my question or just delaying the answer.
Harnett described other important systems, too: the worlds of pawnshops, jewelry brokers, and antiques dealers, and the risks and rewards of associating with each. He told me of brokers who routinely abused Diggers with piddling offers and veiled threats. Reverend Knox—who wanted the Diggers saved and in church, not damned and behind bars—passed along warnings of these blackmailers. The day Knox died, Harnett lamented, the road would become much more treacherous. How would they know, for example, which buyers would purchase gold teeth without asking questions? Or which curio dealers traded in vintage Bibles?
“When Knox is gone,” Harnett said, “the money will dry up. And then, for most of us, there will only be Bad Jobs.”
“What’s a Bad Job?” I asked.
“There are things,” he said, gesturing into the blackness, “that people out there will pay you to do. Pay good money for you to do. There are things people want and we are the only ones who can get them. There are other things, too, even worse.”
“Like what?”
Harnett ignored the question. “Any Digger who starts down that path, he’s pretty well near the end. You can’t do those kinds of jobs and live with yourself. I’ve seen it again and again, Diggers who thought Just this once, I need the money. And that was that.”
“Suicides?” I whispered.
My father spat out a hunk of bad jerky. “Many.”
35.
LIGHT FOUGHT RUDELY TOWARD my pupils. I tasted dirt and cloth—Harnett’s shoulder. I sat up quickly, wiping at the drool and tasting the sour crud of Eileen and Floyd’s rations.
“Shh,” Harnett said.
I rubbed my eyes; pebbles, embedded for hours within the heel of my palm, dropped into my lap. The Woman in Black was still there, curled like a dog on Nathaniel Merriman’s plot. An edge of morning sunlight warmed the tops of gravestones and threw black stripes across the gentle slope of the cemetery, but churning across the sky were storm clouds.
“Don’t we need to get out of here? It’s light; people will see us.”
“I’ve waited too damn long. I’m getting in there.”
“But people will see,” I insisted.
He looked at me. “People don’t see as much as you think.”
I opened my mouth to call him on his portentous bullshit, when suddenly he wrapped both arms around me and threw me to the ground. The stink of jerky from his breath filled my sinuses.
A man was walking up the path. Seconds later he glanced our way, but Harnett had successfully concealed us in the shallow ditch at the mausoleum edge. The man continued up the path, his crisp and metered footfalls sounding like Ted’s metronome.
Harnett rolled off me and crouched low. I followed suit. The man left the path and crossed over to the Woman in Black. He got on one knee beside her and shook her gently until she raised her head.
“Okay, that’s more like it,” Harnett whispered, nodding.
Together, the man and woman looked up at the brewing storm, then appeared to exchange words. Still kneeling, the man stretched out his arms and took the woman into a furious embrace.
“Oh, no,” Harnett said.
The man and woman clutched at each other, and their backs shook with the force of their crying.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Harnett said.
Moments later, they were both sprawled like toddlers, pawing at Nathaniel Merriman’s grave and pushing up tufts of sod with their feet. Harnett cursed and stood, lifting me by my collar and pushing me onto the path ahead of him.
“Where’re we going?” I said.
“Breakfast,” he growled. “Until these basket cases get their shit together.”
We left the cemetery, checked on the truck, passed the bar where I had bought the jerky, and walked down a main street even less exciting than the one in Bloughton. Harnett moved as if he could smell the bacon in the air. I yawned and struggled to keep up. Within five minutes he had sniffed out a diner, and we pushed through the door and fell into opposite sides of a booth. A waitress approached.
I recognized the tattoos instantly. I looked past Eileen and into the kitchen, where the ponytailed Floyd was jabbing a smoking grill.
Eileen’s red-painted lips split to reveal two rows of false teeth.
“It’s our jerky boy!” she cried. “Floyd, it’s our jerky boy!”
“We don’t got any jerky,” he muttered over the sizzling.
“It’s the boy who bought the jerky!” she shouted.
“We don’t got any jerky, crazy woman.”
Harnett rubbed his temples. “Two coffees. Two of everything: eggs, bacon, toast, but coffee first.”
Eileen made a squiggle on