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Chapter 11

It was 1979 when the quarry collapsed. Leesa and Darnell had been together four years. There were no children. In fact Leesa had been a bit older than Darnell. In 1979 Darnell was 24. When Leesa passed over she was 33. That was why Darnell hadn’t known her at the hardware store. Donald had known about her because guess what he had been working at the quarry since he dropped out of college. He had called in sick the day of the quarry collapse. Actually he had a bad hangover-a condition that lasted for quite a few weeks after that day. Leesa never let the age difference between Darnell and her enter into any part of their lives. Darnell consequently didn’t know much about Leesa’s life before their relationship and he wasn’t one to waste talk asking useless questions. Leesa had fallen so much in love with Darnell that she didn’t let her past affect him or their lives together. She was one cool chick and Darnell knew that. He truly appreciated it. To him she was like some mythical protégé of the gods. She liked to call herself Buffalo Woman and would run around the house making Buffalo Woman noises. Darnell would laugh until he pissed in his pants.

Even though Darnell made his house comfortable to his tastes he found it harder and harder to stay indoors when the weather was not inhospitable. To keep him from venturing out, the weather had to be terrible. Darnell had started to appreciate all kinds of weather. He liked it shakin cold. He liked it drippin hot. He liked it all.

His porch faced north. It was on the slope of the south end of a wide valley whose northern rim one could see as a purple band that took up a small bottom slice of the horizon. He stood or sat there a lot. He watched the sky and the valley and the distant hills. When he watched he felt a lot less alone and a lot happier. When he was young, watching the valley did not bring him those feelings. It occurred to him often that when young watching the valley had made him feel lonely. And now the feeling was the exact opposite of lonely.

As he watched and the years moved on he would get small ideas. He would cut a few branches from the apple tree or he would mow the lawn the opposite way or he would transplant an interesting plant he had run across while he was working or walking around in the hills behind the house. He’d put them on the dirt pile where he could watch them along with everything else.

In those hours and days he would feel words rise up from within him. At first he would petition the powers of the universe to bring Leesa back to him. He knew that that was total selfishness and foolishness. There were no other loved ones brought back from death in anyone else’s life he had ever seen. He knew in his heart of hearts that that was the price of living: we paid for beauty here with the pain of knowing that it was only temporary. Permanent beauty resided eternally in something else that we were always moving towards on the road. He even thought sometimes that the beauty was just in the walking on that road. He wasn’t sure yet. When he told Donald that Donald reminded him that most of the time Darnell needed his pickup truck to go down the road.

Darnell flipped him the finger.

 

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Chapter 12

There was an unreality to the early 1980s for Darnell. Darnell’s willpower and at times the skillful meddling of Mrs. Gruber supported the rapid fire succession of days. Since Darnell moved at such an unaccustomed speed eventually even he slipped through the cracks with Mrs. Gruber.

Darnell developed an astonishing ability to become invisible if he so desired. One day he popped up on the Gruber’s elaborately fashionable back deck to replace some rotting planks. He startled Nikki and her college friend as they were coming through the patio door-in only their bikini bottoms. Nikki turned screaming back into the house. Jill her college friend discovered an instant calmness to which she reacted by slowly stopping and facing Darnell. In the clear light he was looking up to understand the screaming. His eyes followed the line of Jill’s feet, legs, bikini bottom, arms, breasts, shoulders, neck, face, and hair. All of this was illuminated in the gold bath of sunlight.

He squinted and his mind reeled.

In a dry rattle he let out these words “Darling… you.”

He could say no more.

Jill blushed and looked quickly down at the deck. When she looked up, Darnell had vanished.

 

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Chapter 13

Darnell ended up at the hill above the quarry in his pickup truck. He wasn’t upset but he was astounded. He was astounded into complete silence and feeling. He had just seen Leesa walk out of the Gruber’s house with nothing on her but her bikini bottoms. Well he knew it wasn’t Leesa but the resemblance was so intense that he truly thought that he had seen her ghost or had a vision.

His reaction was immediate. He looked down into the quarry and decided that he would go home and would not leave his house until he had worked all this out in his heart.

Nikki’s first thought was to go to her aunt and have her arrest Darnell for being a peeping Tom. Jill intervened quickly. She told Nikki that it all seemed innocent to her.

“Nikki, relax. He was like a scared animal. He wasn’t peeping, that’s for sure. Who was he anyway?”

“That’s Darnell Pines. Everybody says he’s freakin weird. I don’t know… he does something to my insides. The first time I saw him I thought I was looking at someone I had known or been in love with in another life or something. And I don’t usually think like that. Norma has him hangin around ever since his wife was killed in the quarry crash. Now I’m thinking maybe he’s a perv.”

“That guy’s no perv. He’s some kind of spirit man. I saw the signs in his eyes. It’s a Native thing. He’s Native.”

“Huh?”

“He’s american indian-haven’t you gone to college? At least partways indian. Strange part of the country for a guy like that to be. He’s very beautiful. I hope we run into each other again. Maybe we make little papooses.”

“What are you talkin about Jill? You like older men or what? What do you mean? You would date him?

“I’d marry that man in a hot minute. There’s stuff I know. I was raised by a traditional native american family. My blood goes back deep. I was like an orphan you know. They ended up with me because my mother gave me to them to raise. She was a hippie, I guess. They were my Grandparents. My dad was Native. Died in Viet Nam. They told me my blood went way back. I was raised in Wisconsin. Santee Sioux.”

“But you’re from Pittsburgh, Jill. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I was adopted off the reservation when I was eleven. I was a great listener, and I learned all my Grandparents had wanted to teach me before they passed over. Marty and Carol got quite a package when they got me. They are wonderful people. I was very lucky. It was quite prearranged. That’s the way it felt to me. I didn’t worry more than one night after I met them. I left the reservation with my heart in the wind.”

“And you’d marry Darnell Pines in a hot minute. You’re messed up, girl. Anyway, I always wanted to have a chance with him. Well, deep down inside I did; I can’t say that I would want to let you have him…”

“Girl, it ain’t up to you. You could try your hardest to keep it from happening, but you would just end up married to some guy like your Uncle Harry. Trust me. Just try not to marry a guy like your Uncle Harry. OK, white girl?”

“I’ll keep you away from him if I want to.”

“It’ll be fun watching you try…”

Jill laughed a little deep chuckle and slipped her Dickinson t-shirt over her breasts. She went back out onto the deck and across the yard into the morning sunlight.

 

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Chapter 14

Norma Gruber took the news of Jill meeting Darnell with apparent calm. She casually mentioned later that she had booked the three of them on a cruise ship out of Jamaica. They were flying out in two days for a three week partay.

Harry took the news of the cruise in the same way he took all news from Norma-with an obsequious smile and nod of approval. He made no display of disapproval of Norma’s plans ever. He was always in her debt. No man of business could ask for a more appropriate wife than she. He would do anything for her. It was his grail.

Cruises and Caribbean sun and sand held little appeal for him anyway. He liked land earth solid ground. He was much more conscientious about the quarry since the accident as he called it. He had no trouble keeping the business because it kept itself. There was no letup in demand for the products The Gruber Earthworks provided.

It took a lot of anxiety and guilt mixed with fierce determination to put the quarry back together. But he did it. Besides Leesa he had lost a shovel operator. His foreman had been badly disabled. He worked by himself until as if by some kind of magic the personnel he needed appeared and the quarry righted itself onto a course for the future. Sometimes he didn’t understand the things he ended up doing. He advertised for help on the radio. He set up a small charity for the community in the shovel operator’s name and the charity fundraising chairwoman became his new chief clerk. It all fell into place eventually but nothing moved forward until he had a revelation.

Harry didn’t give much thought to the things beyond the physical that’s a certainty. When he was in church his mind was on the golf course. Death for him before the accident had always been something that happened to animals or to others who didn’t mean anything to him. His parents were still alive and well cared for in a retirement villa. He was an only child. His was a patch-patch view of reality. When he and his childhood friends had played army, each would wait for the other to say “patch-patch” and that would heal their mortal battle wounds. But Leesa’s death was harsh for him-in all its aspects.

He was in a state of restriction after the quarry caved in. He turned each corner of each day to find himself in unknown territory. He couldn’t believe life could be like that. He was mortified. The feelings were like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. He was off the edge of the cliff and didn’t start falling until he looked down to see that the earth was no longer under his feet. The nausea was full force.

To commit suicide would have served to end the feeling he was sure. He took himself up to the highest point of the quarry on a windy afternoon and he was ready to leap, tears and lunch erupting volcanically. Just as he was about to leap, the force of the wind pushed him outside himself. His mind or his spirit (he didn’t know what to call it) flew across the quarry and the wide glacial valley. He looked down as he flew and everything was different. There were huge trees and primitive people here and there and animals roaming at ease. An old woman waved to him as he flew by. Her smile was familiar. She was praying he thought. There was a different light-golden and serene. He could describe heaven the same way. He was amazed. That is all he could say about it inside. The earth was amazingly different. He snapped back to his body and luckily, he thought, he was still at the top of the cliff. His tears and the nausea were gone. His fear and guilt were dispelled. He felt free. At least he felt more like his old self but with a lighter heart and mind. The word “gonay” rose to his lips and into the wind. The woman’s last word was “Gonay!”

He didn’t tell anyone about what he had done or what had happened to him. He wanted to but Norma didn’t seem like the right person to tell. It was something he could have told Leesa and she would have had a good laugh over it. She would have said something like “Harry, you gotta stop hittin the vodka so hard.” But her smile would have warmed up his heart and made him somehow understand that it was just another minute in his life. “Relax, big guy” she would have said “The force was with you…” “Laughter and Leesa” he thought.

That was what happened before things changed for the better for Harry. If anything he felt lucky. He felt that he could be more responsible for himself somehow. He felt back on the ground but the ground had more meaning for him. That happened in late October of 1979.

 

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Chapter 15

After seeing Leesa’s ghost (actually Jill Hendricks) Darnell spent all of his time at his house. The summer was proceeding gorgeously. Darnell was feeling bottled up. He had tried a relationship or two in the five years since Leesa was gone and had loved his heart out. In each relationship the women after two or three months just disappeared. Suddenly they couldn’t be found anywhere. It was as if Darnell was in one universe and they were in another. If he bothered to call their places the phone would make squealing noises or someone would answer who seemed to be speaking the English language backwards. After the second time Darnell took notice and figured that he was probably trying too hard or-there was some kind of plan going on that he better start either figuring out or following. One way or the other.

After being around the house the first day Darnell had pretty much caught up on absolutely everything that he had to do. He ended up in the shed looking around at the small corner of junk that was neatly placed there. It occurred to him that the pile of junk was the stuff he had bought at the auctions with Donald years ago. He hadn’t done anything with the stuff except the kerosene lanterns. He used the lanterns to light The Space Station as he sometimes affectionately called his house. Kerosene light was the mellowest light. There were the set of golf clubs and the gardening tools and the screen. He shook his head at the fact that they hadn’t moved in about ten years and decided to leave them alone.

He sat in the afternoon sunlight on the porch. There was a warm breeze and it hadn’t worked on him very long before he was asleep. He dreamed of the quarry. He was working on the underside of a huge shaking grate that sorted out the different sizes of stone. He was being showered with dust from the machinery. The light was soft like it was in cloudy weather. All of sudden the sun came out and he turned from the control panel to look at it. The work area was glowing. The sun was reflecting off billions of specks of gold dust and the stones in the grate were now the hooves of hundreds of golden deer. A crack of thunder ended the dream and he slowly got up from the chair.

Darnell was hungry. He made himself a peanut butter and banana sandwich and got a glass of lemonade. There was a rattling crack of thunder and then a loud crash in the shed. After he finished his sandwich he ran across the rain to the shed to see what had made the noise. The screen had fallen from the shed’s concrete retaining wall onto the garden tools and had landed perfectly on its edge. The tools were framed within it. He took this as a sign. He had no idea what the sign was.

 

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Dirt Continues in the April Issue of CommonSense 2