Lightning crashed around them as they crossed the St. Croix River into Wisconsin and headed up the bluff. When they passed the Hudson turnoff, the thunderhead opened. Rain swept across the road, shaking the car, and Druze was forced to slow as they pushed into the dark countryside. By the time they reached the exit to the lake, they were down to forty miles an hour, the last car in an informal convoy.
'What a fuckin' night,' Druze said. Lightning answered.
'I couldn't make it another twenty-four hours,' Bekker answered. 'Is he deep?'
Deep? Ah, he meant George. 'More than two feet, anyway,' Druze said. 'Probably closer to three.'
'Should be quick… Won't take long,' Bekker said.
'You weren't here last night,' Druze said sourly. 'We're talking about a peat bog. This is gonna take a while.'
They missed the turnoff to the cabin. Druze had slowed further on the blacktopped county road, driving thirty, then twenty-five, watching for the reflectors that marked the turn… but they missed them, went a mile too far, had to come back. They saw only one other vehicle, a pickup, passing in the opposite direction, a man with a hat and a face that was a blurred oval hunched over the steering wheel.
They found the track coming back, turned and picked their way between the high bushes. The rain was tapering off; the thunderhead, still spitting out long chains of lightning, had moved to the north. The cabin popped up in the headlights like a mirage, congealing out of darkness, suddenly, and close. Druze parked in front of it, killed the headlights and said, 'Let's do it.'
He took a gray plastic raincoat from the backseat and pulled it on. Bekker wore sophisticated foul-weather gear, with a hood like a monk's cowl.
'Take my hat,' he said to Druze, snagging it out of the backseat and passing it to the other man.
They got out, the ground firm underfoot, sandy rather than muddy. As the rain slowed, a wind seemed to increase and moaned through the bare birch trees overhead. Past the cabin, perhaps two or three hundred yards across the lake, Bekker could see a blue yard light and, lower, the yellow rectangle of a lighted window.
'This way,' Druze grunted. His pantlegs below the rain suit were already wet, and he felt the first tongue of water inside his athletic shoes. He put the spade over his shoulder and, with the flashlight playing on the ground, led the way through the brambles, back to the edge of the tamarack swamp. The ground changed from high and sandy to soft, and finally to muck.
'How much…' Bekker started.
'We're here.' Druze shined the light on the ground, and Bekker could just pick out an oval pattern of raw earth.
'I kicked some shit over it before I left,' Druze said. 'In two weeks, you wouldn't be able to find it if you tried.'
'We'll do that again before we leave. Maybe get some leaves on it,' Bekker said vaguely. Rain ran down his face and collected in his eyebrows, and he sputtered through it. He was disintegrating in the water, falling apart like the wicked witch, Druze thought.
'Sure,' Druze grunted. He jammed the flashlight into the branches of a bare bush and scooped up a shovelful of muck. 'Dig.'
Bekker worked frantically, shoveling, talking to himself, spitting in the rain, digging like a badger. Druze tried to be more methodical but after a few minutes simply tried to stay out of the way. To the north, the thunderhead was still rumbling, and another burst of rain put a half-inch of water in the hole.
'I can't tell…' Bekker said, gasping between words, 'I can't tell… if the water's from the rain… or if it's coming up… from below.'
'Some of both,' Druze said. The flashlight caught a lump that looked different, and Druze prodded it with the tip of his shovel. The blade hit something resilient. 'I think I got him.'
'Got him? Here, let me…'
Bekker motioned Druze aside and knelt in the hole, holding the blade of his shovel like a scoop, working like a man in a frenzy, throwing the muck out in all directions. 'We got him,' he said, breathing hard. A hip, a leg, a shoulder, the sport coat. 'Got him got him got him…'
Druze stood back, holding the light, while Bekker cleared the mud away from the top of the body. 'Shit,' he said, looking up at Druze, his pale face the color and consistency of candle wax, 'He's facedown.'
'I just kind of dumped him…' Druze said, half apologetically.
'That's okay, I just have to…'
Bekker tried to free the body by pulling on the sport coat, but there was still too much dirt around it and it held George as firmly as if he were frozen in concrete.
'Suction or something,' Bekker grunted. His rain suit and his face were covered with mud, but he paid no attention. He straddled what he could see of the body, put his hands around George's neck and tried to pry the head free. 'Can't fuckin' get it,' he said after a minute.
'We have to clear away.'
'Yeah.' Bekker went back to the shovel, still using it as a scoop, a pan, and dug around the body, trying to loosen the arms, which were apparently sunk in the mud below. He got the left one first, the hand white as chalk, the fingers rigid and waxy as candles. Then Bekker got part of the left leg and turned his face up to Druze and said, 'If you could help just here.'
Druze squatted on the rim of the hole, reached in, grabbed George's belt. 'Get his head,' he said. 'Ready? Heave.'
George came partway out of the hole like an archaeological artifact on the end of a crane cable. Not stiff, but not particularly loose, either, his legs still anchored in the muck, his head hanging forward…
'There,' Druze said, and with a heavy pivoting motion of his shoulders he managed to flip the body onto its side, the legs rolling out of the muck below. Mud caked the nose and mouth, but one eye socket was clear. As the rain washed away the last of the soil, they could see the dead white orb of an eye looking up at them.
'Jesus,' Druze said, stepping back.
'I told you!' Bekker screamed. His hand groped in his pocket and came out with a screwdriver. 'I told you, I told you, I told you…'
He held the corpse's head by the hair and drove the screwdriver first into one eye socket, then the other, over and over, ten times, twenty, thirty, with furious power, screaming, 'I told you,' until Druze grabbed him by the collar and jerked him out of the hole, hollering, 'Enough, enough, enough…'
They stood looking at each other for a moment, the rain still driving down, Bekker gasping for breath, staggering, Druze afraid he was having a heart attack, and then Bekker said, 'Yeah… that should be enough.'
He took the flashlight from Druze, squatted next to the hole and with an almost gentle hand turned George's head. The eyes were deep bloodless holes, quickly filling with mud.
Bekker looked up, and a long flash of lightning from the distant storm lit him up as clearly as a fly on a television screen. His face was beautiful again, clear, the face of an angel, his white teeth flashing in a brilliant smile.
'That should do it,' he said. He let George's head go, and the body flipped facedown into the watery hole with a wet, sucking splash.
Bekker stood up, turning into the rain, letting it wash him. He was bouncing, Druze thought: Jesus, it's a dance. And as Bekker danced, the rain slowed, then stopped. Druze was backing away, frightened, fascinated.
'Well,' Bekker said a moment later, his labored breath squeezing through the hysterical smile, 'I suppose we should fill the hole, should we not?'
The grave filled quickly. The last they saw of Philip George was his right foot, the sock pulled down around the hairless, paper-white ankle, the shoe already rotting with water. Druze beat the surface down with the shovel, then kicked some leaves and brambles over the freshly turned soil. 'Let's get the fuck out of here,' he said.
They hurried back to the car, and Druze had to jockey it back and forth to turn in the narrow track in front of the cabin. Bekker, his voice clear and easy now, said, 'Check the answering machine. Three, four times a day. Call from public phones. When George turns up missing, the cops are probably going to sit on me. If I've got to talk to you… the tapes are the only way. And listen, don't forget to press number three, and reset the tape.'
'I meant to ask you about that,' Druze said, as he wrestled the Dodge onto the blacktopped road. 'If you reset the tape, isn't the message still there…?'
