The air was hot and thick and dusty as we bounced along the Mexican desert in my father's old Chevy pickup truck. The windows were down because the air did not work, and my father was smoking. So was I. I had just turned 16 a month before and my drivers license was sitting heavy in my pocket. The road were were following was barely a road at all, just two faint depressions in the dry dirt.
"Shit. Fucking Mexico. Fucking Mexicans." The truck hit a bump and we both banged our heads on the ceiling because neither of us had on our seat belts. I was sitting on a bucket where the passenger seat was supposed to be, and that father had taken out years ago to make room for something and could not figure out how to replace.
He took one last drag on his cig and threw it out the window. "Gimme another, Jack," he growled at me, and I was already digging out the pack from the glove compartment because I knew he'd ask for another. The truck bounced over another bump and everything went flying and I lost sight of the pack.
"What's taking so fucking long?" he said as he smacked the back of my head, which knocked my forehead into the dash. "Fuck."
I finally dug out the pack that he had had me buy for him with his ID and some of my allowance and handed him a cig and held out the lighter. My hand was steady, even though the truck was not, and soon enough it was lit and he took a long drag, smiling. "Shit, that's good."
He drove a little while longer, until the cig was down about halfway, and then made a sharp turn onto a dry riverbed, drove along it for another few minutes, and then stopped. "Here's good," he said.
We both got out, and father and I walked back to the bed of the truck, which was covered with a blue tarp, like thousands of other trucks you'd see in any city in America. The border guard had not even bothered to look under it, just like we knew he would not. Father pulled it off. "Fucking flies."
In the back of the truck was a man and a shovel. The man was about medium height, young, with short brown hair and no shirt on, and dead. His face was a bloody mess where my father had shot him. Small black flies crawled all over his body, which had been lying in the back of the truck for fourteen hours. He had been out on the edge of our ranch when he'd come across him, a hiker, trespassing on our land.
The shovel was mine. The edge was nice and sharp, for cutting into the ground better. It was a large, pointed shovel, like a sword.
"Get him outta there already, fuck," my father said. I climbed up into the truck and grabbed his feet and drug him out. He landed in a heap with a thud, throwing up a cloud of dirt and little black flies. I grabbed by shovel and climbed back out.
"Dig it pretty deep, for fuck's sake Jack." He walked around to the truck again and sat back down in the driver's seat and pulled out one of the Playboys that was in the glove compartment. I started digging.
The sharp edge really did make it easier. I knew this from when we buried mother. She died when I was ten. Father had even built a little box for her to be buried in, instead of just throwing her body into a grave. She was in the backyard, and the weeds were especially thick now above her grave, marking it for me without marking it. The dirt was dry and pretty free of rocks, which made for quick going. Every fifteen minutes or so, father would come out and look at my progress. I could see the stiffy in his pants when he did, except for the last time, when instead I saw a small stain on his thigh. "Fucking slow, you piece of shit," he said.
It took about an hour to dig the hole. I climbed out and called for father. He came out of the truck to inspect my work, standing at the foot of the hole. "Fucking took for-fucking-ever, shitface." I stood just behind him to the left, shovel in hand. I was almost his height now, and stronger than he was. The shovel was light in my calloused grip, and the edge was still sharp. I hefted it and swung just as he was starting to turn.
It caught him in the side of his neck and bounced. He fell to the ground, sputtering, bleeding, scrambling to get back up, to protect himself from another blow. "F-F-F-Fu--"
I swung the shovel again, low and fast, just missing his neck and slamming into his shoulder, sending him sprawling out into the dirt, onto his back. There was blood now, on the shovel, on his shirt, on the ground. I stood on his chest and looked down at him, shovel in hand.
He coughed and hacked, trying to draw a breath through his ruined windpipe into his collapsing lungs. I hefted the shovel with both hands and took careful aim.
"Jack--" he managed to spit out before I dropped the shovel through his neck. Blood splashed across the desert like paint on a blank canvas, vivid with its hot redness. It was on my pants, my shoes, but not my hands. The shovel had hit his neck and slid off to the side, so his head was only half-attached. His jaw had come open as he died, and his tongue was sticking out just a little, his eyes bugging out, his face frozen in fear.
I got off his dead body and emptied his pockets, and then drug him into the hole I had dug. It was deep enough that he would not get washed away when the rains came later in the year. I went over to the truck and pulled off the dead man's pants and shoes and put them on, since they did not have blood on them and mine did. I threw my old pants and shoes into the hole, and then pushed in the body. The shovel was not as sharp anymore, but I could still cover the bodies with no problems.
I covered the back of the truck with the tarp again, and took the head of the shovel off the handle. The handle I left in the back of the truck, and the blade I stuck under the driver's seat. I opened up the glove compartment and put away father's Playboy and pulled out the pack of my cigs, lit one up, and drove off.