Coronado - Dennis Lehane [40]
“Told her to tell you that’s all she knew. I’d hid it here. Somewhere here.”
“Lotta ground.”
You nod.
Your father turns so you are facing, his hands crossed over his groin, the gun there, waiting.
“The kinda money that stone’ll bring,” your father says, “a man could retire.”
“To what?” you say.
“Mexico.”
“To what, though?” you say. “Mean old man like you? What else you got, you ain’t stealing something, killing somebody, making sure no one alive has a good fucking day?”
The old man shrugs, and you watch his brain go to work, something bugging him finally, something he hasn’t considered until now.
“It just come to me,” he says, his eyes narrowing as they focus on yours.
“What’s that?”
“You’ve known for, what, three years now that Gwen is no more?”
“Dead.”
“If you like,” your father says. “Dead.”
“Yeah.”
“Three years,” your father says. “Lotta time to think.”
You nod.
“Plan.”
You give him another nod.
Your father looks down at the gun in his hand. “This going to fire?”
You shake your head.
Your father says, “It’s loaded. I can feel the mag weight.”
“Jack the slide,” you say.
He gives it a few seconds, then tries. He yanks back hard, bending over a bit, but nothing. The slide is stone.
“Krazy Glue,” you say. “Filled the barrel too.”
You pull your hand from your pocket, open up the knife. You’re very talented with a knife. Your father knows this. He’s seen you win money this way, throwing knives at targets, dancing blades between your fingers in a blur.
You say, “Wherever you buried her, you’re digging her out.”
The old man nods. “I got a shovel in the trunk.”
You shake your head. “With your hands.”
DAWN IS COMING up, the sky bronzed with it along the lower reaches, when you let the old man use the shovel. His nails are gone, blood crusted black all over the older cuts, red seeping out of the newer ones. The old man broke down crying once. Another time, he got mean, told you you aren’t his anyway, some whore’s kid he found in a barrel, decided might come in useful on a missing-baby scam they were running back then.
You say, “Was this in Las Vegas? Or Idaho?”
When the shovel hits bone, you say, “Toss it back up here,” and step back as the old man throws the shovel out of the grave.
The sun is up now and you watch the old man claw away the dirt for a while and then there she is, all black and rotted, bones exposed in some places, her rib cage reminding you of the scales of a large fish you saw dead on a beach once in Oregon.
The old man says, “Now, what?” and tears flee his eyes and drip off his chin.
“What’d you do with her clothes?”
“Burned ’em.”
“I mean, why’d you take ’em off in the first place?”
The old man looks back at the bones, says nothing.
“Look closer,” you say. “Where her stomach used to be.”
The old man squats, peering, and you pick up the shovel.
Until Gwen, you had no idea who you were. None. During Gwen, you knew. After Gwen, you’re back to wondering.
You wait. The old man keeps cocking and recocking his head to get a better angle, and finally, finally, he sees it.
“Well,” he says, “I’ll be damned.”
You hit him in the head with the shovel, and the old man says, “Now, hold on,” and you hit him again, seeing her face, the mole on her left breast, her laughing once with her mouth full of popcorn, and then the third swing makes the old man’s head tilt funny on his neck, and you swing once more to be sure and then sit down, feet dangling into the grave.
You look at the blackened shriveled thing lying below your father and you see her face with the wind coming through the car and her hair in her teeth and her eyes seeing you and taking you into her like food, like blood, like what she needed to breathe, and you say, “I wish…” and sit there for a long time with the sun beginning to warm the ground and warm your back and the breeze returning to make those tarps flutter again, desperate and soft.
“I wish I’d taken your picture,” you say finally. “Just once.”
And you sit there until it’s almost noon and weep for not protecting her and weep for not being able