Page 68 of Havoc

She wants to and I don't let her, and it's the only argument we have all night and I win it because her heel opened again on the walk in and there's blood in the sock and both of us know it.

Ground's exactly what she said. Turns to soup at about a foot and a half. Every shovelful comes up heavier than the last and the water comes in behind it faster than I can take it out, and the mosquitoes find us in the first two minutes and stay for all forty.

She holds the flashlight and don't say a word.

At two feet the blade hits something that gives instead of stopping.

Two contractor bags and a blue tarp, and the tarp's held with about nine wraps of duct tape she put on herself, and the whole thing comes up out of that hole with a sound I ain't ever going to forget.

She takes it before I've got it clear.

Down on her knees in the mud with it across her thighs, and she gets the tape off with her fingernails because neither of us thought to bring a knife, and she peels the tarp back and then the first bag and then the second one.

And there it is.

Black leather gone gray across the shoulders. Twenty-two years old and it's been in a room in New Orleans and in a canvas bag and in the ground behind a bait shop and it smells like all three, and the top rocker says GALLOW KINGS and the bottom one says LOUISIANA, and there's a serpent between 'em with no crown on it.

Right chest, over the heart. Hand-stitched, white thread, gone yellow.

TITHE

She holds it up off her legs with both arms out straight, like a woman handing something to somebody who ain't there.

Then she brings it in against her chest and puts her face down into it.

I stand in a hole with a shovel and I look at the trees.

She doesn't cry long. Thirty seconds, maybe.

Then she sits back on her heels in the mud and wipes her face with a forearm that's got more mud on it than her face does, and she starts goin' through it.

Pockets first. Both outside, then the inside one on the left.

"Nothing," she says.

"You expected somethin'?"

"I've been imagining a letter for nine days. I know there isn't a letter. I've been imagining one anyway." She turns it over. "There's nothing in a man's pockets after twenty-two years in a stranger's house. Somebody went through this the day they took it off him."

She's got it flat across her knees now and she runs her hand down the front of the left panel.

Stops.

Does it again.

"That's not right."

"What."

"Feel it." She holds it out and takes my hand and puts it where hers was. "There. Left side, under the pocket. The right side's soft and that side isn't."

She's right. There's somethin' flat in the lining that goes about four inches by six and don't move when you push at it.

I get the flashlight down on it.

The stitching along the bottom hem of that panel don't match the rest. Whole cut's machine-sewn — even, tight, factory work from before either of us was born. The bottom four inches of that left panel has been opened and closed again by hand, with a heavier thread, in stitches a quarter-inch long and crooked as a fence line.

Somebody did it in a hurry.