A Transfer of Books and Body

"Melody."

Zartwig's mind drifted...

"Melody."

"Yes? Oh, yes, my love."

They rose where they lay on the thick porch swing mat, and she began their ride in the sunset, the sun beaming orange and red flame across the shiny gray floorboards. They leaped and cantered, smiled and touched.

Melody said breathlessly, "And after Bad Max shot him, and he executed a stumbling trip out the back door, he sped away into the fading light on his silver stallion. And Leena bounded onto the bare back of the strawberry roan and dashed after him urgently. And as the sun set behind distant mountains, she found him there alone on the ground, bleeding, with the silver stallion not far off. And she slid from the back of the strawberry roan in the dark and went to his side. 'Leena, goodbye,' he managed to say, and she wept over him. 'I'll be there with you, my love,' she whispered through tears. And then she drew his revolver from its holster and pointed it to her heart and murmured his name as she pulled the trigger. Her body fell across her lover's and their blood mixed, forever."

Melody's ride crested them, and she collapsed onto him. Their warm moist clench turned into tender kisses, and they were confident in thoughts of spending happy, long years together. They giggled softly at Melody's rendition of a Marty Robbins favorite and held themselves close to one another in the fading light...

So many years ago, Zartwig thought. That first ride. Now it soon will be over.

According to Doctor Cunningham, his wife's surgeon, the end would come soon. The dark.

My Melody. Of love. Can I pull the trigger?

Looking easily at the weapon now, Zartwig silently considered an answer to his own question. The Remington, a rare calibre .45 Model 911, stared back at him. He imagined the pistol saying, "I don't fire until you pull the trigger, old man."

Does Melody want that? How many times had she recited her version of that Marty Robbins song during their magnificent rides together? She''s never said as much, but does she want my blood to stop its flow when hers does?

Zartwig knew he wanted the mutual end. But it was the matter of pulling the trigger. His hand. "Can I do it?" His whisper was barely audible.

He passed a slight-fingered septuagenarian hand across his forehead and through thinning brown hair. Where he sat in his den behind the great gray metal desk, he tucked his thin legs beneath the swivel chair. His shoulders tipped forward without prompting. Could he no longer control the stoop that had recently over-taken him?

With left hand fingers, he traced the half moon scar below the right corner of his mouth. Images of Melody filled the space into which he stared. His Melody could not go on much longer fighting the reversals of her latest stroke. The dark would come.

"I'm surprised, actually, that she's held on like this," Doctor Cunningham had said. Like it was an unwanted medical betrayal.

And I have a great will to die...with her, Zartwig had thought at the doctor's declaration.

He sat up straighter at the desk, rubbed his knee with his right hand. "She doesn't want to leave alone," Zartwig suddenly burst out to the room. "That's it. Not alone. The dark will come."

He must be there for her.

Melody had been full of life every minute, challenged by its complexities, humored by it subtle setbacks, willing always to spring again into the fight. "Life is a trip you don't pack a bag for," she was fond of saying. There were nooks and crannies ever cropping up for new exploration, she said.

But not the dark.

Ever the battler, his Melody. But now she lay dying in a white-walled hospital room, drained and as colorless as the white walls themselves. And she didn't know how to battle the coming of the dark.

Zartwig's eyes slid back to the pistol. It lay in appropriate display on top of the open, oversized Duck's Pond village treasury book. The pistol's purpose for being there was to remind him, lest he weaken, as he had a moment ago, of his solution to losing Melody. It wasn't just his loss that counted, he reprimanded himself. Her loss came first. She didn't want to go away from him, into the dark. He must follow.

He looked at the books before him. Underneath the village treasury book lay another thick, oversized ledger, the one from the Callton-Winzler Insurance Agency branch office. Both books were his current accounts volumes...his books. A native of Duck's Pond and the tiny town's six-time elected clerk-treasurer, he was the lone keeper of the village accounts and caretaker of the town's treasury. And as a forty-year veteran of Callton-Winzler's branch office in Duck's Pond, he also was a trusted keeper of paperwork for hundreds of area insurance policy holders.

And the books...his books...had been altered. He stared at the rows of columns, moved his eyes up and down across the figures...figures irreversibly changed, played with by his own precise, neat left hand. Shame flushed him, and he shook suddenly from a little chill.

For six terms, four years each term, he had served the northwest Ohio village of Duck's Pond, present population, 994 souls. At the age of seventy-four, he faced a seventh election next month. He knew he wouldn't complete the term. The election was less than three weeks away. He ran unopposed, as usual, for the office of village clerk-treasurer. He was a given in Duck's Pond village elections.

Only once, in his second election, had he been challenged for the position. No one else living within village limits, the only persons eligible to run for the clerk-treasurer's spot, wanted the position. It was a paperwork hassle, they all said. Mostly, Zartwig knew, they meant it was an unwelcomed hassle among neighbors.

Listening to town residents complain about their increasing water bills, the lack of garbage pickup service, and which village streets would be paved in a given fall was no one's idea of a good time. Keeping treasury books straight, winding through government grant applications, and doling out monthly water and sewer bills didn't rank much higher on anyone's list of entertaining pastimes.

Zartwig loved the books. A meticulous bookkeeper enjoyed the flaunt of rows of figures in need of a pencil to corral them into logical, sensible placement, he explained to those who would listen.

Now he was a remorseful fraud. He had fuged the figures, broken them into personally profitable obedient servants. And they had coughed up thousands of dollars out of the village accounts. He had pilfered over the past eighteen months to pay for some of Melody's expensive medical care. It had been ridiculously simple and not the stupendous challenge he had anticipated.

Shuffling his feet under the desk, he vaguely wondered if he could reverse it.

He stared at the three volumes spread open functionally on the desk in front of him. These books, he lamented to himself, for which, over the years, he'd had so much respect, were now his shame.

His position had been respected by the townspeople who counted on him. He'd kept the ledgers in immaculate numerical order. They now served as the millstone in his downfall, encumbering evidence against his proud life's work. He didn't see how it was possible to retreat. The deed of embezzlement was done. Should he leave confessive admission, or let fate lead others to possible, eventual discovery of the gaps in the accounts? Either way, he decided, he must follow through with the Remington as planned. It was his destiny and his wish to be with Melody. She needed him.

For a moment, he thought of carrying the Remington with him to the hospital. He discarded the idea as too dangerous. If something should happen...if for some reason, he were interrupted in his trip to T.M.C., the pistol would become a liability. What was he doing with it? someone might ask. He already was too nervous to trust himself to invent more excuses for strange behavior.

Better to leave the Remington lie for his later intended use.

Abruptly, Dale Zartwig got up, left the books and the Remington pistol without tidying up, and went to his car, a second-hand, blue-painted Ford Escort. Melody waited silently for him at Toledo Medical College. His Melody.

Except for the rattle of the Escort, the night was quiet as Zartwig steered wearily toward T.M.C., some forty miles northeast of Duck's Pond. He was tired after the evening's usual uneventful but long-winded village council meeting. Collin Creagor had seen to the longevity of the meeting, as he did so often.

Collin had insisted there was a large family of rats roaming his rental property on Cap Street. Twice a month, every second and fourth Monday on its regualr meeting nights, village council heard about Collin's rats. Time and again, Council president Jerry Kleinduck told Collin that rats were not Council's problem. And Collin would stick out his scrawny jaw and insist that the rodents were in the habit of nesting across the street on a vacant lot behind the grain elevator and that the vacant lot was ill kept by its absent owner, an out-of-state former resident, and that the lot's need of cleanup put the area within Council's jurisdiction for action and that made the rats Council's problem. By gummie.

He didn't need any more of that, Zartwig thought. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as he left the corporation limits of Duck's Pond.

Time to let go, he thought, staring through the windshield. Melody was losing her life.

Life. It's not about holding on, he thought. It's about letting go. When Melody could let go, he would let go, too.

Zartwig drove steadily through the fading dusk, looking forward to seeing his love one last time.