onto the Merriman mourner. “Sometimes the digs go easier than you’d expect, too. Once I drove across three states to find a diamond tiara a beauty queen had been buried in. The graveyard, when I found it, was going through some sort of septic situation. Ground overrun with mud and sewage. Stones overturned and sinking. It was so bad her skeleton had floated up and she was just sitting there waiting for me, the tiara right on top of her head.” His forehead knotted. “Spent all night trying to give her a proper burial, but in that muck? I was just wasting my time.”
He settled back against the crypt with a sigh. “This is right where we want to be. Good sight line, a posture we can hold for as long as necessary, up against a structure we can depend on.”
“Depend on for what?”
He glanced at me. “Depend on not to fall down.”
I laughed once, quietly, but he was dead serious.
“You think anything in here is kept to some sort of code? You lean against a stone like that woman out there is doing, and you’re gambling. Some of them are just barely nudged into the dirt. Some of them, if you haven’t noticed, weigh several tons. Things of such size fall over. That’s what happened to Copperhead.”
“Copperhead,” I said. “Was he a Digger?”
Harnett nodded and pointed at a massive twenty-foot cement monolith. “Decided to take a breather against one of those. Crushed his skull. Crushed everything. This was just three, four years ago. Knox told me the police report wrote him off as some kind of drunk.” Harnett looked at his hands. “Copperhead never took a drink in his life.”
The night stretched on. The clouds wore thin in spots and the thousand points of the Milky Way reflected each one of the markers below. Still the Woman in Black slumped and moaned. After a while her noises were joined by another: my stomach.
“Suck on a stone.” Harnett tapped the loose rocks at our feet. “It’ll help.”
I picked one up and examined it.
“But it’s a rock,” I said. “It’s a dead-person rock.”
“Christ almighty.” Harnett sighed. “Either your stomach or your mouth is going to wake up every corpse in this yard. Go find some food.” He jabbed a thumb toward the cemetery entrance. “Get going.”
The darkness in that direction was absolute. Maybe I had misunderstood. “What?”
“We passed a little place. Just around the corner from the truck.” He reached into his pocket, rustled around for a moment, and then pressed a twenty into my chest. “Here.”
“But, hey, wait.”
“I’m serious, kid.” He kept his eyes on the woman. “It’s going to be a long one.”
The place, when I found it, was a tavern barely bigger than the single pool table it housed. A fat man with a ponytail pocketed stripes by himself while a woman with tattoos covering her neck watched sitcoms behind the bar. I coughed to get her attention and asked if they had any food.
“We don’t sell food here,” she said.
“We got peanuts, Eileen,” said the man.
“We don’t got any peanuts, Floyd!” she yelled with surprising ferocity.
“We got pickles,” he said.
“Floyd!” She picked up a baseball bat and shook it at him. “We don’t got any goddamn pickles!”
He shrugged. “We got jerky.”
Eileen set down the bat and looked at me proudly, gently brushing her hair back from her forehead.
“We have lots of jerky,” she purred.
My pockets crammed with twenty dollars’ worth of Slim Jims, I escaped from Floyd and Eileen and plunged back into the purple gloom of the cemetery. I was back at my father’s side in minutes and together we peeled cellophane from greasy tubes of meat and chewed. Between swallows, Harnett continued his lessons. He told me about barbershops, next to newspapers the single best source of information on the recently deceased. Whenever possible, he told me, he would get a haircut in an area where newspaper coverage was thin; no self-respecting barber could resist listing everyone he knew who was ailing or recently dead. Before I could complain that I myself would’ve preferred a barber job to Harnett’s home-salon butchery, he continued. “Barbers and Diggers have been intertwined for centuries,” he said, noting something called the United Company of Barber Surgeons, begun in sixteenth-century Britain. “Together they were able to get from Parliament the exclusive right to conduct anatomical dissections.”
I wagered a guess: “And the Diggers supplied the bodies?”
Harnett just smiled. “In time,” he said, though I didn’t know if he was responding to