The eastern horizon was graying, which meant they didn’t have much time. Tossing Carl the keys to the pickup, he climbed aboard the backhoe, and Rub leaped up beside him. “Don’t get too far ahead,” he told the other two. “I don’t know where we’re going, and top speed on this thing’s about two miles an hour.”
As they crept slowly through the cemetery, Sully found himself wishing that Peter was here. His son’s default mode was disapproval, at least where Sully was concerned, but there were also occasions when he let his guard down and surrendered to the madcap spirit of the moment. Once, years earlier, Sully had conscripted him to help steal the Roebuck snowblower. Every time it snowed, Sully would swipe it, only to have Carl steal it back. With each theft they increased their security measures to prevent further larceny. Finally Carl had brought it out to the yard and chained it to a pole. The property was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and patrolled at night by a Doberman named Rasputin. Sully’d knocked the dog out with a handful of sleeping pills inserted in a package of hamburger, but he still needed Peter to climb the fence and liberate the snowblower with the bolt cutters he’d also swiped from Carl. All had gone smoothly, the Doberman off sleeping somewhere (they assumed), until, just as Peter severed the chain, they heard a low growl, and there stood Rasputin within a yard of him, his feet wide apart, his teeth bared hideously. For a long minute he and Peter just stared at each other until the dog began to palsy and froth at the mouth. A moment later, the pills trumped his malice, and he just keeled over in the snow.
Later, at the Horse, his entire face lit up by an uncharacteristic joyful grin, Peter couldn’t get over it. “That,” he told Sully, “was more intense than sex.” Seeing his son so happy, Sully had wondered if it might represent some kind of turning point. Maybe Peter had finally given himself permission to enjoy life from a less ironic distance. But the next morning he was his old buttoned-up self, clearly ashamed about having allowed himself to be drawn into his father’s foolishness. Too bad, Sully couldn’t help thinking. Though he had no desire for a son made in his own image, he hated to see Peter refuse to acknowledge such a basic truth about himself: that he liked to have fun.
Arriving at the judge’s grave site, Sully handed the dog down to Carl, who held him at arm’s length, penis facing outward. “Let’s lock him in the truck,” Sully suggested. Rub had a vivid imagination and didn’t always draw clear distinctions between what was alive and what wasn’t. When he saw the backhoe in action, its jaw gulping big mouthfuls of fresh earth, he might get into attack mode.
“Right,” Carl said, bearing the struggling animal away. “There might still be a surface in there that he hasn’t peed on.”
Sully was studying Raymer, whose whole demeanor had changed since they’d arrived at Hilldale. Having set these proceedings in motion, he now looked like a man who finally understood their gravity. He was staring at the grave they were about to desecrate, but his gaze, unless Sully was mistaken, was inward. “Hey?” Sully said, swinging the backhoe’s claw into position.
“What?” Raymer said, snapping out of it.
Testing the levers that lifted and lowered the inverted scoop, Sully said, “You sure about this? Because what we’re about to do here is—”
“Criminal?” Carl suggested, returning from the truck. “Deviant? Perverse? Imbecilic?”
Sully ignored this. “If we get caught,” he told Raymer, “it’s your reputation on the line.”
“What about mine?” Carl said.
“That’s hilarious,” Sully told him.
Raymer glanced around nervously. “Who’s going to catch us?”
“We won’t know until they show up.”
Raymer worked his jaw as if he was literally chewing on the problem, then finally stiffened into resolve. “All right. What the hell,” he said, his voice catching and producing that same parrotlike sound Sully’d heard on the other side of the bathroom door. Raymer himself must’ve heard its strangeness, because he immediately cleared his throat, like something foreign and perhaps nasty had gotten lodged in there and he needed to expel it. “We’ve come this far.”
At this Carl snorted.
“What?” Sully said.
“Nothing,” Carl said. “I was just thinking about Napoleon invading Russia.”
Both Sully and Raymer blinked at this.
“Also the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and the Vietnam War,” Carl continued. “Not one of those clusterfucks could truly commence until somebody said, What the hell. We’ve come this far.”
And on that note Sully pushed forward the lever that lowered the backhoe’s claw into the soft earth above the casket of Judge Barton Flatt, who likely would’ve received — had His Honor died in time to qualify for it — the inaugural Unsung Hero award that Sully’s landlady would be getting two days hence. Next year, unless Sully was mistaken, he’d be a shoo-in.
—
A FEW MINUTES LATER the backhoe’s steel teeth located Judge Barton Flatt’s casket with a fingernails-on-the-blackboard screech. All three men winced. “Relax, Your Honor,” Sully called down into the hole. “It’s just me, not God.”
After that, though, he worked more carefully. A backhoe wasn’t exactly a precision instrument, however, and it was still too dark to see very well, so a minute later when he managed to jostle the casket again he wasn’t surprised.
“Jesus,” Carl said. “Don’t rupture the fucking thing.”
Sully, who feared precisely this, paused the backhoe. “Let’s find the edges,” he suggested. He always kept a broom in the back of the truck, so Raymer went to fetch it. “Grab the rake while you’re at it,” Sully called after him. “And a couple shovels.”
Raymer answered in his parrot voice, saying something Sully couldn’t make out. Carl cocked his head at the sound and raised an eyebrow at Sully, who just shrugged.
Once the outline of the casket was exposed, Sully was able to work around it, deepening the hole and providing enough space for one man to stand at the foot and another along one side. When he switched the ignition off and the machine shuddered into silence, it was quiet except for Rub’s excited yipping in the pickup. “Okay, girls, in you go,” Sully said, climbing down and taking the flashlight from Carl.
“You’re not coming?” Carl said wryly, lowering himself into the hole.
“Yeah, that’d be great,” Sully said. “All three of us down there and nobody to pull us up.”
“I hope you’re not claustrophobic,” Carl said to Raymer when he, too, dropped into the hole.
To which Raymer replied, “I am, actually.”
Carl paused to regard him. “What the hell’s wrong with your voice?”
Raymer cleared his throat. “It’s a recent thing.”
“You sound like you should be testifying from behind a screen.”
Directing the flashlight’s beam down into the hole, Sully noted that the casket’s burnished surface now bore two deep parallel scratches, and when Carl grabbed on to one of the ornate handles, it came off in his hand. “Nice work,” he said, handing it up to Sully, who tossed it onto the pile of excavated dirt.
At first, even with Carl and Raymer tugging on it, the casket refused to budge, as if it contained not the body of a man wasted away to nothing by radiation and chemotherapy but a cache of gold bullion. Then all at once it came loose with a sucking sound, its contents shifting audibly inside. “You know what?” Carl said. “I just decided I want to be cremated.”