The End of FUN (30 page)

As I flipped through the pages, I noticed that a lot of the stories contained my sister's byline. Like over half of them. From the looks of it, it was just Evie, one other dude, and the Associated Press.

The office door opened and Evie appeared.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you, like, the only reporter or what?”

My sister looked at me. “You didn't know that? They let everyone go but Brian and me. It's insane. When I started out we had six reporters. SIX, Aaron.” She fanned out her fingers and added a thumb. “Now it's two!”

“You're doing a good job.”

“No, I'm hanging by my fingernails from a ledge. And do they thank me? Oh, they
thank
me all right, and then they ask for more.
You're doing a good job, Evelyn. You're keeping us afloat
. No, I'm drowning here.”

“I thought you were hanging from a ledge.”

“Both. I'm hanging and the water is rising and I just know they're going to walk in here one day and turn off the lights and shut the whole thing down. It's only a matter of time. Journalism is dead, Aaron. This, what you see here, is the death rattle.” She threw herself into a chair and let out a sigh. It was weird to see her like that. Most of the time with my sister it's about 80% for show, but here she seemed truly bummed. I tried to cheer her up as best I could.

“You're doing a good job. The articles are cool.”

“You don't get the paper out at Grandpa's, do you? I'm signing you up, OK? It'll, like, double our subscription rate.”

I was on my way out the door when Evie stopped me.

“Hey,” she said. “Wait. So why did you come here anyway?”

I reminded her about the dig and my promise to find something in a week, but she was so wrapped up in her own stuff, it almost didn't register.

“Right,” she said. “And did you find anything?”

The way my sister was looking at me, it gave me pause. The truth is I'd kind of been thinking about telling her I was done, we could sell the house. But that wasn't going to cut it. “I haven't found anything—
yet
. That's what I came here to tell you, I just need a little more time. There's something there. I'm really close. Just a little more time, that's all.”

And then came the heat: 98 the next day, 99 the next, then straight up to 104. Evie had signed me up for a subscription to the paper, and on Thursday the latest edition arrived. The heat wave wasn't quite yet enough to break any records, so the
Daily
went looking for another angle. A chiropractor had passed out in his attic after trying to fix the swamp cooler. He was driven by his wife and daughter to the hospital and revived, and the three of them made the front page under the headline
HIGH TEMPS CONTINUE,
which I would've changed to
DEATH TOTAL FOR HEAT WAVE HOLDS STEADY AT ZERO
.

Given the heat, I decided on a new, more efficient approach. Instead of digging blind pilot holes here and there, I'd approach it more scientifically. I tied a string to the trunk of the tree, measured out eight feet, and walked it in a circle, dragging my bar in the dirt to trace out the circumference. Within this circle I'd dig down an inch at a time, as in an archaeology excavation.

The top layers were much softer than the hardpan underneath, so for a while—until I'd extracted the top foot or so—my work would be easier. Or so I thought. But I hadn't factored in the heat effect or the fact that digging is still digging no matter how you dig it—which is to say: WORK.

It took the better part of two days to dig out that first foot, and my hands were blistered pretty bad by now, and I could feel my resolve slipping. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of my sister, and how hard she was working, and how nice it would be to walk up to her with a couple gold bars tucked under my arm and say, “Take it. Go treat yourself to a day at the nerd spa or whatever.”

Anyway, three days into my new approach and I was about ready to give up, and then something happened. I was digging out the perimeter on the western end when I heard a sound. It was like:
tink!

By this point I knew the sound of a rock, and this did not sound like a rock. I set the shovel aside and knelt on the ground to brush away the dirt, and there it was, looking me right in the eye. I'd found something. Holy shit. I'd FOUND something!

It was…

(…Drrruuuuuuumrollllllllllllllllllllll…)

A fork.

A
fork
?

Yup, that's what it was. The pattern on the handle matched the set in the kitchen.

OK, a fork
.

I polished it with my shirt and set it against the tree. It sat there looking back at me. I dug some more, and not much later I found something else.

A spoon.

OK, a spoon
.

Were they silver maybe? I brushed the dirt off the spoon and read the inscription.
Stainless steel
. Great. Wonderful. What next?

Two more spoons and another fork. Then a pair of butter knives, another fork, and two more spoons. I tossed them over to where the fork and spoon were. They clanged off each other as the pile grew. Along with the forks and spoons and knives, I also found a cheese grater, a pair of tongs, and that spatula Katie had been looking for. Oso's metal detector had been correct. There was metal junk everywhere. But that was the problem. That's all it was: junk.

After all the clues, this is what he'd buried? I kept digging, but the more kitchen items I excavated, the more I began to doubt the whole enterprise. What next? A toaster?

And yet every time I heard the shovel hit metal I was hopeful, like it might be something
more
than a fork or a spoon or whatever—but it never was.

Around noon, clouds began to gather—thunderheads—blotting out the western sky. The gray washed overhead and the wind began to rise. The air cooled, and my shadow began to fade, then disappeared altogether, soaking into the ground like water. In the distance, Anne Chicarelli's horses were becoming agitated in their corral. They charged the perimeter, necks outstretched, plunging through the cooling air. I could feel it too: something was coming.

And then it came.

I was chucking another spoon at the pile when I saw a flash. Lightning branched up the sky, a fiery tree, quickly burning itself out. A moment of silence, then a deep rumble began to gather at the far edge of hearing. It rolled across the land in a low, crackling chorus, and then the crackle opened into a giant
BLAM!
that shook the very ground beneath me.

I made it inside just as the first raindrops began to spatter across the windowpanes.

said Homie
™
,

“I don't want to.”

Just to get it off my back I took the challenge, but I didn't really try, and in the end I could only get nine meats.

“Yay.”

I stood at the kitchen window. Now that the rain was here, the horses had settled down in their corral, resigned to getting wet. But their trials weren't over yet. It began to hail. Just like that: rain one second and hail the next, tiny white stones boiling over the earth, bending the rabbit brush and grass. The metal roof tinked and panked overhead. Still the horses didn't move. Where would they go? I watched the hailstones bouncing off their backs—tiny from my vantage, but not so small when you were up close, I'm sure.

Sometimes it must really suck to be a horse.

I woke the next day feeling bummed about the dig and called Katie to see if that would cheer me up. I told her about what I'd found buried under the tree.

“The whole thing is a joke,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“If it isn't, feel free to tell me what it is.”

“I don't know—I've been dealing with my own problems.”

The quarantine had been lifted, but when the extermination squad was taking care of the leper mites, they discovered all these code violations in the foundation, and now her building had been condemned.

“What are you gonna do?”

“Well, I'm packing up my stuff right now.”

So I drove into town to help Katie. What are friends for, right? Anything = better than digging up more stupid forks. When I got there, her place had changed. Where before it had been kind of spare, now there was crap everywhere, books and boxes and clothing, like a packing bomb had exploded.

Katie had changed, too. She had on this big gray wig that went down over her ears like a helmet.

“What's with the wig?”

“It's for the play. Harold Pinter's
The Birthday Party
. I'm ‘Meg, a woman in her sixties.' The director wasn't happy I'd be in Tahoe for a week, but he really doesn't have much choice. I've actually done this play before, so I pretty much know all the lines:
Is that you, Petey?
Pause.
Petey, is that you?
Pause.
Petey?
And then Petey says,
What?
and
I
say,
Is that you?
There are a lot of pauses. That's what Pinter is known for: the ‘Pinter pause.'”

“You're going to Lake Tahoe?”

“My dad's visiting from Spain. We're staying at my sister's for a couple weeks, then he's coming back here to see the play. God! I didn't realize how much crap I had until I started going through my boxes. I guess it's a chance to simplify. They said to just leave what we don't want. And when the workers come in they'll be like,
Hey, Tom, I wonder what kind of person lived here.
Pause.
I don't know, Bob.
Pause.
But she sure had a lot of crap
.”