Never, Ever Bring This Up Again – 2

They were three feet down when Terry stopped digging again and knelt on the grass to reach into the hole. “Hey, check this out.”

“What?” Curtis wasn’t digging as fast and kept going to catch up.

“Stop, get your keychain out.”

Curtis left his shovel upright in the mound he was making next to the headstone and knelt across the hole from Terry, fished his keychain out and pressed the button on the one-bulb LED flashlight, his other hand hooded over it. “What is that?”

“Some kind of tubing,” Terry said, “but look, it goes all the way across, and right here it intersects with another tube that goes up to the end where her head’s at. Shit, here’s another one that runs that way. It’s like a net.”

Curtis swept the light over the hole while Terry pulled on the light blue tubing, which had connections about every six inches and looked to Curtis like a toy volleyball net. “Maybe it’s some kind of sprinkler system?”

“Too deep for that,” Terry said. “When I was doing landscaping, we buried the trickle hoses a few inches down, a foot at the most.”

“Cut it open.”

Terry unclipped his lockblade from his pocket and flicked it open, got a loop of the tubing poking out of his fist and had to saw the blade a few times to get it through.

Curtis put the light close to the open ends. “Looks like phone cable.”

“Yeah, something electrical.”

They both looked at it some more until Curtis said, “Why’s it in here?”

“Got me. You’re the one supposed to do the research.”

“How far does it go?”

Terry stood up and Curtis had to move so he could straddle the hole. He got two handfuls of the tubing and pulled with just his arms, then got his legs and back into it and the tubing came out of the dirt like tree roots, popping and dragging loose soil from Curtis’s end. Terry stepped to his right and shook the net out like a picnic blanket and let it fall on the grass of the grave next to Alice’s. They stood at the foot of it with their hands on their hips and eyed the net, then the hole, then the net again. The whole thing was about a foot longer on each side than the hole.

“Some kind of weed killer?” Curtis said.

“Man, I have no idea.”

Curtis went back over the research he’d done over the past few weeks, to see what they might come across, and couldn’t bring up anything that matched this. Probably should have done more, he thought, instead of getting bored and looking at porn. He checked his watch, almost quarter after two, and said, “Screw it. It’s gonna bug me though, so let’s take it with us.”

He knelt at the end and flipped a foot of it over the rest and pulled, flipped the layers over, pulled, but one of the far corners got hung up. Curtis crawled to it and tugged and found a smaller wire going from the tubing toward the headstone. He pointed the flashlight at it and saw two thin wires side by side like speaker cable, red and white. He traced them into the hole with the light and saw where they went into the dirt directly under the headstone.

Curtis pulled and the wires sliced up through the dirt a little more then stopped. He pulled harder and they slipped through his hand so he wound them around his knuckles and tried again; nothing.

“Godammit.” To Terry, “Keep digging.”

Curtis crawled to the base of the headstone and got his body close to shield the light and panned the flash over the marble, which looked gray in the moonlight but was actually all kinds of pinks and reds. He worked around the back and got to the side where he was digging before he found it, right next to his pile of dirt. A couple more shovels on this side of the pile, he thought, and it’d be covered up.

The base of the headstone was rectangular and tiered like a wedding cake, and there was a metal panel the size of a playing card in the middle of the second tier. Curtis used the brass tag with his initials on it from his keychain to loosen the two screws. He slipped the cover off and saw the battery pack in there, black shrink wrap binding all the cells together. The red and white wires were connected to the pack with a blocky white clip, which was tight against the hole that went into the headstone.

Curtis worked the battery pack out and got a hand on the clip and pulled the wires, watching the other ends slide into the grave until the slack was gone and the net twitched. He said, “Let me see your knife.”

Terry walked around the hole and handed it to him. “You figure out what it is?”

Curtis cut the red and white wires on the other side of the clip. “No.” He gave Terry his knife back and said, “But we wasted enough time on it.”

“We?” Terry said. “You want me to work on your end for a while? I can just about see China from mine.”

“You want a cookie?”

“Yeah, a fortune cookie,” Terry said, and they both laughed, giving each other shit in a situation like this.

Curtis put the battery pack in his pocket—might be able to rig it up for a bike headlight or maybe sell it—then stepped over the hole and gathered up the net, the red and white wires coming out easy now, and left it all in a pile on the neighbor’s grave. He stepped to his corner and got back to work, not caring about the noise anymore and wanting to beat Terry to the casket even though Terry had a head start. Terry saw his pace and scoffed and went crazy with his shovel, the dirt going everywhere. They kept that up, grunting and smiling and starting to breathe hard until Curtis jammed his shovel in and heard the noise and stopped, Terry frozen at his end except for his chest puffing in and out.

“That,” Curtis said, “sounded like concrete.”

#

They got the dirt scraped away and stood over the grave, looking down at the rough concrete slab inside, and Terry said, “Is that normal?”

Curtis wiped his forehead on his sleeve and checked the time: Almost three. Three hours and it would start getting light, and they didn’t even have the casket out of the ground yet. “No. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You gotta quit looking at porn.”

“Shut up. I saw concrete liners, but those were like big boxes for the coffins to go in. They were finished, you know, smooth. This is all pocked and bumpy, like it was poured in. Plus they aren’t required here, from what the website said.” Throw that last bit in to prove he’d actually looked into things.

Terry said, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“You wanna call it?”

“Shit no, we already dug all this up.”

Terry waggled his shovel like a microphone stand. “We’re not getting through that concrete with these.”

“I brought the sledge.”

“No dynamite? Same noise, just about.”

“I’ll figure it out,” Curtis said, already walking back to the truck.

#

He ended up bringing the sledge and both rubber floor mats back, Terry watching with one eyebrow up and his chin resting on the end of the shovel handle while Curtis jumped into the grave and stacked the mats at the foot and stood with his back to the headstone. He toed the concrete and didn’t know why, like he could tell the thickness that way. It could be two feet thick and the sledge would bounce right out of the cemetery.

“This is a test swing,” Curtis said.

He raised the sledge and Terry put his fingers in his ears. Asshole. He brought the sledge down with a little muscle behind it, letting the weight of the hammer do the work, and barked a laugh when the concrete gave out like a pie crust, the sound maybe a little louder than stomping on gravel. Curtis dropped the sledge and put both fists over his head.

“Oh, come on,” Terry said.

“What, you wanted it to be harder?”

“Not a lot, but harder than that. Now you’ll never shut up about it. Fuckin floor mats.”

#

Curtis broke the concrete and Terry scooped the loose chunks out and added them to the pile of dirt. Terry asked a few times if Curtis wanted to switch, but Curtis told him no, breaking the stuff was too easy, rubbing it in and loving it. It was almost four in the morning by the time he got through that and the dirt beneath it and felt his shovel blade hit and slide along a solid surface. By then the hole was only big enough for one guy anyway, and Curtis was in up to his shoulders. His back and arms were burning from having to get the dirt all the way up and over the rim of the grave.

Terry saw it and said, “You ready to switch yet?”

“Yeah. I think we’re just about good for the drill.” Curtis got himself out of the hole, barely any room around the edge because Terry was piling the dirt too close, and Terry dropped in with a hollow thud on top of the casket. Curtis sat on the dirt pile and wiped his face on the inside of his shirt, some grit and mud even in there so it didn’t do much good.

He watched Terry work his shovel all the way around the edges, spending extra time around the head to make sure there was enough room, the casket maybe five feet long and narrower than he’d thought it would be, looking like a miniature display model. Curtis said, “You want the drill?”

“Yeah, let’s try it.”

Curtis grunted when he stood up and found the backpack half-covered with dirt and concrete, goddam Terry, and got out the drill, the one-inch eye screw, and the piece of rebar about as long as his forearm. He knelt next to the grave and handed the drill to Terry then pointed the LED flashlight at the head of the casket.

Terry eyeballed the midline and aimed the drill a foot from the end, got it vertical over the wood and started drilling. He let the bit sink in, pulled it out to clear the flutes and went in again until he’d gone almost an inch. He stopped and said, “How thick is this wood?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I don’t want to go through and hit her in the face.”

Curtis laughed. “I don’t think she’d mind.”

“I know. Just seems…rude.” He stood up and gave the drill to Curtis, who handed him the eye screw and rebar then got the light back on the hole. Curtis had seen plenty of horror movies and let his mind run with the image of Terry leaning over the casket and a hand busting out of the wood to grab him around the throat, pulling him slowly down toward the dry skin and white, bared teeth that creaked open, Terry unable to get loose even though the corpse had no muscles left.

Curtis wondered, if that happened, would he jump in to save Terry or piss himself and run? Maybe stand at the edge of the grave and poke at Alice’s zombie corpse with a shovel until she let Terry go.

Terry said, “Hey. Light, please.”

Curtis got the flashlight back in the right spot and watched Terry feed the rebar through the eye screw and turn it like a valve, twisting the screw into the hole. When it was all the way in Terry said, “Good?”

“Looks good from up here.”

Terry stood up and looked around the edge of the grave, saw a gap in the dirt he’d piled everywhere, and jumped halfway out and stuck the rebar into the grass. He kicked his legs and struggled like he was at the peak of Mount Everest, making a show of it until he got out and stood up and looked around with crazy eyes, triumphant over the pits of hell from which he’d escaped.

“Having fun?”

“I made it,” Terry said, still playing around.

“Who’s going to hook the strap up?”

“Ah, fuck,” Terry said, and jumped back into the hole.

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