My spadework had not been disturbed.
"Dolan," I said, cheerfully enough, I thought.
There was no answer.
"Dolan!"
No answer.
He's killed himself, I thought, and felt a sick-bitter disappointment. Killed himself somehow or died of fright.
"Dolan?"
Laughter drifted up from the mound; bright, irrepressible, totally genuine laughter. I felt my flesh lift itself into large hard lumps. It was the laughter of a man whose mind has broken.
He laughed and he laughed in his hoarse voice. Then he screamed; then he laughed again. Finally he did both together.
For awhile I laughed with him, or screamed, or whatever, and the wind laughed and screamed at both of us.
Then I went back to the Case-Jordan, lowered the blade, and began to cover him up for real.
*
In four minutes even the shape of the Cadillac was gone. There was just a hole filled with dirt.
I thought I could hear something, but with the sound of the wind and the steady grumble of the loader's engine, it was hard to tell. I got down on my knees; then I lay down full-length with my head hanging into what remained of the hole.
Far down, underneath all that dirt, Dolan was still laughing. They were sounds like something you might read in a comic book: Hee-hee-hee, aaah-hah-hah-hah. There might have been some words, too. It was hard to tell. I smiled and nodded, though.
"Scream," I whispered. "Scream, if you want." But that faint sound of laughter just went on, seeping up from the dirt like a poisonous vapor.
A sudden dark terror seized me--Dolan was behind me! Yes, somehow Dolan had gotten behind me! And before I could turn around he would tumble me into the hole and--
I jumped up and whirled around, my mangled hands making rough approximations of fists.
Wind-driven sand smacked me.
There was nothing else.
I wiped my face with my dirty bandanna and got back into the cab of the bucket-loader and went back to work.
The cut was filled in again long before dark. There was even dirt left over, in spite of what the wind had whipped away, because of the area displaced by the Cadillac. It went quickly. . . so quickly.
The tone of my thoughts was weary, confused, and half-delirious as I piloted the loader back down the road, driving it directly over the spot where Dolan was buried.
I parked it in its original place, removed my shirt, and rubbed all of the metal in the cab with it in an effort to remove fingerprints. I don't know exactly why I did that, even to this day, since I must have left them in a hundred other places around the site. Then, in the deep brownish-gray gloom of that stormy dusk, I went back to the van.
I opened one of the rear doors, observed Dolan crouched inside, and staggered back, screaming, one hand thrown up to shield my face. It seemed to me that my heart must explode in my chest.
Nothing--no one--came out of the van. The door swung and banged in the wind like the last shutter on a haunted house. At last I crept back, heart pounding, and peered inside. There was nothing but the jumble of stuff I had left in there--the road-arrow with the broken bulbs, the jack, my toolbox.
"You have got to get hold of yourself," I said softly. "Get hold of yourself."
I waited for Elizabeth to say, You'll be all right, darling . . . something like that . . . but there was only the wind.
I got back into the van, started it, and drove halfway back to the excavation. That was as far as I could make myself go. Although I knew it was utterly foolish, I became more and more convinced that Dolan was lurking in the van. My eyes kept going to the rear-view mirror, trying to pick his shadow out of the others.
The wind was stronger than ever, rocking the van on its springs. The dust it pulled up from the desert and drove before it looked like smoke in the headlights.
At last I pulled over to the side of the road, got out, and locked all the doors. I knew I was crazy to even try sleeping outside in this, but I couldn't sleep in there. I just couldn't. So I crawled under the van with my sleeping bag.
I was asleep five seconds after I zipped myself into it.
*
When I woke up from a nightmare I could not remember--except there had been hands in it, clutching at my throat--I found that I had been buried alive. There was sand up my nose, sand in my ears. It was down my throat, choking me.
I screamed and struggled upward, at first convinced that the confining sleeping bag was earth. Then I banged my head on the van's undercarriage and saw flakes of rust silting down.
I rolled out from under into a dawn the color of smutty pewter. My sleeping bag blew away like a tumbleweed the moment my weight was off it. I gave a surprised yell and chased twenty feet after it before realizing it would be the world's worst mistake. Visibility was down to no more than twenty yards, and maybe less. The road was totally gone in places. I looked back at the van and it looked washed-out, barely there, a sepia photograph of a ghost-town relic.
I staggered back to it, found my keys, and got inside. I was still spitting sand and coughing dryly. I got the motor going and drove slowly back the way I had come. There was no need to wait for a weather report; the weather was all the jock could talk about this morning. The worst desert windstorm in Nevada history. All roads closed. Stay home unless you absolutely have to go out, and then stay home anyway.
The glorious Fourth.
Stay in. You're crazy if you go out there. You'll go sandblind.
That I would chance. This was a golden opportunity to cover it up forever--never in my wildest imaginings had I suspected I might get such a chance, but it was here, and I was taking it.
I had brought three or four extra blankets. I tore a long, wide strip from one of them and tied it around my head. Looking like some sort of crazed Bedouin, I stepped out.
*
I spent all morning carrying chunks of asphalt up from the ditch and placing them back into the trench, trying to be as neat as a mason laying a wall . . . or bricking up a niche. The actual fetching and carrying was not terribly difficult, although I had to unearth most of the asphalt blocks like an archaeologist hunting for artifacts, and every twenty minutes or so I had to repair to the van to get out of the blowing sand and rest my stinging eyes.
I worked slowly west from what had been the shallow end of the excavation, and by quarter past noon--I had started at six--I had reached the final seventeen feet or so. By then the wind had begun to die and I could see occasional ragged patches of blue above me.
I fetched and placed, fetched and placed. Now I was over the spot where I calculated Dolan must be. Was he dead yet? How many cubic feet of air could a Cadillac hold? How soon would that space become unable to support human life, assuming that neither of Dolan's two companions was still breathing?
I knelt by the bare earth. The wind had eroded the impressions of the Case-Jordan's treads but not quite erased them; somewhere beneath those faint indentations was a man wearing a Rolex.
"Dolan," I said chummily, "I've changed my mind and decided to let you out."
Nothing. No sound at all. Dead for sure this time.
I went back and got another square of asphalt. I placed it, and as I started to rise, I heard faint, cackling laughter seeping up through the earth.
I sank back into a crouch with my head forward--if I'd still had hair, it would have been hanging in my face--and remained in that position for some time, listening as he laughed. The sound was faint and without timbre.
When it stopped, I went back and got another asphalt square. There was a piece of the broken yellow line on this one. It looked like a hyphen. I knelt with it.
"For the love of God!" he shrieked. "For the love of God, Robinson!"
"Yes," I said, smiling. "For the love of God."
I put the chunk of asphalt in neatly next to its neighbor, and although I listened, I heard him no more.
*
I got back to my place in Vegas that night at eleven o'
clock. I slept for sixteen hours, got up, walked toward the kitchen to make coffee, and then collapsed, writhing, on the hall floor as a monstrous back spasm racked me. I scrabbled at the small of my back with one hand while I chewed on the other to stifle the screams.
After awhile I crawled into the bathroom--I tried standing once, but this resulted in another thunderbolt--and used the washstand to pull myself up enough so I could get the second bottle of Empirin in the medicine cabinet.
I chewed three and drew a bath. I lay on the floor while I waited for the tub to fill. When it was, I wriggled out of my pajamas and managed to get into the tub. I lay there for five hours, dozing most of the time. When I got out, I could walk.
A little.
I went to a chiropractor. He told me I had three slipped discs and had suffered a serious lower spinal dislocation. He wanted to know if I had decided to sub for the circus strongman.
I told him I did it digging in my garden.
He told me I was going to Kansas City.
I went.
They operated.
When the anesthesiologist put the rubber cup over my face, I heard Dolan laughing from the hissing blackness inside and knew I was going to die.
*
The recovery room was a watery tiled green.
"Am I alive?" I croaked.
A nurse laughed. "Oh, yes." His hand touched my brow--my brow that went all the way around my head. "What a sunburn you have! My God! Did that hurt, or are you still too doped up?"
"Still too doped up," I said. "Did I talk while I was under?"
"Yes," he said.
I was cold all over. Cold to the bones of me.
"What did I say?"
"You said, 'It's dark in here. Let me out!'" And he laughed again.
"Oh," I said.
*
They never found him--Dolan.
It was the storm. That flukey storm. I'm pretty sure I know what happened, although I think you'll understand when I tell you I never checked too closely.
RPAV--remember that? They were repaving. The storm almost buried the section of 71 which the detour had closed. When they went back to work, they didn't bother to remove the new dunes all at once but only as they went along--why do otherwise? There was no traffic to worry about. So they plowed sand and routed up old paving at the same time. And if the 'dozer operator happened to notice that the sand-crusted asphalt in one section--a section about forty feet long--was breaking in front of his blade in neat, almost geometric pieces, he never said anything. Maybe he was stoned. Or maybe he was just dreaming of stepping out with his baby that evening.
Then came the dumpsters with their fresh loads of gravel, followed by the spreaders and rollers. After them the big tankers would arrive, the ones with the wide sprayer attachments on the backs and their smell of hot tar, so like melting shoe-leather. And when the fresh asphalt had dried, along would come the lining machine, the driver under his big canvas parasol looking back frequently to make sure the broken yellow line was perfectly straight, unaware that he was passing over a fog-gray Cadillac with three people inside, unaware that down in the darkness there was a ruby ring and a gold Rolex that might still be marking off the hours.
One of those heavy vehicles would almost surely have collapsed an ordinary Cadillac; there would have been a lurch, a crunch, and then a bunch of men digging to see what--or who--they had found. But it really was more tank than car, and Dolan's very carefulness has so far kept anyone from finding him.
Sooner or later the Cadillac will collapse of course, probably under the weight of a passing semi, and the next vehicle along will see a big broken dent in the westbound lane, and the Highway Department will be notified, and there will be another RPAV. But if there aren't Highway Department workers right there to see what happens, to observe that the heavy weight of a passing truck has caused some hollow object under the road to collapse, I think they will assume the "marsh-hole" (that is what they call them) has been caused by either frost, or a collapsed salt-dome, or possibly a desert temblor. They will repair it and life will go on.
*
He was reported missing--Dolan.
A few tears were shed.
A columnist in the Las Vegas Sun suggested that he might be playing dominos or shooting pool somewhere with Jimmy Hoffa.
Perhaps that is not so far from the truth.
*
I'm fine.
My back is pretty much okay again. I'm under strict orders not to lift anything which weighs over thirty pounds without help, but I've got a good bunch of third-graders this year, and all the help I could want.
I've driven back and forth over that stretch of road several times in my new Acura automobile. Once I even stopped, got out, and (after checking in both directions to make sure the road was deserted) took a piss on what I was pretty sure was the spot. But I couldn't produce much of a flow, even though my kidneys felt full, and when I drove on I kept checking the rear-view mirror: I had this funny idea, you see, that he was going to rise up from the back seat, his skin charred to a cinnamon color and stretched over his skull like the skin of a mummy, his hair full of sand, his eyes and his Rolex watch glittering.
That was the last time I was on 71, actually. Now I take the Interstate when I need to head west.
And Elizabeth? Like Dolan, she has fallen silent. I find that is a relief.
The End of
the Whole Mess
I want to tell you about the end of war, the degeneration of mankind, and the death of the Messiah--an epic story, deserving thousands of pages and a whole shelf of volumes, but you (if there are any "you" later on to read this) will have to settle for the freeze-dried version. The direct injection works very fast. I figure I've got somewhere between forty-five minutes and two hours, depending on my blood-type. I think it's A, which should give me a little more time, but I'll be goddamned if I can remember for sure. If it turns out to be O, you could be in for a lot of blank pages, my hypothetical friend.
In any event, I think maybe I'd better assume the worst and go as fast as I can.
I'm using the electric typewriter--Bobby's word-processor is faster, but the genny's cycle is too irregular to be trusted, even with the line suppressor. I've only got one shot at this; I can't risk getting most of the way home and then seeing the whole thing go to data heaven because of an oHm drop, or a surge too great for the suppressor to cope with.
My name is Howard Fornoy. I was a freelance writer. My brother, Robert Fornoy, was the Messiah. I killed him by shooting him up with his own discovery four hours ago. He called it The Calmative. A Very Serious Mistake might have been a better name, but what's done is done and can't be undone, as the Irish have been saying for centuries . . . which proves what assholes they are.
Shit, I can't afford these digressions.
After Bobby died I covered him with a quilt and sat at the cabin's single living-room window for some three hours, looking out at the woods. Used to be you could see the orange glow of the hi-intensity arc-sodiums from North Conway, but no more. Now there's just the White Mountains, looking like dark triangles of crepe paper cut out by a child, and the pointless stars.
I turned on the radio, dialed through four bands, found one crazy guy, and shut it off. I sat there thinking of ways to tell this story. My mind kept sliding away toward all those miles of dark pinewoods, all that nothing. Finally I realized I needed to get myself off the dime and shoot myself up. Shit. I never could work without a deadline.
And I've sure-to-God got one now.
*
Our parents had no reason to expect anything other than what they got: bright children. Dad was a history major who had become a full professor at Hofstra when he was thirty. Ten years later he was one of six vice-administrators of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and in line for the top spot. He was a helluva good guy, too--had every record Chuck Berry ever cut and played a pretty mean blues guitar himself. My dad filed by day and rocked by night.
Mom grad
uated magna cum laude from Drew. Got a Phi Beta Kappa key she sometimes wore on this funky fedora she had. She became a successful CPA in D.C., met my dad, married him, and took in her shingle when she became pregnant with yours truly. I came along in 1980. By '84 she was doing taxes for some of my dad's associates--she called this her "little hobby." By the time Bobby was born in 1987, she was handling taxes, investment portfolios, and estate-planning for a dozen powerful men. I could name them, but who gives a wad? They're either dead or driveling idiots by now.
I think she probably made more out of "her little hobby" each year than my dad made at his job, but that never mattered--they were happy with what they were to themselves and to each other. I saw them squabble lots of times, but I never saw them fight. When I was growing up, the only difference I saw between my mom and my playmates' moms was that their moms used to read or iron or sew or talk on the phone while the soaps played on the tube, and my mom used to run a pocket calculator and write down numbers on big green sheets of paper while the soaps played on the tube.
I was no disappointment to a couple of people with Mensa Gold Cards in their wallets. I maintained A's and B's through my public-school career (the idea that either I or my brother might go to a private school was never even discussed so far as I know). I also wrote well early, with no effort at all. I sold my first magazine piece when I was twenty--it was on how the Continental Army wintered at Valley Forge. I sold it to an airline magazine for four hundred fifty dollars. My dad, whom I loved deeply, asked me if he could buy that check from me. He gave me his own personal check and had the check from the airline magazine framed and hung it over his desk. A romantic genius, if you will. A romantic blues-playing genius, if you will. Take it from me, a kid could do a lot worse. Of course he and my mother both died raving and pissing in their pants late last year, like almost everyone else on this big round world of ours, but I never stopped loving either of them.
I was the sort of child they had every reason to expect--a good boy with a bright mind, a talented boy whose talent grew to early maturity in an atmosphere of love and confidence, a faithful boy who loved and respected his mom and dad.
Bobby was different. Nobody, not even Mensa types like our folks, ever expects a kid like Bobby. Not ever.