Burial Read online

  E.C. Dude was trying to decide whether he had the energy to go to the Sun Devil Bar & Grill and sink a couple of cold Coors. They used to have an icebox in the trailer but Papago Joe had donated it to a family on the Salt River Reservation. It had been one of those spontaneous charitable gestures to which Papago Joe was prone; although Papago Joe could have used some charity himself sometimes. Times were difficult for everyone, especially Indians, and sometimes Papago Joe would share a cigarette with E.C. Dude and tell him about the times when ‘times’ weren’t easy or difficult, but simply ‘times’.

  ‘The sun came up, the clouds passed by, this way, mostly. Then the sun went down again.’

  ‘Sounds like cool times,’ E.C. Dude would remark, although he was never quite sure what the hell Papago Joe was talking about.

  ‘That’s right,’ Papago Joe would nod, his voice serious. ‘They were seriously cool times.’

  E.C. Dude had almost persuaded himself that he didn’t need a beer when he felt the trailer shudder underneath him. Shudder, as if somebody had gently nudged a 4X4 into the side of it. He sat up, listening, waiting for the trailer to shudder again. Then he heard a knocking, scraping noise from outside, almost as if the cars in the lot were banging together.

  He swung off the couch, pushed his sunglasses onto his nose, and opened the trailer door. Outside, the glare and the heat were tremendous. It was only a few minutes after midday, and the sun stabbed at him from every windshield and every door-mirror and every polished bumper. The concrete lot was dusty white, the highway was dusty white, the sky was dusty white.

  E.C. Dude hesitated, and sniffed. Over the familiar smell of hot automobiles and rubber, he was sure that he could smell something else. Like a fire burning … mesquite and charcoal and some kind of long-forgotten herb. A sourish smell, but a smell that strongly reminded him of when he was young.

  He came down the hot aluminum steps of the trailer and stood with his hands resting on his hips, looking all around. The highway was silent, the sales lot was silent. High above his head, a turkey vulture idly and arrogantly circled on the thermal current, not even bothering to flap its wings. The red and white pennants all around the lot hung limp, as if they were soon going to melt and start dripping.

  He listened. He heard a soft, high-pitched scraping noise. It came from somewhere close to the back of the lot, where the cars were parked against the long whitewashed wall of the ‘workshop and servicing facility’.

  It definitely sounded as if one automobile were being very slowly forced against another, fender to fender. Paint scratching, wheel-arches buckling, trim bending back, drip-rails being wrenched away, stud by stud. He shielded his eyes with his hand, trying to see if any of the pick-ups parked against the workshop wall were occupied. But they all appeared to be empty; and none of their motors was running.

  He jumped up and down a few times, so that he could see way across the lot. But as far as he could make out, not a single car had anybody in it. It was just him, the cars, and the desert.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. Then, ‘Shit.’

  He stopped jumping, because he was out of condition, and in any case he felt like he was shaking his brains up and down. He listened, his eyes tightly closed, trying to pick up the faintest sound of a footstep or a quietly opened automobile door or a furtive whisper. Papago Joe had always taught him that you could hear much more clearly with your eyes closed.

  Again, he heard that buckling, scraping noise; and then the distinctive hollow crunching of collapsing panels.

  He opened his eyes. A small boy of about eight was standing by the gate, watching him solemnly. He looked like a half-caste, half-Apache and half-white. He wore a baseball cap with a picture of Michelangelo the Ninja Turtle on it, and a grubby white T-shirt that asked Who Knows What Evil Lurks In The Hearts of Men?

  The small boy said, in a really snide nasal voice, ‘You’re wearing girl’s panties.’

  E.C. Dude looked down. He had worn out his last pair of boxer shorts months ago, and he had been wearing Cybille’s panties ever since. He just hadn’t been bothered to go to K-Mart and buy himself some more.

  ‘So I’m wearing girl’s panties?’ he demanded. ‘What’s it to you? At least I’m not wearing a stupid Ninja Turtle hat.’

  ‘Only fairies wear girl’s panties.’

  ‘What do you know about fairies?’

  ‘I know they wear girl’s panties.’

  E.C. Dude had seen this boy before, kicking a ball around the back of the Sun Devil Bar & Grill. He probably belonged to that new waitress of theirs, the one with the short blonde hair and the rusty green Caprice. E.C. Dude didn’t socialize or gossip too much, so people came and went and most of the time he never even found out their names. He always reckoned that rootless people were entitled to their privacy, just like he was.

  He climbed back into the trailer and took his jeans off the back of the chair. The boy came to the foot of the steps and stared at him while he buckled up his belt. The boy crunched up one eye against the dazzling reflections from the Airstream’s polished aluminum body.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the boy asked him.

  ‘E.C. Dude,’ said E.C. Dude.

  ‘That’s a dumb name. What kind of a name is that?’

  ‘It’s my name. What’s yours?’

  ‘Stanley.’

  ‘Your parents called you Stanley?’

  ‘My mom called me Stanley, after my dad. My dad died.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t remember him. Mom said he had it coming.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  E.C. Dude took off his sunglasses and peered out over the lot. It seemed to be quiet now, but he thought he ought to go and look at those cars parked close to the workshop wall. They seemed to be undisturbed, in spite of all that crunching and scraping. Maybe he’d just been hearing freak echoes from Johnny Manzanera’s scrapyard across the highway.

  He might as well have a beer, too. Now that he had been thoroughly disturbed from his preferred position on the orange couch, E.C. Dude decided to go over to the bar and have a beer. He went to the far end of the trailer, to the kitchen, where there was a clutter of empty soup cans and instant noodle pots and half-eaten Hungry Man dinners. On the counter next to the toaster stood a smeary glass terrarium. Inside it, dry and motionless, rested a Gila monster.

  E.C.Dude lifted the terrarium’s lid, reached inside, and took two $20s out from under the rocks. The Gila monster licked its lips, and its eye rolled up like a camera-shutter, but otherwise it ignored him.

  Stanley said, ‘Gila monsters are bad luck.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What do you know about bad luck?’

  ‘My mom says we always have bad luck.’

  ‘Really? Well, that’s bad luck, always having bad luck.’

  ‘Gila monsters have dead people’s souls inside them, and they won’t let them go.’

  E.C. Dude stepped out of the trailer, closed the door, and locked it. He looked this way and that, just to make sure that there was nobody lurking around the lot, and then he came down the steps.

  ‘I’m going for a beer,’ he told Stanley. ‘How about you?’

  ‘So long as you’re buying.’

  Hm, thought E.C. Dude. Those are the words of a kid who’s spent too long hanging around bars.

  They had walked only a few yards across the sun-cracked concrete when E.C. Dude heard that noise again. This time, it was much louder, much more dramatic. It sounded as if a whole car were being compressed in a crusher, panels collapsing, transmission shearing, windshield cracking.

  It was immediately followed by a high, rubbery-sounded chorus of protest from all around the lot. He turned this way and that, and as he turned, a bronze metallic Delta 88 that was parked right next to him began to buck on its suspension, and then suddenly start to slide sideways. Sideways, without anything visibly dragging it. Its tire-treads rumbled and squealed in an unholy, discordant quartet, and after six or seven feet its front bumper no
isily collided with another sedan.

  E.C. Dude turned to Stanley in total amazement. ‘Can you see that? Look at it! Holy shit, it’s moving by itself!’

  But all Stanley could do was stand where he was, his eyes wide, terrified.

  Every car on the lot began bucking and dipping, and the shrieking of tires grew louder and louder. Their rooftops surged up and down like the backs of stampeding cattle. E.C. Dude ran to the bronze Delta 88 and tried to open the door, but the car abruptly tore away the front bumper assembly of the sedan next to it, and was pulled so forcefully away from him that he almost lost his fingers in the doorhandle.

  Pulled — but pulled by what?

  The whole collection of cars began to smash themselves into the back wall of the workshop, and into each other, in a huge unstoppable demolition derby. There was nothing that E.C. Dude could do but stand and watch them in horror and misery. Fenders ripped against fenders, doors were torn off by their hinges, steering-columns were forced through seats and windows. The cars were pulled toward the workshop wall with such irresistible force that they began to mount each other’s rooftops. E.C. Dude watched as one of their better bargains, a two-thousand dollar Regal, reared nose upward behind the trunk of an 88, and then rolled over on its back.

  The noise was ear-splitting. A hideous cacophony of grinding and crunching and warping metal, combined with the slate-pencil squeaking of laminated glass.

  Stanley clapped his hands over his ears. ‘What is it?’ he screamed. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ shouted E.C. Dude. ‘There’s nobody driving them — they’re just doing it themselves!’

  Two sedans reared up against each other like battling steers. With a long continuous screech of metal against metal, they pushed themselves higher and higher until they were almost vertical. Then one of them fell over sideways, and rolled over and over down the struggling, jarring chaos of other cars.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said E.C. Dude, in disbelief. ‘What the hell am I going to say to Papago Joe?’

  ‘Look!’ said Stanley, pointing. ‘Look at the wall!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ E.C. Dude demanded.

  ‘Look at the wall!’ Stanley shouted.

  ‘What’s the matter with the wall?’

  ‘Look at the shadows!’

  E.C. Dude stared at the workshop wall. All he could see at first were the heaving, angular shadows of the struggling cars. But then, off to the right-hand side, he saw a strange shape that wasn’t part of a car at all, but more like a human figure. Except that it couldn’t have been a human figure. Its head was huge and misshapen, and it ducked and dived as it hurried across the wall in a way that no human could run.

  ‘Shit, there’s somebody there!’ said E.C. Dude, angrily. ‘There’s somebody there, man, and they’re smashing the cars up deliberate!’

  E.C. Dude glimpsed the shadow again. It looked as if the culprit were trying to run along the workshop wall and escape unnoticed out of the back of the lot. E.C. Dude said firmly to Stanley, ‘Wait here, man, okay?’, and dodged forward, trying to see where the shadow might have gone.

  He tried to skirt around the right-hand side of the lot. Maybe he could head the shadow off. But as he approached the wall, he realized that nobody could have made their way through this battlefield of tortured, shrieking, colliding cars. Jesus, you’d be trapped and crushed in an instant.

  E.C. Dude climbed cautiously up onto the back of a turned-over pickup truck; but just as he managed to catch his balance, the truck shifted beneath the soles of his boots like something alive. He jumped back off it and stepped away. This was seriously bad news, all of this, and he didn’t want to get involved. In any case, there was no longer any sign of the shadow, or the man whose shadow it might have been.

  He heard a tumbling metallic noise and something struck him on the side of the foot. He jumped clear, did a hotfooted dance, and managed to dodge a shower of spanners and wrenches and screwdrivers that were rolling across the concrete to join the tangle of cars.

  Every loose tool and empty bottle and thrown-away box and worn-out tire was being dragged into the heap of wrecked automobiles up against the workshop wall.

  A long section of chain-link fencing began to rattle and shake, and then another, until the whole perimenter fence was jangling. The red-and-white pennants tore themselves loose, and flew towards the workshop, catching on some of the smashed-up automobiles, and fluttering wildly.

  Then — to E.C. Dude’s despair, Papago Joe’s Airstream trailer began to creak and tilt.

  ‘It’s going to fall over!’ shouted Stanley. ‘Look, it’s going to fall over!’

  Already, two or three cars had stopped on the highway, and people were hurrying from the Sun Devil Bar & Grill, including Stanley’s mother, the waitress with the short blonde hair. In a high panicky voice she called, ‘Stanley! Stanley!’ and came running across the lot barefoot.

  She scooped Stanley up in her arms just as the Airstream’s suspension collapsed, and the whole trailer rolled over onto its side. There was a deep crunching of broken glass and stoved-in aluminum sheeting, and E.C. Dude heard all of Papago Joe’s china and glass and books and pots and pans go tumbling from one side of the trailer to the other, followed by a heavy thump and a bang which was probably his TV set.

  After that, however, quite abruptly, the destruction seemed to be over. The hot noonday silence was broken by an occasional clang and rattle as another hubcap dropped off, or a capsized automobile settled on its roof, but that was all.

  E.C. Dude surveyed the lot and didn’t know what the hell to do. All that seemed to have been left standing was the sign saying PAPAGO JOE BARGAIN USED AUTOS —, with its buffalo skulls. Even the ‘buckskin’ fringes had been ripped away.

  Stanley’s mother came up to E.C. Dude and stood frowning at him. She was small and snub-nosed, with a big china-blue eyes. He guessed that she was twenty-four or twenty-five tops, which meant that she couldn’t have been very much more than a teenager when she had given birth to Stanley. She wore nothing but a white XXL T-shirt which billowed in the breeze.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked him.

  ‘Sure, I’m okay.’

  ‘What happened? How did all these cars get wrecked?’

  Stanley chipped in, ‘The shadow did it.’

  ‘The shadow?’ asked Stanley’s mother.

  E.C. Dude grunted. ‘Who Knows What Evil Lurks In The Hearts Of Men? Only the Shadow knows, ho, ho, ho.’

  ‘What a mess,’ said Stanley’s mother. ‘I was asleep and all the crashing woke me up.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said E.C. Dude. ‘It must’ve been some kind of magnetic storm or something, I don’t know. I’m supposed to be taking care of these cars, shit.’

  ‘The shadow did it,’ Stanley insisted.

  ‘Oh, come on, now, Stanley, ssh,’ his mother told him. ‘By the way,’ she said to E.C. Dude, ‘I’m Linda Welles. I’m working at the Sun Devil. Thanks for taking care of Stanley he’s always wandering. It’s something in the blood.’

  ‘E.C. Dude,’ said E.C. Dude.

  ‘E.C. Dude? That stand for something?’

  E.C. Dude shrugged. ‘Nothing in particular,’ although it did. It was just that he was too embarrassed to tell her.

  Jack Mackie from the Sun Devil came stalking across the concrete, the sun shining on his grey greased-back hair.

  ‘Christ almighty, E.C., Joe’s going to scalp you for this. Look at his cars. Look at his Goddamned trailer. That’s his house, man. You knocked over his Goddamned house.’

  ‘I just can’t figure what happened,’ said E.C. Dude. He picked up a bent steering-wheel, steered with it for a moment, then dropped it.

  ‘The shadow did it,’ Stanley insisted.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Jack. ‘Joe’s in Phoenix, aint he, trying to get custody? This won’t help his case much. All his living smashed up, and no place to take his girl back to.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault, man,�
� said E.C. Dude, mournfully. In the far distance, he heard the whooping of a siren. Deputy Fordyce, no doubt.

  Jack Mackie walked around the wreckage, kicking a tire here and there, as men always do. ‘I never saw anything like this, E.C., Never in my natural days. I mean, what did you do here, man?’

  ‘I swear on the Bible I didn’t touch them,’ E.C. Dude protested. ‘I didn’t touch one of them.’

  Stanley pointed at the wall at the rear of the workshops. ‘It was the shadow. I saw the shadow running along there and then it got away.’

  At that moment, Deputy Fordyce arrived, with his usual flourish of tires and howling siren and flashing lights. He climbed out of his car and walked towards them, a tall crimson-faced thirty-year-old with a big hat and gingery hair and a wide bottom in sharply-pressed slacks.

  He took off his orange Ray-Bans, neatly folded them, and tucked them into his breast pocket.

  ‘You again, E.C? ‘he remarked. He studied the twisted wreckage, his eyes bulging and fierce. ‘These vehicles all look pretty well wrecked to me, even by Papago Joe’s standards.’

  ‘I was just telling Jack, I didn’t touch one of these cars, not one.’

  ‘The shadow did it,’ Stanley piped up; but his mother said, ‘Shush, honey, don’t interrupt.’

  ‘I was thinking maybe it was a magnetic storm or something,’ E.C. Dude suggested.

  ‘Amagnetic storm?’ asked Deputy Fordyce, with exaggerated interest. ‘What the hell is a magnetic storm?’

  ‘I don’t know. There was something about a magnetic storm in Superman.’

  ‘Oh, really? Guess I’ll have to bone up on it. You’ll have to tell me which issue.’