Unlucky in Law

“What?”

“Stef,” she said again, and then just breathed.

Dark had gathered outside. Yellow lights brightened in the mist. He leaned down to Erin and stroked a strand of hair back from her forehead.

“Forgive me for this,” he whispered. “Never leave me.”

He put on a warm jacket, located the new gardening gloves he had bought, and stuffed them in his pocket. Outside, he pulled tools from the shed where Erin stored things for her landscaping jobs: a shovel, a pick, a few other things that he thought might come in handy. He tossed them into the trunk of his Honda Civic.

A few cars passed, and every one made him jump. One slowed down as it passed, and he regretted not making sure the light had been out above the shed, but in the dark, he couldn’t make the car out, and in the end, he decided it didn’t matter. What he had to do was macabre, yeah, but not wrong, exactly.

Who was there to care about an old man dead for decades? The only people who might care didn’t, as far as he could tell.

Stefan patted the wallet in his pocket. He needed this money. Erin wouldn’t have to pay the rent again this month, and with what was left over, plus what was to come, he could buy something for her that he had wanted to buy for a long, long time.

He took Del Monte Avenue as it curved around the bottom of the bay, passing the wharf and the Doubletree I

Driving around the perimeter of the cemetery, he looked for a hidden place to park nearby. The cemetery boundaries didn’t include any good private places, so he pulled into the lot at De

Stefan checked his watch, discovering it was just past midnight, then pawed through the back seat until he found the flashlight. From the trunk he pulled out the shovel and pick, which he pushed into the army-surplus duffel bag he had brought. Walking along the boundary of the cemetery, the bag slung on a long strap over his arm, he watched for cops, taking in the sounds of the night, amazed at how vivid white clouds looked against the black sky. In spite of his black jeans and black polo shirt, he felt bright as a peacock.

Avoiding the gate with its pointed metal shafts, and the open side around the corner that had no wall but seemed too exposed, he threw the bag over the six-foot wall, listening for the soft clank as it hit ground on the other side. He cast one last look at the street. Bums and dopers sometimes hung out at the picnic tables across the street, but he couldn’t see anyone. Still, he definitely felt watched.

The ghosts aren’t happy to see me, he thought.

He had meant to cheer himself up, but this joke had the opposite effect. Childish fears woke up and started working on him.

Maybe this wasn’t illegal. Was it? It was trespassing, sure, but was it more? He didn’t want to break any laws, not only because he had promised Erin, but because he always got caught. He was a poor risk. Whether you believed in the system or not, there was power behind it, and you were the little guy getting squeezed like a juice box if it took hold of you.

He fingered the little Buddha Erin had given him to wear around his neck, saying it might help avoid the bad luck that followed him around everywhere like an evil little brother.

Stefan had always had bad luck. If he used a meter, it expired before he could finish his business, and the meter maid would show up in a bad mood. If he so much as palmed a ballpoint pen after signing a credit-card receipt at the store, the clerk ran after him to get it back.

Five hundred dollars in my pocket, he told himself. More to come when the job is done. Now, that’s good luck.

Grabbing a tree limb, he got his boots onto the rough wall and dropped into the cemetery, landing on wet grass. He was on the end near the corner, roughly in position. Turning the flashlight on, he skulked off the path among the graves, hunting for the headstone he had scoped out two days before. At first he stepped gingerly between the stones, but then he loosened up, thinking, The people aren’t under the stones. They’re stretched out in front of their stones, right where I’m walking.

Some of these flat stones were a hundred years old. The groomed green grass and silk flowers kept the place-well, not pretty, but kind of sweet during the day, but in the dark, they became brown blobs that could trip him if he wasn’t careful.

He looked for an odd marker, one with two straight parallel boards at the top and, below, a crooked, slanty one. He flashed on the headstones, on the strange names and lettering. Why did so many Russian people come to Monterey, he wondered, enough of them to rate their own neighborhood of the dead?

After what seemed like forever, he found a funky headstone marking the right name. Unlike most of the graves here, this one had a concrete rim and contained just muddy dirt and gravel instead of a grass surface. Opening his case, he pulled out the pick, swallowing hard. He swung it back and when it hit dirt it buried itself right up to the shaft in the damp ground.

Stopping, he looked around. The nearby graves did not open. No bony fingers pushed up the stones. He could smell the kelpy waters of Monterey Bay on the breeze, hear the street traffic, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that some things didn’t sound natural. Standing with the shovel poised over dirt, he listened hard, heart pounding even though he hadn’t even started digging.

Dead means dead. Don’t start thinking about it.

Working furiously, Stefan assaulted the soil next to the complicated gravestone. As he dug, his body warmed up. The chunk-chunk of the shovel covered up what the wind did to the trees and bushes around him, and to his heartbeat.

Once his eyes adjusted, not daring to leave his light on for long, he turned it off and went mostly by feel. He dug as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast.

When they were both young, he used to dig holes with Gabe. He remembered trying to dig to China, and ending up with a shallow hole in the grass, and his mom pitching a fit.

He had a few good memories mixed in with the bad ones. When his brother had gotten sick, that was bad. Gabe would lie in bed, pasty white, listless, while their mom rushed around to doctors looking for hope. Sometimes Mom looked at Stefan, and even though she tried to hide it, he saw her outrage that it was Gabe who had gotten sick, and not him. Gabe was her favorite, born loved and deserving of success, with Stefan the sidekick goofball who slipped on banana peels when there weren’t any.

But Gabe got cured, and Stefan was proud that he had been able to help him with that. Now look at Gabe, Mom’s gold-star boy, making decent money and taking her out for Mother’s Day next month to some fancy restaurant in San Francisco. And check out her younger boy, out here in the cold, digging up a dead body, getting a rhythm going, panting, liking the exercise and finding the work remarkably easy. This dirt wasn’t hard; in fact, it was strangely uncompacted, considering the guy had been buried for over twenty-five years. That heavy rain last night must have softened the ground a lot.

Gabe would never have agreed to do this. Mom always said Gabe got the smarts and Stefan got the muscles. Stefan didn’t necessarily agree. He had ideas, lots of them, as many as Gabe. He would like to start a business someday, where he could work outside. He thought he could do better, now that he had Erin. He had someone who respected him, who thought he came first.