Now I could hear an approaching motor.
I grabbed the cones again, replacing them as fast as I could. Two of them spilled out of my hands and rolled down into the gully. I chased after them, panting. I tripped over a rock in the dark, fell sprawling, and got up quickly with dust on my face and blood dripping from one palm. The car was closer now; soon it would appear over the last rise before the detour-junction and in the glow thrown by his high beams the driver would see a man in jeans and a tee-shirt trying to replace road cones while his van stood idling where no vehicle that didn’t belong to the Nevada State Highway Department was supposed to be. I got the last cone in place and ran back to the sign. I tugged too hard. It swayed and almost fell over.
As the approaching car’s headlights began to brighten on the rise to the east, I suddenly became convinced it was a Nevada State Trooper.
The sign was back where it had been – and if it wasn’t, it was close enough. I sprinted for the van, got in, and drove over the next rise. Just as I cleared it, I saw headlights splash over the rise behind me.
Had he seen me in the dark, with my own lights out?
I didn’t think so.
I sat back against the seat, eyes closed, waiting for my heart to slow down. At last, as the sound of the car bouncing and bucketing its way down the detour faded out, it did.
I was here – safe behind the detour.
It was time to get to work.
Beyond the rise, the road descended to a long, straight flat. Two-thirds of the way along this straight stretch the road simply ceased to exist – it was replaced by piles of dirt and a long, wide stretch of crushed gravel.
Would they see that and stop? Turn around? Or would they keep on going, confident that there must be an approved way through since they had not seen any detour signs?
Too late to worry about it now.
I picked a spot about twenty yards into the flat, but still a quarter of a mile short of the place where the road dissolved. I pulled over to the side of the road, worked my way into the back of the van, and opened the back doors. I slid out a couple of boards and muscled the equipment. Then I rested and looked up at the cold desert stars.
“Here we go, Elizabeth,” I whispered to them.
It seemed I felt a cold hand stroke the back of my neck.
The compressor made a racket and the jackhammer was even worse, but there was no help for it – the best I could hope for was to be done with the first stage of the work before midnight. If it went on much longer than that I was going to be in trouble anyway, because I had only a limited quantity of gasoline for the compressor.
Never mind. Don’t think of who might be listening and wondering what fool would be running a jackhammer in the middle of the night; think about Dolan. Think about the gray Sedan DeVille.
Think about the arc of descent.
I marked off the dimensions of the grave first, using white chalk, the tape measure from my toolbox, and the figures my mathematician friend had worked out. When I was done, a rough rectangle not quite five feet wide by forty-two feet long glimmered in the dark. At the nearer end it flared wide. In the gloom that flare did not look so much like a funnel as it had on the graph paper where my mathematician friend first sketched it. In the gloom it looked like a gaping mouth at the end of the long, straight windpipe. All the better to eat you with, my dear, I thought, and smiled in the dark.
I drew twenty more lines across the box, making stripes two feet wide. Last, I drew a single vertical line down the middle, creating a grid of forty two near-squares, two feet by two and a half. The forty-third segment was the shovel-shaped flare at the end.
Then I rolled up my sleeves, pull-started the compressor, and went back to square one.
The work went faster than I had any right to hope, but not as fast as I had dared to dream – does it ever? It would have been better if I could have used the heavy equipment, but that would come later. The first thing was to carve up the squares of paving. I was not done by midnight and not by three in the morning, when the compressor ran out of gas. I had anticipated this might happen, and was equipped with a siphon for the van’s gas tank. I got as far as unscrewing the gas-cap, but when the smell of the gasoline hit me, I simply screwed the cap back on and lay down flat in the back of the van.
No more, not tonight. I couldn’t. In spite of the work-gloves I had worn, my hands were covered with big blisters, many of them now weeping. My whole body seemed to vibrate from the steady, punishing beat of the jackhammer, and my arms felt like tuning forks gone mad. My head ached. My teeth ached. My back tormented me; my spine felt as if it had been filled with ground glass.
I had cut my way through twenty-eight squares.
Twenty-eight.
Fourteen to go.
And that was only the start.
Never, I thought. It’s impossible. Can’t be done.
That cold hand again.
Yes, my darling. Yes.
The ringing in my ears was subsiding a little now; every once in awhile I could hear an approaching engine... and then it would subside to a drone on the right as it turned onto the detour and started around the loop the Highway Department had created to bypass the construction.
Tomorrow was Saturday... sorry, today. Today was Saturday. Dolan was coming on Sunday. No time.
Yes, my darling.
The blast had torn her to pieces.
My darling had been torn to pieces for telling the truth to the police about what she had seen, for refusing to be intimidated, for being brave, and Dolan was still driving around in his Cadillac and drinking twenty-year-old Scotch while his Rolex glimmered on his wrist.
I’ll try, I thought, and then I fell into a dreamless sleep that was like death.
I woke up with the sun, already hot at eight o’clock, shining in my face. I sat up and screamed, my throbbing hands flying to the small of my back. Work? Cut up another fourteen chunks of asphalt? I couldn’t even walk.
But I could walk, and I did.
Moving like a very old man on his way to a shuffleboard game, I worked my way to the glove compartment and opened it. I had put a bottle of Empirin there in case of such a morning after.
Had I thought I was in shape? Had I really?
Well! That was quite funny, wasn’t it?
I took four of the Empirin with water, waited fifteen minutes for them to dissolve in my stomach, and then wolfed a breakfast of dried fruit and cold Pop-Tarts.
I looked over to where the compressor and the jackhammer waited. The yellow skin of the compressor already seemed to sizzle in the morning sunshine. Leading up to it on either side of my incision were the neatly cut squares of asphalt.
I didn’t want to go over there and pick up that jackhammer. I thought of Harvey Blocker saying, You ain’t never gonna be strong, bubba. Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some wither up and die... Why you pulling this crap on your system?
“She was in pieces,” I croaked. “I loved her and she was in pieces.”
As a cheer it was never going to replace “Go, Bears!” or “Hook em, horns!” but it got me moving. I siphoned gas from the van’s tank, gagging at the taste and the stink, holding onto my breakfast only by a grim act of will. I wondered briefly what I was going to do if the road-crew had drained the diesel from their machines before going home for the long weekend, and quickly shoved the thought out of my mind. It made no sense to worry over things I couldn’t control. More and more I felt like a man who has jumped out of the bay of a B-52 with a parasol in his hand instead of a parachute on his back.
I carried the gasoline can over to the compressor and poured it into the tank. I had to use my left hand to curl the fingers of my right around the handle of the compressor’s starter-cord. When I pulled, more blisters broke, and as the compressor started up, I saw thick pus dripping out of my fist.