Thu, 19 May 2005

He Was Having Difficulty Swallowing
He called me and asked if I had a shovel he could borrow. I remember him having a shovel, a much nicer shovel than mine, so I asked him why he needed a shovel. He told me he was digging a hole in his backyard. I asked him why he was digging a hole in his backyard. He told me that digging a hole was something he knew he could do, and that he had to do something, and he didn’t know what else to do. I told him I’d be over with my shovel in half an hour.

When I pulled up in his driveway I saw he had erected two small worklights at angles to the hole, which was maybe four feet deep and a couple feet wide, in order to keep digging through the just-fallen dusk into the night. He was sitting at his picnic table, where two months back we ate overcooked hamburgers while he entertained friends from work and the new husbands of old girlfriends. The broken handle of the first shovel was set across the table, but the scoop was nowhere to be seen. I handed him my shovel, which I permanenetly borrowed from my parents when I first moved into the hose where I lived with Sarah all those years ago, which he took out of my hand while walking back to the hole, heavy in his legs and chest. He set about digging, throwing the dirt up and to the side, onto one of two piles, shifting his stance from time to time. I watched him for about twenty minutes, then went in to get a beer. I sat on the picnic table, drinking, listening to his telephone constantly ring, caught at every fourth ring by the machine, completely ignored by him as he kept digging. When I went in to get a second beer, I was about to answer the phone when I heard him start swearing and kicking at the walls of the hole.

Having hit a layer of clay which he could not get through, he was at a loss as to how to continue the hole. He looked at me, asked what I thought, and I told him I had no idea, except maybe that he could make the hole wider, if he just wanted to keep digging. No, he said, the hole has to keep going down, and if he could just get past this fucking clay he’d be set for a while. This, of course, was just plain wrong, and I told him he’d need to get a backhoe if he was going to keep digging. No, no, he said, he had to keep digging, keep digging down. He pulled himself out of the hole, walked to the shed, and came back with a hand trowel, which he used to pick at the clay, throwing small pieces of it onto the pile of dirt. I picked up my shovel, strangely protective now that he had no use for it, and asked him if he was okay.

“Does it look like I’m okay?”

I didn’t have an answer to this, so I went out to my car, put the shovel across the back seat, and started driving home, only I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t was to go anywhere, so I drove around out on the highway for a few hours, until I ended up at a diner in one of those small outlying towns, where I asked the waitress for ten dollars worth of quarters so I could make a call out to the coast, so that I could call Sarah, though I had no idea what I would say.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #