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 windshield. 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 glass 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 hoarse 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 shirt, 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 shield my face. It seemed to me that my heart must explode in my chest.