by John Dunning
He shifted slightly and she turned over, releasing him. He pulled himself up and straddled her, swung his leg over, and got out in the predawn wood. The forest was like a medieval painting, drippy and gloomy with pockets of deep fog and, far out beyond the railroad, a rosy nimbus where the sun was struggling to break through. In the tent he heard her stir. “There’s no rush,” he said. “Just come when you’re ready.”
He walked out past the dampened remains of last night’s fire, picked up his shovel, and headed across the way. He had a new hunch; the discovery of the road had given it to him, and now as he walked through the tall grass the hunch got suddenly stronger. It was too early yet for effective work: the fog was hanging on, getting thicker if anything, and choking off the sunrise. The woods were still locked in black shadow and he couldn’t see much of the ground, but he walked until he reached what he thought was the edge of the old township.
When he turned he was looking straight up the tracks and the sign, MAYNARD, seemed to be floating in the soupy morning. But he could read the letters and that made it spookier as the hunch gripped him tighter.
This is where it happened, he thought. Not on the other side; over here, with George looking back up those tracks at that sign. He was a sensitive kid, that’s why the word kept giving him nightmares.
Imagine the turmoil in a kid like that if he had to watch the killing of a man. Georgie surely would have turned away at the moment of death: turned from the horror of it and had the word MAYNARD burned into his mind by a gunshot. Then had to face the horror anyway and help with the burying, the body still warm, the blood still flowing. It was as good an idea as any and this was as good a place to start.
Holly arrived with their small bag of food. Nothing elaborate today, just canned goods from the store. She sat on a stump and gave him his choice and he said, “I’ll take the peaches if you don’t care.” She cut the top out of the can and handed it to him, took the pears for herself, ate slowly, and waited for his thoughts on the new day. “This puts a little different slant on it,” he said. “I think the sign plays into it; I’ll tell you why later if that’s how it turns out. For now let’s just say that I’ll start work down here, where I can look up that stretch of track and keep that sign in view.”
The fog had thickened and the sign had an otherworld visage that he couldn’t shake off. “You’d never know there was a town here,” she said. “I wonder why they never built it back.”
“They say it ran afoul of the good people. Too much gambling, drinking, fighting. This was the whorehouse district over here.”
She laughed dryly. “God help us all when the good people get going.”
He drank the juice from his can.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I haven’t given a thought to my job or the guys in the band. Jud’s going crazy by now.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about getting fired.”
“What about you?”
He shrugged. “If they want to fire me, that’s what they’ll do.”
“Does it matter? Do you really care?”
He didn’t know how to answer that without getting into the need to explain. But he didn’t want to lie, so he said, “Yeah, it matters. For different reasons than you might think. Sometime I’ll tell you maybe.”
She kept looking at him in that curious way. He met her eyes and said, “I seem to’ve found something there that I didn’t know I was looking for. Kinda like what you’ve found, if that makes any sense to you.”
“Yeah, it does. It’s probably too bad for both of us.”
Dulaney picked up his shovel. “Well, this is nice but it ain’t gettin’ the work done.” He moved off into the trees. Holly went the other way, north along the railroad tracks.
The rosy tinge had gone, leaving a gray pall over the woods. The fog was a nuisance: thick pockets of it drifted in from the east. Occasionally he could see across the glade at the east end of where the town had been, a hundred yards at its widest point. Once he saw Holly, like a fleeting specter in a ghost story, gone in a moment. He turned and came back across the town site toward the railroad, found the remains of a chimney and a trace beyond it. The trace might’ve been a street, maybe an alley behind one of the cribs, where the whores could stand and display their wares or gather for a smoke between customers. Dulaney stood still and in that moment he could almost see the guys milling around, hear the chatter of the dice, and smell the hard liquor. All of them dead now—the women and their pimps, the brawlers, the drinkers, the good people too—all dead and gone.
He went down a recess and up the other side, and the sign floated before him. There was nothing to the place and never had been, just a few wooden buildings on a piece of land no bigger than a postage stamp, but plenty big enough if you had to dig it up from one side to the other.
He found his first dig site, a small depression just into the trees, with the MAYNARD sign wafting in clear view up the tracks. Draped his shirt on a tree, and soon he was in his rhythm, arms and hips as relentless as a well-oiled machine. In half an hour he had an oblong pit, three by six, with piles of earth growing on both sides. It wasn’t far to the grave digger’s finish line: six feet under and still no break in the earth, no bed of clay or other change in texture, no discovery that might tell him something one way or another. Prudence told him to stop when his thighs caught a shower of breakaway earth. It would be easy to get in trouble here, have the walls come down and bury him. That’s all she needs right now, he thought: to come back and find me dead under a cave-in.
A train passed, going south to Atlantic City. He stood behind a tree and watched it float along, the windows like a streak of light in the mist. The caboose flitted away and the fog sucked it up, and a moment later he started in again.
He was no longer fussy now that he had broken ground. If something caught his eye, he would dig it up and look. At eight o’clock he was again up to his knees in dirt. He could finally see the sun, a pale white ball floating out beyond the trees to the east. At midmorning, with three holes and half a dozen short digs behind him, he still had the hunch as strong as ever. He hadn’t found the right piece of ground yet, but it was here, he could feel it. He hadn’t seen Holly in more than an hour, but in a way he was relieved by her absence. With her standing watch he would feel a need to apologize, to be timid with strokes he now took at a rugged, fierce, white-hot pace. As if he’d hit the old man. As if the old man would feel it.
The clearing of the fog came suddenly, and within fifteen minutes, at about ten o’clock, the day went from soupy gray to a brilliant hot yellow. On and on he went, gaining strength as he always did in the face of a daunting physical battle. Soon, if Holly didn’t return and break his rhythm, he would slip into that state of automatic reflex where the mind seemed to separate and steel the body against almost any punishment in pursuit of a goal. Ten minutes later he was lost in it, and he felt nothing after that, he shoveled tirelessly. The next time he looked at the sky, the sun was at noonday and he realized that Holly had been gone too long. He gave her one sharp shout but only the birds called back.
He threw his shovel down into the dirt, picked up his gun belt, and walked north along the railroad. He felt uneasy, the same prickly sensation he’d felt two nights ago standing alone on the platform at Pinewood. He didn’t call out again, just headed off into the woods where he’d last seen her. He reached a wall of old growth, so thick she couldn’t possibly have gone there, and pushed on north. Even after forty years he could see where the fire had gone. Brakes appeared in the old growth, and these had come back first as meadows and later as new growth, which had all but filled the open spaces with smaller, younger trees. He walked up the length of these pine brakes until the old forest closed him off again; then he’d skirt the edge of it and work his way back to the west, all the way to the railroad, where the zigzag process would begin again. The way was slow and tedious and the sun was over the top of the sky when he found her.
She was sitting on
the ground in deep forest, very still, as if waiting for someone to come wake her. As he approached, her head turned slightly in his direction but she didn’t look. She trembled and her face was ashen, and her eyes filled with tears when he came around and squatted before her.
He knew what the matter was. She had found her father.
She looked off into the glade and he reached out and squeezed her shoulder. He walked away and there in the glade was the grave site. He had no doubt as he kneeled and ran his fingers around it, just as she had known when she’d turned over the camouflaging bed of pine needles and exposed the slightly sunken trace. Dulaney got up and looked back through the forest and up the tracks. The word MAYNARD filled his vision.
He had had the right idea, he’d just picked the wrong side of town to start on.
After a while he went back to her and squatted in the dirt at her feet. Her face broke his heart: he had never seen such raw hurt in someone he loved, as if everything rotten that had ever happened to her had come to roost at once. Until now she’d been fooling herself: still half believing he’d be wrong and she could cling to that faint hope that the old man was alive. Now she’d have to watch while he was dug up and examined, and Dulaney didn’t know what he could do for her. That was the worst part, he had no idea how to start trying to help her. He wanted to crush her against him and hug the pain out of her but she invited no touch, encouraged no words, asked for no show of strength to help her hang on to her own. He asked, “Would you like me to leave you alone for a while?” and she gestured yes and he rose from the dirt and moved away. “I’ll be up where we started.”
There was no talk yet of digging up the grave and there’d be none until she was ready. To keep himself busy he started covering up his holes. An hour passed before she came to find him. He asked if he could help her but she only shook her head. She sat on the ground at the head of the hole, as close as she could get without falling in, and watched him work. He tapped in the earth and covered it with dead flora, and then, when he was satisfied that he’d left no trace of a dig, he moved on to the next hole.
At once she moved with him, sitting close on the ground in that same meditative way, watching without looking. She moved whenever he did, as if suddenly she didn’t trust letting him out of her sight. Right now I’m all she’s got, he thought. Maybe she’s got a big-time career ahead of her, maybe she’ll meet a thousand people and marry one of them and have his children, but right now, at this moment, I’m all she’s got. Everyone else from the old days is dead.
( ( ( 35 ) ) )
HE dug up the old man an hour later. An ordeal with her sitting close, watching every plunge of the shovel and every heave of the earth.
There was no getting her to leave. He had tried that and finally left her alone. She sat so still, moving only her eyes, and he worked with care, intimidated as he knew he’d be by her presence. It was a deep hole, a discouragement to predators, but his leisurely pace continued. It gave him time to think, but what now arose in his mind was a whole new set of problems with no easy answers. There was only one clear fact: he himself could not be tied to any official discovery of the body. That would lead only to jail.
He hit something solid, and as he scraped around it, it became a sheet of plywood. It took a while to dig that out, and the earth beneath it was rich and black, cool to the touch. That might mean anything from total decomposition to little at all. It was possible, he thought with a shiver, that the body would still be whole, the flesh intact, the gore still in evidence. He leaned on his shovel and spoke to her. “Why don’t you go back to camp and let me finish here? I’ll come tell you what I find.” But she wouldn’t go, and a few minutes later he found Carnahan’s hat.
It appeared whole under a shovelful of earth. He picked it out and knocked off the dirt against his leg. He could see what had happened, how the hat had been overlooked until the covering up was under way, then tossed in on top. Holly said, “Give me that, please,” and her hand quivered as she took it and her eyes filled with tears. God damn this, Dulaney thought: I’d give a thousand dollars and work all year to get it if she weren’t here now. She looked in his face and tried to smile, a last small attempt to be brave, but it was doomed and she crushed the hat between her breasts and cried silently into the felt.
In what seemed like no time he had reached the body. It was wrapped tightly in canvas with the folds tucked under at each end. He handled it with care, working his shovel around the edges to free it from the earth without damage. When this was done he took it in his arms and hoisted it out of the hole, laying it gently on the ground. He motioned her to sit still: then he climbed out of the grave and carried it out to a flat place in the grass. There he unrolled the canvas and took his look.
The first thing he saw was the violence. Shot in the back of the head, like Peter: the whole forehead blown away by the exit wound. But the flesh had held. It was pale and leatherlike, and Dulaney could still recognize Carnahan’s face.
He looked at her and nodded. She got to her feet and came around the hole but he stood before her and blocked her way.
“You don’t need to look.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“It’s pretty bad. Take my word for it. You can trust me.”
“I know I can, Jack. But I still need to look.”
He moved away. Afterward she came to him and said, “You can put him back now.” She dropped the hat near the grave and walked out of the trees, across the tracks, and up to the campsite.
She had broken down the little lean-to when he got back to camp; she had rolled up the tarp and put everything back in the gunnysack. Something about her had changed: something that had always been there, even in times of her greatest mystery, seemed gone away now. As if part of her had died with the old man, he thought.
He guessed the time at four o’clock. They had been here twenty-four hours, and it had aspects of both an eternity and an instant. He got out his canteen and put an arm over her shoulder.
“Oh, Jack, don’t hug me. If you do I’ll just break down again.”
But he held her tight with the smells of the earth and sweat all around them, and after a while they sat in the shade and he gave her a drink from his flask. It took her breath away.
“Now sip a little. It’s strong but you’ll get used to it.”
She sipped and sipped again. She passed him the flask and he drank a mouthful and passed it back.
“Oh God,” she said, drinking. “Oh Christ, what am I gonna do?”
“I don’t think you need to decide that now.”
But of course she did. “We’ll have to leave him here,” she said. “I can’t have them get their hands on him, I don’t trust any of them. It’s better to leave him, so they don’t know that we know.”
He didn’t say what he was thinking: that leaving him here had risks of its own. Someone could come back and dig him up, move him where he’d never be found, and then where would they be?
But she had decided. “We’ll leave him. And tell no one we know.”
So he went back and buried the body. Put in the hat, then the plywood, covered it tight, and scattered the brown pine needles across it.
At seven o’clock they made the trek back up the tracks. The car looked undisturbed where they had left it yesterday, and he found a place to turn around for the bumpy ride out of the woods. Once she said, “I wonder if I’ve done the right thing.” Dulaney nodded in understanding rather than encouragement. “Everything changes if you bring the law into it now,” he said. She sniffed. “But would anything get resolved? I can’t trust any of them. Harford runs everything.”
At the road he turned on his headlights and started back to Pinewood.
“We’ve got other things to decide,” he said as they reached the cutoff. “Everything’s different now.”
“Yes it is. We’ll have to talk, but not now.”
“I’m not going to leave you alone tonight.”
“I won’t be alone. I’m going
to work.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I need to go in. For any number of reasons, not the least of which is my own sanity. The show must go on, Jack—how would it look if I missed two nights in a row?” She touched his cheek, then leaned over and kissed him on the corner of his mouth.
“Can I come watch?”
“Why not? What difference does it make now, right?”
“And afterward I’ll meet you on the beach.”
“All right. I can’t promise when.”
“It doesn’t matter when. I’ll be down below the pier, whenever you get there.”
They headed up through the white marsh district, then east on the final run to the beach.
“He was a great man, Jack. But of course, you know that. Did you know about his women?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I saw him with a woman once, back in Brooklyn. That’s all.”
“I never saw him with anyone. But I always knew they were there. When I’d come visit, there were signs that he had a woman in his life. I never said anything, didn’t want to embarrass him. But I knew he didn’t have an easy time with my mother, and now I wish I’d said something just to make him easier with it. Don’t worry about it, Dad. Be happy. Life is short. Little did I know then how short it was.”
He pulled into the lot where they had left her car. She got out and looked back through the window. “Don’t trust anyone, Jack,” she said. Then she was gone.
( ( ( 36 ) ) )
A SUDDEN splash of beach neon brought him back to reality: the festival had come, with barricades and noise, music and dancing and cookouts in the streets, and people swarming by the hundreds. The crowd had doubled in just two days and even now it seemed to swell before his eyes. Cars were banned from downtown until Monday and he had to park far away and walk in to his rooming house. It was sometime after nine when he got home.
