Asleep in the Deep

ASLEEP IN THE DEEP A Leo Rudovsky Adventure (The Last One, in Fact)

The green arrow flickered off and the yellow on, but Rudovsky made the left turn anyway. Ten weeks of no rain had left a coating of reddish dust on the roadway and just about everything else. The air seemed gauzy and desiccated. Leo Rudovsky decided to check the air filter next time he had the hood up on his aging Ford F-100 pickup truck. Sunday. After church, Rudovsky performed a few desultory chores around the house. A prickling around his eyes and the bridge of his nose made him feel for all the world as if he were about to cry. Then it was time to go. The heavy cargo in the bed of the truck had taxed the springs to the limit, and he had no idea how he’d get the thing offloaded without a crane. There was no way he and Ed Harris could do it alone. “Christ.” Harris invaded Rudovsky’s thoughts. “It feels like I’ve been eating this goddam dust since the beginning of summer.” “You have been, I guess,” Rudovsky said. “It coats everything, including your lungs and your stomach lining, I bet.” “What are we gonna do with that cargo of yours when we get to the cemetery?” “Don’t know for sure.” Rudovsky swiped at his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief. “They have cranes to lift these things, don’t they?” “Yeah. I think so. But I bet you got to order them in advance, and I bet you got to have a grave already dug. You ain’t done any of them things, right?” A cloud passed from in front of the sun; the heat intensified more than the light. The truck seemed to bank like an airplane, tilting left as Rudovsky guided it around a downhill left turn. He double-clutched and tried to downshift to ease the strain on the brakes, but everything seemed to go wrong at once. The transmission stuck in neutral, and Rudovsky couldn’t get it back in gear; every attempt produced nothing but a clanging, grinding sound. The shift lever thrashed as if it had a rebellious and violent plan of its own. “Come on, damn it,” Harris shouted over the roar of dusty wind in the truck’s open windows. “This road goes downhill for a mile and turns hard right at the reservoir.” Rudovsky pushed the brake pedal and the truck slowed almost imperceptibly. Seconds later, a smell of hot metal filled the cab, mixing with the oily dust. The speedometer showed fifty and climbing, but the tachometer reported that the engine was idling, completely out of gear, at less than 1,000 RPM. Rudovsky yanked on the emergency brake and the lever came off in his hand. For the first time that summer, he turned to his friend and grinned. “We appear plumb out of options, old boy,” he said. “Never particularly expected to be buried at sea, but I always liked the idea. Asleep in the deep, or whatever the sailors say.” “Goddammit, man, you’re nuts. Run it into a ditch or something.” “No, I’m going to splash it. Save yourself if you want to try.” In the distance the reservoir, almost twenty feet below its banks, presented a muddy-looking surface on the other side of the wooden warning barrier at the bottom of the hill. Harris looked quickly at Rudovsky and saw the grin of madness. He opened the door and rolled out aiming for a hummocky patch of dry grass. He hit with a thump, threw up a cloud of dust as he rolled like a rag doll thrown across a dance floor, and lay still. Rudovsky watched in the rear-view mirror as Harris rolled over and got to his knees. That was the last thing he saw. And that’s how Leo Rudovsky and his beloved wife of thirty years came to be entombed in a Ford F-100 pickup truck in the silt at the bottom of Mahoney’s Reservoir. Requiescat in Pace