by Daniel Kraus
URGENT: at Lio.’s request, epitaph added: Job 20:15. Alerting
Dggrs. Burial: 29th. Tix at EDI. Godspeed.—Kx
“He’s dead,” I said. “Lionel’s dead.”
Harnett was shaking his head.
I felt my heart pound with hope.
“He’s not dead?”
Harnett swiped the letter back and shook it.
“He is. He is dead. He is dead and I am sad.” Then, to my surprise, his face broke into the gladdest smile I’d ever seen. “But he’s left us a gift.”
When a pastor in street clothes arrived ten minutes later he chuckled at my agitation, unlocked the church, and ushered me inside to a large Bible parted upon a pulpit. I paged forward and back. The man nudged me aside and licked his finger. After a moment he pointed at the relevant verse.
“ ‘He will spit out the riches he swallowed; God will make his stomach vomit them up.’ ” I repeated this to Harnett seconds later. He grabbed my elbow and began pulling me down the sidewalk.
“The treasure,” he said.
“Wait. You mean it’s real?”
“ ‘The riches he swallowed.’ ”
We were heading in the direction of the bus station, which would take us toward the A8 and the Edinburgh Airport, where Knox had plane tickets waiting.
“It’s with him.” I slapped my head. “It’s inside his coffin.”
“ ‘God will make his stomach vomit them up.’ ”
“He wants us to dig it up. That’s why he showed us the plot.”
Harnett glanced at the sky and up there I saw what he saw: a way out for both of us, enough money for him to live out his vagabond days in Europe and for me to follow whichever path I saw fit. He whispered, “You crazy bastard.”
“But Knox sent the same note to all the Diggers,” I protested. “There’s no time, we’ll never get there in time.”
“The note said the twenty-ninth. That’s two days. There’s time.” Harnett picked up his pace. “But you’re going to have to shut up and get moving.”
By midday we found ourselves at Glasgow International Airport, nearly one month after we had arrived, once more with nothing but the clothes on our backs, an old trumpet, and one backpack held together by threads. Heading for the security checkpoint, I again slipped the segment of my mother’s leg bone into my pants leg and glanced at a mounted television monitor. There was a storm system heading for the Southeastern U.S. that they were calling Tropical Storm Gilbert, but it was expected to weaken before landfall. The weatherman sounded confident. I didn’t give it another thought.
37.
WE FLEW INTO WASHINGTON, D.C., under slate skies. The first spots of precipitation I saw were against the windows of a rental car that we had no intention of returning. By the time we hit Richmond, Virginia, the rain was battering us like machetes, popping against the hood and windshield with such force that I kept seeing Harpakhrad sailing toward the glass.
The radio told the tale. Tropical Storm Gilbert was now Hurricane Gilbert and was bearing down on the Outer Banks at Category Five levels. Winds were expected to reach 150 miles per hour. Anything within five hundred yards of shoreline was doomed. Massive evacuations were widespread. You couldn’t buy bottled water. By the time we hit North Carolina a caravan of cars clogged the interstate, heading in the opposite direction. We never considered stopping. In mere hours we could call our digging days done and Valerie Crouch could at last rest in peace.
We were forced to pull off for gas about two hours from Lionel’s. Vehicles idled in crowded lines for a chance at the pumps. Rain moved horizontally, ripping hoods from people’s heads as they watched their words being stolen into the sky. There was a feeling of impending apocalypse; men were giddy with the threat. Harnett spent five seconds in the rain to enter the store and came back soaked to the skin. He threw a cheap shovel and flashlight into the backseat. He tossed me trail mix, evidence of a tragic lack of Doritos. Outside, an armoire bungeed to a pickup bed was disassembled by the wind. We lost thirty minutes, an hour. And the radio station kept the bad news coming: Lionel’s house looked to be ground zero.
Fueled, we rolled back out into the street, the gusts fighting us for every inch. The car shuddered and creaked. Harnett pulled over for a moment and cowered as if even the effort of steering was too much. When we moved again we couldn’t exceed twenty-five—anything faster and we felt our wheels begin to leave the earth.
Thirty miles from the coast the two-lane road disappeared beneath a lake. There were abandoned cars stranded in water up to the door handles. We paused at the edge of the water. Harnett looked at me and then pressed the gas pedal. Our motion sounded like the removal of masking tape. Two fans of brown water sprayed. The tide shouldered us repeatedly like some mammoth underwater monster. Water began pooling at my feet.
Somehow we made it. We risked two more floods and crawled around scores of fallen trees. Five miles from Lionel’s house we put the car in park and ran outside to pull a length of fence from our path. Immediately the car door crashed shut on my fingers. I waited for the pain, but it didn’t come because the fingers were wood. Staying low, I scrambled after Harnett. Twigs and rocks audibly assailed our bodies. Trees on either side of us broke one at a time. Harnett gripped the far end of the fence, I took the near. He pulled and I pushed. I saw him yell something. He waved his hands and lay flat against the pavement. I looked over my shoulder and saw the giant yellow sickle of a broken McDonald’s sign sailing through the air. It capered above us and then dove. I dropped and felt runners of water twitch as the object swooped over us. There was a crunch, muffled by the coarse bellow of the storm, and when we dared look we saw that the top of our car had been smashed in. We could still hear the mumble of bad news from the radio.
Harnett took the shovel and the flashlight. I took my backpack. We ran but it felt like walking.
Downed power lines snaked miserably. Road signs somersaulted, sparking against the pavement with each revolution. It took us twenty minutes to cross a small bridge that was sloshing and treacherous with spill. We came upon a traffic light hanging just a foot from the ground, and we fell against it, clutching it and panting. It was huge. I ducked my head against the dead red lens and for a moment the sucking howl of the storm diminished. Night was coming fast.
Lionel’s charming, pink-trimmed roof had crumpled sideways into the yard, collapsing the living room wall into a smear of rubble. His tasteful furniture and framed pictures had been yanked into the sky. We staggered through the unprotected clearing and made it to the aperture of the path through the woods. Trees beat at the trail like two endless rows of fists. The light was fading. The danger was palpable.
Harnett pressed his teeth against my ear. “YOU CAN STAY HERE.”
I shook my head.
“STAY HERE.” He nodded. The rain thrummed from his skin.
There’s no heroism, not anymore—in Edinburgh, that had been Harnett’s justification for letting the Diggers expire. But I could see from the mad glint that shone from his eyes that there was one last chance for heroism and it was now.
I grabbed him by the collar and shook my head. He set his jaw and, perhaps, suppressed a grin, and then threw an arm around my back. Joined, we plunged into the screaming whorls and hurtling torrents. Wood fired like thunderclaps and heavy branches pushed against our shoulders. Harnett fought them off with the shovel, and in those courageous strikes I thought I saw something happen between the shovel and him, an accord between man and wood, but I couldn’t be sure.
Trees gave way and there was the hill leading down to the cemetery and the ocean beyond. Only the hill had become a pulp of debris and the cemetery was gone. That couldn’t be right. I kneeled and tried to see through the silvery thrash. Harnett pointed the flashlight but it only lent definition to the layers of rain. He shut it off and we stared, and after a while we understood.
The ocean had surged to such levels that it had not just overtaken the cemetery but gutted it. Now it was a churn
ing swamp crashing with coffins and boiling with bodies. Headstones tossed like leaves. Bones rolled white like surf. Geysers of mud erupted at the collision of gruesome things.
We stepped, then slipped, then fell. I splashed down in flowing water up to my chest. I wrapped my fingers around the buckled remnants of a fence and whipped my face through the storm until I found Harnett pulling himself upright a few feet away. I drove my legs through the water until I was at his side. He took hold of my arm and we moved along the fence, looking for the easiest path inward.
Harnett froze at the point of entry and tried to turn me away. It was too late. A man was impaled upon the dull square pegs of the fence. Rain beat upon his open eyes and filled his mouth. It was Fisher, the garrulous old man who had spoken in mixed metaphors and preferred grave worms to all other kinds of tackle. We had underestimated him—he had been the first to reach Lionel’s cemetery, and the first to die.
Harnett brought me close and stepped into the vortex. Invisible hands yanked us into the vile stew. I raised my chin above water, pushed my feet through mud, felt my toes tickle a coffin that rolled beneath my sneakers. I reached for a headstone but it bobbed away from my grasp.
I saw black water flash off Harnett’s teeth as he shouted, but his effort was useless under the ocean’s continual detonations. The storm surge kicked up corpses to block his path. He fended them off with the shovel. I tried to follow. My arm plunged through a rib cage; I flapped furiously to dislodge it. Lightning flashed and I saw coffins jumping like pistons. Harnett was balanced against a towering tombstone that leaned dangerously inland. He motioned me in. I collapsed against a Jesus with even fewer fingers than I.
“I CAN’T FIND IT!” His face sparkled with moonlit salt. “I CAN’T SEE, I CAN’T REMEMBER!”
There was desperation in his voice—he was lost, as was all hope. I leaned in and our foreheads sealed with mud. I tried to tell him it wasn’t true. There was hope and that hope was me. In a flash I remembered—
—the split oak forking overhead—
—the capillary universe of leafless treetops threading the horizon—
—cursive alphabets invented by our footprints—
—the fibula of beach lying hard and gleaming below—
—the bilious curdle of surf—
—rock scatterings that drew invisible pentagrams between points—
—the shape of the outcropping itself: a fallen maple leaf of stone—
—everything that I had specified the day Lionel had brought us here. I squinted and saw the lighter, brighter, softer hues of that day transposed against the seething tumult. Landmarks revealed themselves. Through a hundred bodies and the dirigibles of caskets and stones, I saw the way. I sent a silent thank-you to the mother who’d fostered this ability, and then took my first step. I grinned and looked back over my shoulder to tell my father the good news.
Harpakhrad cut through the rain as if it were fabric. Harnett’s neck was struck with such force that I recoiled, lost my footing, and slithered beneath water. A bloated white face rolled past me and I batted at it, knocking the bottom jaw loose in a plume of gore. I rocketed back to the shattering planet above—Harnett, Boggs, I couldn’t see them, didn’t know where they were. A casket collided with my elbow and I scrambled atop it and waited for lightning. I was floating away.
There—a shocking distance behind me, Harnett clawed through the muck on his belly. Boggs followed, teetering. The remnants of his three-piece suit slopped to his body in muddy lumps. Somehow his top hat had not sailed away; the brim curled downward and I felt the sick certainty that he had sewed it into his ears. Slicing through the rain was Harpakhrad as she alternated between weapon and crutch. I realized with horror that Boggs had not amputated or repaired his foot. The dead appendage still hung in its pouch of black, gangrenous skin.
There was nothing I could do to reverse the tide. I saw Harpakhrad flash and Harnett’s tool meet it across an emptied grave. The blades locked and twisted; Boggs slid away and struck again with a looping sidearm. Harnett shucked left and trapped Harpakhrad with an arcing stab of his flimsy tool. The men’s bodies came close—and that was all I saw. The current spun me and the two men were lost, though I heard their instruments’ thin whistles and shattering collisions before they, too, became part of the storm’s texture.
The casket I was riding struck something hard and I spilled. I took another dive and was paddling toward the locomotive roar of the ocean even before I surfaced. I pushed through squalls, blinking furiously and craning my neck to note each specified landmark. I confused the storm above with the one below. I mistook floating scraps of flesh for fish. It was a black march that I half expected to kill me.
The ocean, which had once been fifty feet below, now overtook the land, leaving only a tiny island of mud at its highest point—the outcropping that jutted over the beach, the forked tree, the humble headstone. I dragged myself from the ferment and walked with my elbows and knees until my hands took hold of the stone. With shaking fingers I wiped mud from the engraving: LIONEL MARTIN. JOB 20:15.
The water glowered with a cruel green light. I embraced the stone and laughed against the cold rock. I had done what no other could do. I had found Lionel’s treasure.
Harnett, though, would never find me. I raised my head into the blinding deluge and screamed; the sound was unfairly stolen. I slapped my hands into the mud; it was as soundless as a stone tossed into a frothing sea. I stripped off my backpack and prepared to beat it against the ground when I recognized the weight that shifted inside.
I pushed aside the serrated edge of my mother’s bone and withdrew the only other cargo. The trumpet was warm in my palm and the rain spiraled across its golden curves. My knuckles bent comfortably around it, but I hesitated when my wooden fingertips met the buttons. There was no sensation. Nothing. There was no song my maimed body could still play. And then I raised the instrument to my lips and found that I was wrong—there was one song I could play, the Harnett family theme, and blaring through the storm was our single note of failure that, just maybe, just this night, would not fail:
F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F,
F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F, F—
