Henry mashed his cigarette into a tinfoil ashtray. It was full of tar-stinking butts. He crumpled the ashtray closed and, squirming against the passenger door, stuffed the smoldering lump into his jeans like a carcinogenic pocket warmer.
 
A mid-sixties wind blustered through the front cab windows of the Ford blue truck. I was staring at the Polaroid camera shuddering on the dashboard. Our reflection was faint on the lens, a miniature silhouette, the three of us seated side by side.
 
We were on our way to Sandy Mush, a green mountain valley with old road beds leading up to hidden, steep slopes, about a thirty-five-minute drive north west of Asheville, North Carolina. Derrick was driving with a fixed grin and one hand slack on the steering wheel. Wire-frame glasses, freshly shaven, he always smelled of Speed Stick by Mennen, original scent. You'd find no butts in his ashtray, the tray fully extended, loaded with coins and Magnails for land surveying. There was still a charred whiff of Henry's butts clinging to the air. Derrick looked past me to glance over at him.
 
"That bake full of butts ever set your leg on fire?"
 
"Not yet," Henry said. His brows cramped resolutely behind his black frame glasses. He seemed to be welling up with paternal pride over the lump in his pocket. I joined in.
 
"You packing that stink-butt egg when you're teaching Comp 101?"
 
"Packing? No, open carry." A shard of sunlight flared off his glasses. He continued with a nick of slobber building in the corner of his chapped lips. "I show it to them day one, tell them, 'You've got to keep your butts if you're a smoker, just like you've got to keep your vague pronouns and dangling modifiers if you're a writer.'"
 
There was still an afterimage shard of sunlight swimming inside my eyeballs. Henry grabbed onto a fistful of air. "See, it's all about waste management, proper disposal. You can't just go flicking your butts to the curb. You got to bring them home, flush them down the toilet."
 
"What about the vague pronouns," I said, "the dangling modifiers?"
 
"Those you don't flush." He looked to the middle of the road as if in the distance was a troubling presence staring back at him. Then a private thought seemed to crack behind his eyes. He sniffled through the hairy sprigs of his nostrils. His voice became jittery and emotional. "Behind every vague pronoun's an investigation waiting to happen." Then his eyes, bagged with insomnia, sharpened. "It's all about the waste you write and learning how to follow its lead."
 
I was still thinking of Henry presenting that egg full of cig butts to his students.
 
"So, you stink up the classroom like that? At an adjunct level? Man, that's balls. You sure it's not balls you're feeding us?"
 
"Come to my class and find out."
 
"That might be awkward," I said.
 
"Why?" He straightened his glasses.
 
"I think you know why."
 
Henry was teaching at the same college where we had all met, and he and Derrick had stayed to graduate and I had dropped out, over eight years ago.
 
"Who gives a shit about that?" Henry said. "You could audit my class. Sit in back next time I give my spiel on waste management."
 
"Think I just got front row."
 
I wiped a speck of Henry's spittle from the side of my cheek. He popped another Winston cigarette in his mouth and struggled against the wind cutting through the window to fire it up. Eventually he prevailed, puffing on his cig with a Unabomber’s fervor. We blew past an automotive store with Gosset's Grocery coming up on the right.
 
"Anybody need anything?" Derrick asked. "Last chance. Only thing I've got on my property is spring water."
 
I tongued a scrim of lard and a crumble of spicy sausage from the rear of my mouth. We'd all just finished take-out biscuits from Bojangles. All good, we all agreed. Then we shot past Gossett’s Grocery and I looked out onto a battered single-wide trailer. There was a large plywood sign propped against a rider mower in the front yard. An advertisement for Y2K canning supplies, the wording neatly stenciled and air-brushed black. "Prepare. Prepare. Prepare. Can what you can. Y2K. The Day is Nigh."
 
Nigh as in still a year and a half away. We all agreed that a potential global meltdown over a glitch in two-digit code was a bunch of hooey. Either way, Derrick and Henry were prepared, not with some hideaway cave stocked with jelly jars of pickled okra, green beans, and yeast for probiotic beer, but with a stockpile of their own firearms. Well, Henry only had two firearms, an AMT Hardballer and ASM-DT amphibious rifle, a nineties classic from the Soviet Union. He was ready to barricade himself in his Woodfin home if it came to that. But Derrick—you couldn't even keep up with his arsenal, his most recent purchase being a Heckler and Koch grenade launcher.
 
He often talked about joining the Army, but you'd think he'd already served. He was a proud member of the N.R.A., and would years later defer his steady progress toward becoming a licensed land surveyor, leaving the small company he worked for as a theodolite operator, to enlist as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. Then it would be off to Iraq. Derrick and Henry seemed to have a grip on their future, backing it up with firearms.
 
My future wasn't as clear as any of that. Working banquets at the Grove Park Inn, ballroom parties, country club weddings, convention buffets. And between shifts, pantry room naps in a dead sector of the hotel, a bottom shelf for a plank-board cot behind a row of gargantuan cans of stewed tomatoes.
 
There was a time you'd get enough drinks in me and I'd probably bring up my filmmaking aspirations, but the shelf life on that had expired. I'd trashed all my Super 8 films after having them transferred onto a VHS tape, a series of short three-minute reels, but then apartment living on the dark side of a mountain can add a fuzzy green funk of mold to just about anything, my treasured cassette included. Then there was the night after work I invited a ballroom dishwasher to my place to show him my movies, and the VCR just chewed the tape up and spat it back out like squid-ink spaghetti.
 
It's possible I could've fixed it by winding the tape back into the cassette. But we'd been drinking warthog gin and the warthog said go and get your hammer. Stan the dishwasher shielded himself as I destroyed both the VCR and the cassette. I smashed them up good, cassette chips flying, ribbons of magnetic tape on the hammer jostling like a pom pom. Stan hugged me after that with a manly clap across my back, and then looked at me with amazement in his eyes, as if he'd just witnessed something far superior to anything I could ever have screened on my television. Truth is, you can only watch your own productions so many times before they start failing you. The destruction was justified.
 
I remember him driving off that night in a souped-up Corolla. A shiny little beast, cherry red, with performance flywheels, high-revving camshafts, and a tailpipe that needed fixing, hanging as it scraped along the asphalt, often sparking like a match scratching to be lit. If I still had my Super 8 camera, I'd have probably asked him to let me use that car in one of my movies. That Corolla had character. Stan, not so much.
 
Another bump in the road and I was catching Derrick's Polaroid camera as it hopped off the dashboard onto my lap. An instant camera—he said he'd loaded it that morning with a fresh pack of film. I guess you could say I was striving for a comeback of sorts with Derrick's help. What we were setting out to shoot that day wouldn't be a motion picture, but a series of photographs I could lay out on a coffee table like tarot cards, or a scattershot storyboard to a single scene. I asked Derrick what I owed him for the film. He winked at me, said it was on the house.
 
"Just give me a production credit."
 
"How about producer?"
 
"That'll work."
 
He rocked a fist. Then I could hear the shovels jittering from the truck bed. I started gnawing on a fingernail.
 
"You look nervous," Henry said after scrubbing a flick of ash into the thigh of his grubby jeans. "You ready to die?"
 
I smiled back at him.
 
"Yessir."
 
But I'm not so sure my smile was all that convincing. My former film projects, the ones I'd revised with the hammer, often involved depictions of myself killing myself. Gunshot spatter on the wall. A sway of legs kicking midair. A plastic bag on my head with the hyperventilating suck coming to a concave end. I preferred black-and-white film where the blood was easy to make with Hershey's chocolate syrup. But this would be in Supercolor 635. Not that the film quality was what had me nervous, but that Derrick and Henry were going to be burying me alive.
 
It's hard to say if my art was evolving or devolving from death simulations to death approximations. This wasn't going to be a scene in which a corpse would be buried by his killers. I'd been thinking of this more as a Jacques Cousteau of the dirt. Those pantry room naps behind the cans of stewed tomatoes at GPI. That's where the vision had first appeared. Newton had his apple. Bhudda his Bhodi tree. Now I would have my dirt.
 
Before Derrick and Henry came to pick me up that morning, I'd taken apart my Red Devil vacuum cleaner for parts I'd use as my communication and breathing apparatus, the red flexible tubing for hearing and the adjustable steel pipe for breathing. The noose, the pistol, the insecticide cocktail that had me rabidly foaming at the mouth—those had been campy and fun, macabre films to make. But this...
 
There was a quaint country house and out in the yard a portable table stacked with fresh ramps for sale, the honor system, two dollars a bunch. Maybe we'd stop by on our way back. You could smell them too, the atomic bomb of the onion/garlic world. Eat a ramp raw and your pits will stink for a week. Derrick was talking up a patch of ginseng he'd found in the upper climes of his land, where we were headed, the mountains deep in the valley, where all roads end.
 
I returned to my hangnail, gnawing as I sang under my breath with a melodic twang, the opening lines to Slayer’s “South of Heaven.”
 
The steep incline of switchbacks along the gravel road leading to the heart of Derrick's property abruptly ended on a long and narrow lot. We were in the middle of twenty-eight acres of forested land, the mountain continuing to rise to the right. Shutting the truck doors, we stretched our legs, backs, and arms. The engine ticked as it cooled down. A lush smell of green trees and vegetation permeated the air, akin to skunk. Most of the trees were tall and healthy, chestnut and scarlet oak, hickory and poplar, a few short and stumpy, paw-paw and sassafras. But it was the taste of mountain air, rich as a moist cake of loam, and the fiddlehead ferns waiting to be snipped, buttered, and pan-sautéed on the red-hot nautilus of an electric stove, that had me wanting to burrow into the earth like a man-sized worm.
 
Astride the weed-whacked lot was a firewood log pile, topped with an expanse of three blue tarps, the sides of the stacked and quartered logs left exposed for the green wood to season. All of it had been chainsawed and assembled from what had been cleared to make the road. Derrick pointed to where soon he would start building a single-room cabin. Then he pointed back down the road, mentioning a sun-bright area we had passed, where he planned to put a house.
 
They grabbed the shovels from the truck bed. I followed with the parts I'd removed from my Red Devil vacuum cleaner. Derrick already had a plot in mind, leading us up a path only his eyes could track. Only ten steps climbing dirt, root, and stone, and I was already out of breath. I stopped to spark up a smoke, opening the pearl-snap breast pocket of my blue western shirt. Pack in hand, I tamped out a Lucky Strike. This would be my last cigarette before my friends buried me.
 
The first puff was dramatic, but not enough for Derrick to take a picture. We continued our upward hike for at least a tenth of a mile. Then with a sweep of the boot, Derrick started clearing a spot on the ground. Henry helped him as I sucked on the last of my smoke. Then I scraped the non-filter out against the craggy face of a nearby boulder, feeling compelled by Henry's presence to store the butt in the cellophane sleeve of my dwindling pack of Luckies.
 
Now more present than the smell of the surrounding damp forest was the stink of black ash. It was still on my fingertips from having stubbed out my last smoke. Henry jabbed the shovel into the dirt. This was the first picture Derrick took. He placed it on an oak stump to slowly develop. I could see the image starting to appear in a milky dissolve of chemical ephemera. Then I hobbled as I pulled off my sneakers and socks, pants, underpants, shirt, and undershirt. This was going to be a naked affair, except for the Saran Wrap I was going to duct-tape over my face and groin. I wanted all holes covered, except for my mouth and one ear. Then I stepped up to the grave that with each shovel-load continued to deepen before me. The wind blew over my naked skin. It was chillier than expected. I jumped in place, warmed my hands.
 
Then I started covering my groin, biting off strips of duct tape to adhere the clear wrap to my upper thighs and waist. They continued digging with an automated pace, switching out now and then to work the pit one at a time. I wrapped my face tight enough to smash my nose. I tore holes in the plastic over my mouth and right ear. I taped the wrap where it ended on my neck. The job was done and soon they were done too, standing there, hands relaxed on the grips of their shovels. My friends looked blurry and somber through the shrink wrap, like an antique portrait of gravediggers.
 
I stepped up to the edge of the pit, sensing its depth: three to four feet deep. There was more than enough room for me to lie comfortably on my back. Henry stabbed his shovel into the earth. It stood alone as he stepped up to me like a bunny rancher with a hand-bolt gun. Playfully, he nudged the twin barrel of his fingers against my temple.
 
"You ready for this?"
 
I nodded yes and he offered me a hand, which I accepted by the wrist. Something I'd learned from Derrick, telling me once how movies are full of shit. That a hand won't save anyone from falling from a rooftop or a cliff. You've got to grab them by the wrist. I think that's what had him squinting with a smile from behind the viewfinder. Another flash, another photograph discharged from the mouth of the camera.
 
The dirt was surprisingly cold. I held the steel pipe upright with the base of it duct-taped over my mouth. Henry pinned the tube leading down to my ear to the outside of the pit with a birch log. I gave them the thumbs up. Derrick took another picture. Henry started shoveling.
 
Then they both shoveled. Dirt thumped onto my chest. I shut my eyes. They picked up the pace, goading each other on, to see how fast they could accomplish the job. All sense of daylight quickly vanished, and the pressurized build of dirt amassed over time until it felt as though Henry and Derrick had decided to sit on my lungs. That's when the shoveling stopped. I could hear them thwacking the ground flat above me. I imagined the shapes of the spades being imprinted on the dirt, an abstract collection of geometric lines. Henry must've crouched to the ground. His voice sluiced the length of the accordion tubing, filling my ear as if booming into an empty chapel.
 
"HOW YOU DOING DOWN THERE?"
 
I could hear Derrick chuckling behind him.
 
"Fine, except for the ringing in my ear."
 
I didn't want to tell them how heavy the dirt was against my chest, that'd probably rile them to test the ground above, see if by boot pressure alone they could crack a rib.
 
"Well, give us a shout if you need anything," Derrick said. "We'll be back after a while."
 
"Wait, what?"
 
"I've got some things down at the wood pile to check."
 
This wasn't something I'd anticipated. I'd always figured they'd wait until I was ready to say I'm done. Maybe they were joking.
 
"How long will you be gone?"
 
There was only the soft white noise of the wind whistling down the tube.
 
"Guys?"
 
Nothing.
 
My next breath tasted like burnished steel. It was easy to imagine the carpet dust and grime that had sucked up the length of this pipe at a high velocity. I tried flexing my right hand. I couldn’t even move my fingers. Okay, okay… you’ve got this.
 
The air in the tube was starting to turn stale, yet it was cold enough to evaporate the moisture from the back of my throat, my uvula already starting to feel raw, a soreness that sharpened with every breath.
 
How stupid I'd been to think the dirt would be toasty as a sleeping bag, when now the earth was working fast to distribute the core of my body heat elsewhere. The bottom of my foot itched. A muscular spasm was threatening to turn into a cramp in the small of my back. Was it possible that I was beginning to breathe more carbon dioxide than oxygen? I was waiting for the tingling sensation of passing out to arrive. But the stark hold of the dirt continued to keep me ice cold and alert.
 
Then a fleck suddenly appeared on the back wall of my throat. I coughed, unable to swallow. The next several heart beats jumped into my head. I had no idea how far the pipe extended. Could it be that they buried it flush with the ground, so that a strong wind could with great ease sideswipe a handful of dirt down into the pipe. I coughed again, enough for the fleck to hop like a flea. Then I could taste it on my tongue. It wasn't dirt, but a caraway seed from the sausage biscuit that morning. I could see the biscuit in my mind's eye like a buttermilk muppet laughing at me hysterically, You're gonna die. The earth was in on it too, starting to suck the heat from my bones. Then came the out-of-body experience, warped as a wide-angle lens. I could see the ground I was buried in, a curvature of dirt surrounding the pipe driving straight down into a crooked show of teeth.
 
I was there. I was nowhere. I was awake. I was asleep. I was there for a minute. I was there for an hour. It was dark. It was bright. I was breathing. Was I breathing? My throat was burning raw. I was ready. Was I ready? Ready for what?
 
That's when Derrick said smile and I could sense the electric blue light from the flash bulb piping down into my mouth, and it would look like a picture from the afterlife, my full set of teeth like some unwieldy thing, barely visible down in the pipe, the photograph mildly opaque with an ectoplasmic hue, that without context simply made for a crappy weird picture, one I would absentmindedly leave with a dollar tip at the Waffle House after wolfing down a country ham dinner along with some of the dirt that spilled from my hair.
 
Henry would waddle ahead of us after that meal as if on the brink of exploding. We'd all had the same dessert, a slice of Southern Pecan pie, while reviewing the pictures Derrick had taken, pictures I would keep after he laced them up in a bowtie of hazard-orange flagging from his land-surveying kit, except for the one I'd left behind, which I can still see, sitting there beside the salt shaker and napkin dispenser. Derrick offered to turn around so I could go and get it, but I told him to keep on driving.
 
Henry was telling us what he admired about Elizabeth Bishop's poem “The Moose” while I studied the dirt beneath my fingernails. The poem was about a night-time encounter between a busload of passengers and a moose out in the middle of a country road. But it was no ordinary bus, like it was no ordinary moose, not the way Henry described it. What he was talking about was the numinous, where one feels in touch, or within the presence of something divine. Maybe that's what I'd been looking for when I asked them to bury me. But what had I seen? Not much more than what they'd seen in those pictures. And I won't say panicking in the dirt was numinous.
 
Then there was the traffic coming and going on the Smokey Park Highway. The discussion had moved on to the CIA, MK Ultra tactics, LSD and mind-scrubbing. I was still sitting there, the middle man, listening to the wind as it blustered through the windows.
 
Their argument centered around mass control. What about self-control? Preservation. I thought about the hammer and all that I'd destroyed. Those films had been dead ends, and properly disposed of at that. Then there was the picture I'd left behind—how if I'd kept it I'd probably never think of it again. I guess that's what constitutes a haunting, something gone still lingering in your mind, or something suddenly there, damp as a cold breath against your neck, or spectral as a luminous figure suddenly vanishing as soon as he appears in the distance. And who was he? Did you see him too? Struggling with a Super 8 camera.
 
So what if he's gone? Now there were those crooked teeth at the end of the pipe. Sometimes I wake up thinking of them in the middle of the night. The sheets tangled across my legs and arms, my pillow clammy with sweat. It's like those teeth were trying to tell me something. A dark, nervous energy down in the pipe, a voice not quite my own, voices in fact, solemn, yet alive, eager, yet deadpan as someone stating ingredients from a soup can.
 
Most times, I’ll just stare into the dark, and wait to fall back to sleep. But if the voices are loud enough, I’ll get up. Sometimes, I’ll get dressed, grab a notebook, and drive to the nearest Waffle House on Tunnel Road.
 
In those after-midnight hours, there's always a booth available like the one I sat at with Derrick and Henry. It’s never dark in the Waffle House, a bright yellow interior. The jukebox is rarely ever on. There’s just the music of the chef clanging his spatula, and the hiss of cured meat sweating on the grill.
 
Then there's the warmth of the bottomless cup of black coffee and my fine-point pen. I'll flex my right hand and wait for the memory of the photograph to slowly drift back into focus, so that I might hear whatever those teeth at the end of the pipe have to say, knowing I've got all night, or rather what's left of it, to write it all down.
 
 

© Ian Caskey 2021
 
Can What You Can is from the collection of stories Voices in the Dirt by Ian Caskey, Recital Publishing 2021.