Eyes of Prey

Bekker grunted. His rain suit and his face were covered with mud, but he paid no attention. He straddled what he could see of the body, put his hands around George’s neck and tried to pry the head free. “Can’t fuckin’ get it,” he said after a minute.
    “We have to clear away.”
    “Yeah.” Bekker went back to the shovel, still using it as a scoop, a pan, and dug around the body, trying to loosen the arms, which were apparently sunk in the mud below. He got the left one first, the hand white as chalk, the fingers rigid and waxy as candles. Then Bekker got part of the left leg and turned his face up to Druze and said, “If you could help just here.”
    Druze squatted on the rim of the hole, reached in, grabbed George’s belt. “Get his head,” he said. “Ready? Heave.”
    George came partway out of the hole like an archaeological artifact on the end of a crane cable. Not stiff, but not particularly loose, either, his legs still anchored in the muck, his head hanging forward . . .
    “There,” Druze said, and with a heavy pivoting motion ofhis shoulders he managed to flip the body onto its side, the legs rolling out of the muck below. Mud caked the nose and mouth, but one eye socket was clear. As the rain washed away the last of the soil, they could see the dead white orb of an eye looking up at them.
    “Jesus,” Druze said, stepping back.
    “I told you!” Bekker screamed. His hand groped in his pocket and came out with a screwdriver. “I told you, I told you, I told you . . .”
    He held the corpse’s head by the hair and drove the screwdriver first into one eye socket, then the other, over and over, ten times, twenty, thirty, with furious power, screaming, “I told you,” until Druze grabbed him by the collar and jerked him out of the hole, hollering, “Enough, enough, enough . . .”
    They stood looking at each other for a moment, the rain still driving down, Bekker gasping for breath, staggering, Druze afraid he was having a heart attack, and then Bekker said, “Yeah . . . that should be enough.”
    He took the flashlight from Druze, squatted next to the hole and with an almost gentle hand turned George’s head. The eyes were deep bloodless holes, quickly filling with mud.
    Bekker looked up, and a long flash of lightning from the distant storm lit him up as clearly as a fly on a television screen. His face was beautiful again, clear, the face of an angel, his white teeth flashing in a brilliant smile.
    “That should do it,” he said. He let George’s head go, and the body flipped facedown into the watery hole with a wet, sucking splash.
    Bekker stood up, turning into the rain, letting it wash him. He was bouncing, Druze thought: Jesus, it’s a dance. And as Bekker danced, the rain slowed, then stopped. Druze was backing away, frightened, fascinated.
    “Well,” Bekker said a moment later, his labored breathsqueezing through the hysterical smile, “I suppose we should fill the hole, should we not?”
     
    The grave filled quickly. The last they saw of Philip George was his right foot, the sock pulled down around the hairless, paper-white ankle, the shoe already rotting with water. Druze beat the surface down with the shovel, then kicked some leaves and brambles over the freshly turned soil. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.
    They hurried back to the car, and Druze had to jockey it back and forth to turn in the narrow track in front of the cabin. Bekker, his voice clear and easy now, said, “Check the answering machine. Three, four times a day. Call from public phones. When George turns up missing, the cops are probably going to sit on me. If I’ve got to talk to you . . . the tapes are the only way. And listen, don’t forget to press number three, and reset the tape.”
    “I meant to ask you about that,” Druze said, as he wrestled the Dodge onto the blacktopped road. “If you reset the tape, isn’t the message still there . . . ?”
     
    Across the lake, the yellow rectangle burned in the cabin window. A woman in a pink robe, her hair in curlers, sat under the light reading an old issue of Country Living. She was facing an old-fashioned picture window, positioned to look over the lake, when Druze and Bekker got back to the car.
    “Richard,” she called to her husband, and stood and looked out the window. “There are those headlights again . . . . I’m going to call Ann. I really don’t think they were planning to come up