowhere. Fitzmartin's trap was wide and deep, lined with sharp stakes. I wished I could put the body back on his doorstep. Give it right back to him. Let him sweat.