by John Case
“Amen!”
“Oh, yes!”
“Sweet sleep!”
“Lord on high!”
I take a deep breath. Jesus. Ever since the boys were taken, I keep venturing further and further away from what seems normal. I am so far out on the edge of anyplace I expected to be… I’m in the middle of a swamp in a white tuxedo. I stare at the coffin.
I take another deep breath. I think about the M.E. out in Vegas speculating that Clara Gabler had been in a pine box, maybe a coffin, but that she seems to have waited for her fate willingly, without struggle. “I don’t think I can do this,” I say.
The jolly look evaporates from Diment’s face. Suddenly he looks grim with disappointment. “Then I can’t help you,” he says.
“Hell,” I hear the skinny guy’s voice say. “The last guy got buried just to get a number! Shit.”
“I know,” starts another voice, “this one jumpy, like that…”
Diment holds up a hand to silence them.
Standing in the moonlight, with my improbable tuxedo seeming almost to absorb the moonlight, I fumble for the words. “What I’m being asked to do,” I start. My mouth is so dry, I can hardly speak. “What I’m being asked to do – will it be worth it?”
“That up to you,” Diment says to me. His face is stone. His eyes glint in the torchlight. He looks tired and angry. Around us, the others murmur.
I feel like I’m at the top of a cliff, about to leap into space. “No,” I tell him. “It’s not up to me. It’s up to you. Can you tell me how to find Boudreaux?”
Diment shakes his head. “You out of turn, son. That a question for after; you understand what I’m saying? First you got to prove your trust.” But although the old man dodges the question, his rheumy eyes don’t. They remain fastened on me. He stares intently, holding my eyes. There’s no malevolence in his gaze. “If you trust me,” he says, “I help you.”
I don’t know why, but I believe him.
A drumbeat starts up, a slow steady rhythm from somewhere to my left. Voices murmur. Someone chugs rum. The skinny guy cackles. A woman hums the tune of a lullaby.
I keep my eyes on my feet as I walk over to the casket. And then, before I can change my mind, I climb into the box. The whole crowd leans over me. I can see the big man, bending to lift the wooden cover. I close my eyes. I’m crazy.
“Alex!” Diment says, and my eyes snap open.
He’s looking down at me. Behind him, the big man and a couple of others hold the lid of the casket. Diment drips some liquid onto my face from his fingers. It feels cold, but it seems to burn as it hits my skin. Tetrodotoxin? Are my lips beginning to feel numb?
“Wait!” I say, trying to sit up. Three men push me gently back down.
A clear soprano sings “Amazing Grace.” Panic rolls through me. Isn’t that for funerals? And then I think: This is a funeral. They’re burying me.
“Trust me,” Diment says, and then the lid clatters into place atop the casket.
I keep my eyes shut tight. Maybe I’m hypnotized or something. Because this is how people disappear.
Suddenly, I can feel my breath against the wood, and my heart vaults into my throat. Maybe they’re going to let me out now, I think for one glorious moment. Maybe all I had to do was prove I’d do it, and then…
But no. That hope evaporates and it’s all that I can do to stop myself from panicking and hurling myself against the wood as they begin to nail the top of the casket into place. Why is that necessary? If this is some kind of fake funeral, why real nails? Big nails, too. I saw them. And the coffin looks brand-new. Why wouldn’t they use the same coffin over and over again if this is a regular thing? Because this coffin is going to stay here. The swamp is probably full of buried bodies.
It’s so loud, amazingly loud, each blow of the hammer a deafening concussion. There’s also the impression – which makes me cringe down, away from the lid – that the nails might plunge right through the wood. The nailing starts at my head and goes down around to my feet and then back up toward my head. In the background, when the man driving the nails moves to a new site, I can hear the drumbeat, and singing.
The hammering starts again. It’s so loud. I’d like to put my hands over my ears, but the coffin is too tight for that.
I count the nails as they’re driven in, eleven so far. Isn’t that excessive?
It’s so loud.
And although I really can’t stand it, somehow I endure the noise. When it stops, I find to my shock that I am praying. Praying in a mindless, stumbling way, repeating the Our Father over and over, a tumble of meaningless syllables. I’m not religious, and the rush of words in my head seems like a cheap trick. And a sort of collapse. I don’t think I should be allowed to pray if it’s not something I do regularly. It’s like I’m borrowing something I’m not entitled to.
OurFatherwhoartinheavenhallowedbethyname.
Still, I can’t stop.
Thykingdomcomethywillbedoneonearthasitisinheavengiveusthisdayourdailybreadandforgiveusourdebtsasweforgiveourdebtors.
I have the impression that if only I can say it fast enough, perfectly enough, if only there are absolutely no silences between the words, nothing bad will happen to me.
Andleadusnotintotemptationbutdeliverusfromevilforthineisthekingdomandthepowerandthegloryforeverandever.
Did I mess up? I think I did. I start over. OurFatherwhoartinheaven…
The casket shakes and there’s a smell of plastic as a pipe, or something like a pipe, is fitted into a hole in the casket, just above my face. I never noticed the hole, which surprises me. You’d think I’d be all tuned in to anything like that. See, your prayers are answered, the voice in my head says.
I can’t touch the hole, I can’t see it, but I can tell it’s there from the smell of plastic and the slightly cooler drift of air through it. With some effort, I can raise my head up and fasten my lips around the pipe and draw in air.
It’s as if my entire body has been clenched like a fist while the coffin was nailed shut. Now, realizing there’s a pipe for air, I begin to let go a little. I’ve been so clenched up, though, that relaxing my muscles makes me start to shake. I’m still caught in this spasm when I feel the casket sway as it’s lifted into the air.
It seesaws back and forth, yawing right and left. I can hear voices, a shout, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. And then the coffin is lowered. It yaws gently as it descends, but then, with a couple of feet left, they let go. Newtonian forces prevail: I slam into the top of the coffin, my nose crashes into the breathing tube hard enough to make me cry out. I have a terrible fear that I’ve dislodged the tube. I squirm up, to see if my lips can reach it. Yes.
And then a shovelful of dirt crashes onto the wood. I wince, as if it might come through the wood and hit me.
Then another, and another.
Then… nothing. Just the darkness.
And the sound of my own breathing.
CHAPTER 39
I’m not sure if I’m asleep or just in a kind of trance – or maybe oxygen deprived – when I first hear the sound. It comes from a long, long way off – like China. It’s a muffled scraping noise, one that means nothing to me, that’s happening independently, that seems to exist in a separate universe. I observe the sound with the detachment of a machine, one of those monitors in a museum, for instance, silently tracking humidity and temperature, keeping a record for future perusal by some sentient being.
The sound goes on and on, and gradually I adopt the idea that my new universe will contain this sound. I’m not sure how I feel about it because the sound is not actually pleasant, now that I contemplate it as a permanent condition. Now that it is omnipresent. Now that it occupies most of my consciousness. I cannot feel much – the wood against my fingers, the ragged surface of the breathing tube. I can see nothing. Smells are confined to the odor of my own body, the pine wood, the manufactured smell of the plastic pipe.
The only thing that changes is the sound, and so it
comes to absorb all my attention. After a while it seems to me that the sound is actually inside my own head, that I’ve somehow invented it.
It’s not until a shovel hits the wood that I’m jolted into the perspective of a true observer, that the sound represents an event in time. It’s the sound of a metal implement striking the wooden object in which I am encased. The realization propels me out of my trance state.
I am buried alive and someone is digging me out.
Immediately, I’m inundated by a tsunami of fear and claustrophobia. I’m buried alive!
And I’m overcome with terror that whoever is digging me out will stop. Coming out of my trance, I don’t at first remember how I got where I am or even where that is. An earthquake or an avalanche, a terrorist attack? What I do know is that I can’t see, I can’t breathe, that I’m trapped and panicked.
I try to shout – wanting to offer some sign that the effort is worth it, that whomever my rescuer might be, there’s a person down here. I want to shout out: I’m alive. I’m here. Don’t give up.
What emerges from me is nothing like what I intend. It’s not a shout, not even a scream. It’s more like a moan or a growl, so low-pitched I doubt anyone could hear it. It’s almost as if my voice lacks the velocity to break the sound barrier.
By the time the coffin is raised, and the cover pried off – a process that takes a long time – I remember how I came to be buried alive. I wonder, as they work on my exhumation, how long I was under. While I was buried, I lost my bearings in time and space. For a while, I even lost the idea of me, of Alex Callahan. Time seemed to expand infinitely. At first, I counted my breaths in cycles of one hundred, but eventually, I started losing track, and then I seemed to forget the proper sequence of numbers and then it seemed pointless. I went insane for a short time, screaming and writhing and trying to claw my way out, an effort that left my fingers raw and bleeding. I used the pain, for a while, to keep my spirits up. As long as it hurts, I told myself, I’m alive. A new Cartesian deduction. Dolor ergo sum. Or something like that.
I felt regret about it: disappearing. It would be tough on my parents and Liz. My main concern was for the boys, because I considered myself their last chance. Others might go through the motions, but everyone else had given them up for dead. That thought carried me for a while. By thinking of Sean and Kevin, by recounting every memory of them, by summoning up their faces and their voices, I was able to keep my head together for some time. And I had a vision of them, which I was persuaded was true, that I am still persuaded is true.
Somehow my mind slipped the temporal-spatial chains and delivered me to a room I’d never seen before. It was as if I were in the center of the ceiling, looking down. The boys were asleep in wooden bunk beds of the bulky, rough-hewn “western” sort. They slept under burgundy-colored fleece blankets, Sean on the lower bunk, Kevin on top.
Kevin stirred, under my gaze, and turned over from one side to the other. His mouth was open and I could see that his two new front teeth, which had just begun to emerge from his gums when the boys arrived from Maine, were almost fully in now. The edges had a vaguely scalloped appearance, ridges that must wear down over time, and the teeth looked too big for his face, as such teeth do. And then the vision vanished and I was back in the dark, trying to summon up anything, Christmas at the in-laws’, Sean’s face when he saw the bike under the tree.
Eventually, though, I suffered a collapse of the will. Diment had buried me alive. He was Boudreaux’s friend. If I thought his kind look promised anything, it was wishful thinking. I wondered if Pinky would be able to track down my grave.
And then I passed beyond regret, into a new arena, where I was beyond any interest in myself. This is the way I think I survived. I gave up. I obliterated every thought because they all circled back on themselves: “What if I turn over?” always led to “Can I turn over?” And so on.
In a way, it was a relief to give up. To stop counting, to stop focusing on my pain, to stop thinking of Sean and Kev, to stop hoping. To stop thinking that Alex Callahan had any importance in the universe. To stop thinking at all.
As the nails are pried off, the screech is the loveliest music I’ve ever heard. When the lid comes off, I’m blinded by the light and my eyes reflexively slam shut. Hands grasp my arms and sit me up.
“Come on now, take it easy. Don’t try to open your eyes just yet. Just let the light filter in through your lids like.”
Someone holds a paper cup of water to my lips and I gulp a few sips, a messy process. I try to lift a hand to my face to wipe my lips, but the hand shakes so badly I can’t really do it; I just bat myself in the face.
“That’s okay,” says a voice I recognize as Diment’s. “You be all right. Didn’t I tell you, man? You jez have to trust. Body don’t like bein’ pinned down like that, that’s all. But you be all right, same as I promise. Just take it easy. Let the world welcome you back, brother.”
More water. It’s delicious, an elixir. As is the damp air against my skin, which provides an exquisite rush of sensations. And the sunlight through my eyelids, flickering and patterned through something I can’t see, is a revelation after the darkness.
“You a new man, now. You reborn. We gon’ stand you up, come on.”
Strong hands under my arms lift me to my feet.
“Open your eyes, Alex. Jest a little, tha’s right, now a little more. Step out onto the earth.”
The world is still bleached out, like an overexposed photograph, but I can see enough to step over the side of the coffin onto the dusty earth.
“Oh, yes!” a female voice calls.
“He one of us now!”
Their voices are sweet and wonderful, the most dulcet music. In fact, liberated from the coffin, I am drenched in sheer wonderment. The humid air against my skin, the sun, the trees rustling in the breeze, the dirt… I tremble with delight. I even start to cry, tears of joy and relief.
“Oh, yes! Now he see!”
On the ground to my right is an intricate design made out of a white powder. It’s lacy and beautiful.
“That’s a veve,” Diment tells me, following my gaze. “That help bring the loa here.” He leans down and, with his fingertips, stirs the design into the dust.
The members of the bizango are gathering flags and drums, and stuffing the bottles and plastic plates and cups into trash bags. Some of their faces are smeary with white powder. They look worn out, as if the night was a difficult one for them, too.
Once again, it’s as if Diment can read my mind. “It not restful when the loa come into you. You shake and fall down and then you dance. We all tired now – you the only one get any rest.” He laughs his alarming laugh.
I’m outside Diment’s place, sitting on a disintegrating rattan chair in a little concrete patio hidden behind the structure. It’s just a concrete slab, with a cable spool for a table and two sagging chairs. To the right are some animal pens or chicken coops of different sizes, handmade of bamboo and interlaced with vine. One of them holds a speckled hen, but the others are empty. The hen sits compact and motionless with the exception of her bright eyes.
I’m back in my own clothes and I put in a call to Pinky from the BMW’s phone to let him know I’m all right. Now I wait for Diment to come out. Usually, I hate to wait, but for the moment I’m without impatience. The night underground propelled me into a new mindset. It would be overstating it to say that I feel “reborn,” but I do feel refreshed and alive. And free of my normal impatience, my usual restless chafing against the constraints of any schedule not designed with me at its center. I take heart from that strange vision of the boys in their bunk beds, which reaffirmed my belief that they’re alive.
“You know why I agree to help you?” Diment asks when he joins me, maybe half an hour later. The old man looks tired, his color bad, his rheumy eyes bagged and exhausted.
“No.”
“Twins. You seek your boys and they are twins. It is for this. Otherwise, I am an old man who does not
like to miss his sleep. Twins are very special in vaudoo. Above every other loa – which be the spirits in charge of the whole world, the living and the dead – above all of them, is the Marassa.” He nods.
“The Marassa?”
“Oh, yes, they the twins. They make the rain fall, they make the herbs that heal the sick. The two in one – they symbolize the harmony of the world as it should be, the balance of the earth and the sky, the fire and the water, the living and the dead.”
“The twins.”
“So it is,” Diment says in his mellifluous voice. “So it is this way. The twins not entirely, what you say, friendly, oh, no. They get angry, sometime. They jealous. Things go out of balance. But in vaudoo – twin children in a family, this a thing of great importance. They are” – he searches for the word – “a reminder of the mystery. You must have ceremony for them – this you must do if you find your sons, yes? This you must promise me.”
“Ceremony?”
“In their honor. Every year. You listen now. Every once a year. Christmas, this one possible day, but the celebration must be apart from the Christmas celebration, so that may be not the best choice. January fourth, that a second appropriate day.”
“That’s-”
But he holds up his hand to stop me.
“The third one is the Easter eve, the day before the Christian Easter. If you not have ceremony for the twins, it bring unhappy days.”
“It’s no problem,” I tell him. “We always celebrate. Their birthday is January fourth.”
This stuns him, almost scares him. “You are sent to me. So I may serve the Marassa.” He closes his eyes, mumbles, crosses himself, lets his head fall to his chest. When he opens his eyes again, he looks so tired I ask him if he wants to rest for a while.
“Look, I need to get Pinky’s car back to him,” I tell him. “I can come back later.”
“No, no, no, no.” He draws his open hand down over his face. “I tell you now what I know about Byron. I might know one or two thing. We can hope-” He makes a gesture, his hands rising into the air. “We can hope it help you.”
