Dig Here!

        

        I don't know if ol' Cliff was a witch, a "diviner", or just plain lucky, but what he did down yonder that afternoon on the campus of East Central University spooked me plenty. I was a kid, barely eighteen, working my way through college with a summer job on the school maintenance crew, and already had more on my plate of a natural sort than I could understand.

        I didn't need anything supernatural cluttering up thought processes still in the early stages of development, but," it was", as they say," what it was", or was it? You tell me.

       Out of all the people on The ECU campus Cliff was by far and away the least "educated", even less than me. I had at least graduated from high school. Cliff? I'm pretty sure he never got much past the eighth grade, if that far, yet he knew things that nobody else on campus knew, even the maintenance crew boss, a scrawny little whiny ass that loved his power as much as he did his Master's degree in Horticulture. 

       Cliff got the things done the "boss" loved telling people to get done. He got them done before he was told to. The boss might say, "Cliff, those toilets on the first level of the married apartments all need cleaning," he'd say that, practically clicking his heels together at the same time, "Fall semester be here before you know it. Hop to, men. You, too, Conrad."

       "Did that three days ago, boss", Cliff would say, using an old red, farmer Brown handkerchief to wipe the sweat from a brow that always had sweat on it, even in cold weather, and it was July now.

       "Well, then, you need to take this kid and yo-yo those weeds around the south end of the football field before the rats find them. First game be here before you know it."

       "We done it yestertidy, boss."

       "Hmm. Well, yes. Whatta' you know about where those old gas lines are, laid out in front of the Administration Building? Dean Tillman says you ought to know where they are if anybody does. Do you?"

       "Well, I don't rightly know, not exactly. They was put in right after the war, I know that. Mebbe '49, '50. It was a long time ago. I helped do it."

       "You and the kid get a couple shovels and try to dig around out there where you think they are and see if you can find them. There'll be a backhoe in there day after tomorrow and they're gonna' need to know where to start."

       There were lots of things that made me like Cliff. Top of the list was he loved shotguns and quail hunting. He was a tournament grade trap and skeet shooter, did it for money on the side, raised bird dogs that he fed better than he fed himself, and reloaded the shotgun shells he shot to keep from going broke. He shot and reloaded nothing but Winchester AA hulls, by the thousands, the best reload hulls God ever made. 

       How do I know "by the thousands"? Because Cliff kept the empties in the back seat area of his old, powder blue Ford Falcon, the only vehicle he owned so far as I knew. I looked into that backseat area every day before work started, thinking one day I might see a body covered up under all that red. The empty hulls filled the backseat space clear up to the bottom of the windows. You couldn't have gotten another in there sideways if you tried.

       I liked talking to Cliff. He knew all kinds of old stuff, particularly about dogs, quail, shooting, how to lead that high house bird coming to the number eight station; how to cook quail all kinds of way, not just fried, and how to make gravy that would make a king beg. He was the Bubba Gump of quail cookery before there was a Bubba Gump.

        But he was hard of hearing. Oh, my goodness. All that shooting, on top of all that age. But it was alright. I had been raised by old people, knew about the bad hearing, and the smell. Old people smell like... well, like old people. Depending on how you grew up, you either tolerated that, or you didn't. Cliff smelled like dirty overalls, double AA hulls, and burnt powder, and he wasn't going out to eat in town any time soon. Take it, or leave it.

       One time working our way with yo-yo's through a hot patch of greenbriars over by Fentem Hall I asked him, "Cliff, you married?"

       "Nope."

       When we got over to the Administration Building, we kind of sauntered around, me following behind Cliff, like we were looking for something we had lost. I had no idea what the old man was looking for, but so far as I was concerned his rank exceeded mine, so I acted like I was interested, too.

        Finally he said, "Go to my car and get those two brass rods on the passenger side floorboard, and bring them to me. They're lying right next to that peach tree branch."

       I found the rods. They looked to me like some I had seen in my uncle's welding shop, like rods you might use with an acetylene torch to solder together pieces of metal. They were maybe two, two and a half feet long, and one one end of each was bent into a short right angle making them look like brass "L's" I handed them to Cliff.

      "Now what?" I said.

       He didn't say a thing. He took the rods from me and grabbed them, hard, at the angle of the "L's" like they had short pistol grips with very long brass rod barrels, and then stood there quietly just looking around. He stood that way a long time just looking around, and then without a word he snapped his elbows to his sides, brass barrels parallel and pointing straight ahead, and started walking away from the Administration Building with me like a baby duck following right along behind him, waiting to see what was going to happen next.

       He went about ten feet that way, eyes straight ahead so far as I could tell, paused, and then in practically a military sharp left-face did a ninety degree turn and started off in another direction. I had to quick-step to keep up with him now, and as I pulled alongside of him I looked down at the rods and they seemed, in spite of his white knuckle grip, to be trying to come together.

        He did another ninety degree turn and we were now headed straight for the Ad. Bldg. Then he stopped so quickly I almost ran into him. I looked at his hands. If he gripped them any tighter the rods would maybe melt into brass puddles and fall to the ground. They had left their parallel and formed a perfect "X", which seemed to be centered right in front of his belly.

       "Dig here," he said.

       "What?"

       "Dig."

       I dug, and dug,and dug, and dug, close to three feet down and was close to revolt as it was both hot and the hole necessitated me digging around as well as down so as to clear it of the dirt that kept falling in. Cliff, doing nothing but standing there watching me dig, was using that old dirty farmer Brown to wipe sweat out of his eyes almost constantly. What's a kid for, if not to use?

       Finally: Clink. Clink. I used the point of the shovel to clear away about an inch of dirt and there lay the gas line, about two inches in diameter. I couldn't believe it.

       "Cliff. How'd you do that?"

        I was looking down into the hole at that damn pipe when I said it, and not smiling. Like I said, I was spooked. He didn't answer. He was looking at his hands, like they weren't his.

       "Cliff," I said it louder, thinking maybe he hadn't heard me, "how'd you do that?"

       "I don't know. I don't know. My mother couldn't do it. She said my grandmother could. Mom said she knew I could, right off when I was little. She said she knew I had caught it."

       "Why didn't you have me fetch that peach tree branch?"

       "That's for water."

       Which is what we got next when we went inside the Administration Building, water from a steel fountain; water so cold it made your teeth hurt. Water brought to the fountain by a steel pipe buried deep down in the ground where the witches live.

       

© 2020 Conrad M. Vollertsen