great to be alive in Colma, the town was home to eighteen cemeteries, and the celebrities buried there ranged from Wyatt Earp to Joe DiMaggio. Boggs, in one of the fugue states that typically followed a frenzied night of digging, had ranted all night about his many adventures in Colma, despite the fact that we had spent the evening in an anonymous corner of one of the lesser grounds. But perhaps we had taken photos of someone famous, after all, because here was a person, maybe a relative, gunning his engine for revenge. Vengeance: it gave life purpose. Something about this rang familiar to me, though I didn’t know why.
Then washer fluid squirted from the hood and the wipers fanned sludge. Boggs grinned through a crescent of cleared window—another stolen car. He honked the horn in a pattern probably intended to be recognizable and tipped his top hat out the window.
“Let’s get a move on.” He honked some more. “Move it or lose it.”
A trash bin helped me up. My legs shook and I looked down at the emaciated bones, the emphatic bands of gristle. They did not look ugly to me; rather, I took pleasure in my increasingly whittled shape. Day by day I looked more like the characters in the Rotters Book. It felt very Hollywood, this desire to be shapely and famous. Everyone out here felt this way. At long last, I was normal.
“Giddyup, son. We’re already packed.” I noticed in the car’s rear compartment the rickety shovel, our sacked belongings, the canisters of film, the quilted cradle of Harpakhrad. “Me and you, we got a book to finish.”
Light-headed with equal parts unhealth and excitement, I stumbled to the driver’s side window. Boggs had already crawled aside so that I could take on the role of designated driver. He patted the seat. Flakes of dead skin salted the stained fabric. Boggs brushed it away and chuckled.
“Dig the Diggers.” His voice gurgled with the sludge of meth. “Final chapter. What do you think? Ain’t that poetry for a poet?”
I followed orders. Miles peeled away like meat from bone. There were as many variations of landscapes as there were colors of decay. A wasp zipped into the car as we crossed the Columbia River and Boggs let it bite him twice so he could suck out the poison and rub it into his gums. Mostly he hummed and stole one-eyed glances that I didn’t like. There was one Digger, after all, whose inclusion in the Rotters Book had not yet been discussed.
Our first stop was near a military training center in the state of Washington, and as I dug Boggs curled himself against a nearby tombstone and paged through a battered Ray Bradbury paperback that he had peeled from the bottom of a Dumpster. I didn’t protest; after overindulging on the drugs he’d stockpiled for the trip, he looked worse than ever. Half of his face had been swallowed by a raw-looking rash erupting with yellow pustules, and he mumbled incessantly as he pushed his nose into the book. My impression of Bradbury was that he was not a humorist, yet Boggs chortled until his blue eye gushed water.
I unearthed a Digger named Aberdeen. Boggs was too preoccupied to operate the camera, so I took over those duties, too. Aberdeen looked bad in the photo, the leathery hood of his head shriveled in defeat. In Utah, I looked upon the remains of Copperhead and my finger paused over the camera button, hazily recalling the photo I had taken long ago of Harnett and the severed hand. That photo had never seen the light of day, and this one shouldn’t, either. Its alignment in the book ended up crooked; I couldn’t bear to look when pasting it in. This was not right. Something about this was not right.
Next we went to Texas to disinter the man known as Boxer. Standing above his grave with the shovel, I started coughing and continued until I choked. Boggs looked at the tears the coughs brought to my cheeks and laughed until he too was sputtering. Only a day away was a man called Wolff. His grave was well fortified: a steel casket sheathed within a concrete vault. I chipped at the caulking with a fastidious patience I did not feel. Behind me, the flipping of Bradbury, page after page. While I coughed, Boggs vomited, and I smelled the familiar scent of urine when he became too absorbed in his reading. Yet his good