“Gravity,” Lyon said, like maybe he was trying to convince himself.
The shack smelled of moistness and age, black earth and mildewed leaves. It was a heavy, vaporous odor that got thicker by the moment. Both men just looked at each other, then away, their faces gaunt and chiseled by stress, their eyes jutting from their skulls, glassy and unblinking.
Then Specks was back.
He handed out crowbars and hammers from his sack of tools, left the shovels leaning up in the corner. By the shifting lantern light, they yanked up the rotting planks one by one until the clotted black earth below was revealed and a fetid, loamy stink filled the shack.
“Okay, girls,” Specks said, stripping down to his undershirt-a tank top, of course, to show off all his gleaming muscles-and grinning like a skull in a basket. “You know what happens now.”
But Lyon shook his head. “I just don’t know if I can.”
“Oh, you will,” Specks told him. “By God, you will. We’re in this together and together we’ll do what has to be done.”
Specks told them to start digging while he unwrapped their package. He used a knife, cutting the ropes free from the sackcloth, exposing Pauly Zaber’s huge, naked corpse like a grim surprise under a Christmas tree. Zaber had gone white as lace, distended and obese, a thickset rage of chins and pendulous tits, an immense belly like some fleshy beach ball inflated to the point of bursting. And everywhere, just bleached and rolling. The only color on him was the tattoo of an eagle on his chest…and that looked like something hit by a truck now, a mangled crow at best. The artwork had been shattered by blackened bullet holes, streaks of gore that oozed and dried.
He hadn’t bled very much and Specks was quick to point out that was because one of the bullets had shattered his heart. When it stopped pumping, he said, Zaber stopped bleeding.
Weams said, “Look…look at his face…”
It was a white, greasy mass, thick-lipped, one eye open and staring, the other retreating into a pouch of fat. Maybe it was rigor mortis or something, but his mouth was drawn into a lurid, toothy grin. There was something vile and perverse about that.
Specks had a hacksaw out. “Who wants to go first?”
Lyon made a whimpering sound and almost lost his lunch when Specks laid the teeth of the saw against Zaber’s pudgy gullet and began to draw it back and forth, back and forth. Weams had to take him outside. And when they were both there, the night closing in and the rain on their faces, they both got sick, the nausea boiling up and out of them in tangled, gagging tides. But it was more than just what Specks was doing in there, but the sound of it. That shearing, meaty sound like a crosscut saw ripping into a ball of suet. And when Specks struck bone… Jesus.
Weams and Lyon had a smoke out there, pulled from Specks’ flask of whiskey, and wondered to high heaven how they would ever purge this night from their minds. When they went back in, Zaber’s legs and head were missing. Specks had cut them off and bagged them in green Hefty garbage bags. There was blood soaking into the soil, blood smeared right up to Specks’ elbows.
Weams looked down on that legless, headless torso and felt a clawing madness in the back of his skull. Zaber was now an immense, fish-white blobby thing with arms still in place, head sheared to a stump, legs gone where they entered the hip. He could see the grizzled meat in there, marbled and red like fresh beef, the sawed knobs of bone trailing streamers of white ligament.
It was too much, just too much.
“Lyon,” Specks said, enjoying himself, “take off his arms. Me and Weams will go dump this trash in the river.”
Lyon was shaking. “No, no, no…Jesus, you can’t…you can’t leave me alone with that thing…”
Specks started laughing. “All right, Weams you stay. You each do an arm. Start cutting in the armpit, it’s soft there. I’ll take this stuff down to the river, fill the bags with rocks and sink them. By the time the bags rot through, won’t be enough left to float.”
“C’mon, Specks,” Weams said. “Let’s just dump him in the hole as is.”
“No. Arms are hooked to hands and hands to fingers. Fingers have fingerprints. If anybody finds the torso, I don’t want them matching fingerprints to it. And Zaber has a record. He did time. So cut him up.”
He told them to put the torso in the big hole they’d dug and to bag the arms, bury them off in the woods. Before he left, he said, “And don’t let me down, boys.”
He tossed Zaber’s legs over his left shoulder and even bagged in that green plastic, they could see that the undersides of his knees were resting atop Specks’ shoulders.
“Man,” he said. “These legs gotta weight eighty a piece.”
He picked up the bag with the head in it and off he went.
Which left Weams and Lyon alone with the torso, watching it, not wanting to look, but unable to stop. There was a grim magnetism to the thing. So they watched and waited-maybe for it to move.
“I don’t like this,” Lyon said. “I don’t like any of it.”
“It doesn’t seem to bother Specks,” Weams said.
“That’s because he’s a fucking animal.” Lyon went to the door, peered out, then closed it again, making sure Specks wasn’t out there eavesdropping. “I mean, c’mon, whose idea was it to kill fucking Pauly?”
“Specks’. But we went along with it.”
“Sure we did. And whose idea was it to slice the body up? Specks’. He’s too easy with all this, man. He’s done this shit before.”
Weams had been thinking that, too. Specks did the shooting. He’d known exactly how to bag up the remains and he seemed to know exactly how to cut them up. “Specks has been around. He’s a bad boy. But he got us out of some ugly shit with Zaber. I mean, shit, I was into the guy for almost twenty G’s.”
Lyon sighed. “Me, too. But still…we should have thought about this. Killing a guy…Christ, that makes us no better than Specks. He’s done time before, but we haven’t. I don’t think I could take it.”
Weams didn’t say so, but standing there with that massive legless, headless corpse spread at their feet, he was thinking that prison was the least of their worries.
“Okay, we’re part of this now. No going back. But I’m not going any farther,” Lyon announced. “I won’t butcher a…a corpse.”
“Me either,” Weams sighed.
They pushed it into the hole with their boots and it landed with a flopping, rubbery sound that made them both gasp. Then they buried it, smoothed out the soil. They dug a dummy hole out in the woods, buried it back up. It would convince Specks…unless he wanted to paw around in there.
When he returned, they were fitting the floorboards back in place, nailing them tight.
“How was it, girls?” he asked, rain dripping from his hair. “Messy?”
“Let’s not talk about it, okay?” Weams said.
“Sure, sure, whatever you say. The arms?”
“Out in the woods,” Lyon said.
Specks seemed satisfied. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s the last we’ll see of Pauly Zaber.”
But Weams had to wonder.
*
Later, the night thick as soup beyond the windows of the old house, Weams was watching Lila mix him a vodka martini. Just watching her, you knew she had been a bartender once. Too smooth, too easy with it.
Just like Specks with a dead body.
Lila was all dolled-up in a short skirt and sequined top, a gold chain teasing her ample cleavage. That was Lila: all dressed-up and nowhere to go. And she knew damn well why there was nowhere to go: no money, no nothing. Just that old creaking house and Weams, her husband.
Lila handed him his drink. “Let me guess,” she said, her eyes frigid and brittle like black ice, “you were out with Lyon and Specks? Stop me here if I’m wrong. Out playing the ponies, working the slots, dropping a few hands of blackjack. Am I close on this?”
Weams sipped his drink, heard his wife, but only saw a blubbery white thing falling into a grave. “I guess. Maybe…what did you say?”
“How much this time?”
“How much what?”
