Backhoe Bob sat in the gas-station diner with the Sheriff, who also happened to be named Bob. Locals have been calling them Backhoe Bob and Sheriff Bob for a long time now, to differentiate between the two a’ them. At one time there was a third Bob – Bob Rutherford, who was Backhoe Bob’s original partner in the backhoe service. His nickname was “Just Bob ” because that’s what passes for humor here. Early on in their partnership, Backhoe Bob and Just Bob bid on the cemetery services contract for the county – cemetery services being a polite way of referencing grave-digging work. They won the contract, and they dug their first grave shortly thereafter, for a woman named Philomena, a farmer’s widow. There are not many Philomena’s anymore. One less for sure. So, they dug a nice, tight hole for her and now she rests beside her husband and a stillborn infant named Mercy.
The next grave Backhoe Bob dug, he dug alone. Just Bob had a heart attack while standing at his kitchen sink at five in the morning on a Thursday, and he now lies in that same cemetery, under a stone that says Robert Randall Rutherford Jr., where he now waits for his wife.
Backhoe Bob dug that grave alone, then gave up the contract.
It felt like there was bad luck coming, he said. I can do without bad luck.
The two surviving Bobs sat there in the gas-station diner watching hockey on the big screen, drinking their coffee and eating their pie. Spring, playoffs, and someone would win and someone would lose. A woman named Martha, who might have been an ex-Hutterite, ran the diner and served the coffee hot and the pie from a microwave. In a census-designated place like this, with a gas-station, a grain elevator, and a road, there is no money in cooking, and no pretension in the menu. Pie comes from the freezer.
Game over, Backhoe Bob took his leave of Martha and Sheriff Bob and addressed the latter, saying I’d like to tell you to stay busy and keep out of trouble but you are the only guy I know who I hope isn’t busy.
It’s worse than it’s ever been, Sheriff Bob said. Methamphetamines, Bob. Meth is the worst. A lot of scabby faces these days. They steal a truck, come on out here to the rural parts, and steal another truck, plus whatever else they can tear out of the sheds and the barns and the houses of people out for two hours to go to the city and go to a Costco. They take that back into the city and it’s gone and they’re high and they do it again and again. It’s tiresome. Twenty years ago, it was just drunks and wife-beaters. Now … he said, and shook his head. Now, you know, meth ruins whole families. If you have a meth-head in the house you don’t have a television set, or appliances, or a vehicle, or money. They take all that. You eat your dinner off of the kitchen counter because you haven’t got a plate. It’s gone too. You eat with a knife and fork you keep in your pocket when you’re not eating because that’s the only way you can keep them.
Backhoe Bob had his coat on and was halfway out the door.
Do you have a quad or anything like that? Sheriff Bob asked him.
Oh yeah, Backhoe Bob said. A little one. For the grandkids to ride around the fence line when they come out.
That’ll be the first thing to get stolen, Sheriff Bob said. Let me know if you see anything odd up around your place. Maybe you should get a big ol’ dog.
Been thinking about it, said Backhoe Bob, and he was out the door.
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Backhoe Bob drove back to his acreage ten miles out of what was left of town with just the running lights on. Far off, to the southwest, you could see the arch of the clouds coming, the formation of which, gray in their bower even at night, bespoke themselves of high winds to come on the morrow. Closer to his home, he could see the play of another vehicle’s headlamps on the wall of his house.
Goddamn, he said, and then stopped the truck.
He took his 7mm out of the gun rack and thumbed a few rounds into it and took the safety off, before putting the truck back into gear and making the last click into his property at barely above an idle. There, on the slope of his driveway, was an old beater of a Dodge pick-up, a plum color and more than a little rusty. Both doors were open, and it was idling in the cool evening air, pushing warm water vapor out of the exhaust. Behind it and to the left, beside his little shop, someone had hooked his old ‘78 GMC up to his lo-boy trailer – the one he moved the backhoe on. A man was pushing a woman on his grandkid’s little quad onto the lo-boy while she steered it.
Hey, Bob shouted.
They both stopped their transit to look up at him.
He squeezed the trigger and put a 7mm PRC round through both of them hitting the woman in the midsection and killing the man outright. The man had been a little lower than the woman was and had bent over to push the quad. The bullet went in just under his collarbone and through his heart – just like that – and he was dead. The crack of that 7mm could probably be heard back at the diner, if anyone was there to hear it, but even if they did, all would assume that some farmer was talking a shot at coyotes gone after the calves, or something like that.
He stood there after the shot for a full-on minute, before he started to walk up to the man and woman, his boots crunching on the shale.
The man was deader than dead, and there was not a lot of blood. The woman was lying face-up on the ground beside the trailer and bleeding, paralyzed from her stomach down. The round had hit her spinal column before exiting into the man.
She swore at Backhoe Bob while he stood there looking at her. She spit out an inchoate string of profanity and saliva.
Backhoe Bob thought a minute, then went into his tool shed and pulled out a blue plastic tarp and lay it on the ground. He rested the rifle against the trailer and went and shut the old GMC off. Then he went and pulled the dead man onto the tarp.
He asked the woman, who was still swearing, if she could stand.
She swore.
Can you crawl? he asked.
She was quiet for a minute, then told him to Fuck Off.
He grabbed her by her ankles and dragged her onto the tarp beside the dead man.
She screamed.
Did that hurt? he asked.
She wouldn’t answer.
Good, he said. Then, I’ll be back.
Backhoe Bob walked into his house with the rifle and took his boots off, then went into his kitchen and fired up the coffee maker. When the coffee was ready, he sat down at the kitchen table and took his coffee. On the fridge, underneath a corncob fridge magnet, there was a picture of he and his wife Anne at the palliative care center where she had lived out the last few weeks of her life. It was the last picture he’d had of her. He looked on her smiling there, and at the sweater that hung too large on her by half, and he thought about how at the time of the picture she seemed better than she had been in a long while, and he’d thought that maybe something had happened and it would somehow turn around, but it didn’t and by the time she passed, she didn’t look like she did in that picture, and in that picture, she didn’t look like she had in any picture before. He drank his coffee slow and it was cool by the last swallow. Annie girl, he said, I’m going to be late. It’s been a long day and I’ve yet got work to do. Don’t wait up for me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
He walked back out to the trailer with the rifle. The woman was still there. She had not moved.
You know, he said, I thought you might crawl away, make a break for it. Find your legs even. Not that it would matter. Town is ten miles away. You would need a miracle, and I guess you wanna be told that there is a miracle coming but I am here, and here there ain’t gonna be any miracles, at least not tonight.
The woman swore at him again, calling him a piece of shit, and a hillbilly, and other things.
He unloaded the firearm and put it back in the gun rack back in his truck. He took the quad and rolled it back off of the lo-boy and put it into the shed. He noted that they’d kicked in the door to the shop. I’ll have to fix that later, he thought. He unhooked the lo-boy from the GMC’s fifth-wheel hitch and then took the GMC and went and turned it around and parked it where it had originally sat.
I can’t believe you started for those two sons-a-bitches, he said to the truck, you’re only fifty-fifty on starting for me.
The GMC and trailer taken care of, he went over to the tarp. The woman had started to scream, to shout, AH AH AH AH.
Ain’t no one going to hear you, he said. There ain’t no one around. What do you think they would do for you anyway?
I got money, she said. We got money. I can pay you.
Backhoe Bob didn’t answer that.
You know, he said, that quad is for my grandkids. My wife – Annie – she loved her grandbabies. Annie had a dignity about her, a kind of reserve. I was the only one ever called her Annie. To everyone else she was Anne. We moved out here, thinking it was a good place to raise kids, and it was. We stayed out here, thinking it was a good place for the Grandkids to come, and it is. That we didn’t get more time, well that’s the cancer’s fault. It come and took her, all too quick. But that’s cancer, it does what it does. And now you come to steal from Annie’s grandkids.
The woman started to shout again. AH AH AH AH. Not even words, just shouts.
Backhoe Bob went and got the backhoe and started digging. It was dark now, darker than dark, but he’d been at those controls for more than forty years and he could judge depth in his sleep. Done, he stopped the backhoe and came back to the tarp. The woman had closed her eyes and he thought she might have bled out. There was a fair amount of blood on the tarp, most of it hers and not the dead man’s. The living bleed, he thought, but the dead not at all. She smelled too, or the dead man did, or more likely both. They smelled acrid, impure, leaching out toxins and traumas and writhing, spasming fear. She woke up when he started to pull the tarp to the edge of the hole he’d dug. She started to talk again, nonsense now, the same pejoratives thrown at him, the same promises of money in quantities left unspecified.
You can beg better than that, he said, before dumping them both into the hole.
He took the tarp all the way over to the house and hung it off of some nails on the north wall. I’ll come back and wash you later, he said to the tarp, then he went back over to the hole and looked in. The woman had fallen to lie face up on top of the dead man and her eyes were wide open. She had bright green irises, and the whites of her eyes were the color of November snow. She did not blink. The scabs on her face, the symptom of her toxic being, had been rendered invisible by the dirt and her mouth was indistinct. She was now reduced to only her eyes and not anything else. Far off in the starlit darkness they both could hear the excited chirping of coyotes. Whatever it is coyotes know, they know. They are them what find the lost, sextons to the last place the abandoned lie. Their own laws are few and they obey none of anyone else’s, and on this night, they sang like a chorus of imps.
I dug graves before, Backhoe Bob said to the woman, who did not respond. She had sublimated it seemed; merging with the cradle of broken-up earth he’d made in the dark.
I dug two graves, he continued. I figured I was done. I did not dig for Annie – no, no, no. She’s buried in the city, as will be I, when comes my time. Others made her grave, and others will make mine.
The woman had started to cry. He ignored her.
How’s that for chance, he said, the coyotes heard clearly at his stops. How’s that? Me and Annie, country-folk by inclination, returned to the expensive ground of our city fathers, and you, a big city girl, under more than eight feet of country dirt not fit for growing anything other than weeds and winter wheat. Eight feet. Ain’t no one ever going to find you. Ain’t no one even going to look for you, I bet. Yeah, that’s what I think. The world hates a thief. Maybe, a hundred years from now, the gas company will move a line or something but by then there won’t be nothing, not even the smell of your poisons and your desperations and your fears.
The woman cried and cried.
Backhoe Bob did not cry, and he did not speak to the woman again. He got back in the backhoe and put the fill he’d dug out back on the living woman and the dead man. When he’d filled it, he used the bucket of the backhoe to level the ground and then to move more shale over it and back and forth and back and forth he went until it was level to his satisfaction, and he could drive over it with the great weight of the hoe and no impression other than tread could be seen, and if the wind comes on the morrow like the firmament has promised, the marks of those treads too, will be unfound.
⁂
The last thing Backhoe Bob did was to reach into the old Dodge the thieves had come in and put it into low gear and let it idle out of his driveway and into the ditch across the road where it came to rest nose down with both doors open. Light was come, not the fire of sunrise but the pale blue herald of the passing of the evening, and with their muse slumbered airless and breathless under eight feet of the sparse prairie earth, the coyotes had ceased to sing.
Backhoe Bob went in and slept in he and Annie’s bed for a few hours, then got up, made coffee and took a slip of paper out and walked across to the abandoned Dodge and wrote the plate number down on the scrap. He took that back into the house and phoned the sheriff to report an abandoned vehicle in the ditch across from his property. He told Darla, who answered the phone and did the typing for the sheriff, that if they were busy there wasn’t any rush, he’d keep an eye on the truck and at any rate, he’d probably see Sheriff Bob for hockey and pie at the diner that night anyways and they’d deal with it one way or the other. After he hung up, he went to the side of the house where the tarp hung and he took out the hose and washed it, the black blood and the dry and clinging earth and the frayed and torn grass roots and the flies too, the flies that come warmed in the sun to find what it is that feeds their maggots, and he stood and washed all of it until the tarp was blue again and swelled up taut to dry in the wind that had come to honor its covenant.
⁂
Far to the north, in the village of Granum, Alberta, a single grave lies outside of the cemetery, the edge of which is overgrown with caragana that blooms yellow in the spring and can’t be rooted out short of digging it up and salting the earth of the roots. The only thing visible on the headstone is a date, specifically 1908. They say there is a woman who is buried in that grave who died of suicide, or of tuberculosis, or that she had been a prostitute, or that none of these things are true and that her grave lies where it does for no reason other than that she was buried there first and the graveyard demarcated after, and the caragana, planted as a windbreak, were put in after that and now the hedge sets the boundaries of the cemetery, and the dead rest where they have always rested and remain indifferent to the conjectures the living make about them, and the caragana pay no attention to dates and times and months and years and the worked stone put in place or the people walking by the stones, or the bodies at rest beneath them.
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