There was, however, the thinly smiling (but not at all smiling) aggression everyone could sense beneath the broad grin of the ever-present wise ass, and I believe Kyle sometimes gave a demonstration or two, of course masked as a joke, just to make those with an ugly side think twice about crossing him. At the end of seventh grade, he brought a tape measurer with him into the hallway and bet Ronnie Shoemaker that he could put a two-inch dent in a locker with one punch. A crowd gathered in the traditional semicircle at the end of a line of thin lockers we called "The Gray Mile," and watched Kyle wind up, bash the steel, crimp it in about an inch and a half, and fall to the ground in gales of laughter.
At the end of the same year, Kyle became the hero of metal shop by cutting off the tip of his pinkie. I heard that they listed it as an accident on the school report, but I was there. This was not incidental. Kyle had been at the station with the portable band saw turned upside-down and propped to an angle in a set of huge bench vices, filled in their creases with metal shavings, dirt, and WD-40. His project was a four-post lantern shell and he was supposed to trim the scrolls down from twenty-four inches to a foot. Before doing so he walked the room with a whisper in a given ear at the soldering and welding bench, a hand to a shoulder at the drill press, face to face in front of the bench grinder. Protective glasses were propped up on foreheads and safety shields were put in open positions. I set down my file. Kyle approached the Portaband, flicked it on, and turned a sly smile to us. He then ceremoniously raised his hands above his head, the triumphant prize fighter. He held the tip of his left pinkie in between the pads of his right thumb and index finger. He lowered it all slowly and then leaned into the whine of the machine. We craned our necks and went up on our toes. No one had a good angle for a visual past his shoulder, except, that is, for Junior Macenhaney over by the dual industrial wash basins who suddenly put a dirty work glove up to his mouth and pointed.
Kyle turned around. He was still smiling. A thin, spotty line of blood had splashed up his cheek and over the left lens of his goggles. He walked up to Mr. Ruthersford, who was bent over the tool drawer, and shouted,
"Hey dude! Want a Chiclet?"
After being rushed to the nurse and then the Children's Hospital out past Rutherford Heights, they sewed the tip back on for him. You didn't even notice the tiny scars nowadays unless you got right up close and personal with it, but he still got mileage from it. He claimed he couldn't feel it anymore, and on a dare right before last Christmas break he put it over a flame in science lab long enough to burn the nail black.
You would have to assume a guy like that was a vicious competitor if forced to fight. Some guys boxed real well, and others even laid down rules like no eye gouging or crotch shots, but Kyle gave the impression that he would do anything to beat your butt if he had to. I pictured kicking, bites, scratches, and worst of all, props if they were handy. What would stop a guy who cut off his own fingertip for a thrill from grabbing a rock and bashing your cheek with it, or snapping off a car antenna and jabbing your eye, or breaking a bottle and swiping it at your jugular?
I was no weakling myself, but my skills didn't apply here. I could wrestle pretty well, and had earned a spot on the B team last year. Though there was an ace at a hundred and ten pounds named Barry Cutlerson who knew all kinds of fancy ways to stack you up, put your head where your ass should have been, and twist you into a pretzel, I had my own reputation for being "a worm," rarely pinned, often winning my matches by a couple of points. But even if I could rush Kyle, get a single leg, and take him down, what happened next? What could I really do except hold him there? I needed to knock him out and run home, not tire myself out submitting him.
The cold fact was that I had to have the cold will to pick up a rock when he wasn't looking and sucker him. I had always wondered if those who bragged about keeping weapons handy actually had the gumption to use them. What did it feel like to murder someone if you thought you had the right? I looked down at my hands and pushed out a shaky breath. I just helped murder someone for absolutely no reason at all, and I deserved a bash on the head as much as did Kyle. A sneak attack just muddied and worsened the complicated equation.
"Hey Jimmy," Kyle called. "I want to show you something. C'mon, man, you're really going to like it."
I turned and spit into the dirt. There was blood in the saliva because I had bitten the inside of my lip without realizing it. Kyle stepped across the lane, took a position before me, and rubbed the sole of his sneaker over the place I had moistened. The thin streak of red mud blended, darkened, and vanished.
"What, did you cut yourself shaving?" he said. I sucked in at my lip to nurse the wound that was no more than a trickle. He licked his teeth, smacked his lips, gulped air a few times, and let out a tremendous belch.
"Whiplash!" he said. He then took a fistful of my shirt and dragged me across the road past the back side of the car. "Look."
We were on the far side of the road now, near the edge of the woods, and I saw nothing but a patch of wildflowers in front of a thick march of trees.
"What am I looking for?" I said.
"The doorway, man, the doorway!"
Now I knew. There was a space about nine standing men wide between two elms at the lip of the forest. A rough path pushed a short way in, quickly hooded and darkened by overhanging branches. The far side of the glade was a wall of ferns, vines, and brambles.
"Go in, Jimmy," Kyle said. "Walk through the doorway, make a sharp right, and find the surprise down at the end of the path."
I advanced into the shadows. I did not want to take the time to second-guess it. Dead vegetation crinkled under my sneakers and passed through my mind vague images of snake skins and insects. I shook it off. I had been in dark forests hundreds of times, hunting out salamanders, fossils, and arrowheads, and whatever was down here had to be better than what was waiting in the Honda.
The woods took me in like a cold womb. Stabs of sunlight slipped through at odd angles, and a spiderweb that had once spanned a two-foot nook between a trunk and crooked branch now fluttered with one side unfastened, a frail shroud pointing in stuttering rhythm the way of the breeze.
I followed the light wind and shifted right. I edged down the rooted path about twenty-five feet down as Kyle had advised and then it was there, waiting in silence.
It was a place where the ground fell off in a twenty-foot arc. A deep, black hole.
It was going to be the woman's grave.
Closest to the dark, empty shape cut into the ground were huge banks of dirt piled at the far side covered with what looked like low cut open air circus canopies. There was a digging machine to the left, and a score of rusted shovels scattered along the perimeter. I dragged my feet to the rim of the pit and peered over the edge. The drop was so deep I could not see the bottom. Edges of roots pushed out of the near inner wall like the knobby fingers of jailed witches. I reached into my right front pocket and fumbled out a bent nail. I tossed it into the hole. Once the nail winked out of sight I did not hear it land.
The other nails followed, all of them, mate joining mate down the black well of silence. No one had told me to unload the evidence here; I just sensed it was right.
All on my own I was beginning to think like a criminal.
I forced myself to pull my glance out of the blackness of the abyss and walk the border. The scene around the hole past the dirt hills and shovels was busy with "stuff" that made a haphazard background of things I passed on the roadway a thousand times and took utterly for granted.
Just beyond the biggest pile of light brown dirt was a smaller heap of crushed stone. At the far side of the clearing there were two machines with massive inner coils and big, flat bottom-pads. They were turned on their sides like discarded bicycles near an apparatus that looked like a standing ride mower with a nine-foot chain saw at the end. Five rolls of orange construction fencing were lying in some overgrowth between two trash cans filled with wooden stakes, and the mini-bulldozer now directly to my left s
at opposite the position I had just abandoned at the front side of the hole.
The machine had "BOBCAT" stenciled in block letters beneath some dried mud caked to the back panel. Around front, the wide bucket was full of the whitish crushed stone in a pyramid shape and the whole thing was raised out about ninety percent flush over the lip of the hole. I stepped in closer. It seemed as if the driver of the machine had stopped cold just before getting fully squared in position to spill the rocks, and there was a thick length of old chain now holding up the bucket. It was padlocked through a hole between the digging teeth and figure-eighted into the high steel mesh of the cab.
The Bobcat was obviously busted.
So was the chain. There was a broken link halfway up that was rusted through, cloven on one side and almost forced straight by the pressure of its neighbors. The whole affair was held together by what seemed no more than a thread.
"Do you know what this is, Jimmy?"
Across the hole, Kyle was standing with his arms stretched out wide. He had followed me down to see my reaction and then give a lecture. His old smile was back like neon.
"It's a footer, James. Before my asshole dad started his own asshole company he poured concrete for Molina Industrial. He always talked about footers and stuff. Bored me to freakin' tears."
The smile left him. He reached down to his sock for a cigarette.
"Want one?"
I shook my head. He straightened, puckered his face, lit up, and dragged. He spoke through the smoke, aiming and directing the cigarette as a movie professor would do with a pointer.
"Footers are good, James. Footers are our friends. They pour cement to complete footers, and we're lucky we found this one half-baked. They dig these things for big columns that hold up bridges and stuff, and you can see that this one was a mistake. All we've got to do is put Blondie and her piece-of-shit car down the hole. We fill the fucker with dirt, throw on a light cover of crushed stone, and when the new guys do show up, they'll think the first team filled it back in a long time ago."
My nose flared out.
"What if they think it looks like it wasn't done by a real contractor? What if they decide to dig it back up?"
He snorted.
"Too much money, my man! Contractors are cheap whores by trade! Why would they dig around into a mistake when the help costs over twenty an hour? If they don't think the little bow we put on it is nice enough, they'll swirl around the rocks on top more professionally or something."
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I was not good at this riddle stuff, especially considering that I was not as technically minded (or as willing to roll the dice) as Kyle. The apparent ease of all this was more than disturbing, and I still wanted to weasel out some way of running off, or at least delaying any more interaction with the dead thing up there, without Kyle literally beating me to a pulp.
"What if it wasn't a mistake?" I said.
"It was."
"But how do you know?" My chin was out and I was pleading now. "It looks like they had every reason to dig here and the foreman or whoever just blew the whistle in the middle for some reason. What if the job starts up again and the same guys do come back and try to pick up where they left off?"
Kyle took a sharp drag. Blew it out hard.
"They won't."
"How do you know?"
"First, because you don't have extra-fine dirt ready on the side unless you brought it in for repacking. Look at the piles, Jimmy. This dirt didn't come from this hole. There are no rocks in it, and no roots. Also, why the crushed stone? That stuff goes on top of a repair. You don't use it when you're going to put in a pillar. And even if this turns out not to have been a mistake originally, it won't be the same guys working off those old plans that never came together in the first place. It's been eight months since this job shut down. Look at it, Jimmy!" He put up his hands. "I know you're not a diesel head, but look around. Doesn't this hole seem funny to you?"
"Yeah."
"And why?"
"Because it's in the middle of the woods. It doesn't fit."
"Right!" he said. His hands were both offered out to me now. "The guys digging the holes didn't work for the same company cutting the trees, or pouring the 'crete, or grooving the road. No one got along and no one ever knew what the other was doing. It was a big fucking mess and my dad used to laugh about it regularly. Every night. Believe me, I'm an expert on the subject even though I never wanted to be until right about now."
"Oh." It's all I had left, really.
"Let's go," Kyle said. "We've still got a lot of fun stuff to do."
I walked around and put my back to the hole. Kyle's arm was around me immediately. The smoke from his cigarette twisted up a hooking shape at the rim of my head and struck a chord of familiarity in me, the sensory trigger of my concept of "friend," of "not mom," of "other," of the "not me" that was becoming more of the latest "me" every second.
Side by side, each absorbed in thought, we made our way back up the incline toward the open air. Below our feet, the roots along the path pushed up and across, and I caught a toe at one point. Of course, Kyle held me up. It was nice and at the same time crushing, since it reminded me again of his superior strength. We turned the corner past the floating spiderweb and walked into the heat and the brightness, through the two elms that made Kyle's doorway. We stopped. The car was waiting for us. I noticed that from this angle I had to tilt my head up slightly to look at it. The path from it to the trees sloped downward ever so slightly.
"Jimmy."
"Yeah?"
"How ya doing?"
"'Kay."
"Do you think that you're strong enough to shove the back bumper and move the car by yourself? The right front tire is flat but the other three are OK."
My answer was automatic.
"No. I'm not big enough, Kyle. I'm sorry."
"No problem." He turned me to him and put his hands on my shoulders. He looked at me with full, sincere eyes.
"I can move the car or at least get it going, Jimmy, but the rest of this is on you. Just promise not to fuck it up, all right?"
"What do you mean?"
"What I mean, James, is that this whole thing will be fine if you can pull through."
"How?"
He glanced up at the Honda.
"I'm going to push. You've got to steer."
My breath hitched. I blinked. The picture became clear, and it was not pretty.
I was going to have to get in with her and shut the door. The space between the two elms was barely enough to fit the car through, let alone allow me the luxury of trotting beside with my hands reaching in to the steering wheel.
I was going to have to sit in her lap and feel her press against me. Or more realistically, I was going to have to sit in its lap and feel it press against me while I tried to maneuver the entry, pull the turn, hold it steady over the roots, and bail at the last second.
Suddenly I heard something, faint and sneaky like a whisper. It could have been the wind or the traffic droning past on the overpass, but I knew that it wasn't.
It was the corpse. She was waiting for me in that hot vehicle, baking, letting a horsefly run over her crushed lip, the gash in her head, an open eyeball.
And on some dark wavelength that only existed between sinners and the vengeful dead, I could hear her say something. It flickered between us but for a moment. A message in the static, barely on the radar.
"I dare you," she said to me.
I swear it.
4.
The right corner of the Honda's fender was turned up and embedded in the tree. At first, Kyle wanted to piston out his foot and kick it loose with the sole of his sneaker, but there wasn't quite enough fender to kick on the outside edge. He tried wedging himself between the tree and the crimped hood, but the car was too close. He could not summon the power needed for the push with his knees up in his chest like upside-down V's. We removed our shirts to be used as makeshift gloves for our fingers and actually crawl
ed under the car. Kyle had the one-inch nub to the far right and I hooked my hands more toward the center where there was a lip in the steel to grab. We both straddled the trunk of the tree from under there like a horse, Kyle on ground level, my legs splayed above his. Something from the engine dripped on me three times, but it wasn't quite hot enough to leave burns.
There was a squeal and a stuttery moan like a door creaking open. The fender had come loose. It gave about an inch. We crawled out from under the car and brushed off. After a couple of misfires and determined "one-two-three's," we really put our backs into it and managed to push the car backward a few inches more from the tree in a hesitant, lumpy sort of progress. Now that there was a bit of room, we both mounted the hood, backs to the tree, shirts now used as buffer cushions against the hard bark. We pushed with the soles of our feet and actually managed to extend our legs.
The new placement had the vehicle about three feet from the tree's base, and I got a full frontal view of the corpse from between the shadows of overhanging branches.
Her head was facing downward. Blonde hair stuck to her jaw on the left side in a glaze that looked like matted red paste. Her hair band had been thrust a few inches backward and drew rakes of thin, red trails behind it. Bangs clumped with sloppy strokes of red hid the top of her face, but her mouth was in sight, burst open, swelled, and caught in a scream. Her tongue was out and dripping off of it, she had a long dangler, a spindle of blood, snot, and drool that went past her chin all the way to the chest.
I stepped down, turned away, and crossed my arms.
"I can't do it, Kyle."
He stepped in front of me.
"You have to."
"No way. You do it."
"Go ahead and move the car one inch by yourself and I will."
My mind raced.
"Why just me? We can both get it going and then you could jump in to steer."
He pointed at the car.
"There isn't enough room. One of us has to bang a hard right on the wheel from the start or it will end up back at the tree."
Seven Deadly Pleasures Page 21