Chapter 10: Hollow Ground

They never did put that hole in the mountain. We cut brush and drilled test holes above the supply station the rest of that summer, and in the fall the orders came down and the battalion went to Vietnam, and what an engineer does over there is the same work — dig, blow, probe — in ground that belongs to somebody else.

The wet season was on us when we landed. The canvas stayed wet, the socks in the bottom of the bag stayed wet, the dirt under a man stayed wet, and you put on the same fatigues wet that you had taken off wet, and after two weeks you stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing your own smell.

They wanted a road, and part of that road ran through country that was hollow already. Nobody tells you that before you go. The ground over there has holes in it older than the war. Some were dug that same year by the other side, some had been dug for water a long time back by people nobody could name, and some came out a quarter mile from anywhere a man would put a door. We probed for them. We went into the ones that had men in them and we closed the rest with charges and fill.

There was a creek that came out of the side of a hill at a boil and ran fifty yards and went under the rock again. The men who had been in country a while said that water had to come up somewhere, and that nobody had ever found it.

Ray Delgado was in the platoon. He came out of the same part of the country I did, a town a hundred miles from mine, and we figured that out in the second month. He talked about money the way other men talked about baseball. He had a mother in a house he had been paying on since he was seventeen, and there was a bill on that house every month, and he had it worked out to the dollar what he had to send to keep it.

The tunnels were hot in a way the daylight was not. Twenty yards in, with your lamp turned down and your shirt over your nose, the air is already used, and what is left is not air. The rule was two men in and twenty minutes, with a man on the rope. After the second hour down there a man’s face goes dark under the lamp and his eyes water and he starts seeing things in the passage. I watched a man sit down in the mud and argue with somebody about the water. Doc did not care which of them was right. He put a canteen in the man’s hands and walked him out into the open, and he said if we brought him one more he was going to the lieutenant.

One of the new men came out of a lateral with his lamp off and stood in the light at the mouth a while before he would say anything. Then he said there was a man standing in the water at the end of it, watching him, and that he had spoken to him and the man had not answered. Four of us went back in with him. There was the passage. There was the water in the end of it. There was the mud. There was nobody. He did not tell it again, and nobody asked him to.

The rain had been on us five days when the shelf came down. What we were doing that week was cutting a section by hand under a rock shelf, taking the clay out a shovel at a time and shoring behind us, because no machine would fit past the mouth of it. Ray was inside with two men. I was at the mouth with the sergeant.

It did not come down all at once. It came in one long slide, dirt and water together, and the water came out past us and took the lamp off the stand. The two men who were in there got out. One of them came out on his knees, and the sergeant and I dragged the other one out, and Ray did not come out.

The lieutenant came up the fill at a run and put everybody back off the mouth. He told the men with shovels to put them down. I said Ray was in there. He said he knew that. He said the working face was wet to the top and still moving, and that any man he put in there was going to be under the same dirt, and that we were pulling back to the machines and doing it right. He was doing his job. He said it straight and he did not dress it up, and I have no complaint about him.

I put the shovel down like I was told, and then I picked it back up and went in.

The sergeant caught my belt at the mouth and held it. After a while there was another man in there with me, and then there were three of us, and one of them dug and one of them passed the clay back hand to hand. I have no idea how long it took. Clay like that comes out in gobs you can hold in one hand, and then it comes out in gobs you cannot, and the water comes up behind you as you take it out, because the roof coming down had opened the hole into the creek.

We found him by his voice. He said my name. He was under a length of timber and about a ton of that clay, and the timber was holding the clay off his chest, and as long as it held, it was the only thing keeping him alive. We could not cut it and we could not pull him.

“Can you breathe?”

“Quit,” he said. “Get out of here.”

“Shut up, Ray.”

He was quiet a while. Then he said, “It’s coming again. When it comes, you go out, and you don’t come back in.”

“I’m not leaving you in here.”

“Don’t tell my mother about this,” he said. He said it twice. The second time it was not as clear.

I told him I would write to her. He said don’t. I told him I would do it anyway, and that I would go out and see her. I do not remember what he said to that.

We took the clay off him from the sides, working around the timber, and we got him out through the mouth of that hole. He talked on the way out. He was still talking when the medic got to him in the rain, and then he was not. Doc worked on him and then Doc stopped working on him.

The two of us came out of that hole glued together with mud and blood from the chest down, and it hardened on us in the rain inside a minute, and the medics had to get scissors and cut the clothes off the both of us to get us apart.

They sent him home. I was still in the country when they buried him, and I was not there.

After that I asked the questions a man asks. There was a man in the platoon on his second tour who had been down more than the rest of us and did not talk much. I asked him where the water went.

“The tunnels don’t start anywhere,” he said. “People have been digging for water in that country a long time. When they don’t find it, they keep going. That creek goes under the hill and it doesn’t come out on this side, so it’s going somewhere there’s room for it. The ground under all of that country is hollow. It was hollow before any of us. The war didn’t make it. The war found it.”

One of the engineers off the road said it was an old channel, cut back when the river ran higher. “The passages are what the water left behind when it dropped. What you hear down there is water working on rock.” He had a road to build and a survey to run, and he did not want to hear any more about it.

Neither man was guessing, and I have had ten years to think about it.

Then there was the matter of me going into that hole after I was told not to. They brought it up at the battalion. There were three questions. Did you hear the order? Yes. Did you go in anyway? Yes. Did you take anybody in with you? No. That last one was true. I told them that if it came out the same way I would do the same thing again. I could see on the major’s face that he had heard that before and that it was not helping anybody, and I said it anyway.

They sent me home on paper. I have the paper in a box. Whatever the words on it are, I have never read it to the end.

My father was at the table when I came in. He asked me if I was back for good. I said I was back. He said all right. My mother was at the stove and did not turn around.

I wrote to Ray’s mother that fall. She wrote me back one time. It was a short letter in a careful hand — small even letters, set down one at a time, the way a person writes who came to it late — and the words in it did not run the way mine run. I could read part of it, and I have kept it.

I never wrote a second letter. What I did instead was go down to the post office on the first of the month and send her twenty dollars in a money order. The money I was sending was money I needed, so that winter I went out and found work.

On the first of the month I walk down to the post office, and the woman behind the glass knows me by now, and I write the name and the amount on the order and pay for it, and I put the stub in the drawer with the others, and I go on to work. I have not been out to her house.