The door to Hernando’s Hideaway stood wide open and Ruben waited behind the bar, among half-full glass bottles time-dulled and chipped. Hugh placed Crusoe on the pine slab and the bartender regarded the dirt boy with no more interest than he might the sunrise.
“What’ll have you stranger?”
“Anything,” Hugh said.
The first drink went down rough. He ordered another. This one easier, the others following it too. Hugh knew he was good-drunk when all sudden he came awake prone against the floor. The Hideaway emptied. He hollered and got no answer except for his own voice. Sawdust covered the left side of his face. A tender lump the size of a quail’s egg on his head. Crusoe was sitting upright beside him. Ruben had nailed a note to the bar asking Hugh to latch the door when he left.
Fog lifted off the river in sheets as he walked its bank, picking through resurrection fern and bleached driftwood gone hard as rock. Here and there broken bottleglass shined blue and green and brown-that-favored-black in the milky moonlight. Hugh fished out pieces worth keeping and tried to forget what he’d done. What he yet had to do.
Instead he thought about his art. The only thing he truly remembered about his first assemblie was the deep-down urge to make it. He turned this memory over and over in his mind, same as the river-smoothed glass in his hand, as he cut toward a drooping wire fence. He hurried across a field full of purple thistle and goldenrod growing up to his waist and taller. Time had passed, summer ending, and still he could hear stone smashing bone, feel the force of impact in his hand. Haunted, he’d gradually quit gathering assemblies. Maybelle was asking what was the matter. What was the matter? He’d had to lay into Velston again after doing in the birthmarked man. The foreman’s leg kept twitching while Hugh reburied the corpses, then the two fresh bodies. About fitting. No, Hugh thought, fitting would of been dragging Velston and the birthmarked man into the river with stones tied around their waists. But they might not stay sunk. Might come back up. He still wasn’t sure whether he’d leave them in the cemetery or carry them over at The Seven with the rest he’d hauled there and buried in a clearing.
He left the overgrown field, sticking to a pinebrake instead of risking trouble on the road. He sensed the stink of death upon hisself and worried Maybelle could too. Hugh felt their time together was marred by his great secret. If he could just finish this undertaking, he thought, then they could start fresh. Beyond the trees a spermy cloudtail passed across the moon’s bruised face. Wild dogs yelped in the not-so-distance. For a moment he got turned around and lost. He asked the dirt boy if he knew where they were and got no answer in return. Eventually he righted hisself and found the path to Freedom Hills.
Partway down the path a long kingsnake slithered out from the groundcover and crossed his boots. Kingsnakes, Caz always said, were good signs—like an owl screeching twice. Once foretold death, three times a marriage, four trouble, five a journey, six the arrival of guests. But twice was a good sign. Hugh tried remembering how many times the owl in the split oak had screeched the morning Loudermilk showed up on The Seven. Once, twice. All Hugh could remember now was the screech the birthmarked man had let out as he brought the stone against his head.
He found Lee Malone out back of his house, sitting with the guitar he called Rosette propped on his lap and a jar of corn liquor on the ground between his bare feet.
“Get a seat,” Lee said, “you son of a bitch.”
He sat on a bucket, Crusoe on his knee. Lee slid over the jar and he took a swallow. They were silent. Both men comfortable with this condition. They preferred each other’s company to anybody’s, from the time they were boys who spent their days catching harmless snakes, swimming butt-naked in copper-colored creeks, racing the valley’s dirt paths till their toenails chipped and bled. Even drew blood one summer and mixed it. Hugh’d never thought twice about how befriending Lee might look to folks in town. Treebornes were apart. Folks in town paid little mind to them. Lee was his brother. Always said they’d do anything for each other. Now he was about to ask Lee to prove this long-ago promise still truth.
“I need help,” he said.
“And folks in hell need a cool drink of water don’t they?” Lee strummed a big open chord. “How’s that my problem buddyroll? I’ll tell you my problem. Them damn fools at Roger’s chucking coins. You believe that? Like them niggers got enough to be chucking in the first place. Acting like it’s the funniest damn thing they ever seen to chuck money at a man while he plays guitar for them.” Lee plucked a few sorry notes then said, “You know, folks liable to think you crazy toting that thing around.”
Hugh ignored this appraisal. “Will you help me or not?”
Lee took another drink. “Depends,” he said. “Saw your picture in the paper. Yankee what’s-his-name about to make you famous, huh.”
“I never said that mess they wrote.” Truth, Hugh didn’t know about the newspaper story till Maybelle mentioned it the night they met. Days later a digger named Nawgahyde smacked him upside the head with a copy of the Times, and Hugh saw a likeness of hisself drawn above a couple-paragraphs credited to Seth A. Loudermilk. The diggers had been teasing him ever since. “Didn’t even know he was doing it.”
“Well he did,” Lee said. Then, changing subject: “It’s a pretty little-old feller. Still don’t look right though, grown man toting a mud doll all over creation.”
He kept on about Crusoe, a variation on the conversation repeated every time he saw the dirt boy. Sometimes Hugh wondered was Lee pulling his leg. After several minutes he wound back around to fussing about the folks at Roger’s Lounge—a floating bar on the Elberta River where Lee sometimes still performed.
“How come you don’t just sing some other way if you don’t like them teasing you?”
“We can only do how we’re made to buddyroll.”
“Sounds like some horseshit to me.”
“Nobody asked you if it did artist. Now what you needing from poor old me this time of the goddamn night?”
Hugh straightened up and started telling. Lee set down Rosette. Her strings wommed and he hushed them with his calloused fingers. “Come again?” he said more than once. And Hugh did. Still, Lee wondered had he heard right. Killed two Authority men and was unearthing a cemetery before it flooded.
“And ain’t nobody noticed them men missing yet?”
“They did,” Hugh said, “but we ain’t skipped a lick of work for it. Even the bosses ain’t nothing but parts and pieces down yonder.”
“And you still working for them?”
“That ain’t the point.”
“Seems like the point to me.”
“You ain’t listening.”
“Oh I am,” Lee said. “Heard you clear as a church bell on Sunday morning.”
They walked to The Seven and hitched Byron to the wagon. Hugh put two shovels, a pick, and a roll of burlap in the bed while Lee climbed up on the seat with Crusoe. They set off with the moon yet high and the mule miffed at being called to work. Its coat the ragged gray of cold fire-ash, and had been from the time Hugh bought him.
Other side of town they picked up an old logging road. The air in the woods hung close and still. Only owls stirred among blue-black treetops. None screeched. The road petered out and saplings thumped the wagon’s underside. Byron stopped frequently to munch weeds and briar, to blow airy farts. An owl swooped low and spooked the fool creature. Byron would go no farther till Hugh beat him on the flank with a balled fist.
The brush threaded in and out of itself, making impassable stretches. They doubled back twice. They could hear the river up ahead, but could not see it running. Lee sang, Went and bought myself a new car, filled that sucker up with gas … and Byron brayed along like an ill-mannered drunk. Every little bit the mule would drop a pile of steaming shit and haw loudly as he continued onward through the dense woods. Brand-new engine in perfect condition, Lee sang, and a woman just about as fast—
“Will both of you just shut the hell up,” Hugh said.
Neither man nor mule would.
When they came out of the woods into the cemetery clearing, Lee hopped down and kissed the ground like a sailor back home from sea. “Any these your kin?”
“We ain’t all us whites kin.”
Lee laughed. “Then how come you to care what happens to them?”
“Here,” Hugh said, pitching Lee a shovel. “Dig.”
They lit a few pine knots and stuck them in the soft ground. When they opened the plain pine coffins they found the corpses buried with keepsakes: a piece of hard candy, pins, pages torn from the Bible, playing cards, a dried lock of hair with ribbon yet tied around it. Come dawn Hugh and Lee had four corpses wrapped in burlap and loaded in the wagonbed. Hugh insisted they rebury the coffins with as much care as if nothing had been removed. Not for fear of being caught—no one would flinch at the sight of a looted cemetery where soon would be a-hundred-plus feet of water—but for the rightness of the gesture.
The sky was beginning to blush pink and red like a lover’s neck. Soon, Hugh knew, the loggers would be tromping nearby. Starlings cut overtop the cemetery clearing.
“What you aim to do with them two?” Lee asked, nodding toward where Hugh had buried Velston and the birthmarked man.
“Worry about that last.”
“Crazy as a goddamn duck,” Lee said, pitching a final load of dirt then tamping it down. “Let the lake take them buddyroll.”
“If I’m crazy then reckon what it says you’re out here with me?”
Before leaving Hugh pressed wax paper to the headmarkers and scratched back and forth with an oil pencil till names and dates appeared. He folded the paper and stuck it in his shirtpocket. They departed ahead of full light, reaching the path down into Freedom Hills time the first batch of tamales at Dyar’s was ready to be served.
“Be by after dark,” Hugh said.
“Dark tonight?”
“Yeah dark tonight.”
“Shit fire.”
“You got somewhere else to be?”
Lee waved as he walked off. He stopped just a little way down the steep path and hollered back, “Do what you supposed to now artist.”
Back at The Seven Hugh unhitched Byron and let the mule roam while he buried the four corpses in a clearing out behind the pasture. In the kitchen he ate a stale chunk of cornbread then went down at the springhouse and drank buttermilk from a clay jug while he sat for a spell with Crusoe. Fuck Lee Malone, he thought, staring at a dozen assemblies he’d gathered since Loudermilk left. He had been doing what he was supposed to do—and more. Fuck, and this was supposed to feel good? It didn’t, he didn’t. Fuck Velston and the birthmarked man’s dead asses too, he thought. Ought to just let the lake take them. Hugh got up and checked the cooling machine he’d for some reason built. Sometimes it ran so cold it spat snow. Back at the house he locked the headmarker etchings in a box, along with a land deed, some old coins of no real value, and the stones his daddy had swallowed on the day he died.
Caz’s dying was drawn out, but, looking back on that time, it began on a day when Hugh the boy woke to a cold and driving rain. The house felt empty in a way it hadn’t before. Hugh tried shaking this feeling as he fried eggs, heated biscuits, smeared on the biscuits an extra gob of peach jelly, and ate alone. Rain pecked the roof as if trying to tell the boy something he already knew. It’d been years since Caz stayed out all night. A common occurrence for a time. Hugh could look back on those days and be grateful because if not for his daddy being the way he was then he wouldn’t of met Lee Malone. After he’d finished eating that morning Hugh fed the chickens, fixed a breakfast plate for Caz and set it on the woodstove, then left for Prince’s Cannery, where he worked so long at peeling peaches that moon-shaped scars would forever mark his fingers and thumbs.
The rain yet drizzled that night, the plate on the stove where Hugh’d left it. He sat on the porch and fiddled with an assemblie. His daddy had let go of berating him over the things he made. Hugh was too distracted to work though. He built a fire and stoked it so warmth spread throughout the two-room house. His momma’s quilting rack hung from the ceiling, holding a piece she’d began before taking off with a traveling riflemaker from Wyoming. Hugh could not remember his momma, but he’d learned from Caz to despise her and the riflemaker, who wore a buffalo-fur coat. Caz burnt all the quilts she’d made. Father and son nearly froze to death that first winter without covers. Hugh didn’t remember this either, but he did too. Memory, he’d learned, could be inherited. He was staring up at the quilting rack, wading memory, when his daddy stumbled inside covered with bloodred mud.
“I been out hunting gold,” Caz announced. “And, son, I have seen a big-old wall holding back a mountain of water and one day that mountain’s bound to crumble upon us.”
“What you mean Daddy?”
“The Lord said, ‘Behold, that which I built I’ll break down, and that which I planted will one day yank up by the roots, even all this land.’”
The next day Caz began digging on The Seven. Before long you couldn’t walk anywhere without coming across a hole. Some were chest deep to a man, others divots.
The idea to dig for gold was not new, but it had not taken hold of Caz in a number of years. Hugh believed the notion originated with Granny, Caz’s first wife, who died one winter while ice draped the valley end to end. Granny, an Elberta Indian, spoke of the valley’s unmarked graves from her people’s war with the Spanish. De Soto’s caravan had passed through on the way to what would become Arkansas, where his men chucked his lifeless body into the Mississippi River—the biggest unmarked grave in the country—and it hung up on sandbars, passed through petrified forests, and spun over silty gravelbeds where fish long as children floated unblinking, all the way out to the Gulf of Mexico. De Soto was liable to be circling the world yet. After Granny died Caz married Irina Wade, Hugh’s momma, a little woman with wet black eyes like a deer, who went into unexpected fits that some folks credited to God, or the Devil one. She hit Caz, he claimed, with a firepoker once, and his ear looked like cabbage till the day he died. Irina wasn’t but fifteen time they wed under a brush arbor, nineteen time she gave birth to a live son named Jesse Absalom, and twenty-one time she fled Elberta with the traveling riflemaker. Some years Caz coaxed a living from a cotton patch. He fed his son what he could kill and grow on these seven hundred acres, which came to him through a grant for something to do with Granny and her people, though Caz told it was due to his service in the war. Truth, nearest Casabianca Treeborne came to the fighting was squatting in a poke salad patch while a ragged bunch of homeward soldiers stumbled past.
One day Caz dug too near the house and the foundation collapsed. The floor split, and the woodstove dropped and cracked on one side. To have the house raised and reset, Hugh traded the wagon his uncle Frank the cripple had once used to hunt foxes. Caz never knew this cost. Likely by then he no longer remembered he’d once had a brother named Frank, who lived the final fifteen years of his life useless from the waist down because a forgotten bullet worked its way up his spine and rendered him so.
After his memory, Caz’s words went. That winter it snowed in Elberta for the first time in thirty-three years. Caz continued his hunt for De Soto’s gold. Hugh worried he’d one day find his daddy froze to death. He imagined pouring boiling water on Caz’s purple body so it’d come loose from the stubborn ground. For days and days the snow lay up in trees, shimmering like spilled sugar, then a rain fell and formed a layer of crunchy blue ice. The fishpond froze solid. Caz looked less a man and more like something that would scurry from underneath a bluff into daylight, only to retreat before it could be definitively seen.
That spring Caz went missing. After searching for days Hugh found him at what Caz said Granny always told him was an Elberta Indian mound. Caz’d dug out a good chunk of the mound time Hugh got there. A shovel lay near where he was yanking on a yellow root. Hugh tried getting his daddy to rest in some shade. Caz pushed his son away and began forcing stones into his own mouth. He gagged, choked. The skin around his lips tore. He spat out one stone and furiously rubbed it, then forced another past his bleeding gums.
After this Hugh chained his daddy to the busted kitchen floorboards. Caz pried loose the nails and escaped. Hugh brought him back and chained him to an oak tree. For months he fed Caz corn mush and raw eggs, gave him buckets of water to drink and rinse hisself if he saw fit. Caz did neither. Hugh once tried praying. Good Lord in Heaven, he began. It was no use. He didn’t believe. Yet the old man sat underneath the oak tree and spoke in many different tongues. Howled and spat if his son came near. Caz was missing half his teeth. Gums so infected he could not fully close his mouth. One day Hugh came outside and found the chain broken, Caz gone. He searched all over The Seven. He knew what he would find, but did not know when or where. Then one afternoon he came upon bits of teeth down by Dismal Creek. A little farther downstream he saw several bloody stones. In a slow pool floated his daddy’s naked white body. When Hugh dragged Caz out, he could feel more stones underneath the skin at his stomach.
Four nights in a row Hugh Treeborne and Lee Malone dug till dawn and came away from the cemetery with eleven more corpses. They’d discovered a group of unmarked graves as well. The soil seemed damper—the Elberta River inching nearer. Hugh worried he hadn’t buried Velston and the birthmarked man deep enough. He could of chucked a stick over the stone wall to where the logging crew had reached.
“Ain’t making it,” he said.
“Hell we ain’t,” said Lee.
Hugh squatted down, gripping the shovel for balance. “It’s my fault.”
Lee wiped his forehead. “Ain’t your fault somebody decided to plant these graves right here buddyroll. You just took on the burden, Lord knows how come.”
“Won’t never move them all in time.”
“Give up then,” Lee said. “Just like with that damn yankee wanting them whatever-you-call-thems. And what you done since? Where you at artist? Out here in the dark of night digging up a bunch of dead bodies, like a goddamn fool.”
“Fuck you.”
“Nuh uh,” Lee said, dropping the shovel and raising his hands. “Fuck you buddyroll. Fuck all this.” He started walking off.
Hugh hollered, “Go on big-talker. Just go on then!”
Lee held up a middle finger as he disappeared into the woods.
After Hugh had returned to The Seven and buried the corpses in the clearing he sat with Crusoe in the old chicken coop he called his studio. Caz always kept chickens. Named them after folks in the Bible. It was Hugh the boy’s job to feed the chickens dried corn kernels and whatever bugs and worms Caz pulled off plants in the garden. Hugh hated those chickens, always pecking his toes or else flogging his head. Shit all over—and stunk too. Sometimes Caz would wring one’s neck. He got a kick out of saying something like, Son, let’s fry up old Jeremiah tonight. After Hugh found his daddy’s body floating in Dismal Creek and had buried it in the cemetery at Elberta Second Baptist, he went home and wrung the neck of every last chicken in the damn coop. Plucked them bald, lopped off their heads and yellow feet, gutted them then carried the warm carcasses to Lee, who set up a deep iron vat out behind his house and filled it with oil. Lee broke down the chickens, soaked the parts in buttermilk while a fire heated the oil, then he dredged the parts in flour and dropped them in the vat. The oil overflowed and a party broke out. Lee played on his guitar Rosette whatever songs folks wanted to hear. Hugh woke up the next morning—head feeling whacked by a board—with a skinny black woman against his side. He didn’t know her name. This was how an old chicken coop became his studio. This was the kind of story, he thought, Loudermilk wanted to hear.
Weeks later, summer extinguished, the diggers were still hounding Hugh about the article in the paper. One man named Rabbit said he thought Hugh would of done got rich and took off to New York City by now. It was Philadelphia where Loudermilk came from, but same difference—million miles from Elberta, Alabama. Underneath the men’s teasing was an honest wish for Hugh to make good though. He no longer believed it possible—if he ever truly had. But this he kept secret from the men. Why poison the wells of others? He’d been the one who threw open the henhouse door and waved the fox inside.
When the men weren’t teasing Hugh and each other they speculated about what might of happened to Velston and the birthmarked man. Drowning seemed most likely. That didn’t make for good bullshitting though. Some claimed Velston’d simply become the statue of De Soto once again. Hugh kept his mouth shut on this matter too.
* * *
Working without Lee, he’d fallen behind reburying the corpses and instead dragged them underneath the house. He placed them far in back in case a dog caught scent. Despite their age and state of decomposition the corpses gave off an odor. He dragged the cooling machine under there and ran it, hoping to blow out the stench. He needed time. Maybelle could tell something wasn’t right. As milder weather painted the trees, which began dropping their leaves, she asked more often why he’d stopped gathering assemblies and, recently, how come he didn’t invite her to sleep inside the house.
After work one evening he fished around in boxes till he came across a pamphlet called Wild Alabama. Used to, they’d hand them out free in town. It’d been umpteen years since he’d seen the face on front of this water-damaged copy: oiled mustache and bird-beak nose, hollowed-out cheekbones and flat eyes. Hiram Transtern was a short man and prone to chewing dogwood twigs as an affectation he believed endeared him to Elbertans. Looked more poet than explorer—serious and sad. Transtern had led expeditions into the Egyptian desert, Pacific islands where men ate each other and worshipped monkey heads, then one day he walked right into the Elberta County Courthouse and asked for a set of maps nobody knew existed. Word of his arrival soon spread. Oodles of folks claimed they saw Transtern cross the river and begin his journey. Longer ago the story, the more folks who were there for it. Some even claimed Transtern let them see the forgotten maps that showed exactly where Chief Coosa had been buried with all his treasure. Whoever, if anybody, did watch Hiram Transtern float across the Elberta River then walk into that great stretch of wilderness later to be named after a senator who held dear his peaches, those folks were the last to ever see the man—living or dead.
Then, twenty-some years later, his son Hiram Transtern Jr. came to Elberta with a hot-air balloon. This time the town got it right and held an official ceremony to see off the famous explorer. Hugh remembered bits and pieces of the day: the balloon’s bright orange cloth, the burner’s blue flame, a four-piece veterans’ band playing loud and out of tune, fried dough sprinkled with sugar. Transtern Jr. waved and waved till he’d floated beyond the tree-lined horizon. Then the band quit. Everybody milled around, not knowing quite what to do.
Unlike his daddy, Transtern Jr. did return—though with nothing to show for his weeks spent in the wilderness but for a few mild injuries and a wooly beard, and minus one beautiful hot-air balloon. But he’d returned, and Elberta, Alabama, embraced the Transterns’ failure more than it ever would of dared to their success.
When Maybelle arrived at The Seven later that night, the Transterns and that balloon were still on Hugh’s mind. He showed her the pamphlet.
“And nobody ever found it?” she asked.
“No,” he said. He could sometimes forget Maybelle wasn’t from Elberta. She seemed to fit so well. “But any time they uncovered a artifact or a grave the whole town would just seize up,” he said. “I mean, for weeks. Sometimes it’d be months.”
The words that’d come from his mouth stunned him. Hugh knew what he had to do. But Maybelle was staying tonight. He’d asked her to stay. He wanted to do the things they did when they lay down together, more often before he fell behind with the corpses. A night spent with Maybelle would be a sacrifice though, one less night he had to finish what he’d started before the river swept into the cemetery and he no longer could.
He let the cooling machine run for a while before taking her hand and leading her inside the house. It was loud. Of course she asked what on earth the noise was. He told her he had a surprise, then pulled the mattress near where cool air seeped up between floorboard cracks. Better to confront it, he thought. They got down on the mattress and kissed. Stinks, she said, her skin turning to gooseflesh as Hugh undressed her. He told her an animal must of got up under the house and died. The smell wasn’t bad as he’d feared and it did feel good for such cool air to blow on their naked bodies—even in the fall.
After they made love Hugh waited till he thought she was asleep then snuck outside. He crawled under the house, cobwebs catching on his face. The brittle bones made awful cracks he feared she would hear even over the sound of the machine. He chose hands and ribs because they snapped easier. The ancient perfume made him slightly drunk. He laughed, then stopped hisself and listened for her stirring above.
He carried the bones to the studio and put them in a tote sack. Grabbed a shovel. He whispered for Byron the mule, who’d wandered out of his stall. Hugh thought he heard the creature around back of the house. Retching. Sometimes Byron would munch milkweed and foxglove, other plants and roots, that made him sick.
Instead of finding the mule Hugh came upon Maybelle there in the dark. He smelled something sour. She gasped when she saw him and asked what was he doing prowling around thisaway. He told her he couldn’t sleep.
“What’s that sack?”
“Junk,” he said, using the word she sometimes used for things he gathered. But he’d stalled answering. Maybelle said she didn’t believe him and took the sack. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t.” Too late; she’d emptied the bones.
“Oh my Lord! Are these, are they human?”
Hugh could no longer lie. He told her all of it, from the beginning. He could see Maybelle trying to hide her horror; her face like a watermelon dropped on brick. She kept asking who they were, who were they.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What do you mean don’t know?”
“I mean I don’t know who they are May.”
She looked down at her bare feet. “You ain’t some kind of pervert are you?”
“Jesus, no,” he said.
“Well what are you doing with a bunch of bones Hugh?”
“Listen,” he began, “I under—”
“Just tell the truth, damn you!”
Hugh knew what he said next would bind or break them, same as he knew walking into a river would get a man sopping wet. When he’d finished explaining his reasoning and the plan he now had, he could not tell which outcome had occurred. Maybelle seemed rightly disturbed by all this. But she did not leave. She got dressed and climbed onto the wagonseat next to him. Her reckoning wasn’t complete, but it began as they set out across town on the wagon, the sack of bones and a shovel stowed in back.
They waited in the brush for the night guards with their torches and blades to settle in with a late meal and a deck of playing cards. As he dug, Hugh disturbed the ground as little as possible. It had to look authentic, he said. With Maybelle’s help, he arranged the bones in the bottom of a hole no more than a few feet deep. He sprinkled in some arrowheads and broken pottery from his collection, then filled the false grave and smoothed over the dirt. Maybelle swept away their footprints with a green pine branch.
On the way back she said she wasn’t feeling well and asked if he’d drop her off at the apartment she still rented in town. Hugh feared this would be the last he saw of her. Worry sank into his gut as he returned home to change into his Authority uniform, then doubled back to the worksite. Tormented him till he squatted in the woods with a sick stomach as blue light broke overtop the receding treeline and spilled onto the muddy riverbank like a burst yolk. He wiped with leaves then pulled up his britches and watched the first workers arrive. Mist swept low as men slid down into the channel and began cutting into the earth. Hugh took his place among them. It wasn’t a couple hours into the shift till a digger hollered, “It’s a goddamn skeleton!”
The new foreman—a man named Alan—told them to take a break. They ate lunch early, balled up the greasy butcher’s paper from their sandwiches and chucked it at each other. Alan was waiting on a radio callback from headquarters. Another lunch hour passed. Still getting paid—least they hoped this was truth.
They started a game of tackle on the riverbank. Some men stripped naked and swam, the river cold and calm. Hugh Treeborne had climbed up the rise where folks sometimes picnicked and watched the scene from above. What luck, the men all agreed, daylight inching toward dusk. An Indian grave right here. What goddamn luck, they all said, over and over, getting paid to just fool around.