“Ray, you shouldn’t do this to yourself.”
He was heading straight for the milk of magnesia.
She drove home with the windows open and a bottle of beer in her lap. The air was soft, wrapped around her like the finest mosquito netting. She took the long road that skirted the Alafia River, passed quietly humming power lines marching through sand and scrub pine, and it all looked good to her.
Karl had thrown away the pillows in his sleep, kicked off the sheet. One forearm was curled under him while the other twitched spasmodically. He groaned once and opened his eyes halfway.
“Miss me?” Tildy said, changing into pants.
“What … What time is it?”
“Anytime.” She danced toward him, twirling invisible tassels.
He sat up and probed furiously behind the bed; a crackle of paper and he slumped back cradling an envelope. “Yes, baby, we almost there. We gonna be so rich you won’t recognize us.”
Saturday dawned cloudy and cool. By seven thirty Karl had packed his tools — crowbar, pickaxe, three sizes of shovel — into the car, tested the metal detector’s batteries, unplugged its six-inch loop and replaced it with a twelve-incher, going for maximum depth penetration over pinpoint accuracy. He was loaded for bear.
Cautiously, just after eight, he went in to wake Tildy. She had reacted with surprising annoyance to his plan, but this hadn’t flustered him. He’d read the pertinent texts aloud to her, patiently explained the connections he’d succeeded in making between them, the subsequent implications of his dream.
“What is this about?”
“You don’t see how I asked for a sign and it came?”
“This doesn’t make a damn bit of sense,” she’d said fiercely.
“Don’t have to make sense,” he replied. “It ain’t a map, it’s an inspiration.”
Forcing down a piece of raisin toast, Tildy was more despondent than before, and tangled in questions. Had Karl become truly demented, past all hope? Did he belong in a hospital? Was humoring him this way really the kindest choice? And why, when he’d said to her, “You don’t even want to believe in me,” had this accusation been so painful?
By nine they were parked at the head of Gardenville Road, shivering in silence marred only by the idling motor. Karl sat slumped against the dashboard, fists pressed into his eye sockets, communing with who knew what. His lips were moving. A last prayer? Tildy wished she had it in her to say one too.
“Okay, sugar, let’s move out.”
He was so jaunty it made her want to cry.
“Take it nice and slow. I’ll know it when I see it.”
Like an eager dog Karl thrust head and shoulders out the window, investigating the air with an elevated nose. Mist formed on the windshield. They passed a mobile home park, a chicken farm, the ruins of a church or one-room school.
“Hold it. Yeah, back her on up.”
A wedge of sloping roof visible through the trees, a dormer window with three of four panes broken out, a pair of weedy ruts angling out of sight.
“We’re gettin’ real warm. Can you feel it?”
There were signs of recent activity: fresh tire tracks, saplings bent and broken. Karl scrambled out of the car and searched the brush for further spoor. He found a crushed box, the kind used for takeout sandwiches. The mustard splotch on it was still fresh, hadn’t yet completely hardened. A few feet away, pressed into soft earth and disfigured by bootprints, was a paper sign that said: CRIME SCENE AREA DO NOT ENTER. He held it up for Tildy to read. He shimmied and kicked, a dance to celebrate his vindication.
“Maybe we should come back when it’s dark,” she said, wondering if they were being watched.
“Fuck no.” He was yanking her out the door, pawing her up and down. “I been waitin’ thirty-four years for my big moment. I always knowed a man couldn’t live the life of Karl Gables without some damn compensation comin’ to him. Now here I am after thirty-four years and I ain’t about to wait even another five minutes to finally get my end of the seesaw offa the ground.”
This is going to break his heart, Tildy thought, swaying through the ruts with Karl running in front of her, an awkwardly suspended figure in the frame of the windshield. She cut the engine and waited, listened almost hopefully for the crashing footfalls of the stakeout team sweeping down to intercept them before they got any closer. But there was only a faint sandpapering of wind, the overlapping chirps of two birds contesting territory.
“Come on. I need you to help carry things.”
She took a pick and shovel and a canvas sack they normally used for dirty laundry (“the swag bag,” Karl called it now), and followed helplessly along.
The color and texture of driftwood, the house looked like the setting for a Halloween cartoon. The front door dangled on a single hinge; a few scattered wads of newspaper stood out against the spongy darkness, nothing more. Karl ripped up one of the buckled porch slats and dropped to his haunches, studying the heavy skies. He dug around with the stick at the edges of the foundation, crumbled a chunk of earth in his hand, sifted it.
“They told me, ‘down in the leaves.’ No point messin’ in there.” He threw the stick into the black mouth of the doorway. “Somewhere under us,” and he put his ear to the ground.
Tildy shivered and buttoned up her sweater. This would be a vigil. She had turned away; Karl’s arms curled around her from behind, his nose cold on the back of her neck.
“Don’t be mad with me, baby. You’ll see.”
He clapped on the earphones, fiddled briefly with the tuning and volume controls, and began a preliminary sweep with his metal detector. Ten feet from the porch, beeps came loud and fast. He made a few circles of the area, homing in on where the signal was loudest, then took up the smaller shovel and began digging. Minutes later, he pulled out the bottom part of a kerosene lamp; an earthworm hung from its rust-chewed edge.
“At least you know the machine’s working right,” Tildy said helpfully.
But two hours later her supply of comforting words was running low. There were holes in front of the house, in back of the house, along the sides. Karl had worked painstakingly at first, scooping out round, smooth-edged cavities and mounding dirt neatly to one side, but the last ragged few looked like shell craters with dirt flung in all directions. The booty so far included a screwdriver, two spoons, a paint can and a faucet. The chill had settled in for the day, but Karl was perspiring heavily and had peeled down to his undershirt.
“In the leaves,” he muttered.
She could not bring herself to look at him.
He stood with one foot resting on the edge of the porch, leaning over with his chest supported on the bent knee. “The man that won’t be beaten can’t be beaten.” He was gasping for air. “And I won’t. No, I won’t.”
Karl sprang onto the porch, took one step toward that yawning door and his foot crashed through rotten wood. Foundering, he landed on his side, twisted, and splinter-teeth gouged his ankle. Tildy rushed to him, but he diverted her with a ferocious snarl, and turning very slowly lifted the foot free. Red blood seeped through a torn white sock, and lodged by its stem under crisscrossed shoelaces, a thin round of dead brown — a leaf.
Karl pitched his head back and yodeled with joy. “See that? I’m right on top of it.”
“What? What?”
“There’s a leaf on my shoe.” Reaching for it with quivering fingers, “Lord, I’m gonna kiss this leaf.”
And so he did, with the hungry gratitude of a man saved from drowning. Then he reached into the hole his foot had made and tossed up a great profusion of leaves that sailed and propellered down the air to land all around him like banknotes at the climax of a crime film.