American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,106

in his armpit, grimaces, and grabs the pair of ankles sticking out of the tarp. The man’s socks are bloody and his two-tone shoes now sport a third tone. Zimmerman clambers in, grabs the other end of the tarp, and pushes their burden out.

It is a long and dangerous route down to the ravine. Dord, who is backing, takes extra care with each step. He is convinced that the wrong step would snap his ankle and send him tumbling down the ravine, so he ignores Zimmerman’s chiding (“You’re moving slower than fucking Christmas!”) and backs down baby step by baby step.

He cannot imagine any punishment more hellish than this. He swears to God, as he so often does in the throes of his addiction, that this is the last fucking time he’s getting high, because every fucking time he gets high something goes absolutely bugshit, and then the next thing he knows he’s carrying a dead body down an uneven precipice in the middle of the night, and fuck me, is that something cold and wet running down my arm, oh Christ almighty I hope I’m imagining that…

Finally Zimmerman says, “Okay. Stop.” He maneuvers to the edge of the ravine and looks out. The bottom is dark, yet he does not point his flashlight down. “All right. We’re gonna throw him over. You ready?”

“Sure,” gasps Dord.

“Okay. Count of three. One. Two…”

With each count they swing the dead body back and forth, each time moving longer and faster. Then on the final count they let him go, and he’s moving so fast and he’s so heavy that Dord almost sails into the ravine with him. Zimmerman has to reach out and snatch him by the wrist to keep him on the path. “Careful,” he says calmly in Dord’s ear, like this is a routine occurrence for him.

There is a thud at the bottom of the ravine. But there is no sprinkling of rocks, nor any dust rising up from the darkness. And that thud did not sound right: there was a wetness to it, one that shouldn’t be heard at all out in the desert.

“Did something break?” asks Dord. “In him, I mean.”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” says Zimmerman. “Give me the gun. The one you picked up at the road.”

Dord hands him the bloody pistol, happy to be free of it. Zimmerman shines his light around the path until he finds a large, flat red rock just off to the side. Brown stains lie across its face in streaks. Zimmerman walks to the rock, places the gun in its exact middle, and turns it so it’s facing the path, as if he wants anyone who comes down to the ravine to see this gun on this stained rock.

“All right,” says Zimmerman. “Back to the truck.”

Dord looks back at the dark ravine. “Ain’t we gonna look to see if he’s hid right?”

“He’s hid fine. And we were told not to look.”

“What? Why?”

Zimmerman gives him an angry look. “Dord… this is just one of those things, okay? One of those things we talked about. Let’s just go.”

“I’m so goddamn sick of that, Mike,” says Dord. “I’m sick of being told what I can and can’t do. We’re being led around by the nose here.”

“Dord…”

“Come on, we just hid a fucking body for these folks, and we can’t even check to see if the work’s done right? It’s our asses on the line if he’s found out here. I got a fucking pocketful of DNA evidence here.”

Zimmerman does not answer. He just watches Dord with anxious eyes, and says, “Listen. I’m going to walk back up to the truck. And I’m not going to look anywhere but ahead of me. I suggest you do the same. You do, and you’ll be fine.” Then he turns and trudges back up the path, head bowed and eyes averted.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says Dord. He struggles for a moment, wondering what to do. For though Dord has a talent for belligerence, he likes Zimmerman and he doesn’t want to disbelieve or disappoint him. He seems to be the only sane voice in Dord’s life at the moment.

Yet his curiosity is too much. He wants to know. He has to know. He has to find out what they don’t want him to see, especially when it’s just a few feet below him.

“Just to check,” he mutters. Then he turns and shines his light down into the ravine.

At first he sees nothing but rock. This concerns him. He even