Holes (11 page)

Stanley waited in line, then handed him his canteen.

Mr. Sir held it up to his ear and shook it. He smiled at the swishing sound.

Stanley hoped he wouldn’t dump it out.

To his surprise, Mr. Sir held the canteen under the stream of water and filled it.

“Wait here,” he said.

Still holding Stanley’s canteen, Mr. Sir walked past him, then went around the side of the truck and into the cab, where he couldn’t be seen.

“What’s he doing in there?” asked Zero.

“I wish I knew,” said Stanley.

A short while later, Mr. Sir came out of the truck and handed Stanley his canteen. It was still full. “Thank you, Mr. Sir.”

Mr. Sir smiled at him. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Drink up.” He popped some sunflower seeds into his mouth, chewed, and spit out the shells.

Stanley was afraid to drink it. He hated to think what kind of vile substance Mr. Sir might have put in it.

He brought the canteen back to his hole. For a long time, he left it beside his hole as he continued to dig. Then, when he was so thirsty that he could hardly stand it anymore, he unscrewed the cap, turned the canteen over, and poured it all out onto the dirt. He was afraid that if he’d waited another second, he might have taken a drink.

After Stanley taught Zero the final six letters of the alphabet, he taught him to write his name.

“Capital Z – e – r – o.”

Zero wrote the letters as Stanley said them. “Zero,” he said, looking at his piece of paper. His smile was too big for his face.

Stanley watched him write it over and over again.

Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero …

In a way, it made him sad. He couldn’t help but think that a hundred times zero was still nothing.

“You know, that’s not my real name,” Zero said as they headed to the Wreck Room for dinner.

“Well, yeah,” Stanley said, “I guess I knew that.” He had never really been sure.

“Everyone’s always called me Zero, even before I came here.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“My real name is Hector.”

“Hector,” Stanley repeated.

“Hector Zeroni.”

After twenty years, Kate Barlow returned to Green Lake. It was a place where nobody would ever find her—a ghost town on a ghost lake.

The peach trees had all died, but there were a couple of small oak trees still growing by an old abandoned cabin. The cabin used to be on the eastern shore of the lake. Now the edge of the lake was over five miles away, and it was little more than a small pond full of dirty water.

She lived in the cabin. Sometimes she could hear Sam’s voice echoing across the emptiness. “Onions! Sweet fresh onions.”

She knew she was crazy. She knew she’d been crazy for the last twenty years.

“Oh, Sam,” she would say, speaking into the vast emptiness. “I know it is hot, but I feel so very cold. My hands are cold. My feet are cold. My face is cold. My heart is cold.”

And sometimes she would hear him say, “I can fix that,” and she’d feel his warm arm across her shoulders.

She’d been living in the cabin about three months when she was awakened one morning
by
someone kicking open the cabin door. She opened her eyes to see the blurry end of a rifle, two inches from her nose.

She could smell Trout Walker’s dirty feet.

“You’ve got exactly ten seconds to tell me where you’ve hidden your loot,” said Trout. “Or else I’ll blow your head off.”

She yawned.

A redheaded woman was there with Trout. Kate could see her rummaging through the cabin, dumping drawers and knocking things from the shelves of cabinets.

The woman came to her. “Where is it?” she demanded.

“Linda Miller?” asked Kate. “Is that you?”

Linda Miller had been in the fourth grade when Kate Barlow was still a teacher. She had been a cute freckle-faced girl with beautiful red hair. Now her face was blotchy, and her hair was dirty and scraggly.

“It’s Linda Walker now,” said Trout.

“Oh, Linda, I’m so sorry,” said Kate.

Trout jabbed her throat with the rifle. “Where’s the loot?”

“There is no loot,” said Kate.

“Don’t give me that!” shouted Trout. “You’ve robbed every bank from here to Houston.”

“You better tell him,” said Linda. “We’re desperate.”

“You married him for his money, didn’t you?” asked Kate.

Linda nodded. “But it’s all gone. It dried up with the lake.
The peach trees. The livestock. I kept thinking: It has to rain soon. The drought can’t last forever. But it just kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter …” Her eyes fixed on the shovel, which was leaning up against the fireplace. “She’s buried it!” she declared.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Kate.

There was a loud blast as Trout fired his rifle just above her head. The window behind her shattered. “Where’s it buried?” he demanded.

“Go ahead and kill me, Trout,” said Kate. “But I sure hope you like to dig. ’Cause you’re going to be digging for a long time. It’s a big vast wasteland out there. You, and your children, and their children, can dig for the next hundred years and you’ll never find it.”

Linda grabbed Kate’s hair and jerked her head back. “Oh, we’re not going to kill you,” she said. “But by the time we’re finished with you, you’re going to wish you were dead.”

“I’ve been wishing I was dead for the last twenty years,” said Kate.

They dragged her out of bed and pushed her outside. She wore blue silk pajamas. Her turquoise-studded black boots remained beside her bed.

They loosely tied her legs together so she could walk, but she couldn’t run. They made her walk barefoot on the hot ground.

They wouldn’t let her stop walking.

“Not until you take us to the loot,” said Trout.

Linda hit Kate on the back of her legs with the shovel. “You’re going to take us to it sooner or later. So you might as well make it sooner.”

She walked one way, then the other, until her feet were black and blistered. Whenever she stopped, Linda whacked her with the shovel.

“I’m losing my patience,” warned Trout.

She felt the shovel jab into her back, and she fell onto hard dirt.

“Get up!” ordered Linda.

Kate struggled to her feet.

“We’re being easy on you today,” said Trout. “It’s just going to keep getting worse and worse for you until you take us to it.”

“Look out!” shouted Linda.

A lizard leaped toward them. Kate could see its big red eyes.

Linda tried to hit it with the shovel, and Trout shot at it, but they both missed.

The lizard landed on Kate’s bare ankle. Its sharp black teeth bit into her leg. Its white tongue lapped up the droplets of blood that leaked out of the wound.

Kate smiled. There was nothing they could do to her anymore. “Start digging,” she said.

“Where is it?” Linda screeched.

“Where’d you bury it?” Trout demanded.

Kate Barlow died laughing.

There was a change in the weather.

For the worse.

The air became unbearably humid. Stanley was drenched in sweat. Beads of moisture ran down the handle of his shovel. It was almost as if the temperature had gotten so hot that the air itself was sweating.

A loud boom of thunder echoed across the empty lake.

A storm was way off to the west, beyond the mountains. Stanley could count more than thirty seconds between the flash of lightning and the clap of thunder. That was how far away the storm was. Sound travels a great distance across a barren wasteland.

Usually, Stanley couldn’t see the mountains at this time of day. The only time they were visible was just at sunup, before the air became hazy. Now, however, the sky was very dark off to the west, and every time the lightning flashed, the dark shape of the mountains would briefly appear.

“C’mon, rain!” shouted Armpit. “Blow this way!”

“Maybe it’ll rain so hard it will fill up the whole lake,” said Squid. “We can go swimming.”

“Forty days and forty nights,” said X-Ray. “Guess we better start building us an ark. Get two of each animal, right?”

“Right,” said Zigzag. “Two rattlesnakes. Two scorpions. Two yellow-spotted lizards.”

The humidity, or maybe the electricity in the air, had made Zigzag’s head even more wild-looking. His frizzy blond hair stuck almost straight out.

The horizon lit up with a huge web of lightning. In that split second Stanley thought he saw an unusual rock formation on top of one of the mountain peaks. The peak looked to him exactly like a giant fist, with the thumb sticking straight up.

Then it was gone.

And Stanley wasn’t sure whether he’d seen it or not.

“I found refuge on God’s thumb.”

That was what his great-grandfather had supposedly said after Kate Barlow had robbed him and left him stranded in the desert.

No one ever knew what he meant by that. He was delirious when he said it.

“But how could he live for three weeks without food or water?” Stanley had asked his father.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” replied his father. “I wasn’t born yet. My father wasn’t born yet. My grandmother, your great-grandmother, was
a
nurse in the hospital where they
treated him. He’d always talked about how she’d dab his forehead with a cool wet cloth. He said that’s why he fell in love with her. He thought she was an angel.”

“A real angel?”

His father didn’t know.

“What about after he got better? Did he ever say what he meant by God’s thumb, or how he survived?”

“No. He just blamed his no-good-pig-stealing-father.”

The storm moved off farther west, along with any hope of rain. But the image of the fist and thumb remained in Stanley’s head. Although, instead of lightning flashing behind the thumb, in Stanley’s mind, the lightning was coming out of the thumb, as if it were the thumb of God.

The next day was Zigzag’s birthday. Or so he said. Zigzag lay in his cot as everyone headed outside. “I get to sleep in, because it’s my birthday.”

Then a little while later he cut into the breakfast line, just in front of Squid. Squid told him to go to the end of the line. “Hey, it’s my birthday,” Zigzag said, staying where he was.

“It’s not your birthday,” said Magnet, who was standing behind Squid.

“Is too,” said Zigzag. “July 8.”

Stanley was behind Magnet. He didn’t know what day of the week it was, let alone the date. It could have been July 8, but how would Zigzag know?

He tried to figure out how long he’d been at Camp Green Lake, if indeed it was July 8. “I came here on May 24,” he said aloud. “So that means I’ve been here …”

“Forty-six days,” said Zero.

Stanley was still trying to remember how many days there were in May and June. He looked at Zero. He’d learned not to doubt him when it came to math.

Forty-six days. It felt more like a thousand. He didn’t dig a hole that first day, and he hadn’t dug one yet today. That meant he’d dug forty-four holes—if it really was July 8.

“Can I have an extra carton of juice?” Zigzag asked Mr. Sir. “It’s my birthday.”

To everyone’s surprise, Mr. Sir gave it to him.

Stanley dug his shovel into the dirt. Hole number 45. “The forty-fifth hole is the hardest,” he said to himself.

But that really wasn’t true, and he knew it. He was a lot stronger than when he first arrived. His body had adjusted somewhat to the heat and harsh conditions.

Mr. Sir was no longer depriving him of water. After having to get by on less water for a week or so, Stanley now felt like he had all the water he could want.

Of course it helped that Zero dug some of his hole for him each day, but that wasn’t as great as everyone thought it was. He always felt awkward while Zero was digging his hole, unsure of what to do with himself. Usually he stood around awhile, before sitting off by himself on the hard ground, with the sun beating down on him.

It was better than digging.

But not a lot better.

When the sun came up a couple of hours later, Stanley looked for “the thumb of God.” The mountains were little more than dark shadows on the horizon.

He thought he could make out a spot where the top of one mountain seemed to jut upward, but it didn’t seem very impressive. A short time later the mountains were no longer visible, hidden behind the glare of the sun, reflecting off the dirty air.

It was possible, he realized, that he was somewhere near where Kate Barlow had robbed his great-grandfather. If that was really her lipstick tube he’d found, then she must have lived somewhere around here.

Zero took his turn before the lunch break. Stanley climbed out of his hole, and Zero climbed down into it.

“Hey, Caveman,” said Zigzag. “You should get a whip. Then if your slave doesn’t dig fast enough, you can crack it across his back.”

“He’s not my slave,” said Stanley. “We have a deal, that’s all.”

“A good deal for you,” said Zigzag.

“It was Zero’s idea, not mine.”

“Don’t you know, Zig?” said X-Ray, coming over. “Caveman’s doing Zero a big favor. Zero likes to dig holes.”

“He sure is a nice guy to let Zero dig his hole for him,” said Squid.

“Well, what about me?” asked Armpit. “I like to dig holes, too. Can I dig for you, Caveman, after Zero’s finished?”

The other boys laughed.

“No, I want to,” said Zigzag. “It’s my birthday.”

Stanley tried his best to ignore them.

Zigzag kept at it. “Come on, Caveman. Be a pal. Let me dig your hole.”

Stanley smiled, as if it were all a big joke.

When Mr. Pendanski arrived with water and lunch, Zigzag offered Stanley his place in line. “Since you’re so much better than me.”

Stanley remained where he was. “I didn’t say I was bet—”

“You’re insulting him, Zig,” said X-Ray. “Why should Caveman take your place, when he deserves to be at the very front? He’s better than all of us. Aren’t you, Caveman?”

“No,” said Stanley.

“Sure you are,” said X-Ray. “Now come to the front of the line where you belong.”

“That’s okay,” said Stanley.

“No, it’s not okay,” said X-Ray. “Get up here.”