“I don’t remember that story. How’s it go?” I glared at him. “Pollard, shut up. Derrick, shut up. This ain’t no story here. This is reality. We gotta get thoo here and dump this shit in the river. Now y’all get your heads right, and stay the fuck away from the whiskey. You both drunk as coots.” Derrick held up a skull. “Got my head right. Right here.” But then they shut up and got to work, and by one o’clock or so we had been through the heads and had maybe a tablespoon of fillings and crowns. We stood up and knocked all the crap off ourselves as best we could, then sloshed the last of the whiskey over our hands and faces. We were smeared from head to foot with all kinds of slimy shit from the skulls—I’m just glad I didn’t know what most of it was or I would have thowed my guts up. I caught myself gagging several times while we were working on them heads. The water was too damned cold to jump in the river, but I sure as hell thought about it. We’d slugged at least a pint and half of whiskey each, but I could barely feel it. I suggested that we haul the heads down to the river and throw’m in, so we loaded our individual piles into three sacks, then rolled the sheet of plastic up and stuffed it into one of’m. Then we lugged the bags to the river to a deep hole I knew about in a bend a few yards down from our swimming spot. I had the little pieces of gold rolled up in a bandana and shoved down in one of my pockets. Pollard first suggested thowing’m in the swimming hole, but I flat slapped down that idea. I could just see some fool kid comin’ up from a drop off the rope, holding one of them skulls up and sputtering, “Alas, poor Rastus, I knowed him, y’all,” or something like that, not that I said that to them. I went halfway through my senior year before dropping out and going to work at the station, which give me roughly twice the schooling of the two of them put together, and I doubted that either of them had read a word of Shakespeare or even heard of Hamlet or a skull named York. I figured that Rastus worked better than York, which sure as hell wasn’t a local-sounding name. We stopped at the swimming hole, which had a tall tree leaning out over it and a rope hanging from it. Under the tree was a clay bank slicked down over the years until, when it was wet, you could sit down and slide on it and get shot halfway across the river if the water was down a good bit, like it was most of the summer. Even divided up and with most of the clay and crap knocked off, them skulls was still heavy as hell, so we sat down and rested a spell.
Ruffin—111