"Fine," I said. "I'll take the back and you lean in to the front through the open door. You can work the wheel and help me get it rolling too. As soon as you hit the patch of flowers there, it's downhill. You could take it all on your own."
He looked at the ground and shook his head.
"Won't work. The guy who leans in the front don't have the leverage. The bigger kid has got to be at the back. And once it gets moving there won't be time to switch places."
I went to the back of the car.
"Let's try it my way first."
"Fine." He shrugged, put his shirt back on, and walked toward the driver's side door. "Just hurry the fuck up."
"Fine," I mimicked, as if the last word really meant something. I retrieved my own shirt, threw my arms through the sleeves, and took a stance behind the vehicle. I started getting ready to get set, and my heart sank a bit.
Kyle's not going to push very hard.
Didn't matter. I had to try. I bent down and pressed my hands against the back bumper. I started to draw deep breaths. I pictured the thing rocking a bit in the starting groove, then making lumpy advance by the sheer force of my will. Think it—be it. Easy. No problem.
I heard the car door open up front.
"Ready when you are," Kyle said.
I tightened up and got ready for the push of my life. I counted it out really loud so there would be no false starts off the blocks.
"One, two . . . THREE!"
Nothing. No way. Dead weight going absolutely nowhere. I pushed again with every possible piece of strength and my back screamed with it. My face prickled and my eyes went scream-wide. Nothing. Nothing at all.
"Ready when you are," Kyle said. With a final gasp I dropped to all fours and hung my head. I pushed up on my fingertips and dragged through my feet to cross them Indian style. I sat in the dirt. I stared at the red cauliflowers left blooming on my palms and heard the approaching footsteps.
Closer, then halted.
"Door's open for you up there," Kyle said. "Now try it my way. Just to see, OK?"
I got up and brushed by him. Our shoulders knocked together a bit in passing and I held up my jaw. I was angry and enjoying the feeling. I was also aware somewhere beneath the surface that I was feeding off the anger to manipulate myself away from the idea of approaching the horror in the front seat. By the time I registered this idea I was there at the opening, so I continued as quickly as possible before the little that remained of the power of my anger blew off.
I stuck in my right hand. The steering wheel was hot and I curled my fingers tight. I braced my left palm in a pushing position against the door's armrest and had a sudden feeling that the woman was going to clamp down her broken teeth on my elbow and sink them in as deep as they would go.
The car started moving. Kyle had gotten it going on his own, and we bumped about two inches forward.
"Turn the wheel!" Kyle said.
I spun it hard to the right and heard the tires beneath me creaking and scraping in the dirt. The car slowly moved away. I sidestepped in to keep up.
"Aim it!" he shouted.
I straightened back the wheel and walked faster beside the moving vehicle. Every time the wound in the right tire rotated to the bottom there was a skip and a clump, and that combination was getting less and less pronounced as we gained speed. We bumped off the road and went through the wildflowers. I had thought this was just a test, just to see . . .
"Keep going!" he yelled.
Now I was running beside the car, almost struggling to catch up with it. The "doorway" between the trees was looming a few feet before me. All options vanished and it was now or nothing.
"Do it!" Kyle roared. "Do it for real!"
I did it.
I jumped into the hot car and reached for the door that was flapping out like a broken wing. My nails scratched at the plastic and I found the void in the arm rest. I pulled the door shut and all sound around me snapped off as if by a switch.
The woman was a hot envelope stuck to my legs and back. Her hair brushed along my right shoulder and my neck. I was moaning, bending in low for a view beneath the bloody cracks in the windshield.
The front end of the car made it between the trees for a bald second, and then there was a terrific yet muffled screaming sound as the flanks of the vehicle scraped against the bark on both sides. We jarred through and the light wiped dark. It felt as if we had gone under water, and the heavy smell of death and hot vinyl filled my lungs.
I jerked the wheel to another hard right and skidded a bit, just missing the thicket on the far side of the glade. The car swerved and I straightened back the wheel, my scream rupturing through the thick silence as the woman's wet face fell against my neck. I screamed again when the knotted branches of overhung trees rushed in and elbowed the roof. The car picked up speed down the rough decline and the roots underneath wailed hard on the tires. The woman and I shucked against each other in hard, sticky frictions.
The wide hole approached fast. It was time to abandon ship. I reached for the door handle.
My fingers found it, pulled up, and then tried to shove outward.
Nothing. The impact with the trees had crimped the door and jammed it. I made a weak play at giving it a shoulder. Frozen solid.
The hole was everything now, huge and black and big as the earth. I jammed down my foot for the brake and found a jungle of the woman's feet. I stomped down haphazardly, got nothing, and felt a discarded shovel bang up under the car.
The hole was upon us. I could not even make out the front edge anymore, only its wide rim at the periphery and its yawning, bottomless center. I brought up my hands. The front tires fell away into nothingness and there was a shock and a bang as the undercarriage scraped across the dirt cut-away. There was a final thump from the back tires and bumper, and then we were jettisoned into the black.
5.
The dead woman and I were flung off the seat, floating and bumping around in the black. My knuckles scraped on the windshield. The body beneath me slipped out from under, bounced away, and hurtled back in. Her hair snapped in my eyes and my head banged the roof. My legs forked out, my eardrums popped, and then we hit bottom.
"Holy fuck!" were the wild words I could actually see spelled out in my mind as the impact hammed the nose of the car. "Holy fuck!" as the windshield ruptured across and above me and my head was hurled forward.
I had a quick vision in the pitch black, a glimpse of what my face would look like after smashing into the hard rim of the steering wheel. It was no work of art. In reflex, I thrust out my hands to block. The heel of my left hand caught most of the wheel while my right barely got in a thumb.
It broke my fall, or at least put a major dent in it.
I hit face first.
There was a loud smooonch. A slap of pain plastered out from the bridge of my nose, but what I did hit could not have been factory made. It felt like wet webbing over caved seashell plating. I felt it mold and contour, and a burst of liquid smeared between my lips.
It was the woman's face wedged between me and the wheel.
My first kiss in the dark.
For a moment I was too disoriented to scream. With the car's nose rammed to the ground, my ass was back where my head should have been and down seemed like up.
I sucked in a big breath to let out a holler and swallowed a throatful of blood. Her blood. Salty. Greasy and thick and inside me. I choked. I spit, I scrambled, and flailed. I fell waist-deep into the vertical void between the wheel and the seat and clapped my chin to something hard. The blow sang through my jaw making my teeth buzz and my ears ring. I twisted away and felt a cool brush of air at my face. It was my first clue as to where I was and which way I was facing. I gathered together a scatter of common sense and recognized that the impact had blown the door open.
I pawed for the shallow breeze.
I flutter-kicked, climbed, and doggie-paddled through the dark portal and fell out on the bowed-out door. I stood, wobbled, and grabbed
at the wheel-well of the back tire. My eyes had adjusted to the deep shadows and I could see in gray, grainy snatches. I chinned up past the driver's side opening, reached up, hauled in, and put my feet where my hands had just been. I soon found footing on the rear hood, almost slipped backward, crouched, and froze there for a moment.
"Are you cooked down there or what? Jimmy-man, quit jerking me off and say something, huh?"
The voice was faint and dreamlike. I stood up slowly and felt a brush of fresher air. Still, I pictured the woman's eyes suddenly coming open in the darkness below me. She would jerk and twitch and then gnash and spit at the air. I could feel her desire to crawl out of the car in jerks and spasms, to reach up for a pant leg, yank me back down, and suck back the blood I had stolen.
I had my hands splayed out for balance and I saw my best chance sticking out of the earth, just above the shadows. The re-grown roots that had pushed their way through the higher end of the pit's inner walls hung about a body length away and three feet over head.
I jumped.
I stretched out and my feet made insane bicycle pedals in the open air. I forced my right hand into a last-ditch, overhand sweep and clutched out for broke. I caught the base of the nearest root and just managed to turn a shoulder before crashing into the embankment. A burst of dirt showered around me and I held on. I twisted myself to face front and my left hand joined its mate. I pulled my chin to my fists and then grasped out for the next highest root. The heat of the open air teased my forehead and I strove for it, arms burning, just like on the pegboard anchored to the polished block wall in the gymnasium at school. I really had to reach to the side for the next root, and I almost slipped back into the hole. I got it by the fingertips, shimmied it into a fist, swung out one-handed, grabbed with both, and pulled. Sunlight bathed across the base of my neck and my back. I was in it now with my chin again parked at my clamped fingers, and I could taste making it, and when I raised up a knee for a last thrust to the top, there was a hard tug on my ankle.
I shrieked.
I struggled and kicked and almost lost hold. Of course it was the pawing zombie that had followed me up the wall to pull me back down into the shadows. It was the beast, the dead-alive thing hungry for boy-guts, she who wanted to rip me to steaming ribbons and sniff at the remains for her shoplifted blood.
Of course it was just a root that had snagged on my pant leg. I tore loose, clawed up to the lip of the hole, and screamed again when a hand closed tight over my wrist. I was dragged up into the heat. The pit's edge scraped along my chest, ripped my shirt, and drove dirt into my underwear.
I was out of the hole. At the far end of my arm was a strange being that I believe on earth they once called a boy. He yanked me out the rest of the way and my wrist roared with Indian burn. His footing tangled and he let go of me. He fell flat on his butt and I almost tripped over him. He looked up at me in amazement.
"What the fuck, Jimmy? You look like the Creature From the Black Lagoon! Is that all your blood or what?"
"No!" I cried. He jumped to his feet and it looked like a blur. The light was overly bright, tinged with afterimage, and Kyle was a swirl of the woman and the hole. I fell on him with flailing fists and he knocked me aside with an easy, backhanded pass.
"No!" I cried, swinging at nothing. I was still deep in that grave, covered with darkness and kissing a corpse. "No!" as I stamped on the ground. "No!" as I clawed at my hair.
He hit me.
It was a nasty, open-handed wallop that caught me full in the face and cracked loud in my ears. My head turned with the force and my mouth dropped open. The sting gave way to a dull throbbing that worked itself into the sobering sounds of the wood; the call of a bird, the shrill of crickets, the sigh of the wind. I was free and I was alive. The dead woman was no longer the entire world, but a series of frightening pictures that flickered by slower and slower.
I let out a grunt of exhaustion and sat down. I was breathing in dry sobs. I hugged my knees and shook.
"Hey," Kyle said.
I ignored him. I noticed that he had moved closer, but not quite close enough to reach out and touch. I stared at his sneakers.
"Clean laces," I thought. I rubbed my arms to smooth the chill that stole over me. "Thanks for your help," I said to the sneakers.
"Don't mention it," Kyle replied. He had noticed my dry, toneless delivery, and his three-word retort clarified things. He was too proud to admit that he had not jumped down into the footer to help. "Don't mention it" meant, "C'mon, Jimmy. Let's move on to bigger and better things. Of course I didn't fly after you down the hole. I probably would have landed right on your head and snapped your damned neck with my squeaky-clean sneakers." "Don't mention it" meant, "Let's not talk about it because I'll come up with a million excuses as to why it was better for you to go down there instead of me." "Don't mention it" was Kyle's way of admitting that the two of us were never again to be friends.
"Help me fill it back in, Jimmy. We're almost done."
A spade-point digging shovel landed at my feet. It was an ugly, rusted old thing with the initials P.D.G. written on the wooden shaft in spidery black magic marker.
Kyle turned his back and walked up to a mound of fill piled at the far edge of the pit. He pulled up the stakes of the tarp canopy and let the canvas blow off toward the back of the clearing. It looked like some of the fine soil had run off over time, but there was still a massive amount left in a shape that vaguely looked like a large pair of camel humps. He picked up his shovel, sunk it into the pile, and tossed the first scoop of backfill into the opening. The sound of dirt scattered across sunken steel was gritty and final.
The horror of it all was now somehow diluted, and I was left with a hollow grief in the pit of my stomach. I pushed up and dragged the shovel to my side of the hole. To the immediate left was a mound of fill with a clear plastic covering flattened over it and kept taut with tent stakes at three corners. I took a moment to peer over into the dark tomb, my expression closed and flat. She was not a zombie. She was no monster. She was a once-pretty lady whom two bad kids had to make disappear before dinnertime.
"I'm sorry," I said. It was an empty whisper. I pried up the plastic at one of the corners, dug in, and threw my first shovelful of dirt down the hole. There was a tinkle of soil across the wreckage, and that led to another thrust, and another followed by another. The sounds of our shovels were flat accompaniment to the memory of the unlucky soul trapped beneath us, and though the sounds were anything but musical, they were rhythmic in their dumb regularity.
It was hypnotic. I developed blisters on my hands that had been mildly alarming when they formed, annoying when they broke, and then an afterthought when they finally went numb. The afternoon wore on and spun itself into gray, gauzy, thoughtless purpose.
We were fully entranced when I dug up the watch.
This pile of dirt is different.
I'd noticed but not noticed. I was on overdrive, a machine, shoulders and back aching in a distant way that was not really "mine" somehow. My shovel was making a different noise. The pile had rocks in it and was filled with trashy stuff amongst rougher dirt. There was a busted cup to a field telephone with the bigger holes in it for the ear, small pieces of wire with the copper sticking out, an industrial rubber glove that was black on one side and yellow on the other, an old, opened pack for a Trojan condom, and a million cigarette butts. I pushed up and put my hand to the small of my back. Kyle had exhausted four huge dirt piles and I had managed three. There wasn't much left to dump. I sunk my spade into the pile and it made a gravelly sound. Something winked up. I turned the shovel and scraped the tip over the area. It brought to the surface a Mickey Mouse watch with one of the bands torn off. The face was scarred by a jagged pair of nearly parallel cracks, and the colors and familiar shapes just under the deformities doubled like mirrors. The image brought up the trace of a smile. Red and black kiddie colors, big white gloves on those stick arms. The red second hand was continuous, and didn't do tho
se little twitches across the background. One of Mickey's gloves was on the ten, and the shorter one was just shy of the five.
I jerked up and looked around in a wider view than I had taken a second ago. Had the cover of the forest screwed my sense of time flow that badly? It was not as if I was some expert like the explorers in adventure books who always seemed to know the time by the position of the sun, but I usually knew when the day was getting old. I looked back in the general direction of my house and then up toward the jobsite above us. The sun was filtered through the trees the same as it had been all day. Of course it was. The sun didn't go down until seven or eight at the end of the summer. I could have gone at least another hour and a half until I noticed any difference at all. My thinking was behind the eight-ball here, and I cursed myself for it. Worse, Ma had bought me a watch and I always forgot to wear it. I think it was on my bookshelf next to a ceramic mug I made in fourth grade, but I wasn't sure. It would have been easy to convince myself that I never wore the thing because it got in the way or I thought it looked snobby, but it wasn't that easy. I was simply too lazy to remember to put it on. Then, I was forever asking my friends what time it was like a begging little idiot. My whole life was one step behind, and it was self-inflicted.
I threw down my shovel. Kyle had ceased digging as well and he was gazing into the hole.
"Looks almost ready," he said. "Almost."
"What?" I said. "Uh, Kyle, I just dug up a watch and it's getting close to five o'clock here." I took a good look into the grave and saw that we had actually filled it three quarters of the way. It seemed good enough to me and I suddenly burst into action. Last-minute business, chop-chop. I was dimly aware that I hadn't asked permission or advice, but the time factor had forced me to independence. Kyle stuck the point of his shovel into the ground, and leaned on the D-handle with his elbow. I believe he was smiling.
I vaulted up the rooted path. The sun made me wince and I spread my index finger and thumb to make a visor. The Honda had left a trail of tire marks. I ran up and dragged my feet across the evidence. Dust rose. I coughed a few times. There were imprints running through the wildflowers as well, but I couldn't straighten all of the broken flowers of the world, now could I? With nothing leading up to the impressions they would be a mystery. An unnoticed one, I hoped.
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