Buckets

by Travis Flatt

From up the basement of the house at the end of the cul-de-sac, Deputy Sheriff Matson carries two buckets to join the others along the driveway. Under his nose, a mustache of Vicks VapoRub grows crusty. In the front lawn, he takes long, shuddery breaths. An elderly couple, the drive side neighbors, wait for him scowling. After several near consecutive shifts of these journeys down into hell, his lungs have grown like a diver’s, allowing him to hold his breath longer and longer.

“Take those somewhere,” the old man says as he passes, pointing a huge knuckled finger at the buckets hanging and swaying from Matson’s aching hands, “you’re stinking up the neighborhood.”

*

Watching from the driveway, the ghost of Bucket One, a leather-skinned drifter, smokes a phantom cigarette. Each ghost hovers near their bucket of dirt, teeth, and bones. Six buckets so far, lined at length down the driveway about three feet apart.

“Where do you think they’ll dump us?” Bucket One says to the ghost of Bucket Two, a truck stop sex worker who shivers from withdrawal and clutches her rod thin upper arms.

This conversation they’ve had for days now. There’s not much else to talk about, other than whether the Man in the House choked or clubbed you.

Bucket Three, who sits crisscross applesauce across from them, chimes in with, “I’m thinking the river, for some reason.” Also homeless, technically, if only for a few hours, he’s a runaway with washer-fresh clothes and shower-shiny hair. He strums idly on an acoustic guitar.

Bucket One smiles softly and stamps out his cigarette. “That’d be nice. I’m thinking the landfill, brother.”

As they watch Deputy Sheriff Matson set the next two buckets down, bucket three mutters, “I can’t swim.”

*

Deputy Sheriff Matson stands at the top of the basement stairs. With the walls knocked out and the floor dug up, the whole house smells as fierce as the basement. Once inside, it’s best to march down, grab a trowel, and scoop one of the lined grid spaces into buckets and go.

Midway down the stairs, a forensics investigator stands arguing with a detective, blocking his path.

“We’re setting a tarp out on the driveway, Jesse,” says the detective. “We’re not Keystone Cops.”

“But who was where?” asks the analyst, growing angry.

“We took pictures,” says the detective, sounding embarrassed, “and numbered everything.”

They stand nose to nose and glaring, oblivious to the hot stink that Matson fears will follow him home and never wash away. Finally, he can’t stand it. “We know they were down there. Let’s just get them up.”

*

As Matson dumps the last bucket onto a tarp spread across the driveway, the ghosts stand huddled by the garage door. A jawbone skitters into the grass. Matson curses and runs after it.

Bucket One, who’s just flicked away another cigarette, grinds his teeth side to side and rubs his stubbly chin, screwing up his face. “Shit. I think that was mine.”

Bucket Two vomits bile again and apologizes. The others all give little, courteous waves of dismissal. Bucket Five, a silent college student in fashionable ath-leisure wear, leans over and rubs the shivering woman’s arm.

Talk returns to the where question. There’s a mutual fear of ashes and urns.

Some share unabashed fantasies, like bones tossed from an airplane to soar over rivers and valleys.

Others, who’ve never left the county, hope for burial in some distant place.

Others speak the opposite and wish for a cemetery littered with family and friends.

By the time talk wanders back to murder, it’s become difficult to hear.

Next door, the elderly neighbors have led an enormous German Shepherd from its backyard pen to join them accosting the police. It tugs its leash and barks ceaselessly while the detective shouts back empty, half-hearted threats of arrest.

Distant thunder moans.

The analyst gazes at the black horizon, cursing. He stands from the tarp, drops his brush, and calls to three officers who gather at a pickup truck sharing a six pack. “Ten minutes. Then we load this—” he points to the neatly arranged piles of bones “—in the buckets and haul it back to the station.”

A fat raindrop falls through Ghost Three’s guitar; he sets it flat down on the asphalt. He stands and wipes his palms on the jeans his mother ironed the night before he stole her credit card and went wandering off along the highway, then shrugs and says, “Well, y’all, looks like this is goodbye.”