by Sean McGinty
“Well, I didn’t mean any of you, obviously,” she said, and her eyes flickered over mine.
It was time for dinner. We sat out back and ate hamburgers, and let me tell you, that girl was having FUN®. I mean really having FUN®. Username: shiloh_lilly. Unlike me, she wasn’t in FAIL—in fact, she was working on her Seventh Star. I watched her with envy. She wasn’t rude about it or anything, but you could tell—I could anyway—that while she smiled and nodded and answered questions, she was doing ten other FUN® things at once.
I kept stealing secret glances at her—she really knew how to rock a tie-dye. She was a pretty quick eater, too, but this turned out to be because she was in a hurry to meet up with some of her friends. Sam was going, too. The rest of us were invited, but only out of Mormon politeness, and we all said thanks but no thanks. Dad had to leave for band practice, and so then it was just me and Evie.
“I know a good Realtor,” said Evie. “But first we need to get someone out there to appraise it….”
“Hold on! Slow down! Before you just give away the inheritance, I need a little time, OK?”
“I’m not talking about giving away anything. I’m talking about making prudent financial decisions.”
“All I know is, it would be ridiculous to sell a house with money buried on the property—not to mention disrespectful to Grandpa. We gotta have, like, a little faith in his will before we just auction off all his property to the highest bidder.”
Evie sighed. “You really think there’s something buried out there?”
“No—I know there is.”
“How much time do you think you need?”
“A week,” I said. “Tops. OK? Then we can talk about selling.”
I woke early the next day (for me anyway), grabbed a shovel and a digging bar from the basement, and rooted around in my grandpa’s closet for some work gloves. I found a pair of leather ones, all gnarly and stiff. Also a hat. ANTELLO PROPANE, it said. The red had faded to pink, with a dark ring of old sweat circling the inside. It didn’t quite fit. Just a little too small. I hesitated before undoing the plastic snaps in the back. Gloves are one thing, but there’s something personal about a man’s hat.
What a trip. My grandpa had worn the hat and now I was wearing it, and standing on the ground he’d stood on, under the thin shadow of the same scrawny Russian olive. In the distance I could just barely make out the two horses, Cain and Abel, standing in Anne Chicarelli’s corral, still as statues. The only thing giving them away, the occasional swish of a tail.
The snow had completely melted now. The obvious thing was to look for disturbed earth, or places where the brush had been cut, or maybe some kind of an X. But as far as I could tell, the ground around the tree looked the same as everywhere else—sagebrush, cheatgrass, rabbit brush, dirt. I stood with my back to the trunk, took eight paces due east, and stuck my shovel in the earth.
As I dug deeper the gloves softened, fitting themselves around my hands. The earth became cooler, with the faint smell of water, and after a couple feet I found these moist cords of rope veining the soil—roots—branching and diminishing into finer and finer strands, until the fibers became like human hair. They were springy and gave me trouble until I figured out I could slice through them with the shovel. I cut them and tossed them out into the sun, where they dried up like sea snakes washed onto a beach.
Shit, I thought. This is going to be easy.
But two feet down the earth began to change, topsoil giving way to hardpan clay. I traded the shovel for the digging bar, raising the heavy iron and ramming it between my moccasins. With each soft whump the earth lifted and split in a muffled detonation. Sweat trickled down my temples, along my cheeks, to my neck. I fell into a new rhythm, breaking up the ground with the bar, scooping it out with the shovel…breaking earth…scooping it out…It was kind of good to be working. At least I had something to do with my hands.
Around 11:00 I hit something hard and the bar rang out like a tuning fork. Metal? Some kind of lid? I fell to my knees and scraped away the dirt, revealing…a rock. About the size and shape of a dinner roll, or maybe a large muffin. There were more. I dug them out, one by one, and by the time noon rolled around the hole was maybe up to my chest.
Then Evie showed up.
“How’s it going? Any luck so far?”
“Not unless you count rocks. I’m starting a new hole.”
She peered into the one I’d dug. “And how deep would you say that is?”
“I don’t know. Four feet? Five?”
“But it needs to be eight.”
“Eight? No, I think you’re misunderstanding. Dig near Russian olive eight feet. The hole needs to be eight feet from the tree.”
“Really?” My sister gave it some thought. “Are you sure? I thought it needed to be eight feet deep.”
“Eight feet deep? You know how deep that is?”
“Ninety-six inches.”
“If I was standing in the bottom I would barely even be able to touch the top.”
“But listen to the sentence, Aaron: Dig near Russian olive eight feet.”
“Yeah? And?”
“Dig near. It’s saying you need to be near the tree. But the hole’s supposed to be eight feet deep.”
“No—what it’s saying is you gotta dig eight feet near the tree. Depth isn’t specified.”
“Eight feet near?” she said. “That just sounds weird. Near is the wrong preposition. You’d say out from. Dig eight feet out from the Russian olive. The way the sentence is constructed, you are supposed to dig an eight-foot hole. Near the tree.”
We argued about it a little longer, and then Evie left, and I was like, Thanks for all your enthusiastic support and positive vibes.
Because eight feet deep? Really? That was a lot of digging. Like, exactly how much digging? As a general rule I try not to bring math into things, because precision can be a real bummer, but I was already tired of digging, so I thought I could use the distraction.
I brought up Homie™ and worked out an equation. Not an equation like Equation™2 Trifold Lenspoppers (YAY!), but a regular old equation:
> area of a circle = πr2!
With eight feet of diggable ground radiating out from the base of the tree, that would give me
> π × 8 × 8 = 201 ft2!
But of course that was only surface area. So suppose Evie was right and the depth was also eight feet? Then we had to figure out the volume.
Volume of a cylinder = πr2h, with h in this case being the depth of the hole. Assuming a radius and depth of eight feet, that would give me
> π × 8 × 8 × 8 = 1,608 ft3!
According to Homie™, one cubic foot of earth could weigh anywhere from 80 to 125 pounds, depending on water and clay content. Assuming a weight somewhere in the middle—say, 100 pounds—then:
> 1,608 cubic ft of earth × 100 lb per cubic ft = 160,800 lb of earth!
Wait. What?
I ran through the calculations again, but the answer came out the same: 160,800 pounds of earth to move. And I’d told my sister I would get it all done in a week.
So like this:
> 160,800 lb ÷ 7 days in a week = 22,971 lb per day!
> 22,971 lb ÷ 10 working hours in a day = 2,297 lb per hour!
> 2,297.14 lb ÷ 60 minutes in an hour = 38 lb of earth per minute!
OK, so thirty-eight pounds per minute for ten hours a day for the next seven days—so basically I would have to be a nonstop whirling robot machine of digging excellence like the earth had never seen. Except that I didn’t have seven days left. I’d already started! Day one was almost done! Had I moved my quota of earth? How much time was left? What was it in minutes? Seconds? How did that alter the equations? How much did the shovel weigh? How much weight can a seventeen-year-old human male reasonably expect to lift per minute?
There’s no end to the math that can be applied to a given situation, but that doesn’t change the fact that at some point you’ve actually got to do the wor
k. There was no need to calculate any further. I had been led down a dark and dangerous path, and it was time to turn back.
The lesson here was clear: Screw you, math.
Even with mathematics itself against me I kept at it, and as I dug the next day my thoughts meandered here and there, touching lightly on different subjects like a rabbit grazing in a wide meadow. I thought about my grandpa, who’d stood out here on this same land, digging in this same earth. I thought about how he’d told me I was smart. I thought about the ashes and the gun. I thought about my dad and my sister and all the money they’d thrown my way. I thought about Katie, and what it would be like to walk up to her and say, Guess who just found the treasure? You want to check out Belize?
As I dug, the leather on the gloves wore down to a smooth, steely gloss from the bar, and taking them off at lunch I found a bloody blister on the inside of each of my thumbs, and learned about new Griffin® Antibacterial Anesthetic & Disinfectant Skinsafe™ Safety Gel (YAY!).
The next day, day three, my shovel broke, right where the shovel part connects to the handle. The thing just snapped in half. I tried scooping out the dirt using just the blade, but it was foolishly slow, and eventually I drove into town to snag one of Dad’s shovels, and by the time I made it back the sun was going down.
And that was day three.
Day four was slightly better, in that I got some digging done. Even so, it didn’t amount to much.
When I’d first laid eyes on the excavation site, I could see it real easy in my head: take out a chunk there…a chunk there…and KAPOW! Treasure. Only, it doesn’t work that way in real life. It comes out one shovel load at a time, and each of those loads has to be lifted out by you.
Day five is when the fatigue hit. I woke and thought about sitting up—and that’s about as far as I got for a while. I was sore. I mean really sore. I mean sore everywhere. Shoulders, back, arms, legs—entire muscle groups I hadn’t thought about in years.
Eight feet deep? Insane. I climbed down to the bottom of the first hole and started digging again. But the last two feet were straight hardpan. Every inch had to be broken with the bar and then scooped out above my head, and by the time I got it to the surface, only about half the dirt was still in the shovel.
Near the end of the day I brought out his tape measure to check out the depth of my holes—I had three now, and they seemed pretty deep to me. But as they say, “the tape does not lie,” and in this case the tape said 5 feet 9 inches in the very deepest one—5 feet 10 if I really fudged it.
Screw you, tape.
On the sixth day of digging I just about gave up. Pathetic, right? I’d been so sure that I could find the treasure in a week, and here I was on my ass scratching pictures in the dirt.
Homie™ popped up with a message from Katie.
katie_e: hey are u at your grandpa’s?
original boy_2: yeah i’m here
katie_e: something terrible happened!
original boy_2: what is it?
katie_e: can i come over?
original boy_2: of course!
It was late afternoon, sun shining down full force, but the thought of Katie coming over perked me up, and I decided to get some real work done. I dug through the heat, dug until the sun sat in a ball of flame on the horizon, shadows stretching long and thin across the desert. The light bled from the day and still no sign of Katie, so I dug on, dug until it was too dark to see what I was doing. The ground was black, the horizon a dark shadow. Looking back toward my grandpa’s house, something caught my eye. A little glow in the darkness. Two little glows. Headlights. A pickup truck.
I found her on the porch steps, frowning in a yellow jumpsuit. Yellow jumpsuit? Not a yellow jumpsuit, a Chemstop® hazmat chemical protective garment, to be exact, with double storm flap, attached chemical-resistant gloves, and durable TuffWeave™ outer layer (YAY!).
“Hi, Katie. What’s going on?”
She thrust out her arm, slid back her sleeve, and lifted a piece of gauze. “What’s that look like? Be honest.”
It was pretty gross, all right. This reddish, necrotic sore on her forearm.
“What is that?”
“A leper mite bite. I’ve got leper mites! But you didn’t answer my question: What does it look like?”
“I don’t know. It’s, um, big and sort of webby and—”
“A puckered butthole!” she blurted. “That’s what one of my students said. And I was like, Puckered? Nice vocab word, Taylor. I thought it was just a mosquito bite, but it kept getting worse. So I went to the doctor, and he tested it for leper mite saliva, and now my whole building’s under quarantine!”
“Quarantine?”
“The extermination squad showed up this afternoon. The whole place is under plastic wrap! They wouldn’t even let me take my grade book! I had to stand in the chemshower for fifteen minutes and then they burned my clothes! I’ve been trying to reach Olivia all afternoon, but she won’t message me back!”
“Who’s Olivia?”
“The P.E. teacher. We’re not, like, great friends, but I know she’d at least give me something to wear and let me sleep on her couch. If she would answer my messages! I don’t think I rinsed long enough. That stupid chemshower is burning up my skin. God, if I ever needed a sign, this was it. I’m not supposed to be in this stupid town. Do I look red to you?”
Kind of hard to tell under just the porch light. But I knew the answer to her problems. She didn’t need to leave town.
“Stay here.”
“What? No. I just need to get in touch with Olivia.”
“Really? Why not just stay here?”
Katie looked at me like, You know why not.
“There’s a spare bedroom and everything. I wouldn’t even—” I paused. “Just think about it anyway.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “But could I use your shower? And maybe borrow some clothes? This stupid jumpsuit is itchy.”
While Katie was in the bathroom, I dug through my bag and got her something comfortable. I knocked on the bathroom door, and it cracked open and an arm appeared. I handed her the clothes.
She was in there a long time, and meanwhile I strolled around the house humming to myself. I couldn’t help it. Because here she was! And who could say—maybe this Olivia the P.E. teacher was a real flake and the only option would be for Katie to stay here with me. She probably hadn’t had a chance to eat in a while, so I figured I’d make her some food. My cooking skills are pretty limited, but I can do toast and eggs OK.
Homie™ was bugging me about taking a cooking quiz, so I did that, and then Katie appeared. Her skin was pretty red, and kind of shiny, too, but at least she seemed a little more relaxed now, standing there in my sweats and old plaid shirt.
“Nice threads.”
She sniffed the air. “Hey, do I smell something burning?”
The eggs!
I couldn’t find a spatula to scrape them off. In that whole kitchen there was barely a utensil, I swear.
“No spatula?” she said. “How did he cook?”
I didn’t have a clue. I’ll say this, though: it was almost too much, Katie standing next to me in the sweats and shirt. Almost like jammies. She was helping me with the eggs now, scraping them off with a fork. Brushing up against me as she reached for the salt and pepper.
“Katie.”
We were looking into each other’s eyes now. I was asking her a question. A silent kind of question. She tried to hide the answer, but I swear before she pushed me away I saw it. I swear I did.
But then she blinked and drew back, and the answer changed. Shook her head a little, almost imperceptibly. It was like, Aaron. Friends. Remember?
Right. We ate our burned eggs in silence, then Olivia messaged Katie back—this was around 10 P.M.—and she thanked me for the hospitality, got in her truck, and drove away.
I didn’t sleep very well that night. I just kept thinking about Katie. What does age matter? In the end, what does it even mean? A couple m
ore years on Earth, that’s all. A little more experience.
I was still thinking about her the next morning, my seventh day of digging, as I trudged out to the Russian olive tree. I just didn’t get it. I did and I didn’t. I pounded the earth with the digging bar and scooped out the dirt. Then around noon I just sat down and looked out at Ass Mountain, with its big white rock A.
If you’ve ever driven through Nevada, you’ve probably noticed that the towns all have their initials spelled out in white rock on some nearby mountain or hill. As far as I know, the mountain they’re on takes the letter as its name. Thus, you have “E Mountain” in Elko and “C Mountain” in Carlin—and let us not forget Battle Mountain’s massive BM—but as for the town of Antello, the name “A Mountain” has some obvious issues—like you can imagine a scene with out-of-town visitors quickly devolving into a hick Abbott and Costello routine:
“Which mountain?”
“A Mountain.”
“I know, but which mountain?”
“Witch mountain?”
“No—WHICH mountain?”
“I told you: A Mountain.”
“But what’s the name of the mountain?”
“No—A is the name of the mountain.”
“Buddy, I’ll kick your teeth in.”
The name has some problems, so to avoid confusion the locals have referred to A Mountain by a number of different names over the years. At one time it was Ant Hill, which was then bastardized by a generation into Panty Hill, and by their cruder descendants—my generation—into Ass Mountain.
And YAY! for its lofty heights—loftier even than the 400-foot, max-flight potential of an AirWind® AlphaFlight™ expandable stunt kite, with triple-stitch construction and convenient storage sleeve (YAY!).
I mention the hill because that’s where I was looking when Oso called.
“Hey, bro. Can you see me?”
“Where are you?”
“Up on Ass Mountain! Right below the A. See?”
