Jay ignored him. 'You still have that big cable in the barn?'
'Yeah, but so goddamn what?'
I listened to their conversation with mounting fear.
'I saw the forty-five hundred is loaded.'
'Won't work,' Poppy announced.
'Yes it will, if I can get the Cat started.'
'You'll kill somebody. Not me, but somebody. Probably yourself. Cable will snap and whip back and cut off your head.'
'Thank you, Poppy, thank you very fucking much.'
'Then your girlfriend won't have nobody to suck on her tit.'
'You're a gentleman, Poppy. Always have been.'
'Guys, you can't do this,' I insisted. 'Call the police. It's their business.'
Poppy pointed at me menacingly. 'Why did you bring him, anyway?'
'You got somebody else for me at three in the morning?'
Poppy shook his head, no fight left. 'I been waiting, Jay, is all.'
'You did a lot already,' Jay said in a softer voice. 'Now we've got just one more thing to do. Go get the cable.'
Poppy grunted, climbed in his battered truck, and drove off.
Jay headed down the slope, and despite my misgivings, I followed him, slipping my way down the crusty sand. The bulldozer looked like a yellow toy tossed carelessly within a giant sandbox, but up close it was enormous and in notably poor repair. Its yellow body paint was pocked with rust, its hydraulic lines wrapped with duct tape. The driver, Herschel, was a heavyset black man in a plaid work shirt who sat in the seat fallen backward, feet spread wide, chin up and eyes upon the heavens. He might have been fifty, he might have been seventy. The storm had iced his head and body. He was quite dead.
Jay scrambled alongside the bulldozer. 'Oh, Herschel,' he moaned. 'What're you doing out here?' He climbed up the side of the machine and knelt next to the dead man, his forehead touching the man's hand. 'You told me you were done last week! Why did you come out here?' He slumped against the giant treads of the dozer, head down. 'Oh, Herschel, oh, man…'
I was intruding, so I retreated into the darkness, wondering what Herschel had meant to Jay. The two figures were a study in contrasts- white and black, young and old, alive and dead- but Jay's ease next to the dead man suggested an intimate history. Finally he stood and climbed into the cab. He wiped one of the gauges, examined it, then turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. He gave the frozen body a firm push but it didn't move. The dead man's gloveless hand was draped on the shifter knob, not clutching it but making incidental contact.
He pushed and pulled but the hand was stuck fast. 'Frozen.'
'Don't tear the skin,' I called.
'Yes, fuck it, I know!' roared Jay into the snow, his long coat whipping behind him. 'Bill, come up here!'
'What?'
'Get up here, I need you.'
'For what?'
'Come on!'
I climbed awkwardly to the cab, feeling bad about everything.
'Christ, Jay, I'm supposed to be in bed. Not standing here!'
The dead man's face gazed upward into the storm. Snow had crusted over the surface of his eyes. He wore a digital watch, the tiny red seconds-light blinking as if its owner would consult it at any moment. I noticed he was not wearing socks and that his shoes were low carpet-paddlers, not work boots high over the ankle.
'Just put your hands on his, try to start warming it.'
'You crazy?'
'Yeah, I am.'
'I'm not holding hands with a dead man.'
'I can't move this thing otherwise.'
'Why not just call the police?'
'I can't, counselor,' he said in a low, determined voice. 'I just can't do that.'
It occurred to me that I could hike up the sandy cliff, get in Jay's truck, check to see if he left the keys in it, take out the box of cash and put it on the ground, then drive away. Back to Manhattan, drop the vehicle in a lot, walk straight to my apartment. Up the stairs, key in the door, jump in bed, good night moon, and dream about Salma Hayek. I could do that. I could do that now.
But I didn't. Instead I placed my two warm hands around the large cold one, which was frozen solid. I counted to thirty, then clapped my hands together for warmth and tried again. After several tries, my hands were numb and Herschel's hand was unchanged. Holding hands with a dead man was not why I went to Yale Law School, not why I worked seventy-hour weeks for ten years in my twenties and thirties, not why I said yes to Allison. It was crazy. But despite myself, my mind was working on the problem, figuring it. 'Poppy has coffee,' I remembered. 'In his truck.'
'Right!' Jay shouted.
A moment later he had scrambled up and down the slope and was pouring coffee from Poppy's large Thermos onto Herschel's hand. Steam lifted through the glare of the flashlight. 'This is going to work,' he said, shaking the gearshift violently. He poured more coffee out. 'It's- there.'
Jay moved the shifter to the side and now the hand stuck straight into space. 'Let's see if we can get this started.'
There wasn't much room between Herschel's frozen gut and the steering wheel. Jay wriggled into a crouched, half-standing position, his rear against the dead man's groin. 'Herschel, man, I'm sorry about this,' he muttered. ' 'Course if you weren't so fat…' He turned the key. Nothing happened. He tried again. I heard a faint clicking.
Jay climbed down from the cab and lifted the toolbox lid incorporated into the bulldozer's bottom step. 'Probably left the lights on. Battery's almost drained.' He pulled out what looked like a can of spray paint, leaned up onto the engine hood, and sprayed into the chimney-shaped metallic funnel protruding from it. 'Ether,' he said. 'Right on the starter. Get a hell of a spark.'
Jay tossed the can back into the toolbox, then fished inside and pulled out another, smaller can, and staggered through the soft sand around the front of the bulldozer, keeping his hand on the toothed top edge of the huge bucket. Despite his youth and clear physical vitality, he seemed to be laboring. He unscrewed the fuel cap that protruded through the steps on the other side of the cab and upended the can against it, banging it. Then he fingered out a glob of something that looked like blue butter and wiped it into the fuel pipe.
'What's that?' I called.
'Gel.' He wiped more of it into the pipe. 'Warms diesel fuel.'
He threw the can away into the gloom and climbed atop the cab. The controls for the backhoe and the hydraulic pads sat at the rear, downhill side of the cab, and the controls for the bucket and for the bulldozer itself on the uphill side.
'Get me a stick,' Jay hollered. 'With a Y on the end.'
My feet were cold and I had sand in my shoes but I looked around and saw a dead tree a few yards off. I broke off a three-foot branch and lurched back to Jay. He took the stick from me. 'Usually you can swing around in the seat here.'
This time he sat down on Herschel's lap. Instinctively I looked at the man's face to see what it felt like to have Jay sitting on him. But his stony mask didn't change, of course. Jay turned the key. The engine clicked, turned over, and caught. The bulldozer vibrated loudly. I felt a sort of worried joy. Sand started trickling from behind the dozer. Jay twisted backward and pushed at the hand controls with the stick. One of the huge hydraulic pads descended slowly, settling into the sand. Jay switched off the engine.
We climbed up the slope. Poppy had returned with the cable and was sitting in the large truck. A work glove was taped to its steering wheel like a disembodied hand, and I assumed that Poppy slipped his ruined fingers into it for a better grip. He hopped down to the ground and he and Jay pinned both ends of the thick cable to a tow ring on the rear of the truck. They dragged the loop end of the cable down to the bulldozer, where Jay attached it to a ring
