“So I was really, really lost. And at that point, I’m concerned about finding my own way out. I come to this clearing in the woods, and it’s starlit and spooky. There’s these mooshed-down places in the grass and leaves, like maybe deer bed down there. Then I see these flat ovals in a ring around the edges of the clearing, and I figure this is where a herd sleeps for the night, right?”
On fair summer nights, we slept above ground. We read the skies each morning for any hint of foul weather. As Jimmy paused for a breath, I thought I heard the notes from the stones in the river again.
“There’s this circle of ashes and burnt sticks from a campfire that some freakin’ hunters or backpackers left, and if I have to stay the night in the woods, this might be a good place since, obviously, someone had stayed here before. I made myself a small fire, and the flames hypnotize me, for next thing I know, I’m asleep and having the strangest dreams. Hallucinations. Bad acid. A voice from far away, a little boy calling and calling ‘Mama,’ but I can’t see him, and I’m too tired to get up. You ever have one of those dreams where you think your alarm clock is going off in your dream, but it’s really going off beside your bed? Only you think it’s just a dream, so you don’t get up to shut if off, then you oversleep, and then you remember when you do get up that you had a dream about it ringing?”
“I think I have that dream every morning,” said Mary.
“Dig it. I can’t see him, but I can hear little Oscar crying out for his Mama, so I start looking for him. ‘Oscar? Your mama and daddy sent me here to find you.’ So he starts calling out, ‘I’m under here!’ Under where? I can’t see him, and what he’s under? ‘Keep calling me’ . . . and I try to follow the sound of his voice. That’s when I fall into the freakin’ hole. Crashing right through branches and stuff that someone had laid over the opening like it’s a trap. I’m stuck in this hole up to my armpits in the dead dark of night with the boy crying his eyes out nearby. A bad scene, man, a bad scene.”
The girls stopped swinging. My mother leaned forward. I forgot about the gathering storm and concentrated on the elusive melody, but it receded in the swale of talk.
“I was jammed inside, man. My arms are trapped up against the sides of the hole. Worse is, my feet aren’t on the bottom of the pit, but dangling there, at the top of a bottomless pit. Or maybe something’s down at the bottom, going to get me.” He lunged out at the girls, who screamed and giggled.
“I stayed still, considering my situation, Mrs. Day, and I shout out to Little Oscar to be cool with the yelling ’cause he was getting on my nerves. And I says, ‘I’m stuck in a hole, but I will get you as soon as I can figure out a way to get out.’ And he says he thinks it’s a tunnel. So I tell him to crawl around and if he sees a pair of big feet in the middle of the air, they’re mine and could he help me get out?”
In the distance, the low rumble of thunder. I hopped off the porch and ran down to roll up the windows of his car. The hobgoblins would be huddled, all elbows and knees, worried about a sudden wrack of lightning. The song had slipped my mind again.
“Morning comes, so now I see where I am, which is still stuck in a hole. But give myself a skosh more room on the left, all I have to do is twist and down I go. Turns out I was only a foot or two off the bottom. But my feet are asleep, and my arms are aching, and I have to take a leak—pardon my French, Mrs. Day. I was dog-tired, but that boy—”
We jumped at a loud boom of thunder and a wraith of light that filled the horizon. The air smelled of electricity and the coming deluge. When the first fat drops lashed the ground like coins, we scurried inside. Cummings sat between Mary and Elizabeth on the sofa, and Mom and I perched in the uncomfortable chairs.
“At the bottom of this hole,” Jimmy continued over the rumbling, “tunnels in three different directions. I shouted down each one, but no reply. I was beginning to wonder whether Oscar was at the other end of any one of them or did I dream up the whole thing. You should see these tunnels, man, unbelievably cool. Lord knows who or what made them. Or why. As you crawl along, they get real skinny, like maybe kids made them. You snake on your belly until you come to the end and another chamber, sometimes big enough where even I could squat. And at each of the chambers, there were more tunnels. It just now occurs to me that I saw something like this on TV with Cronkite. Like the VC. Maybe it’s a Vietnamese camp?”
“Do you really think,” I asked, “that the Vietcong have invaded America and set up camp in the middle of nowhere?”
“No, man. Do you think I’m crazy? Maybe it’s where they train our guys to go into the tunnels to find their guys? Like a beehive. A freakin’ maze. I went back and forth, trying not to get lost, when suddenly I realized that I hadn’t heard from Oscar all day. Just when I think maybe he’s dead, here he crawls in like a mole and pops his head up. The thing of it is—and I didn’t notice this at first because of all the dirt and grime—he was naked as a jaybird.”