The grade steepened. Luntz yanked at the gearshift and found second.
“Yeah, it was Gambol.”
“You cunt. You fucking cunt.”
“Who are you talking to? Gambol isn’t here, Sally. The fucker can’t hear you.”
“I’m talking to you, you cunt, you fucking cunt. He wanted you.”
“Who? Gambol? He didn’t know I was here. How would he know? He was after you, Sally.”
“You fucking cunt. Maybe that Indian bitch told him. She told him. She snitched.”
“Anita doesn’t know a soul in Alhambra. Not one swinging dick.”
“It was that cunt of yours.”
“Anita never heard of Alhambra. She thought Alhambra was the name of a prison.” Luntz pounded open the wing window and slipped his cigarette out into the wind, and it flew away in a shower of sparks. He didn’t ask where to go. He just kept going.
The crescent moon lay directly overhead, and on such a night the river’s swollen surface resembled the unquiet belly of a living thing you could step onto and walk across.
Anita stood in the darkness by the water, her head high and her shoulders back, and stared at the shape standing across the river from her.
Anita went onto her knees and spooned to her face four swallows of water with her left hand, and the shape across the water did the same. Now they knelt across from one another, the river between.
For half an hour she didn’t move. Her knees, her calves, her hips, all burning. She did not take her eyes from the one across the river.
The last two nights in this spot had been chilly. This night too. The backs of her hands, her cheeks, her lips had been chapped by the wind.
When she got to her feet, the knees of her pants were frayed and bits of gravel clung to the fabric, but she didn’t brush them clean or in any other way distract her focus from the figure kneeling on the opposite bank.
The dark shape across the water grew elongated, also standing.
They faced one another with the Feather River in between. In two or three more hours they would kneel again and drink.
Luntz pulled the flashlight from Sally’s hands and gave it a shake and fiddled with the switch.
Sally grabbed at it. Luntz let it go. Sally banged its head on the dashboard.
“It’s junk.”
Sally dropped it onto the floor and stomped it twice, saying, “It’s dark — it’s dark!”
“We’ll use the parking lights.” Luntz pulled the knob, and tree trunks materialized before them in an orange glow.
They went to the back of the truck. Sally let down the tailgate and took the pickaxe and the shovel by their ends and dragged them out, letting the shovel fall. Luntz snatched the cuffs of Capra’s jeans with both hands and pulled. “Help me get him out. Ah, God. His pants are coming down.”
Sally said, “Jesus’ bloody
nail
wounds, man. Leave him
alone.” A few yards in front of the truck, Sally rolled aside a chunk of log and kicked away dead branches to make a bare enough spot and hacked at the earth with the pickaxe, hunched over, walking backward, saying, “Jesus’ bloody fucking
punctures
, man.”
“How deep?”
“We need four feet. Four and a half. If we do this right we can get it done in two hours. I’ll break it up, and you dig it out, then I break up another layer. You work one end, I’ll do the other, then we switch. I dug miles of ditches at Chancellor Farm.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near La Honda. Hah! In the hills. Hah! Reformatory. Hah!” Sally stopped talking and only slung the point of the pickaxe at the ground in front of him, saying, “Hah!” with every blow. In a minute he tossed his shirt aside and pulled his T-shirt over his head and wound it around the pick’s handle and said, “Protect your hands,” and Luntz stripped to the waste and bandaged the handle of his shovel and plunged its point into the dirt.
They worked without need of a pause. Luntz felt able to dig until his hands wore away or he struck the earth’s molten core. Each time the shovel hit a stone he went to his knees in the hole and clawed it out and tossed it, no matter how big it was, many yards into the brush.
“Who’s that? Who
is
it?”
“Just coyotes.”
“Just?”
“Dig. Dig. Dig.”
Sally hacked at dirt with the pickaxe as if he were going at some monster’s face. “This is insane. This is insane. This is insane.” Luntz joined in and they chanted together, “This is insane, this is insane, this is insane.”
When they couldn’t work any more from outside the hole, they took it in shifts, one resting by the edge while the other stood at the bottom and gouged. A change came to the darkness, not exactly daylight. Luntz craved water, but they’d brought none. During his rests the sprain in his right hand throbbed and burned. While he dug he felt nothing.
Sally stopped and said, “Enough, enough, that’s enough.” He stood in a hole up to his armpits.
Luntz helped him out and they climbed into the bed of the pickup and scooted Capra’s corpse to the rear and jumped off again. Capra lay on the tailgate with his arms above his head and one leg dangling. He still had a face, but it didn’t look like Capra, and the back of his head was gone. “You take that end,” Luntz said, coming around Sally to wrap Capra’s ankles in his arms, and Sally locked his elbows in Capra’s armpits and took Capra’s halved head against his chest, and they hauled the corpse around to the front of the truck and without discussion rolled Capra into his grave and buried him.
Sally collapsed beside the mound and lay on his hip, breathing hard and running his fingers over the churned
earth. “When was the last time you talked to him?” he asked Luntz. “What day?”
“Me?”
“What was the last thing he said to you?”
“I don’t know. You were there. He asked me how many hot dogs I wanted.”
“No, no, man — something that meant something.”
Luntz tried to remember. He stood up and rubbed at the muscles of his back, below the ribs. “He told me I’ve gotten quiet, and he said he liked it.”
“Yeah.” Sally laid his hand on the grave and got to one knee.
“Sally, hand me that shovel.”
“It’s called a spade.”
Sally extended the spade’s handle, and Luntz took it in both hands and said, “I can subtract, Sally,” and hit him with the flat of it as hard as he could.
Sally clutched the side of his head with both hands and fell backward with his calves under him.
Luntz said, “Who told Juarez where I was?”
Sally scurried on his back like a spider, hopping, scrabbling, the blows missing, Luntz swinging anyway—“Who told Juarez — Who told Juarez — Who told Juarez?”—until Luntz’s strength died, and he stopped swinging. To keep upright he leaned on the shovel. “It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t him, and it wasn’t her. So it was you. And how did you know I shot Gambol? Juarez told you, that’s how.”
Sally had rolled onto his side. “That Indian bitch told me.”
“Bullshit.”
Sally got to his hands and knees and tried to rise and gave up. He was weeping and spitting out blood. “This is Friday, Friday, Friday.”
“So what?”
“It was set up for
tomorrow
night.”
“They don’t come on the night they say.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because there’s always a snitch. Like you.”
Sally crawled as far as the grave and put his hands on the pickaxe as if he were talking to it. “I just wanted to get us