“Hello,” he said. “Hola.”
“Hola,” she answered without looking at him.
“Do you have time to talk? Hable Inglés? ”
“Trabajo,” she said without looking at him. She continued quickly picking and carefully placing the big Bartlett pears into the bulging sack.
“I know what that means,” Toon said. “Work.”
Her tanned skin was smooth and brown and perfect. Everything about her looked perfect to Toon. He stared at her. He couldn’t help himself. She kept working until after two or three minutes all the pears she could reach on that tree were in the sack and then she hopped from the ladder to the ground and lifted the ladder in both hands and carried it to the next tree down the row.
Toon climbed onto his bike and peddled away. “Adios, senorita,” he called as he passed her by and she didn’t look at him and didn’t answer.
He peddled back and forth by the same orchard at different times of day for the next three days and he never saw her again and that had happened seven years ago and ever since Toon had dreamed about the Mexican girl two or three times a month. She was the only girl he had ever dreamed about.
Toon was awakened from his dream by a muted rumbling roar and he felt the stone wall against his back and the packed dirt floor underneath him tremble. When the roar and trembling ceased he heard a steady noise like hail pounding against a roof and when that sound stopped he was wide awake.
He knew his eyes were wide open but everything was absolutely black and then he heard the dripping water again. “What the fuck?” he said and he held his right hand inches in front of his open eyes and couldn’t see it.
“You okay?”
It was Shrimp.
“Where the fuck are you?” Toon said. “What the fuck just happened?”
“Explosion. A loud blast right outside. Right up above us.”
“What?”
“You were still asleep. Right outside, right up above us.”
“What? Where are you, man?”
“Right here.” Now Shrimp had his hand on Toon’s shoulder and he slid his hand to Toon’s bicep and squeezed his arm and took his hand away. “I’m right here, dude. You okay? Don’t panic.”
“So what the fuck happened?”
“Somebody out there set off dynamite and blew half a mountain down overtop of us. Right down over the way we came in. They knew we were here, man.”
“How’s anybody know?”
“I got no fucking idea.”
“Who the fuck’s trying to kill us?”
“If whoever it was wanted to kill us they could’ve walked right on in here and done the job.”
“Then why’d they do it? What can we do?”
“I got no idea why they did it Toon ol’ buddy. But I sure as shit know what we can do.”
“What?”
“Dig.”
“Dig our way out?”
“With our hands.”
“It’s so fuckin’ dark.”
Toon felt Shrimp’s hand back on his arm and this time Shrimp was pulling at him. “This way. We got to start. The air in here sucks but it’ll last a while.”
“Got any matches?”
“No sense burning up the air. Let’s fuckin’ dig, dude.”
* * *
So Shrimp and Toon dug.
They scooped handfuls of dry earth from the pile that sealed the entrance to the mine shaft and they tossed the earth behind them as far as they could throw it. Soon the heavy moisture-laden air in the shaft grew noticeably warmer. The sweat of the two men increased the humidity around them and caused them to sweat more profusely. The earth they dug was a kind of coarse-grained dust that caked under their fingernails and coated their hands and arms and faces. Both men panted with exertion and their noses and mouths and throats became coated with dry dust. For a while they coughed up phlegm and then the coughs turned dry. Every few minutes with the intervals growing shorter as they worked and as their fatigue grew the two of them made their way through the darkness to the place where warm water dripped from the cave’s ceiling onto the floor. They couldn’t see the large puddle they stood in while they drank but after several trips the water leaked through their boots and soaked their socks. They stood in the puddle and took turns catching drops of water in their opened mouths.
“It’s harder to breathe already,” Toon said in a raspy voice as he stood in the hot wet darkness waiting for Shrimp to give him his turn at the dripping water.
“I got to shit,” Shrimp said as he stepped away.
“Well go on back there a ways to shit,” Toon said as he tilted his head upward and opened his mouth wide. The first drop of water hit his forehead. After he adjusted his stance a drop hit his nose and after another slight adjustment the third drop fell into his mouth. He heard Shrimp shuffling his feet as he moved farther back into the shaft and he counted the drops and swallowed after every ten. After fifty drops he stepped away. “It tastes like shit,” he said. “Like fucking sulfur. Did those gold miners use chemicals? Mercury or some shit? Anyway fifty drops is my limit.” When he leaned forward to let the drops of water hit the top of his head or the back of his neck a long loud resonating bowel explosion sounded from a few yards away. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You think the poison water did it to you? If you were on a toilet seat that there would’ve lifted you two feet high. I’m goin’ back to dig.”
“My bad,” Shrimp said.
A minute after Toon began digging Shrimp was back and the two men scooped earth with both hands and tossed it behind them.
“My fuckin’ pants’re stickin’ to me with sweat,” Shrimp said after a while.
“Mine too.”
“You know what life is?”
“Yeah,” answered Toon. “A pain in the ass.”
“Worse, man.”
“A royal pain in the ass?”
“Way worse. Life’s a kick square in the fuckin’ balls and a bucket of piss poured over your head.”
“That water back there tastes like piss.”
“Yeah, and we got to drink it.”
“All I know is, soon’s I get back to town I’m gettin’ Beetle Bailey an’ Sergeant Snorkel tattooed on my ass.”
“What happened to Dagwood Bumstead?”
“Changed my mind is all,” Toon said.
“How come?”
“Dagwood’s a dork.”
“So’s Beetle Bailey.”
“Yeah, well at least he’s a soldier.”
“So that’s good?”
“A soldier beats a businessman dork any damn day.”
“What the fuck are we doing here in some fucking mine shaft talking about this shit? Beetle fucking Bailey. I mean, I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance—better than fifty-fifty—that today would be another regular day, maybe a little ass-kicking at the most. There’s always rumors, always dudes talking about big-time rippers moving in, about tough, super-tough, dudes from someplace else. Well it fucking happened. Shadow’s wasted. Our plans are fucking fucked. Our restaurant.” Shrimp coughed hard and pounded his fist against his chest until finally the coughing stopped. “So all that fucking leaves is, let’s fucking dig,” he said.
Though their pace had slowed considerably they kept digging. The air grew warmer and heavier and Toon’s eyes burned and Shrimp’s throat was so sore that despite his thirst he decided against going back for more rancid water.
“How much dirt you figure’s piled here?” Toon asked. “How many fucking tons?”
“A lot. The whole goddamn mountain shook when that charge went off.”
“Well how long you figure this’ll take?”
“I got no idea. But we got to do it. You want out?”
“Yeah.”
“Then dig.”
* * *
As they worked in exhausted silence Shrimp remembered a squad patrol a few weeks before he was shipped home. The sergeant’s name was Bumgard and Shrimp and the other squad members regarded him as a stupi
d cracker asshole because all he ever did was look for trouble even if there wasn’t any. That day Bumgard had looked hard but they found no trouble anywhere and they finally reached a small hut at the end of a dirt street. Bumgard kicked the door in and they followed him into a small room with a few straw mats on the floor and an old wooden crate for a table with a couple of empty bottles sitting on the crate. The young woman standing beside the crate was one of the prettiest females Shrimp had ever seen anywhere. Her head was uncovered and she wore a loose-fitting white dress. Her hair was black as a crow’s wing and her skin was smooth and her eyes were like fire and she held a baby girl in her arms. The baby girl might have been two years old and it was already plain to see that someday she would look much like her mother. Shrimp was surprised when he realized that the baby wasn’t afraid and neither was the mother. The mother stared at Bumgard with the fire in her eyes turned to ice. “Out!” the mother said. “Go!” She knew that much English. She pointed at the rickety door that Bumgard had kicked in. “Back outside, men,” Bumgard said in his squeaky cracker voice. “Ain’t nothin’ for us here.” Shrimp was the last one out of the hut and the last thing he did was smile at the lovely mother and wave his free hand at her. When the mother gave him a tiny smile and waved back Shrimp felt good for the first time in more than a year. He remembered the mother and daughter often and hoped they had made it.
“Gotta sit down,” Toon said.
“Yeah,” Shrimp agreed. “Fuckin’ A, man.”
They sat in the hot, wet stifling darkness with their aching backs against the high pile of dirt they’d made behind them with their digging.
“I guess I can climb back up in a while,” Shrimp said. “In a few minutes. Maybe.” When he heard himself speak it sounded like the voice of a stranger. The muscles had cramped in his hands and he found he could no longer bend his fingers. He had periodic dry heaves and every few minutes since shitting his stomach muscles had cramped spasmodically and his calf muscles were cramping too and his wet feet burned inside his boots. When he wiped his face with the back of his hand he realized his skin was coated not with dust but with something more like slimy mud. His throat was so sore he could barely swallow and every time he took a deep breath stabs of pain coursed through both lungs. “We might die in here,” he said.
“You think?”
“You?”
“Yeah,” Toon said, “I guess.”
“Yeah we might.”
“Maybe somebody’ll look for us though. Dig us out.”
“Who?”
“The guys. Somebody.”
“Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody gives a shit about an old mine shaft either. Hardly anybody even knows this place is here.”
“You want to go back for water?” Toon said.
“No,” Shrimp answered.
“I guess I can hack it.”
“Hack what?”
“Dying. Croaking. Death.”
“If we die we got no choice,” Shrimp said. “We got to hack it.”
“How many guys you seen die? How many people?”
“Dozens. Hundreds.”
“Me too. Hundreds. What the fuck’s it all for?”
“Nobody knows,” Shrimp said.
“Nobody?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, shit, then at least I’m not the only one.”
“The only one what?”
“The only one who doesn’t know jack shit.”
“Nobody knows jack shit about dying.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody,” Shrimp repeated. “People pretend is all. Like religious people. Like assholes with education.”
“You ready to get back up?”
“Almost.”
“I think I got to get some water.”
Shrimp sat motionless with his eyes closed and his arms at his sides and his legs outstretched. With every minute that passed it seemed harder to breathe and he felt progressively worse. Now his stomach burned and his head throbbed. When he tried pressing the back of his head into the dirt piled behind him the pain grew worse.
“What the fuck,” Toon muttered. “Too fucking much dirt. I can’t even fucking get by here.”
“Can’t get by where?” Shrimp asked in his croaking voice. His throat felt raw now and the pain grew worse every time he tried to speak or swallow.
“Can’t get by this fuckin’ dirt,” Toon answered. “We piled so much up I can’t even get by anymore. We’re cut off from the fuckin’ water!”
Shrimp heard Toon scraping at the dirt with both hands. He imagined him digging like a dog that was making a hole to bury a bone and the image in his mind almost made him smile.
He heard Toon stop digging.
“We don’t deserve this, man,” Toon said.
“You sound like Clint Eastwood, man. In that cowboy movie.”
“What?”
“Clint Eastwood.”
“Cowboy movie?”
“Yeah.”
“Never saw it.”
“You saw it with me, man.”
“Way back?”
“Way back, before the war.”
“War? What war?”
“Fuck you.”
“What’s it about?”
“The movie?”
“Yeah.”
Shrimp heard Toon sit back down beside him.
“The movie?” Shrimp said again.
“Yeah.”
“Hurts me to fucking talk. It started out with some whore kidding a cowboy about his tiny little dick. In the whorehouse. The one with the tiny dick’s in the whorehouse with his friend. So after the whore makes fun of the guy’s dick he cuts her up and after that Clint Eastwood and some black dude and some kid come to town to kill the one with the tiny dick and his friend. The whores collected money to pay whoever killed the two cowboys.” Shrimp remembered the movie well but it hurt too much to keep talking. “I forget what all happens after that,” he said.
“So what’s it got to do with what we deserve?”
“Some badass sheriff Clint Eastwood’s about to blow away says he doesn’t deserve to die. So Clint Eastwood says, ‘Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.’ That’s what he said and I figure he was right. That’s the fucking point. My fucking throat’s on fire though. I can’t hardly talk anymore.”
“All we ever wanted to do was make a decent living. That’s all we ever wanted to do, man.”
Toon sat next to Shrimp. Leaning back against the dirt he could hear Shrimp and judged him to be no more than a couple of feet away. He heard his own raspy breathing. Now it felt as if someone had stuffed a dry rag down his throat.
After every third or fourth breath Toon let out a long sigh. He could smell Shrimp and then he wondered if he might be smelling himself. Then he thought he was smelling them both.
Rapid random thoughts drifted through Toon’s mind. He remembered when he and a buddy had cut class in high school to go swimming out at the lake on a sunny day and they needed an excuse afterward so they took bottle caps out of a trash can and cut their own faces up and then went back to school with their faces scraped and cut and bloodied and claimed they’d been attacked and beaten by a town gang at lunchtime, and the lie worked. He remembered a camping trip he’d taken with his dad when he was ten. Eleven. First they’d dug worms and then they’d fished in a river near the campground and Toon caught the biggest trout and his dad had taken a picture and the framed picture with Toon and his monster trout had hung on their living room wall up until Toon left home for the army. Toon had never been back home and he wondered if the picture might still be there in the living room. If it was hanging there still he wondered what else if anything he’d leave behind when he died. If he died in this mine shaft and nobody found him even his tattoos would be gone and even if they did find his dead body they’d put him in a box and bury him somewhere in a hole and the tattoos would be gone six feet under anyway. His parents were poor and the cheapest thing would be to bury him in the nearest m
ilitary cemetery. He remembered his first steady girlfriend when he was seventeen and how he copped her cherry in the backseat of a car he borrowed and parked out by the golf course and how it was the only cherry he ever copped in his life. He wondered where she was now and he figured no matter where she was or who she was married to she remembered him too because girls must remember the guys who copped their cherries. He remembered when he got motor pool grease on his canteen cover and stole a clean canteen cover to replace his ratty one from a guy he didn’t like in another platoon because he needed the clean one to pass Saturday inspection and the platoon sergeant of the guy he stole it from reported Toon to the company commander and then a friend of Toon’s who clerked in the supply room lied to the company commander and claimed he’d issued Toon the new canteen cover an hour before inspection, and that lie worked too.
Toon heard Shrimp’s labored breathing beside him in the darkness. In the space of a minute the raspy breaths came quickly and then slowed and then quickened again. Then there was a lapse of several seconds when no breath came and then finally Toon heard a drawn-out sigh.
Toon knew he could do no more digging. He felt far too tired and too dizzy and too sick to work. He realized he was too far gone to get up on his feet and he knew for certain he would die here and with that realization another memory came suddenly and clearly to his mind.
Before he went to war he did his basic training down south and then his advanced eight weeks out west and then after that he had been issued orders for Nuremberg where he worked as a mechanic in a motor pool. Before the army he had always been poor and hated being poor and soon after he arrived in Nuremberg Toon fell into a strict routine. He worked hard all month and ate in the mess hall and slept in the barracks and never left the post for anything. Every payday he dressed in an expensive tailor-made white silk suit and a white dress shirt and a broad bright red silk necktie. He had bought the shirt and tie at an exclusive department store on one of his rare trips to town and the suit came from a Chinese tailor who served GIs from a small shop across the street from the base. On payday he left the post in a taxi and got out at an expensive restaurant called Der Messerschmidt and tipped the driver generously and went inside and ate an expensive meal with a bottle of champagne. After the meal of shrimp cocktail and fillet steak with a rich dessert he drank several shots of kirschwasser. He tipped the waiter generously and then he took a cab to one of the best whorehouses on the Frauentorgraben and engaged a woman for the night. In the morning he tipped his whore generously. He never engaged the same whore twice. After he left the whorehouse in a taxi he ate an elaborate brunch with more expensive champagne at a nearby hotel patronized by both German businessmen and American tourists. After the meal he sat at the hotel bar and sipped more kirschwasser and bought drinks for whoever happened to be there with him. Sometimes men at the bar thanked him and when it was a German Toon always told him the same thing: “I’m a rich American. It don’t make any difference to me.” When an American thanked him he always said, “No sweat, dude. I can afford it.” He kept close mental track of his money and knew when he left the hotel bar that he had more than enough to pay the taxi fare back to the base. When he got off at the base he gave the taxi driver all the money he had and he would remain flat broke until next month’s payday when he would do it all again.
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