She shifted her hips without looking at me, making it seem pretty natural, but not quite, and suddenly she moved away from the mound and put her hand to the small of her back and rubbed, then reached out and rubbed at what had poked her. 'This looks like a bone,' she said to no one in particular.
I went over and could see the edge of something poking through the mound of dirt. It looked more like a rock to me, but even if it was a woolly mammoth bone, I wasn't greatly in the mood for paleontology. I felt she had used it as an excuse to get me over there so she could persecute me with her presence.
She ignored me and began to dig around the edges of the thing and pretty soon it was clear what it was, and it was considerably more exciting than a rock or bone.
It was the blade to a boat propeller.
She looked toward the bank where Howard and Paco were standing, staring out at the water.
She said, 'There's something here.'
Howard and Paco came over. Leonard and Chub showed up.
Howard looked at what was there, said, 'Oh man, that means—'
'Means it's a boat propeller,' Leonard said. 'But not necessarily the boat propeller.'
'How would a boat get up here?' Chub said.
'Water might have put it here and receded,' I said. 'Since no one would have looked for the boat down here, it might have been sitting here, slowly gathering dirt over it.'
'Or,' Paco said, 'what we may have here is a propeller blade and a mound of dirt. But one thing's certain. There's a boat in there, we're not going to talk it out.'
Shovels came out then, and we were on that mound of dirt like worms on a corpse. Howard and Paco and Leonard on one side, me and Chub on the other, Trudy with a trowel working at the propeller. Chub was so frenzied he nearly whacked me twice with his shovel handle, and he nipped my ankle with the shovel blade once. I had to threaten to do him damage to make him watch what he was doing. But we were all a little frenzied, and when Trudy uncovered a large hunk of outboard motor, even more so. We dug and we dug and the sun went down and the cold became colder, but I wasn't aware of it until I paused to relax and felt the sweat cooling on my face. The cold air cut at the rims and insides of my nostrils and sliced down my throat and hissed in my lungs and made them throb like a wound.
But I kept digging.
At some point Howard turned the wrecker toward us and pulled on the highbeams so we could see. We started digging even faster. We came to some thick twists of roots and we got the axe and Leonard elected himself Paul Bunyan. He cut at them with hard, precise strokes and the roots flew up and out, and we went back to digging. Finally Howard's shovel hit something that sounded unlike root or rock. He dropped his shovel and dipped his hands into the dirt and came out with the crumpled top of an aluminum cooler.
We all paused and looked at it. There in the cold highbeams and the splotchy moonlight, it had as much majesty as a silver shield. 'Could be, could be,' Howard said, and then we were digging again, really digging. The mole population of the world couldn't have been any busier. Wooden fragments that might have been boat pieces were found next. They were as crumbly as artificial fireplace logs.
Then Howard's shovel hit something else. He lifted out a long aluminum canister cracked in the middle. We all looked at it. I felt as if I had suddenly been filled with molten lava, that a little ice had gone out of my soul. Lost years were on the verge of being regained. Possibilities went through me, grew heads like a Hydra. The fact that this money might be partially mine for the taking, that it was stolen and illegal, filled me simultaneously with ecstasy and guilt, like I'd have felt if my mother had ever caught me jacking off to a girlfriend's picture.
Howard tried to loosen the lid, but couldn't. He finally resorted to bending it at the break to work it apart. He managed that and wads of something dark fell out of it. Trudy was suddenly there with a flashlight and Howard grabbed what had come out of the canister and squeezed it between his fingers and cussed.
I took hold of it too. It was paper, probably the money; it was black and the texture of wet tissue. Another year or so, it might make good garden mulch.
'There's supposed to be several containers,' Trudy said. 'They can't all be broken.'
'Yes they can,' Leonard said.
His words were anvils dropping on our heads. I felt a little dizzy and empty, as if hungry, but there wasn't any food that was going to fill this gap. The boat and the canister had given us a moment full of dreams, and now those dreams threatened to grow wings and fly south and die among the bones of all our dreams.
Yeah, that money could make up for a lot of missed ambitions, but without it we were nothing more than a batch of losers, standing cold and silly, empty-handed on the muddy bank of an unnamed creek.
We went back to digging and sifted through some more wood and some metal and plastic and some chunks of glass. Eventually we came up with another canister. This one wasn't broken open. Howard got a screwdriver and a wrench and with shaking hands went to work on the lid, popped it off.
Inside was some money. It was in a plastic bag, in bundles, and looked in good shape. Howard tore open the bag and the money fell out. Trudy grabbed it, unfolded it, dropped to her knees, starting counting.
I could hear her breathing, all of us breathing. We were puffing out white, cold smoke, chugging like little trains trying to make a last bad hill.
It took a long time to count that money, longer than I would have imagined, and we all stood there watching those bills go off that wad and out of her hands and onto the ground, and after what seemed enough time for continents to sink beneath the waves and new ones to rise up out of the sea on the shoulders of volcanic eruption and for new life-forms to come into existence, she said, 'A hundred thousand.'
With the sharp voice of greed, Howard said, 'There's got to be more than that.'
We went at it again, and before long uncovered another canister. Again the money was counted—this time we all took some of it and made little piles—and what we had in this one was just short of two hundred thousand. All of it was in good shape. We dug till we found two more canisters. Both held money. One had a few damaged bills on top, but the bulk of it was okay. We leveled the mound. No more money.
