By John Boosinger
I bury things. People other than myself would think the things
I bury are,
for the most part, boring;
if they ever found any of it, which they won’t.
Those things that I take the
time to bury are chosen carefully,
and they’re mine. Everything I have ever chosen has had its reasons
for
being buried, and I guess you’ll
just have to believe me on this one
because I’m not ever going
to tell about some things. My only
requirement for selection is
that it be able to fit into a wide-mouth
canning jar. I get them ten for a dollar at the thrift store
in town
now, but I used to steal them.
When I have a few things together that
need burying I get in my truck
with my shovel and my jars and whatever
it is that's going to be in
the jars, and I drive someplace nice, which
is most anyplace around where
I live, and I go to work digging. The
fall is the best time for it,
just after the first rain. You peel
back
the top layer of moist, rotting
leaves and the aroma from down below
comes floating up on a bed
of steam. It’s the smell of microbial
excrement and there is nothing
else like it. If you’ve ever eaten
an
honest to God truffle you’ve
come close, but it has to be fresh and you
have to eat it whole. These first three inches are home to a rich
display of life. I watch the bugs reveling in the sweet earth
that is
all around them, struggling
to escape the light when I peel back their
leafy canopy. It’s important to save these layers because
they need to
be replaced when you’ve finished.
If the earth is good you can go six
inches farther down, just with
your fingers. I always do because
it’s
the most honest way to dig.
It’s how you get to know the earth that we
all take for granted. When you find the hard stuff you set the shovel
tip at a nice steep angle and
hop onto its back. It slides in real
nice
and then, pop, you’ve got a
perfect wedge balanced on your shovel, like
a piece of dirt pie. I know it sounds strange, talking about digging
and burying things like this,
but I’m not crazy; I’m no fruitcake like
the folks living down in the
senior center. It’s just something
I do.
God gave me a special gift
with a shovel, and I use it.
My name is Hayden Potter. I’m
twenty years old and I live just outside
of Laytonville, California. Main Street is Highway 101, which is why we
still exist. We’re a small town and if they ever build a
bypass we’re
done for. There’s about two dozen stores lining Main
Street, the
largest being Dylan’s Grocery.
That’s where I work. To the east and
west the pine covered hills
rise up steeply with a few houses here and
there on both sides. Over the hill to the West it’s all clear cuts
and
logging roads. No good for digging of any kind. Five minutes East the
pot fields start, if you know
where to look. I know where to look
because I find a lot of places
when I’m out doing my work. I’ve seen
some things you just wouldn’t
believe, good and bad both.
Today is a perfect
day for digging. It’s the middle of
November, the
air is crisp, and the clouds
are thick in the sky. Sunny days are
all
wrong for digging, they don’t
convey the right message at all. Overcast
days make me feel alive.
The cloud cover is going to hold all day, I
think; I have a good feel for
the weather. The fog starts rolling
into
our valley well before the
sun comes up. I work the graveyard
shift
down at Dylan’s, stocking shelves.
When its time for my four o’clock
break I step outside and I
can feel the wet air pushing around me. It
folds around the loading dock,
across the parking lot, and right on down
main street. The prettiest thing I see at night around here
is the fog
rolling down the road, all
lit up and glowing from the orange street
lights.
Another thing
I like about night work is you don’t have to wake up
early. I go to bed at four in the afternoon and wake
up in time to
start work at eleven. I unload the freight into the aisles and start
slicing away. We use these giant razors to slice the top
off every box,
then we unload until our hands
ache. But in the morning, the aisles
are
empty and the shelves are full
and that’s a good feeling.
It’s about 9 am, which means I’ve been off work for an hour. I bought
a dozen donuts and a coffee
from Chuck’s Donuts, and a pack of baseball
cards. If I get Tony Gwynn I’m going to bury it too,
because Tony Gwynn
is the greatest player that
ever lived. After that I had to go
home for
my shovel and my jars and a
few other things, then I had to go pick up
Joe. I’ve never taken anyone with me before, but
I’ll make an exception
for Joe. We used to play on the Laytonville High baseball
team
together, our Junior year,
the year that we made it to the state
championship game. He’s up front with me. The seat has a nice bounce
to it at the speed I’m going,
the kind of up and down rhythm you get
even when the road looks fast
and smooth stretching out ahead of you.
I’m trying to make good time
because I have a lot of hiking and a good
deal of digging to do, and
it gets dark early in November.
Once you get
out of town, which doesn’t take long, 101 goes nice and
easy for about ten miles, passes
the occasional house, then opens up
into four lanes. If you keep heading South you’ll end up in
Willits. I
usually don’t. Willits people can be real stuck-up bastards.
If you
turn East instead, onto highway
36, you’ll follow the Eel river as long
as you like. It’s a beautiful
river.
When I was six I almost drowned
in the Eel river. My foot got caught
between two rocks where the
water moved fast and I was just hanging
there, laid out flat underwater,
rolling with the current. Everybody
says I struggled for a while
and that my dad pulled me out and saved my
life, but I don’t remember
any of that. What I do remember is
looking
down into the water at the
tiny fish working so hard to fight against
the current, and feeling sorry
for them because I was so relaxed and the
water was so smooth and the
sun was warm on my back. For the next
three
weeks everyone spent so much
energy being grateful I was alive I
couldn’t escape being noticed.
I hated being noticed. When you’re six
you can’t get anything done
when you’re being noticed. The thankfulness
ceased to bring them pleasure
soon enough, though, and I was able to do
what I liked again. In a final fit of parental concern my mom bought
me
a shovel and a book about buried
treasure, to keep me away from water, I
guess. I spent the next several months digging up
the hillside behind
our house, but I only ever
found a spoon. A week later I decided
to
bury my own treasure so that
I could go back and find something
interesting for a change.
I rolled my dad over onto our front room
carpet and found some quarters and a five dollar bill
in his pocket. I
also found some lace doilies
in the kitchen, and my mom’s best earrings
and some other things, I don’t
remember what, and buried it all in a big
hole, on the other side of the hill behind our house.
This was before
I started using jars. I was going to wait a year to dig it up, but
I
didn’t last more than twelve
weeks, which is longer than most
six-year-olds would have waited.
I remember being so disappointed with
what I found. It was one big, filthy, disorderly mess.
I couldn’t even
find the five dollar bill or
most of the quarters and only one of the
earrings. After that I started stealing my mother’s canning
jars, and
only burying things that no
one else would miss, like the mouse that
died in our flour bin. At first I would wait a few weeks then dig
up
the jars again to monitor the
progress. I learned something then;
that
the pleasure in life is in
the tightening of the lid on the jar, and in
the finished hole, and in hiding
the loose dirt under oak leaves and
dead branches when you’re finished.
It is very important to me now that
my jars stay buried. I also learned that day that I have an
unusually good memory. In my mind, a map of our backyard took shape,
and the knowledge of where
every one of my treasures lay became visually
sandwiched onto that map.
That became the greatest pleasure of all.
The map is more complete now,
and more richly detailed. It is all
of
Laytonville, and the hills
rising up around it, and it is the
logging
roads and abandoned driveways
climbing up and away from the Eel river,
101, the back alleys and dark
places no one else knows about. And
everywhere throughout my map
tiny points of light float in place, more
than six hundred of them glowing
just below the translucent surface,
each a place marker for a single
buried jar. This is the other blessing
God has given me.
I have only once forgotten
where I buried a jar. That’s because
when I
buried it I intended to come
back for it. It’s eight hundred dollars
in
a small mouth mason, vacuum
sealed. I came by it in a bad way. It was
our Junior year in high school,
Joe’s and mine. We were good friends.
Most people would agree we
were the best two players on the team. He
was hitting near .500 and was
second in the state for home runs. The
only two people in town more
idolized than Joe were Coach Jackson, who
was a hell of a good coach,
and myself. I was the star pitcher.
Didn't
lose a game all year, except
the last one. Lord knows I could have
won
it, but the coach of the other
team offered me cash to lose the game,
and I took it.
I think a lot of people would have have done the same.
Maybe not. What I can’t stand to think about is how all
the anger and
pressure for the loss came
down on coach Jackson. I know he was
stressed because that night
he invited me over to his house and raped
me, face down, right there
on his mahogany desk. I won’t lie,
we’d had
sex before. A lot. But
before then it had always been me and Joe both,
and always real nice because
we were his star players. At school
in the
loft above the gym usually,
or in his office. When we were freshman
he
had caught us doing some things
we shouldn't have been doing, and he was
real nice about not telling
the cops. He took us under his wing
right
away. I won’t tell you it didn’t hurt the first
time, both Joe and
me. We haven’t ever talked about it, but we had
an understanding.
Anyway, that’s one of the things
I feel bad about, what it did to
coach. He couldn’t have been in his right mind for
the things he did
that night. Some times I think he might have done some
really bad stuff
to me if he had known that
I threw the game, so I have that to be
thankful for. Nobody but that loser of a coach from the other
team
knows what I did.
So I had a good chunk of money,
but I didn’t know what to do with it.
Losing the game wasn't the
most honorable thing I’ve ever done, and I
got tired of looking at it
pretty quick. If you ever need eight
hundred
bucks, it’s buried in a jar
near Camp Winnarainbow, North of Laytonville
a few miles, next to a redwood
tree. Don’t ask me which one, there’s
a
damn lot of redwood trees up
there. Anyway, if I knew, it wouldn't
be
there anymore.
9:30 am. The drive is fantastic
when you leave 101 and start up the
Eel river valley. I’m a good driver and I can really let it loose
around those corners. Here, before you cross the first bridge, the
road
becomes a smallish cliff on
your right, ending sixty feet down on the
rocky beaches of the river.
Its one of those rivers that seems to be as
much boulder as water. In a lot of places there are tunnels kept clean
by the currents that pass all
the way under the largest of the rocks.
It’s a challenge to your will
to live just to get all the way through
them. This is where I come on the weekend to watch
the high school kids
get drunk and stoned and have
sex on the pebbled beaches. One night
I
watched two of them burn the
hair off their legs when they rolled over
and their sleeping bag caught
in the bonfire. They couldn’t get
out
because they were both stuffed
into one bag.
Other times I just come out here to watch the hand of God touch all
things with His grace. On sunny days I’ve seen hawks catching rabbits
and ground squirrels, and even
snakes. I saw a bald eagle reach into
the river and pull out a trout,
as if the fish were just waiting there
to get caught. That must be a beautiful feeling, to be that
trout.
Spends his whole life fighting
the never ending flow of water, then in a
single moment he is free, feeling
the air slide effortlessly over his
scales, seeing a horizon of
earth and sky from above the clouds, held in
the secure embrace of those
smooth black talons.
I look over to Joe. His eyes
are closed and the wind is whipping the
hair around his face. Often I leave the windows down in my truck
even
on the coldest days, to remind
me that I’m alive. I long for the
peacefulness that I see in
his face, but I’ve got to watch the road.
It’s only a few more miles
to the turnoff that I would like to take and
its not an easy one to find,
which is the way I like it, especially this
time.
My senior year was the worst
year of my life. Joe and I stopped
talking over the summer before
school. Then he got himself a
girlfriend, which is not something
I would do. Jessica was her name.
He started hanging out with
Jessica’s friends, who were all self-serving
jerks. They mostly just sat around the old mill behind
the school,
smoking and drinking and talking
about going to Davis together to party
for another four years. I avoided talking to them when I could.
Neither myself nor Joe played
baseball that year, and you can bet that
Joe wasn’t playing because
Jessica told him not to. I wasn’t
playing
because if I had to play against
that same coach again I wouldn’t be
able to look him in the eyes.
He’s not their coach anymore, but I’m two
years out of high school and I haven’t thrown a baseball
in that time
anyway. I still love the sport, I just don’t have any
compelling
reasons to drive to Willits
twice a week for an adult league.
Then there was graduation day,
the day our elders bestow on us their
blessings and set us free into
the world . Even back then I thought it
was a load of crock. By the time graduation day came around I had
already decided that I wasn’t
going to stand up there with everyone to
have my life validated by adults
I had no respect for. But interest
in
the mechanisms of my fellow
man got the better of me. Graduation was
being held outside on the football
field, like it always has in good
weather, which lent me an opportunity
to watch the events of the day
without having to deal with
all the people. I hate dealing with
people. Years before I had ever been around, the school
had boarded up
the sides and back of the football
bleachers to keep those horny 50’s
kids from making out after
school. Don’t ask me why they made
out under
the bleachers, or why the administration
believed that boarding them up
would stop the fine youth of
Laytonville from making out, or doing
anything else they wanted to
for that matter. Most of the people
in the
world make no sense at best,
or are complete wastes of oxygen at their
worst. Try not to take it personally, but I would
probably think you
were an asshole too, if I ever
had the misfortune of meeting you.
That’s statistically speaking.
You might be swell. Anyway, I had found
a loose board that I could
slip past when I was a freshman because I
tend to look for those things.
Under the bleachers is not a place most
people would want to go.
Since it was boarded up it’s never once been
cleaned out. It’s an anthropological study of the high school
football
fan just to walk around under
there. My lawn chair sat on it just
fine
though so I found a good view
between some people’s feet, and sat down
to watch the farce that is
high school graduation. You’re wondering
about my parents. They didn’t miss me, because they weren't there.
They care about these things
about as much as I do. I must not
have
stayed awake very long, because
I don’t remember much about the
ceremony. Half a valedictorian speech, and lights out.
That night Joe and his friends
got drunk and beat the crap out of me.
They cut off my testicles with
a pair of scissors and left me to die.
I won’t tire you with the whole
story. I didn’t tell anyone. Who
would I have told shit like
that to. They all left town, that
same
morning I imagine. They didn’t
go to college. I don’t really care
where
they went. A few bags of adult diapers later I crawled
out of my house
and got the job I have now.
Don’t pretend like you really care.
Everyone cares so much about
the starving kids here or the rape victims
there, for five minutes.
Tears and promises and then the news is over
and its reruns of Cheers.
In case you do care, today I’m putting all
the pieces together. Tonight, I’ll go have a drink and be done with
the
whole thing.
It started last night. Or early this morning. Whatever, it was dark
outside. I stepped outside for a break. It must have been my four
o’clock, because the fog was
just rolling in. I heard this laughing
and
talking around the corner and
knew that it was Joe, no question. He
was
with somebody else, I didn’t
recognize the voice and I didn’t really
care. I heard him say good night, and watched him
start down B street
into the dark residential neighborhoods
to the west of Main Street. I
followed. With ten minutes left to my break, his neck
carved easily
under my box blade, and I let
his body fall into a gully. I threw
some
dead branches on him, wiped
the blade clean on the grass, and returned
to work. The boxes fell apart smoothly under my blade,
and my hands
never faltered as they swung
the pasta sauce onto the shelf, four at a
time, labels facing out.
I worked so fast this morning I had time to
help out on aisle 6; then the
donuts, the coffee, the cards, the shovel,
the jars, and Joe.
10:00 am. I almost miss the
turnoff I’m looking for, an ancient logging
road only marked by a rusted
sign with the words “property of” still
painted on it. It’s not the sort of sign you notice even when
you’re
looking for it. It’s a very rough road and Joe’s head keeps
folding
further back and the mess keeps
getting worse. His body is twisted
forward and sideways now, turned
all the way around so that his now open
eyes are looking up. I’m breaking one of my own rules in doing this,
the one about not going to
the same place twice to bury anything. But
I
like this place. The earth is good and it digs easily. There is one
jar buried here, holding the
parts of myself I could find under the
bleachers. Next to that spot I will start two new holes.
Later there
will be a third for his body,
but that is tedious work. I will enjoy
digging my small holes for
now. In one I will bury Joe’s testicles,
as
it should be. In the other I will bury the baseball cards
unopened.
There could be a Tony Gwynn
inside. I hate to be disappointed.