So, Bubba and his brother Quentin, who had fallen heir to the twelve acres along with their cousin Josh, all of whom had agreed to throw in their shares for the Waving Palms project, had Bubba’s front loader and a backhoe they’d rented, and they were digging a nice big pond at the lower, western end of the ten acres and running a good-sized ditch into it along the swamp on the north. Bubba didn’t own the ground on the north or the south side, where another good-sized ditch led into the swamp. Everything the backhoe dug out of the pond and the ditches got dumped on the eastern edge of the property, along the road, to raise it up. It’d be muddy as hell for a few weeks, full of dead frogs and snakes and all the stuff that squirmed around down in that muck, but when the eastern end had a chance to dry out a little, they’d dump a few loads of fill dirt and gravel on it, grade it out and really dig the foundations. By that time, they’d be able to fool with the ditches some, make them look more natural, and plant some other stuff around.
“Hey, Bubba,” yelled Quentin, when Bubba cut the engine for a minute to clear some brush from the bucket-teeth. “C’mon over here. See what Josh found!”
Trampling through a patch of rare and endangered orchids, Bubba stomped over to the other two men who were standing in a patch of ferns on a little hillock, one they hadn’t planned to touch.
“Why the hell’d ya smash it?” he asked, more interested than irate. The patch of ferns looked as flat as a pool table, though it might be very slightly dished at the center.
“C’mon,” Quentin admonished. “Look addit! We din do that.”
It seemed to Bubba likely they hadn’t. The general flatness had been accomplished through repeated pounding by something large, like a section of log, like the heavy tampers used to settle fill dirt around drainpipes, or foundations, stuff like that. Must be a big man or more’n one did it. Something that size would be a heavy ole bitch of a thing, almost two feet across.
“Whaddaya think?” asked Quentin.
“I think somuddy buried somethin,” Bubba replied. “And when he set them ferns back on top, he smooshed the whole thing down tight. Probly, just did it. A week from now, they’d all be growed up again, and we wouldn’a seen it.”
“You think maybe money?” asked Josh, thoughtfully.
Bubba looked around. “Nah. I think more likely a body. It’s too wet here for money or paper. Most likely a body.”
“We gonna dig it up?” asked Quentin.
“Why’n hell we do that?” his brother replied. “Get all messed up in somethin none of our business! Let dead bodies lie, that’s what I say.”
They returned to their work, making considerable progress by early afternoon, when they stopped work, parked the machines, and got into Bubba’s pickup to drive to the nearest town for sandwiches and beer. After some jollity between them and Dolly, the clerk at the convenience store, they took an extra six-pack, got into their car and drove back the way they’d come. At least so Dolly told the police when they came asking, having found a receipt with the store name on it in the empty seat of the pickup.
That was the last she saw of them, she said, driving off down the road, waving at her.
“They were okay?” asked the police, “not fighting among themselves?”
“Oh, hell, no,” said Dolly. “Those boys’d have to be sober to fight about anything, and they ain’t been sober since high school. I’ve known ‘em forever, since then, anyhow. They’re just happy drunks.”
If so, they’d died happy. The backhoe was right where somebody left it, and the front loader. The truck the men had arrived in was parked by the road. Scattered around the machines were six empty beer cans, two shoes (unmatching), one shirt sleeve, a pair of dark glasses and a blood-soaked item later identified as a hernia truss. Trodden into the muck were the missing men’s bones, all three skeletons, the medical examiner said, when he’d had a chance to sort them out and reassemble them. No flesh. Just bones.