by Paula Guran
Why am I looking?
“Sheila—”
“Brittany.” She threw him a pout, then softened it, to butter him up. “Lissen, I wanted to talk to you about that test, the one I missed? I wanna take it over. Like, not to cheat it or anything, but just to kinda . . . take it over, y’know? Pretend like that’s the first time I took it?”
“None of the other students get that luxury, and you know that.”
She fretted, shifting around in her seat, her skirt making squeaky noises against the school-issue plastic chair. “I know, I know, like, right? That’s like, totally not usual, I know, so that’s why I thought I’d ask you about it first?”
Sheila spent most of her schooling fighting to maintain a low C-average. She had won a few skirmishes, but the war was already a loss.
“I mean, like, you could totally do a new test, and I could like study for it, right?”
“You should have studied for the original test in the first place.”
She wrung her hands. “I know, I know that, but . . . well let’s just say it’s a lot of bullshit, parents and home and alla that crap, right? I couldn’t like do it then but I could now. My mom finds out I blew off the test, she’ll beat the shit outta me.”
“Shouldn’t you be talking to a counselor?”
“Yeah, right? No thanks. I thought I’d like go right to the source, right? I mean, you like me and stuff, right?” She glanced toward the door, revving up for some kind of Big Moment that Doug already dreaded. “I mean, I’m flexible; I thought that, y’know, just this one time. I’d do anything. Really. To fix it. Anything.”
She uncrossed her legs, from left on right to right on left, taking enough time to make sure Doug could see she had neglected to factor undergarments into her abbreviated ensemble. The move was so studied that Doug knew exactly which movie she had gotten it from.
There are isolated moments in time that expand to gift you with a glimpse of the future, and in that moment Doug saw his tenure at Triple Pines take a big centrifugal swirl down the cosmic toilet. The end of life as he knew it was embodied in the bit of anatomy that Sheila referred to as her “cunny.”
“You can touch it if you want. I won’t mind.” She sounded as though she was talking about a bizarre pet on a leash.
Doug had hastily excused himself and raced to the bathroom, his four-page newspaper folded up to conceal the fact that he was strolling the hallowed halls of the school, semi-erect. He rinsed his face in a basin and regarded himself in a scabrous mirror. Time to get out. Time to bail. Now.
He flunked Sheila, and jettisoned himself during summer break, never quite making it to the part where he actually left Triple Pines. Later he heard Sheila’s mom had gone ballistic and put her daughter in the emergency ward at the company clinic for the paper mill, where her father had worked since he was her age. Local residual scuttlebutt had it that Sheila had gotten out of the hospital and mated with the first guy she could find who owned a car. They blew town like fugitives and were arrested several days later. Ultimately, she used her pregnancy to force the guy to sell his car to pay for her train fare to some relative’s house in the Dakotas, end of story.
Which, naturally, was mostly hearsay anyway. Bar talk. Doug had become a regular at Callahan’s sometime in early July of that year, and by mid-August he looked at himself in another mirror and thought, you bagged your job and now you have a drinking problem, buddy. You need to get out of this place.
That was when Craignotti had eyeballed him. Slow consideration at reptile brain-speed. He bombed his glass at a gulp and rose; he was a man who always squared his shoulders when he stood up, to advise the talent of the room just how broad his chest was. He stumped over to Doug without his walking stick, to prove he didn’t really need it. He signaled Sutter, the cadaverous bartender, to deliver his next pitcher of brew to the stool next to Doug’s.
After some preliminary byplay and chitchat, Craignotti beered himself to within spitting distance of having a point. “So, you was a teacher at the junior high?”
“Ex-teacher. Nothing bad. I just decided I had to relocate.”
“Ain’t what I heard.” Every time Craignotti drank, his swallows were half-glass capacity. One glassful, two swallows, rinse and repeat. “I heard you porked one of your students. That little slut Sheila Morgan.”
“Not true.”
Craignotti poured Doug a glass of beer to balance out the Black Jack he was consuming, one slow finger at a time. “Naah, it ain’t what you think. I ain’t like that. Those little fucking whores are outta control anyway. They’re fucking in goddamned grade school, if they’re not all crackheads by then.”
“The benefits of our educational system.” Doug toasted the air. If you drank enough, you could see lost dreams and hopes, swirling there before your nose, demanding sacrifice and tribute.
“Anyhow, point is that you’re not working, am I right?”
“That is a true fact.” Doug tasted the beer. It chased smooth.
“You know Coggins, the undertaker here?”
“Yeah.” Doug had to summon the image. Bald guy, ran the Triple Pines funeral home and maintained the Hollymount Cemetery on the outskirts of town. Walked around with his hands in front of him like a preying mantis.
“Well, I know something a lotta people around here don’t know yet. Have you heard of the Marlboro Reservoir?” It was the local project that would not die. It had last been mentioned in the Pine Grove Messenger over a year previously.
“I didn’t think that plan ever cleared channels.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t for you or me to know. But they’re gonna build it. And there’s gonna be a lotta work. Maybe bring this shithole town back to life.”
“But I’m leaving this shithole town,” said Doug. “Soon. So you’re telling me this because—?”
“Because you look like a guy can keep his trap shut. Here’s the deal: this guy Coggins comes over and asks me to be a foreman. For what, I say. And he says—now get this—in order to build the reservoir, for some reason I don’t know about, they’re gonna have to move the cemetery to the other side of Pine Grove—six fucking miles. So he needs guys to dig up all the folks buried in the cemetery, and catalogue ’em, and bury ’em again on the other side of the valley. Starts next Monday. The pay is pretty damned good for the work, and almost nobody needs to know about it. I ain’t about to hire these fucking deadbeats around here, these dicks with the muscle cars, ’cept for Jacky Tynan, ’cos he’s a good worker and don’t ask questions. So I thought, I gotta find me a few more guys that are, like, responsible, and since you’re leaving anyhow . . . ”
Long story short, that’s how Doug wound up manning a shovel. The money was decent and frankly, he needed the bank. “Answer me one question, though,” he said to Craignotti. “Where did you get all that shit about Sheila Morgan, I mean, why did you use that to approach me?”
“Oh, that,” said Craignotti. “She told me. Was trying to trade some tight little puddy for a ride outta town.” Craignotti had actually said puddy, like Sylvester the Cat. I tot I taw . . . “I laughed in her face; I said, what, d’you think I’m some kinda baby-raper? I woulda split her in half. She threw a fit and went off and fucked a bunch of guys who were less discriminating. Typical small-time town-pump scheiss. She musta lost her cherry when she was twelve. So I figured you and me had something in common—we’re probably the only two men in town who haven’t plumbed that hole. Shit, we’re so fucking honest, folks around here will think we’re queer.”
Honor and ethics, thought Doug. Wonderful concepts, those were.
There were more than a thousand graves in Hollymount Cemetery, dating back to the turn of the nineteenth century. Stones so old that names had weathered to vague indentations in granite. Plots with no markers. Minor vandalism. The erosion of time and climate. Coggins, the undertaker, had collated a master name sheet and stapled it to a gridded map of the cemetery, presenting the crew picked by Craignotti with a problem rather a
kin to solving a huge crossword puzzle made out of dead people. Doug paged through the list until he found Michelle Farrier’s name. He had attended her funeral, and sure enough—she was still here.
After his divorce from Marianne (the inevitable ex-wife), he had taken to the road, but had read enough Kerouac to know that the road held nothing for him. A stint as a blackjack dealer in Vegas. A teaching credential from L.A.; he was able to put that in his pocket and take it anywhere. Four months after his arrival in Triple Pines, he attended the funeral of the only friend he had sought to develop locally—Michelle Farrier, a runner just like him.
In the afterblast of an abusive and ill-advised marriage, Michelle had come equipped with a six-year-old daughter named Rochelle. Doug could easily see the face of the mother in the child, the younger face that had taken risks and sought adventure and brightened at the prospect of sleeping with rogues. Michelle had touched down in Triple Pines two months away from learning she was terminally ill. Doug had met them during a seriocomic bout of bathroom-sharing at Mrs. Ives’ rooming house, shortly before he had rented a two-bedroom that had come cheap because there were few people in town actively seeking better lodgings, and fewer who could afford to move up. Michelle remained game, as leery as Doug of getting involved, and their gradually kindling passion filled their evenings with a delicious promise. In her kiss lurked a hungry romantic on a short tether, and Doug was working up the nerve to invite her and Rochelle to share his new home when the first talk of doctor visits flattened all other concerns to secondary status. He watched her die. He tried his best to explain it to Rochelle. And Rochelle was removed, to grandparents somewhere in the Bay Area. She wept when she said goodbye to Doug. So had Michelle.
Any grave but that one, thought Doug. Don’t make me dig that one up. Make that someone else’s task.
He knew enough about mortuary tradition to know it was unusual for an undertaker like Coggins to also be in charge of the cemetery. However, small, remote towns tend not to view such a monopoly on the death industry as a negative thing. Coggins was a single stranger for the populace to trust, instead of several. Closer to civilization, the particulars of chemical supply, casket sales, and the mortician’s craft congregated beneath the same few conglomerate umbrellas, bringing what had been correctly termed a “Tru-Value hardware” approach to what was being called the “death industry” by the early 1990s. Deceased Americans had become a cash crop at several billion dollars per annum . . . not counting the flower arrangements. Triple Pines still believed in the mom-and-pop market, the corner tavern, the one-trade-fits-all handyman.
Doug had been so appalled at Michelle’s perfunctory service that he did a bit of investigative reading-up. He discovered that most of the traditional accoutrements of the modern funeral were aimed at one objective above all—keeping morticians and undertakers in business. Not, as most people supposed, because of obscure health imperatives, or a misplaced need for ceremony, or even that old favorite, religious ritual. It turned out to be one of the three or four most expensive costs a normal citizen could incur during the span of an average, conventional life—another reason weddings and funerals seemed bizarrely similar. It was amusing to think how simply the two could be confused. Michelle would have been amused, at least. She had rated one of each, neither very satisfying.
Doug would never forget Rochelle’s face, either. He had gotten to play the role of father to her for about a week and change, and it had scarred him indelibly. Given time, her loss, too, was a strangely welcome kind of pain.
Legally, disinterment was a touchy process, since the casket containing the remains was supposed to be technically “undamaged” when removed from the earth. This meant Jacky and the other backhoe operators could only skim to a certain depth—the big scoops—before Doug or one of his co-workers had to jump in with a shovel. Some of the big concrete grave liners were stacked three deep to a plot; at least, Craignotti had said something about three being the limit. They looked like big, featureless refrigerators laid on end, and tended to crumble like plaster. Inside were the burial caskets. Funeral publicists had stopped calling them coffins about forty years ago. “Coffins” were boxes shaped to the human form, wide at the top, slim at the bottom, with the crown shaped like the top half of a hexagon. ”Coffins” evoked morbid assumptions, and so were replaced in the vernacular with ”caskets”—nice, straight angles, with no Dracula or Boot Hill associations. In much the same fashion, “cemeteries” had become “memorial parks.” People did everything they could, it seemed, to deny the reality of death.
Which explained the grave liners. Interment in coffins, caskets, or anything else from a wax-coated cardboard box to a shroud generally left a concavity in the lawn, once the body began to decompose, and its container, to collapse. In the manner of a big, mass-produced, cheap sarcophagus, the concrete grave liners prevented the depressing sight of . . . er, depressions. Doug imagined them to be manufactured by the same place that turned out highway divider berms; the damned things weighed about the same.
Manning his shovel, Doug learned a few more firsthand things about graves. Like how it could take eight hours for a single digger, working alone, to excavate a plot to the proper dimensions. Which was why Craignotti had been forced to locate operators for no fewer than three backhoes on this job. Plus seven “scoopers” in Doug’s range of ability. The first shift, they only cleared fifty final resting-places. From then on, they would aim for a hundred stiffs per working day.
Working. Stiffs. Rampant, were the opportunities for gallows humor.
Headstones were stacked as names were checked off the master list. BEECHER, LEE, 1974-2002—HE PROTECTED AND SERVED. GUDGELL, CONROY, 1938-2003—DO NOT GO GENTLY. These were newer plots, more recent deaths. These were people who cared about things like national holidays or presidential elections, archetypal Americans from fly-over country. But in their midst, Doug was also a cliché—the drifter, the stranger. If the good folk of Triple Pines (the living ones, that is) sensed discord in their numbers, they would actively seek out mutants to scotch. Not One of Us.
He had to get out. Just this job, just a few days, and he could escape. It was better than being a mutant, and perhaps getting lynched. He moved on to STOWE, DORMAND R., 1940-1998—LOVING HUSBAND, CARING FATHER. Not so recent. Doug felt a little bit better.
They broke after sunset. That was when Doug back-checked the dig list and found a large, red X next to Michelle Farrier’s name.
“This job ain’t so damned secret,” said Joe Hopkins, later, at Callahan’s. Their after-work table was five: Joe, Jacky, Doug, and two more guys from the shift, Miguel Ayala and Boyd Cooper. Craignotti sat away from them, at his accustomed roost near the end of the bar. The men were working on their third pitcher. Doug found that no amount of beer could get the taste of grave dirt out of the back of his throat. Tomorrow, he’d wear a bandana. Maybe.
“You working tomorrow, or not, or what?” said Craignotti. Doug gave him an if-come answer, and mentioned the bandana. Craignotti had shrugged. In that moment, it all seemed pretty optional, so Doug concentrated on becoming mildly drunk with a few of the crew working the—heh—graveyard shift.
Joe was a musciebound ex-biker type who always wore a leather vest and was rarely seen without a toothpick jutting from one corner of his mouth. He had cultivated elaborate moustaches which he waxed. He was going gray at the temples. His eyes were dark, putting Doug in mind of a gypsy. He continued: “What I mean is, nobody’s supposed to know about this little relocation. But they guys in here know, even if they don’t talk about it. The guys who run the Triple Pines bank sure as shit know. It’s a public secret. Nobody talks about it, is all.”
“I bet the mayor’s in on it, too,” said Miguel. “All in, who cares? I mean, I had to pick mushrooms once for a buck a day. This sure beats the shit out of that.”
“Doesn’t bother you?” said Boyd Cooper, another of the backhoe jockeys. Older, pattern baldness, big but not heavy. Bull neck and cleft chin.
His hands had seen a lifetime of manual labor. It had been Boyd who showed them how to cable the lids off the heavy stone grave liners, instead of bringing in the crane rig used to emplace them originally. This group’s unity as mutual outcasts gave them a basic common language, and Boyd always cut to the gristle. “Digging up dead people?”
“Nahh,” said Jacky, tipping his beer. “We’re doing them a favor. Just a kind of courtesy thing. Moving ’em so they won’t be forgotten.”
“I guess,” said Joe, working his toothpick. He burnished his teeth a lot with it. Doug noticed one end was stained with a speck of blood, from his gums.
“You’re the teacher,” Boyd said to Doug. “You tell us. Good thing or bad thing?”
Doug did not want to play arbiter. “Just a job of work. Like re-sorting old files. You notice how virtually no one in Triple Pines got cremated? They were all buried. That’s old-fashioned, but you have to respect the dead. Laws and traditions.”
“And the point is . . . ?” Boyd was looking for validation.
“Well, not everybody is entitled to a piece of property when they die, six by three by seven. That’s too much space. Eventually we’re going to run out of room for all our dead people. Most plots in most cemeteries are rented, and there’s a cap on the time limit, and if somebody doesn’t pay up, they get mulched. End of story.”
“Wow, is that true?” said Jacky. “I thought you got buried, it was like, forever.”
“Stopped being that way about a hundred years ago,” said Doug. “Land is worth too much. You don’t process the dead and let them use up your real estate without turning a profit.”