Dead Echo

  *

  On the night before the second find Baskin woke in a cold sweat at 4 a.m. His heart pounding, he thought he was having a heart attack. Sure he was only 45 but he had been under a lot of stress. He sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath as he tried to bring the ghost of the nightmare back to life. It was then he remembered: the dark chamber, the parade of naked flesh, and then the spattered stains against the far wall. Bodies piled in abundance, fatter versions of the atrocities he remembered from college from the class he’d taken on the Holocaust. Men, women, children, all heaped and piled one on top of another while living, naked bodies slithered and slid among and within them. He also remembered the smell, that brutal vice around his throat, and felt sure, upon awakening, he could still feel the cold steel tight about his neck. And as he slowly regained control of himself, as he tediously felt the wickedness retreat into the far corners of the room, slipping in among the baseboards and back through the floor, he thought of, for only the tiniest, bare second of waking, his wife, bedded down beside him. Because, really, he tried to tell himself, sometimes the child was there in the dark, never that far away inside the bulk of manhood, once more in need of an understanding mother. But as his hand wilted at her bare shoulder he pulled back and wrapped his knees to his chest, trying to remember the foolishness that had awoken him while some other desperate part of his mind tried to forget.

  It left enough of a residue to make him cautious. He’d gotten the go-ahead to commence work any and everywhere on the site, and even though Thursday morning eased out of the earth like a sweet breath, the phantom of the night persisted. He was not a superstitious man, God forbid, he thought all such bullshit for grandmothers and niggers, but the intimacy of the memory refused to abate.

  He arrived at the site trailer an hour earlier than usual and worked out the crew schedule with no particular goal in mind, except to catch up on the last few lost days. And it was at this task that the premonition came on him again. As his skin began to crawl along his back and down his arms, he again saw the pile of bodies, the living amongst them, squeezing and rolling in their putridity. He felt another mild pain in his left arm and wiped a hand across his forehead. He cupped his mouth in his hand and stared blankly at the desk’s surface, his mind running on channels he could not fathom.

  And then it passed.

  He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. He looked at the task sheet and unconsciously scratched out the names of the crew he’d scheduled for the city main work. In its place he wrote down two other names, and those of only a backhoe operator and his own nephew, a kid on loan for the summer. Baskin’s brother, a real estate broker from Seville and one of the baker’s with his thumb in the pie, had wanted his son to get “a little reality check” during his summer break. The kid was a dynamo in chemistry but hardly more than a breathing body at “man’s work” as the kid’s dad had told him (speaking from his own depth of experience from more than twenty years ago at a construction site), not more than a month before. It was from this supposed wealth of knowledge that he considered his son lacking in the fine art of “honest work”. Baskin thought the whole thing laughable but what his brother wanted he got, and damned if Baskin hadn’t obliged him on this too.

  He called in his overseer at seven and distributed the schedule. Then he retired to his computer and scrolled through the miasma of emails he’d accumulated in the past several hours. Just before nine-thirty he got the summons, extremely urgent, if he read the look on Adam’s face correctly. He took the walkie-talkie from the junior site manager, closed the door to his office, and spoke for a moment very quietly. During the exchange his face gradually went white and with a muttered curse and his fingers playing unsteadily against the walls of the trailer, he left for the company truck. Within two minutes he pulled up alongside the goddamned dump truck, in its now customary spot next to the city main work. Looking like it was made to fuck up his life. The nephew, Scott, met him as he opened the door. “Trouble, Unc,” the boy said, his face not much more colorful than his uncles’. Baskin shook his head and withdrew from the cab, not even looking at the boy as he made his way over to the hole where the dump truck driver stood. His name was Peter Sims and he stood resolutely looking down, working the faded old Cat Diesel hat nervously in his hands. He watched the boss come on and pointed a shaking finger down, taking two steps back so the foreman could get a better view past him. Baskin walked up, wordlessly, to the edge of the pit and looked down.

  There, right before him, just outside the excavation the university pricks had established, lie a vast collection of broken bones and semi-intact skulls. From his point above Baskin counted four of them…at least four. Scattered chunks of what looked like rotted leather and lengths of bone framed them like some macabre painting. He heard the dump truck driver shuffle up behind him, held out his hand in case the man had a mind to speak. He squatted down to a knee, pulled a rock from the soil and chunked it into the hole. “Goddamn,” he said and squinted into the sun. At his right shoulder he felt his nephew. He stood up and spat on the ground. Many things ran roughshod through his mind, none of them pleasant. He turned to his nephew, stepped closer. “We’re gonna go ahead and clean that outta there,” he told the boy tonelessly. The boy said nothing, just averted his eyes. Baskin turned to the driver. He’d known the man for the better part of fifteen years; their association ran through divorces and all manner of barrooms, and right then Baskin was owed all he was going to ask. He leaned in closer than he had with his nephew, conspiratorially, as if he knew the man’s mind. “Pete,” he muttered. “Dammit I need you now, man. This is a righteous fuckall, but my ass is on the line here. The first time was a gimme but we ain’t gonna be able to shake this shit off if it gets out.”

  The man continued gaping into the hole, nodding his head in barest acknowledgement as Baskin continued. His nephew edged up alongside and this time Baskin turned to include him. “Old goddamn bones, boys. You see it just like I do. Nothing came outta it last time and if we doan let it, ain’t nothing gonna come outta it now. Forget it. The university fucks’ll just come out here and turn the whole goddamn place into a playground and we can kiss this job goodfuckin’bye.” He stared at them, each in turn, directly in the eyes, nodding his own head now as he went. “We’re gonna keep going. Ain’t another twenty-five feet to the fuckin’ main and we’re pushin’ through. The dead are dead, far’s I’m concerned, and it ain’t none a our goddamn business anyhow.”

  No one met his eye. He was a big man, and formidable when roused. It had come around to Pete’s turn to speak, everyone knew that. He looked at a spot just below Baskin’s nose, where a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. “How d’ya mean?” he said.

  Baskin pointed at his nephew. “Get the backhoe and finish filling that truck. Anything showin’ when you’re finished, cover it up. I’ll make a coupla calls. Ain’t nobody else gonna be workin’ down here today, anyway. I ‘ad a feelin’ this fuckin’ mornin’…. Regardless, get it cleaned up and we’re gonna forget the whole damn thing. There’s too much fuckin’ money involved here, gentlemen. Our bottom line is to get this done, and by God that’s just what we’re gonna do.” And with that he turned around and left.

  And they did just what he said. The truck was filled, the area combed for errant traces of bone they might have missed. The boy and Pete, the dump truck driver, worked silently, neither looking at the other out of fear some understanding would emerge to clap them further into misery, telling themselves all the while that orders were orders, and after all, Baskin was right. Just a bunch of old bones lying around like dynamite waiting to go off. That was all it was.

  The area was finally clear around the main two hours later; Steve worked a wide oval out from the concrete junction housing, wider than necessary so there would be no need for further digging. And as he worked he thought of the coming semester and how he’d never do this kind of work again, regardless of the lessons his old man wanted him to learn. Because he’d a
lready learned one of the biggest, most dangerous, already. Here he was covering up a potential murder site. And oddly enough, it wasn’t that hard. If you looked around at the scenery while you worked, and kept telling yourself that it was just a typical Monday morning with the rest of the work week stretching out ahead, it wasn’t so hard to refocus on the task at hand. Work was work; orders were orders. Why, hadn’t his old man continually lauded the Marine drill instructors he’d used as examples of duty and responsibility? This was just like that…only different. But not enough to matter, he decided, lifting the last load into the back of the dump truck. He hadn’t wanted this goddamn job in the first place. Pete, on the other hand, didn’t have any options. Alcoholism had neatly encased him years before and he wouldn’t be working now had not Baskin known somebody at the licensing board. He was just lucky the last DUI had been four years ago (God only knows how), and his name was pretty much shit everywhere else, anyway. He didn’t do it out of loyalty, and his intelligence, or lack thereof, didn’t cloud him with any chimeras of moral and legal consequence. He did it because Baskin told him to, and in a world of few contacts, his options were fewer than his friends. Besides, what did it have to do with him anyway? He didn’t know any of these poor fucks. And sooner or later everything ended up coming around to just this anyway. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust (something his poor old mother had warned him), just like the Bible said.

  He climbed up into the bed of the dump truck and covered over a few bones that stuck free of the dirt. Then, while Steve nosed around the hole looking for anything they’d missed, he pulled the tarp across the load and sat in the cab, the walkie talkie lying on the seat beside him, waiting for instructions to come down the pipe.

  It was amazing, really, how easy it was to get rid of the problem once you’d decided that’s what you were going to do. Baskin had a friend at a landfill and arranged to dump the load there. It wasn’t the first time and Franklin wasn’t known to possess a suspicious nature (Baskin had told the man he was under time constraints and the landfill was closer than his other option) as long as the money was good. And once in the landfill, especially after a few run-throughs by the garbage trucks and bulldozers, even if the bones were discovered, nobody would know where the hell they’d come from anyway.

  So that was that and work continued.

  The city main connection was secured, the other lines laid down with no further discoveries. The streets paved, the stucco applied and roofs shingled. Landscapers came and went like ants on a nest, utilities connected. Baskin got a bonus for pulling the job in under deadline and went on to the next job, already distancing himself from the problems of this one. The houses went on the market; the fields around the subdivision were mowed and cleaned of building refuse and trash.

  The neighborhood was ready.