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It’s a good thing I thought of the commercial construction grade oxygen masks. The fumes from the acid would be enough to not only make us sick, but they could roast the interior lining of our lungs. Or what would my son the doctor call them? Air sacks? The fumes might even kill us if exposed for too long. That in mind, we act fast, the two of us working together to open the jugs and pour all of the acid onto the bodies. When we’re done, the tub is full to the brim, and the bodies are already disintegrating, turning the clear liquid a distinct shade of dark red. The acid even begins to bubble, boil, and hiss, like a witch’s brew.
Since there’s nothing left to be done, Joanne and I step out of the bathroom, close the door behind us, remove our masks.
“How long do you think it will take, Jo?” I ask.
My forehead is coated with beads of sweat where the rubber seal on the mask covered it.
“I don’t know really,” she says. “In the TV show I watched, they cut to a commercial. And then when it resumed...”
She uses the back of her hand to wipe away the perspiration on her own forehead. Her face has taken on a sort of curious expression. Not a confused expression. But more like she just realized something she should have realized earlier. Or, said another way, she just thought of a crucial detail that should have hit her over the head earlier.
Her eyes suddenly go wide.
“Oh shit,” she says.
Forcing the mask back on her face, she goes to the bathroom, throws the door open, steals a quick look.
Abruptly about-facing, she screams, “Bradley, hit the deck!”
It begins as a rumble, then proceeds to an almost painful roar as the house trembles and bucks like it’s about to slide off its foundations. It’s like we’re suddenly caught up in an earthquake. Only we don’t have earthquakes in Upstate New York. Not like they have in Los Angeles or San Francisco anyway. I find myself down on my belly along with Joanne when the bathroom explodes.
A second explosion inside the basement immediately follows. Unlike the bathroom blast, this one isn’t like a bomb has detonated. It’s more like a truck just drove through our front picture window, dropped through the wood floor and crashed, grill first, into the concrete cellar.
“What the hell was that, Jo!?” I bark, raising myself onto my knees and then onto my feet.
Joanne slowly stands.
“We should have used the fifty-gallon tub after all,” she says, eyes wide, her voice strained and shocked.
“Why?!”
“I forgot one crucial element to the story.”
“What crucial element?”
“Our bathtub,” she says. “It has problems draining.”
“So what?” I say, shaking my head. “The pipes are way too old. We can’t afford to replace them.”
She shakes her head and furrows her brow like I’m not getting her point.
“Don’t you see, Bradley?” she says. “Those pipes are crusted with Drano.”
“Drano,” I repeat while my already spinning brain begins to figure out where she’s going with this. The imaginary lightbulb positioned over my head lights up. “Drano combined with acid, makes the bathtub go boom.”
“Excellent deduction for a mailman,” Joanne says.
Together we just stand stone stiff while our eyes focus on the giant hole in the floor that used to be our vestibule bathroom. Toxic fumes are now rising up from the basement. I put my mask back on. Joanne does the same.
“I guess we’d better head down to the basement and see what kind of mess awaits us,” I say.
“You go first,” Joanne says.
So, first, the good news. The bodies (and yes, the body parts), are almost entirely dissolved, save for a few bones and teeth here and there (a couple gold teeth are to be found to my delight). But now for the bad news. Not only is the upstairs bathroom a total loss, but the still active acid is also even creeping into the basement concrete floor. If we let it go on for much longer, we’ll be digging ourselves a real hole.
But that’s when the second imaginary lightbulb goes off over my head.
“We need to figure out a way to start cleaning this stuff up,” Joanne says, her tone agitated if not downright annoyed. “But how?”
“Relax, Jo,” I say, a sly grin forming on my face. “Let the acid continue doing its work. When that portion of the concrete slab is completely dissolved, we’ll dig a shallow grave for what’s left of the bodies. I’ll spread the lime over it and then fill the grave back in with the loose dirt. After that, I’ll head back to the Lowe’s, buy some ready-mix concrete, and replace the floor.”
“And then what? If the police come sniffing around they’ll see we put in a brand new concrete floor. What if they see our exploded bathroom? They’ll get suspicious. As it is, you already got pulled over by the police. They saw all the stuff you picked up at Lowe’s.”
“We’re gonna renovate the bathroom and the basement. We have the money to do it now. No one will ever be the wiser because who would suspect a couple mild mannered, way past their prime, lower middle class, innocent folks like us of murdering two inner city gangsters and keeping their stash of drugs and cash?”
“We didn’t murder them, Bradley,” Joanne is quick to correct. “It was an accident that was brought on by their very erratic if not downright dangerous driving.”
“How many times did you drive over the one fella?” I ask. “And the gun that shot the bullet that killed the second fella didn’t go off all by itself, Jo.”
She smirks. “I was defending myself. You would have done the same thing. Or maybe not.”
“And yet here we are,” I say.
Just then, a sound like a giant egg cracking. The concrete floor has dissolved to the extent that the center of the slab has cracked and is now giving way to a long, open trench that’s only getting wider by the second. It’s exactly what I want to happen. Turning, I bound back up the wooden basement stairs.
“Where are you going?” my wife asks.
“I need a shovel and the pickaxe,” I say. “We need to bury what’s left of the bodies.”
A shovel and what used to be my late dad’s pickaxe in hand, I once more head down into the basement. My breathing is a bit labored with the oxygen mask still on, and me not being in the best of shape, the Plexiglas shield is getting a little fogged up. But I proceed with chopping up the exposed earth with the axe end of the pickaxe. Meanwhile, Joanne is using an old push broom (also my dad’s) to gather the shards of shattered porcelain bathtub along with the leftover human remains into one giant puddle of blood, bone, and leftover bits of clothing including belt buckles and mostly disintegrated boot soles (she picked out the gold teeth already and stored them in her pocket).
Once I’ve switched the pickaxe for the shovel, I dig out a shallow grave. Hopping back up onto the basement floor, I give Joanne the go-ahead to sweep the remains into it. When she’s done, I spread one full bag of lime over what’s left of the gangsters. I then start on refilling the grave with the loose dirt.
“Wait, Brad,” Joanne says.
I look up at her. “Wait? Wait for what?”
She’s holding onto the broom handle with both hands, her chin resting on them. It’s tough to see her full face through the Plexiglas shield, but I can tell something is bothering her.
“I just feel like we should, you know, say something. Like a prayer or something.”
“Jeeze, Jo,” I say, “who knows how many innocent men, women, and kids these gangsters raped and murdered in their day.”
“Yeah, but they were just boys, Brad. And we are Catholics, even if we don’t go to mass as much as we should.”
As if it will help my thought process, I gaze up at the gaping rectangular hole in the home’s first floor.
“I believe it’s been about three years since we attended church,” I say. “And that was for my old boss’s funeral. May he rest in pieces.”
“But we’re still believers, Bradley. And we’re not getting any younger. Like I said, this whole thing was both an accident and a matter of self-defense. But believe you me, one day we’re going to have to answer for our deeds to a much higher authority than say, the Albany Police Department or the FBI.”
“Okay, okay, Jo,” I say. “I get your point.”
I toss the shovelful of dirt onto the lime covered remains, then stand up straight and make the sign of the cross. Both my hands gripping the shovel, I clear my throat.
“Dear God,” I say, “may you receive the souls of these two young men into your mercy. May you see the good in them, that you may forgive them their trespasses and find a special place for them in your Kingdom. That you might give them peace, love...”
My voice trails off while my eyes shift to Joanne’s. Here’s the thing about three and a half decades of marriage. You don’t need your partner to raise her voice or to even speak real words to know what she’s thinking. It reminds me of an old friend of mine I used to work with at the post office. He comes home from work one afternoon and his wife is standing in front of the big picture window, staring out at something. There’s no dinner cooking, no bottle of wine on the table, nothing. She’s just looking forlornly out the front picture window. She can’t be looking out for him because he’s already in the house. But when she slowly turns to him and offers him a pale faced look like he’s never seen in their twenty-plus years of what he thought was matrimonial bliss, he realizes right away what she’s telling him.
“How long have you been sleeping with him?” he asks, breaking the silence.
“Long enough,” she says, a tear running down her cheek. “I’m so sorry.”
Without another word spoken between the two, he packs up his bags and leaves that very hour.
The point is not about marriage and cheating, it’s about communication. And right now, standing inside that basement with the remains of two gangsters now a permanent part of this humble residence, Joanne and I are communicating loud and crystal clear.
“Oh hell, Lord,” I say, “I hope you send both these guys as far south as you can. We’re awful sorry for killing them, in terms of the Ten Commandments and all that. But if you ask me, they had it coming.”
Joanne smiles.
“Amen,” she says.
“Amen,” I say.
Punching the business end of the shovel into the small dirt pile, I fill in the grave on two gangsters who shall never be heard from again. And aren’t we all just a little bit better for it.