The Dark Half(13)

open long enough to cook himself a little dinner and have a can of beer before tumbling into bed. Spring cleaning always ended on the same day: the one on which he felt that his constant backache was going to drive him completely out of his mind.

June spruce-up wasn't anywhere near as bad, but it was important. Come late June the summer people would start arriving in their accustomed droves, and with them would come old residents (and their children) who had moved away to warmer or more profitable parts of the country but who still held property in town. These were the people Digger regarded as the real ass-aches, the ones who would raise the roof if one blade was off the old waterwheel down at the sawmill or if Uncle Reginald's gravestone had tumbled over on its inscription. Well, winter's coming, he thought. It was what he used to comfort himself with in all seasons, including this one, when winter seemed as distant as a dream. Homeland was the biggest and prettiest of the town boneyards. Its central lane was almost as wide as a regular road, and it was crossed by four narrower lanes, little more than wheel-tracks with neatly mown grass growing up between them. Digger drove up the central avenue through Homeland, crossed the first and second intersections, reached the third . . . and slammed on the

brakes.

'Oh piss in the shithouse!' he exclaimed, turning off the pick-up's engine and getting out. He walked down the lane toward a ragged hole in the grass some fifty feet down and to the right of the cross-lane. Brown clumps and piles of dirt lay around the hole like shrapnel around a grenade explosion. 'Gawdam kids!'

He stood by the hole, big callused hands planted on the hips of his faded green work-pants. This was a mess. On more than one occasion he and his co-workers had had to clean up after a bunch of kids who had either talked or drunk themselves into a little midnight grave-digging - it was usually an initiation stunt or just a handful of teenage dimbulbs, randy with the moonlight and kicking up their heels. To Digger Holt's knowledge, none of them had actually dug up a coffin or, God forbid, disinterred one of the paying customers - no matter how drunk these happy ass**les happened to be, they usually didn't do more than dig a hole two or three feet deep before getting tired of the game and leaving off. And, although digging holes in one of the local boneatoriums was in bad taste (unless you happened to be a fellow like Digger, who was paid and duly empowered to plant the customers, that was), the mess wasn't too bad. Usually. This, however, wasn't a case of usually.

The hole had no definition; it was just a blob. It surely didn't look like a grave, with neatly squared corners and a rectangular shape. It was deeper than the drunks and high-school kids usually managed, but its depth was not uniform; it tapered to a kind of cone, and when Digger realized what the hole did look like he felt a nasty chill race up his spine. It looked the way a grave would look if someone had been buried before he was dead, come to, and dug his way out of the ground with nothing but his bare hands.

'Oh, cut it out,' he muttered. 'Fucking prank. Fucking kids.'

Had to be. There was no coffin down there and no tumbled headstone up here, and that made perfect sense because there was no body buried here. He didn't have to go back to the toolshed, where a detailed map of the graveyard was tacked up on the wall, to know that. This was part of the six-plot segment owned by the town's First Selectman, Danforth 'Buster' Keeton. And the only plots actually occupied by customers held the bodies of Buster's father and uncle. They were off to the right, their headstones standing straight and unmolested..Digger remembered this particular plot well for another reason. This was where those New

York people had set up their fake gravestone when they were doing their story on Thad Beaumont. Beaumont and his wife had a summer home here in town, on Castle Lake. Dave Phillips caretook their place, and Digger himself had helped Dave tarring the driveway last fall, before the leaves fell and things got busy again. Then this spring, Beaumont had asked him in kind of an embarrassed way if some photographer could set up a fake tombstone in the cemetery for what he called 'a trick shot.'

'If it's not okay, just say so,' Beaumont had told him, sounding more embarrassed than ever. 'It's really not a big deal.'

'You go right ahead,' Digger had answered kindly. 'People magazine, did you say?'

Thad nodded.

'Well, say! That's something, isn't it? Somebody from town in People magazine! I'll have to get that issue for sure!'

'I'm not sure I will,' Beaumont said. 'Thanks, Mr Holt.'

Digger liked Beaumont, even if he was a writer. Digger had only gone as far as the eighth grade himself - and had to try twice before he could get through that one - and it wasn't everybody in town called him 'Mister.'

'Darn magazine folk'd prob'ly like to take your pitcher stark naked with your old hog-leg stuck up a Great Dane's poop-chute if they could get it that way, wouldn't they?'

Beaumont went off into a rare gale of laughter. 'Yeah, that's just what they would like, I think,'

he had said, and clapped Digger on the shoulder.

The photographer had turned out to be a woman of the sort Digger called A High-Class Cunt from the City. The city in this case was, of course, New York. She walked as if she had a spindle up her box and another one tucked up her butt and both of them turning just as brisk as you please. She'd gotten a station wagon from one of the car-rental places at the Portland jetports and it was stuffed so full of photo equipment it was a wonder there was room for her and her assistant inside. If the car got too full and it came to a choice between getting rid of her assistant or some of that photo equipment, Digger reckoned there would be one pansy from the Big Apple trying to hitch him a ride back to the airport.