wincing and moaning too awful much.
Bob looked over at Sam’s body in the grass and made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Hell of a thing, ain’t it Jack? Life’s hard, then you die, then you shit yourself. There’s just no dignity in dying, no matter how you look at it…”
“Might not be any dignity,” I said. “But at least you don’t have to get phone calls from aluminum siding salesmen anymore.”
“Got news for you,” Bob said. “We won’t be getting those anyway, and we’re alive.”
“It’s because we don’t have a phone,” I said. “If we come across a phone, you can bet we’ll be hearing from them.”
Bob called to Crier. “You’re gonna bury the old fart, ain’t you?”
Crier came around from the back of the camper. He was a sight. He was scrawny as a month-old corpse, but didn’t have as nice a complexion. He still had his clothes and shoes, but they seemed to be held together by little more than body odor and hope. His hair was long and shaggy and thinning. His beard looked like a nest. He had the shit-stained blanket in his hand, and he gracelessly tossed it into the grass, an act that gave me some hope. Humanity was once again on the roll.
“You’re kind of pushy, Bob,” Crier said.
“I ain’t saying you have to bury him-”
“That’s big of you.”
“-I’m suggesting it. If I had two good hands and two good feet, I might do it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let your conscience be your guide.”
Crier said something under his breath, then went to the back of the truck and came out with a tire tool.
“Hey, forget it,” Bob said.
Crier used the tool to pop the hubcap off the rear right tire. He took the cap out to the grass and tossed it down next to Sam. He began pulling the grass and cussing while he did it. It was pretty interesting to watch. Once in a while he’d toss a wad of grass, dirty roots still intact, toward Bob, and it would land near his sore feet or slam into the truck beside him. Bob started moving his head like a nervous anaconda.
Actually, I think Crier could have hit him if he’d wanted to. It wasn’t that far a shot. Instead, he was trying to make Bob nervous, which I could kind of understand. Bob didn’t always bring out the best in a person.
As for me, I tried to sit casual with my punctured biscuit hooks in my lap, looking at the crusty wounds on the backs of my hands where the nails had come out and gone into the wood of my cross.
When Crier had a good patch of grass pulled, he took the hubcap and used it to dig with and his mouth to cuss with. He worked the dirt between his legs like a dog burying a bone.
It was almost solid dark when he finished the grave. It wasn’t much, more of a shallow trench, really. The moon came up in the north, right where the sun had gone down, the place I had decided to call west before, and I had a vision of my real or imagined multiple-eyed, many-tentacled, bladder-shaped aliens pulling levers and pushing buttons and causing gears to creak and crank and start the final descent of the sun and the rise of the moon, which spilled its light into Sam’s final resting place like thin cream.
Crier hooked his hands under Sam’s chin and pulled him over to the trench. Sam’s body rustled through the grass like a snake. Crier rolled him into the hole face first. Sam’s legs stuck out at one end, and his left arm flopped from the grave and lay in a manner that suggested he was about to push up and get out of that hole as soon as he gathered his strength.
“You’re gonna have to dig some more,” Bob said.
Crier turned slowly and looked at Bob. The moonlight on his face made him look like the man most likely not to give an ax. I hoped he knew that Bob’s sentiments were his own and that I was an independent.
“Maybe not,” Bob said. “Hell, just throw some of that grass over the spots that don’t fit, and fuck it.”
Crier turned back to his work, took hold of Sam’s free arm and brutally twisted it behind Sam’s back like a kid working his end of a wishbone. When the arm cracked loud enough to run a cold tremor up my spine, Crier pushed it down against Sam’s back and put a foot on it and pressed, rocking back and forth on it until it stayed in place. He bent Sam’s overlong legs at the knee, folded them to where the soles of his feet touched the back of his naked thighs, sat on them and bounced hard.
Every time Crier got up to examine his handiwork, the legs would creep up slowly. Finally Crier had had enough. He hopped on them one last time, got up and grabbed the hubcap and started scraping the dirt into the trench and topped it off by tossing loose grass on it.
I guess it was an okay grave, in that it beat lying naked in the grass with a blanket full of your shit nearby, but it was disconcerting to see the top of Sam’s feet and part of his ankles sticking up in the moonlight. If any of Sam’s relatives had been around, I don’t think they’d have liked it.
I suppose it got to Crier too, because he took the hubcap and set it on the soles of Sam’s feet as a kind of marker. And though it wasn’t perfect, it did sort of tidy things up.
Without saying a word, Crier went around on the other side of the truck and got in. I could tell from the way the truck moved he had lain down in the seat.
Bob leaned over to me and said, “Think it would be okay if I asked him to help us into the camper?”
“Maybe not just now,” I said.
From inside the cab we heard Crier say something about “goddamn ingrates,” and Bob and I went very, very quiet.
2
We crawled under the truck and tried to sleep. The grass made it pretty soft, but there were bugs crawling on me and it began to get cold and I was feeling stiff in the hands and feet. One thing I had gotten used to in the drive-in was the constant moderate temperature, and that made the chill seem even chillier.
I got one of the larger bugs off of me and crushed it with my thumb and forefinger, a movement that made my sore hand throb. The bug’s body collapsed like a peanut husk. I tried to look at it closely, but under the truck with only a stray strand of moonlight, there wasn’t much to see. It looked like a crushed bug. Maybe I was expecting little silver wires and a battery the size of a pinhead.
I suppose Crier started feeling guilty, because in the middle of the night he came and woke us up and pulled us out from under the truck and helped us into the camper, which he had, in fact, cleaned out quite well, though the odor of Sam’s last bad meals clung to the interior like moss.
Still, it wasn’t cold in there and the bugs, real or synthetic, weren’t crawling or biting.
After we lay down, and Crier was about to shut the back of the camper, Bob said, “No kiss and story?”
Crier held out his hand, palm up, made a fist and let the cobra rise.
Bob looked at Crier’s stiff middle finger and said, “That’s not nice.”
Crier shut the back of the camper and went around to the front seat and lay down.
Bob managed to get up on his knees and thumped his forehead against the glass that connected the camper to the cab.
Crier sat up and turned to look. I’ve seen more pleasant faces on water moccasins.
“Night-night,” Bob said.
Crier did the trick with his finger again, only with less flourish this time, then lay down out of sight.
Bob wiggled onto his sleeping bag, got on his side and looked at me and said, “You know, I like that guy, I really do.”
That night the dreams came back, the same sort I’d had in the drive-in. They seemed more like visions than dreams, like I had tapped into some consciousness that controlled things. Bob and Crier didn’t have the dreams, so I could only guess that through some quirk of fate, or by alien design, I had been given this gift. Or, I was as crazy as a cat in a dryer.
Hot-wired to aliens or not, the dreams/visions were clear. I could see the aliens in them, their bulbous heads sporting wiggling tendons tipped with eyes, tentacles flashing about, touching gears and punching buttons. Lights
