Gun Lake (34 page)

Craig breathed in and out.

“And in
Godfather
. Or
Godfather II
. I can’t think straight—when the Godfather—Brando—when he keels over and dies in the vineyard.”

Kurt only looked at Craig and pressed the moist towel against his side and tried to ignore the burning in his eyes.

“And Han Solo in
Empire Strikes Back
. Remember that?”

“He didn’t die,” Kurt said, just to hear his own voice and to know this was real and not some awful dream. “He came back.”

“Yeah, but at the time, you thought he might be dying. It was all emotional—”

“Craig—”

“Remember in
Heat?”
Craig continued, his words choked up and half-empty. “Remember, Kurt? That was the one Sean liked. Remember?”

“Yeah.” But Kurt couldn’t remember anything. He didn’t want to think about movies.

“Remember when De Niro is shot by Pacino? And he says his last few words. He says, ‘Told you I’m never going back.’ Then he holds onto Pacino’s hand. Remember that?”

Kurt nodded. He had never seen the film, but now he did remember Sean talking about that line. Said it was his motto.

“Kurt?”

Craig held out his hand, grimy with blood. Kurt held on to it.

“Our father—” Ossie began.

“No, shut up, don’t—” Kurt interrupted.

“—which art in heaven—”

“Ossie, get outta here. I swear—I don’t want to hear this. Don’t—”

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done—”

“It’s all right,” Craig said. “It’s okay.”

“No, Craig. Look Ossie, that’s not gonna do anything—”

“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors—”

Kurt gave up talking to Ossie. “Look at me,” he told Craig.

“What?”

“Think about the happiest moment of your life.”

“What?”

“The happiest memory you can think of. Ever.”

“For thine is the kingdom, and the power—”

“I can’t think—” Craig mumbled, his voice becoming heavier. “Don’t know—”

“Just anything. Tell me—childhood, anything. Like your top five happiest moments.”

“Amen,” Ossie said, then continued to pray with his eyes closed.

“My dad … used to take me … the movies—”

“Yeah, really? Where?”

“Back home—Athens. We’d get a big … big thing of popcorn … watch shoot-’em-up flicks.
Bonnie and Clyde
… remember that one?
The Great Escape
. Classics … you know?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said, aware that Craig’s grasp was not as tight now.

“Never thought … just wanted to have fun. Wanted to be somebody. Like those guys on the screen. Didn’t ever mean to harm—”

“I know you didn’t.”

He let out a gasp of pain. “I’m gonna die, Kurt.”

This time Kurt didn’t disagree. “Tell me about going to see the movies with your dad.”

“He was a … a big guy. Nice guy. Everybody liked my dad. Always wanted … wanted to be like him. But I didn’t know how. He liked movies good enough … not as much as me. You know … ?”

“Craig.”

“Yeah,” he said, his face sweaty and pale, his eyelids closed.

“Come on, buddy, keep your eyes open.”

“It’s … okay.”

Kurt looked at Ossie and then back at Craig. He felt Craig’s grip let go.

The two men sat on the edge of the bed and just looked at Craig, this big man with a huge red stain on his gut and a content look on his round, boyish face. Kurt breathed in and out and tried to grasp what had happened in the last fifteen minutes.

All this way for what? For this? He got all this way just to shoot himself in the gut and die this ugly, pitiful death
.

Kurt felt a surge of anger unlike any he’d felt in years.

“Kurt—” Ossie began.

“No,” he said with clenched teeth and a pulsing, racing urge flowing through him. “Don’t say another word. ’Cause I swear to God that I’ll hurt you if you say another word. I don’t want to hear it because it means absolutely
nothing
. Nothing. You hear me? Nothing. Look at him. Look at him!”

Kurt stood up. He spit out a curse, held his blood-covered hands out to the side.

“This is what happens to people like us. See it? Do you see it? You, me, Sean, Lonnie, the whole lot. It’s what happens, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And you can keep on trying and praying or whatever it is you do, but leave me out of it. Okay? I don’t want to hear any more about it. Your God is dead, and in the end that’s all we’ll be too.”

Kurt hurried outside to find Wes and Sean, leaving behind a still-kneeling Ossie and the body of a man he had considered a friend.

It’s not right—a father needing forgiveness from his son. But that’s all I can ask for. When I’m not here, I hope you know I wanted that. At the very end of it all, in the last few moments and with my last breath, I wanted it more than anything else. Mercy. Peace. And more than any thing—forgiveness
.

HE TRIED TO CONVINCE HIMSELF that this was just a job to do. He was just hauling wood or carrying a sack of potatoes. And it didn’t matter that the hour was so late and that he had goose bumps even though his back and underarms and neck and forehead all remained soaked with sweat. He wanted to believe the lie, that this was just another thing to carry out, another one of Sean’s ideas.

But it wasn’t.

This was a human they were carrying, a man who had joked and laughed with them, who just hours ago had been making up favorite-movie lists.

This was a man named Craig Ellis, who had still had dreams. Who’d still believed some of them could come true, right up to the moment the self-inflicted shot took his last breath.

It shouldn’t end like this, Kurt thought. For anyone.

Ossie had cleaned Craig up the best he could, and they had wrapped a sheet around him, but Kurt still refused to breathe through his nose. He didn’t know if Craig smelled. Surely he wasn’t decomposing yet. But there were other smells—gunpowder, body odor, the smell of fear, whatever—that Kurt worried about.
He didn’t want to throw up. He wanted to keep his cool and make it wherever they were going. Wes carried the head

name the five best burial scenes

while Kurt carried the feet. Craig still wore the boots he had stolen from the Harman’s sporting-goods store back in Louisiana.

Should a man be buried in boots he stole?

These were the thoughts of a man going crazy, Kurt thought. A man on the run. A man with no future.

“This is where it goes downhill,” Sean said, the flashlight ahead of them beginning to move again.

It was a fifteen-minute walk from their cabin—branching off the same trail Kurt and Craig had been walking earlier—a narrow path that led to a place called the Devil’s Soup Bowl. This was actually a hill in the woods that dipped down into a deep, round cavity. Sean had been scouting around there this afternoon and had found a place where he thought they could bury Craig. Although a handful of trails led down into the scooped-out area, most people stayed at the top rim of the Devil’s Soup Bowl. Sean had found a spot behind several big trees, deep in the bottom of the pit.

Pit
.

It had been Sean’s term, but the implication wasn’t lost on Kurt.

The pit
.

That’s where all of them were headed now. No turning back. No passing Go. No collecting two hundred dollars.

We’re all gonna end up like Craig.

A light from behind flicked through the trees, focused on Kurt and Wes and their burden, then settled down around their feet, showing them where to step. Kurt stepped forward into the little pool of light. For a moment he had forgotten that Ossie was following behind them with another flashlight.

If it wasn’t the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, without a stir from nature or the heavens to draw attention, Kurt might have wondered about someone coming upon them. But not here. Not now. The only noise was the trudging of their own footsteps. They were starting down a hill, a steep hill, deep in the Michigan backwoods.

We should never have come here
. Kurt blamed Sean for bringing them to Michigan, keeping them hanging on while he took care of whatever mysterious business he was bent on.

Not that Michigan had been all bad. Everything had been starting to change, had begun to get clearer, lighter, brighter. And then this. This stupid thing.

favorite all-time movie suicides

Shut up
, Kurt told the voice.

“It’s just right down here,” Sean said in a normal volume.

Kurt took another downhill step, slipped and nearly fell, then caught himself. Craig’s body was heavy, a lot heavier than Kurt would have imagined.

favorite all-time dead people in the movies

No
.

They reached a dense, overgrown area. They had to slide between thick tree branches and tangled weeds to reach the small, flat spot next to two big trees.

“Right here,” Sean said.

His light dotted the ground. Ossie’s flashlight found it, and the spot grew larger.

This would be Craig’s final home, where he would be laid to rest. Remote, unmarked. He didn’t deserve this—not this death, not this secret burial. No man deserved to go that way.

favorite funeral scenes in the movies

Kurt couldn’t get rid of Craig’s voice. It spoke to him out loud, from underneath the stained cotton fabric that hid him from their view. They knew what he looked like, what he sounded like. They knew well.

“Kurt?”

He looked up and saw the outline of Sean’s face, hard and solid. His jaw tense, the goatee a dark shadow in the flickering light.

“You all right?” Sean asked him.

He nodded.

Yeah, I’ve never been better
.

Images passed in his mind.

Craig tying up the first guard, the first supervisor, making
sure he didn’t hurt the guy. Craig in the sporting-goods store, his face white with shock at the gunshots. And crouching in the crawl space of the family home. And in the car. Ossie’s apartment. By the lake. Smiling. Laughing.

Craig wasn’t a bad man. Not bad bad. He was decent and full of life and had dreams and wanted a chance to try and live them out. And now we’re burying him. He never really had a chance
.

Sean started digging with one of the shovels he had carried in his other hand, both borrowed from a toolshed down the road from the cabins. Wes took the other shovel Ossie had brought and started doing the same.

They dug in silence.

The Devil’s Soup Bowl rose on all sides around them. A big hole scooped out by a glacier—how many years ago? Thousands or millions or billions? Kurt didn’t know, didn’t care. He just knew that the way it had happened was random and purposeless. There wasn’t a God who dug out the Devil’s Soup Bowl or made Craig or Sean or Ossie or cared what any of them did. It was all random, and the only thing that wasn’t was what you did with your own two hands.

You know that well, don’t you?

He ignored the other voice, the familiar deeper voice coming from the pits below.

yeah you’re a real brave man

The sound of the earth being dug up, of dirt and rock being tossed aside, filled the air for minutes. After about twenty minutes of slow and tedious work, Kurt took the shovel from Sean.

Ossie held the light and shone it in the small hole they were making. Craig would have compared this to movies. How come, in the movies, digging graves looked so easy? It wasn’t. It was hard. This ground was unrelenting, tough, meshed with roots and rocks; it didn’t want to give way. They dug slowly, taking turns, sweating and breathing hard and taking constant breaks.

And as the time passed, they began to talk a little more.

Kurt couldn’t say why the others felt talkative. But he knew why he felt that way.

The place had been aptly titled. Devil’s Soup Bowl.

He didn’t believe in the devil, or in demons, but here he could almost feel them. They were in the air. In his gut. In his soul. Even though he sweated, he felt cold inside. Deep underneath the heavy breathing and the sound of the shovel picking up more dirt, he could hear faint, low whispers. Sounds in the underbrush. Twigs snapping. They freaked Kurt and made him want to speed up. And speak out.

So he did. And they did.

“When’d you meet Craig?” Kurt asked as he shared a cigarette with Sean. They stood on the edge of the dug-out grave, holding the flashlights as Ossie and Wes shoveled dirt over the body.

They could no longer see the light-colored sheet. It had looked eerie, ghostlike when they placed Craig’s body in the hole. It was about four feet at its deepest point. Should have been deeper, maybe, but they just couldn’t dig anymore. Ossie had volunteered to help put the dirt back over Craig. He didn’t say much. Sean could tell he was praying, some to himself and some out loud.

“I’ve known him almost three years now,” Sean said. “Got to know him right away at the joint. Nice guy.”

“You wonder about guys like him being at Stagworth.”

“I wonder about all of us being there,” Sean said.

“No, I mean, you have people like—like Lonnie. You know. Or even you or me. I mean, that’s fine. Some people are born to mess up. But it’s just—people like Craig. Deep down, underneath it all—there was a pretty good guy there, you know?”

“Stupid too.”

“He wasn’t stupid,” Kurt said.

“Stabbing the guy in the bar. Either it was because he was angry and vicious or because he was just drunk and stupid.”

“Liquor makes a lot of people stupid,” Kurt said.

“No arguments there. Just, ol’ Craig wasn’t exactly a saint.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“He’s dead and can’t say anything for himself,” Ossie said, inhaling deeply. “Leave him be.”

“I am. But people die, and then they turn into heroes and good guys. And Craig was neither.”

“He was a good guy,” Kurt said.

Sean finished the cigarette. “He made a mistake. A final mistake that cost him. Guess he paid his debt to society, huh?”

“Why is it?” Kurt asked.

“What?”

“Some never get to pay that debt.”