The lantern put out a ghastly yellow glare, dazzling me and making more shadows than anything else. I walked away from it to keep my night sight. My arms were spotted with dirt, and I felt more nervous than ever. From a distance the lantern’s flame was larger and fainter, and my companions were black silhouettes, the ones with the shovels waist-deep in the earth. I came across a grave that had been dug up and left open, and I jumped and hustled back down to the glow of the lantern, breathing hard.
Gabby looked up at me, his head just over the level of the dirt pile we were making. “They buried them deep,” he said in an odd voice. He tossed up more dirt.
“Maybe this one’s already dug up,” Del suggested, looking into the hole at Mando, who was getting up a handful of dirt with every shovel toss.
“Sure,” Nicolin scoffed. “Or maybe they buried him alive and he crawled out by himself.”
“My hand hurts,” Mando said. His shovel stock was a branch, and his hands weren’t very tough.
“ ‘My hand hurts’,” Nicolin whined. “Well get out of there, then.”
Mando climbed out, and Steve hopped into the hole to replace him, attacking the floor of the hole until the dirt flew into the mist.
I looked for the stars, but there wasn’t a one out. It felt late. I was cold, and ravenous. The fog was thickening; the area wrapped around us looked clear, but quickly the mist became more visible, until several yards away it was all we could see—blank white. We were in a bubble of white, and at the edges of the bubble were shapes: long arms, heads with winking eyes, quick sets of legs…
Thunk. One of Nicolin’s stabs had hit something. He stood with both hands on the stock, looking down. He jabbed tentatively, tunk tunk tunk. “Got it,” he said, and began to scrape dirt up again. After a bit he said, “Move the lantern down to this end.” Mando picked it up and held it over the grave. By its light I saw the faces of my companions, sweaty and streaked with dirt, the whites of their eyes large.
Nicolin started to curse. Our hole, a good five feet long by three feet wide, had just nicked the end of the coffin. “The damn thing’s buried under the headstone!” It was still solidly stuck in the clay.
We argued a while about what to do, and the final plan—Nicolin’s—was to scrape dirt away from the top and sides of the coffin, and haul it out into the hole we had made. After we had scraped away to the full reach of our arms, Nicolin said, “Henry, you’ve done the least digging so far, and you’re long and skinny, so crawl down there and start pushing the dirt back to us.”
I protested, but the others agreed I was the man for the job, so pretty soon I found myself lying on top of that coffin, with dripping clay an inch over my back and butt, tearing at the dirt with my fingers and slinging it out behind me. Only continuous cursing kept my mind off what was lying underneath the wood I was on, exactly parallel to my own body. The others yelled in encouragements, like “Well, we’re going home now,” or “Oh, who’s that coming?” or “Did you feel the coffin shake just then?” Finally I got my fingers over the far edge of the box, and I shimmied back out the hole, brushing the mud off me and muttering with disgust and fear. “Henry, I can always count on you,” Steve said as he leaped into the grave. Then it was his and Del’s turn to crawl around down there, tugging and grunting; and with a final jerk the coffin burst back into our hole, while Steve and Del fell down beside it.
It was made of black wood, with a greenish film on it that gleamed like peacock feathers in the lantern light. Gabby knocked the dirt off the handles, and then cleaned the gunk off the stripping around the coffin’s lid: silver, all of it.
“Look at those handles,” Del said reverently. There were six of them, three to a side, as bright and shiny as if they’d been buried the day before, instead of sixty years. I noticed the gash in the wood where Nicolin had first struck.
“Man,” said Mando. “Will you look at all that silver.”
We did look at it. I thought of us at the next swap meet, decked out like scavengers in fur coats and boots and feather hats, walking around with our pants almost falling off from the weight of all those big chips of silver. We shouted and yipped and yowled, and pounded each other on the back. Gabby rubbed a handle with his thumb; his nose wrinkled.
“Hey,” he said. “Uh…” He grabbed the shovel leaning against the side of the hole, and poked the handle. Thud, it went. Not like metal on metal. And the blow left a gash in the handle. Gabby looked at Del and Steve, and crouched down to look close. He hit the handle again. Thud thud thud. He ran his hand over it.
“This ain’t silver,” he said. “It’s cut. It’s some kind of… some kind of plastic, I guess.”
“God damn,” said Nicolin. He jumped in the hole and grabbed the shovel, jabbed the stripping on the coffin lid, and cut it right in half.
Well, we stared at that box again, but nobody did any shouting this time.
“God damn that old liar,” Nicolin said. He threw the shovel down. “He told us that every single one of those funerals cost a fortune. He said—” He paused; we all knew what the old man had said. “He told us there’d be silver.”
He and Gabby and Del stood in the grave. Mando took the lantern to the headstone and put it down. “Should call this headstone a kneestone,” he said, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
Nicolin heard him and scowled. “Should we go for his ring?”
“No!” Mando cried, and we all laughed at him.
“Go for his ring and belt buckle and dental work?” Nicolin said harshly, slipping a glance at Gabby. Mando shook his head furiously, looking like he was about to cry. Del and I laughed; Gabby climbed out of the hole, looking disgusted. Nicolin tilted his head back and laughed, short and sharp. “Let’s bury this guy and then go bury the old man.”
We shoveled dirt back in. The first clods hit the coffin with an awful hollow sound, bonk bonk bonk. It didn’t take long to fill the hole. Mando and I put the grass back in place as best we could. When we were done it looked terrible. “Appears he’s been bucking around down there,” Gabby said.
We killed the lantern flame and took off. Fog flowed through the empty streets like water up a steambed, with us under the surface, down among drowned ruins and black seaweed. Back on the freeway it felt less submerged, but the fog swept hard across the road, and it was colder. We hiked south as fast as we could walk, none of us saying a word. When we warmed up we slowed down a little, and Nicolin began to talk. “You know, since they had those plastic handles colored silver, it must mean that some time before that people were buried with real silver handles—richer people, or people buried before 1984, or whatever.” We all understood this as a roundabout way of proposing another dig, and so no one agreed, although it appeared to make sense. Steve took offense at our silence and gained ground on us till he was just a mark in the mist. We were almost out of San Clemente.
“Some sort of God damned plastic,” Gabby was saying to Del. He started to laugh, harder and harder, until he was leaning an elbow on Del’s shoulder. “Whoo, hoo hoo hoo… we just spent all night digging up five pounds of plastic. Plastic!”
All of a sudden a noise pierced the air—a howl, a singing screech that started low and got ever higher and louder. No living creature was behind that sound. It reached a peak of height and loudness, and wavered there between two tones, rising and falling, oooooo-eeeeee-oooooo-eeeeee-oooooo, on and on and on, like the scream of the ghosts of every dead person ever buried in Orange County, or the final shrieks of all those killed by the bombs.