Chapter 9: The Blue Hole

In the spring of 1969 the papers had more armies in them than a man could keep straight. There were divisions in Europe and divisions on a border on the far side of the world, and a fleet that had put to sea, and every two or three weeks a place I had never heard of was on the front page for a day and then was gone and nobody said anything about it again.

Nobody in our valley read the papers close. The market and the weather and the ball scores were on the same page as the war, and the war was down in the corner of it, where it had been for years. I read it the same way everybody else did. I was twenty that spring and I had never been further than the city, and it had begun to sit on me that nothing in a newspaper had ever had anything to do with me.

What we had at home was the drills. The siren out behind the school went off at eleven on the first Wednesday of the month, and the kids carried their chairs down to the basement and sat with their coats over their heads while the teacher took the roll. The county had the sign up over the courthouse basement, the yellow and black one, and inside there were drums of water and tins of crackers, and once a year a man came down from the state and went through and changed out what was dated. The school board spent most of one spring arguing in the paper about how deep a shelter ought to be, and then let it drop.

And all over the country that year they were digging. You could read about it on newspaper ads and on the plywood at the edge of a job, and there were men in this county who had gone off to work on things they would not talk about when they came home for Christmas. We had the war on the television at the filling station in town, and we had boys out of the valley in it, and one of them wrote home twice and then stopped, and his mother did not talk about it.

None of it came near me. The letter had come in February and it gave me a day in March.

Before that day came, my father had a name to use, and he used it. We were in the city, in an office with a map of the state on the wall and one window that looked at a parking lot, and he asked at the desk for Colonel Emmett Boyd.

Boyd was a heavy man gone gray at the front, and one of his hands did not work right and he kept it in his pocket. Him and my father had been in a cold country together once, in the other war, and my father had brought him out of it on his back, and that is the whole of what I knew about it, because neither one of them ever said two words about it in front of me.

He looked at me a while, and then he asked me what I wanted to be in.

“Air Force,” I said.

He waited.

“I hear the food’s better,” I said.

He put a knuckle to my forehead and pushed my head back, the way you would do a kid. My father sat with his hat on his knee and did not say anything, which was how he was by then.

“Infantry,” Boyd said. “Like everybody else. Two years with troops, Hollis. When you have your rank, I’ll have you down here at a desk.”

“I’d just as soon stay with troops,” I said. “I don’t do good in an office.”

“Then stay with them,” he said. And then he said, “This is one. Don’t come back for another,” and he stood up and shook my father’s hand and we went out.

I have used a favor since then, more than once, and I want to put down here where I learned how it works. Everybody in that valley had somebody they could ask for something. I was twenty years old before I had one to spend.

I went in the Army in March. Basic was three months at a post in the flat country, and it was sun and ticks and a rifle and a man yelling at us in the chow line, and the food was not better.

Halfway through, the orders came down and made engineers out of the lot of us.

There were not enough men anywhere who knew how to do that work, and they took them where they found them. They had holes going into rock under statehouses and holes going into hills out west, and ours was the kind of job where the paperwork says what you will build and does not say what it is for. We were going to put a hole in a mountain and put a building inside the hole. That is all that was on paper. There was a regulation about discussing it, and nobody discussed it. A man could guess, and I have heard three men guess since, and none of them had it on paper either.

Two men in the platoon put in papers that week to get out of it. One of them wanted the infantry on account of his brother was in it. One of them wanted anything that was not going into a hole in the ground. I did not put in papers.

I have thought about that more than about anything else I did that year, and I do not have anything better to say for myself than this. I did not want a desk. If I stayed on a road somewhere with a rifle and a shovel I was never going to be anybody in particular. Half the platoon had figured on going over, and it was hard to explain to a man who wanted to go over that we had been picked to stay home and dig.

The rumor that went down the line was that when the job was done they would put us back in the line where we came from. Nobody signed anything about that.

In June they put us on trucks and took us up into the mountains.

The camp was on a bench above a creek, with the road coming up to it from the south, and past the camp the road kept going up about a mile and quit. There was a supply station up there where the road ended, a shed and a pump house and a wire fence, and a caretaker who had been at that station eleven years and did not say much. Half a mile past the station the country dropped away into a bowl in the rock the size of a house, and there was water standing in the bottom of it.

I had never seen water that color. It was blue the way a piece of glass is blue. The bottom of the bowl shelved down and out of sight, and in the middle of it there was the eye, where the spring came up. The men called it the eye. Nobody had ever got to the bottom of it, and nobody knew where the water under it went.

It never froze. Men had come up there in February that first winter the camp was going in, and stood on the rim in the cold and watched it, and it had not a skin of ice on it.

It was posted — no swimming — and the sign had been up so long the letters were most of the way off it.

The people out of the village below had been in that country longer than the Army had. As far as I ever saw, none of them went down into that bowl, and none of them let their kids down there, and one of them told the caretaker to keep the fence up. That is as much as anybody would say about it, and I left it alone, on account of I came out of a valley that had a rule of its own about a spring.

There were three graves on the flat behind the pump house, inside the wire, with markers on them, and one of the markers still had a name on it a man could read from the road.

The first time I asked the caretaker about them he said it was road work, and went inside. The second time he told me.

“Fifty-one,” he said. “They were putting the road in. Three of them come down off the grade after work and went in. Not one of them come up.”

“They couldn’t swim?”

“It’s not a swimming hole,” he said, and that was the end of it. He never told it again. If you brought it up after that he looked at you until you quit.

One of the engineers said it would be the niter in the water, that a man’s legs would quit on him in it and there was nothing to be done about that. The caretaker said that was the story. He did not say it was not.

I have a book that came down to me from my grandfather, called The Book of Hollow Ground. It is the first half of a book and the second half is gone, and the tear is old. I had it in the bottom of my bag up there, and I took it out and read it in the bunk by flashlight.

What it says about that country is that the lode does not run through those mountains. It says the mountains are what the lode came out of, that there are doors under them, and that the doors were shut up on purpose, by hand, and that the shutting was the work. That is what is in the part of it I have. I do not know that I believed a page of it then, and I am not sure now.

I never showed it to anybody up there.

The sergeant read the names off the tailgate at chow, five of us and the lieutenant, and said five days of rations and two canteens apiece, on the road at six. We were going up past the station to look at the ground and pick where the hole would go. He did not say any more than that.

I walked up to the station after that and stood at the fence with the caretaker a while, and he asked me if we were going above, and I said we were, and he said we should fill our canteens at the station first.

“There’s nothing up there you’ll want to drink,” he said, and he went inside and shut the door.

We were on the road at six.