Holes (13 page)

Vacancies don’t last long at Camp Green Lake.

Twitch had been arrested for stealing a car. He claimed he could break into a car, disconnect the alarm, and hot-wire the engine, all in less than a minute.

“I never plan to, you know, steal one,” he told them. “But sometimes, you know, I’ll be walking past a real nice car, parked in a deserted area, and, you know, I’ll just start twitching. If you think I twitch now, you should see me when I’m around a car. The next thing I know, I’m behind the wheel.”

Stanley lay on his scratchy sheets. It occurred to him that his cot no longer smelled bad. He wondered if the smell had gone away, or if he had just gotten used to it.

“Hey, Caveman,” said Twitch. “Do we really have to get up at 4:30?”

“You get used to it,” Stanley told him. “It’s the coolest part of the day.”

He tried not to think about Zero. It was too late. Either he’d made it to Big Thumb, or …

What worried him the most, however, wasn’t that it was too late. What worried him the most, what really ate at his insides, was the fear that it
wasn’t
too late.

What if Zero was still alive, desperately crawling across the dirt searching for water?

He tried to force the image out of his mind.

The next morning, out on the lake, Stanley listened as Mr. Sir told Twitch the requirements for his hole: “… as wide and as deep as your shovel.”

Twitch fidgeted. His fingers drummed against the wooden shaft of his shovel, and his neck moved from side to side.

“You won’t be twitching so much after digging all day,” Mr. Sir told him. “You won’t have the strength to wiggle your pinkie.” He popped some sunflower seeds in his mouth, deftly chewed them, and spat out the shells. “This isn’t a Girl Scout camp.”

The water truck came shortly after sunrise. Stanley got in line behind Magnet, ahead of Twitch.

What if it’s not too late?

He watched Mr. Sir fill X-Ray’s canteen. The image of Zero crawling across the hot dry dirt remained in his head.

But what could he do about it? Even if Zero was somehow
alive after more than four days, how would Stanley ever find him? It would take days. He’d need a car.

Or a pickup truck. A pickup truck with a tank of water in the back.

Stanley wondered if Mr. Sir had left the keys in the ignition.

He slowly backed away from the line, then circled over to the side of the truck. He looked through the window. The keys were there, dangling in the ignition.

Stanley felt his fingers start to twitch.

He took a deep breath to steady himself and tried to think clearly. He had never driven before.

But how hard could it be?

This is really crazy, he told himself. Whatever he did, he knew he’d have to do it quickly, before Mr. Sir noticed.

It’s too late
, he told himself. Zero couldn’t have survived.

But what if it wasn’t too late?

He took another deep breath.
Think about this
, he told himself, but there wasn’t time to think. He flung open the door to the truck and climbed quickly inside.

“Hey!” shouted Mr. Sir.

He turned the key and stepped on the gas pedal. The engine revved. The truck didn’t move.

He pressed the pedal to the floor. The engine roared, but the truck was motionless.

Mr. Sir came running around the side of the truck. The door was still open.

“Put it in gear!” shouted Twitch.

The gear shift was on the floor next to the seat. Stanley pulled the lever back until the arrow pointed to the letter D, for Drive.

The truck lurched forward. Stanley jerked back against the seat and tightly gripped the wheel as the truck accelerated. His foot was pressed to the floor.

The truck went faster and faster across the dry lake bed. It bounced over a pile of dirt. Suddenly Stanley was slammed forward, then instantly backward as an airbag exploded in his face. He fell out of the open door and onto the ground.

He had driven straight into a hole.

He lay on the dirt staring at the truck, which stuck lopsided into the ground. He sighed. He couldn’t blame his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather this time. This time it was his own fault, one hundred percent. He had probably just done the stupidest thing he had ever done in his short and miserable life.

He managed to get to his feet. He was sore but didn’t think he had broken any bones. He glanced back at Mr. Sir, who remained where he was, staring at Stanley.

He ran. His canteen was strapped around his neck. It banged against his chest as he ran, and every time it hit against him, it reminded him that it was empty, empty, empty.

He slowed to a walk. As far as he could tell, nobody was chasing him. He could hear voices coming from back by the truck but couldn’t make out the words. Occasionally he’d hear the revving of the engine, but the truck wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

He headed in what he thought was the direction of Big Thumb. He couldn’t see it through the haze.

Walking helped calm him down and allowed him to think clearly. He doubted he could make it to Big Thumb, and with no water in his canteen, he didn’t want to risk his life on the hope that he’d find refuge there. He’d have to return to camp. He knew that. But he was in no hurry. It would be better to return later, after everyone had a chance to calm down. And as long as he’d come this far, he might as well look for Zero.

He decided he would walk as long as he could, until he was too weak to go any farther, then he’d turn around and go back.

He smiled as he realized that wouldn’t quite work. He would only go
halfway
—halfway as far as he thought he could go, so that he’d still have the strength to return. Then he’d have to make a deal with the Warden, tell her where he found Kate Barlow’s lipstick tube, and beg for mercy.

He was surprised by how far out the holes extended. He couldn’t even see the camp compound anymore, but he still kept passing holes. Just when he thought he’d passed the last hole, he’d come across another cluster of them, a little farther away.

Back at the compound, they had dug in a systematic order, row upon row, allowing space for the water truck. But out here there was no system. It was as if every once in a while, in a fit of frustration, the Warden would just pick a spot at random, and say, “What the hell, dig here.” It was like trying to guess the winning numbers in a lottery.

Stanley found himself looking down into each hole he passed. He didn’t admit to himself what he was looking for.

After more than an hour had gone by, he thought he had surely seen the last hole, but then off to the left he saw another cluster of them. He didn’t actually see the holes. He saw the mounds of dirt that surrounded them.

He stepped over the mounds and looked into the first hole. His heart stopped.

Down at the bottom was a family of yellow-spotted lizards. Their large red eyes looked up at him.

He leapt back over the mound and ran.

He didn’t know if they were chasing after him. He thought he might have seen one leap out of the hole.

He ran until he couldn’t run any farther, then collapsed. They hadn’t come after him.

He sat there awhile and caught his breath. As he got back to his feet, he thought he noticed something on the ground, maybe fifty yards away. It didn’t look like much, maybe just a big rock, but in a land of nothingness, any little thing seemed unusual.

He walked slowly toward it. The encounter with the lizards had made him very cautious.

It turned out to be an empty sack of sunflower seeds. He wondered if it was the same one Magnet had stolen from Mr. Sir, although that didn’t seem likely.

He turned it inside out and found one seed stuck to the burlap.

Lunch.

The sun was almost directly overhead. He figured he could walk for no more than another hour, maybe two, before he had to turn back.

It seemed pointless. He could see there was nothing ahead of him. Nothing but emptiness. He was hot, tired, hungry, and, most of all, thirsty. Maybe he should just turn around now. Maybe he’d already gone
halfway
and didn’t know it.

Then, looking around, he saw a pool of water less than a hundred yards away from where he was standing. He closed his eyes and opened them to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. The pool was still there.

He hurried toward it. The pool hurried away from him, moving as he moved, stopping when he stopped.

There wasn’t any water. It was a mirage caused by the shimmering waves of heat rising off the dry ground.

He kept walking. He still carried the empty sack of sunflower
seeds. He didn’t know if he might find something to put in it.

After a while he thought he could make out the shape of the mountains through the haze. At first he wasn’t sure if this was another kind of mirage, but the farther he walked, the clearer they came into a view. Almost straight ahead of him, he could see what looked like a fist, with its thumb sticking up.

He didn’t know how far away it was. Five miles? Fifty miles? One thing was certain. It was more than halfway.

He kept walking toward it, although he didn’t know why. He knew he’d have to turn around before he got there. But every time he looked at it, it seemed to encourage him, giving him the thumbs-up sign.

As he continued walking, he became aware of a large object on the lake. He couldn’t tell what it was, or even if it was natural or man-made. It looked a little like a fallen tree, although it didn’t seem likely that a tree would grow here. More likely, it was a ridge of dirt or rocks.

The object, whatever it was, was not on the way to Big Thumb but off to the right. He tried to decide whether to go to it or continue toward Big Thumb. Or maybe just turn around.

There was no point in heading toward Big Thumb, he decided. He would never make it. For all he knew it was like chasing the moon. But he could make it to the mysterious object.

He changed directions. He doubted it was anything, but
the fact that there was
something
in the middle of all this
nothing
made it hard for him to pass up. He decided to make the object his halfway point, and he hoped he hadn’t already gone too far.

He laughed to himself when he saw what it was. It was a boat—or part of a boat anyway. It struck him as funny to see a boat in the middle of this dry and barren wasteland. But after all, he realized, this was once a lake.

The boat lay upside down, half buried in the dirt.

Someone may have drowned here, he thought grimly—at the same spot where he could very well die of thirst.

The name of the boat had been painted on the back. The upside-down red letters were peeled and faded, but Stanley could still read the name:
Mary Lou
.

On one side of the boat there was a pile of dirt and then a tunnel leading down below the boat. The tunnel looked big enough for a good-sized animal to crawl through.

He heard a noise. Something stirred under the boat.

It was coming out.

“Hey!” Stanley shouted, hoping to scare it back inside. His mouth was very dry, and it was hard to shout very loudly.

“Hey,” the thing answered weakly.

Then a dark hand and an orange sleeve reached up out of the tunnel.

Zero’s face looked like a jack-o’-lantern that had been left out too many days past Halloween—half rotten, with sunken eyes and a drooping smile. “Is that water?” he asked. His voice was weak and raspy. His lips were so pale they were almost white, and his tongue seemed to flop around uselessly in his mouth as he spoke, as if it kept getting in the way.

“It’s empty,” said Stanley. He stared at Zero, not quite believing that he was real. “I tried to bring you the whole water truck, but,” he smiled sheepishly, “I drove it into a hole. I can’t believe you’re …”

“Me neither,” said Zero.

“C’mon, we got to get back to camp.”

Zero shook his head. “I’m not going back.”

“You have to. We both have to.”

“You want some sploosh?” Zero asked.

“What?”

Zero shaded his eyes with his forearm. “It’s cooler under the boat,” he said.

Stanley watched Zero crawl back through his hole. It was a miracle he was still alive, but Stanley knew he would have to get him back to camp soon, even if he had to carry him.

He crawled after him, and was just able to squeeze his body through the hole. He never would have fit when he first came to Camp Green Lake. He’d lost a lot of weight.

As he pulled himself through, his leg struck something sharp and hard. It was a shovel. For a second Stanley wondered how it got there, but then remembered that Zero had taken it with him after striking Mr. Pendanski.

It was cooler under the boat, which was half buried in the dirt. There were enough cracks and holes in the bottom of the boat, now the roof, to provide light and ventilation. He could see empty jars scattered about.

Zero held a jar in his hand and grunted as he tried to unscrew the lid.

“What is it?”

“Sploosh!” His voice was strained as he worked on the jar. “That’s what I call it. They were buried under the boat.”

He still couldn’t get the lid off. “I found sixteen jars. Here, hand me the shovel.”

Stanley didn’t have a lot of room to move. He reached behind him, grabbed the wooden end of the shovel, and held it out to Zero, blade first.

“Sometimes you just have to …” Zero said, then he hit the jar against the blade of the shovel, breaking the top of the jar clean off. He quickly brought the jar to his mouth and licked the sploosh off the jagged edges before it spilled.

“Careful,” Stanley warned.

Zero picked up the cracked lid and licked the sploosh off that as well. Then he handed the broken jar to Stanley. “Drink some.”

Stanley held it in his hand and stared at it a moment. He was afraid of the broken glass. He was also afraid of the sploosh. It looked like mud. Whatever it was, he realized, it must have been in the boat when the boat sank. That meant it was probably over a hundred years old. Who knew what kind of bacteria might be living in it?