I was fifteen years old and me and my first girlfriend had just split up the day that dad showed me the way. He walked upstairs (stomped, really – he never did figure out how to use a staircase), took one look in my room, and told me “c’mon.”
So I c’moned all the way downstairs and out the door and into the truck and down the way and by the park and down the trail all the way down to the old quarry, where we took a path behind a pine tree that went further then it looked, and he showed me the pit.
“Dump it in there,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“You know what.”
And I supposed I sort of did, because there was only one ‘it’ that mattered right then and it was squatting in my chest and sort of pulling me down in a way that had nothing to do with gravity. So I walked up to the edge of the pit and I shut my eyes and I threw it away.
There was a little whoosh of moving air, a distant bump from something bouncing off hard-packed dirt. That was it.
I felt light again. I felt right again.
“There ya go,” said dad. He patted me on the back and let me take the wheel on the way home and we ordered pizza.
“Remember that,” he told me. “Whenever you need it.”
So I did.
***
I got carried away at first. I think dad knew that’d happen, but he didn’t say anything. Didn’t raise a brow or lift a finger when I went out there after I blew an exam, got in a fight, broke up with my second girlfriend, sat with the dog when we put him down, said something I regretted to a friend, all in eight months.
I think dad also knew I’d lay off eventually. And I did. When I went out there the day after I got wasted and put a dent in the truck I felt silly, standing there with a little twist in my stomach and walking in circles around the pit, thinking about weight and pressure and wondering how many mistakes like that I’d have to pull together to make one failed exam to make one half-strangled conversation you’d been putting off for days and never practiced right to make one dying old dog.
It wasn’t good math. No good at all.
So I went home, and like, I felt a bit lighter in a different way. Sort of. And dad never said anything about it, and I thought that was pretty okay. I mean, if it WASN’T he wouldn’t have said anything either, but he’d have looked at me different. I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure.
I was pretty sure he’d talk to us when he had those extra doctor’s appointments too.
***
So after that I visited the pit a lot. One BIG trip after the news finally broke – mom saw a piece of unopened mail from the hospital, which finally brought the whole thing out – and then a steady never-endy stream of little ones, drip drip drop, because every time he stepped out of the truck and went indoors and I saw the gravel stuck in the tires and the pine needles in his soles I knew he’d been to the pit. Which was what made me go there. I wonder if I ever rebounded on him like that, backwards? Who knows, he never talked to me about it. I never talked to him about it either. Why would we? We had the pit. And a year and a half in, I made one more big, big, big trip, still in my good rented suit, and I felt my shoulders lift so much higher that it felt like they must’ve been around my elbows before, bending me double with all sorts of things I had no business thinking about.
I sighed, deep and relieved, and just over my own breath I heard a little soft rattle and I looked down at my still-shiny rental shoes and there it was, a little dribble of everything I’d just thrown away, oozing free of the rim of the pit.
I still don’t know what happened to those shoes to this day. No clue. They weren’t there after six years, I tell you that much.
***
Those six years were awful.
I mean, they weren’t that bad.
Good things happened, right? I got a dog. I broke up with a girlfriend and stayed friends. I finished school. I got a good job. I got engaged. I did a lot. A lot of good things.
It’s just that all the other things, well, I had nowhere to put them. I could feel them stuck in my chest in the day and rattle loose with my breathing at night. I could feel them swelling like nodules under my armpits and against my throat. I could smell them sour whenever my deodorant ran thin and I needed a shower.
So when a friend of mine had an accident at a stoplight involving someone who didn’t like stoplights and my fiancé asked if I wanted to talk I told her no thanks, got in the truck, and took a drive that was longer than it had been last time.
The brush was overgrown too. Nobody went to the park much anymore. But the pine was still there. And the pit. But not my shoes.
I listened to the pit. Something was sloshing around down there. Too close. Too close.
That was okay. I’d thought ahead a little this time. I had a shovel. And a rope.
So I measured out ten paces and started digging and I didn’t stop until I felt a bit sick and the air hurt to look at and the rope was taut and dangling above my head, and I crawled out covered in dark earth and sweat and feeling like the heaviest thing in the whole world.
Then I stood there, and I let it fall away and knew I’d done the thing right. Heard nothing but the wind, no impact.
***
It didn’t last as long as the first one. I didn’t think back then that I’d put it together wrong – I still don’t. I think I just had more on me, and it was heavier. That six year weight, plus well, kid problems are smaller than adult problems. They pack closer together, keep down well.
So after it filled up I dug another pit.
Then another.
And then, well, after the divorce, I filled two in one year. And then I saw a buddy at work – known him for years – and he was going through it too, and.
Look. The whole point is you don’t talk about any of it. You don’t have to talk about it. But you can SHOW someone, right? Dad showed me.
So I showed him. And yeah, they fill faster with two people, but they dig easier too. One of us tied the lines and ran the bucket; the other shoveled. It worked pretty well.
Then we heard of a buddy of his. Good guy. Childhood friend. His mom passed, you know, and he didn’t know what to do, and we couldn’t tell him. But we could show him.
And he knew how to work a backhoe.
***
We had to get permits at some point. That was the closest it came to ruining the whole thing, to putting words around it all. So we showed the guy at the county office, and he showed his boss, and in the paperwork everything’s not THERE but it’s worded so you can see the shape of where it would be if we said anything. Which we didn’t.
You don’t have to look hard to see it anymore anyhow. The park’s not much these days, but the old parking lot is full day in and day out. Backhoes, drills, dump trucks. Guys with shovels and levels and ropes and wheelbarrows. All of them trudging in like death warmed over, walking out with bright eyes, straight backs, high shoulders, a different set of regulars for every day of every week. The pine’s gone, but the trail is wide – and paved and fitted with streetlights, after the tire ruts from the heavy machinery got so deep you almost couldn’t walk it without planks and guardrails at noon, let alone after dark. You can hear the engines running all day and all night from the highway, wheezing and beeping and groaning. The guys at their controls drink coffee to keep awake past midnight, then clock out at daybreak in time to drop their burdens in the new pits and head home to sleep it off.
There’s been buzz about making them wider. We’ve already had to cut down half the trees already, we can probably get an actual quarry going. Maybe work our way into the backwoods. Gets harder and harder to keep everything unstated at that size, but you know, it’s an investment in the future. If you build it, they will come.
I’m not sure how deep they are. I’ve never looked in any of them.