A Fine and Private Place

Chapter 14

Oh, that was a moment, when Campos stood up straight, black over the black grave, with the coffin on his shoulders. It cast a shadow in the truck headlights, and Mr. Rebeck could not see Campos's face at all. But he saw the big hands gripping, the hands whose backs were badlands of tight muscles and thick blue veins, with the knuckles like skulls under the moon; and the naked back, where the muscles bunched like fists; and the ribs, so tight against the skin that they made Campos look tiger-striped; and, most of all, the thick legs, spread wide apart to support the man and his long burden. Campos himself cast no shadow, for the earth was very dark.

In that moment without morning, Mr. Rebeck found himself wondering, Is the world holding up Campos now, giving him a place to stand, or is it really Campos who weighs down the world and keeps it from blowing away?

The coffin was heavy up front, and it teetered forward a little, but Campos bent quickly and shifted his hands, and it was all right. Then Campos began to walk to the truck. He took slow, even steps, carrying the coffin high on his shoulder. His legs and back were straight, but his shoulders were perceptibly bowed, and his neck was twisted so that his mouth was close to the coffin, as if he were speaking love to the woman whose body he carried so tenderly. When he reached the truck, he turned and bent his knees until the coffin rested on the lowered tailgates. Then he fell away from it, touching his hand to the ground for support, and straightened up again.

"Okay," he said to the two people who sat near the truck and watched him. With a casual hand he pushed the coffin farther into the back of the truck and reached for his shirt, which hung on the tailgate where he had left it.

Mr. Rebeck heard Mrs. Klapper sigh with exaggerated relief beside him. Before she could say anything, he said to Campos, "Are we going now?"

Campos nodded. He held his shirt without putting it on. He was breathing deeply, cautiously touching a raw spot on his neck where the coffin had rubbed away the skin.

"Okay," he said again. He walked to the front of the truck and stood by the door. In the dim light there his body gleamed gold with sweat, and brown with sweat, and black. He put on his shirt, leaving it unbuttoned.

"Shouldn't we fill in the grave before we go?" Mr. Rebeck asked.

Campos looked over at the empty grave with the piles of dirt scattered around it and shrugged. "Fill it in when I get back. Come on."

Mr. Rebeck rose from the stone he sat on and offered a hand to Mrs. Klapper. Grasping it, she pulled herself to her feet, brushing her dress with her free hand. She was not wearing the crescent hat, after all.

"Well," she said. "So now everything's all right? Nobody's left anything behind?"

"Everything's fine," Mr. Rebeck said. They started walking to the truck. Campos had started the engine.

"Now what?" Mrs. Klapper asked.

"Now we have to take the coffin to Mount Merrill," Mr. Rebeck said. "It's not far."

Mrs. Klapper blinked at him. "And you bury it all over again? Vey, what people. Like a dog with a bone."

"It's a favor for a friend. I told you about it."

"I know you told me. It's a favor for a friend. All right, who can refuse a friend? So fine, we sit here all night and watch your friend dig up a grave, and now we got to go with him so we can watch him bury it again. Rebeck, you got some friends I wouldn't even want for enemies."

"I couldn't refuse him," Mr. Rebeck said lamely. "He's a very good friend."

"All right, to you he's a very good friend. Me, I don't like him. He scares me."

The last few words were whispered because they had reached the cab of the truck. Mr. Rebeck pulled the door open and stepped back to let Mrs. Klapper get in first. She gave him a sour look, wagging her head slightly, and he realized that she was a little afraid of sitting next to Campos. However, there was nothing for it; Campos was looking at them, waiting impatiently for them to get in, and they would have enough trouble fitting three people into the cab without worrying about the order. So Mrs. Klapper got in and gingerly seated herself next to Campos. Mr. Rebeck climbed in after her. There was barely room enough for him, even when Mrs. Klapper moved closer against Campos's hard, sweating body. But he sat down next to her and closed the door carefully.

The engine hiccuped fiercely, and the truck jolted off. Mr. Rebeck leaned his elbow on the window and felt the door handle pressing against his leg. It was three in the morning by Mrs. Klapper's tiny wrist watch, and very dark. Mr. Rebeck found it hard to breathe, and even the beating of his heart was painful. He turned his head away from Mrs. Klapper, not wanting her to see how frightened he was.

When he had told Mrs. Klapper that he had decided to leave the cemetery, she had literally whooped with delight. After that, she sat down on a rock and began to cry. She stopped abruptly when he told her that he would have to wait until night to leave. And when he told her about Campos and the coffin she got to her feet, holding her purse in both hands, and said that he was a crazy grave-robber, and that it would undoubtedly be better if he stayed in the cemetery where the psychiatrists couldn't get at him. He had gone mad from being alone, just as she had warned him.

But she stayed, snapping her fingers for an explanation she could accept with dignity, whether she believed it or not. The one he finally chose, about doing a last favor for Campos, was not as solid as she would have preferred, but it would do. She accepted it, saying that friendship was a fine thing, and adding that she would wait with him, because he would certainly get lost if he went into the city alone at night.

There was still Campos to be approached, but he would not come on duty until midnight. So they strayed around the cemetery, trying hard to look like an average middle-aged couple, and secretly believing that anyone could look at them and tell that they were very unusual people who were about to do a very unusual thing. From five o'clock on they stayed out of Walters' way as he drove around the cemetery looking for stragglers. Mr. Rebeck was afraid that Mrs. Klapper would become bored very quickly, but he realized after a while that she was having a wonderful time playing cops-and-robbers because she knew that it was the last time they would ever do anything like this. It was then that his heartbeats began to hurt, even though the time of leaving was hours away.

Together they sat on the mausoleum steps as the sun went down and ate the little food that he had left over from the previous day. They were oddly shy with each other because they had never eaten together before, but they smiled at each other often and sometimes talked with their mouths full. When the meal was over he brought her a glass of water from the faucet behind the building.

Then he excused himself for a moment and went into the mausoleum, closing the door behind him. The room was dark and stuffy with the sun down, but he had long since ceased to need his eyes here. He knew where everything was: his clothes more or less in one corner; his few books in another, covered with paper bags and waxed paper; his blankets and cushions and raincoat in a third. The raincoat was folded carefully; it was too new to lie crumpled. A tennis ball lay on top of the blankets. The raven had found it in the cemetery, years ago, and had brought it to him. He never used it for anything, but he always kept it where he could see it, even though it had turned greenish-black with age.

It was a very narrow room, he realized, although it had always seemed wide enough for his needs. His mind must look like that to an outsider: many old things cluttered in a narrow space; neat, but without any real order. But, like the room, his mind had always suited him, and he knew that both would continue to do so if he stayed, because there was nothing to compare them with except the barer minds and narrower houses of the dead.

"I must take some things with me," he said aloud. "How can I go to the city again with nothing of my own?" He stooped and picked up an armful of clothes, thinking vaguely that he might sort them out and take the best ones with him. But he had picked up much too many to sort properly, and he held them too close to his chest.

"I must certainly have something of my own," he said hoarsely, and then the door creaked hesitantly and the room brightened a little. Mrs. Klapper stood in the doorway.

"I heard you talking," she said. She saw him standing with his arms full of clothes, and came farther into the room. "Rebeck, what is this? You expecting a moving van?"

"I'm just taking some of my things with me," he said, knowing how ridiculous he must look to her. "I didn't want to leave the place all littered up."

"What's the matter, you can't leave your stuff here one more day? Who's going to steal it? Look, don't load yourself down now, you won't be able to help your friend. We'll come back first thing tomorrow with a couple of big shopping bags and get everything in."

"No," he said quickly. "No. I have to take it now. I won't be coming back."

"All right, so I'll come by myself and get it. Rebeck, don't worry about it, it'll be fine." Gently she took the bundle of clothes from his unresisting arms and held them herself. She smiled at him, and he managed to smile back.

"Rebeck," she said, "you know, if you changed your mind all of a sudden, if you don't want to go, it's all right. You can tell me. It doesn't matter."

With those words she had locked him outside the gate. Until then, he might have stayed.

"Leave them, then," he said, and walked out of the door of the mausoleum for the last time. She followed him a moment later. They held hands as they walked and did not say anything.

Midnight and Campos came together. It was as if he had ridden the midnight to work the way other people took buses, and tied it outside the black gate to wait for him until he was ready to go home. Mrs. Klapper almost ran the first time she saw the big man, and Campos seemed equally wary of her. She stayed outside the office while he and Mr. Rebeck talked together. The radio was playing all the time.

And inside, shouting sometimes to be heard over the radio, Mr. Rebeck pleaded for Laura and Michael and, because of them, for himself. He never remembered anything he had said to Campos that midnight, as a man has no memory of the words he speaks in his sleep and thinks them the words of a mad stranger when they are repeated to him.

Asking a favor of Campos, Mr. Rebeck thought, was like praying to a jade god with blind onyx eyes. Campos sprawled in his chair with his eyes almost closed and his dark face without expression. Mr. Rebeck left long pauses in his proposition, like blanks in a questionnaire, but Campos never said anything, and he had to go on. He must have talked for fifteen or twenty minutes, with the radio going and Campos hulking in his chair like a blind god.

When he finished speaking, Campos did not move. He stared at Mr. Rebeck with his eyes closing and closing until the last flicker of black had disappeared. Quite still, quite still, Campos; as calm as a window face to face with tragedy.

Then, still blind, he reached out a big hand and turned the radio off.

In the silence Mr. Rebeck heard the breaths of two men, himself and Campos.

Campos opened his eyes and got up. He walked out of the office, leaving the light on. Mr. Rebeck followed him. Mrs. Klapper went with Mr. Rebeck. They had to hurry to keep up with Campos.

Now, squeezed between Mrs. Klapper and the door, with the window open and the hot wind of their passage blowing on his face, Mr. Rebeck looked at his hands. There were new scabs of dried blood on his knuckles, and a scrape on the back of his right hand still bled sluggishly. He had tried to help Campos dig at first, until he scraped his hand and the big man turned on him and told him to go somewhere and sit down. He was rather proud of his bleeding hand as he looked at it. He hoped that Laura could see it.

Mrs. Klapper craned her neck to see what he was looking at. "You put some Mercurochrome on that, first thing," she said. She touched his hand lightly and leaned back.

This thing we have done is illegal, he thought. I ought to tell Campos. Maybe he doesn't know. It is only fair to tell Campos. We will be at the gate very soon.

"Campos," he said. "If the police find out what we have done, they may arrest us."

"Rebeck, don't talk like that," Mrs. Klapper said worriedly. "The devil can hear you."

Campos did not even turn his head. "They won't find out."

"If they do," Mr. Rebeck pressed, "it will certainly cost you your job. I just wanted to tell you."

"Work somewhere else. Street's full of jobs."

"Rebeck, sha!" Mrs. Klapper said. "What kind of talk is this, policemen and losing jobs? Don't worry so much."

"I just wanted to tell Campos," he said to her. He leaned on the window and watched the tombstones go by like sailing ships.

The truck swung wide around a curve, jouncing as one back wheel slipped into a water-filled rut and out again. Mr. Rebeck knew the road well. There were long ridges of earth and dry grass on each side, and few graves. There would be one more curve before the gate.

If he turned around, he knew, he would be able to see Laura. He was sure of it. She would be sitting on her own coffin, looking forward as he was looking back to find her, and she would not be gray in that moment, but the color of morning. Her dress would be the color of morning, too, and of Queen Anne's lace. Her eyes would be as bright as the eyes of a living woman, and her black hair would fall down to her shoulders. It would be nice to turn and see her, to raise his hand to such beauty.

But if he turned she would speak to him, wanting to thank him for what he was doing for her, and he did not think he ought to be thanked.

In his mind, he said to her, "I am taking you to Michael, as you asked, Laura. But it is not life I am taking you to, and you must understand that. I am taking you to the few minutes or hours of happiness that you earned simply by never having them. Though you close your hands on them, they will pass from you like wild birds, and you will not even remember having had them. It might have been a better thing to leave you where you were. The one delusion you never had in your life was the one about the permanence of happiness. This is what I am giving you. Not life. Not even love. Only this. I am sorry that I cannot give you more. In time I may be sorry that I gave you anything at all. Do not thank me for it. Be happy, if you can, but do not thank me."

He looked past Mrs. Klapper to where Campos sat at the wheel, humming very softly to himself. The big man drove well, without seeming to pay much attention either to the road or to the truck itself. But there was a strange expression on his heavy face as he gripped the wheel and hummed his tune. Mr. Rebeck would not have called it love. The truck might have.

On a sudden impulse Mr. Rebeck leaned forward and said "Campos, Laura sang well, didn't she?"

Campos turned slightly to regard him out of dark, calm eyes. He drove with one hand, buttoning his shirt with the other, taking the road without looking at it.

"Pretty good," he said, and turned his head away.

"Thank you, Campos," said Mr. Rebeck.

Mrs. Klapper sighed and wriggled a little, trying to make herself more comfortable between the two men. "Rebeck, who is this Laura? Don't tell me if I shouldn't know."

Is she jealous? he wondered in halting delight. When was a woman ever jealous over me? How late I shall have to begin so many things.

"A woman I knew once," he said. "I'd almost forgotten her."

Then round the last curve, and the hill sloping away before them, and at the bottom of the hill the black gate.

It was wide open. Campos had left it so. To the left, the one light of the caretaker's office still shone; beyond was a deeper, gray-patched darkness that Mr. Rebeck knew must be the street. The gate moved a little in the night air. He could hear it squeak softly, like a bat.

The iron squeaks and murmurs in the ground and the iron snakes slide through the green leaves. The world is crouched to drop on me out of the first green tree. Why am I doing this, what was it I said I would do? Help me now, Laura. Michael, stay with me a little. Somebody stay with me. A man should not go into the world alone.

Halfway down the hill, the light from the caretaker's office blinked blue and went out. The gate disappeared. Mr. Rebeck was not surprised; the bulb had burned all through that night. The only light now came from the truck's headlights, and from the moon, which was pretty but not really useful.

Campos said, "Mierda," as if he were trying to spit out his tongue. He tapped the brake lightly with his foot as a grudging concession to the darkness. The truck slowed a bit, but not much.

"Rebeck," Mrs. Klapper said softly, "you sure?"

He looked at her as she sat next to him, glad she had asked but wanting to tell her that with every escape she offered him she forced him deeper into the world. Did she know that? Probably, he thought. It made no difference.

"No," he said. "I'm not at all sure."

Mrs. Klapper gripped his hand tightly. Her own hand was small and soft, but surprisingly strong. Campos sat behind the wheel and hummed to himself, now and then singing a line or a few words of the song. Mr. Rebeck had never heard it before.

Because the truck's headlights did not reach very far, they did not see the gate again until it was almost upon them. Mr. Rebeck actually rose to his feet, and only knew it when his head bumped on the roof of the cab. Mrs. Klapper held his hand but did not pull at him. Campos did not even bother to look. He hurled the little truck at the gate as if it were a rock to be thrown at a dark window.

It might have been easier if the gate had been the way Mr. Rebeck had dreamed it by night and imagined it by day: the spikes atop it tipped with drying blood, and the iron snakes hissing a silent warning of silent death, poised to strike at the head and heels of any man who came too close. These could be faced, for he had two friends with him, and a man can draw strength from his friends when the iron snakes are all around him.

But the gate was only a gate, after all, and the spikes were very rusty. The truck brushed against it as it passed through, because Campos took his hand off the wheel for a moment to wipe his nose. And then a new road was under their wheels and the gate was behind them, and Mr. Rebeck became slowly aware that he was standing with his head touching the roof of the cab, that Mrs. Klapper was still holding his hand, and that Campos had never stopped his deep, monotonous humming. He sat down, but he did not look back.

"I made it," he said to Mrs. Klapper. "I made it."

"I was holding my breath all the time," Mrs. Klapper said. Her voice sounded very tired.

Mr. Rebeck looked out of the window. He was fascinated by the houses and the cars parked along the curbs.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"This is all Yorkchester," Mrs. Klapper told him. She pointed past him. "Over there my doctor lives. A wonderful man, only with a bad breath on him like his mouth is a thousand years old. You'd think, he's a doctor, a doctor could do something, but no. A fine man. He plays the violin. Rebeck, I was so worried, I thought I'd go crazy."

"It's all right," Mr. Rebeck said. He was leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed.

"I didn't know what to do. I thought, My God, I made him do this, I dragged him all the way down here, look how frightened he is. I thought, If anything happens to him it's your fault, you stupid woman. Rebeck, you're sure you feel okay? You don't look so good."

"I'm fine," Mr. Rebeck said. They were driving under the elevated railroad that ran past the cemetery. The truck bounced on the cobblestones, coming so close to the El pillars that he could have touched them. They were a reddish-gray in the headlights stippled with soft lumps of paint that were crusted on the outside and semi-liquid underneath. It was dark, four-o'clock dark, but some of the stores along the way had left their neon signs on, and their windows seemed very bright in the empty streets.

"You know," he said, "I always thought that there should be a graciousness to life. It was very important to me. Sometimes I would say to myself, 'When the world learns how to be gracious, then I will go back. Not before.' I thought I would know, you see."

An empty taxicab pulled abreast of them as they stopped for a traffic light (Campos was capricious about traffic lights; sometimes he stopped for them), and the driver and Mr. Rebeck stared at each other with real curiosity until the light changed and the cab vanished between the pillars like a deer among trees. Campos turned left and drove up a long paved street choked with two-family houses. There was a light on in one of them, and a middle-aged woman standing at a window. Her eyes were tired but amused as she watched the little truck rattle by.

"And now I've left the cemetery," Mr. Rebeck went on, "with no guarantee that the world has improved at all. In fact, I am sure it hasn't, not in any way that means anything. But it doesn't bother me, for some reason. Not right now, anyway. Maybe tomorrow, or a little later. Right now all that makes me sad is a feeling that I have wasted almost twenty years of my life. It would not be waste if I had learned something, if I were a better man because of those years. But I am as I was, only older, and that makes it waste. And waste to me is a terrible thing, a crime."

He was sure as he spoke that Mrs. Klapper would agree with him, but he was also sure that she would shrug and say, All right, so you wasted. So what? What can you do about it? At least, you didn't get sick and die there, thank God. What else counts? He needed her reassurance.

Instead she said slowly, "Everybody wastes time. A little here, a little there. You wake up in the morning, it's all bright and shiny, you get out of bed and say to yourself, Today is the day! Today I'm going to be a great man. Then you look out the window, you see a pretty girl on the sidewalk—zoom, into the pants, into the shirt, downstairs, 'Hello, did you drop this?' And you say to yourself, All right, so tomorrow I'll be a great man. Who ever got anywhere by rushing? Tomorrow positively, Thursday for sure. . . . Tell me, Rebeck, that's not wasting time?"

Mr. Rebeck only looked at her. Her forehead was in shadow, but he could see her eyes.

"So let's say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don't let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he's getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends."

The streets were very empty. The few cars that passed were all taxicabs. Once a cat galloped across the street in front of them and hid behind the fender of a parked car, watching them until they were safely past.

"Rebeck, this is not a waste? This is the big waste. Five minutes here, an hour there, maybe a week somewhere else. You count it all up, you got your twenty years, and maybe more. At least you got yours over with in one lump. Now you got them out of the way, you can go be a great man."

"Only I'm not a great man, Gertrude," Mr. Rebeck said quietly. "I could never be. It isn't in me."

"So who's breaking your arm, be great? Did I say it like an order? Don't be great, you don't feel like it. Just don't do anything you don't want to, that's all I'm saying. You shouldn't have to do something you don't like."

She looked at him thoughtfully, nibbling at her gloved forefinger as she always did. "Rebeck, what are you going to do, now you're out of the cemetery? You got any idea?"

"I don't know," Mr. Rebeck said. "Pharmacy is the only trade I ever learned. I suppose I could go back to it."

"Pharmacy is good," Mrs. Klapper agreed. "A druggist makes a very nice living. Only it's changed a lot in twenty years; they have a lot of new things now. Miracle drugs."

"I could study. It would be funny, going back to school at my age."

"What's funny? Lots of people do it, people older than you." Mrs. Klapper frowned. "I'm trying to think of all the new drugs they got now you'd have to know about. Penicillin. You know about penicillin?"

"Yes," Mr. Rebeck said. "I read about it in the newspapers."

"Good, so at least you know penicillin. They also got a lot of things that sound alike. I mean, they end the same way. Let me think a minute—"

"The sulfa drugs?" Mr. Rebeck suggested. "The myacins?"

Mrs. Klapper stared at him. "Rebeck, you know all this, what are you bothering me for? What are you hocking me you got to go back to school? You're out of the cemetery five minutes, already you're a druggist again."

Mr. Rebeck laughed. "No. I just read about those drugs. I don't know how they work. I'd have to study."

"All right, so study. Sometimes you worry me, Rebeck."

When they stopped for another traffic light, Mr. Rebeck saw a group of boys standing on a street corner. They wore sports shirts and heavy cowboy boots. All of them had pale faces, and they leaned against a wall and one another, looking idly at the truck. They looked weakly vicious, and lonely.

"Hoods," Mrs. Klapper said, following Mr. Rebeck's glance. "This I'm sorry you had to see. Bums, all of them. What good could they be doing, up so late? Nudnicks."

Mr. Rebeck grinned at her as the truck jerked forward again. "And what are you doing up so late, a respectable Bronx woman like you?"

"My fault? My fault? I said, Hey, let's go over to Mount Merrill and drop off a corpse? This was my idea? I got nothing to do with this, Rebeck. If a cop stops us, you kidnapped me. You and the big one over there."

She yawned and stretched, looking past Mr. Rebeck at the unlighted apartment houses and the moon going down behind them. Her forearm rested gently on Mr. Rebeck's shoulder as she looked out of the window.

There weren't any trolleys any more, he remembered. The raven had told him. The flimsy-looking cars were gone, all of them, and the tracks they had run on were paved over. Now and then, looking carefully, he could catch a wink of silver out of the hidden heart of the street, and then he would know that a trolley track still ran there, wrapped in ragged tar and asphalt.

He looked back once, through the glass slit behind him, because he wanted to see Laura once more. But the back of the truck was empty, except for the smugly stark coffin and the few tools that rattled beside it. There was nothing of Laura herself, neither dark hair nor autumn voice, neither gray eyes nor remembrance of soft laughter. Only a coffin in the back, and a pick, and a shovel, and a crowbar. Of Laura, who had sung to him and loved Michael, nothing.

And yet he knew she was there. As surely as he knew that he would never be able to see ghosts again.

Well, I made the choice myself, he thought. I knew what I was doing. Sooner or later I would have had to choose. No man can speak with both the living and the dead forever.

Then he heard Campos humming in a kind of metallic harmony with the snarling engine, and he thought, Campos can. Campos will always be at ease in both worlds, because he belongs to neither. He loves no one—no, forget that. Morris Klapper was right; love has nothing to do with it. Campos simply does not care about either world, and it is caring about things that grinds down our souls and makes us do stupid things. He will always be able to see ghosts and people, because neither of them can touch him, to please him or to hurt him. I thought I was like that.

For a little time he thought of Laura, and envied Campos the life that he himself had left. Then he forgot envy as he watched the houses pass by in silence. The houses amazed him. There was an unreality about them, a cleanness of glass and new bricks that made it impossible to imagine people living in them, eating and making love and flushing toilets. Yet obviously people did. He saw ashcans in front of most of the buildings, and baby carriages; these are the two sure signs of human occupancy anywhere. He wondered if Mrs. Klapper lived in a place like these.

"Gertrude," he said, nudging her elbow, "is this still Yorkchester we're in?"

Mrs. Klapper blinked and sat up straight. She had been half asleep, he realized.

"No," she said, trying to get her bearings by the street names. "Where we are, I'm not sure, but it's already way out of Yorkchester."

"I hope Mount Merrill isn't far," Mr. Rebeck said. "We haven't got too much time."

"Hey, you," Mrs. Klapper said to Campos, familiarity having whittled away her fear of him. "You. Sitting Bull. How long to Mount Merrill?"

For answer Campos turned the truck so sharply to the left that Mrs. Klapper was thrown against Mr. Rebeck, jarring the breath out of him. The big man drove the truck up a steep, pebbly hill, flanked on both sides by a few small private houses. When the hill leveled off he let the truck coast a little and then brought it to a stop in front of a gold-painted iron gate. There was no watchman behind the gate, and no light in the wooden caretaker's shack.

"This is it?" Mrs. Klapper asked, sounding mildly chagrined. "This little thing is Mount Merrill?"

"Back entrance." Campos grunted. Leaving the motor on, he got out of the cab and walked forward to investigate the lock on the gate.

"Hoo-hoo," Mrs. Klapper said. "Back entrance. We come in with the groceries, huh?"

"It's easier this way," Mr. Rebeck explained. "They always have someone on duty at the main entrance, Campos says."

Campos flicked the padlock casually with his forefinger and went around to the back of the truck. He returned a moment later, carrying a crowbar, which he fitted into the hasp of the lock. Without preamble, he placed both hands on the crowbar and pushed down. He actually rose on his toes and threw his whole weight on the bar. The long muscles of his wrists and forearms swelled briefly, and then the lock flew apart with a sound like that of a spoon being dropped into a glass. Campos opened the gate wide and came back toward the truck.

"My God!" Mrs. Klapper said in the whisper she ordinarily reserved for hurricanes and quadruplets. "Rebeck, my God, didn't he ever go to school? What are we doing here?"

"There was no other way to get in." Mr. Rebeck was a little worried himself. Having broken his own lock, he would have broken a good many more to bring Laura to Michael, but he was beginning to think that it had not been wise to bring Mrs. Klapper. If they were arrested, would she be also? He had never considered that possibility.

Mrs. Klapper was considering it. "For that kind of thing," she muttered as Campos climbed back into the cab, "for that kind of thing they put you in jail and eat the key for breakfast."

"It can't be that bad," Mr. Rebeck said, sure that it was.

"No? Rebeck, I don't think they even let you get mail. They probably read you the newspaper once a month."

And so they drove through the Mount Merrill Cemetery, staring ahead in the cottony dark for a place to bury Laura Durand. In time they found one, a rather arid patch of land with a few small graves around it, and none close by. It would have been good, Mr. Rebeck thought, to bury her close to Michael's grave, but it would have been merely a nice gesture, and the dead do not appreciate the importance of gestures to the living.

Campos marked out the lines of the grave with the edge of his spade and began to dig. Mr. Rebeck and Mrs. Klapper sat in the cab, Mr. Rebeck's offer of help having been silently refused. For a long time neither of them said anything. They watched Campos standing ankle deep, calf deep, knee deep in the earth, hurling the dirt over his shoulder with an odd, blind twist of his body. Dawn was not near yet, but the dark had softened as the stars went out, so that Campos was no longer the black shape that waits where man thinks his destiny should be standing; he was just Campos, no one's friend, digging a grave for Laura for his own reasons, or for no reason at all.

Presently Mrs. Klapper looked at Mr. Rebeck and said thoughtfully, "You know, Rebeck, this whole thing is crazy. Everything. Look, it's after four in the morning, the sun's going to come up soon. Everybody's going to wake up. I'm an old woman, I should be waking up too. So instead I'm sitting in a graveyard in a truck, at four in the morning, watching King Kong tearing up the grass, and waiting for the police to come along. Rebeck, for you maybe this is not crazy, God alone knows. For me, believe me, this is crazy."

"I know," Mr. Rebeck said, wanting to tell her about Laura and Michael, and knowing that it was the one thing he could never tell her. "But it really is a last favor to a friend. Someday I'll tell you about it, if I can."

Mrs. Klapper shrugged. "Tell me, don't tell me. I believe you. It's too late not to believe you. Anyway, Rebeck, when you are my age you find out it doesn't make any difference if you don't believe something somebody said to you. Who cares? It leaves you with nothing. A woman my age has no choice. Believe. Who knows, maybe it'll come out right."

She pushed her thick hair back from her forehead and scavenged frantically in her purse, trying to hold back a sneeze until she found a handkerchief. Watching her at the especially unbecoming moment, Mr. Rebeck felt his heart grow warm for her. Wanting his features to show at least something of this, he contorted them into an awkward smile.

"You're not old," he said quietly.

Mrs. Klapper smiled then, rubbing the back of her neck, her eyes half closed.

"I know it," she said happily. "You think I could say I was if I was?"

Then Campos was finished digging the grave, and the rest was all three of them lowering the coffin into the hole and Mr. Rebeck helping Campos fill the grave with earth and stamp it smooth. Watching them hopping and prancing under the blue dark, big scarecrow, little scarecrow, Mrs. Klapper burst out laughing. "Like the kids in the candy store," she said.

No matter how flat they tried to make it, how flush with the ground, it looked like a grave where no grave should be. They could only hope that no Mount Merrill official would pass that way until the ground had settled. The winter would freeze it and frost the turned-up brown earth to the color of the earth around it, and in spring the ferny wild grass would grow on Laura's grave, hiding it and warming it.

"Anyway, it's got no headstone to give it away," Mr. Rebeck said. He paused and added, "Isn't it strange? Laura will be buried here and no one in the world will know it except us. Everybody will see her headstone in the Yorkchester Cemetery and think she is buried there. And for them it will be just as if she were."

"People don't know," Campos said surprisingly. He leaned on his spade, sweating again, but breathing easily. "The stone's all they want. Put up a stone, tell them their mother's buried under it. That's all they want. They go to the stone and say, Sorry, Ma, I'm a bastard. Makes no difference."

They walked slowly to the truck, but Mr. Rebeck kept turning to look back at the grave. He did not really expect to see Laura spring lightly from the ground, lovely and immortal, and run among the stones until she found the man who loved her, but he would have liked to see them together. There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But the happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead.

Campos drove them back to the gate, which he closed carefully and pointlessly behind them, and then drove the truck down the steep hill. A young couple sat on the porch of one of the houses, talking softly, very close to each other, but not touching. They looked up as the truck passed the house, and then looked away.

"That's the best way in the world to catch cold," Mrs. Klapper said. "Dopes." But she was smiling sleepily.

At the bottom of the hill Campos stopped the truck. Mr. Rebeck and he looked at each other.

"Well?" the big man asked. "You coming back?"

Mr. Rebeck sat quite still. Mrs. Klapper drew her hand from his and waited.

Meeting Campos's passionless eyes, he thought, This man is pure, and as beautifully sterile as all cemeteries. I am neither pure nor sterile. I am infected with life and will die of it in time. Sainthood is not for me, nor wisdom, nor purity. Only pharmacy, and such love as I have not buried and lost. This is a very little out of all a man might have, but it is all a man ever gets. I will sell coltsfoot candy, if there is any left in the world.

So he shook his head and said, "No, Campos."

Campos nodded and started the engine again. Mrs. Klapper climbed out of the truck, but Mr. Rebeck remained behind for a moment.

"Good-by," he said. He held out his hand.

Campos looked at the thin, brown hand without much interest. Finally he took it briefly in his own, which was rough-skinned and dry.

"See you," he said, and drove away.

The man and the woman watched the truck with much greater intentness than it deserved until it turned a corner and was gone. Then Mrs. Klapper stretched elaborately, still without looking at Mr. Rebeck, and said, "So?"

"So?" he mimicked her. "So what?"

"So where to now? It's almost dawn, Rebeck. You got a place to go?"

The man looked at the strange houses, and at the street lights, which were going out like stars. He put his arm around the woman's shoulders.

"It's not dawn yet," he said, smiling at her. "This is what they call false dawn."

"All right, dawn, false dawn. I'm not going to fight with you. Come on home with me, have at least a cup of coffee. It'll wake you up."

"I'm up," Mr. Rebeck said. "I've been up all night."

"Rebeck, you're a trial and a trouble to an old woman. So you're coming or not?"

"I'm coming, Gertrude."

They walked along the street together, slowly, because they were both very tired. Mrs. Klapper's heels clicked on the sidewalk. They were the only people on the street, as far as they could see.

"There's a subway around here," Mrs. Klapper said. "Gets you right home." She looked up at him—a pleasurable feeling, he thought. "Rebeck, you like sour cream with cottage cheese?"

"I don't remember," he said. "I haven't had any in a long time."

"Wonderful in hot weather. With blueberries, if I still have some. I probably ate them all up. Walk slower, Rebeck, where are you rushing to? Maybe we can see the sun come up. Which way is the east?"

Mr. Rebeck pointed to where the sky was the color of the bricks in the new houses. He saw a bird flying. It was the only bird in the sky, just as they were the only people walking on the street. It was far away, flying in wide, unhurried circles, contemplating the world on which its shadow fell with the arrogance that all flying things have. He thought it might be the raven, and wished that he had had a chance to say good-by, although he knew that it would have meant nothing to the raven. But men must always say good-by to things.

Aloud he said, "I wonder what happened to the seagull."