《Dolans_Cadillac》(18)

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?

I knelt by the bare earth. The wind had eroded the impressions of the Case-Jordan's treads but not quite erased them; somewhere beneath those faint indentations was a man wearing a Rolex.

"Dolan," I said chummily, "I've changed my mind and decided to let you out."

Nothing. No sound at all. Dead for sure this time.

I went back and got another square of asphalt. I placed it, and as I started to rise, I heard faint, cackling laughter seeping up through the earth.

I sank back into a crouch with my head forward - if I'd still had hair, it would have been hanging in my face - and remained in that position for some time, listening as he laughed. The sound was faint and without timbre.


Chapter Twenty

When it stopped, I went back and got another asphalt square. There was a piece of the broken yellow line on this one. It looked like a hyphen. I knelt with it.

"For the love of God!" he shrieked. "For the love of God, Robinson!"

"Yes," I said, smiling. "For the love of God."

I put the chunk of asphalt in neatly next to its neighbor, and although I listened, I heard him no more.

I got back to my place in Vegas that night at eleven o'clock. I slept for sixteen hours, got up, walked toward the kitchen to make coffee, and then collapsed, writhing, on the hall floor as a monstrous back spasm racked me. I scrabbled at the small of my back with one hand while I chewed on the other to stifle the screams.

After awhile I crawled into the bathroom - I tried standing once, but this resulted in another thunderbolt - and used the washstand to pull myself up enough so I could get the second bottle of Empirin in the medicine cabinet.

I chewed three and drew a bath. I lay on the floor while I waited for the tub to fill. When it was, I wriggled out of my pajamas and managed to get into the tub. I lay there for five hours, dozing most of the time. When I got out, I could walk.

A little.

I went to a chiropractor. He told me I had three slipped discs and had suffered a serious lower spinal dislocation. He wanted to know if I had decided to sub for the circus strongman.

I told him I did it digging in my garden.

He told me I was going to Kansas City.

I went.

They operated.

When the anesthesiologist put the rubber cup over my face, I heard Dolan laughing from the hissing blackness inside and knew I was going to die.

The recovery room was a watery tiled green.

"Am I alive?" I croaked.

A nurse laughed. "Oh, yes." His hand touched my brow - my brow that went all the way around my head. "What a sunburn you have! My God! Did that hurt, or are you still too doped up?"

"Still too doped up," I said. "Did I talk while I was under?"

"Yes," he said.

I was cold all over. Cold to the bones of me. "What did I say?"

"You said, "It's dark in here. Let me out!" And he laughed again.

"Oh," I said.

They never found him - Dolan.

It was the storm. That flukey storm. I'm pretty sure I know what happened, although I think you'll understand when I tell you I never checked too closely.

RPAV - remember that? They were repaving. The storm almost buried the section of 71 which the detour had closed. When they went back to work, they didn't bother to remove the new dunes all at once but only as they went along - why do otherwise? There was no traffic to worry about. So they plowed sand and routed up old paving at the same time. And if the dozer operator happened to notice that the sand-crusted asphalt in one section - a section about forty feet long - was breaking up in front of his blade in neat, almost geometric pieces, he never said anything. Maybe he was stoned. Or maybe he was just dreaming of stepping out with his baby that evening.

Then came the dumpsters with their fresh loads of gravel, followed by the spreaders and rollers. After them the big tankers would arrive, the ones with the wide sprayer attachments on the backs and their smell of hot tar, so like melting shoe-leather. And when the fresh asphalt had dried, along would come the lining machine, the driver under his big canvas parasol looking back frequently to make sure the broken yellow line was perfectly straight, unaware that he was passing over a fog-gray Cadillac with three people inside, unaware that down in the darkness there was a ruby ring and a gold Rolex that might still be marking off the hours.