He looked for an odd marker, one with two straight parallel boards at the top and, below, a crooked, slanty one. He flashed on the headstones, on the strange names and lettering. Why did so many Russian people come to Monterey, he wondered, enough of them to rate their own neighborhood of the dead?
After what seemed like forever, he found a funky headstone marking the right name. Unlike most of the graves here, this one had a concrete rim and contained just muddy dirt and gravel instead of a grass surface. Opening his case, he pulled out the pick, swallowing hard. He swung it back and when it hit dirt it buried itself right up to the shaft in the damp ground.
Stopping, he looked around. The nearby graves did not open. No bony fingers pushed up the stones. He could smell the kelpy waters of Monterey Bay on the breeze, hear the street traffic, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that some things didn’t sound natural. Standing with the shovel poised over dirt, he listened hard, heart pounding even though he hadn’t even started digging.
Dead means dead. Don’t start thinking about it.
Working furiously, Stefan assaulted the soil next to the complicated gravestone. As he dug, his body warmed up. The
Once his eyes adjusted, not daring to leave his light on for long, he turned it off and went mostly by feel. He dug as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast.
When they were both young, he used to dig holes with Gabe. He remembered trying to dig to China, and ending up with a shallow hole in the grass, and his mom pitching a fit.
He had a few good memories mixed in with the bad ones. When his brother had gotten sick, that was bad. Gabe would lie in bed, pasty white, listless, while their mom rushed around to doctors looking for hope. Sometimes Mom looked at Stefan, and even though she tried to hide it, he saw her outrage that it was Gabe who had gotten sick, and not him. Gabe was her favorite, born loved and deserving of success, with Stefan the sidekick goofball who slipped on banana peels when there weren’t any.
But Gabe got cured, and Stefan was proud that he had been able to help him with that. Now look at Gabe, Mom’s gold-star boy, making decent money and taking her out for Mother’s Day next month to some fancy restaurant in San Francisco. And check out her younger boy, out here in the cold, digging up a dead body, getting a rhythm going, panting, liking the exercise and finding the work remarkably easy. This dirt wasn’t hard; in fact, it was strangely uncompacted, considering the guy had been buried for over twenty-five years. That heavy rain last night must have softened the ground a lot.
Gabe would never have agreed to do this. Mom always said Gabe got the smarts and Stefan got the muscles. Stefan didn’t necessarily agree. He had ideas, lots of them, as many as Gabe. He would like to start a business someday, where he could work outside. He thought he could do better, now that he had Erin. He had someone who respected him, who thought he came first.
Yes, he would have a business, and then they would have kids, and that was fine by him. He wanted that. He wanted to create a happy family with her. His childhood wasn’t happy, with his mom always treating him like second-best after his brother, her hero. A chronic, infernal worry about money had hung over their lives like a bad moon. His mother and brother both loved him, he believed that, but being poor didn’t help family relations. He would love his kids equally. He would take them camping, be the good father he had never known.
His thoughts went back to Erin. He would buy her a new bed, with a pillow-top mattress, and an aquarium for her birthday. Erin liked goldfish. And after tonight, he could finally afford that ring, the one in the window she pretended not to notice, the one that made her look hungry.
Something in the dirt stopped the shovel. He looked into the open grave. Dirt, blackness, wet. A shiny patch? He probed at it, around it. Six feet deep, that’s how deep the old man was supposed to be, so how come he’d only dug a couple of feet and the shovel was hitting something?
He scraped around the obstruction, trying to figure out where the edges were in the big hole. Because he felt fear overtaking him, he put the shovel aside for a moment and, head up, listened to the wind, which was stirring up the plants and getting loud. Dude, didn’t anybody else notice? No, they wouldn’t. They were dead!
He laughed, his nerves tingling right down to his fingertips. Eucalyptus and the scent of the local pine mixed unpleasantly with the damp old dirt in the air, hanging around him like mildewed walls. Working the soil again, he couldn’t locate any edges to the thing, whatever it was, in the grave, so he gave up with the shovel and put it on the ground beside the hole. He jumped in with the pick, staying close to the edge, but rubbing up against the dirt. He had worn canvas shoes so that they could be washed later.
Flipping on his flashlight, he reached down with his gloved hands and felt around inside the hole. Smoothing away another layer of dirt, he could see what was there: a couple of big plastic garbage bags all wrapped together and tied with loose rope. Trash? An old Christmas tree? He tried to lift the bundle. No, too heavy, and all one piece. Had a relative tossed in a bag of the old man’s possessions at the funeral in 1978? Did Russians do that? Had they buried the old man in a bag?
Then his breath caught as he thought, It’s a body that got out of its coffin! The shape was right, the length and size of the thing in there-did they even have plastic trash bags in 1978? The bags didn’t look twenty-five years old, either.
Scrambling out of the hole, he shivered. The urge to get out of there was so compelling that he had to plant his feet harder on the ground to keep himself from leaving the whole shebang behind and running like hell.
Think.
He stomped his feet a few times, got back in, and shined the light carefully all around the bags. Just more damp dirt, harder underneath.
He scratched his head, heedless of the dirt.
An arm fell out. He shined the light on it, saw what it was, and stumbled back against the dank soil wall he had dug, half in and half out of the grave.
“Shit!” he shouted. He looked anxiously around but saw nobody. Wind flowed in from the sea and lifted his hair.
The thin female arm, ending in painted nails, wore a plain watch with a black leather band. Crouched right there, a foot from the bag, Stefan looked at the arm for a second. She might be alive! He reached out gingerly to touch the cold, dirty hand. He lifted it, feeling for a pulse.
He was ready for the thing to start twitching, to grab at him. But the hand was dead, and so was its owner. He pushed the button on the watch and the backlight flashed on, ticking, time accurate to the minute.
Now he should slit the bag and look at her, but he did not want to see her face, maybe see the evidence of some wasting disease or car-crash injury. He didn’t want to dream of a dead face for the rest of his life. She was none of his business! No-
Momentarily stifling his fear, anger flashed through him. Somebody was playing with his head. He should go right now, gather up his stuff and just bolt.
He reconsidered. Maybe the gravediggers often threw someone in on top of another coffin. Weren’t there double tiers sometimes? The cheap seats. The bunks. He didn’t smile at the thought. He had gone through all that worry, dug until his back was killing him, and now, by God, he would find the old man and get what he came for.
All the hard work was done. He pulled his gloves up tight, then lifted the body in the trash bags. Her body, heavy, flopped around like a beat-up stuffed toy. He found it hard to hold on. Horribly, her arm fell against his chest as he laid the body on the ground beside the hole. He cried out.
She’s dead. She doesn’t care, he told himself, jumping back into the hole. In staccato, powerful thrusts, he struck the ground with the pointed tip of his shovel, rapidly opening up a narrow trench. For some time he didn’t think at all. Another hour went by. She became company, his silent witness, rolled over a few feet away and sleeping. Did souls hang around after death? What would her soul look like?
Would he just feel it like a worm wiggling into his ear? Damn these chills running up and down under his parka-he was going to have to quit, he felt sick with fear…
“Shit!” Hurting his shoulder, he hit something. He dug harder, deeper, like a crazy man. Not much farther down, the top of a mahogany casket showed up, exactly what he had been told to expect.
“There you are, you damn dead Russian,” he grunted.
The clasp, so firm looking, was not locked. Wiping off the dirt, he closed his eyes and opened it.
Swamp air. As squeamish as a tourist on a tossing boat, old food rising in his esophagus like a tide, he opened his eyes and looked at the remains of Constantin Zhukovsky.
Thank God. Just bones in rags. Not enough humanity left to say, Get away from my casket, you son of a bitch.
Pulling the duffel in, Stefan breathlessly stuffed the bones in, everything falling apart as he packed sloppily, like he was going on a little vacation to Hell. Feet. The skull, with hair, the hat falling off. Bits of clothing clinging to the skeleton fell away as he picked up the ribs.
Something small and hard fell into the coffin, and he rooted around until he found it. In the dark he couldn’t see very well what he had, but it was made of metal. He ran a grimy fingernail over the blackened surface and saw a golden gleam. The haunts were everywhere, all around him, outside and inside, and his thoughts had gotten disorganized. Fingers trembling, he stuck the metal object into a pocket. Quickly, he pushed the duffel out of the hole and slammed the lid of the casket. Then he climbed out, filthy, not caring, just wanting it to be over.
The dead woman lay in her plastic shroud on the gravel, pitiful, frightful. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He felt her wrist one more time-the lifeblood not pumping-tucked her arm back in and rolled her over to the lip. He let her drop and heard the thud. Then he shoveled dirt until his heart pounded with the effort and sweat flicked off his face.
He tried hard to repair the surface so the gravel wouldn’t look too bad. He couldn’t see well enough to know if he had succeeded. The edges could probably use something to make the merge between the intact and the disturbed earth invisible, but all he could do was stomp the ground and riffle around with the toe of his shoe, hoping things would look okay when daylight came.
Bones, it turned out, weren’t so heavy, but they didn’t lie neatly in the duffel. They seemed reluctant to give up their structure. He couldn’t zip the bag all the way. He carried the partly open thing over his shoulder across the grass and stones, under the dripping trees, then threw it over the fence, climbed over, and skulked back to the car, looking around the whole time, seeing things that just couldn’t be there, eyes in the bushes, dark forms of ghosts hiding behind trees.
Trying to open the trunk, he fiddled with his keys, but his hands shook so much, the usual jiggling didn’t work. He laid the duffel in the back seat, on the floor, stuffing it down and covering the remains with a blanket.
All he had to do now was drive up Highway 1 and drop the duffel into a Dumpster behind the self-store place in Marina. The guy who had hired him would take it from there, and mail Stefan another five hundred the next day.
Driving slowly along Pearl Street, he struggled with himself, sweating in the cold. Who was the dead woman? Was he meant to find her? Why? On Aguajito he turned at a dignified speed. A few other cars, lights, people. He felt comforted being around the few night stragglers still on the streets.
He turned on some music and sank in to the driver’s seat, let out a big breath. All good. He fingered the little Buddha around his neck.
At the corner of Sixth, a red light erupted behind his car, just the silent, turning red light, but he knew right away that it didn’t matter that he had driven perfectly.
He should have known. He never got away with anything.
He pulled over.
Telling the story had drained him. “ Erin dumped me. She only came to see me once, to tell me she dropped my stuff at my mom’s.”
“That’s rough,” Nina said.
“Her parents were already iffy on me because of me being in jail a couple of times before.”
Nina nodded sympathetically.
“That’s the worst part, losing Erin. But here’s what I’m thinking. I go on the stand-whatever you call it when you get up in court to testify-and I tell the jury what happened, the whole thing, spit it out. What do you think are the chances that they’ll believe me? Because if they do, she has to. I know she’s hurting, too.”
“It’s an interesting story.” He did tell a good story, but then many of her clients did. They all had such excellent motivation for lying, and months in jail to perfect their yarns. If a lie bought you freedom, and telling the truth bought you imprisonment, well, the choice was a no-brainer for most of them. “I’m going to go back to it in a minute to ask you some questions. But I ought to say right now, Stefan-you won’t be telling any of this to the court.”
