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Show Blue Run/58 clear thread, Brother Dell'd looked me straight in the face the whole time he delivered the Cain and Abel sermon. It was something, really, how his eyes glowed when he threw his head back and shouted, "Oh Cain where is thy brudder?" And me about half in shock like everybody else, beside Mama, the way her chin quivered. The embalmers who'd stolen his Rolex watch, they'd had to reconstruct part of Jimmy's face. The whole thing-it was just too fucking much And brother Dell Cain and Abling me, then offering the call to salvation, looking me straight in the eve-this is your fault and you know it. don't you, vou sad little fuck? And, you know, I believed him for a while. In the hollow of my bones I felt it was so. A couple friends had driven down to the funeral from Fayetteville, Ray Ray and Dirky Lee high on whiskey and road food. Ray Ray hadn't brought shoes, so I gave him a pair of Jimmy's. Together, they sat up in the balcony looking down on the silver casket and me-beside Mama on the first pew-riveted to Brother Dell while he Cain and Abled me. Dirky Lee was so moved that he wrote the whole scene down, verbatim, for a novel, all the way to Jimmy crashing his car into a tree stump, a fact Dirky jazzed up by making him naked in a Trans Am. It's his ending scene, his finale, for Jesus sake. "Cain, where is thy brudder?" Brother Dellwood, I'll have to contend with him, and I'm not entirely ashamed to tell that contending with Brother Dellwood Walker was an event I could almost look forward to. Salvation, my ass How about slay him with laughter? "How about them apples?" what Mama always said. Get down to the root of all things-laughter and slaughter It's dark when I wake up, and I about half expect for the phone to ring and somebody else I love to be dead My daughter's tonsils are enlarged; her breathing is raspy, like how Uncle |