“Whoever this Waylon character is, I don’t want to be here when he gets back.” He drops the gun on the pillow, where it lands with a metallic thud.
John looks at the pillow, bulky and misshapen, thinking he’s had enough surprises for one day and he ought to just leave, but like a man falling downstairs who can’t stop his own descent, he reaches down and with his knuckles lightly taps it. The pillow is hard. John pushes it. It barely moves. He grabs the closed end of the pillowcase and vigorously pulls it until he’s holding in his hands just the case and gazing down at a dented, dirt-stained, large metal container. Feeling like a tumbleweed caught in a tornado whose eye is his own tragic act, John bends down next to the container. Fumbling with trembling hands to open the rusted latch, he hears a voice in his head say every life has a defining moment; here comes your second. He opens the case, looks inside, and sees piles and piles of haphazardly stacked bills in various denominations.
In John’s head a flat, practical voice says he ought to drag the girl away from the quarry, maybe to Quentin’s swamp, where even hunters don’t venture, weigh her down with stones, then drop her in a deep bog. He can’t do it, though. He can’t even bring himself to dig a hole and put her in it. The thought of covering her with dirt reinforces in his mind a hundredfold his awful act. Burial has a ring of finality to it he can’t yet bear.
This time carrying in one hand the flashlight and in the other the pick poised in front of him like a spear, he duck-walks into the cave, the sleeping bag draped over his shoulders, listening for telltale rattles, knowing that where one snake lives, so may others. Past the entrance, he is able to three-quarters stand, the jagged granite ceiling acting as a painful reminder not to lift his head too high. The silence starts an ominous hum in his ears. Nervously he thinks of the precariousness of his position, imagining himself an egg beneath an elephant’s ass.
Crouched near the center of the cave, he moves the light in a slow circle around the oblong interior of dark red and slate-gray rock, two sides of which ooze a moldy dampness. The back wall is dry; in the floor in front of it, John sees a rectangular hole surrounded by freshly dug dirt, gravel, and a long, flat rock. One side of the rock is earth-stained, as if it has recently been removed from the hole, which looks to be slightly bigger than the metal box full of money in the lean-to. A nervous twitch starts in the muscles of John’s injured shoulder. He tries to fathom the man who had crawled into a snake-filled cave with a pick, shovel, and Luger to unearth a box of money, and how the money had come to be there in the first place. A rattle sounds to his right.
He flashes the light that way and sees, three feet from him, two eyes like hot coals inches from the ground, and behind them, above a coiled, thick body, a tail rapidly vibrating its cacophonous clatter. He could back out of the cave. The rattler wouldn’t bother him. But he thinks of the girl, trapped there with it, and his pent-up emotions from the previous hours coalesce in blind rage.
Keeping the snake lit, he moves the pick in a silent arc through the dark air in front of him, stopping it a foot above, and a few inches behind, the diamond-shaped skull, before swiftly bringing it down lengthwise. He slams one foot on the pick, pinning the reptile to the floor, then lifts and forces down hard the heel of the other on the snake’s head and grinds until he hears a dull pop. The rattler lies still. After a minute, John picks it up by its tail. He holds it that way while shining the light around the rest of the interior, searching for more snakes and not finding any. He exits the cave, holds the rattler out like a trophy toward the dead girl, hollers, “That there’s the last of ’em,” and tosses its body next to the first one.
Then he grabs the cadaver by the shoulders and drags it head-first into the cave. After laying the sleeping bag along the driest wall, he places the body on it, folds its hands beneath one side of its face, and gently tucks its knees in at the waist. For a minute or so, he crouches there, studying the girl’s body in the flashlight’s beam, seeing on her cherubic face a child’s peeved, forlorn expression. Then he runs back across the quarry and retrieves her satchel with its contents, and the stuffed lion. He lays the satchel near her feet and the lion on the sleeping bag next to her. Still not satisfied, he unzips the bag, then spends several minutes wrestling the cadaver and the lion into it, so that, when he’s done, just their two heads stick out. Even now, he has trouble leaving the girl. On his knees over her, he prays:
“As you seen, God, her dyin’ was an accident. Maybe I shot too quick and now I gotta live with it. I ain’t figured it all out yet. Even ’bout the money, which I could dearly use. Anyway, here she is for you to watch over. Thank you. Amen.”
He emerges from the cave into the midday sun covered with the girl’s blood and feeling like some misunderstood, tragic figure—a latter-day Frankenstein—who’s rapidly evolving into the monster he’s widely believed to be. The buzzards are on the deer carcass again and he chases them off, screaming maniacally, then runs straight from there to the lean-to, where he enters, grabs the metal box and the pillowcase, hauls them outside, and transfers the money from the former to the latter, tying the case, when he’s finished, with a granny knot.
He looks around at the carnage in the field and thinks if he doesn’t clean up the trail of blood and dead bodies even a moron stumbling on the scene could draw a pretty good picture of what’s happened and maybe even who did it. He buries the shot rattlesnake beneath a slag heap, then, not wanting to waste good meat, wraps the other up in a pair of men’s dungarees that were in the lean-to and brings them and the money over next to the dead deer. Knowing he can’t lug back the entire carcass, especially not along with the money and rattler, he decides to make the rest disappear.
He kneels down next to the body, pulls out his hunting knife, and with its serrated edge starts sawing just in front of the buck’s hind legs. The torso is hard-boned, gnarled, and muscular from years of fighting and just living and, for nearly thirty minutes, resists John’s efforts to sever it. Afterwards he cuts out the deer’s tongue and wraps it with the snake in the dungarees.
When he’s finished, his muscles are burning; he’s sweat-soaked and drenched with gore from a half-dozen bodies; his mouth is parched; and he’s weak from hunger and adrenaline overdose. He glances at his watch. Nearly three o’clock. He worries that maybe Waylon will come back early—though if he comes in a vehicle, as he will almost surely have to, it will be a four-wheel drive that John will hear winding up the steep, potholed road a good ten minutes before it arrives, but even that will be cutting it close. He’s concerned, too, about somebody else, a hiker maybe, wandering into the quarry, though the likelihood of it seems slim. Mostly, he just wants to be gone.
He hoists the buck’s head and upper torso onto his shoulders, walks over to the pond of algae-black water, drops the three-quarters carcass onto the bank, and stuffs it with several pounds of stone. Following the task he is so hot and thirsty that he takes off his pants and shoes, walks into the tepid water, and laps at it. After taking two steps, he drops in over his head. He stays beneath the surface, scrubbing himself, seeing only a few suspended weeds inches in front of his face, until his lungs threaten to burst. He emerges, screaming out the air still in his chest, sucks in some more, then goes down again. He goes down and comes up half a dozen times, before swimming over to the water’s edge to retrieve the rock-laden torso. He hauls the body into the pond with him, then sinks with it to the bottom. When he’s satisfied it will stay there, he swims to the top, climbs from the water, dries himself, and dresses.
Using the T-shirt he found in the lean-to and a fallen spruce branch, he spends several minutes cleaning up, then smoothing over the grass around and beneath the dead deer, then the path made by the human cadaver from the briars to the cave. When he looks at the field afterwards, he has to remind himself that the girl or the deer ever existed.
With the sleeping-bag cover he ties the shotgun around his waist; then he drapes over his shoulders the buck’s hindquarters and the snake-and-tongue-filled dungarees, whose combined weight is maybe sixty pounds. He carries the money by his side, on the long walk home alternating the heavy pillowcase between his left and right hand every few minutes.
He hangs the deer’s hindquarters and the rattlesnake from the rafters in the woodshed, then, carrying the money sack and a length of bailing twine, slithers on his stomach into the crawl space beneath the shed and lashes the pillowcase to the top of one of the heavy foundation beams.
Too exhausted to move afterwards, he lies there, imagining the girl doing likewise in her dank tomb, and wondering if at the quarry he left unattended some minor detail that, like a loose thread in a suit, could lead to a mass unraveling. The wondering, he knows, will end only with his surrender, capture, or death, which leads to his feeling that events are being orchestrated by some higher force and that, like a caged rat, he is the subject of some bizarre experiment.
