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 bucketloader’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.
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 smutty 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.
Stay in. You’re crazy if you go out there. You’ll go sandblind.
That I would chance. This was a golden opportunity to cover it up forever — never in my wildest imaginings had I suspected I might get such a chance, but it was here, and I was taking it.
I had brought three or four extra blankets. I tore a long, wide strip from one of them and tied it around my head. Looking like some sort of crazed Bedouin, I stepped out.
I spent all morning carrying chunks of asphalt up from the ditch and placing them back into the trench, trying to be as neat as a mason laying a wall . . . or bricking up a niche. The actual fetching and carrying was not terribly difficult, although I had to unearth most of the asphalt blocks like an archaeologist hunting for artifacts, and every twenty minutes or so I had to repair to the van to get out of the blowing sand and rest my stinging eyes.
I worked slowly west from what had been the shallow end of the excavation, and by quarter past noon — I had started at six — I had reached the final seventeen feet or so. By then the wind had begun to die and I could see occasional ragged patches of blue above me.
I fetched and placed, fetched and placed. Now I was over the spot where I calculated Dolan must be. Was he dead yet? How many cubic feet of air could a Cadillac hold? How soon would that space become unable to support human life, assuming that neither of Dolan’s two companions was still breathing?