Gemini Summer (3 page)

eight

The boys never learned what Old Man River said to Creepy Colvig. They didn’t even know he’d come back until they heard him digging again. Then Danny, a bit ashamed of what he’d done, was afraid to go out and ask.

Right then, he decided that he would have to spend the rest of his life in the south end of the Hollow and never go near where the Colvigs lived. As he sat on the table, watching his mother scrub the skin raw on his knees and his hands, he felt quite sad about that. He could never cross the little bridge again. He would have to use the big one instead, and walk nearly twice as far to get to school.

“Sit still,” said his mother.

“Sorry,” said Danny. He’d been squirming.

She opened the bottle of iodine. A glass dropper was built into the cap, and it tinkled round the bottle as she stirred.

“Is it going to hurt?” asked Danny.

“It might sting,” she said, and it did. But Danny only grimaced; he made no sound as she smeared the iodine across his knees with the glass dropper. It felt tangy and sharp, like lemon juice rubbed into his cuts. Outside, the Old Man’s shovel was scraping on stones. “You should help your father sometimes, Danny. And you too,” said Mrs. River, raising her voice so that Beau would be certain to hear. He was in the living room, and the TV was on.

She made brownish, rusty streaks across Danny’s knees and his palms. “I don’t know what he’s doing out there, but I don’t like him doing it on his own. He’s like a crazy man, all that digging.”

“A dog could help him,” Danny said. “If we had a dog, Dad could just show him where to dig, and then stand back and—”

“Fiddle-dee-dee, is that all you ever think about?” said Mrs. River, suddenly smiling. She gave Danny’s head a little push, and he saw how her eyes were shining, and it made him happy inside. “One day we’ll move to the country,” she said. “We’ll move down South, and the first thing we’ll do is get you a dog. That was always the plan, to live in the country. To have dogs and horses.”

“Then why don’t we move there?” said Danny.

“Not enough work for your father.” She looked out the window, then dabbed again with the iodine.

“But the Hollow’s like the country,” said Danny. “It’s
nearly
the country.”

“Oh!” she said with a little laugh. “Now don’t you sound like your father? He said the same thing years ago, when we first came down here. He found he could park his truck out front, and to him this
was
the country.” She put the dipper back in the iodine bottle and tightened the lid. “Well, he’s never known what it’s like to have your neighbor a mile away. Sometimes I think this is as close to the country as your father ever really wants to get.”

The Old Man came in then, so suddenly that Danny jumped at the sound of the door banging open. But the Old Man didn’t look angry. He only got himself a glass of water, and he rubbed Danny’s head on the way to the sink, and again on the way back. At the door, just before he slipped out, he said, “I found a burial ground out there, Flo.”

Beau was gone in an instant, but Danny had to wait as his mother covered his knees with Band-Aids, all that were left in the box. She crossed them over each other, until his knees looked like pink baskets. Then Danny leapt down and ran out, his mother shouting after him not to get himself dirty. He scrambled to the top of the pile, and from there saw the bones right away.

Three skeletons lay in the ground, in a row that wasn’t quite straight, and not level at all. The Old Man had uncovered them carefully, so that Danny could see how the yellow bones had once been joined.

The tiniest little body, with its tiny little bones, had been a hamster or a mouse. In the middle was a cat, set down in the ground all curled round itself, the way cats always curled when they slept. The big one had to be a dog, because it wore the loop of a red collar, now dark and moldy. The bits of a brass buckle were there, and a name tag shaped like a bone.

The Old Man glanced up and saw Danny. “You don’t want to look at this,” he said, shuffling sideways to stand between Danny and the bones. “Me and Beau, we’ll deal with it, son.”

“I
want
to see,” said Danny, and he went down and crouched beside the dead dog. He didn’t mind at all that it was now only bones. It was interesting to see the insides of a dog.

“How long have they been here?” asked Beau.

“I don’t know,” said the Old Man. “Thirty years if a day, I guess.”

Danny pulled the name tag from the dirt. He could see that it had once been painted yellow, but now it was almost all rust. He rubbed it on his sleeve, then read the name—Billy Bear—and it made him deeply sad. He could imagine what Billy Bear had looked like; he saw him, in his mind, covered in reddish brown fur, much fatter than he seemed now that he was only bones. He could picture Billy Bear playing with sticks, or reaching up a paw, asking to be stroked. Then he started crying, and kept his head down so that no one would see, because he was very ashamed to be crying twice in one day.

Beau and the Old Man were talking about the tiniest body, trying to figure out what the mushy stuff around it was. “I bet it’s cardboard,” said Beau. “I bet they buried him in a little cardboard box. See, Dad, that dog was laying on a blanket.”

Danny hadn’t noticed that, but now he did. Only a shred of cloth was showing, but there were scraps here and there that had been torn away by the Old Man’s shovel. It had been a yellow blanket, just the same color as the name tag. Yellow must have been Billy Bear’s favorite color, Danny thought, and this his favorite blanket, where he’d slept each night for all his life, beside a bed or beside a chair, and now for thirty years in the ground.

It was clear then to the Old Man and to Beau that Danny was crying. His shoulders were shaking, and a tear fell from his face to land on the little name tag. Danny thought Beau might laugh, but he didn’t. And the Old Man picked him up, lifting him right from the ground the way he hadn’t lifted him in two or three years. The Old Man pressed him to his chest, and Danny smelled the dirt and the sweat, and he shuddered in his father’s strong arms.

“It’s okay. It’s all right,” said the Old Man, holding him tightly. “Danny, I knew you shouldn’t have looked. Beau, go get the trash can, will you?”

“No!” said Danny. “He isn’t garbage, Dad. He had a name—it was Billy Bear. What if he’s sleeping here? What if he wants to be petted again?”

“Oh, Danny, that’s not how it is,” said the Old Man. He eased down to the earth, so that he was kneeling and Danny was standing beside him, still wrapped in his arms. “These are just bones, Danny. They’re no more or less than what’s left on your plate when you finish a pork chop. There’s no feeling in bones, son. The part that was a dog, that’s long gone.”

“Where did it go?” asked Danny.

“I don’t know,” said the Old Man. “It’s just
gone
. Like his heart and his brains and all that. See, Danny, they’re gone. It’s just dirt now, nothing but dirt. The bits that made him up, they make up something else now. A part of Billy Bear could be in a tree, or in the grass over there by Highland Creek. He could even be in you.”

Old Man River rubbed Danny’s chest with one hand, his back with the other. “I don’t know much about it, Danny. But Billy Bear isn’t down here in the ground anymore, I’ll tell you that.”

Beau was standing nearby. “Do you still want the garbage can, Dad?” he asked.

“Well, that’s up to Danny, I guess,” said the Old Man. “If he wants to rebury the bones somewhere else, that’s fine with me.”

“Why can’t they just stay here?” asked Danny.

“Because they’re in the way.”

“In the way of
what
?”

The Old Man sighed. He gestured with his hand, to show Danny all the digging that he’d done. Then he pushed up his cap and sighed again. “Well, maybe it’s time you know. Maybe I should have told you from the start.”

nine

From his pocket, Old Man River took out a handkerchief. It was white and blue, with a crimson border, like an American flag squashed in his hand. He wiped Danny’s nose, then folded the cloth and wiped his own forehead. “Boys, I’m not just digging here. I’m building a fallout shelter.”

None of them knew until then that Mrs. River had come out from the house. She was standing just beyond the pit, at the driveway, where the Old Man’s pile of dirt was smallest. She’d arrived when Old Man River was talking about Billy Bear, and had listened with a look on her face that was soft and tender. But that vanished now.

“Have you lost your mind?” she shouted. “A fallout shelter?”

“Now, Flo—” he said.

“Great balls of fire, Charlie.
Why?
”

All of Hog’s Hollow must have heard her shout that word. Birds flew from the trees, and a distant lawn mower stopped mowing, and in the August heat there was such a stillness that Danny heard the crack of a ball on a baseball bat from the field far away. His mother stood there with her hands on her hips, and the Old Man looked as though she’d slapped him.

“Don’t you read the papers, Flo?” he asked. “Don’t you know what’s going on in Vietnam? It’s 1941 all over again, but this time it’s worse. It will bring the end of everything.”

The Old Man climbed up onto his mountain of dirt. He stood like Moses at the top of it, and the boys sat below him, and Mrs. River stared up from the driveway. “I see it coming,” said the Old Man.

Danny was still thinking about Billy Bear, and only half listened to what the Old Man had to say. He’d never heard of Vietnam or the Gulf of Tonkin.

“This is how the last war started,” said Old Man River. “It’s how they all begin, I guess. A bit of shooting, then it spreads like fire, and there’s no putting it out. But this time it won’t be guns; it will be missiles. It’ll be men pushing buttons, and it will all be over before you even know it’s begun. For crying out loud, they might be pushing the button right now. Those missiles could be dropping out of the sky and—”

“Stop!” said Mrs. River. “You’re scaring the boys.”

“Well, they
should
be scared,” said the Old Man. “We should
all
be scared. Then I wouldn’t be digging here by myself night after night. I’d have some help.”

“You need it,” said Mrs. River. She was staring into the hole, at the mud and the bones of the animals. “You think I could take the boys down there? Into the dirt? Do you think we could live in the dirt while a war goes on, then come up like—like
moles
when it’s over?”

“It will be survivable,” said Old Man River.

“Survivable!”
she scoffed. “Oh, fiddle-dee-dee, you and your war talk. Come along, boys.”

But the boys didn’t come along. They stayed down there in the pit, with the Old Man towering high above them, and little Flo River looking sick with worry.

“You can’t run away from it, Flo,” said the Old Man. “There’s nowhere to run to.”

He came down from his mountain, then took up his shovel again. “And it
is
survivable. The government says it is. We’ll have concrete walls three feet thick, a roof banked up with dirt. We’ll have food and water, and we’ll be safe here, the four of us. Darn it, Flo, that’s all that matters. I want to keep us safe.”

He kicked his shovel into the ground and pried away the dirt. He was going deeper. Danny started digging out the bones of Billy Bear, scraping with his hands around the edges of the rotted blanket. Beau looked at his mother, then at his dad. “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“Help your brother,” said the Old Man. Mrs. River turned and left, her shoes scuffing through the spilled earth.

The boys moved all three of the skeletons. They used Danny’s old wagon for a bier, carrying each of the animals in a big cake of dirt. They dug one long trench behind the house and buried the bodies side by side. Danny got so caught up in the ceremony of it that he forgot his sadness about Billy Bear. He found blankets for covers, and made wooden crosses from sticks that he gathered in the woods. He sang “Jesus Loves Me” in time to the drumbeats of the Old Man’s shovel.

When it was done, Danny still had the name tag that Billy Bear had worn. He got a piece of string from the kitchen drawer and made a loop to go around his neck. Beau said it was a creepy thing to do, to wear the tag of a dead dog. But Danny said that one day he would have a dog and call it Billy Bear, and then he would hang the tag on its collar. “I think Billy Bear would like that,” he said.

ten

Old Man River took to his digging with a fever greater than before. He dug in the mornings now, before driving off in the pumper truck. He spent so long in the pit, it seemed to Danny that it was the only place he ever saw his father anymore.

All the games they’d played—there was no time for those. The Old Man would come in for his supper and go right back out again. He never sat and watched TV, never helped Beau with his model rockets or Danny with his construction sets and card houses. He didn’t come in until the boys were asleep, so there were no more bedtime stories, and
Treasure Island
—half finished—sat dusty on the table between the beds.

The Old Man and his hole became a curiosity not only in the Hollow but all around the heights. It was a mystery to Danny how everyone suddenly knew about his father’s dream. Danny had told fewer than a dozen people and had made sure they all knew it was a secret. But crowds sometimes gathered, everyone staring down from the edges as though they were watching the fat polar bears in the concrete pit in the zoo. Once Danny saw Creepy Colvig driving by very slowly, his elbow poking out from the window of his wood-paneled station wagon. Even Dopey came and peered into the hole one morning, scratching his bottom with one hand, his round head with the other.

Danny thought the Old Man would be furious to be watched so much. But, instead, he often stopped his work to explain about the shelter, showing where the food would go and where he’d build the bunk beds. “I’ll tell you what we should have done,” he’d say. “We should have got together and made one big shelter for all of us.” But Danny was glad that hadn’t happened. He wouldn’t have wanted to live in the ground with Creepy and Dopey.

The only person in Hog’s Hollow who never went near the hole was Mrs. River. It might have been full of crocodiles, the way she avoided it. She parked her car on the road—her big Pontiac with its fenders and tail fins—and went in and out of the house through the side door. She tried not to look toward the window as she made dinner, as she washed the dishes, now in silence. Before the Old Man started digging, she’d sung little Southern songs as she’d worked in the kitchen. She’d sung about Camptown races and shortening bread, and Danny had loved to hear her sing. Now she never spoke a word as she worked, and never mentioned the pit until the thirtieth of August, the twenty-first day of the Old Man’s digging. Suddenly she pushed the window open and shouted at him, “Will you never be finished with that?”

“Not until it’s done,” he said.

“Great balls of fire! How deep will you go?” she said.

“To bedrock,” he answered. “I’m going down to bedrock, Flo.”

That made Danny shriek with laughter. He was sitting on the porch with Beau, the two of them eating watermelon and trying to see who could spit the seeds farthest up the pile of dirt. Their pieces of watermelon lay on the ground like the ribs of a green animal. Danny laughed so hard that watermelon juice squirted from his nose, and that made Beau laugh, too.

“You’re like a pair of hyenas,” said the Old Man from his hole. “What’s so damned funny?”

“Bedrock,” said Danny, for a picture had come into his mind of the Old Man reaching Bedrock, and of all the funny people pouring out. He imagined Barney Rubble driving up in his stone-wheeled car, and Dino the dinosaur raising his head. “Yabba dabba doo,” he said, just like Fred Flintstone.

That made all of them laugh, his mother in the kitchen and his father in the hole. Danny heard the laughter booming up from the ground and thought, for a moment, that they were just a happy family again. Then the window closed, and the shoveling started, and he felt the sense of something awful on its way.