I took hold of the edge of the grave with both hands, then the flashlight dropped, and I heard the whistling of the shovel being swung. I threw my hands up in a wide X pattern and twisted my head to the side as the shovel came down and hit my wrists and pain exploded in me, but I had twisted my body so that it carried the power of the blow to the side, and with a quick turn of my arms, I wrenched the shovel free, dropped it, seized the sides of the grave, pulled myself up into a crouch.
The flashlight still lay on the ground, and there was a dark shape behind it, and I dove for it, was rewarded by my arms encircling Tim's neck.
I dropped my grasp from his neck to his sides, pinned his arms against him just as he reached into his coat pockets to get hold of the guns. I used my right knee to strike him in the side of the leg, on the pressure point there. He sagged and I butted him in the face, and he went down. I was all over him then, but the water flowing under us made us slide and we went backwards into the grave. We hit the coffin and the sides blew out, and the bodies beneath us leaped up. I felt a bony arm clasp my face, blocking my vision, filling my head with the stink of rotting meat. I don't know if it was me or Tim that screamed, but one of us did.
The rest of the coffin came apart beneath us, and we rolled in a wreck of bones and flesh. I came up on top, driving straight punches into Tim's face, and they were good punches, but I'd forgotten about the shovel I'd left in the grave, and Tim got hold of it, and though he didn't have room to swing it, he popped it forward, banging me between the eyes with the handle, then he was on top of me, trying to strangle me. I thrashed amidst the wreckage of Soothe and Florida, brought the sides of my hands down hard behind his elbows, pushed in. He couldn't hold the choke. I was gaining control. In another second I was going to turn him over and be on top, and he knew it. He shoved to his feet, leaped for the edge of the grave.
I managed to grab his leg. He kicked back reflexively. It was a lucky shot to the jaw. In the instant I was dealing with the pain he got out of the grave. I got it together pretty quick, went after him, stumbling over the flashlight as I went. The light spun toward him, showed him in its glow, then rolled away, but not before I saw he had pulled the automatic from his coat pocket.
Then there was a sound, like a stick snapping, and Tim did a little trick with his legs, as if he were trying to bury his heels in the earth, then he sagged and fell on his side, did a few kicks that carried him around in a semicircle, then he stopped moving. I could hear his breathing. It was hard and heavy.
'Hap. You okay?'
Leonard grew out of the darkness, limped toward me. He was holding his pistol. I answered, 'Just barely.'
'I got to thinking about things,' Leonard said. 'He went from not wanting to cooperate to being awfully anxious to cooperate. He wanted me to come even when you didn't. I got to wondering why he was so eager to get us down here. I'd have been here sooner, but the leg isn't working so well.'
'I'm just glad you came . . . shit!' I glanced where Tim had been lying. He was no longer there.
Leonard wheeled with the gun and I got hold of the flashlight. I shined it about the graveyard. Tim, walking as if he were imitating the scarecrow in the Oz movie, was making bad time toward the far side of the graveyard, toward the woods. He got to the barbed wire fence, fell against it and stuck there, his upper body bending over it, as if he were trying to fold in half. Then I heard a loud cracking, a roar, like the sound of a freight train magnified by ten. In the glow of the flashlight I saw a tall silver mass of flying needles coming out of the forest. Pines snapped and crackled into toothpicks. Great oaks screamed as they were pulled from the ground.
The mass of silver needles was a great wall of water. Before I could say, 'I'll be a sonofabitch,' the wall came down on us like a thousand pianos falling, and the great gray mountain of wetness pushed Leonard and me together and carried us away.
We held to each other and the water carried us high up, then under, and I couldn't breathe, and it was the marsh all over again, only worse, because the power of the water was so awesome there was no fighting back, no swimming. It churned us up and carried us through the heights of trees. We clung to each other and breathed again. Then it was down once more into choking darkness and confusion. A moment later, we were on top of the water again, coughing, and the next thing I knew I was hung in a tree, my body slamming against the tree trunk. There was a great weight tearing at my right shoulder, and I realized it was because I was holding on to Leonard and the water was jerking at him and trying to take him and my shoulder with it.
'Let go, Hap, you stubborn sonofabitch!'
I could see Leonard's shape now, at the end of my arm, and the bastard let go of my hand, but I held his wrist and gritted my teeth. It was like the marsh, and I hadn't let go and we had made it, and I wouldn't let go this time.
'Let go!' Leonard said, 'or it'll take us both!'
'Then it will,' I said.
I heard Leonard laugh. A choked water laugh. A crazy laugh. Then he snapped his wrist loose of my fingers and the dark churning water pulled him from me, washed him away.
Chapter 30
A few hours before morning a hot gold corkscrew of lightning hit the top of a pine across the way and knocked it in half and caught it on fire. The rain sizzled in the flames and the tree burned out quickly and the fiery limbs that fell off of it were consumed by the flooding waters.
Then the rain stopped and the clouds split open like cotton candy being torn by greedy fingers and the wind blew their remnants away. A great gold moon rose high up and was visible through the summit of the trees—a pocked Happy Face against black velvet. I looked at the stars and thought first of my father, pointing out the shapes in the heavens, then of Florida and how we had once made love in her car and lay on her car hood afterwards looking at the stars, feeling as if they were near and belonged to us.
In time the moonlight and starlight brightened even more and I spied a strange configuration in a massive oak, as if nature had made an image of the crucified Christ out of debris and put heaven's spotlights on it. I watched it for a long time, uneasy with it, then nodded some, thinking of Leonard.
Dawn came rosy, as if it had never rained, and the moon was dissolved by sunlight and the sun itself was a bleeding red boil that did little to warm the chilled air. The water below me had dropped ten feet, but it was still a rush of mud and wreckage. A bloated cow was wedged between a pine and a sweet gum, and with the water no longer rushing, I could hear flies working the carcass, getting their breakfast. I ached all over. I was freezing. My coat and clothes crinkled and popped with ice when I moved. Ice fell out of my hair.
