The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster Read Free Book Online

fortifying them. Traditional air drilling wouldn’t do in such a place; the holes would just collapse onto themselves. The churned-up dirt had to be shoveled out of the pit, a job that fell to Toby and, when Dad allowed it, to me. Dad also would let me shake in the powdered mud, but like everything else, he micromanaged it, often in contradictory ways.
    “Not so much, Mitch, not so much.”
    “More, goddammit, more.”
    “OK, put that shit away.”
    “Where’s the fucking mud, Mitch?”
    I occasionally caught a glimpse of Jerry, who would roll his eyes or scrunch up his nose and silently pretend to be Dad yelling out orders. Dad’s bark pushed me to the verge of tears, but Jerry’s clowning brought me back around.
    Once the hole went to the specified depth, Dad ran a charge down it. The explosives came in big plastic sticks—sometimes white, sometimes red—with threading on each end. The sticks were as thick and half again as long as a rolling pin. The wooden stake that marked each dig included information about how much explosive to run. This involved joining the sticks, wiring them with a blasting cap, and then carefully lowering it all down the hole.
    With all the powdered mud he was using, though, getting the explosive down the hole was difficult. He, Jerry, and Toby often took twenty or thirty wooden rods, each ten feet long with metal hooks on the ends, and connected them, using the chain to shove the explosive through the muck and down the hole. It was an imprecise science; one wrong move could separate one rod from another deep in the hole, and Dad could spend an hour or more trying to blindly hook them up again. No bald-faced display of profanity I’ve seen before or since can compare with the sight of my father kicking empty explosives boxes and blasting out obscenities as the clock wound down on his workday while he tried to figure out how to get his cocksucking rods back.
     
     
    “Mitch, do you want to learn how to drive?”
    Jerry and I stood watching Dad make mercifully easy work of a well.
    “Drive what?”
    “The Love Boat. I’m thinking the pickup, you goofball.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Sure. I know you’re not having too much fun without your mini-bike here. You can start driving the pickup between holes.”
    We were talking a distance of only a hundred yards or so, but to my eleven-year-old sensibility, it might as well have been a cross-country interstate journey.
    “What about him?” I said, nodding toward Dad.
    “It’ll be our secret. By the time he figures out you’re doing it, he’ll just be glad you know how. It will make it easier for him to fire Toby.”
    We both laughed at that.
     
     
    Sure enough, by the time the hole had been dug, the explosive had been dropped, and Dad had put his report onto the stake, he wasted no time climbing back into the rig and pressing on to the next site. He paid me no mind.
    In the pickup, Jerry said, “Now, step on the clutch.”
    “I know how.”
    “Oh really?”
    “Well, I mean, I’ve seen you guys do it.”
    “OK, genius, just take it away.” Jerry crossed his arms and waited for me to fail. I did, but only just.
    I succeeded in starting the pickup, but I had no appreciation for just how hard the clutch was going to spring back on me as I tried to release it and give the truck some gas. We lurched and sputtered and came to a stop. Ahead, the rig and the water truck grew smaller.
    “You’ll get it,” Jerry said. “Give it a little more gas.”
    That worked. The Ford lurched forward in first gear.
    “Now, you’ve got to use your ears. When the engine whines, shift.”
    I did so, double clutching as I had seen Dad do in the rig.
    “No need for that,” Jerry said. “Step through the floorboard and hold it until you’re in the next gear. You don’t want to burn out the clutch.”
    My other misstep occurred on the stop. I forgot about the clutch and just depressed the brake. The pickup heaved, cutting out and throwing us