Wormfood

I stopped looking for Grandpa’s grave and concentrated on the job at hand. Get the job done and get out, this had become my new mantra. Just get it over with and get home.

The Johnson family had its own corner of the cemetery, even had a wicked little spiked fence to keep out the undesirables. We carefully straddled the fence and climbed onto a wide concrete slab that had been poured over the top of Earl and Slim’s parents. Once on top of the slab, we rested for a moment, staring into the dark water under the canopy. Oddly enough, while Junior and Bert and me fought to catch our breath, panting and bent over, bracing our hands on our knees, Fat Ernst seemed the least tired. I had never seen him with that much energy. He paced the length of the slab, maybe seven, eight feet at the most, chewing on his wet cigar and slapping his hands together. “All right then, gentlemen. Let’s get to it. There’s at least fifteen, maybetwenty, twenty-five thousand bucks down there waiting for us. All we gotta do is dig down six goddamn feet and grab it. That’s it. Easiest goddamn money you ever made. Come on, let’s move it.”

“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 begi

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 co

“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 go

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 fu

“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 ru

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 pla