Kings of the Earth: A Novel (18 page)

DeAlton

T
ELL YOU THE TRUTH
I liked it better before you threw all that yellow on it. You had something before. You had something that belonged in a museum.

I’m not kidding. You’ve got to be future-minded. You’ve got to take the long view.

I know. You’ve got a point. Maybe someday but not now. You park that thing outside the Everson Museum in Syracuse they’d just haul it away even if it still had all that psychedelic shit on it. They don’t know the value of anything.

But I still don’t think you’ve done it any favors with that yellow paint. Or yourself either, as far as that goes.

So what do you want for it?

Fuck. You must be crazier than you look, and that’s saying something.

Hey. You know I don’t mean anything by it. Not after all we’ve been through.

Good. That makes me feel better.

I know you know.

So what’d you pay for it new or whatever?

Christ Almighty. You must have been plenty high.

Yes, sir, I knew you then and I know you now.

You missed a spot above that taillight. Right there.

And these days it doesn’t even hardly run. I’m surprised you got it into the barn. Tell you the truth I don’t see how you’re going to get out from underneath it.

That tire’s almost bald right there. And the other one too now I look at it. Plus you could get high just sniffing the seat cushions. You probably don’t notice it anymore but I don’t know how you’ll ever get that smell out. You’re going to need yourself one understanding customer. You’re going to need one majorly
simpático
dude.

Oops. There’s another spot you missed right there.

All right. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we add up what I owe you, take away a hundred for my trouble, and see if we can’t work out something that doesn’t hurt either one of us too much.

I know. I know.

Hey, it’s your choice. You wait, though, you’ll end up paying somebody else to haul it away. Plus if this thing gets in the wrong hands you’re in deep shit.

Jesus. Have you ever even thought about running a Shop-Vac through it? A broom? You ever emptied the ashtray? That’s what they call evidence, pure and simple. Don’t you doubt it for a minute.

All right. Good. This is your lucky day, old buddy. Be glad I came along when I did.

Preston

Y
OU NEED A SPECIAL LICENSE
to drive a school bus. It’s not a Class A, I don’t think, but it’s something like it. Not the same level as what you need for driving a semi truck but it’s on that order, on account of the technology’s different from a family car. The gearbox mainly. So you could have just about knocked me over when I came around front on the riding mower and saw that yellow school bus stuck in the turn and DeAlton at the wheel. At least he wasn’t hauling kids. He nearly tipped it over in the ditch.

We had a circus getting it out. I mean three rings. It took all five of us and the tractor and the Buick I was driving then. We could have used the horse if she’d still been with us but she wasn’t. Audie drove the tractor. He always had a touch for it and even now, when he can’t see so good, he still gets the fussy work. One of these days he’s going to run that thing into the woods and kill himself, but he hasn’t done it yet.

A state trooper came along at one point and asked if we could use any help but DeAlton waved him on. The trooper volunteered to get up in the bus and steer if we wanted but he said no thanks, we could handle it ourselves. DeAlton looked a whole lot cooler to that state trooper than he did to the rest of us. He made it seem like we had the whole operation under control, which if you know the Proctor boys was questionable to say the least. I think the way he spoke so cool to that trooper gave Creed and Vernon a little faith that we might actually get the job done, so that was all right.

It took the better part of the afternoon and we lost the passenger side mirror on a fence post, but we got that bus up the dirt lane and put it behind the barn. We hoisted up one end and then the other with a block and tackle so we could take the tires off and set it down square on the dirt. Dug it out a little on the front end where it was high. DeAlton said you could live in it if you wanted to or you could keep chickens in it or maybe turkeys. He said if his uncles wanted to look at it the right way he’d just expanded their living quarters by a hundred percent. They could sleep on the benches. Pipe heat out from the stove. He thought I could probably help with that and I guess I could have if it hadn’t been the dumbest idea I’d ever heard.

Vernon asked him what a valuable addition like this was worth and DeAlton said he thought he’d never ask. I’d have gotten in between them over that deal, but they’re family.

Tom

H
ENRI POPPED THE TRUNK
and then ran around to unscrew the lightbulb from the trunk lid.

“That’s one careful dude,” said Nick.

“He’d been all that careful,” Tom said, “he’d have ditched that bulb already.” Not that he would have thought of it himself, but saying it made him feel superior.

“Still,” said Nick. “You’ve got to respect Henri. He’s a professional.”

They both opened their doors and Tom reached up to switch off the dome light, wishing he’d thought of it about a half a second before. While his eyes readjusted to the darkness he turned to Nick and asked him why Henri had the trunk open anyhow, but Nick didn’t answer. He was gone and the door was closing behind him. Tom put one leg out onto the gravel and then remembered to get the Baggie from the glove box, which wasn’t easy in the pitch dark and with as much beer as he had in him. He hoped there were some rolling papers in there but he couldn’t remember.

When he got out Nick already had the VW’s hatch open. He looked at Nick in the light that bounced off the lake from the stars and asked him what he was doing and Nick said wasn’t it obvious. He couldn’t take that shit home on his motorcycle now could he. There was a little bit more than would fill up the saddlebags in case he hadn’t noticed. And sure enough there was. Over behind the Caddy, Henri had switched on a little penlight and was passing it over a trunkful of grass. Bricks of it in plastic wrap and bales of it in burlap sacks. There must have been two hundred pounds, maybe more. Nick got an eyeful and nodded his head once, and Henri cut the light. He clearly wasn’t interested in whatever little bit of dope Tom might have wanted to talk about.

Ruth

T
HE SUMMER PASSES
and her sons cut the hay and bring it in and the late rains wash the low hummock of her grave. Rivulets run from it. Grass sprouts up and weeds. In the woods the leaves turn and fall. Preston Hatch comes up with a garden rake over his shoulder and a pocketful of seed, and he roughs up the earth of the grave and he plants grass. He gleans hay from the cut field and he covers the seed over. He bows his head and he says a prayer but not for rain. That much he counts on without reservation, and snow too, with the changing of the seasons.

When the monument man comes up the dirt lane he stops at the house next door as the more promising of the two. It has been raining lightly all afternoon and he is in a foul mood for having to work in it. He has a ball cap and a three-day growth of beard and a cigar screwed in between his teeth like a carriage bolt. Margaret comes to the door when he knocks, and without even withdrawing the cigar or saying that he is sorry for her loss he asks which way to the stone. She points up the hill. Then she points to the Proctor house and advises him to go there first, since it isn’t her grave and it wasn’t her mother who passed away to fill it. It was theirs. Their mother and their grave. And he’d better learn to feign a respectful measure of sympathy if he plans to be spending his time among the bereaved.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and he touches his cigar to the brim of his ball cap and leaves.

The brothers are in the barn. He goes to them without moving the truck, his feet sticking in the barnyard mud, and they come out to meet him halfway. Which of them has made out the words on his truck will stay a mystery.

“Whyn’t we go on in,” he says when they have made their introductions. Tilting his head toward the barn.

“Not with that seegar lit up,” says Creed. Just like that.
Seegar
.

“Sorry,” says the monument man, extracting the cigar and hiding it behind his back and blowing smoke leeward from the corner of his mouth. “I should know some folks don’t care for the stink.” It is the first sympathy he has shown. “My own wife, for example.”

“It ain’t that.”

“I don’t hardly notice it myself.”

“It ain’t the smell,” Creed says. “You don’t want no fire in a hay barn.” He laughs either at the idea of it or at the monument man’s ignorance. Maybe both.

The monument man looks over at the barn as if a sprinkling of hot ashes might do it a world of good.

“You’re welcome to chew if you want,” Vernon says. Showing his own wrecked teeth.

“That’s all right,” says the monument man. “I got work to do anyhow.” He sticks the cigar back between his teeth and he yanks down his ball cap to shield it against the rain, and then he walks back to the truck.

He drives up through the pasture to the edge of the little graveyard. He pulls around to the wooded side of it where there is more protection from the weather and less chance the tires might get stuck if the rain gets any worse. It sure does seem to be settling in. A wind has risen from the east. He gets out of the cab and compares the stencil he cut in accordance to his father’s old records against the lettering already on the stone and decides it’s all right, and satisfied he takes a towel and rubs the stone dry and marks it and mounts the stencil to the face of it with rubber cement. He masks off the stone around the stencil and puts down tarps to catch the sandblasting compound. The air compressor he leaves in the truck bed since he has plenty of hose.

It won’t be a long job. Just the two digits. He can’t afford to waste effort on it because his father sold these packages complete and now that the old man is in the ground himself the time and materials are coming straight out of his own pocket. The old man probably made five or six of his long solitary fishing trips to Saranac Lake on the work his son has yet to finish. It’s all there in the contracts, so there isn’t a thing he can do about it. If there’s anything these old-timers know how to hang on to it’s the paperwork for a headstone. He’s learned that lesson once or twice.

He preps the sandblaster and puts his goggles and his gloves on, and he knocks the dirt out of his respirator and puts that on too. He takes off one glove to check that the stencil is glued down tight and won’t go anywhere or leak compound around the edges and ruin the stone. He puts the glove back on, then he goes back to the truck and pulls the rope on the compressor. Beneath the sound of it he picks up the shuddering gun and kneels on the tarp he’s spread over the grave and squeezes back the trigger.

For a moment it’s raining everything. Water and sandblasting compound and pulverized granite. Against the onslaught the monument man settles his mind and counts steadily, metronomic by long practice, and moves the gun evenly across the face of the rock. One pass and he releases the trigger and then another pass from the other direction. After this second pass he stops and puts the gun down and sprays water from an Indian pump over the stencil and assesses the cut. His father would have disconnected the gun and blown the cut clean with compressed air but he is not his father and he hates to waste motion and it’s raining anyhow. Once he is satisfied as to his progress he begins again, confident that he knows within a pass or two how many it will take to finish. Thinking as he goes that he knows of no work more permanent than this. Wondering will his own children take it up when he is through, but thinking it unlikely.

He releases the trigger and rubs a fist over his goggles and turns to look left, down the hill toward the house and the barn, where amid the fierce cloud of grit and granite borne downwind like the locusts of old he spies a single figure upright. The voiceless brother. His hands covering his face and his elbows lifted up like wings. Enduring the torrent of rain and rock. The monument man nods to him in acknowledgment of whatever might have brought him here, mistrust or curiosity or even love, and then he turns once more to finish his work.

Preston

I
BLAME
my own impatience. If I’d waited to plant the grass until after they’d come to put the year on the stone I don’t guess I’d have had to do it twice. But to tell the truth it seemed like they weren’t ever going to come. And then it’d been winter and what then. So I planted it once and it began to come up pretty well and then they came to work on the stone and it got all trampled down again and I had to do it over. I didn’t mind. You owe some things to the dead even if they’re not your own dead. I guess in some way they’re all your own.