“You start digging then,” Junior said, still catching his breath.
“You know I got a heart condition. So quit your bitching and get to work.”
Junior picked up both shovels and violently tossed one to me, and we got to work. The beginning was the hardest. We stabbed the shovels blindly into the water, wrenching great, dripping piles of sludge out of the mud and slopping it over to the side. Eventually, Junior and I built up a sort of wide, low wall around the area where we guessed the grave was. The pain in my side receded into a dull ache that I knew would hurt like hell tomorrow. Fat Ernst carefully lowered the submersible pump into the water and plugged it into the extension cord. Junior adjusted the plastic hose so the water was pumped out over the little dike we had built. I was hoping for a break while the grave was being drained, but Fat Ernst wasn’t in a break kind of mood.
We pried more sludge out of the hole. I dug until my back and arms were screaming for relief; blisters rose up on my palms almost instantly, breaking and oozing from the rough wooden handle and the silt. We kept at it, settling into a ragged rhythm of digging and lifting. Bert hummed the theme to some other TV show for a few minutes. I think it was The Munsters, but Bert wasn’t very good. Fat Ernst finally slapped him on the back of the head and that shut him up. Fat Ernst didn’t say much either, just kept pacing back and forth, mincing along in the rain as if he were being forced into some formal dance and had to take a leak really bad.
We kept digging, excavating a square hole roughly six feet wide and six feet long. The pump died when we were about four feet down. The motor started in with this hiccupping whine for a while, then simply stopped. There was only thick mud coming out of the end of the plastic hose at that point anyway. Junior unplugged the pump andthrew it out of the grave. Fat Ernst ignored it. We kept going, lifting out shovelfuls of mud that had the consistency of wet concrete and slapping it over the dam around the hole, until I couldn’t feel my arms anymore, couldn’t feel my hands, and the only thing I could hear was the sucking, squelching sounds as each bite was taken out of the earth and splashed over the wall.
It wasn’t too long after mud strangled and killed the pump that Junior’s shovel hit something solid. He pulled it out, tried again. The blade sank into the muck nearly up to the handle, and this time there was no mistaking the sound, like a baseball bat cracking a rock under water. I stabbed my own shovel into the mud and, sure enough, felt the tingling jolt up my dead arms when it connected with something solid.
“That’s it,” Fat Ernst whispered in a tight voice. “That. Is. Mother. Fucking. It.”
CHAPTER 21
Without a word, Junior and I kept digging, holding the shovels sideways as we scraped mud out of the hole, flinging it away in looping, uneven arcs out into the rain and darkness.
It didn’t take long to figure out we had hit the concrete shell that held the coffin. I stood back while Junior went to work with the sledgehammer, pulverizing the cement lid. Within minutes, the rough slab collapsed around the coffin. I started throwing chunks of concrete out of the grave.
About three feet of the casket extended into the hole; the rest was buried under the south wall. We had been close, but we hadn’t dug down directly on top of the whole thing. It looked like we had found the top end, because I could see the seam where the lid was cut in half, in case you felt like lifting it up and saying goodbye during the funeral.
Fat Ernst had to wake Bert up by slapping him on the back of the head again. But once he was awake, even Bert could see that we were getting close, and he took his job seriously, kneeling at the top of the dike and holding the lantern out over the hole.
“All right, then.” Junior said, and stuck his shovel into the mud and left it there. “Gimme that crowbar.”
Fat Ernst thrust the three-foot bar into the hole, nearly crunching my skull in the process. “Do it. Pop that bitch open.”
“Oh that’s what I’m gonna do all right,” Junior said in a velvet, seductive voice as he felt along the edges of the coffin. “Gonna pop your sweet little cherry like a virgin on prom night. That’s right, baby.”
I backed into the far corner, giving Junior some space as he got romantic with the coffin. He found a spot he liked, along the side and near the grooved seam along the top. He took the crowbar and jammed it up under the overhanging lip on the side, then wrenched it down in a rushed, savage motion. The wedged tip snapped clean out of the groove and flipped up and popped Junior in the nose. He went back against the side of the pit, landing hard, and before he had even burbled out “Mudderfugger,” blood started gushing out of his flattened nostrils as if somebody had cranked open a faucet.
“Shake it off,” Fat Ernst commanded.
Junior didn’t do much except make fists, little grabbing motions in the air in front of his face, and blink rapidly.
“That must hurt like hell,” I said.
“Popped your cherry,” Bert said, and I guess that struck him as particularly funny, because he started giggling uncontrollably, and the lantern started to shake, throwing our huge shadows around the hole like lurching giants.
“Come on, come on,” Fat Ernst said. “We’re almost there. Quit fucking around.”
Junior blinked a few more times and shook his head, spraying blood all over the place. With a tremendous, “You fucking fuck!” he raised the crowbar above his head and brought it down on the coffin with all his strength. The impact left a slight dent and made a hollow boom, but that was all. This pissed Junior off even more, and he attacked the coffin in ferocious spasms, flailing away at it like an old blind woman trying to kill a rattlesnake with her cane.
Finally, he gave up, exhausted and spent. Blood was still running freely from his nose, but Junior ignored it and stared at the coffin like he was trying to scare it into opening. “Gimme that sledgehammer.”
Fat Ernst dropped it into the hole. Junior bent over the coffin, inspecting the dents and grooves that he had inflicted on the lid. Sliding his finger along the seam where the lid was cut in half, he found a small notch, a chip broken out of the surface. “There we go,” he whispered.
He caressed the notch, then gently worked the blade of the crowbar into the narrow space. “Hold this,” Junior said to me, indicating the bar. He held it upright, directly in the center of the lid, as if he was about to stake a vampire.
I did what I was told, firmly grabbing the cold steel with both hands, holding it snug into the little chipped space. If I had realized what Junior was planning, I probably wouldn’t have been so quick to grab the damn thing, because he stepped back, swinging the sledgehammer up and over his head. He said, “Watch it,” and smashed the hammer flat down on top of the crowbar in a tiny burst of sparks and stinging chips of metal. The jolt vibrated up my arms into my chest and it felt as though I had grabbed hold of an electric fence. I’m lucky I didn’t let go, and managed to keep the crowbar in an upright position, because the second blow came just as fast. I stepped as far away from the coffin as I could, holding the crowbar with one straight arm. Junior kept whipping the sledgehammer over his head and swinging it down, like he was working on a railroad, driving iron spikes into solid rock.