by Daniel Kraus
“Joey, you’re the only one who could’ve possibly answered the bonus questions,” she said.
I shrugged in wretched bewilderment.
She arched her eyebrows. “Calculus?”
Yes! Calculus! I nodded with enthusiasm. Though we didn’t share periods, we both suffered through Coach Winter’s shaky stabs at education, and almost daily I saw Heidi poring over her textbooks during lunch. Usually she was with a few friends, other honor roll girls with their homework fanned alongside their food, but today the seats around her were empty. And I was being summoned.
I glanced at Foley. He eyed Heidi suspiciously but said nothing.
“Okay,” I said to her. “All right. Okay. All right.”
As if by teleportation I found myself sitting down next to her, and out of her mouth were spilling the letters and numbers that made up that week’s extra credit. She pointed and asked questions. I found myself shaking my head and correcting her. She groaned and called herself stupid. I told her not to feel bad, it was a tough one. Her thin lips twisted into a satirical smile and she peeked through the sides of her glasses.
“Okay, smarty,” she said. “Let’s do the next one.”
As I led her through the proof, I began to get the feeling that she already knew the answer. Twice I made nervous mistakes and she was quick to fix them. I thanked her sincerely for her assistance, which just made her chuckle some more. The whole thing was making me feel dangerously relaxed. I glanced at Foley to make sure he still existed and that this whole day wasn’t a dream.
He was frowning in another direction. I followed his gaze and found Celeste sitting at a table, gabbing with friends. A few seats away, Rhino, demolishing food with his ponderous jaw. Next to him, Woody Trask, still cruelly separated from his girlfriend, cracking his knuckles over an ignored tray of food and staring directly at Heidi and me.
“What’s wrong?” Heidi’s finger hovered over a differential equation.
“No,” I said. “I mean, nothing.” I felt the focused heat of Woody’s concentration. “I should probably go eat.”
“Oh.” She sounded offended. “It’s not like Winter curves these things.”
She thought I was trying to protect my grade point? That was all wrong, but my tongue was inferior to the task of sorting it out. The chair coughed as I stood.
“Who are you looking at?” she asked. To my horror, she twisted herself around to search the cafeteria. I stumbled over the chair trying to extract myself from her table.
Heidi’s head whipped back to her homework. She removed her glasses and smoothed down her hair.
“Woody Trask is looking at me,” she said in hushed wonder. Whether this statement was meant for me to hear, I didn’t know or care. I tripped my way across the floor, my face burning, my chest stinging. I sensed something whip by my face. A mustard-slicked bun bounced off my chest. A brownie vaporized against the back of my head. I didn’t bother to check which of Woody’s lackeys had done the throwing. All that mattered was how Heidi’s kind eyes had lost all interest in me the second she removed those glasses. I dropped into place across from Foley and pointed my face at my cooling po’boy.
Almost immediately Foley’s tray screeched from the table. I looked up and met eyes that had gone dark and guarded. I wanted to say something. He didn’t know what this single lunch had meant to me—tonight when I carved the day into the side of the sink it would be more than just another line.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed. “You like getting kicked around? You want that shit to continue?”
“No,” I pleaded. “No.”
“I can’t help you if you ignore every fucking thing I say.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know he was watching, I didn’t know—”
“I’ll bring those CDs.” His formerly buoyant voice wilted with sarcasm and distrust. He peered down at me as he passed. “You got brownie in your bald spot.”
34.
NATHANIEL MERRIMAN WAS BURIED in Lancet County, Iowa, just south of the Minnesota border. Harnett and I arrived at about four in the afternoon. We left our tools in the truck and wandered together onto the main path. The Lancet County Cemetery had no fence, but we paused at the sign stating the house rules: no pets, no littering, closed at sundown. Nothing at all about digging up bodies.
Just enough daylight remained to make a pass of the plot. But as soon as we crossed the threshold I was deluged with memories of the suicide victim bloating in her pool of black liquor, and within instants I began specifying—
—golden specks of pyrite embedded in the stony path—
—the scabby contours of damp tree bark—
—shrubbery knotted in the shapes of hands, pitchforks, jester hats—
—ants squeezing from a hill like pus from a wound—
—and soon swirled within a heightened reality of such absurd levels that I began to totter. Harnett righted me by the collar and told me to look about solemnly as if I were hunting for a loved one’s grave. Eager for a good grade, I frowned and tossed my head in a frenzied search.
“Easy,” Harnett said. “You look like you’re having a seizure.”
The gravestoned horizon was an exposed jaw of foul teeth. We instinctively hugged a row of mausoleums, their barred doors allowing slivered glimpses of stained glass and locked drawers. Breaking into these, I realized, would not involve any digging. I whispered my brainstorm to Harnett.
“First off,” he responded in a fake conversational tone, “whispering like that it makes it look like we’re planning to rob a grave or something.”
“Sorry,” I whispered. He glared and I tried again more casually: “I’m sorry.”
He gestured at one of the crypts. “They’re usually not worth the effort. You chip a lot of cement and bend a lot of iron and break a lot of glass. There’s no time to repair that mess, and that’s the most important thing, kid, the most important thing of all: never let them know you were there.”
“Duh.” I said it because I could feel the security cocoon of my specifying wear away, and beneath, waiting patiently, was the dead woman, her maggot eyes, the chasms of her slashed wrists. Quickly I scanned the cemetery for Two-Fingered Jesus and thought I saw him proselytizing to huddled stones.
“You want to spend a few years in prison?” Harnett asked with a fake cheer that emphasized his ill temper. “Either of us gets caught and it’s third-degree criminal mischief. And that’s progress. A hundred years ago, you’d be strung up by your neck and publicly whipped. If you think something similar isn’t possible today, then you’re reading the wrong newspapers.”
The pathway forked. Harnett paused to gauge each path’s twists.
“How old is the Merriman grave?” I asked.
“Been under two years.”
“Why’d you wait so long?”
“Wasn’t listed in the obits. Had to piece it together from other sources.”
This meant there would be no fresh mound, no telltale bouquets. “So what, we’re going to read every single gravestone to find it?”
“Open your damn eyes.” He pointed at the ground. “See that?”
“Sure.” I paused. “I see grass and leaves.”
Harnett chose a path and charged ahead. He pointed at another seemingly random patch of ground. “Okay, there. See?”
I saw only more grass and leaves and told him so.
He pushed a hand through his hair. “New graves rise slightly. You know this. After some time, though, the opposite happens, they settle and sink.” He pointed yet again. “When leaves fall, they come right out and tell you where to look, they practically hand you the bodies. If you can’t see this then you better wait in the truck.”
The subtle clue, when I finally noticed it, was repeated all over: leaves caught in gentle depressions otherwise imperceptible to the naked eye. It would be the same with thawing snow, I realized with a surge of excitement. This was what Diggers did—they used nature’s clues to solve man
kind’s puzzles.
Encouraged, I picked up speed and unexpectedly collided with Harnett. Pain burst through my nose. He whirled around and dropped into a praying position before a random grave.
“Damn, Harnett.” I rubbed my injured nose.
“Get down here,” he said.
I read aloud the name on the stone. “Oliver Lunch.” I snorted. “Nice name.”
“Will you get down?”
I kneeled and dutifully tried to summon images of Sundays at church with my mother. Nothing came to me. Harnett sneaked a glance over his shoulder and then retreated to Oliver Lunch. “You never know what you’re going to get, kid.”
I took the cue to peek over my shoulder. In the fading light, at the top of a nearby hill, a woman in a black dress embraced a shiny obsidian gravestone, her posture of genuine grief putting our feigned sorrow to shame. Even at this distance it was clear she was sobbing. I blinked at Harnett.
“I thought you said it’d been two years,” I said.
“It has been. To the day.”
It dawned on me. “The anniversary.”
He shook his head and exhaled. “Well, shit.”
We quietly returned to the truck, sat in the cab for ninety minutes until the sun had sunk, and then grabbed our gray sacks and moved quietly back through the cemetery. When we reached Oliver Lunch, Harnett again put on the brakes. My hand flew to my abused nose; he gripped my arm and pulled me from the path.
“Well, shit.”
“Damn, Harnett,” I complained, checking my nostrils for blood. “What, she’s still there?”
His shape in the darkness nodded. Nearby was a mausoleum the size of Harnett’s cabin, and together we squatted against a wall. Once my eyes adjusted I found the grieving woman, still draped across Nathaniel Merriman’s marker and uttering occasional soft noises.
“She can’t stay there all night,” I said. “Can she?”
Harnett did not respond.
I crossed my arms and snuggled my head into a thin cushion of moss. “Some anniversary.”
Harnett locked onto the Merriman mourner. “Sometimes the digs go easier than you’d expect, too. Once I drove across three states to find a diamond tiara a beauty queen had been buried in. The graveyard, when I found it, was going through some sort of septic situation. Ground overrun with mud and sewage. Stones overturned and sinking. It was so bad her skeleton had floated up and she was just sitting there waiting for me, the tiara right on top of her head.” His forehead knotted. “Spent all night trying to give her a proper burial, but in that muck? I was just wasting my time.”
He settled back against the crypt with a sigh. “This is right where we want to be. Good sight line, a posture we can hold for as long as necessary, up against a structure we can depend on.”
“Depend on for what?”
He glanced at me. “Depend on not to fall down.”
I laughed once, quietly, but he was dead serious.
“You think anything in here is kept to some sort of code? You lean against a stone like that woman out there is doing, and you’re gambling. Some of them are just barely nudged into the dirt. Some of them, if you haven’t noticed, weigh several tons. Things of such size fall over. That’s what happened to Copperhead.”
“Copperhead,” I said. “Was he a Digger?”
Harnett nodded and pointed at a massive twenty-foot cement monolith. “Decided to take a breather against one of those. Crushed his skull. Crushed everything. This was just three, four years ago. Knox told me the police report wrote him off as some kind of drunk.” Harnett looked at his hands. “Copperhead never took a drink in his life.”
The night stretched on. The clouds wore thin in spots and the thousand points of the Milky Way reflected each one of the markers below. Still the Woman in Black slumped and moaned. After a while her noises were joined by another: my stomach.
“Suck on a stone.” Harnett tapped the loose rocks at our feet. “It’ll help.”
I picked one up and examined it.
“But it’s a rock,” I said. “It’s a dead-person rock.”
“Christ almighty.” Harnett sighed. “Either your stomach or your mouth is going to wake up every corpse in this yard. Go find some food.” He jabbed a thumb toward the cemetery entrance. “Get going.”
The darkness in that direction was absolute. Maybe I had misunderstood. “What?”
“We passed a little place. Just around the corner from the truck.” He reached into his pocket, rustled around for a moment, and then pressed a twenty into my chest. “Here.”
“But, hey, wait.”
“I’m serious, kid.” He kept his eyes on the woman. “It’s going to be a long one.”
The place, when I found it, was a tavern barely bigger than the single pool table it housed. A fat man with a ponytail pocketed stripes by himself while a woman with tattoos covering her neck watched sitcoms behind the bar. I coughed to get her attention and asked if they had any food.
“We don’t sell food here,” she said.
“We got peanuts, Eileen,” said the man.
“We don’t got any peanuts, Floyd!” she yelled with surprising ferocity.
“We got pickles,” he said.
“Floyd!” She picked up a baseball bat and shook it at him. “We don’t got any goddamn pickles!”
He shrugged. “We got jerky.”
Eileen set down the bat and looked at me proudly, gently brushing her hair back from her forehead.
“We have lots of jerky,” she purred.
My pockets crammed with twenty dollars’ worth of Slim Jims, I escaped from Floyd and Eileen and plunged back into the purple gloom of the cemetery. I was back at my father’s side in minutes and together we peeled cellophane from greasy tubes of meat and chewed. Between swallows, Harnett continued his lessons. He told me about barbershops, next to newspapers the single best source of information on the recently deceased. Whenever possible, he told me, he would get a haircut in an area where newspaper coverage was thin; no self-respecting barber could resist listing everyone he knew who was ailing or recently dead. Before I could complain that I myself would’ve preferred a barber job to Harnett’s home-salon butchery, he continued. “Barbers and Diggers have been intertwined for centuries,” he said, noting something called the United Company of Barber Surgeons, begun in sixteenth-century Britain. “Together they were able to get from Parliament the exclusive right to conduct anatomical dissections.”
I wagered a guess: “And the Diggers supplied the bodies?”
Harnett just smiled. “In time,” he said, though I didn’t know if he was responding to my question or just delaying the answer.
Harnett described other important systems, too: the worlds of pawnshops, jewelry brokers, and antiques dealers, and the risks and rewards of associating with each. He told me of brokers who routinely abused Diggers with piddling offers and veiled threats. Reverend Knox—who wanted the Diggers saved and in church, not damned and behind bars—passed along warnings of these blackmailers. The day Knox died, Harnett lamented, the road would become much more treacherous. How would they know, for example, which buyers would purchase gold teeth without asking questions? Or which curio dealers traded in vintage Bibles?
“When Knox is gone,” Harnett said, “the money will dry up. And then, for most of us, there will only be Bad Jobs.”
“What’s a Bad Job?” I asked.
“There are things,” he said, gesturing into the blackness, “that people out there will pay you to do. Pay good money for you to do. There are things people want and we are the only ones who can get them. There are other things, too, even worse.”
“Like what?”
Harnett ignored the question. “Any Digger who starts down that path, he’s pretty well near the end. You can’t do those kinds of jobs and live with yourself. I’ve seen it again and again, Diggers who thought Just this once, I need the money. And that was that.”
“Suicides?” I whispered.
My fat
her spat out a hunk of bad jerky. “Many.”
35.
LIGHT FOUGHT RUDELY TOWARD my pupils. I tasted dirt and cloth—Harnett’s shoulder. I sat up quickly, wiping at the drool and tasting the sour crud of Eileen and Floyd’s rations.
“Shh,” Harnett said.
I rubbed my eyes; pebbles, embedded for hours within the heel of my palm, dropped into my lap. The Woman in Black was still there, curled like a dog on Nathaniel Merriman’s plot. An edge of morning sunlight warmed the tops of gravestones and threw black stripes across the gentle slope of the cemetery, but churning across the sky were storm clouds.
“Don’t we need to get out of here? It’s light; people will see us.”
“I’ve waited too damn long. I’m getting in there.”
“But people will see,” I insisted.
He looked at me. “People don’t see as much as you think.”
I opened my mouth to call him on his portentous bullshit, when suddenly he wrapped both arms around me and threw me to the ground. The stink of jerky from his breath filled my sinuses.
A man was walking up the path. Seconds later he glanced our way, but Harnett had successfully concealed us in the shallow ditch at the mausoleum edge. The man continued up the path, his crisp and metered footfalls sounding like Ted’s metronome.
Harnett rolled off me and crouched low. I followed suit. The man left the path and crossed over to the Woman in Black. He got on one knee beside her and shook her gently until she raised her head.
“Okay, that’s more like it,” Harnett whispered, nodding.
Together, the man and woman looked up at the brewing storm, then appeared to exchange words. Still kneeling, the man stretched out his arms and took the woman into a furious embrace.
“Oh, no,” Harnett said.
The man and woman clutched at each other, and their backs shook with the force of their crying.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Harnett said.
