The Dig

We dug for days on that forgotten farm.

Dug the colour right out of our hands.

A few days in, Manny turned to me and said the unthinkable,

“Maybe she’s not here”.

It was a valid point, we hadn’t found a thing: not a bone, not a single rusted can. But it was never going to be easy. I reminded Manny of our duty to her parents,

“You heard the woman: ‘that where there is no life is that where she will be found alive’”.
Manny shrugged.

We reached this point of crisis every day.

‘That where there is no life is that where she will be found alive” he repeated aloud, as if tracing for a connection to the words.

At last, spade in hand, he smiled,

“For her parents and their unborn grandchildren”.

We carried on, digging.

One morning,

I was at the bank of the breakfast Stream, that is to say, the bank where we foraged for morning slugs, and looking up, quite without thought, I fancy I saw high up in the adjacent towering tree the shape of a human boot. I should note that my eye sight is poor, that I’m often mistaking things for other things and other things for things, but on this there could be no doubt - an orange wellington boot, difficult to tell the size as only the toe end was visible.

Pushing what slugs I had into a polyethylene bag I rose, squinting in the boot’s direction. I couldn’t be sure if it belonged to a foot or had arrived there by other means; the tree was a bubble of foliage. In fact, were it not for the unusual colour I doubt I’d have seen it at all.

And then Something Happened.

There was a slow, frenzied rustling and the boot had gone.

I raised my concerns at our morning slug-roast,

“Manny, I think there might be people in the trees”.

“People?”

“Yes, people.”

“People in the trees?”

“Yes, people in the trees.”

“People in the trees doing what?”

“People in the trees doing -

Well, I’m not sure what they’re doing but I was at The Stream and I looked up and saw this orange boot.”

“Orange boot?”

“Yes, orange boot. And then there was a lot of rustling and I looked again and the boot had gone.”

“Interesting –

And you’re sure it was orange?”

Manny didn’t seem in the least bit interested.

I was struck by the sudden fancy to push something sharp and endless through his heart, driving a knee through the nose as his knees hit the floor; the desire defeated by suspect moral limitations and the always sobering list of necessary actions required to bring about events of any kind.

I fell to brooding, scolding my senses and Manny in equal measure. I prayed that we find the body sooner rather than later.

The day after the boot incident, Heaven wept and Heaven howled. The tarpaulin pulled over the one corner of abandoned barn we’d managed to colonize held firm but the wind pulled relentlessly at our bamboo walls. The choice was simple: either both stay in the barn holding onto the one dry place we had or take a chance and continue digging in the hope we found what we had to find before things got worse.

In the end we compromised: one dug for four hours while the other collected foods stuffs and tried to look busy correcting the camp.

This went on for a week, a long week.

It was lonely; just me and a spade, and I’m sure Manny felt the same. After awhile I saw the stripped cycle of Time - life as a spoke-less bicycle wheel spinning between unalterable cycles of digging and not digging. Sometimes I heard things, sometimes I saw things. It was not uncommon when lost in these spinning cycles of Time to see things moving around the corners of one’s eye; little things, things consciously wanting to go unseen.

Some time later, the rain stopped. And a good thing too, as I’d only just put the finishing touches on a regretful sexual act.
Call it what you will – man’s need for company, his need for confusion, call it whatever you want, but it had happened.

I pulled away from Manny’s groin without a word, wiping what residue there was around my mouth with the backside of my hand. I turned my attention to the window, unable to see anything outside for all the rain, or was it tension? I imagined Manny’s reflection as it might’ve looked at that moment: rigid, listless, a white hand shaking unsteadily towards an open zipper.

At last, I mumbled something about ‘the mission’ and Manny mumbled back in agreement,

Over the sound
Of
A crawling zipper.

- It’s unwise to shed; I should add, oedipal complexes for the even more fragile complexes of adult male abandonment -

With the rain gone, we laboured silently under grey skies.

The hole was growing fast, a quite ungrateful child. To facilitate it’s growth we constructed a ladder from branches and folded bits of corrugated steel. Every day or two we would extend the ladder a little further.
The effort outgrew our plans. Before long, we were eating our slug-leaf dinners in the hole; talking when it got too quiet, barely moving when the quiet was all our own.

The logical conclusion was Manny’s,

“If we just place the tarpaulin over the hole, we can sleep in here. The work will do itself” he said.

“We’d only have to leave the hole for shits, food, dumping the soil, and ladder bits. The rest would be digging and sleeping. We’ll find the body in no time!”

Two days later and everything was set: digging by day, tarpaulin by night. I had managed to construct a pulley system for dumping the soil which relied on first filling a bag fashioned from old sweaters and then levering it up along a network of tightly wound vines. It worked well enough to consider a triumph. Of course, we didn’t ever discuss it in those terms.

Sometimes we forgot to eat, other times the idea of actually climbing the ladder, finding some slugs, killing them (which wasn’t much of a problem, admittedly), cooking them, eating them, climbing back down to work before climbing back up again to let them out seemed a pointless waste of irretrievable energy.

So it became that the only thing we left The Hole for were ladder parts which was seldom, in itself, as we always brought back surplus amounts of useable junk.

One day,
We stopped adding to the ladder.

Manny, half way up, had paused before shouting down to me,

“Hey, I was just thinking; if we find the body tonight, we won’t need to extend the ladder ever again”.

It was sound reasoning.

Right up to the point when we didn’t find it.

So we laboured on in the earth’s damp chest, seeking a new exit; digging deep past black lungs, feeling for a heart with each shake of a spade.

By now, the sun, as the days grew wider, seemed to hang a little longer in the sky; a confidence thing, maybe.

Whenever it did get dark, we spoke about what would happen when we found the girl’s body.

‘THE GUYS WHO FOUND THE GIRL’S BODY’.

A million headlines in a million different languages.

“When this is all over, I’m going to write a book”, Manny proclaimed aloud one morning.

“A book? About this?” I asked.

“Nah, about an Italian soldier in love with a nurse”.

I told him it was a book I’d dearly love to read and that when we found the body and got out I’d love nothing more than to help him research the lives of Italian soldiers and nurses.

“No! No!” he cried,

“The nurse isn’t Italian –

She might be French”.

I paused, feeling the warm sting of tears on my cheek.

“It’s beautiful,

“If you don’t write that book, I swear to God I’ll crack your mother’s head open with a rock”.

We laboured on; for the book as much as the body.

(There must have been a point where we stopped looking to the sky because)
The hole got darker.

In the months when we had first moved down; I had looked up to the light at every opportunity, remembering, or at least trying to remember, how certain things felt; but time spent looking at soil will turn your eyes to dirt.

The times I did look up, I only ever saw shadows cut against the light of the hole. The last time it had happened; Manny had also been looking.

“One of us should go up, and I think that person is you” he had said.

As all things of consequence do, it came down to Rock-Paper-Scissors.

ROCK>SCISSORS

SCISSORS>PAPER

SCISSORS>SCISSORS

PAPER>ROCK

My superior system of randomly selecting three options in a random sequence thoroughly shamed his inferior system of randomly selecting three options in a random sequence.

We hugged.
I apologized for the blow-job.

The last I saw of Manny he was nearing the top of the hole, hoisted up in the arms of an Earth-Bag on its last legs, to meet whatever it was had made up those shadows.

The next I saw of him he was coming back down in the same Earth-Bag.

The conversation that followed went like this:

“Well? What did they say?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what did they say?”

“That they’re going away”

“That’s it?”

“And something else-”, he said slowly, as though the words were being fed through an ear piece.

“What?” I asked impatiently.

“That we should keep digging”.

The dig continues.