“Get me out!” he shrieked. “Please! I can’t stand it! Get me out!”
“You ready for that counter-proposal?” I asked.
“Yes! Yes! Christ! Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Scream. That’s the counter-proposal. That’s what I want. Scream for me. If you scream loud enough, I’ll let you out.”
He screamed piercingly.
“That was good!” I said, and I meant it. “But it was nowhere near good enough.”
I began to dig again, throwing fan after fan of dirt over the roof of the Cadillac. Disintegrating clods ran down the windshield and filled the windshield-wiper slot.
He screamed again, even louder, and I wondered if it was possible for a man to scream loud enough to rupture his own larynx.
“Not bad!” I said, redoubling my efforts. I was smiling in spite of my throbbing back. “You might get there, Dolan – you really might.”
“Five million.” It was the last coherent thing he said.
“I think not,” I replied, leaning on the shovel and wiping sweat off my forehead with the heel of one grimy hand. The dirt covered the roof of the car almost from side to side now. It looked like a starburst... or a large brown hand clasping Dolan’s Cadillac. “But if you can make a sound come out of your mouth which is as loud, let me say, as eight sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet, then I will get you out, and you may count on it.”
So he screamed, and I shoveled dirt down on the Cadillac. For some time he did indeed scream very loudly, although I judged he never screamed louder than two sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet. Three, at most. And by the time the last of the Cadillac’s brightwork was covered and I rested to look down at the dirt-shrouded hump in the hole, he was producing no more than a series of hoarse and broken grunts.
I looked at my watch. It was just past one o’clock. My hands were bleeding again, and the handle of the shovel was slippery. A sheaf of gritty sand flew into my face and I recoiled from it. A high wind in the desert makes a peculiarly unpleasant sound – a long, steady drone that simply goes on and on. It is like the voice of an idiot ghost.
I leaned over the hole. “Dolan?”
No answer.
“Scream, Dolan.”
No answer at first – then a series of harsh barks.
Satisfactory!
I went back to the van, started it up, and drove the mile and a half back down to the road construction. On the way I turned to WKXR, Las Vegas, the only station the van’s radio would pull in. Barry Manilow told me he wrote the songs that make the whole world sing, a statement I greeted with some skepticism, and then the weather report came on. High winds were forecast; a travellers’ advisory had been posted on the main roads between Vegas and the California line. There were apt to be visibility problems because of sheeting sand, the disc jockey said, but the thing to really watch out for was wind-shear. I knew what he was talking about, because I could feel it whipsawing the van.
Here was my Case-Jordan bucket-loader; already I thought of it as mine. I got in, humming the Barry Manilow tune, and touched the blue and yellow wires together again. The loader started up smoothly. This time I’d remembered to take it out of gear. Not bad, white boy, I could hear Tink saying in my head. You learnin.
Yes I was. Learning all the time.
I sat for a minute, watching membranes of sand skirl across the desert, listening to the bucket-loader’s engine rumble and wondering what Dolan was up to. This was, after all, his Big Chance. Try to break the rear window, or crawl over into the front seat and try to break the windshield. I had put a couple of feet of sand and dirt over each, but it was still possible. It depended on how crazy he was by now, and that wasn’t a thing I could know, so it really didn’t bear thinking about. Other things did.
I geared the bucket-loader and drove back up the highway to the trench. When I got there I trotted anxiously over and looked down, half-expecting to see a man-sized gopher hole at the front or rear of the Cadillac-mound where Dolan had broken some glass and crawled out.
My spadework had not been disturbed.
“Dolan,” I said, cheerfully enough, I thought.
There was no answer.
“Dolan.”
No answer.
He’s killed himself, I thought, and felt a sick-bitter disappointment. Killed himself somehow or died of fright.
“Dolan?”
Laughter drifted up from the mound; bright, irrepressible, totally genuine laughter. I felt my flesh lift itself into large hard lumps. It was the laughter of a man whose mind has broken.
He laughed and he laughed in his hoarse voice. Then he screamed; then he laughed again. Finally he did both together.
For awhile I laughed with him, or screamed, or whatever, and the wind laughed and screamed at both of us.
Then I went back to the Case-Jordan, lowered the blade, and began to cover him up for real.
In four minutes even the shape of the Cadillac was gone. There was just a hole filled with dirt.
I thought I could hear something, but with the sound of the wind and the steady grumble of the loader’s engine, it was hard to tell. I got down on my knees; then I lay down full-length with my head hanging into what remained of the hole.
Far down, underneath all that dirt, Dolan was still laughing. They were sounds like something you might read in a comic book: Hee-hee-hee, aaah-hah-hah-hah. There might have been some words, too. It was hard to tell. I smiled and nodded, though.
“Scream,” I whispered. “Scream, if you want.” But that faint sound of laughter just went on, seeping up from the dirt like a poisonous vapor.
A sudden dark terror seized me – Dolan was behind me! Yes, somehow Dolan had gotten behind me! And before I could turn around he would tumble me into the hole and I jumped up and whirled around, my mangled hands making rough approximations of fists.
Wind-driven sand smacked me.
There was nothing else.
I wiped my face with my dirty bandanna and got back into the cab of the bucket-loader and went back to work.
The cut was filled in again long before dark. There was even dirt left over, in spite of what the wind had whipped away, because of the area displaced by the Cadillac. It went quickly... so quickly.
The tone of my thoughts was weary, confused, and half-delirious as I piloted the loader back down the road, driving it directly over the spot where Dolan was buried.
I parked it in its original place, removed my shirt, and rubbed all of the metal in the cab with it in an effort to remove fingerprints. I don’t know exactly why I did that, even to this day, since I must have left them in a hundred other places around the site. Then, in the deep brownish-gray gloom of that stormy dusk, I went back to the van.
I opened one of the rear doors, observed Dolan crouched inside, and staggered back, screaming, one hand thrown up to shield my face. It seemed to me that my heart must explode in my chest.
Nothing – no one – came out of the van. The door swung and banged in the wind like the last shutter on a haunted house. At last I crept back, heart pounding, and peered inside. There was nothing but the jumble of stuff I had left in there – the road-arrow with the broken bulbs, the jack, my toolbox.
“You have got to get hold of yourself,” I said softly. “Get hold of yourself.”
I waited for Elizabeth to say, You’ll be all right, darling... something like that... but there was only the wind.
I got back into the van, started it, and drove halfway back to the excavation. That was as far as I could make myself go. Although I knew it was utterly foolish, I became more and more convinced that Dolan was lurking in the van. My eyes kept going to the rear-view mirror, trying to pick his shadow out of the others.