One forearm said FTW, and the other showed the number thirteen and a half. He unbuttoned his shirt and slid the collar over one shoulder to reveal a blurred tattoo. Two crudely drawn dice had snake eyes showing. Below them, in block letters, was the phrase BORN TO LOSE.
“No,” Tilden said. “I mean anything worth keeping in your head.”
“You talk like a shrink.”
“Come on, man.”
Baker cracked his knuckles one by one. He stretched his legs until his boots reached the last lip of shade. He stared into space and Tilden decided that he’d forgotten the question, led somewhere private by the skipping of his thoughts. He’d noticed that prison often made stupid men turn smart, and smart men become dumb. He wondered which he was.
Baker lay on his back and spoke.
“Biggest thing I learned is how to make people leave me alone. Next is how to sleep. I never slept good before, but now I can sleep fourteen hours.”
“Nothing else?”
“I damn sure know I like women.”
Passing clouds pushed patterns of shade along the ground. A breeze carried the scent of wheat mixing with the smell of fresh-turned earth. It occurred to Tilden that people always buried their dead on hilltops, often the highest around. Tilden liked the silence. Prison was filled with noise — the crash of steel gates, howls of rage and pain, blaring radios. The only quiet time came after homicide. Tilden had never seen murder until he got put away, and he’d been amazed at how fast it could happen.
Now he sat surrounded by dead that went back a hundred years. Tilden wondered how far into the earth he’d have to dig before he’d stop hitting bone. He understood that the planet was a skin of grass that covered acres of bone, like a skeleton for the earth. Dirt was sinew. Rock was muscle.
After the break they walked to a grave that had been tough to work. They’d dug two days, chopping through roots that veered around the coffin, sometimes holding it tight as if the earth wanted to keep the bones. Tilden was reminded of an old con who’d finally been cut loose. He’d done a twenty-five-year flat bit for a bank robbery that had earned him high status in prison. Outside, he was an old man no one cared about. Nine days into freedom he held up a bar, set his pistol on a stool, and called the police. He returned to prison smiling, glad to be home. A week later he was stabbed three times with a knife made from the instep support of a crippled con’s shoe.
Footsteps pounded in the lane behind Tilden and he turned to the noise. A man was running toward him. He wore green jogging tights and a spandex shirt. Mirrorshades covered his eyes and an antenna bobbed above yellow headphones.
Baker lifted his shovel like a baseball bat. Tilden wanted to shout a warning to leave the man alone, but it went against yard ethics. The jogger came abreast and Baker fell in step behind him.
“Run!” he yelled. “Crank it up, punk.”
The man doubled his pace, puffs of dust rising from his feet. He veered around a bend and disappeared among the pines. Baker grinned. There was a wild expression on his face that Tilden had seen only in prison.
“I was in that big a hurry,” Baker said, “I’d by God get me a car. See me doing that, you can drop me in a sack. Know what I’m saying?”
“I’ll pass on that.”
“I know you’re standup, Til. But if I didn’t, I might wonder what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m chicken of one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Myself.”
“You bet,” Baker said. “I wouldn’t mess with me if I was me.”
“That ain’t exactly what I meant.”
Tilden began moving earth, thinking of the last time he’d seen Baker’s look on someone’s face. Two men had circled each other in the rec room, slashing with weapons made from a razor blade embedded in a toothbrush handle. Each man wore magazines strapped to his torso by strips of sheet. They bled from the arms, but the crude armor protected their bodies. The crowd drew guards who beat both men unconscious. Tilden had still been a new fish, so scared he couldn’t sleep, stunned by the savagery of the guards. The look in their eyes had matched Baker’s.
Tilden and Baker worked through the slanting red light of afternoon, continuing until dusk. They carried their tools to the storage building. Ripe wheat gleamed as though the surface of the earth had caught fire. Nine cars were parked in the gravel lot reserved for a funeral party.
Tilden heard the neigh of a horse, and he and Baker followed the sound to a rise overlooking the cemetery’s edge. A line of people followed a horse-drawn buckboard that held a coffin. Two of the men wore ill-fitting suits, but most were dressed in work clothes, boots, and hats. A few women wore black. Four children walked close together. The horse stopped beside a fresh hole and the men used straps to lift the coffin from the wagon and ease it into the grave.
“Look at that,” Baker said. “Guess they don’t know about the highway coming through.”
“Maybe they already got the grave paid off.”
“Long time since I was at a funeral,” Baker said. “They wouldn’t let me out when my mother died.”
“That’s tough.”
“I never even seen her grave.”
At the bottom of the hill a man was removing shovels from the wagon. He passed them to each mourner as if handing out weapons. Tilden realized that the fresh earth would be easy to move.
“Hey, man,” Baker said, “I ever tell you about a guard I knew on a firing squad in Utah.”
“No.”
“He said it was just a job, but I think he was fucked up. I mean, who’d want to live in Utah?”
“I don’t know,” Tilden said.
“Anyhow, you heard how one rifle is loaded with a blank so each man can think he wasn’t the killer. Well, that’s bullshit. There’s no recoil from a blank so you know if you shot it. He said to make up for it, everybody aims away from the heart. Sometimes all five guys miss and the shot man flops around awhile. The day before, he gets to watch any video he wants.”
The people in the funeral party were filling the grave with dirt. They worked slowly, as if reluctant to finish. A woman rested, leaning on the handle of her shovel.
“They could use some help,” Baker said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“Why not?”
“If it was some stranger wanting to bury my family, I might think it was funny.”
“What’s funny is that damn horse. Think they’re Amish or something?”
“They don’t have them out here.”
“They don’t have a lot,” Baker said. “You like it?”
“What, Idaho?”
“All of it, man. The whole West.”
“Yeah, I like it.”
“I don’t. All this empty space, you know, makes me feel lonely.”
“That’s why I like it,” Tilden said.
A small boy knelt beside the grave and began pushing dirt in the hole. He worked steadily, using his arms to move the soil. A man took his shoulders from behind. The boy shoved him away and began throwing the dirt faster. He lay on the ground with his arms dangling in the grave.
“Probably his mother,” Tilden said.
Tears made clean lines in the dirt on Baker’s face. His chest rose and fell, and he began to pant as if he had lost the mechanics of how to cry.
Tilden walked down the hill to the storage building. He knew he had to be careful. Baker was dangerous now that Tilden had seen him weak. Tilden drank from a spigot and cleaned the shovels, thinking of the funerals he’d missed in prison. Those days had been the worst.
Baker came over the hill, walking with the gait of a mainline con, moving slowly from the hips down, his shoulders swaying in a swagger.
“I’m done, man,” Baker said.
“What?”
“I can’t work that grave.”
“That’s all right,” Tilden said. “I will.”