Lonely and solemn, a lean man with short cropped hair drifted between the tombstones. He grabbed up another fist full of weeds and tossed them into a garbage bag. One stone, still too new to have collected such an unsightly sheath of dust, gleamed once again almost thankfully as he passed a rag over the smooth marble. He read the name: IRENE GOWER: Every whole contains its pieces; within each piece lies a whole; if the pieces scatter, the whole remains pure 1910-1996.

Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead and began to slide down the length of his nose. Underneath the shade of an elm, he could feel a slight breeze offering relief from the stolid head spread out thick in the open sun. Occasional cars passed down the roads of Grace. He heard few sounds within the cemetery beyond the crispness of fallen leaves and dried grass pressed beneath his construction boots. The steeple of St. Genesius's Chapel, the paint chipped and the iron cross rusted, pointed to the sky like a withered limb. Clouds nestled in the distance gave no signs of motion. Then a maroon car appeared, moving down St. Sebastian, approaching the Cemetery.

Roy set the parking break and turned off the ignition. He extinguished his waning cigarette into the tray where only two other butts lay dusted with ash. He would empty the tray later before returning to car to Uncle Shoh.
He got out of the car feeling his damp shirt stuck against his back; he strode passed the gate, entering the cemetery. The paths forking between the stones formed a labyrinth. Roy chose a path and scanned the spaces between the graves. Eventually he came upon an elm tree and saw a man in jeans and a flannel shirt, back leaned straight against the trunk, small black book in hand.

"Balthazar."

The man read for a moment longer before closing the book and looking up. "You know what used to puzzle me? I was thinking this morning about when I was very young. Seems like everyone talked about Jesus being so compassionate, so full of love and forgiveness. When I could finally read for myself, I was struck by the anger. Jesus was an angry man."

"Guess he had a right to be." Roy removed his hat and used a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He replaced his hat.

"Can a person truly forgive if he is full of anger?" Balthazar slipped the book into a deep back pocket. "Get out of the sun, Roy."

"You always keep the good book next to your ass?"

"Most men keep money next to their asses. Must be an important place. What do you keep next to yours?"

"Nothing. Dough's always next to my heart." Roy tapped his jacket right. He then added, "The real important stuff I keep here," tapping his temple. "I got something on my mind, man."

Balthazar peered, his eyebrows squeezing together. Roy shoved his hands in his front pockets. He pulled them out and adjusted his hat. Then he folded his arms across his chest. One hand reached up to his hard chin, his long dark fingers gauging the contours of his taut chin and jaw.

All the while Balthazar remained still. "You might as well tell me."

Roy grasped for a lead in; he knew he would have to explain his explanation and wished for a moment that a smooth word or line could be found, something to make his request seem brief, simple, acceptable.

"Let me ask you something. What was it went through your head when you seen me coming?"

"You know I wasn't afraid."

"No, man. That ain't it." Roy kicked at a patch of weeds, stirring up a bit of dust. "I hate the whole telling of things. I wish it I could show you, then you'd know. But how could you know what the hell I mean, right?"

"I know you aren't after me. That's obvious."

"No shit. That ain't my kind of gig anyways, man."

"Is this a tip off? A guy in a dark suit or maybe a sports coat and sunglasses, was asking questions? Maybe there were two guys? Doesn't matter. People can always find you. There's no point in hiding."

"No, listen. I need to ask a favor. I hate to play this card..."

Swarming, furious swarm
...get him get him, man
A flurry of fists, fierce jabbing, heavy pounding, small brown knuckles laden with gold rings and hands huge as cinder blocks...cuts above the eyes, lips like ketchup covered beets, gasping bloody drool...
Goddam, you got blood on my gold...shit...get him and keep him still, Rupert, come on, put your fat ass on this piece of shit if you got to...
Uncle Shoh pulls out a long barreled pistol from beneath his teal suit coat. He shoves the barrel into the mess of forehead.
Move, try to get to the door, you can't look...
Where yo black ass going, cuz? You ain't walking out now, Roy...Damn, hold on to him, Rupert.
Roy, help me, man pulpy oozing words Roy get them to stop swarming swarming
Shut up. Roy ain't doing shit...hold him, Rupert....now, Roy, you sit tight, cuz, don't go no where...
Light a cigarette, try not to look, try not to listen, only one sound, wishing it would stop swarming, try not to hear Uncle Shoh naming off reasons to drop this man.
He flopping like a fish, Rupert, I guess he want it quick
so loud swarm so loud...sharp white sound like a stick-slap across the back of the neck...ceasing
to struggle, just ringing ears, don't look at the mess of red you know is there...

"You helped me once, so now I owe you. That's what your play is, right?"

Roy looked to the distance where the Chapel stood tired and worn. "It'd be more natural if you volunteered to help. But if I got to do the hard sell, yeah man, you do owe me. You owe me, and I need your help."
Balthazar squatted to his haunches, wrenched up a tuft of weeds amidst the elm roots and tossed them into the bag. He stood up.
"There was a time when I probably would have agreed. The whole idea of a code, a way of doing business. It doesn't hold up. Things aren't the same now. What you did was your choice. Maybe that's not what I would have done. I don't automatically owe you anything because I don't see a value in what you did. You saw it as helping. Maybe you were interfering. Maybe I would be too if I did what ever it is you think I need to do."

"You think too much. I come to you for help because I saved your ass. Maybe you think you don't care, but I don't see you lying down trying to die. You still moving around doing things. You still living. Don't be telling me about getting in the way. Come on now and just do this thing. You in the best position to help me."

"What is it?"

"You gonna help?"

"Depends."

"It don't depend on nothing, man. You commit or not. You and your wise ass bible bibbity babble is wasted all my time. Now I got to get a move on. Maybe I ought to thank you for making me think about stuff, but right now ain't the time to stand around pondering natural mysteries. Uncle Shoh made a mess and I got to clean up."

"I have to clean this place of weeds and trash. And now you want to add to my dust pile. Maybe we're both cleaners, but we don't have the same kind mess. I could say you're wasting my time. But go on
and tell me. What kind of mess is it, Roy? The kind that needs a gun or a broom?"

"A shovel."

Roy opened the trunk. Balthazar looked down and saw a thick mass of black garbage bags bound with rope.

"I think we both use the same brand of bags."

Roy slammed the trunk shut. "Well, now you seen it. There it is. But if you still can't make up your wise ass what to do, I got to get moving before everyone in Grace figures out what's going on. So, you helping or not?"

Balthazar wiped his damp forehead onto his sleeve rolled partially up his sinewy forearm. "Did he deserve it?"

"Probably not."

"So you know him?"

Roy lit a cigarette, took a quick drag then exhaled. "Yeah. Louis Sam. Used to kick it at the casino in Jinx. Wolfed up three steaks at a time at Charcoal Chuck's. A slob, but he was alright. He got stupid and crossed Uncle Shoh, and no one crosses Uncle Shoh. Everyone in Aliento who got any sense knows that."

"What did he do to Shoh?"

"Don't know. I just come into the garage for business as usual. Uncle Shoh and Rupert had him on the floor, working him over."

"And you didn't try to stop them? You said this guy was alright."

"I come into the story half way through without knowing the start, man. I couldn't nothing, otherwise you'd have Rupert here now presenting you with two bags to dump. And believe me, you'd already be helping him by now too or you'd be bag number three."

"It seems so meaningless. Even killing for money makes some kind of sense. Why do you work for Shoh? You're smart. You know people. You could be doing a lot of other things other than taking out the trash."

"Me and Uncle Shoh go way back. My father raised us both. Anyways, whatever connections I got, somehow they all end being tied to Uncle Shoh. He's like some terminal with a million wires. I could maybe out maneuver him for a while, but that's about all. Someday I want to get out of all this mess, believe me."

"Why didn't they just dump him in the river?"

"They would have. But I told Uncle Shoh about some funny business I heard was going down at the casino. That got his attention, so he told me to make the dump while he and Rupert go to Jinx. Like I said, I know this dude. He deserve a decent burial at least."

"So you now have a heart." Balthazar's stern face broke into a thin, dry grin. "In all this mess, there's something good to be had, is that what you think? You want to play on my sympathies---Roy, I don't have any sympathies these days. And don't you think it would look suspicious if the both of us were seen in broad day light, on a hot day, out there digging a grave?"

Roy puffed his cigarette and rested one hand on his hip. "I figure it'd look worse if we was out here at night. No one goes to a cemetery at night to get in some grave digging overtime. People would know there was something not right. Now's the time to do this while Shoh's still in Jinx."

Balthazar began to walk back through the cemetery gate.

"Hey. Where you going?"

"Get your baggage."

"What?"

Balthazar continued walking without looking back. He raised his voice a little. "There's a place you can dig."

Roy tossed down the cigarette butt and opened the trunk. He grabbed up the massive bundle and managed to hoist the bag over his shoulder, the extra weight pressing down on his knees. He moved slowly through the graves. Sweat amassed on his face, neck and back. He could feel his pants and shirt sticking to his skin. He wished he had removed his jacket. Balthazar went beyond the elm. When Roy rounded a large sepulcher, he found Balthazar waiting with a shovel in hand.

"I got to rest a sec." Roy set the body down.

Balthazar handed Roy the shovel. "Just beyond those weeds."

"Ain't you helping? Take me all day to dig a grave by myself."

"I've taken too long of a break already. I have to get back to work now." He turned and started back towards the elm.

"You think this is funny, Balthazar? You getting all kinds of laughs now, ain't you?"

Now beyond view, Balthazar called out, "Just beyond those weeds."

Roy leaned on the shovel handle and mopped his face into his handkerchief. "Son of a bitch."

Roy climbed through the weeds, foxtails clinging to his trousers, and stepped into a loose mound of damp earth, the dirt enveloping his shoe. He pulled his foot out and regained his balance. Below the mound some loose earth spilled into an open pit. Roy nodded and stabbed the shovel into the mound.

He mumbled, "You bastard. You must think it's so funny."

He gathered the body and rolled it into the grave. The shoveling went easily, plentiful scoops of dirt slapping against the garbage-bag plastic. The grave rose quickly like a bruise in the soil.

Roy climbed into the car. The vinyl seats made the air sticky. He turned the key.

"Hey, Roy." Balthazar drifted from cemetery and approached the car.

"I set the shovel against the tree."

"Thanks. I can get you a tombstone at a discount."

"Still trying to be funny? No, leave it unmarked. Never know...Uncle Shoh could find out, and that's a load a trouble I could do without."

"...And I will take the stony heart out of their flesh and will give them one of flesh..."

"Sounds like the Old Testament."

"Ezekiel. That's what I was reading when you showed up." Balthazar looked down towards his boots and returned to the cemetery. Roy watched the lean, solemn man disappear through the gate. Roy grabbed the wheel and backed out. The steering wheel burned like the sun, hurting his palms which were full of little splinters.

But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?
--Macbeth

A cardboard box with a huge strip ripped and peeled back has been left before the headstone along with beer bottles and caps. Balthazar Krebs picks the bottles from the grass, shakes to expel remnants of sticky brown beer, and drops them in a black plastic garbage bag. He wears jeans, thick workman's boots and a denim shirt with sleeves rolled up to elbows.

The grave is an old one. The corners have chipped away, exposing rough granite textures, and the cuts of lettering are filled with grime. MARY BETH BOLMONDO. BELOVED DAUGHTER. 1871-1881.

Balthazar puts the bag in his wheelbarrow. Bottles clink and settle. He looks around other graves, searching for more bottles. Families who leave Aliento forget about graves of long-dead kin and the headstones are left to begin crumbling.

Balthazar is not an old man. His cheeks are striped with wrinkles and his short-clipped hair is gray, but his chin is hard and straight, his build solid, jeans packed with firm legs. He takes a spade from a pile in the wheelbarrow and stoops to work at a weed in the grass.

He cannot work for more than two minutes at a time without looking up and checking his surroundings in a full circle. The habit is prompted by instinct rather than by nervousness.

You were just a child when your mother gave you a rosary of small translucent beads and taught you how to pray by closing your eyes and feeling your way from one bead to the next. She read you stories from the Bible and the biographies of the saints. You grew up imagining conversions. Sinners bowed by white-robed visions, St. Christopher bearing the infant Jesus on his back against a muddy river current, appearances of blood where no blood should be.

But the other boys who sat in the hulls of junkyard cars let you become one of them. In afternoons you would stand on separate corners and keep lookout while one of you pried hubcaps off wheels. You kept other kids away from your block with the threat of steak knives stolen from mothers' kitchen drawers.

You grew bigger and stronger with these boys and one day a high school kid showed you a bag of powdery-white and whispered, "Heroin." You took the bag with your most trusted friend and came back with money.

Emptying out graves in the earth is easier during the rainy times when the clay is moist and comes up in dark rich lumps. In the summer the hard grayish dirt crumbles in shovel pans and falls on the lawn as fine dust.

Balthazar never has to dig graves alone. He is the only full-time groundskeeper, but teams of workers are called in for burial preparations and major jobs like tree-trimming. He is polite but quiet around these others. During lunch breaks he sits in the shade and reads from the Bible. Some of the regular men laugh at this habit.

Two sprinklers are running, tossing streams of water in alternating arcs. When one patch of grass is saturated, Balthazar pulls on the connecting hose and repositions the spray over a new area.

He looks around again. The cemetery has gray stone walls and four iron gates that are left open during the day. No one else is there. When the sun's light lies in broad warm spans across the lawn and the streets on a Friday morning, people stay away from cemeteries.

Men were willing to give you jobs. Maybe because your dark eyebrows curved down in cruel points towards your nose, or your shaved head was big and solid as something fashioned from marble. When you entered a room, other people sensed a large and silent presence. Maybe your face kept straight so easily that people thought you could do things with sufficient thought but without expense of emotion.

You became a button. A button pressed by a man sitting in an office with thick patterned carpets to transmit practiced fury to other, more desperate men. Meetings were arranged in the corner booths of coffee shops. You would wear a three-piece in dark blue, sit and wait with black burnt coffee and a plate of toast until a man sat down across from you, talked for a bit about baseball scores, politics, and his wife before handing you a card handwritten with a name, address, and a few instructions.

You would meet at the same booth at the same time two days later. This time you would leave the shop and walk around the block to your car where he would shake your hand and give you an envelope filled with one-hundred-dollar bills.

On the streets you had no first name, no nickname, no title. Everyone knew you simply as Krebs, and everyone who heard your name understood.

A woman and a young girl have come through one of the gates. Balthazar sees them as he's cleaning his hands under a faucet. The girl holds a plastic-wrapped rose in a small fist.

Balthazar puts a metal watering can under the water's flow. Some people leave flowers in jars or plastic containers. He tries to fill the water daily to keep them fresh.

The woman and daughter have stopped at a grave that Balthazar helped dig. The headstone is a small granite block and grass has not sprouted in the soil. The girl lays the rose so the stem rests on earth and the bloom on the stone.

The first grave Balthazar dug is on the eastern side of the cemetery. At quitting time, he and the other workers left a deep hole to be filled the next day. Balthazar returned that night with a tan imitation leather briefcase. He climbed into the grave with a ladder and buried the case in the bottom by the thin beam of a flashlight. The next day a coffin was lowered while Balthazar watched from the shade. After everyone had left, he helped to shovel in the sealing dirt.

Water from the can drops in separate streams that converge to slip over flower-stem leaves. The mother and daughter stand before their grave, the woman's arms folded.

Balthazar wonders who will come. If it will be a man he knows, one he shared a booth with or another directed by one of those men. He does not know if they will come when he is asleep and unaware. He looks around and takes a little comfort knowing that although this is a small cemetery, there are many more graves here then people he has killed.

You waited in the car for a long time during a darkening evening, watching the door with the number corresponding to the number that was written on a slip of paper jotted down during a telephone call. You had your window rolled down and could hear the voices of children splashing in a swimming pool in the inner courtyard of the motel. The room you watched was on the outside by the parking lot. They always tried to avoid other people, not realizing that this tactic only worked to your advantage.

You saw a man climb the stairs carrying a fast food paper sack. He didn't look around or walk with a nervous step. Two hundred miles from the city he escaped, at a roadside motel in another state--he thought he was safe.

You got out of the car and went up the stairs on the opposite side of the building to approach his door from the other direction. Your raincoat had a slot cut in the pocket to afford access to the gun holster on your belt. Somewhere the children were still laughing.

You quickened your pace a bit, held a key to the doorknob of the adjacent door, but as the man opened his own door you put your other hand into your pocket, grasped the gun and went to his side to hold the gun muzzle to his head.

The look on his face first seemed more like disappointment than fear. But fear came as you had him open the door and get inside. He didn't know what to do with the food bag. You took it from him and flung it on the bed.

You had him lie face down on the floor with legs spread and hands on the small of his back. That's when he started to tremble. "You can have it," he said. "Just take it all."

He told you to look for it in the closet. You kept the gun aimed at his prone figure and reached to the upper shelf of the closet where you found a tan, imitation leather briefcase. You opened it on the bed-hundred-dollar bills in neat stacks. You closed the case, screwed a silencer into the gun's barrel and put the muzzle close against the man's head so the packed skull would muffle the blast even more.

St. Genesius's Chapel is nearby, but Balthazar only goes there occasionally. He does not need to pray in church and when he does pray he does not fold his hands and recite Hail Mary's as his mother taught him to do as a child. Bones are changing into powder under his feet. All ground that refines the dead is holy earth. Sitting in full green shade and contemplating the graves is enough because confessions made among the dead are more than confessions.

The woman and the girl are gone now. Balthazar pulls off his heavy gardening glove and leaves them in the wheelbarrow. He goes to the grave where the two had been standing and crouches before it. JAMES DOLMAN. 1965-1997. The metal plaque is unadorned except for the simple, block letters.

When Balthazar looks around him again two men have entered. One is tall and the other short, chubby, and dressed in a gray suit. He turns back to the grave, but keeps checking on their movements. They walk around the outer pathway by the hedgerows, not seeming to notice him. He looks at the grave for a long time. Stone is a contemplative thing because of its stillness and the solid manner in which it marks time.

The men still wander. They cannot find a grave or they are not looking for a grave. Balthazar does not glance at them as he walks back to the wheelbarrow standing still on the open lawn. He pulls the gloves on slowly and waits.

Coincidences occur that are so specific and determining that it becomes difficult to imagine them not happening. Thus, when you opened the door to leave, case of money in hand, a small boy was passing in bathing trunks smelling of chlorine, dripping of water, and carrying a towel over his shoulder. You opened the door suddenly enough to startle him and he looked. When you saw his eyes you realized he didn't see you but was staring at the man face down in a blood stain behind you.

Before the boy could speak you had already thought about the prohibition against leaving witnesses, so you pulled him into the room with your free hand, let him go to take hold of your gun, and shot him in the face as he stumbled on the carpet.

In the car, you slid the briefcase under the seat and tried to put the key in the ignition only to find your hand was shaking. You sat still to try to calm yourself. Maybe you saw the red overtaking the boy's smooth forehead or maybe you saw something in white or outstretched arms in the flat darkness beyond the windshield. Something you hadn't believed since childhood.

You didn't drive back to the city to deliver the suitcase and receive your portion. You traveled in the opposite direction and changed highways so many times even you cannot recall which ones brought you to Aliento.

Balthazar wipes his gloves together to remove streaks and clods of dirt. He hears footsteps crushing grass behind him.

"Krebs," says a voice.

He continues to wipe his hands. Then turns. The man in the gray suit and the tall man are approaching, walking a few feet apart around headstones. The tall man's hands are in his pockets.

"Nobody calls me that anymore," Balthazar says.

They continue walking farther apart, stopping when Balthazar is between them. "Where is the money?"

Balthazar shrugs. "Gone. All of it."

The man in the gray suit nods slowly and stares at the lawn. The tall man takes a small revolver out of his pocket and aims. He fires a sufficient number of rounds into Balthazar's head. The two leave, walking more quickly now.