《Dolans_Cadillac》(10)

And then, just as I was about to give up and look for something I could use to dipstick the loader's fuel tank (all the better to read the bad news with, my dear), the motor bellowed into life.

I let the wires go - the bare patch on the blue one was smoking - and goosed the throttle. When it was running smoothly, I geared it into first, swung it around, and started back toward the long brown rectangle cut neatly into the westbound lane of the highway.

The rest of the day was a long bright hell of roaring engine and blazing sun. The driver of the Case-Jordan had forgotten to mount his sand-flaps, but he had remembered to take his sun umbrella. Well, the old gods laugh sometimes, I guess. No reason why. They just do. And I guess the old gods have a twisted sense of humor.

It was almost two o'clock before I got all of the asphalt chunks down into the ditch, because I had never achieved any real degree of delicacy with the pincers. And with the spade-shaped piece at the end, I had to cut it in two and then drag each of the chunks down into the ditch by hand. I was afraid that if I used the pincers I would break them.

When all the asphalt pieces were down in the ditch, I drove the bucketloader back down to the road equipment. I was getting low on fuel; it was time to siphon. I stopped at the van, got the hose... and found myself staring, hypnotized, at the big jerrican of water. I tossed the siphon away for the time being and crawled into the back of the van. I poured water over my face and neck and chest and screamed with pleasure. I knew that if I drank I would vomit, but I had to drink. So I did and I vomited, not getting up to do it but only turning my head to one side and then crab-crawling as far away from the mess as I could.

Then I slept again and when I woke up it was nearly dusk and somewhere a wolf was howling at a new moon rising in the purple sky.

In the dying light the cut I had made really did look like a grave - the grave of some mythical ogre. Goliath, maybe.

Never, I told the long hole in the asphalt.

Please, Elizabeth whispered back. Please... for me.

I got four more Empirin out of the glove compartment and swallowed them down.

"For you," I said.

I parked the Case-Jordan with its fuel tank close to the tank of a bulldozer, and used a crowbar to pry off the caps on both. A dozer-jockey on a state crew might get away with forgetting to drop the sand-flaps on his vehicle, but with forgetting to lock the fuel-cap, in these days of $1. 05 diesel? Never.

I got the fuel running from the dozer into my loader and waited, trying not to think, watching the moon rise higher and higher in the sky. After awhile I drove back to the cut in the asphalt and started to dig.

Running a bucket-loader by moonlight was a lot easier than running a jackhammer under the broiling desert sun, but it was still slow work because I was determined that the floor of my excavation should have exactly the right slant. As a consequence, I frequently consulted the carpenter's level I'd brought with me. That meant stopping the loader, getting down, measuring, and climbing up into the peak-seat again. No problem ordinarily, but by midnight my body had stiffened up and every movement sent a shriek of pain through my bones and muscles. My back was the worst; I began to fear I had done something fairly unpleasant to it.

But that - like everything else - was something I would have to worry about later.

If a hole five feet deep as well as forty-two feet long and five feet wide had been required, it really would have been impossible, of course, bucket-loader or not - I might just as well have planned to send him into outer space, or drop the Taj Mahal on him. The total yield on such dimensions is over a thousand cubic feet of earth.

"You've got to create a funnel shape that will suck your bad aliens in," my mathematician friend had said, "and then you've got to create an inclined plane that pretty much mimes the arc of descent."

He drew one on another sheet of graph paper.

"That means that your intergalactic rebels or whatever they are only need to remove half as much earth as the figures initially show. In this case..." He scribbled on a work sheet, and beamed. "Five hundred and twenty-five cubic feet. Chicken-feed. One man could do it."


Chapter Eleven

I had believed so, too, once upon a time, but I had not reckoned on the heat... the blisters... the exhaustion... the steady pain in my back.

Stop for a minute, but not too long. Measure the slant of the trench.

It's not as bad as you thought, is it, darling? At least it's roadbed and not desert hardpan.

I moved more slowly along the length of the grave as the hole got deeper. My hands were bleeding now as I worked the controls. Ram the drop-lever all the way forward until the bucket lay on the ground. Pull back on the drop-lever and shove the one that extended the armature with a high hydraulic whine. Watch as the bright oiled metal slid out of the dirty orange casing, pushing the bucket into the dirt. Every now and then a spark would flash as the bucket slid over a piece of flint. Now raise the bucket... swivel it, a dark oblong shape against the stars (and try to ignore the steady throbbing pain in your neck the way you're trying to ignore the even deeper throb of pain in your back)... and dump it down in the ditch, covering the chunks of asphalt already there.

Never mind, darling - you can bandage your hands when it's done. When he's done.

"She was in pieces," I croaked, and jockeyed the bucket back into place so I could take another two hundred pounds of dirt and gravel out of Dolan's grave.

How the time flies when you are having a good time.