They stood alone in the escaping light, blinking, massaging their wrists, painfully shuffling their feet to get the circulation going. Trin’s hands shook as he tore open the cigarettes. He held the pack to Broker, who craved one. Broker curled his lip. With trembling fingers Trin manipulated the matches and lit a Gauloise. His dark eyes burned with a disturbing fix in the twilight. He stooped, picked up the shovels and handed one to Broker, then to Nina.
“I told them it might be set with explosives,” he said under his breath.
“Fuck you,” said Broker.
“If we dig and load it and last till dawn, we live,” said Trin. “It’s that simple.”
“Cyrus tell you that.” Broker spat contemptuously.
“
“You wanted it for yourself,” Broker accused. “You were going to kill us all-Cyrus, her, me. Then you could take the boat. But Cyrus foxed you.”
Nina grimaced. Her eyes tightened. Broker wanted to touch her face. He’d never see her again in the light.
Not much light left.
“Nobody begs,” she said in a barren implacable voice. She set her mouth. Okay, she had her epitaph to go out on. But it sounded like fatalism. Surrender. Broker wondered what she was thinking right now, standing nine or ten feet over her father’s bones. She drove her shovel into the sand. Maybe she had to see if they were really there.
Even if it meant digging her own grave.
Broker set his thresholds. He would not talk to Trin. He would not beg. His life was a few tons of sand running through his fingers. He wished he had a cigarette. Trin had the cigarettes and matches in his pocket.
There was pain and fear and fatigue. There was no adrenaline to run with it. Broker’s muscles balked, cold taffy. He discovered that he wanted to dig to warm his blood.
To feel alive.
He had the shovel. He could use it as a weapon if Bevode got close enough. At the right time. Swing it like an ax. Take his fuckin’ head off.
They worked side by side, each in their private bargaining with what comes next. Trin giggled. “This is the second time I’ve dug up this damn hole.”
Broker felt Nina’s irritation at Trin spike the night.
And now, in total darkness, there were practical demands. “We need some light,” yelled Broker. Blue Shirt came over with two battery bar lights. Broker hacked shelves in the sand. The widening pit filled with soft illumination. They could see each other’s faces. Seeing the mad expression on Trin’s dripping face, it was a mixed blessing.
He had never looked so foreign. Digging. He was spawned from a tribe of resolute diggers. In his chromosomes, Broker supposed, thousands of years of piling up the dikes to control the water to grow the rice to keep the circle of the seasons turning. One of the great warrior-digger races of history. They dug at Dien Bien Phu, at Cu Chi, at Khe Sanh…
Were Ray’s bones really down there? All the graves in this damn country. You’d hit skeletons anywhere you dug. Bone City. Stacked up for millennia and cross-fertilizing a culture of ancestor worship and reincarnation and pretty soon there’d be no room left.
Nothing but graves.
Nice thing about a big young country. You could travel for days and never see a grave…
Fuck this. Broker threw down his shovel, pushed Trin aside, and grabbed at the cigarettes in his chest pocket. He was so tense he bit right through the first one and had to light another. With a loony smile, Trin advised him, “Relax.”
They worked. Drank water. And worked some more. Trin kept widening the hole and at first Broker fought a flush of petty resentment. Making more work. But a bigger hole meant more time. Time was what they had. They emptied it, shovel by shovel, out of the hourglass of their lives.
Deep in his own bones he began to hear the whispers of childhood.
He looked up. Great damn stars. He didn’t recognize any of them. His torn tennis shoe slipped off the shovel and he almost fell. Stumble-footed. He kicked at the empty plastic bottles. They bumped and staggered like sleepwalkers.
Too done in to do the work. Out of time.
Trin read their fatigue. “We must finish what we started,” he panted. Nina fell to her knees and yanked at her T-shirt. Sodden with sweat and wet sand, it interfered with her movement. She tore at the cloth, ripping a two-foot piece above the hem. Freer in the abbreviated shirt she wiped her face with the ripped cloth. Trin extended his hand for the rag. She threw it at him. He wiped sweat from his face and then handed it to Broker. “We work slow and steady,” Trin insisted.
Nina glared at Trin. A copper wraith, her bare stomach was coated with a sugar of sand and sweat. She sucked in a harsh breath and spat, “How could you deal with them?”
Trin’s smile was pure gook insane. “If we finish the work we live. That’s the deal. Now don’t quit on me!” he snarled at her.
“Fuck you,” she hissed and drove her shovel into the sand. Trin smiled. A Vietnamese smile. Two thousand years old. Broker tried to decipher the expression on the short man’s square face. He was keeping them going.
And so they dug with a new bizarre agenda within the grim prospect that waited. They would not fall down on the job. A credo Broker was raised with. He was a machine stuffed full of bullets. The bullets popped out as sweat.
Six feet into the pit. Even with the already loosened sand from their previous labors, Broker’s arms burned with every lift of the shovel. Each time it became harder to clear the lip of the hole. Nina’s breath was a dry rattle.
Scoop, swing, toss.
Trin’s shovel stabbed into wood with a hollow thunk. Again.
Loose ingots appeared haphazardly, as brilliant in the electric light as details from a Van Gogh. Must have spilled them in their haste their first time in this goddamn hole. Nina cradled one of them in her hands like a small flat loaf of bread. She put the bar down and touched the moldy webbing of the cargo sling that twisted around the pallet. The sling had not been treated with preservative and it crumbled in her hand.
One by one Broker heaved the gold ingots up into the night, twenty, thirty of them.
A flurry of flashlight beams played above the pit. LaPorte and his crew still stayed back, wary of their imagined booby trap. But they were no longer silent. The night animated with their excited voices.
“We’ve hit the pallet. We’re taking a break,” Broker yelled, throwing down his shovel and collapsing in the sand.
“That’s fair. We’re sending over some food.” LaPorte’s voice sounded in the night. His reasonable, collector’s voice. Trin slowly climbed to get it.
He scrambled back down into the pit with a handful of candy bars, energy bars, some donuts, and more water bottles. They squatted like cave dwellers, tearing at the cellophane wrappers with hooked grave-digger fingers. Broker chewed sand along with mouthfuls of an energy bar. Trin bent over a wrapper near one of the lights: brain-dead, he read the list of ingredients.
Nina averted her eyes from this weird normal moment and chewed methodically. Sand cascaded into the pit. Looking up, they saw Bevode’s shadow loom over them, outlined against the stars, catching enough spill from the lanterns to define the leer on his face.
In leisurely stages, Bevode unzipped his fly and eased out his dick. For a long time he massaged himself pleasurably and then he let a thick stream of urine splatter down. The piss steadied in one spot and splashed on the wooden lid of one of the ammo boxes.
“Break’s over,” said Bevode. He zipped his pants and slowly uncoiled his bullwhip.
