Baker jumps with joy. “Eureka!” He pries open the coffin with a chisel and a crowbar. Bright sun enters on a desiccated corpse encased in a wicker-like cage of overgrown fingernails and tangled hair.
Sherry gasps. “Oh, my God.”
Parting the nail-growth, Baker removes a still-ticking watch from the corpse’s skeletal wrist, listens to the ticking a moment, then removes a rusted identification bracelet from the other wrist. Rust has obscured some of the letters. What remains is — arvey. “The ‘H’ is missing,” Baker says. “This is Harvey. He’s worth real money on the alien market.” He peels away the tatters of a suit and shirt. A bullet hole can be seen in the leathery flesh of the stomach area. “The famous gut shot right where it should be. I know who this is. Thank you for your help. We’ll be in touch.”
Kenny holds out his fisted hand, then opens it. “Wait a minute, man. Don’t we get paid something for all this digging?”
“I asked for volunteers, not partners,” Baker says. “You’ll each get fifty yellows.”
Kenny closes his fist again. “The paper says it’s worthless.”
Frightened by Kenny’s aggressive stance, Baker relents. “All right. Fair is fair. We’ll take Harvey to the antiquities office and I’ll pay you in real money, alien money.”
On the outskirts of Witchy Toe, Joe and Sherry carry the front end of the coffin by its handles. Kenny bears the weight of the rear end. Baker walks beside them, but his advanced age begins to slow him down, then stops him altogether. He struggles for breath. “This is killing me.”
They set the coffin down on the shoulder of the road to rest.
Some time later, Baker lies dying on the road, flies crawling on his face, lips parched. “I can’t go on. Take him in and get the money. I’m done for.”
Kenny says, “What I’m wondering is, who’s in this coffin? Whose bones are those and what makes them so fucking valuable?”
Baker doesn’t answer. He’s dead.
A ways from the road is a rickety wooden cistern on rusty steel pilings. From its bottom dangle two alien legs in flight suit and boots, water dripping from them. Atop the topless tower is a parachute waving in the wind.
Joe, Sherry, and Kenny drag the coffin along, exhausted. They don’t notice the dead alien pilot in the cistern.
When they reach the outskirts of Witchy Toe, a sign appears: DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES, followed by an arrow.
A pedal wagon with three coffins stacked in its bed passes them. The pedalers are exhausted.
A new arrival pushing a handcart with a coffin in it nods with a smile as he passes by. “Who you got? I got Sinatra! He’s worth a gazillion.”
“We don’t know,” Joe says. “Somebody named Harvey.”
“Oh, yeah. That’ll get you some green.”
The Antiquities Department is housed in the gymnasium of an abandoned school.
The gym’s original entry doors have been replaced by a solid steel plate.
A long queue of new arrivals, each with at least one coffin in tow, has formed.
Kenny, Joe and Sherry are at the very end of the queue.
A news boy comes by selling City Moons. “Read it and weep. Money plane in fiery crash. Pilot found missing. President cancels money drops. Chaos predicted.”
Joe, Kenny and Sherry have finally reached the head of the line. They lift their coffin onto a conveyor belt that carries it into the building through a second-story window. They wait, listening to the sound of an old-fashioned adding machine. A cellophane-wrapped roll of green money tumbles down a chute like something from a candy dispenser. Sherry scoops it up.
In the lobby of the Terranova, Joe plays his saw to a small crowd, his hat a mere third full.
In the seating area, Kenny and Sherry count their green money. The paper is of such poor quality that the bills stretch and sag like wet dough.
Sherry finishes counting. “I got four hundred.”
Kenny has eight hundred. “Altogether that’s twelve hundred.”
A bright spotlight cuts through the dark, illuminating someone skulking down the aisle of the seating area dressed as Lee Harvey Oswald the day of his arrest in Dallas. The latex Oswald mask is slightly askew. He takes a seat near Kenny and fidgets nervously.
Thirty new arrivals dressed as Dallas police officers circa 1964 storm into the seating area. One of them leads the rest to the stage. Stage lights flare.
An officer shines his flashlight into the audience, face after face, until the beam settles on Oswald. “There he is! Get him!”
Oswald shouts, “This is it!” He pulls a.38 from his jacket and points it at Kenny. “I’ll kill him if you take one more step, you hear me?”
The officers freeze in place.
One of them announces, “He’s armed and dangerous, ladies and gentlemen. He just killed the President.”
A rolling sigh from the audience.
Oswald says, “Let’s go, the three of you. You’re coming with me!” He ushers them up the aisle at gunpoint.
The bright sun dazzles outside the theater. Oswald has on sunglasses. He looks at his Timex watch. A pedal car with a papier mâché body modeled after a 1961 Dallas police cruiser pulls up. An officer hops out, pulls his gun, partially hidden behind the paper car. His nametag says Tippet. “Stop! Or I’ll shoot!” he warns.
Oswald pumps four rounds into the officer, who falls dead without firing a shot, then hurries his hostages into an alley. “Let’s go! Into that alley.”
Kenny has had enough. “Come on, man. The show is over. Leave us alone.”
Joe says, “This is an act, right? This is your job, right?”
Oswald lowers the weapon. “It is, yeah, but I have to do it.” He raises the weapon. “So move!”
He directs them through alleyways, in and out of abandoned buildings, across empty streets and eventually into a manhole leading down to the lamplit ledge of the sewer canal. Now and then they have to dodge or step over large rats. They pass dimly lit cells, occupied beyond capacity with new arrival prisoners passing time languidly, reading books by candlelight, playing harmonica, cleaning fingernails.
They come to an open, well-lit plaza with a modern, clean, glass-fronted bakery. They see the tour boat dock in front and tourists disembark to visit the bakery.
The tour guide speaks gruffly through a bullhorn: “From this ultra-modern bakery come ten-thousand loaves of brown bread every twenty-four hours. This facility, along with the water purification plant we’ll be seeing up the line, provide all the bread and water our prisoners need for good nourishment.”
The last of the tourists enters the bakery.
Oswald waves his weapon. “Okay. Let’s take the boat.”
In the boat, Oswald controls the rudder and fingers his weapon while Joe, Kenny and Sherry pedal. The boat moves at a fair clip until it passes out of the sewer tunnel into the bright sun.
A slight variant of an earlier occurrence in Kenny’s rig. Kenny is drowsy, Joe and Sherry asleep. A highway sign looms in the headlight beam: WELCOME TO KANSAS. In his groggy state, Kenny doesn’t immediately grasp that something is wrong. But when he does, he snaps to alertness, applies the brakes, stops. Joe and Sherry wake up. Kenny backs up, past the sign for another look.
“How’d we get turned around?”
Sherry yawns. “We were in Texas when I fell asleep.”
“And going due south,” Kenny says. “How in the fuck did we end up in Kansas?”
“I told you this would happen,” Joe says. “It happens all the time. People don’t remember is all.”
Kenny shakes his head, truly puzzled. He attempts to turn the rig around on the narrow-shouldered highway, temporarily blocking both lanes.