You're right. It's my last chance and I'm damned well taking it.
He wound the ends of the rope around his hands and pulled. The square of concrete came up easily, gritting on the pivot end.
It stood neatly upright over a square of blackness, now a vertical tombstone instead of a horizontal grave cover.
Louis pulled the rope out of the rings and tossed it aside. He wouldn't need it for the other hail; he could stand on the sides of the grave liner and pull it up.
He got down into the grave again, moving carefully, not wanting to overturn the cement slab he had already pulled up and mash his toes or break the damned thing, which was quite thin. Pebbles rattled down into the hole, and he heard several of them chip hollowly off Gage's coffin.
Bending, he grasped the other half of the grave-liner top and pulled upward. As he did so, he felt something squelch coldly under his fingers. When he had this second half of the top standing on end, he looked down at his hand and saw a fat earthworm wriggling feebly there. With a choked cry of disgust, Louis wiped it off on the earthen sidewall of his son's grave.
Then he shone his flashlight downward.
Here was the coffin he had last seen resting on chrome runners over the grave at the funeral service, surrounded by that ghastly green Astroturf. This was the safety-deposit box in which he was supposed to bury all his hopes for his son.
Fury, clean and white hot, the antithesis of his former coldness, rose up in him. Idiotic! The answer was no!
Louis groped for the spade and found it. He raised it over his shoulder and brought it down on the coffin's latch once, twice, a third time, a fourth. His lips were drawn back in a furious grimace.
Going to break you out, Gage, see if 1 don't!
The latch had splintered on the first stroke and probably no more were necessary, but he went on, not wanting just to open the coffin but to hurt it.
Some kind of sanity finally returned, and he stopped with the spade raised for another blow.
The blade was bent and scratched. He tossed it aside and scrambled out of the grave on legs that felt weak and rubbery. He felt sick to his stomach, and the anger had gone as quickly as it had come. In its place the coldness flooded back in, and never in his life had his mind felt so alone and disconnected; he felt like an astronaut who has floated away from his ship during an EVA and now only drifts in a great blackness, breathing on borrowed time. Did Bill Baterman feel like this? he wondered.
He lay on the ground, on his back this time, waiting to see if he was under control and ready to proceed. When the rubbery feeling had left his legs, he sat up and slipped back down into the grave. He shone the flashlight on the latch and saw it was not just broken, but demolished. He had swung the spade in a blind fury, but every blow he had struck had gone directly there, bull's eye, as if guided. The wood around it had splintered.
Louis slipped the flashlight into his armpit. He squatted down slightly. His hands groped, like the hands of a catcher in a troupe of circus flyers, waiting to perform his part in a mortal docking.
He found the groove in the lid, and he slipped his fingers into it. He paused for a moment-one could not rightly call it a hesitation-and then he opened his son's coffin.
50
Rachel Creed almost made her flight from Boston to Portland. Almost. Her Chicago plane left on time (a miracle in itself), was cleared straight into LaGuardia (another), and left New York only five minutes behind schedule. It got to the gate in Boston fifteen minutes late-at 11:12 P. M. That left her with thirteen minutes.
She still might have made her connecting flight, but the shuttle bus which makes a circle around the Logan terminals was late. Rachel waited, now in a kind of constant low-grade panic, shifting from foot to foot as if she needed to go to the bathroom, switching the travel bag her mother had loaned her from one shoulder to the other.
When the shuttle still hadn't come at 11:25, she began to run. Her heels were low but still high enough to cause her problems. One of her ankles buckled painfully, and she paused long enough to take off the shoes. Then she ran on in her pantyhose, past Allegheny and Eastern Airlines, breathing hard now, getting the beginnings of a stitch in her side.
Her breath was hot in her throat, that tuck in her side deeper and more painful.
Now she was running past the international terminal, and there, up ahead, was Delta's triangular sign. She burst in through the doors, almost dropped one shoe, juggled it, caught it. It was 11:37.
One of the two clerks on duty glanced up at her.
"Flight 104," she panted. "The Portland flight. Has it left?"
The clerk glanced behind him at the monitor. "Still at the gate it says here,"
he said, "but they called for final boarding five minutes ago. I'll call ahead.
Bags to check?"
"No," Rachel gasped, and brushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes. Her heart was galloping in her chest.