The summer wind blew southward, tumbling the different types of leaves and garbage across Salpo Ridge park. It reminded me of how whimsical it had been for me to leave this town and say I’d never come back. The same resolution, no, more the solemn blood oath of every living creature in my high school graduating class. An oath written in the most sacred of non-existent sacred books.

I poked my shovel at the soil, breaking it up from the bigger pieces of rock in order to make it easier to dig this utterly useless hole Harvey told me to dig. One hole in a series of worthless holes along the gravel road excuse for an entrance. The humidity was thick, like choking on a haze of maple syrup that filled my pores and slid down my throat with each deep mid-June breath. There had to have been something out there more befitting for someone with three years of university education. People around here needed to recognize that I had one more year before I could wave a document that proved I was smarter than all of them.

The dirt from my progress caught the air and painted itself on my sticky bare chest and arms. I fought the ground for each shovel-full only to have another waiting. A whole summer’s worth of holes and grunts and piles of earth on the outskirts of a forgotten town. I was alone, the only member of a chain-gang in a prison of mosquito bites, sun burns and incoherent thoughts. I wanted to bury myself so I might take refuge in hell.

Harvey’s truck drove up the long driveway that led to where I was digging, about three acres into a nine acre park that was only ever visited by Harvey and myself. I tried to look as though I was earning the six dollars an hour that Harvey’s position as "boss" administered. He pulled up beside me, the bed of his truck filled with whatever a two hundred year-old retired farmer decided to put in there. Mainly a collection of iron latches and wire fencing a man who was introduced to me as having yet to spend his first nickel found valuable.

Harvey cut the engine and dropped out of the cab. He walked over to me, looking the same as he always did in his ancient T-shirt a thrift store would turn away. His face dried-up and beaten by endless days in the sun. The walk of a man born into his labor-stained work boots.

"How we comin', Ayden?" Harvey asked.

"Oh, good. Ya know…diggin’ these holes." It was painful to have to work this job and lie to the man who paid me about how much I enjoyed it. I may have been cunning enough to lie, but a smile would have been impossible. I dug my shovel into the earth and leaned on it, looking at him with a squint that he probably recognized from his own reflection in the mirror.

"Yeah-ah," he said. His tiny hazel eyes surveying the 4 x 6 x 1 foot holes I made and the plots marked off on the brown grass to my left that embodied the future of my fruitful summer vacation. "Get these here finished up, then get them holes all the way up the road dug. Should be good." Harvey had a talent for repeating his orders, even when they were so appallingly obvious. I was sure that even if we had something else to talk about, we’d still talk about the holes. Still he found it necessary to only tell me one order at a time. It was funny that I never asked him what the holes were for and he didn’t find it necessary to tell me. He probably thought he would solve Salpo Ridge’s poor attendance problem with good old fashioned ingenuity, starting with these holes.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Then we’ll able to get that cement truck up here, fill ‘em in."

"What about all this dirt from the holes? What should I do with the dirt?"

"Welp, we’ll keep it. Maybe I’ll haul it away in the truck bed. Might need some good dirt for somethin’. Never know." He looked up at me with his lip curled, revealing his teeth. I could never tell if he was smiling at something I missed or he was just looking. Even worse, I didn’t know if I was supposed to smile or just look back.. I’m sure I’d figure it out if I had a few decades of farming experience.

"Fellows down at the Ag office picked up someone else to come down here and get to work with you on these holes," Harvey continued, "Frank and Tonya Gilbert’s boy, know him?"

"Nope," I didn’t even know who Frank and Tonya Gilbert were, let alone their boy.

"Yeah, he’s a few years hind you. Be his last year down at the senior high this fall."

"Good, I could use the company," I may have been grateful to have someone around since the crows proved to be poor conversationalists, but somehow I envisioned that I was playing babysitter to a farmer’s kid in the Ag office.

"Good. Well, I better get going. Gotta make sure we got enough saw dust ordered for the barns down at the fairgrounds." Harvey straightened up and went back to his truck, carrying his physique of muscles that looked as though they refused to do anymore serious farm labor. Bailing hay in August was a thing of the past. "The boy will be here tomorrow morning. Evan’s his name," Harvey said and drove off. I wondered if Harvey named his truck whatever John Wayne named his horse.

The day dragged on in miserable heat as you’d imagine it would when you’re digging holes by yourself in a park no one ever visits. I slammed my shovel into the ground repeatedly, carving Harvey’s undisclosed plan for the future of Salpo Ridge out of the earth. The endless sounds of summer bugs under toning my own drifting imagination. I usually thought about things like money or sex, but sometimes I wandered into the endless scenarios of what the world would be like if human sperm could be harnessed to make fuel, thereby creating a glaring imbalance of the sexes. All things a man driven insane by exposure pondered while he quested for a paradise mirage. I took long breaks, most of the time I gazed off at nothing in particular. I amused myself by taking a shit in the woman’s toilet in the lone cinderblock building that housed the facilities. By the time five rolled around I could spit the dirt out of my mouth and walk the three miles back to the house I grew up in with my Grandma.

-------

Each morning I woke up and tried to shake off the hangover from freezer vegetables, Unsolved Mysteries, and hours of listening to my Grandma cough her way closer to the after-life. Grandma’s kindness still stood undeterred from her soul to anyone that would come close to her exile on the living room sofa bed. The only thing I had left to offer her was a report card hanging above the secretary next to every other one I ever had and my coerced promise that she would die in the house she was born in. I wouldn’t say I neglected her. I would say I was quietly uncomfortable with watching the bed-ridden terminal illness of the woman who raised me. I thought I’d let TV personalities do the entertaining.

"How are you feeling today, Grandma?" I would say to her every morning before I left for work. I’d stand in the room and stare at all the books she used to read that lived on the shelves surrounding the TV, being sure to smile most of the time when I looked at her. She was always smiling when I was around. My presence in the room never gave an impression of permanence, just a casual stop-in to make sure she needed anything before I went on to do something no where near as important as the woman who nursed my bouts with the flu or told me how it was when I was wrong. She’d never met any or my friends or professors at school. For the past few years she had been a friendly voice on the receiver and a warm memory. I always spoke of her fondly. She met my last girlfriend Lana, the girl who solved the world’s problems in Political Science classes and broke my heart with her new friend Ruarie, over the phone. It was obvious that I never came home, but she would just as soon enjoy my company during the evenings after I came back from a job she knew I hated, than be anything but the gentle and endearing woman she was.

"Take care today." she said nearly everyday I left the house, "Don’t give Harvey too bad a time. He may be old and ugly, but at least he’s dumb, too!" And she would laugh like old people do when they find repeated jokes they found funny every time. "I love you," and I would be gone until dinner time.

The car hadn’t worked since I left three years earlier, so each day I had to bear the humdrum forty-five minute walk to Salpo Ridge. At seven in the morning, the air smelled like sleeping children with a hard day of little league and grass stains ahead of them. The few people I saw were old men led by tiny dogs on leashes or pick-up trucks with side paneling that had some variation of "& Sons" inscribed on it. Basically, I saw everyone over the age of miserable.

The same birds that sang me to sleep back at university greeted me as I walked into Salpo Ridge. I could already taste dirt. I approached my series of holes to find someone already cutting and throwing the earth away from the ground. The boy looked tan in his white sleeveless shirt. His face had the awkward look of the final months of puberty turning into a full grown man, acne’s last stand. His denim jeans appeared as though they were used to a childhood of filthy jobs, jeans he respected but didn’t love. The parking lot of Salpo Ridge could be full of cars, but I would still be able to pick out his gravel-pasted mid-nineties Grand Am that waited nearby.

"You must be Evan," I said picking up my shovel exactly where I left it the day before.

"Yep," Evan said, glancing at me with a slight nod, still not breaking much stride in his duty.

"I’m Ayden." My shovel joined in tune with his.

"Yeah, I know who you are. You were a senior when I was a freshman." I briefly searched my memory of him, something I could at least bullshit a sense of familiarity, but my interest was destroyed by my realization of this being another day holding the shovel.

We dug for about an hour in conversational silence. The sweat rolled off us, but we pushed on, trying to make as much progress as we could before the sun stood right above us and used our sweat to burn our bodies. Weeks of solitude forced me to try to begin some kind of talk, "So, Evan. You got a girlfriend?"

"Nope," he replied, continuing his chore.

"Probably a good thing. Girls aren’t worth it," I said with a grunt as I threw a larger shovel of dirt. "Part of the reason I’m here, well, back in Kenston, is because of a girl." I thought of Lana with Ruarie, huddled near each other in the library, Lana’s hair pulled up in one of those disarming ponytails that looked like a piece of gorgeous golden brown hair had been cut and tied to her head. Her thick black-rimmed glasses that made her look so well-read. I burned in my feelings of inadequacy.

Evan was quiet as he softened up some earth with the tip of his shovel. "Oh yeah?" he said in a way that told me he heard words but didn’t care enough to listen to them. He didn’t look up at me.

Still, I persisted, "Yeah. Lana was her name. I had to get away from seeing her all the time back in the city since we broke up. Just not right what some girls do, ya know?" I paused waiting for his reply, but he just continued to work. "Lana, and the fact that my Grandma’s ill, so I thought I’d come back and help out. My Grandma knows Harvey pretty well, so, here I am."

Evan’s silence was glaring. The loneliness I detested from my days at Salpo Ridge was replaced by awkward indifference. Each hour passed where my work was mixed with an annoying curiosity as to why the kid was so impersonable. Every time I looked up to see what Evan was doing I was rewarded with no surprises. Just him, slaving away quietly without any notice to anything that I did. At least before he was around Salpo Ridge I could be miserable without having to be ignored.

The day pushed into the late afternoon, always marked by it being the hottest and most daunting. It reminded me of the last five minutes of each school day at Kenston High, years earlier, replayed in an equally horrible setting. By this time it had been hours since Evan spoke to me. Every once in awhile I would tell him about some party I had been to with girls wearing too little and guys drinking to much. A few times I would go into detail about how much fun he would have next year in college, on his own…away from this place. Each time he would respond with the sound of his shovel tossing dirt that would amplify my useless attempts at conversation. Still, I was determined to harass some kind of personality out of my fellow shovelman.

"You don’t say much, do you, Evan?" I asked.

"Nope," he replied scraping another mixture of dirt and brown grass with the point of his shovel.

"Forgive me, but, it’s kinda odd us working here all day by ourselves and not saying anything to each other." I slowed my work pace considerably, spending more time begging for a verbal response with my repeated glances than digging the holes. The silence continued for a few more seconds, holding the tension of what I said. I turned to my side of the hole and continued my work again when he spoke, almost as if he now had to.

"Would you like to hear me tell a story, Ayden?"

I held my shovel and looked back at him. His silhouette still digging in front of the falling sun to the west, blurring his age and spilling rays all around him. "Yeah, sure," I said quietly surprised. "I’d like nothing better."

"There’s this girl at Kenston in my class. Few years ago I’d even say she was my girlfriend." Evan didn’t stop working. His pace was steady, almost rehearsed. "It was sweet how we acted around each other. In junior high she’d wait by my locker in passing periods just to say hi, if she could spare the time not to be late for her next class." Evan paused for a second to wipe the sweat off his face with the bottom of his shirt, still not looking in my direction or hinting that he ever would. The filth from his face now a part of his shirt. He grabbed the shovel and started back up. "We didn’t speak too much outside of those few hellos. Our phone talks were usually shy. We’d call each other only when our friends were over and we’d basically just ask each other what the other was doing or thinking after long silences. Then we’d laugh, because we knew this was new and we were both so bad at it. Not the kind of bad that makes you wanna quit. Jus happy to know we could do nothin but get better at whatever we were tryin to do."

I kept digging, but still ventured looks at Evan, hoping to pull some kind of sense of his story with an expression or stare. "One day we started havin our folks drop us off at Pizza Hut with our friends and we’d drink soda and eat pizza. We used to steal each other’s pepperonis. Then we started talkin more about how exiting it was going to be as ninth graders in the fall. How we were going to get to stand in the student section at football games with all the older kids and join in on all those crazy chants and cheers." Evan stopped digging again. He rested his hands on the handle of his shovel and smiled at nothing in the distance. His smiled lingered when his head dropped back down towards the dirt and his hands began to work, again. I felt unsettled because he looked like he was smiling at something that used to cause him pain. A memory that becomes a part of you even though, at the time, you wished it never happened, like the time you got your ass kicked or the time you cried in front of your not-so-close friends and had to live it down with them never mentioning it.

"We got to Kenston High and she was still with me. I felt proud, not because my friends told me she was hot and her boobs were big and as nice as any senior’s, but because when she wrote her hearts on her folders my initials were in em and when she put up some pictures in her locker, I was in some." I thought about how this was not a story I gave a shit about. His sentimental nonsense was far away from any conversation I yearned while standing in dirt at a deserted park. This wasn’t the precedent for a relationship with a high school kid I wanted, but still I remained quiet, unfamiliar with how I would interrupt or add to something so personal.

"Wasn’t long before the older guys started noticing her. Shit, those guys acted like they were trying to find Waldo in their hunts for the best looking freshman girls. Each day at lunch, they poked each other and pointed out different girls in line and another one would slap his hand when he agreed." Evan took a big shovel full and threw it on top of the pile of Harvey’s future treasure.

Evan’s story began to feel heavy, a morose tale that he would tell in his bar stool as a fifty-year-old drunkard. I felt bad for the poor kid, now, and I wanted him to know that there were far more fun and happy things we could be talking about, even in Kenston, "Yeah, well, those are the things seniors do every year. A prerogative…no…a benefit, I’d say. They did it when I was a freshman, too. Now you’re the senior. Now you’re on top in the school. You got a car, just wait and see."

He staked his shovel and stepped out of the shallow hole onto the grass as if I didn’t say a word. The thirsty blades crunched underneath his boots. The sun was no longer behind him. He turned to me and locked his eyes with mine for the first time, but in a more deliberate way than I expected. His eyes looked like a stranger’s with a reality in Kenston I would never relate to. When he spoke again, he spoke to me with a tone not made out of anger, but out of memory.

"There was this one older guy in particular. He’d visit her outside her locker when I was there, but would dismiss me with one glance at me and a smile to her. He wasn’t rude to her or necessarily that bad at all, jus only concerned with what his wants would be. He was jus eighteen and doing whatever eighteen-year-olds do, no matter how special he thought he was." My skin felt removed and I knew there would be no more work today. Evan swallowed and finished, "I can still hear him say ‘come on, Sandy, let me walk you to class’ every time he came by. I knew I was done from then on. It’s hard for any girl that young to turn down the attention of an older guy. Guess that’s the way it goes." Evan chuckled a bit to himself, then wiped the laughter off his face with his hands, looking down and then back in my eyes as though he was never afraid of what he might see. "I know my story wasn’t one you would normally want to hear, but it was the only one I felt like telling you."

Evan dusted off his pants and sweat-soaked shirt. He looked back up at me, and I saw him again, fourteen and timid, standing next to a girl I thought would be too easy to take. Sandy Pinkerton, the mature looking freshman girl but with skin that reminded me of what it was like to yearn for something supple, virginal. I remembered her wrongfully over matched boyfriend, Evan Gilbert, who knew I’d left this town and didn’t care if I ever came back. I watched him walk and I felt a kind of shame I imagine was like the one he felt the last time I walked away from him. He kicked his dirty boots off on the bottom frame of his car before he got in and drove off.

I staked the shovels in the ground and began to walk back home to Grandma. It was difficult to kick the rocks on the gravel road into town and forget Evan Gilbert again. Maybe I could have, or at least tried to, if I could quit Harvey’s holes and run away like I did before.

The air in the house tasted like air-conditioned sickness and I could hear the TV playing loudly in the living room through the kitchen. I walked down to the basement from the stairs that led from the kitchen and stripped my filthy clothes and left them on top of the washer. The basket from Tuesday’s washing was still full so I rummaged and found some sweats and a T-shirt. I climbed back up the stairs and checked on Grandma. She looked up at me with eyes that would always be glad to see me. Eyes that wished they could see my whole life all over again.

"Is it hot outside?" She asked me, her voice faint and dimming in her small, fragile body wrapped in the same blanket she used every day.

"Not anything you would want to be out in," I said looking at the TV. The screen showed a group of young men and women performing a choreographed exercise routine and I remember how my Grandma hated these shows because she never smiled when she exercised and felt these people were lying because they were.

Grandma reached her hand out to mine, her fingers skinny and smooth, with veins that bulged in her tired and wrinkled skin. "Get washed up, Ayden. You must be dirty."

I looked down at her and smiled. I walked over a turned the TV off, relieving us from the crap that didn’t deserve another moment of Grandma’s time. The bookshelves above and around the TV were dusty and un-used, still organized from that last time Grandma read anything. I scanned the titles and stopped at Threads of Memory, the book Grandma’s sister had written before she died of cancer decades before. I pulled the book off the shelf and took it with me to the edge of the sofa bed where I sat down. Grandma didn’t say a word. I opened the book to the first chapter and turned back to her. "Grandma, how about tonight I start reading to you."