The End of FUN (27 page)

“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. A
NTELLO
P
ROPANE
, 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:

With eight feet of diggable ground radiating out from the base of the tree, that would give me

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 = πr
²
h, with h in this case being the depth of the hole. Assuming a radius
and
depth of eight feet, that would give me

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:

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:

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 work. 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
every
where. 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.