Shallow Graves

that wouldn’t be necessary.
    “You used to do stunt work?” Marty asked. His voice was high and Midwest-inflected.
    “Some stunts, yeah. Just for a year or so.”
    “About this film you did?”
    “Uh.” Pellam pulled off his black 1950s Hugh Hefner sunglasses. The autumn day had dawned bright as blue ice. A half hour ago it had turned dark and now the early afternoon seemed like a winter dusk.
    “It was a Spielberg film,” Marty said.
    “Never worked for Spielberg.”
    Marty considered. “No? Well, I heard it was a Spielberg film. Anyway, there was this scene where the guy, the star, you know, was supposed to drive a motorcycle over this bridge and these bombs or something were blowing up behind him and he was driving like a son of a bitch, just ahead of these shells. Only then one hits under him and he goes flying through the air just as the bridge collapses. . . . Okay? And they were supposed to rig a dummy because the stunt supervisor wouldn’t let any of his guys do it but you just got on the bike and told the second unit director to roll the cameras. And you just, like, did it.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Marty looked at Pellam. He waited. He laughed. “What do you mean, ‘uh-huh’? Did you do it?”
    “Yeah, I remember that one.”
    Marty rolled his eyes and looked out the window at a distant speck of bird. “He remembers it. . . .” He looked back at Pellam. “And I heard that the thing was you didn’t get blown clear but you had to hang on to this cable while the bridge collapsed.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Marty kept waiting. It was no fun telling war stories to people who should be telling them to you. “Well?”
    “That’s pretty much what happened.”
    “Weren’t you scared?”
    “Sure was.”
    “Why’d you do it?”
    Pellam reached down and picked up a Molson bottle wedged between his scuffed brown Nocona boots. He glanced around the red and yellow autumn countryside for New York state troopers then lifted thebottle and drained it. “I don’t know. I did crazy things then. Stupid of me. The unit director fired me.”
    “But they used the footage?”
    “Had to. They’d run out of bridges.”
    Pellam floored the worn accelerator pedal to take a grade. The engine didn’t respond well. They heard the tapping of whatever taps in an old engine when it struggles to push a heavy camper uphill.
    Marty was twenty-nine, skinny, and had a small gold hoop in his left ear. His face was round and smooth and he had eyelids connected directly to his heart; they opened wide whenever his pulse picked up. Pellam was older. He was thin too, though more sinewy than skinny, and dark complected. He had a scrawny, salt-and-pepper beard that he’d started last week and he was already tired of. The lids over his gray-green eyes never lifted very far. Both men wore denim—blue jeans and jackets. Marty wore a black T-shirt. Pellam, a blue work shirt. In clothes like these, with his pointy-toed boots, Pellam looked a lot like a cowboy and if anyone—a woman anyway—would comment on it, he’d tell her that he was related to Wild Bill Hickok. This was true, though it was true in some complicated way he’d distorted so often that he couldn’t now remember exactly where the gunfighter had figured into his ancestry.
    Marty said, “I’d like to do stunt work.”
    “I don’t think so,” Pellam told him.
    “No, it’d be fun.”
    “No, it’d be painful.”
    After a few minutes Pellam said, “So we got a cemetery, we got a town square, two barns and a farmhouse. We got a ton of roads. What else do we need?”
    Marty flipped through a large notebook. “One big, big, big field, I’m talking sonuvabitch big, a funeral home, a Victorian house overlooking a yard big enough for a wedding, a hardware store, a mess of interiors. . . . Goddamn, I ain’t gonna get to Manhattan for two weeks. I’m tired of cows, Pellam. I’m so damned tired of cows.”
    Pellam asked, “You ever tip cows?”
    “I’m from the Midwest. Everybody there tips cows.”
    “I’ve never done it. I’d like to, though.”
    “Pellam, you never tipped a cow?”
    “Nope.”
    Marty shook his head with what seemed like genuine dismay. “Man. . . .”
    It had been three days since they’d pulled off the interstate here in Cleary, New York. The Winnebago had clocked two hundred miles, roaming through knobby pine hills and tired farms and small, simple pastel cubes of houses decorated with pickups in the driveway, cars on blocks,