Digger 1.0 (10 page)

“Yes, Mr. Vo. Outlaws do wear black
hats.”

“So, where we dig tunnels?”

They drove on. Jim dialed in a station out
of Abilene. Buddy Holly sang, “Everyday, it’
s a gettin
’ closer, goin’ faster than a
rollercoaster.”

The night and the wind consumed them and all
that was left were two red taillights that in time were gone,
almost seeming to disappear.

“Well Mr. Vo, we’re gonna start far off the
beaten track. A strange place, high up on a mesa. The government
was gonna make into a state park because of the land features, but
they never did. It’s a high valley no one really knows about up
along some cliffs, and there’s a beautiful river there me and my
Dad used to take trout out of. We’ll have to tunnel under the river
to access the main county telecommunications tunnels.”

“Tunneling under rivers is very dangerous,”
said Mr. Vo.

“But it can be done, right?”

Mr. Vo
lit a cigarette. Then,
“Yes, it can.”

“No one ever goes out that way. We can work
as much as we like and once we start earning some money, we’ll take
time off and spend it down in Mexico on the other side of San
Antonio.”

The bright headlights made the old highway
speeding in front of them seem like the spotlight on a stage in the
moments just before someone might enter and sing.

“So, this place, it will be our outlaw
hideout?” asked Mr. Vo.”

Jim Howard laughed. “Yeah, Mr. Vo. That it
will be. We’ll start up at the top of the place, in these rocks,
and make a lookout. Then we’ll start digging a tunnel that leads
down toward the river. We’ll tunnel everywhere and no one will ever
know until we’ve run off with all their money. We’ll be outlaws,
like Jesse James and Pancho Villa, Mr. Vo. And we’ll be rich and no
one’ll ever figure it out ‘cause they won’t be lookin’ for tunnels.
They’re Americans. They only think on the surface.”

Now.

As he passed from the pasture through the
makeshift gate and into the long garden, Ellis heard a shriek and
some yelling. His mental alarms were triggered—just for a
micro-second—but he relaxed when he saw Amy running from the barn
with two mens hats clutched in front of her. She was sprinting as
fast as she could, and as she ran she was laughing so hard there
were tears in her eyes and rolling down her face, and Ellis heard
Chuck and Shooter yelling, “
Rooster!
” as they sprinted after her, too late and
too slow to catch her. Shooter slowed up a tad and threw a ball
they’d once made from a pig’s skin and stuffed with lamb’s wool and
it missed her by nearly a foot but only made her laugh louder and
run faster.

Chuck and Shooter pulled up and Chuck yelled
after Rooster, cupping his hands so she might hear him over her
cackling, “We’re going to take you out to the Nowheres and leave
you there, Rooster! I promise we will!”

Rooster realized she was no longer being
chased and stopped running, dropping head and hands. She wasn’t
scared of being left in the Nowheres, but the game wasn’t fun if no
one was chasing her. She dropped the hats in the pasture and moped
back toward the house. She wouldn’t take the hats back to the boys.
They’d have to go get them themselves. If she gave the hats back,
then next time they wouldn’t chase her, and what fun would that
be?

Ellis watched as Amy skipped up the front
stairs of the house. As she walked by, she swung her hips and
bumped Renny off the porch. He’d been bending over, trying to
carefully pour some dirty dishwater on bean plants that were
growing in the small garden next to the porch. Renny yelled,
“
Rooster!
” as he tumbled
off the porch and spilled some of his water a little less
cautiously than he’d originally intended. “You’
re gonna make me waste water, Rooster you old
dummy!
” He pushed his glasses back up his nose, climbed back
up to his knees and finished pouring out the rest of the bucket
before he popped up onto the porch and ran back inside.

Ellis shook his head at Rooster’s
shenanigans, then he followed Chuck and Shooter back into the barn.
The two young men were shaping forked branches into a Y, like
comically large slingshots, using machetes to scrape off the
remaining bark.

Ellis picked up one of the finished devices
and examined it. The young men had drilled holes in the two “Y”
ends and had strung them with some homemade twine.

Chuck grunted as he saw Ellis examining
their work. “These go around the goats necks and the string is tied
in a way that keeps it from coming off. If it works like it’s
supposed to, then they can’t jump or crawl through fences. But,
we’ll see about that.”

Ellis nodded his head. “This is genius,
brothers.”

Chuck pointed his machete. “Shooter read it
in one of the homesteading books.”

Ellis placed the finished Y back with the
others and walked further into the barn.

“Where are all the
spreckle
tins?”

Shooter pointed toward the far wall. “In the
cabinet there, near the bottom.” His hands went back to scraping
the bark.

“You both should be using pocket knives or
whittling blades or something else for that. You’re going to cut an
artery and bleed out.

Both boys looked up and Chuck sighed. “Yes,
sir.”

“Whatcha got goin’ that you need spreckle?”
Shooter asked.

Ellis waved him off, as if to say
don’t
you worry about it
. He found the right cabinet. He had to push
away some of the straw that was piled on the old wooden floor in
order to open the cabinet door, but when he got the cabinet open
and looked inside he saw the neatly stacked tins of spreckle.
Pulling out two of them, he popped them open one after the other to
make sure they were full. Satisfied he had what he needed, he waved
at Chuck and Shooter, ducked out the back door, and headed toward
the house.

Spreckle
, the word the family used for its unique,
all-purpose grease/oil/fuel mixture, had gotten its name by
accident. The substance was made of a carefully measured
combination of mostly re-rendered bacon grease mixed with precise
portions of pressed pecan oil, chicken fat, and pitch made from
pine tree resin. The resulting product was used by the family for
everything from fat lamps to making torches, to waterproofing pipe
or anything else that needed patching. The name was coined by Renny
one day when they were making the substance as a family project.
The twelve year old boy had noted that the melty, greasy slime had
“spreckles” in it. He’d meant to say
speckles
, but it had come out
spreckles
. From that point on, the finished product was
called spreckle. A glorious salvaging find from out in the Scraps
of over one hundred old metal fudge tins had given them the perfect
containers for storing their spreckle in easy to use
quantities.

Ellis had his two tins of spreckle, but he’d
need a few more things in order to properly check out the cave.
Above his pallet on a shelf, he found his headlight—one of those
flashlights that goes on your head, held there by an elastic strap.
He didn’t like to use the headlight unless he absolutely needed to.
The rechargeable batteries were priceless, irreplaceable, and
couldn’t be recharged forever, and the small solar panel used to
recharge the batteries took longer to charge four batteries than
the batteries lasted. So he always wanted to have some charged
batteries around, which meant that he almost never used the
headlight. This cave find, however, seemed like an urgent enough
case to justify bringing the light along. He’d only use it if for
some reason the spreckle torch wasn’t sufficient. He also grabbed
his hunting knife in its sheath and stuffed it into his pants
pocket. The headlight went into his other front pocket. Now he
wanted to get out of the house without anyone getting too curious
about what he was doing. When you’re in charge, everyone else is
always curious.

He stopped by the kitchen and Caroline, the
fifteen year-old brunette that everyone called “Kay”, was cutting
vegetables into a big pot being stirred by Renny, and watched over
by ten year old Karl.

Kay looked up from the pot and smiled when
Ellis entered the kitchen. “Where’re you off to?”

“Can’t these boys be hauling water?” Ellis
asked.

Kay looked at Ellis. “No, they need to be
learning how to cook.” She raised the knife and pointed it at him
and smiled. “So answer the question. Where are you off to?”

Ellis winced, but tried to make the reaction
unnoticeable. “Just some things I have to check. You know how it
is.”

Kay gave him a sideways grin. “No…
Ellis, I don
’t know how
it is. I do the same thing almost every day. It must be nice to
have to ‘check on things’. Something new happening would be quite a
nice change around here.”

“Be careful what you wish for, little girl.
And, you’re welcome to be in charge if you’d like,” Ellis said, and
though he knew she’d never take him up on it, in a way he meant it.
He reached over and took a chunk of green pepper and popped it into
his mouth and smiled.

“That’s okay,” Kay said, “you do a good
enough job as leader. But if you ever start slipping, then Delores
might want your position.”

“She can have it.”

Kay put on an artificial pouty face and
stomped her foot. “Quit acting like you don’t love us, Ellis.”

“Just because I don’t want to be in charge
of you doesn’t mean I don’t love all of you. I’m just too young for
this much responsibility.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Kay said as she
stirred the pot. “You’re stuck. Now get out of here and go on your
mystery adventure.”

Ellis patted Karl on the head and winked at
Renny. “You two young men take care of Kay for me.”

“Ok, Dad!” Karl said without looking up.

Ellis glanced back over his shoulder at Kay.
“Don’t hold supper for me. I have some things I need to do.”

“All right,” Kay shouted after him, “but if
it gets close to dark and you’re not here, you know Delores’ll have
the posse out looking for you.”

The screen door slammed behind him. His next
stop was the pillbox. The pillbox was a makeshift entrenched sniper
post placed in a small copse of trees due west of the farm. Almost
invisible from the road or from anywhere else for that matter, the
pillbox had a direct line of sight at anything coming over
Fontana’s Bridge. On most nights, someone (sometimes two or more
people) would be posted in the pillbox to keep watch over the farm.
It was far from a perfect defensive plan. The family didn’t own
much in the way of weaponry. A few rifles and handguns. They had an
old first generation night vision scope mounted on an antique Mosin
for night work, but they didn’t expect to do much more than warn
the others if an attack of any size was imminent. If a horde came
and found the almost hidden bridge, and if the horde made their way
across it, there’d be nothing left to do but the dying.

Due to the difficulty in recharging
batteries, the night scope was only activated when absolutely
necessary. Their defenses were weak, bordering on non-existent if
anyone were to come at them from over the bridge. More needed to be
done, and Ellis knew it.

The pillbox was basically a trench, four
feet deep, four feet wide, and ten feet long that was covered with
a roof made almost entirely of six foot sections of old telephone
pole. The sections were laid side by side, lashed together with
cabling and ran the entire length of the pillbox. The poles were
laid with one end supported above the ground by huge rocks dragged
down from Utah. The whole roof had been covered with carpet and
then a couple of layers of tarp for waterproofing, followed by
almost a foot of topsoil and sod. The sniper had four good-sized
holes to shoot through that were large enough to give him or her a
good field of fire, and enough clearance for the scope. It could be
cold in the pillbox at night, but not having someone watch the
bridge was not an option. During the day, they usually didn’t man
the pillbox. Someone was almost always watching from the barn or
upstairs in the house using binoculars.

The reason he was heading to the pillbox now
was that he knew he could get some sections of rope there. One of
the chores family members did while on watch duty, if they weren’t
sleeping or actively watching, was to make rope from straw. It was
slow, laborious work, but they always needed rope, and they’d
filled the pillbox with straw for warmth and, of course, rope
making duty.

Ellis popped down into the pillbox and
grabbed a section of rope nearly fifteen feet long, and a couple of
shorter sections that had just been started. By the looks of them,
these ropes had been made by Delores. They were high quality and
carefully constructed. Everyone knew Delores made the best rope on
the farm. He’d have to come up with some reason for taking the rope
if Delores asked, but he didn’t figure she’d find out about it
until he’d already made a decision about when and how he should
tell everyone about the cave.

He was just coming out of the pillbox with
his rope and the other materials he’d gathered for exploring the
cave when he saw Chuck and Shooter sprinting toward him from the
barn. Chuck had one of the family rifles—an M1A with a scope
attached—and both of the young men were running like they’d seen
something coming from the direction of the bridge.

Looking down through the swales into the low
end of the draw that ran through the valley and down to Fontana’s
Bridge, Ellis could see there was a horseman standing on the
bridge. The horseman had a small contingent of men with him, and he
held aloft a white flag tied on stick that he was waving slowly
back and forth. The group was stopped on the bridge—not advancing
at all.