A Shovel of Dirt - The Finale

Nelly and Robert, two teenagers, had witnessed a women being buried alive by a man with large hands.

After the man drove away, the teens dug the woman out of the grave and, finding her cell phone in her pocket, dialed the name of Conrad.

Conrad Mellon, the man with large hands, is the ex husband of Karen Mellon, the woman who was buried alive and is now lying alongside her grave, barely breathing.

Upon receiving the call at his favorite bar, he got back into Karen Mellon’s car and started the drive back to the grave site.

The teens were relieved that help was on the way.

"You think we should call the police, too," Nelly said to Robert.

"I don’t think so. We did the right thing. We called a family member. He will know what to do."

Karen Mellon was breathing in shallow breathes. But…she was breathing. She was alive.

"Look," Robert said to Nelly. "She is moving. The lady is moving."

Moving is an overstatement. Karen Mellon let out a shallow sigh, and one arm fell behind her, and her body rolled in that direction.

"Get some water," Nelly directed Robert.

Robert came back with an old can, rusty, with sharp edges, a Hills Brothers coffee can from the years when this gravel quarry was in full operation.

"Don’t splash that on her," Nelly said. "It’s dirty."

Robert agreed, saying, "I’ll just dab it on her cheeks." And he did, with the tail of his t-shirt.

"Put some on her forehead," Nelly said.

Robert drenched his shirt tail, then dabbed it on her forehead.

The woman started to come to.

Her eyes opened, in a creaky, old door hinge that needs oil kind of way, very slowly and fluttering, and closing and opening until they got wider and more of her pupil was visible.

"Hello there," Robert said, looking into her eyes.

She seemed to acknowledge, but not visibly, just from her mind.

Robert looked at Nelly.

"Let’s try to talk to her," Nelly said.

"We called your family," Robert told her, holding her cell phone in his hand in front of her eyes.

"Help is on the way."

Karen Mellon seemed disturbed, and her body started to stretch out of its curled position.

"We called a guy named Conrad," Nelly said, lining himself up in her eyesight.

"He…," Karen Mellon struggled the word out, "is the one."

"What does she mean?" Robert asked Nelly.

From behind them now they heard car tires crunching gravel, approaching them.

"Robert! Isn’t that the same car of the guy who buried her?" Nelly cried out.

Robert turned to see that same car approaching.

The teens looked at each other.

What they had done, and what they now realized, is to contact the very man who buried the woman alive.

It was too late to run, too late to do anything except stand by the woman lying alongside her grave.

"What you guys got?" came the first words from Conrad Mellon.

The teens noticed immediately that he was big, and brawny, and even though it was hot out, he was wearing a long sleeve uniform, dark gray.

His boots were leather work boots with steel toes. He got out of his car, rolling up his sleeves, like there was some kind of work ahead that he had to do.

"You the guys who called me?" Conrad said.

"We found this lady buried alive," Nelly said, playing dumb to the whole story.

"We dug her up and called the first name in her cell phone," Robert said.

Without saying a word to each other, the teens decided to say as little as possible about their role in the event.

Conrad knelt over the woman’s body. His face turned upwards and he said to the teens: "This is my ex wife."

He acted concerned.

Standing up, he said, "Did you guys see who did this?"

"We didn’t see nothing," Nelly said, with Robert nodding his head.

"We just came upon this new grave," Robert added.

"How in tar did you fells know there was a body down there?"

That was a good question. The teens couldn’t huddle on it.

"What else would be in a grave but a body," Nelly said.

"Yea, we didn’t know what we would find, we just started digging."

Conrad Mellon did not seem satisfied with the way the conversation was going.

"Look," Conrad said, " I need to know. Did you see who buried her."

Honesty being a virtue, the teens looked at each other, and thought about the police, their parents, other people they knew. What was the right thing to do?"

Telling the whole story would put them in jeopardy because they were standing at the edge of a gravelly grave talking to the man who dug it.

"Let’s just call the police. Let’s get the police out here," Robert said. He opened Karen Mellon’s cell phone and started to dial 911.

"Put that away, brother," Conrad Mellon threatened.

"You don’t want us to call 911?" Nelly asked.

"What I want is for you two to help me load my ex wife in the back seat of this car, so I can take care of her."

Robert noticed that her ex husband did not say the word hospital, or doctor, or police, just that "he would take care of her."

Conrad walked back to the car, Karen Mellon’s car, and opened the back doors, adjusting the seat or something.

"This guy is going to kill her," Nelly whispered to Robert.

"I wasn’t counting on this," Robert whispered back. "I thought we were calling for help."

The teens knew that if they helped Conrad Mellon put the woman in his backseat and watched him drive away, that that would be the end of Karen Mellon.

It was going on seven thirty in the evening. The sun was sliding downhill, and there was a light dew settling over the gravel pit. The teens started to think of home, their parents, and hey! they had missed their dinner.

Conrad Mellon seemed massive to the teens. He stood about six feet, and he had large hands and large bones and his chest alone seemed as wide as the grill on a Peterbilt truck.

"You guys grab her feet," Conrad directed. He moved to grab the woman under the shoulders. "Lift! Pick her up!" he demanded.

They started moving her toward the car. Awkwardly they first planted her feet in the back seat, then Robert went around to the other door and pulled her limp body through. She was still breathing, but in shallow breathes.

When both doors were closed, Conrad started to get into the driver’s seat, saying, "You guys get outa here. Go home now. Go see your mommies."

"Some thanks," Robert grumbled to Nelly.

Robert was no small man himself. A lineman on the high school football team, he still worked out with weights, and his five foot ten inch frame was solid.

Nelly said to him as the car engine started and the driver put the gearshift into gear: "He’s going to circle around that driveway. We have to do something quick."

Robert knelt down at the grave. There was that long iron bar, with a point on one end, and a flat flange on the other.

"What are you thinking?" Nelly said.

The car was half way around the quarry circle drive.

"I’m going to throw this at him, like a spear."

Nelly stood back.

"What if you miss? He’ll kill us."

"Then…I guess I had better not miss."

The car was coming toward them now, and picking up speed as the driver was eager to leave the area.

One teen was kneeling at the grave. The other was standing off to the side. Not a threatening situation to the driver, Conrad Mellon.

He was putting his sunglasses on as the car was about to pass the gravesite on its way out to the roadway.

Robert clutched the iron bar near the middle, picking it up just high enough to check its balance. The car was getting closer and gathering more speed.

When Robert could see the driver’s face clearly, he stood up quickly and threw the iron spear into the windshield on the driver’s side. There was a loud pop as the iron bar pierced the windshield.

Robert had put everything he had into thrusting that iron spear into the windshield and now could only stand back and look.

The car slowed, and stopped right alongside the grave.

Conrad Mellon looked out the window. It was not the Conrad Mellon they had first met and feared. This Conrad Mellon had a stark look to his face, his eyes unfocused, his expression one of alarm. He seemed unable to speak but he managed to open the door.

The iron spear was stuck in his chest. Thick blood was all over the steering wheel and dashboard and windshield. Conrad Mellon fought with the foreign object, the intruding spear, and tried to force it out of his chest. Minutes went by. Longer minutes. The teens just stood there, now regaining composure, realizing that the man they feared was now incapacitated. Yet Conrad Mellon kept at it, in his workingman’s way, pushing at the iron spear until finally it was dislodged and its tip fell to the floor of the car, the flat end protruding from the windshield.

"He’s trying to get out!" Nelly cried to Robert.

"Just stay on this side of the grave," Robert said. "Keep the open grave between us."

Conrad Mellon was gravely injured and he knew it. If he could have spoke, he might have said that he was getting what he deserved. But probably not.

His work boots stepped onto the gravel next to the open grave. He pulled himself out of the car and hung onto the open door, looking into the rear seat where is ex wife, Karen Mellon, lay now, barely breathing.

The two teens were careful to keep the open grave between them and the man with large hands.

Suddenly, he let go of the car door and collapsed to the ground, rolling over, making grunting sounds, until he rolled directly into the open grave and fell to the bottom, six feet down.

"We ought to bury him, see how he likes it," Robert said.

Nelly said, "You did it, Robert. You did it. You saved all of us."

Robert didn’t know what to say.

Finally, he said, "Give me her cell phone. I want to call 911."

Nelly thought: Finally, real help is on the way.