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"Back entrance." Campos grunted. Leaving the motor on, he got out of the cab and walked forward to investigate the lock on the gate.
"Hoo-hoo," Mrs. Klapper said. "Back entrance. We come in with the groceries, huh?"
"It's easier this way," Mr. Rebeck explained. "They always have someone on duty at the main entrance, Campos says."
Campos flicked the padlock casually with his forefinger and went around to the back of the truck. He returned a moment later, carrying a crowbar, which he fitted into the hasp of the lock. Without preamble, he placed both hands on the crowbar and pushed down. He actually rose on his toes and threw his whole weight on the bar. The long muscles of his wrists and forearms swelled briefly, and then the lock flew apart with a sound like that of a spoon being dropped into a glass. Campos opened the gate wide and came back toward the truck.
"My God!" Mrs. Klapper said in the whisper she ordinarily reserved for hurricanes and quadruplets. "Rebeck, my God, didn't he ever go to school? What are we doing here?"
"There was no other way to get in." Mr. Rebeck was a little worried himself. Having broken his own lock, he would have broken a good many more to bring Laura to Michael, but he was begi
Mrs. Klapper was considering it. "For that kind of thing," she muttered as Campos climbed back into the cab, "for that kind of thing they put you in jail and eat the key for breakfast."
"It can't be that bad," Mr. Rebeck said, sure that it was.
"No? Rebeck, I don't think they even let you get mail. They probably read you the newspaper once a month."
And so they drove through the Mount Merrill Cemetery, staring ahead in the cottony dark for a place to bury Laura Durand. In time they found one, a rather arid patch of land with a few small graves around it, and none close by. It would have been good, Mr. Rebeck thought, to bury her close to Michael's grave, but it would have been merely a nice gesture, and the dead do not appreciate the importance of gestures to the living.
Campos marked out the lines of the grave with the edge of his spade and began to dig. Mr. Rebeck and Mrs. Klapper sat in the cab, Mr. Rebeck's offer of help having been silently refused. For a long time neither of them said anything. They watched Campos standing ankle deep, calf deep, knee deep in the earth, hurling the dirt over his shoulder with an odd, blind twist of his body. Dawn was not near yet, but the dark had softened as the stars went out, so that Campos was no longer the black shape that waits where man thinks his destiny should be standing; he was just Campos, no one's friend, digging a grave for Laura for his own reasons, or for no reason at all.
Presently Mrs. Klapper looked at Mr. Rebeck and said thoughtfully, "You know, Rebeck, this whole thing is crazy. Everything. Look, it's after four in the morning, the sun's going to come up soon. Everybody's going to wake up. I'm an old woman, I should be waking up too. So instead I'm sitting in a graveyard in a truck, at four in the morning, watching King Kong tearing up the grass, and waiting for the police to come along. Rebeck, for you maybe this is not crazy, God alone knows. For me, believe me, this is crazy."
"I know," Mr. Rebeck said, wanting to tell her about Laura and Michael, and knowing that it was the one thing he could never tell her. "But it really is a last favor to a friend. Someday I'll tell you about it, if I can."
Mrs. Klapper shrugged. "Tell me, don't tell me. I believe you. It's too late not to believe you. Anyway, Rebeck, when you are my age you find out it doesn't make any difference if you don't believe something somebody said to you. Who cares? It leaves you with nothing. A woman my age has no choice. Believe. Who knows, maybe it'll come out right."
She pushed her thick hair back from her forehead and scavenged frantically in her purse, trying to hold back a sneeze until she found a handkerchief. Watching her at the especially unbecoming moment, Mr. Rebeck felt his heart grow warm for her. Wanting his features to show at least something of this, he contorted them into an awkward smile.
"You're not old," he said quietly.
Mrs. Klapper smiled then, rubbing the back of her neck, her eyes half closed.
"I know it," she said happily. "You think I could say I was if I was?"
Then Campos was finished digging the grave, and the rest was all three of them lowering the coffin into the hole and Mr. Rebeck helping Campos fill the grave with earth and stamp it smooth. Watching them hopping and prancing under the blue dark, big scarecrow, little scarecrow, Mrs. Klapper burst out laughing. "Like the kids in the candy store," she said.
No matter how flat they tried to make it, how flush with the ground, it looked like a grave where no grave should be. They could only hope that no Mount Merrill official would pass that way until the ground had settled. The winter would freeze it and frost the turned-up brown earth to the color of the earth around it, and in spring the ferny wild grass would grow on Laura's grave, hiding it and warming it.
"Anyway, it's got no headstone to give it away," Mr. Rebeck said. He paused and added, "Isn't it strange? Laura will be buried here and no one in the world will know it except us. Everybody will see her headstone in the Yorkchester Cemetery and think she is buried there. And for them it will be just as if she were."
"People don't know," Campos said surprisingly. He leaned on his spade, sweating again, but breathing easily. "The stone's all they want. Put up a stone, tell them their mother's buried under it. That's all they want. They go to the stone and say, Sorry, Ma, I'm a bastard. Makes no difference."
They walked slowly to the truck, but Mr. Rebeck kept turning to look back at the grave. He did not really expect to see Laura spring lightly from the ground, lovely and immortal, and run among the stones until she found the man who loved her, but he would have liked to see them together. There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But the happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead.
Campos drove them back to the gate, which he closed carefully and pointlessly behind them, and then drove the truck down the steep hill. A young couple sat on the porch of one of the houses, talking softly, very close to each other, but not touching. They looked up as the truck passed the house, and then looked away.
"That's the best way in the world to catch cold," Mrs. Klapper said. "Dopes." But she was smiling sleepily.
At the bottom of the hill Campos stopped the truck. Mr. Rebeck and he looked at each other.
"Well?" the big man asked. "You coming back?"
Mr. Rebeck sat quite still. Mrs. Klapper drew her hand from his and waited.
Meeting Campos's passionless eyes, he thought, This man is pure, and as beautifully sterile as all cemeteries. I am neither pure nor sterile. I am infected with life and will die of it in time. Sainthood is not for me, nor wisdom, nor purity. Only pharmacy, and such love as I have not buried and lost. This is a very little out of all a man might have, but it is all a man ever gets. I will sell coltsfoot candy, if there is any left in the world.
So he shook his head and said, "No, Campos."
Campos nodded and started the engine again. Mrs. Klapper climbed out of the truck, but Mr. Rebeck remained behind for a moment.