Mudville

by Kurtis Scaletta

  This one is big enough to be a bed-and-breakfast or something. It's shaped a bit like a V, with the wide part in front and gables and dormers and whatnot sticking out everywhere. There's even a portico in front with columns, but it's half crumbled, looking like some Greek ruin.

  “Remember to call me sir, and no back talk,” my dad says as we walk around to the back. “I have to keep up my image.”

  “Yes, sir,” says Sturgis while I swallow a smart reply.

  “This is Frank,” my dad tells Sturgis when we find him. “He'll be your boss.”

  Frank is one of my dad's oldest buddies, so I know him pretty well. He's a big guy, looks like he could be the entire linebacker corps for the Chicago Bears, but he's nice when you get to know him. He's sipping a big thermos of coffee and shouting orders at a couple of guys setting up a makeshift tent. The tent gives us workers a place to get out of the rain for lunch and coffee breaks.

  “Frank, I've got a couple of strong young backs for you,” my dad says. “You know Roy. The other one here is Sturgis. Don't treat them any different than anyone else.”

  “Of course not,” says Frank. Since my dad sometimes gripes that Frank isn't tough enough on his crew, I'm not too worried. “Hey, Roy. Hey, Sturgis.”

  “Hey, Frank,” I say.

  “Good morning, mister,” says Sturgis.

  “You guys do what he says,” my dad tells us.

  “Yes, sir,” we both say.

  My dad looks at his watch. “Darn it, I'm already running late,” he says, and runs off to the car, juggling his car keys and the umbrella.

  “You guys are in for a real fun day,” says Frank. “We have about an acre here, and we need new ditches across two sides of it. Both of you, grab a barrow.”

  There are a couple of ugly little wheelbarrows standing by. We each take one, and Frank picks up a couple of shovels. We follow him, pushing the wobbly wheelbarrows across the expanse of gray matter that people in Moundville call a yard, for lack of a better word.

  Every street in Moundville has a little canal, about eight inches wide, on one side or the other. The streets slant a bit, so the water drains into the canal, then sluices out of town. Every property has to have drainage, too—ditches to move all the water that falls on the house and yard into the street canal. In this case, the ditch is so clogged up with mud it's barely any good.

  “We also have to fill in the old ditch,” Frank tells us. “Have you ever dug clay?”

  “Not much, no.”

  “It's heavy.” He scans the property and points out a spot. “We'll start digging there. Do you know why?”

  I shrug and mumble something about it being as good a place as any.

  “So our moat won't fill up with water,” Sturgis guesses. “We start at the low point and dig backward, so the moat drains as we go.”

  “Smart kid.” Frank plants the shovels in the mud. “You guys try not to get in each other's way. When you fill your barrow, go dump it on the pile.” He points vaguely at the far corner of the property. “That's the pile.” He pats our backs like a friendly giant and returns to supervise the raising of the tent.

  “It's a drainage ditch,” I tell Sturgis. “Not a moat. There's no crocodiles in it.”

  “Whatever.”

  We grab our shovels and get to work. I start closer to the canal, with Sturgis a few feet in front.

  The other guys are setting up the ropes and weights to keep one another from falling off the roof or getting carried away by a strong wind. If anyone really was carried off, I bet it was a long time ago. They're pretty careful now, it looks like.

  After about an hour of shoveling, I've barely made a dent in the ground, and my shoulders are already sore. Sturgis is doing much better. His wheelbarrow is nearly full.

  I look at my watch. “Do you want to take a break? Dad said we get one short break in the morning.”

  “You go ahead.” He tosses a scoop of mud into the barrow.

  If I can't talk to someone, a break is just standing around in the rain. So I keep working, counting shovelfuls.

  I try again after another hundred scoops of mud. “We should really take our break now. Otherwise, we'll miss it. It'll be lunch soon.”

  “You go ahead.” Sturgis plants his shovel into the mud before setting off to dump the barrow on the pile.

  I can't understand how he is so far ahead of me. It's not that he's stronger, I think. He's just faster. I wonder if maybe the ground is softer where Sturgis is or if he has a better shovel. I grab his shovel and dig up some mud. It's the same kind of mud and the same kind of shovel.

  Frank comes up behind me. He whistles and slaps me on the back. “Good work. Come on, junior, we're taking an early lunch.” It doesn't surprise me he's already hungry. I'm hungry myself now that he mentions it.

  Frank sees Sturgis returning with his wheelbarrow. “Leave the barrow, kid. It's lunchtime.”

  “You guys go ahead.” Sturgis picks up his shovel.

  “You got to take a break,” says Frank. “It's the law.”

  Sturgis reluctantly plants his shovel.

  Frank elbows me in the ribs and whispers, “He just feels bad because you're so far ahead.”

  I try to tell Frank the truth, but he's gone, hollering to everyone that it's lunchtime. He finally sends some guy off to get burgers, and I have a chance to talk to him.

  “Sturgis dug the big hole,” I tell him. “He's been working really hard.”

  “You're a good kid, Roy.” He claps me on the back. “You can work for me anytime.” He goes back to joking around with his buddies. I feel a little bit better.

  “Hey, you're the McGuire kid, right?” a fellow wants to know when I sit down. I don't really know the guy. I think his name is Ted or Tom or something. He's one of the youngest guys on the crew, like maybe he just got out of high school. Or dropped out, even.

  “That's me.”

  “And who's the funny-looking kid? The one you were working with?”

  “He's my new foster brother.”

  “Your dad takes in strays?”

  “I guess so.”

  I realize Sturgis has come to join us, but he veers away and leaves the tent.

  “He's a good guy,” I tell Tom or Ted, feeling a little guilty.

  The burgers come, but the bags go all the way through the line before they come to me. I get the last two burgers and one box of fries. Sturgis and I will have to share, I suppose.

  I don't see him anywhere, though. I poke my head out of the tent but don't see him. I walk around the building and glance up at a ladder just in time to see one duct-taped shoe disappearing over the top.

  I climb one-handed up the ladder, holding the bag of food. It's not easy. When I finally reach the top, Sturgis is sitting in a small cave of plastic where the workers have begun building the Rain Redirection System.

  “Are you going to have lunch?” I push the bag at him.

  “Sure.” He reaches into the bag for a (slightly wet, mostly cold) hamburger.

  “That guy I was talking to is just some idiot.”

  “Oh, heck, I've heard a lot worse.” He unwraps his burger.

  “I told Frank you did all the work, too. He just made a mistake. So if you're mad about that…”

  “It's no big deal. Frank doesn't really care if we do any-thing anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We're just some kids his boss foisted on him. He doesn't care how much work we do. He just wants us to stay out of the way.”

  “I don't know. Dad says they're shorthanded.”

  “Maybe they are, but we're just kids. We're not that much help.” He's already done with his burger. I get my own while I can. I must be pretty hungry, because even cold, it's not bad.

  “So why do you work so hard?”

  “I don't know. To show you up?”

  I laugh. “You're doing a good job.”

  “Wow, check that out.”

  I turn around. Through a flap in the p
lastic, we can see down the hill, past Moundville, to a swampy wasteland of crumbling, abandoned houses and buildings, descending into a massive lake. You can still see the peak of a church, poking above the water about two hundred feet from shore.

  “That's Sinister Bend,” I tell him. “What's left of it any-way.”

  “I know. It's just amazing to see it from up here.”

  When the rain began, it filled the streets and fields with water, then found the crest of the hill and sluiced down the south side of the mound into the Narrows River. The river backed up and overflowed, filling the town of Sinister Bend like a cereal bowl. Everyone here has seen the footage: water up to the roofs of the houses, and sometimes people on the roofs calling for help and waving their hands in desperation as the water came up around their legs. Even after the Army Engineers built the canals, Sinister Bend was mostly underwater. The whole town was just washed off the face of the earth.

  Sturgis has finished the fries and is now peering into the bag, as if another hamburger or maybe a milk shake is hiding in the corner.

  “Well,” he says as he stuffs the lunch bag into his back pocket, “guess it's back to the salt mine.”

  “I think we have more break time coming to us,” I say, but he's already clambering across the roof and down the ladder, as nimble as a squirrel. I finish my burger alone, then descend to the muddy doom of an afternoon's work.

  “So how was your first day of work?” my dad wants to know when he picks us up.

  “Kind of boring,” I say honestly.

  “It was okay,” says Sturgis.

  “It could have been worse,” I add, but if there are worse jobs than digging mud in the rain for nine or ten hours, I don't even want to know what they are. I just don't want to be the whiner while Sturgis acts tough.

  I kill time before dinner checking my e-mail. Besides all the spam and junk that collected while I was away, I have one message from Steve and one from Adam. Steve asks if I can play basketball tomorrow, so I write about this job I'm suddenly stuck doing. I go on a bit about how lousy it is, then delete most of it. Steve doesn't need to read all that. Instead, I just say that I'm helping out my dad all week but we can play basketball on the weekend.

  Adam writes that he's going to a pro game in Kansas City and he gets to meet some of the players because of this deal they have for up-and-coming baseball players. Do I want any autographs? I rack my brain and can't think of anyone, so I tell him to surprise me.

  It occurs to me after I send off the e-mails that I didn't tell either one of them about my new foster brother. I wonder if that's weird.

  Dinner is fish stick casserole. It's not any better than it sounds. Sturgis puts away two or three plates while I labor over the first. He asks my dad about the details of the Rain Redirection System. My dad is only too happy to talk about the venting that keeps the plastic from inflating and the convex pleats that keep the plastic from filling up with water. Sturgis nods and takes it all in. It's pretty boring to me, but I already know a lot more about those things than I care to. Between the food and the conversation, it's a wonder I make it through dinner without going facedown in a pile of chopped fish and hash browns.

  After dinner, I notice that Sturgis has unpacked his paper bags. He's lined up his paperbacks on the shelf I cleared for him, and in front of the books is a neat row of cassettes. The books mostly have dragons or spaceships on the covers. I think a few of them have dragons and spaceships. For that matter, so do a lot of the cassettes.

  My baseball cards are in shoe boxes on top of the bookcase. I used to be obsessed with them, sorting them and resorting them and memorizing their details and making teams out of batches and pitting them against each other using dice and rules I don't remember. It's weird how you wake up one day and don't care as much anymore, but that's kind of what happened. I still take good care of them, though, and look at them once in a while.

  “I thought you might want to see my baseball cards,” I say to Sturgis, setting the boxes out on the bed.

  He looks at me for a moment, twisting his lip the way he does sometimes.

  “Sure, I can look at them if you want,” he finally says.

  Sometimes I sort the cards by teams, sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by year. These days I have them sorted by position. I like catchers the best, so I start with those. Mike Piazza. Ivan Rodriguez. Jorge Posada. A. J. Pierzynski. Bengie Molina. A Joe Mauer rookie card. I even have a Yogi Berra card from the 1960s that my dad gave me for Christmas. He gave me Yogi's book and planted that card in the middle as a surprise. Sturgis nods at each of them, but I might have been showing him a stamp collection for all he cares.

  “Do you want to see my card?” he asks.

  “You have cards, too?”

  “Just one,” he says. “Let me get it.” He rummages in his bag and comes up with a battered book about motorcycle maintenance. He opens it and removes a card wrapped in tissue paper. He hands me the card.

  It's ten years old, for a pitcher named Carey Nye of the Baltimore Orioles. He's a gloomy-looking guy, tall and lanky like Randy Johnson, with long hair and a mustache. I'm not sure I ever heard of him. His stats aren't that impressive. Then I remember Sturgis's comment from last night.

  “Is this your dad?”

  “It's a real collector's item, right?” He laughs and takes the card back, folding it into the square of paper and putting it in the book.

  “Well, thanks for showing me,” I tell him, trying not to sound either sarcastic or patronizing, and failing on both counts.

  I suddenly feel like I've caught both ends of a double-header, with a marathon in the middle. It's only 8:00, but I brush my teeth, get undressed, and drop into bed. Sturgis is still up, reading by the overhead lamp, as I fade off to sleep. When I wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, the light's still on. Sturgis is sound asleep, cuddling a homeowner's guide to landscape construction.

  “You know,” I tell Sturgis as we scrape around in the mud that Friday. We're done digging the ditch, which now runs across two of the property lines in an L. Frank wasn't happy with the job we'd done; the line of the ditch was ragged, its width and depth irregular. So now we're scraping it, evening out the sides, getting it ready for the concrete lining. “It's not just that it's killing my back and shoulders. It's not just the muddy wetness of it either. It's the mind-numbing boringness of it all.”

  Sturgis is working at his usual clip, a few paces away.

  “I don't know how anyone does it,” I say. “I mean, it's one thing to dig mud nine or ten hours a day for a whole week, but how about doing that day in, day out for months or even years? In the rain, no less? It's really something.”

  He's not listening to me, but I've found that complaining helps pass the time, so I do it anyway.

  The guys order pizza for lunch. Sturgis and I have been eating our lunch on the roof every day, enjoying the view. We figure it'll be pretty messy carrying pizza up the ladder, so we eat in the tent.

  There's this guy, Peter, who joins us at our table. I've noticed him before. He's the shortest guy I've ever seen doing construction, like maybe five foot two. He's also got some-thing messed up with one of his hands. There's no proper fingers on it, just little stubs. I've seen him holding nails while he pounds them in, using power tools, whatever. He handles the pizza just as easily as we do, too.

  “You're the boss's son, right?”

  “Yeah.” I guess word gets around.

  “My son could work, too. Peter Junior. He's your age but strong as an ox. Do you think you could talk to your father?”

  “I don't know,” I tell him honestly. “I think there are laws and stuff. You can have family work for you, but you can't hire other kids until they're older.” Besides, I don't need an-other kid showing me up all the time, is what I'm thinking.

  Peter looks confused. “You mean both of you are family?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” says Sturgis.

  For a while, we just e
at pizza without talking. One nice thing about this job has been the free food, although I guess it really isn't free to me since my dad pays for it.

  “So do you boys have plans for the weekend?” Peter finally asks.

  “Don't know,” says Sturgis. “Maybe read or watch TV.”

  “I think it might rain,” I add. It's the oldest and lamest joke in Moundville.

  “Right. The rain,” Peter says seriously. “I live in Sutton myself, so I don't get it all the time, but I'm originally from Sinister Bend, so …”

  “That's too bad.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Our family lost everything in the flood. Well, we didn't have that much, but I was a kid. It was scary.”

  “Do they know why it keeps raining?” Sturgis asks. “I mean, there must be a scientific explanation.”

  I start in with my whole theory about Walt Dropo of Detroit and percentages and luck. I don't think either Sturgis or Peter buys it.

  “Well, my grandma says an old Indian guy cursed it,” says Sturgis.

  “She must mean Ptan Tanka,” says Peter. “He said dire things were in store for this town.”

  “It had something to do with the Sioux Uprising, right?” I offer. “I mean the Dakota War?”

  “Not the war itself but what came after. The natives were sent away, to live on a reservation in South Dakota. People who had lived here for centuries.”

  “I'm sorry,” I say. I am, too. I wasn't here, and I don't think my ancestors were either, but I'm sorry anyway.

  “Come on,” Lou suddenly calls over from the other end of the table. Lou has been around a long time and is one of Frank's best buddies. “Don't start in with that Indian curse nonsense.”

  “It's not nonsense!” Peter sort of bangs on the table. “I'm just talking about history.”

  “Anyway, the rain is caused by that hydroelectric dam upriver,” someone else says. “The power company pays the government off so they won't look into it.”