sand.
Taggart got up from where he had been sitting. His face betrayed no shock. “What do we do with him?” he said, speaking of Rudy.
“Bury him,” Macy said. “You and Pete and Reavis. Bury him. Then you get out too.” Macy shoved by us and walked off the dock, his eyes watery from grief that may or may not have had something to do with Rudy.
He hurried up the beach and terrace with thick-bodied haste. The little group of men and women on the patio scattered to let him through. He gestured violently at them. From far away, almost as if it came from a place behind the sun, I heard Aimee’s high cat wail.
Reavis brought an old tarpaulin and two shovels from the garage, dumped them on the dock. There was a faint tremor in his lips as he looked at Rudy. The body didn’t bother him. He had seen bodies before. But he had always left them for someone else to bury.
Taggart and I folded the tarp once, laid it flat beside the corpse, rolled him onto it. We carried Rudy in the sling, Taggart going first, staggering a little in the sand. Reavis followed with the shovels. Occasionally they clanked together. The sun was gone and the sky was graying.
In the cove where I had seen Diane and Taggart two nights before, we put the tarp down and began to dig a dozen feet above high-tide line, at the base of a rocky spine of land. There was some wind now and fronds shook in the trees with a dry rustle. Nobody said anything. The only other sound was the chuff of shovels as we dug into loose sandy ground.
When we had a rough rectangular hole about four feet deep we stopped. Any deeper and it might begin to fill with water. We turned to the lumpy tarp and swung it into the new grave. I made sure the covering was tucked around Rudy’s remains. It seemed a small courtesy. Taggart leaned on his shovel and watched with flinty narrowed eyes. Reavis ran a hand through his hair and seemed anxious to leave.
“It don’t make any difference to him whether he’s covered or not,” Taggart said. “Let’s shovel him under and get out of here.”
“Ain’t we goin’ to say anything?” Reavis said.
Taggart turned his head. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. You usually say something when you bury somebody. I don’t know what you say. I ain’t no preacher.”
Taggart’s lips crooked. “He ain’t no preacher,” he said to me in a dry humorless voice. “You got any words that might save his soul?”
“If he ever had one,” I said, “I suppose he used it as a down payment on a bottle of whisky a long time ago.”
Taggart looked again at Reavis. “You got anything to say, go ahead.”
“I ain’t got nothin’ to say,” Reavis mumbled, as if he were embarrassed for having brought it up.
Taggart straightened. “Well, I have,” he said. He took up a shovel of dirt, rained it onto the canvas with a turn of his wrist. “So long, Rudy. You must have known it would happen to you some day.” He turned and flipped the shovel at Reavis. “You help Mallory cover him up. I’m goin’ back to the house.”
“You leavin’ right away?” Reavis said.
“No. Not right away. I’ll hang around a while.”
“Soon’s I get packed I’m goin’,” Reavis said. “There’s plenty of cars.”
“Don’t take the blue one parked by the gatehouse,” Taggart said as he walked up the slight slope. “That’s mine.” I watched him stride through the trees and disappear over the rise toward the house.
Reavis stepped forward with his shovel, dug it almost viciously into the pile of dirt. We worked hard for another five minutes, shoveling and scraping the fill over Rudy’s body, making a long mound. When we were through we looked at each other, then turned and walked away from the grave site.
“I’m glad I’m gettin’ out of here,” Reavis said. He looked sideways at me. “Somebody had to wire that boat,” he said, as if he had received a sudden vision.
“I know it.”
“I don’t want to hang around where I could maybe get it by accident,” he said.
When we reached the house Reavis walked on down to the gatehouse to pack. I saw Stan’s boys loading the trunk of his car with large boxes that might have held the files from the room in the garage. Maxine was dressed in a creamy-brown suit and his hair was combed neatly. He stood by the car with a snappy smile, supervising the loading process. When the trunk lid was closed he put out a hand to the door, glanced at the house. In another month he would probably have that, too. Gerry sat in the front seat and kept looking at him as if she were impatient to get rolling.
I couldn’t let Stan go without saying goodbye. I walked toward the low black Lincoln and called to him. His boys had wedged themselves into the back seat and Stan had the door on his side open. He turned to me and the smile changed a little bit and became a confident smirk.
“I guess you heard,” he said. “I’ve taken over now.”
“Congratulations,” I said. Gerry was staring at me from inside the car and I waved casually to her. “How’s the Count?” I asked her. She averted her face carefully.
I put out a hand to Maxine. He reached for it, but I slid the hand past his, tapped him in the stomach. He faded back against the car, bending a little, a warning of pain in his face. His poise cracked some.
“Have you asked the doctor how much longer you’re going to last?” I asked him.
He glared at me.
“Or are you afraid to?” I said.
“Get away from me,” he said venomously.
I gave him a big fresh warm smile. “All right, Stan,” I said. “But you better watch yourself from now on. You’re in big business now. You know how it is. There’s always some little guy who thinks he might like the fit of your shoes.”
He gulped and tomato-color brightened his cheeks. He took a step toward me, then turned and jumped into the car, slammed the door. It shut with the finality of a lowered coffin lid. I thought about Rudy and Stan. Stan would have something a little more fancy than a paint-spattered tarp. He would roll slowly on hushed black tires to a place of gently waved lawn. But at the end of the journey there would be just another hole, as Rudy got — as everybody got. No matter how far it was to the graveyard, everybody got the same once the trip was over.
The wheels grabbed and screeched as Stan gave it too much gas. Then the Lincoln moved forward smoothly, away from the house.
Behind me another motor started. I looked at the car as it went by. Charley Rinke drove slowly after Stan, slowly enough so that I could see the touch of smile at a corner of his mouth, the satisfied tilt of his head. I had an idea that Rinke had made an eleventh-hour connection and his life wouldn’t be altered too much because of Macy’s departure. His car followed Maxine’s obediently through the gate.
Mrs. Rinke sat beside her husband. I wasn’t able to see her face. She had her hands over it, tightly, as if she planned to keep them there for a long time, as if she were afraid to peer out at the world and the nightmare shapes that had sprung up in it.
The wind was stiffening now, coming around the north corner of the island and frothing the surface of the bay. There was nothing soft and gentle about the wind. It matched the color of the sky, and it was teething. I felt it harsh against my face.
Reavis had come out of the gatehouse with a suitcase. There were two cars parked off the road just outside the gate and he walked toward one of them, after closing the gate from force of habit. No need to shut the gate any more. Nobody would want in now. Turn off the juice in the fence. In a week it would be overgrown with creeping things.
I turned and walked toward the house. In my room I put together my few things and stored them in a suitcase one of the houseboys had dug out of a closet. They were getting ready to leave, too. Macy had paid them off. They seemed happy to be leaving, preparing for the long march to the highway where they would catch a
