Dig

DIG

By Dan Dillard

Born 8/28/2014

Draft 1 Finished 9/28/2014

Draft 2 Finished 1/18/2015

Draft 3 Finished 4/16/2015

Don’t steal this work. It isn’t yours.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2015 Dan Dillard

ISBN: 9781310919947

Dedicated to the graduates of South Brunswick High School, classes of 1988-1992. You know who y’all are.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND AUTHOR’S NOTES:

While there are some similarities in the characters, places and events that take place in this story, let me assure you that a heftier pile of bullshit never existed. I spent a great deal of my life in a town very much like this, although, thinking back, it wasn’t evil. I graduated high school there, made some good quality friends there, and I got into a lot of mischief there. I even met my wife there. That said, if anything in this book seems familiar, it should. If anything is offensive, it shouldn’t be. It isn’t meant to be. If any of the history is wrong, it’s because I changed it—I did do my research! This is me riffing on one possible past leading to one possible present and even a bit of a possible future. It’s fiction, folks, and by definition that gives me some leeway, I just hope I didn’t take too much. But there must be some truth to it. There has to be, right?

Thanks also to Lisa Dissinger for some tow truck knowledge. I hope none of us ever need one, but if you do, I hope it’s reasonably priced and ready to go.

And thanks to Google for filling in some blanks. Since I was already spewing bullshit, it didn’t seem to matter much where it came from.

I’d like to thank Joe Mazza for the tow truck idea—what a great character…the tow truck driver and Joe. And thanks for the lessons. A finer Moe Lester of the guitar I have never known.

Thanks to John St. George for driving The Batmobile. A glorious piece of crap, but she could fly when she needed to…away from trouble, usually.

Thanks to Rob Parrish for the ice cream. I hope you’re still slinging it.

To Boo, Loofa, Noah and Wally, thank you for teaching me that nicknames are a good thing, even though I never got one—late to the party as usual. Even without one, you guys included me, for a time, in the gang.

And thanks to Southport, NC, for the stories, some are in this book—embellished greatly (See again the first sentence of these acknowledgements).

To my beta readers, you help more than you know. A fresh perspective gives me insight on the things I miss. You tell me when I’m full of shit, when my characters all sound the same, when the story hits a brick wall and when her eyes were green on page 15, but blue on page 125. As usual, I will thank these people for their help with my editing process and making the story better than it was...but I will also claim all of the mistakes you might find in the story as my own. They are mine after all. So, in no particular order, my gratitude goes to: Bob Dillard (my father), Bob Dillard (my brother), Stephanie Dillard, Josh Elliott, Tim Anderson, Missy Andre, Jenn Swanson, Rosa Thomas-McBroom, Abraham Toner, Tyler Wyatt McAlister, Trudie O’Melia and R. Harlan Smith.

If I have forgotten anyone in these acknowledgments, yell at me and I’ll fix it.

Timeline:

Albert Gates, Sr. b.1783 d. 1832

Albert Gates, Jr. b.1807 d. 1859

Albert Gates, III b.1838 d. 1880

James Gates b.1862 d. 1904

Robert Gates b.1887 d. 1939

Robert Gates, Jr. b.1914 d. 1976

Loretta Gates b.1941 ...

"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.

And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,

And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season."

— Revelation 20:1 - 20:3

"You load sixteen tons, what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store"

— Tennessee Ernie Ford

Hell is other people.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

There shined a shiny demon, in the middle of the road.

— Tenacious D

DIG

CHAPTER ONE

Loretta Gates

The sun was hot by 9:00 and there was already a thick, soupy quality to the air. Loretta Gates stretched to ease a hitch in her back. Dark patches of sweat grew in the armpits of her brown PEACE t-shirt and along the waistband of her gray capris. It dripped into places she didn’t like to mention. Loretta was a woman who never married, was never loved by anyone but her father and who never grew close enough to a friend, lover or otherwise to have such discussions. She didn’t speak of such things with her own doctor if it could be helped.

She worked for thirty years in a textile mill that sat on the west bank of the Cape Fear River and retired at fifty-six. Pretty as a young woman, the years of hard work were now mapped onto her face and hands, but she was still an intimidating figure, never fragile. She had lived in the same hulking, pine-log house outside of the small port town of Smithville, NC since she was born. Her mother passed when she was still in grade school, her father, when she was thirty-five, back in 1977. Since then, she’d lived alone. She was accustomed to it and she also liked it that way.

In the early 1800’s, the Gates family had owned eight hundred and ninety-two acres on the backside of what was now Leonard Street. Her great grandfather sold most of it to fuel his habits and to build and maintain his obsession—workings that she herself was still using. Her grandfather, known to her as Poppa Rob, hung on with broken teeth and torn nails to the last sixty acres all through the Great Depression.

Robert Jr., Loretta’s father, refused to sell a single square inch of land when the good old American subdivisions came through and began to populate the area in the 1960’s. Once that development was done, her childhood home sat just across the highway from the north end of 11th street, Smithville, North Carolina, US of A. That was where she was today—June 24th, 2005—sweeping the ever-falling, goddamned pine straw from her front walk.

Her family home was only a few miles from the ocean, even closer to the Intracoastal Waterway. She enjoyed the salty breezes and the smell of decaying cypress, the smell of the pines and the buzzing of insects. Loretta walked down to the waterway often, checking on the progress of summer tourism and hating it. They had no business in her small town. No business at all.

Occasionally, she bought ice cream from a young local man who sold out of a truck at the park next to the fishing pier. It was the one treat she allowed herself and it was when she ate her ice cream that Loretta thought back about her life. She was sixty-three years old, almost sixty-four. A long time to be alone, but Loretta reckoned she had it just about perfected.

The thieves came often. They dressed as real estate agents, as developers, as contractors looking to subdivide her property and put a nice shopping center or an assisted living community or apartments on her land. One came dressed as a preacher asking if she might donate a portion of the land so he might build a church. It would set you right with the Lord, Miss Gates, he had said.

Me and the Lord aren’t on speaking terms, mister, she told him. And I’m all right with that. She punctuated the statement with a snap of the latch on her front door and hadn’t even watched out the window to see him leave. She was busy. There were things to do.

They all had the same story. Each of those thieves said her land was nothing but scrub oak and pine trees. Sand and fire ants. She ought to sell. There was no need to keep living there, an old lady like herself. She would be much more comfortable if she only had a small apartment to care for. Somewhere closer to family, closer to convenience. They were all being generous—they had her best interest in mind.

Aw, hell, Miss Gates. This land ain’t worth half of what we’re offering you, a smug Jackson W. Arnett had told her. He stood right there on her front porch and said it, the wrinkled, tanned skin around his eyes looking like cobwebs cut into gingerbread dough. He was sweating, she remembered, as the day had been powerful hot. Hellish.

Loretta looked at the rude, damnable man and smiled, watching a bead of sweat drip from his forehead and follow the cobwebs to his chin where it finally fell to his white shirt in a translucent splat. Then, just like her father had done in the sixties, she said in no uncertain terms, Mr. Arnett, please go on back to wherever you come from and shove your money straight up your ass. This land is Gates’ land, and until the earth comes up and swallow it whole, Gates’ land it will always be.

The thought brought a crooked grin to her face as she swept the walk and pulled weeds from her flower beds. It faded when she got a sand spur caught in the side of her sandaled foot.

Ooh, shit on all you little bastards, she said. It sounded like bar-stids, but bastards was her intention.

There was no breeze that day. The only movement in the stifling, wet air came when a car drove by and stirred up the grit from the road. It silenced the cicadas, birds and other creatures for a moment but as the dust settled and the world seemed almost still in the heat, the animals got back to their songs. She mopped her forehead with a rag and then tucked one end of it into her back pocket to dangle like and off-center tail.

Once she was satisfied her walk was swept free of fallen pine needles and various other debris, satisfied the weeds that invaded her flower bed on the house side of that walkway were pulled and discarded, satisfied things were in order as she defined it, Loretta put curled fingers to her hips, made a HUMPH noise and the crooked smirk came back to her face.

Job well done, ‘Retta, she said right out loud to no one.

Up on her porch, a plank wood deck covered by an extension of the log home’s roof, she gathered a dust pan and went back to the walk to scoop up the pile she had swept. Once it was all in the pan, she walked it out to the edge of the property and dumped it into the drainage ditch to be rinsed away with the next rain.

Another car drove by, followed by another, then a third. The last one was dented and painted blue where it wasn’t rusty. Heavy Metal played so loud the panels of the vehicle rattled and all to the joy of the teenagers inside. Each had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Hey baby! one shouted, followed by whistles, laughter and some howls.

She knew they were joking. Boys didn’t whistle at old women. In point of fact, no man had whistled or howled at her in near forty years. They were ignorant forty years ago and in Loretta’s estimation, not much had changed. She waved after them like she was shooing a stray dog, a frown on her face.

You’ll get yours, boys, she said, and mopped her brow with the rag again. Karma is a bitch. She believed that, had seen it in person. A bigger bitch has yet to be met.

A glance in each direction showed no traffic on the road and she walked across her street to the mailbox. She retrieved a few pieces of junk mail, a renewal slip for her newspaper subscription and a bill from the electric company. Bah, she said.

Back on her porch, Loretta placed her broom and dust pan in a Rubbermaid locker that sat at one end. She surveyed the flower bed and walkway once more before going inside. Everything was in its place. Appearance was everything to those people out there. The thieves never looked beyond it. If she slipped up, even just a little, they would come in and take her home away. She knew they would. They would find any excuse to steal from her.

Job well done, she said again and shut the door.

Inside the house, Loretta fanned herself with the rag from her pocket, thankful for the air conditioning. Her home was comfortable, large and with plenty of natural light. The back of the main room went up two stories into the A-framed roof and was windowed near all the way to its peak. A loft looked out over the acres of woodland that made up her back yard and was her favorite place to sit and think. There was a chair up there with a small side table. She liked the birds and the wildlife that came through, foraging for food. The animals never came right up close to the house, but close enough that she could watch through her binoculars. They sat on the table next to an orchid in a small vase. Often, she sat up there and watched out those windows at the hummingbirds or the lizards that skittered along the ground and up the trees.

There was a pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator and she filled a glass from it before planting her bottom in her swivel bar stool next to the window. Time to rest. Time to watch the animals. Time to relax. She would have done just that if the smell hadn’t hit her. A thick smell, pungent and painful to inhale like sulfur and something burning. It caused her eyes to water, but it caused no alarm as the scent was familiar and it filled her with equal parts of exhilaration and dread.

Ugh, she sighed. Ain’t never a moment’s rest round here.

She gulped the cold, sweet liquid and then set the glass down. Beads of condensation fell from the sides of the vessel to the butcher block counter and pooled there as Loretta walked back to her bedroom, the same bedroom where her father had slept, where Poppa Rob had slept, and where his father had slept. She opened the closet and pulled a pickaxe and shovel from their resting places in the corner, then a pair of leather gloves from a shelf on the side wall. With the gloves on, Loretta tossed the tools up over her shoulder and then leaned over to pull up on a wrought iron ring. The old hatch groaned opened on ancient springs, but then held steady like an obedient soldier. There were steps in front of her that lead down into the darkness, and into that familiar stink.

She descended them, and felt the stench grow thicker, filling her head with urgency and thoughts best not thunk—violence, depravity, selfish, terrible acts. She yanked open a small metal electrical panel and flipped six breakers inside. Light flooded the area around her, then further down fluorescent lamps flickered to life. Beyond that, individual bulbs hung on strands of green wire just like Howe Street during the holidays.

The stairs ended at a three-foot-wide earthen walkway that hugged the wall of a giant stone tube some fifty feet across. The walkway snaked downward like the inner threads of a steel nut, spiraling into the ground as far as she could see. Beyond that, the cavern turned and twisted and Loretta ventured along the path, down lifts and rickety ladders which were illuminated by the strung up lights—actual Christmas lights at the bottom—but those lights only carried her so far. For the rest of the trip, she needed lanterns. Lanterns that were placed, along with boxes of batteries, in strategic locations.

The walk ate up almost two hours. It was a five mile hike if you measured, but three miles straight down into the earth was a fair estimation. It was cool down there and smelled like the charred remains of a campfire mixed with rot and sulfur. At the bottom, she found the place where she had left off the day before. Another lantern waited for her along with another box of batteries. She set her tools down, all but the shovel, clicked on a second lantern and just like her father, her Poppa Rob, his father and three other generations before her, Loretta began to dig.

CHAPTER TWO

Rusty Clemmons

Rusty Clemmons fanned steam away from the hood ornament on his 1972 Buick Riviera. The car was held together with rust and the residue of many drunken nights spent out on the beach. In high school, his friends all called him Strings because he had long hair and played electric guitar in a band that placed second in the school talent show. That show won them a gig at a bar on the island which proved to be the band’s undoing. Just like back in high school, he hadn’t bothered with any sunblock and the skin on his face was already pulling tight in the glaring afternoon heat.

Why don’t you ever break down at night? he said, sweating.

His real name was Russell, but aside from the writing on his birth certificate, he had never been called Russell that he remembered. Even his driver’s license said Rusty on it. He had been Rusty for a long while, just like his car.

The car was dubbed The Bat because his friends always thought it would’ve made a good Batmobile and the fact that when it was running right, that 455 V8 with dual four-barrel carbs was a nasty piece of machinery that could fly like a bat out of clichéd hell. Even in high school, it had been rusted and old, but it was still mostly green with an orange vinyl top that wrapped around that weird bubble of its rear boat-tail window. Now it was mostly rust, primer where the rust had been sanded down or filled with various brands of filler, and it had a blue driver side door he’d picked up in a junk yard. The motor still had some balls, but he paid for it every time he opened her up. This was one of those times.

He hadn’t been home since high school in the mid 1980’s. Rusty was thirty-eight years old and his once thick, down-to-his-shoulders hair was now respectable, receding and shaped with a #2 razor guard by the local barber back home in Chicago. He was thin. In the mirror, he saw an adult version of his former self…but it was a ruse. He was still the same eighteen-year-old on the inside…and he still played one of his dozen-or-so guitars on a daily basis, even giving lessons to some of the kids in his neighborhood when he wasn’t at his miserable, bean-counting day job. It gave him hope so the crazy wouldn’t set in, like it had when Alzheimer’s stole his grandmother.

He always loved his guitars. The sexy curve in the body was convenient to rest on your leg, but he knew it was designed to look like a woman. He loved the feel of the neck, the weight of the instrument…even the stink the strings left on your hand after you played. A stint in the marines in his twenties had dashed Rusty’s dreams of being a musician…of being a rock star, knee-deep in pussy, drugs and cash, but he would always love guitars.

He stared down the black ribbon of highway and watched a mirage ripple in the distance. The sun made him wonder why he’d left the Midwest. Sure, it got hot there, but the breeze from the lake was cool. The Windy City. Culture, people, open all night…he had a high-paying job—at least for a single guy, he had a nice apartment, he had friends…and he had another car that would’ve made the trip without any problems. Fuck.

Perfectly flat land reached as far into the heat haze as he could see.

Nothing but fucking pine trees, he said.

The pines clung faithfully to the length of the road except for a small stretch where a forest fire had wiped them out in 1982. The skeletons of those trees still poked up through the Green Swamp but were covered in green growths of parasitic weeds. It was a place where the uninitiated got lost forever and those dead, burnt trees looked like the fingers of a last-gasp drowning victim sticking up through the waves of a still ocean. The sky was a blue backdrop without as much as a single cloud to break it up.

Rusty thought about his high school dreams. They’d been on his mind ever since he’d received the invitation.

Twenty years? Has it really been twenty years?

The tow truck, silver with its red and white AAA TOWING sign magneted to the door, showed up at 6:15 pm, only an hour after he’d called. It was a Thursday, so it was no problem to find a wrecker, but he was scared of the cost. After hours calls in Chicago could put the average corporate slave into financial ruin, and being stranded fifteen miles away from town there were sure to be surcharges. Rusty leaned against the hood of the Buick with his arms crossed. He’d grabbed a second t-shirt out of his duffel bag and tied it around his head, looking like one of those camel jockeys he’d seen overseas during the Gulf War. Hadjis, they called them sometimes, or sand-niggers…or worse. He’d grown past that even after 9-11…even amidst all the talk of terrorism in the United States. Killing was never in his blood and neither was hatred. The military—at least the part he was familiar with—seemed to breed and thrive on both.

Hell of a nice ride you got there, buddy, the driver said through a rolled-down window. One hairy elbow hung out as the truck slowed to a crawl. A cigarillo poked from the corner of his mouth, one of those with the plastic mouthpiece.

As the man stepped down from the truck, Rusty would’ve sworn he saw the wrecker raise up six inches. The driver was a large man in height and in girth. He wore tan work boots, blue cargo shorts and a short-sleeved button down shirt with the name TRAVIS embroidered on its chest in red thread. You ought to paint that thing up, get it back to its original sexiness. Travis wiggled