Nightmares And Dreamscapes Part 5

'I'm n.o.body,' I said. 'Just a n.o.body who had a good reason to put you where you are right now.'

And with an eerie, frightening suddenness, Dolan said: 'Is your name Robinson?'

I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. He had made the connection that fast, winnowing through all the half-remembered names and faces and coming up with exactly the right one. Had I thought him an animal, with the instincts of an animal? I hadn't known the half of it, and it was really just as well I had not, or I never would have had the guts to do what I had done.

I said, 'My name doesn't matter. But you know what happens now, don't you?'

The screamer began again - great bubbling, liquid bellows.

'Get me outta here, Jimmy! Get me outta here! For the luvva Jaysus! My legs're broke!'

'Shut up,' Dolan said. And then, to me: 'I can't hear you, man, the way he's screaming.'

I got down on my hands and knees and leaned over. 'I said you know what h - '

I suddenly had an image of the wolf dressed up as Gramma telling Red Riding Hood, All the better to hear you with, my dear . . . come a little closer. I recoiled, and just in time. The revolver went off four times. The shots were loud where I was; they must have been deafening in the car. Four black eyes opened in the roof of Dolan's Cadillac, and I felt something split the air an inch from my forehead.

'Did I get you, c.o.c.ksucker?' Dolan asked.

'No,' I said.

The screamer had become the weeper. He was in the front seat. I saw his hands, as pale as the hands of a drowned man, slapping weakly at the winds.h.i.+eld, and the slumped body next to him. Jimmy had to get him out, he was bleeding, the pain was bad, the pain was turrible, the pain was more than he could take, for the luvva Jaysus he was sorry, heartily sorry for his sins, but this was more than - There was another pair of loud reports. The man in the front seat stopped screaming. The hands dropped away from the winds.h.i.+eld.

'There,' Dolan said in a voice that was almost reflective. 'He ain't hurting any more and we can hear what we say to each other.'

I said nothing. I felt suddenly dazed and unreal. He had killed a man just now. Killed him. The feeling that I had underestimated him in spite of all my precautions and was lucky to be alive recurred.

'I want to make you a proposal,' Dolan said.

I continued to hold my peace - 'My friend?'

- and to hold it some more.

'Hey! You!' His voice trembled minutely. 'If you're still up there, talk to me! What can that hurt?'

'I'm here,' I said. 'I was just thinking you fired six times. I was thinking you may wish you'd saved one for yourself before long. But maybe there's eight in the clip, or you have reloads.'

Now it was his turn to fall silent. Then: 'What are you planning?'

'I think you've already guessed,' I said. 'I have spent the last thirty-six hours digging the world's longest grave, and now I'm going to bury you in your f.u.c.king Cadillac.'

The fear in his voice was still reined in. I wanted that rein to snap.

'You want to hear my proposition first?'

'I'll listen. In a few seconds. First I have to get something.'

I walked back to the van and got my shovel.

When I got back he was saying 'Robinson? Robinson? Robinson?' like a man speaking into a dead phone.

'I'm here,' I said. 'You talk. I'll listen. And when you're finished I may make a counter-proposal.'

When he spoke, he sounded more cheerful. If I was talking counterproposals, I was talking deal. And if I was talking deal, he was already halfway to being out.

'I'm offering you a million dollars to let me out of here. But, just as important - '

I tossed a shovelful of gritty till down on the rear deck of the Cadillac. Pebbles bounced and rattled off the small rear window. Dirt sifted into the line of the trunk-lid.

'What are you doing?' His voice was sharp with alarm.

'Idle hands do the devil's work,' I said. 'I thought I'd keep mine busy while I listened.'

I dug into the dirt again and threw in another shovelful.

Now Dolan spoke faster, his voice more urgent.

'A million dollars and my personal guarantee that no one will ever touch you . . . not me, not my men, not anyone else's men.'

My hands didn't hurt any more. It was amazing. I shoveled steadily, and in no more than five minutes, the Cadillac's rear deck was drifted deep in dirt. Putting it in, even by hand, was certainly easier than taking it out.

I paused, leaning on the shovel for a moment.

'Keep talking.'

'Look, this is crazy,' he said, and now I could hear bright splinters of panic in his voice. 'I mean it's just crazy.'

'You got that right,' I said, and shoveled in more dirt.

He held on longer than I thought any man could, talking, reasoning, cajoling - yet becoming more and more disjointed as the sand and dirt piled up over the rear window, repeating himself, backtracking, beginning to stutter. At one point the pa.s.senger door opened as far as it could and banged into the sidewall of the excavation. I saw a hand with black hair on the knuckles and a big ruby ring on the second finger. I sent down a quick four shovelfuls of loose earth into the opening. He screamed curses and yanked the door shut again.

He broke not long after. It was the sound of the dirt coming down that finally got to him, I think. Sure it was. The sound would have been very loud inside the Cadillac. The dirt and stones rattling onto the roof and falling past the window. He must have finally realized he was sitting in an upholstered eight-cylinder fuel-injected coffin.

'Get me out!' he shrieked. 'Please! I can't stand it! Get me out!'

'You ready for that counter-proposal?' I asked.

'Yes! Yes! Christ! Yes! Yes! Yes!'

'Scream. That's the counter-proposal. That's what I want. Scream for me. If you scream loud enough, I'll let you out.'

He screamed piercingly.

'That was good!' I said, and I meant it. 'But it was nowhere near good enough.'

I began to dig again, throwing fan after fan of dirt over the roof of the Cadillac. Disintegrating clods ran down the winds.h.i.+eld and filled the winds.h.i.+eld-wiper slot.

He screamed again, even louder, and I wondered if it was possible for a man to scream loud enough to rupture his own larynx.

'Not bad!' I said, redoubling my efforts. I was smiling in spite of my throbbing back. 'You might get there, Dolan - you really might.'

'Five million.' It was the last coherent thing he said.

'I think not,' I replied, leaning on the shovel and wiping sweat off my forehead with the heel of one grimy hand. The dirt covered the roof of the car almost from side to side now. It looked like a starburst . . . or a large brown hand clasping Dolan's Cadillac. 'But if you can make a sound come out of your mouth which is as loud, let me say, as eight sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet, then I will get you out, and you may count on it.'

So he screamed, and I shoveled dirt down on the Cadillac. For some time he did indeed scream very loudly, although I judged he never screamed louder than two sticks of dynamite taped to the ignition switch of a 1968 Chevrolet. Three, at most. And by the time the last of the Cadillac's brightwork was covered and I rested to look down at the dirt-shrouded hump in the hole, he was producing no more than a series of hoa.r.s.e and broken grunts.

I looked at my watch. It was just past one o'clock. My hands were bleeding again, and the handle of the shovel was slippery. A sheaf of gritty sand flew into my face and I recoiled from it. A high wind in the desert makes a peculiarly unpleasant sound - a long, steady drone that simply goes on and on. It is like the voice of an idiot ghost.

I leaned over the hole. 'Dolan?'

No answer.

'Scream, Dolan.'

No answer at first - then a series of harsh barks.

Satisfactory!

I went back to the van, started it up, and drove the mile and a half back down to the road construction. On the way I turned to WKXR, Las Vegas, the only station the van's radio would pull in. Barry Manilow told me he wrote the songs that make the whole world sing, a statement I greeted with some skepticism, and then the weather report came on. High winds were forecast; a travellers' advisory had been posted on the main roads between Vegas and the California line. There were apt to be visibility problems because of sheeting sand, the disc jockey said, but the thing to really watch out for was wind-shear. I knew what he was talking about, because I could feel it whipsawing the van.

Here was my Case-Jordan bucket-loader; already I thought of it as mine. I got in, humming the Barry Manilow tune, and touched the blue and yellow wires together again. The loader started up smoothly. This time I'd remembered to take it out of gear. Not bad, white boy, I could hear Tink saying in my head. You learnin.

Yes I was. Learning all the time.

I sat for a minute, watching membranes of sand skirl across the desert, listening to the bucket-loader's engine rumble and wondering what Dolan was up to. This was, after all, his Big Chance. Try to break the rear window, or crawl over into the front seat and try to break the winds.h.i.+eld. I had put a couple of feet of sand and dirt over each, but it was still possible. It depended on how crazy he was by now, and that wasn't a thing I could know, so it really didn't bear thinking about. Other things did.

I geared the bucket-loader and drove back up the highway to the trench. When I got there I trotted anxiously over and looked down, half-expecting to see a man-sized gopher hole at the front or rear of the Cadillac-mound where Dolan had broken some gla.s.s and crawled out.

My spadework had not been disturbed.

'Dolan,' I said, cheerfully enough, I thought.

There was no answer.

'Dolan.'

No answer.

He's killed himself, I thought, and felt a sick-bitter disappointment. Killed himself somehow or died of fright.

'Dolan?'

Laughter drifted up from the mound; bright, irrepressible, totally genuine laughter. I felt my flesh lift itself into large hard lumps. It was the laughter of a man whose mind has broken.

He laughed and he laughed in his hoa.r.s.e voice. Then he screamed; then he laughed again. Finally he did both together.

For awhile I laughed with him, or screamed, or whatever, and the wind laughed and screamed at both of us.

Then I went back to the Case-Jordan, lowered the blade, and began to cover him up for real.

In four minutes even the shape of the Cadillac was gone. There was just a hole filled with dirt.

I thought I could hear something, but with the sound of the wind and the steady grumble of the loader's engine, it was hard to tell. I got down on my knees; then I lay down full-length with my head hanging into what remained of the hole.

Far down, underneath all that dirt, Dolan was still laughing. They were sounds like something you might read in a comic book: Hee-hee-hee, aaah-hah-hah-hah. There might have been some words, too. It was hard to tell. I smiled and nodded, though.

'Scream,' I whispered. 'Scream, if you want.' But that faint sound of laughter just went on, seeping up from the dirt like a poisonous vapor.

A sudden dark terror seized me - Dolan was behind me! Yes, somehow Dolan had gotten behind me! And before I could turn around he would tumble me into the hole and - I jumped up and whirled around, my mangled hands making rough approximations of fists.

Wind-driven sand smacked me.

There was nothing else.

I wiped my face with my dirty bandanna and got back into the cab of the bucket-loader and went back to work.

The cut was filled in again long before dark. There was even dirt left over, in spite of what the wind had whipped away, because of the area displaced by the Cadillac. It went quickly . . . so quickly.

The tone of my thoughts was weary, confused, and half-delirious as I piloted the loader back down the road, driving it directly over the spot where Dolan was buried.

I parked it in its original place, removed my s.h.i.+rt, and rubbed all of the metal in the cab with it in an effort to remove fingerprints. I don't know exactly why I did that, even to this day, since I must have left them in a hundred other places around the site. Then, in the deep brownish-gray gloom of that stormy dusk, I went back to the van.

I opened one of the rear doors, observed Dolan crouched inside, and staggered back, screaming, one hand thrown up to s.h.i.+eld my face. It seemed to me that my heart must explode in my chest.

Nothing - no one - came out of the van. The door swung and banged in the wind like the last shutter on a haunted house. At last I crept back, heart pounding, and peered inside. There was nothing but the jumble of stuff I had left in there - the road-arrow with the broken bulbs, the jack, my toolbox.

'You have got to get hold of yourself,' I said softly. 'Get hold of yourself'

I waited for Elizabeth to say, You'll be all tight, darling . . . something like that . . . but there was only the wind.

I got back into the van, started it, and drove halfway back to the excavation. That was as far as I could make myself go. Although I knew it was utterly foolish, I became more and more convinced that Dolan was lurking in the van. My eyes kept going to the rear-view mirror, trying to pick his shadow out of the others.

The wind was stronger than ever, rocking the van on its springs. The dust it pulled up from the desert and drove before it looked like smoke in the headlights.

At last I pulled over to the side of the road, got out, and locked an the doors. I knew I was crazy to even try sleeping outside in this, but I couldn't sleep in there. I just couldn't. So I crawled under the van with my sleeping bag.

I was asleep five seconds after I zipped myself into it.

When I woke up from a nightmare I could not remember - except there had been hands in it, clutching at my throat - I found that I had been buried alive. There was sand up my nose, sand in my ears. It was down my throat, choking me.

I screamed and struggled upward, at first convinced that the confining sleeping bag was earth. Then I banged my head on the van's undercarriage and saw flakes of rust silting down.

I rolled out from under into a dawn the color of s.m.u.tty pewter. My sleeping bag blew away like a tumbleweed the moment my weight was off it. I gave a surprised yell and chased twenty feet after it before realizing it would be the world's worst mistake. Visibility was down to no more than twenty yards, and maybe less. The road was totally gone in places. I looked back at the van and it looked washed-out, barely there, a sepia photograph of a ghost-town relic.

I staggered back to it, found my keys, and got inside. I was still spitting sand and coughing dryly. I got the motor going and drove slowly back the way I had come. There was no need to wait for a weather report; the weather was all the jock could talk about this morning. The worst desert windstorm in Nevada history. All roads closed. Stay home unless you absolutely have to go out, and then stay home anyway.

The glorious Fourth.