Wormfood (18 page)

I nodded, and stumbled away. I didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to see how close she was. “I’ll tell him, I’ll tell him,” I said, moving down the front walk, still nodding like a doll with a broken spring for a neck. I did my best not to run shrieking through the dying light and the circling wasps back to the Cadillac.

I jumped in and slammed the door.

“So? What’d they say?” Fat Ernst asked.

“Junior said not to get your panties in a bunch and they’ll be ready lickety-split.”

“Okay, then.” Fat Ernst lit a cigar. “Took you long enough.”

I figured it out as soon as we pulled into the little parking lot covered in a thin layer of pea gravel and surrounded by a sagging wrought-iron fence. During the long ride back down the highway out of the hills, the Sawyers following us the whole way, I kept wondering why Fat Ernst had told Junior and Bert to bring their shovels. I was a little worried we might be heading back to the pit, but that didn’t make sense. Fat Ernst had enough meat now, but after watching him kick Heck’s corpse and drop him in the Dumpster like that, I knew he was capable of anything. Grandma had been right about him.

We were here to dig up Earl’s coffin. And steal that buckle.

The sun had disappeared over an hour ago, leaving the valley shrouded in almost total darkness. Fat Ernst killed the Cadillac, sat back on the pomegranate seat, and flicked his cigar stub out onto the wet gravel. He instantly lit another.

Earl had been buried in the Lutheran, Methodist, and Baptist cemetery. The Catholic cemetery was on the other side of the creek, closer to town. And the Mormons had their own exclusive plot of land up north, near their church or temple or whatever the hell they wantedto call it. I guess people who didn’t like to associate much while they were alive sure as hell didn’t want to lie next to each other when they were dead. They might end up in the wrong heaven or something. This graveyard waited patiently at the end of Route 11, surrounded by walnut orchards, huge trees with vast expanses of branches, silently hulking out in the darkness.

Fat Ernst kept the headlights on and I realized he
had
been thinking ahead when he took Heck’s submersible pump. The cemetery wasn’t too far from the creek. When they had originally started burying folks out here, the creek was still a ways off, but over the years, especially since they had built the reservoir, the creek had gradually changed its course, carrying away the dark, heavy soil bit by bit, creeping closer and closer to the graveyard.

And now the whole place was under about six inches of water.

The Sawyers’ truck pulled in next to my side of the Cadillac and the engine rumbled angrily in the wet darkness. “Leave your lights on,” Fat Ernst called out as Junior killed the engine. I looked out over the acre of headstones, rising from the black water, illuminated by the headlights. It looked as though someone had started building a bridge, pouring somewhat orderly rows of various concrete supports and foundations across a swamp, then had given up after a while. I opened the door and stepped into the muddy water, feeling the liquid instantly trickle over the tops of Grandpa’s boots and soak into my socks.

Junior and Bert climbed out of the truck and joined Fat Ernst and me in front of the Cadillac, bathed in the harsh glare of the headlights. “If I would’ve known we were coming out here, I would’ve brought some flowers for Pop,” Junior said, leaning against the Cadillac’s hood.

“We’re gonna visit Pop?” Bert asked.

Fat Ernst ignored him and asked, “You got your shovels?”

“Yep.”

“Well, go get ’em and let’s get to work. We’re not here for a goddamn picnic.”

“Hold on,” Junior said, crossing his arms. “We ain’t moving until we know why we’re here.”

“Yeah,” Bert said, nodding. He tried to cross his arms as well, but with his right arm still in a cast, it didn’t work so well.

Fat Ernst smiled. “You ever seen Earl Johnson’s belt buckle? The one made of gold? With a shitload of diamonds all over it?”

“No,” Junior said. A moment of silence. Then he smiled back. “But I heard about it.”

“Well, I just happen to know that Earl had it put in his will that he should be wearing it when they put him in the ground.”

Junior looked astonished and betrayed at the same time. “You mean to tell me … that they … they
buried
it with Earl?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Holy shit.”

“Holy shit,” Bert echoed. I still didn’t think he knew quite what was happening. His eyes were wandering around of their own accord again, and I wondered if he’d been taking his horse tranquilizers on a regular schedule.

“So it’s out there, just stuck in the ground with Earl?” Junior gestured at the headstones.

“You got it.”

“I’ll be damned. Wait a minute—suppose we go get it. How are we gonna split it up? Doesn’t make much sense to break it in half.”

“No, that don’t make much sense at all, does it? You gotta think ahead, like me. See, I’m gonna take it down to Sacramento first thing in the morning, take it in to a pawn shop, trade it in for some hard cash. You’ll have your share by noon tomorrow, no later.”

“Well, hell’s bells, if Earl was that goddamn dumb to wear that buckle into the grave, then let’s go get it.”

“Now you’re talking.” Fat Ernst glanced at me. “Go grab a shovel, boy. Time for you to earn those wages.”

It started to rain, softly at first. I heard raindrops hitting the leavesof the walnut trees and tiny splashes as the drops began to hit the water all around us. Then it began to come down hard, a wall of fat drops and a deluge of white noise. Within seconds, all of us were soaked to the skin. The rain put out Fat Ernst’s cigar. He tried lighting it several times, but no luck. Undaunted, he simply twisted the ashes off and chewed on the end. He spit, still smiling, and said, “Told you I had a plan.”

“One more thing,” Junior said as if he were just remembering something, and I suddenly found myself face down in the water, a heavy ringing in my ears. It took me a minute to realize that Junior had clocked me in the back of the head with his shovel. When I put it together and tried to sit up, he kicked me in the stomach. A great orange bomb exploded somewhere inside and liquid pain ricocheted through my body.

“That’s for shooting at the skull,” he said. “How’m I supposed to fix the horn if there’s nothing left to fix?” He kicked me again.

“Knock it off!” Fat Ernst hollered. “We’re gonna need his help, and he ain’t gonna shovel much if you keep kicking him like that.”

Junior bent down, whispering, “We’re just getting started, you and I.” He made a point of stepping on my hand with his cowboy boot, driving it into the soft mud as he turned back to the truck.

Bert started out into the cemetery first, carrying a Coleman lantern that Fat Ernst had also thoughtfully brought along. It gave me a beacon to follow as I stumbled along behind him carrying two shovels, the sledgehammer, and a crowbar, holding my stomach as best I could. Junior was next, carrying the sump pump, plastic tube looped around his shoulders, and trailing a long, heavy-duty extension cord plugged into the generator in the back of the truck. Fat Ernst brought up the rear, wheezing and panting as we splashed through the graveyard. Immediately, I felt the mud grab hold of Grandpa’s boots as if it were alive and had a mind of its own. With each step, I sank a little farther and farther into the soft soil, until the water was almost up to my knees.

I wondered how we would find Earl’s grave, seeing that they hadn’thad time to engrave a headstone or erect one of those giant monoliths that the rich folks seemed to like so much. Everything was completely covered with water, so we couldn’t even spot the freshly dug dirt. But as it turned out, it wasn’t hard to spot the grave at all. The canopy, used to cover the grave and the mourners during the services when it rained, was still up, waiting down in the far corner of the graveyard, in the Johnson family plot.

As the four of us struggled across the cemetery, shuffling through the mud and floodwater, I realized that Grandpa was buried in here somewhere. Mom and Dad were with Mom’s parents on the other side of the river, in the Catholic cemetery. I stopped a moment, looking around. I used to know where Grandpa’s grave was located; I used to come out here at least once or twice a month with Grandma, but now, in the darkness and rain and mud, I couldn’t find my bearings. All the headstones looked alike, just erratic rows of stone slabs rising out of a black swamp. Our shadows, cast by the headlights, danced and flitted over the stones and mud, looking as if giant ravens flew about, jumping and swirling from one headstone to the next.

I stopped looking for Grandpa’s grave and concentrated on the job at hand. Get the job done and get out, this had become my new mantra. Just get it over with and get home.

The Johnson family had its own corner of the cemetery, even had a wicked little spiked fence to keep out the undesirables. We carefully straddled the fence and climbed onto a wide concrete slab that had been poured over the top of Earl and Slim’s parents. Once on top of the slab, we rested for a moment, staring into the dark water under the canopy. Oddly enough, while Junior and Bert and me fought to catch our breath, panting and bent over, bracing our hands on our knees, Fat Ernst seemed the least tired. I had never seen him with that much energy. He paced the length of the slab, maybe seven, eight feet at the most, chewing on his wet cigar and slapping his hands together. “All right then, gentlemen. Let’s get to it. There’s at least fifteen, maybetwenty, twenty-five thousand bucks down there waiting for us. All we gotta do is dig down six goddamn feet and grab it. That’s it. Easiest goddamn money you ever made. Come on, let’s move it.”

“You start digging then,” Junior said, still catching his breath.

“You know I got a heart condition. So quit your bitching and get to work.”

Junior picked up both shovels and violently tossed one to me, and we got to work. The beginning was the hardest. We stabbed the shovels blindly into the water, wrenching great, dripping piles of sludge out of the mud and slopping it over to the side. Eventually, Junior and I built up a sort of wide, low wall around the area where we guessed the grave was. The pain in my side receded into a dull ache that I knew would hurt like hell tomorrow. Fat Ernst carefully lowered the submersible pump into the water and plugged it into the extension cord. Junior adjusted the plastic hose so the water was pumped out over the little dike we had built. I was hoping for a break while the grave was being drained, but Fat Ernst wasn’t in a break kind of mood.

We pried more sludge out of the hole. I dug until my back and arms were screaming for relief; blisters rose up on my palms almost instantly, breaking and oozing from the rough wooden handle and the silt. We kept at it, settling into a ragged rhythm of digging and lifting. Bert hummed the theme to some other TV show for a few minutes. I think it was
The Munsters
, but Bert wasn’t very good. Fat Ernst finally slapped him on the back of the head and that shut him up. Fat Ernst didn’t say much either, just kept pacing back and forth, mincing along in the rain as if he were being forced into some formal dance and had to take a leak really bad.

We kept digging, excavating a square hole roughly six feet wide and six feet long. The pump died when we were about four feet down. The motor started in with this hiccupping whine for a while, then simply stopped. There was only thick mud coming out of the end of the plastic hose at that point anyway. Junior unplugged the pump andthrew it out of the grave. Fat Ernst ignored it. We kept going, lifting out shovelfuls of mud that had the consistency of wet concrete and slapping it over the dam around the hole, until I couldn’t feel my arms anymore, couldn’t feel my hands, and the only thing I could hear was the sucking, squelching sounds as each bite was taken out of the earth and splashed over the wall.

It wasn’t too long after mud strangled and killed the pump that Junior’s shovel hit something solid. He pulled it out, tried again. The blade sank into the muck nearly up to the handle, and this time there was no mistaking the sound, like a baseball bat cracking a rock under water. I stabbed my own shovel into the mud and, sure enough, felt the tingling jolt up my dead arms when it connected with something solid.

“That’s it,” Fat Ernst whispered in a tight voice. “That. Is. Mother. Fucking. It.”

Without a word, Junior and I kept digging, holding the shovels sideways as we scraped mud out of the hole, flinging it away in looping, uneven arcs out into the rain and darkness.

It didn’t take long to figure out we had hit the concrete shell that held the coffin. I stood back while Junior went to work with the sledgehammer, pulverizing the cement lid. Within minutes, the rough slab collapsed around the coffin. I started throwing chunks of concrete out of the grave.

About three feet of the casket extended into the hole; the rest was buried under the south wall. We had been close, but we hadn’t dug down directly on top of the whole thing. It looked like we had found the top end, because I could see the seam where the lid was cut in half, in case you felt like lifting it up and saying goodbye during the funeral.

Fat Ernst had to wake Bert up by slapping him on the back of the head again. But once he was awake, even Bert could see that we were getting close, and he took his job seriously, kneeling at the top of the dike and holding the lantern out over the hole.

“All right, then.” Junior said, and stuck his shovel into the mud and left it there. “Gimme that crowbar.”

Fat Ernst thrust the three-foot bar into the hole, nearly crunching my skull in the process. “Do it. Pop that bitch open.”

“Oh that’s what I’m gonna do all right,” Junior said in a velvet, seductive voice as he felt along the edges of the coffin. “Gonna pop your sweet little cherry like a virgin on prom night. That’s right, baby.”

I backed into the far corner, giving Junior some space as he got romantic with the coffin. He found a spot he liked, along the side and near the grooved seam along the top. He took the crowbar and jammed it up under the overhanging lip on the side, then wrenched it down in a rushed, savage motion. The wedged tip snapped clean out of the groove and flipped up and popped Junior in the nose. He went back against the side of the pit, landing hard, and before he had even burbled out “Mudderfugger,” blood started gushing out of his flattened nostrils as if somebody had cranked open a faucet.