All The Way Under
David Kearns
Copyright 2016 David Kearns
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the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Prologue
I was twelve years old when someone tried to kill me. The first time, I mean.
My older brother Bricklin was away at Boy Scout camp as a reward for his perfect grades in school. He’d already been gone for a week of his two-week summer camp, and I missed his company sorely. I passed the time by reading his scouting survival guide and learning some of the techniques in the book. I made rabbit snares from willow branches. I cut primitive spears from oak branches with points hardened over an open flame. I hunted edible berries in the forest. I counted the days until my brother’s return and wished I’d paid more attention in school.
My family lived in an undeveloped area east of Oklahoma City where houses were few and far between. The only families who lived in the area were separated by square miles of land that was thick with oak trees, threaded with rutted gravel roads, and spotted with oil wells. One of those wells, an object of my fear and obsession, was a quarter mile from my house. When my bedroom window was open I could hear the oil well’s motor huffing its irregular beat as the drill rod went down and up and down again.
One night I’d stayed up past midnight reading a vintage Tom Swift adventure novel, and I’d listened to the oil well motor as if it were a sort of siren song. I finally put the book down, deciding it was time to have my own adventure and conquer my own demons. I’d climbed out the window in my pajamas and house slippers, and then made my way across the gravel road that ran past my house and onto the narrow game trail that led to the oil well. The shadows cast by the dim glow of my flashlight made the woods seem alive with the potential for menacing encounters. I pressed on, wondering if I would make it back to my house alive. My fears weren’t entirely unfounded.
It was a common practice in that part of Oklahoma City for people to turn unwanted dogs loose ‘out in the country’ to fend for themselves. This happened often enough that a collection of abandoned dogs had formed, reproduced, and grown into a feral pack capable of taking down mule deer. I’d run across several carcasses in the forest which had been savaged so thoroughly by the pack that the only way I could identify the animal was by looking at the paws or hooves. I’d heard the call and response of the pack several times as I read Tom Swift that night, but I hadn’t really thought much about it at the time.
At any rate, I continued along the game trail until I reached the opening in the forest where the oil well had been drilled. The opening was awash with moonlight, and everything I saw or touched seemed alive with danger. The well, the sludge pond, the trees, the moon, even the sound of my own feet on dried oak leaves crackled with an intoxicating resonance. The ink-black well machinery rocked back and forth like a giant insect, exhaling the powerful scent of raw oil sucked from the ground. The spine of the well was two stories high and twenty feet long, with access to the pivot point provided by a rudimentary ladder welded to the side of one of the Samson beams that held the walking beam aloft. I’d watched the walking beam tip up and down like a magician’s pendant until I’d become hypnotized and walked to the base of the well. I’d clamped the tail cap of the flashlight in my teeth, grabbed the rungs of the ladder, pulled myself to the top of that mass of iron, and straddled the big metal beam like a bronco. I was mesmerized by the sensations of the star-filled sky, the noise of the motor, the horizon rising and dipping in front of me, and the vibration of all that steel. I felt like I was in a dream-state rodeo. Eventually, though, I came to my senses, climbed back down, and started home.
As I made my way along the game trail, the call and response of the dogs became louder and more frequent, and I began to wonder if the feral pack was chasing me. My question about the proximity of the feral pack was answered when I crawled through the window of my bedroom, looked back into the yard, and saw a pair of wolf-like dogs appear in the pale light cast onto the yard through my opened bedroom window. The dogs paced back and forth, looking up at me and growling with a tone so low and threatening that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I slid the window shut and locked it. As I crawled under my bed sheets I thought that Tom Swift would have been proud of me. I rode the scary beast, evaded the killers, and survived.
My mother was furious the next day when she saw the oil stains I’d gotten on my pajamas, the carpet, and the bed sheets. I lamely offered her the excuse that I must have sleep-walked to the well. A few minutes later my father came into my bedroom to look at the carpet. I watched as the skin on his face tightened with anger. He left the room with his fists clenched, then returned with a hammer and a handful of galvanized roofing nails. He drove the nails into the window frame so the sliding window couldn’t be opened wider than a few inches.
My father leaned in so close to me that his face filled my visual field. The pores in his skin, his beard stubble, even the small veins in the whites of his eyes seemed magnified. I could smell the coffee on his breath.
“Are you listening to me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Good. You sneak out at night like that again, and I’ll put a deadbolt on your door and start locking you in at bedtime. I’m not kidding. You got that?”
I nodded again.
He looked at me hard, the muscles in his jaw tensed with anger, and then he left the room.
My mom rolled the dirty, oily bedsheets into a ball before putting the palm of her hand on my forehead to see if I was running a fever.
“Are you okay, hon?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said “Sure.”
“You’re scaring us, Del. You need to dial it back a little. Do normal stuff for a while. Would you try to do that for me?”
I nodded.
My mom carried the bedsheets with her when she left the room.
My brother shook his head in wonder at my behavior. “If you’d quit doing weird stuff, Mom and Dad would stop being mad at you all the time,” he said.
“I prefer to think of myself as creative,” I replied.
“Yeah. Creatively weird. You sleep-walked your way onto an oil well. Mom said your pajama pants looked like you rode it. No one else even comes close. You keep this up and you’re going to get yourself committed to a psych ward. I heard Mom and Dad talking about it. You could wind up in a padded cell.”
At the time, I’d viewed Bricklin’s brotherly advice as an unwelcome intrusion from someone who lacked my fearless taste for adventure. Looking back, he was trying to save me from myself.
“It’s under control,” I told him. I won’t do it again.”
“Good to hear,” Bricklin said. “Be better if you hadn’t done it in the first place. You understand that, right? You don’t have to put out a fire if you don’t start the fire to begin with.”
Part of Bricklin’s reward for perfect grades in school had been a new scouting backpack to take to summer camp. He’d given his old backpack to me, along with a plastic canteen that had been chewed on by a raccoon. In Bricklin’s absence, I’d sat in the shade of a tree in my back yard and flipped through one of his discarded scouting survival guides. A section about getting water from air interested me. It said that I could make a solar still by digging a hole in the dirt, stretching a clear plastic sheet across the hole, and putting a small rock
in the middle of the sheet so that condensing moisture on the underside would run towards the middle and then drop into a cup. I’d picked up a shovel and a plastic sheet from the garage, and then wandered into the forest looking for a place to start digging.
My adventures in the oak forests helped me to manage the stresses I felt when I was at home. I knew that my parents were in trouble financially and that my erratic behavior just compounded their anxieties, but I didn’t know how to stop myself. The solitude I found on those forest trails brought me a feeling of peace and counterbalanced my worries about the roller-coaster ride of my father’s business adventures.
My father was a car enthusiast who believed that if you worked hard and were clever enough, the world would reward your efforts. After leaving the military, he’d started a used car business that had done well, but over the years he’d become convinced that if he wanted to make big money he needed to sell imports and collectibles. The small but profitable “Harper’s Reliable Used Cars” became the larger and upscale “Harper Collectible Classics.” My father, desperate for free publicity for the grand opening of his bigger, better dealership in the wealthiest part of Oklahoma City, had legally renamed me and my brother with the names of two of his favorite car makes: Bricklin and Delorean. When the judge at the courthouse asked him for an explanation for the name change, my father told him “These cars are so great that I want to give my kids the same names.” The judge had shaken his head but agreed to my father’s request.
After my father finished at the courthouse, he’d fed the story about our renaming to the tip lines of several of the local newspapers. The story was picked up by the Oklahoma City Times in the weekend section, where the article ran under a picture of my father standing between a Delorean and Bricklin car. In the picture, my brother sat cross-legged in front of the Bricklin, I sat cross-legged in front of the Delorean. It’s the last picture I know of that was taken with me, my brother, and my father in it.
When my father expanded his car business, he’d borrowed heavily to build his inventory and repair the intricate and expensive foreign cars to the like-new condition that affluent buyers expected. To my father’s credit, his gamble paid off while the oil economy boomed. I heard him talking to my mother about it at the dinner table one night. “It takes money to make money,” he said. My mom responded by saying that eventually it would all need to be paid back. My dad waved his hand in the air as if he were shooing away gnats and went back to eating his dinner. Eventually the oil economy went bust as it inevitably did, and demand for antique and collectible Mercedes, Ferrari, and special rarities like the Bricklin and Delorean cars went through the floor. Usually, summertime was a good time to be in my house. That summer, it wasn’t.
I’d started work on the solar still not far from the oil well machinery I’d ridden a few weeks before. After a half day of digging, I’d made a hole about 3 feet deep and six feet wide in that rust-colored Oklahoma soil. I’d returned home before dinner and washed off the dirt and oil smell with bar soap and hose water on the back porch of our home. My mom kept towels and extra clothes on the porch during summertime so that I wouldn’t bring dirty clothes into the house after my adventures in the forest. Privacy wasn’t much of an issue for me as I scrubbed off the dirt. Our house was nearly a mile from the closest home, and my parents were both at work at the car dealership, so I had the place to myself
That night my parents came home at dusk and we ate dinner in silence. My Dad’s expression told me that I needed keep things quiet or risk incurring his wrath. He was on edge.
While I was getting ready for bed, I overheard my parents having a heated argument in their bedroom. My dad said that even if he gave the lender the title to the car dealership, even if he gave him all the cars on the lot, even if he gave him the title to our house, that wouldn’t be enough. “They’re asking for money we don’t have”, my Dad said. “This guy came by the car lot today and told me I needed to pay or bad things would happen.”
My mom suggested calling the police.
He said “And tell them what? That we’ve been laundering money as a favor to a loan shark, but we’re still going under and the lender is making threats? We’d go to jail, regardless.”
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I lay in my bed reading through the scouting survival manual, trying to convince myself that if I knew the right techniques I’d be able to weather any storm that the world sent my way. After overhearing my parents’ conversation, learning how to build rabbit snares, get fresh water without paying for it, make spears, and forage for berries took on a new sense of urgency. I needed to know how to take care of myself if we came under siege. When morning finally came and I heard my parents downstairs in the kitchen, I hatched a plan for how I would spend the day. I needed a gun, though.
My father had a Colt .45 pistol that he kept in the nightstand beside his bed. The previous day I’d seen feral dogs while I was digging near the oil well, so that morning I’d gone into my parent’s bedroom and taken the .45 from my dad’s nightstand. I pulled back the slide assembly far enough to see that there was a bullet in the chamber, flipped the safety off and on a few times, then dropped the pistol into my backpack. I reasoned that I’d have the pistol back in my Dad’s nightstand before he discovered that I’d taken it. Better safe than sorry.
My parents were at the kitchen table when I came downstairs. They had a stack of receipts and a bank ledger out on the table, and were so preoccupied that they barely acknowledged me when I came into the kitchen. I’d filled the plastic canteen at the sink before leaving the house through the garage. As I had the day before, I followed the narrow game trail through the oak groves to the open space. I took off my backpack, picked up the shovel, and started to dig. I reasoned that a deeper, wider pit would make for a better solar still.
I’d been digging for about an hour when I heard a series of muffled booming sounds coming from the direction of my house. I’d dropped the shovel, pulled on my backpack, and started to run. The forest flashed by in a blur as I raced towards my home.
As I reached the exit of the game trail, I saw someone walking out of my garage. That memory haunts me to this day. Red tee shirt pulled tight across a weightlifter’s upper torso. Ink-black shoulder length hair with bangs cut like Prince Valiant. Faded bell bottom jeans over pointy-toed black cowboy boots with a brown leather holster strapped to his right thigh, the chrome handle of a pistol reflecting brightly in the mid-morning sun. I was so stunned by his appearance that I froze.
He walked casually towards a gray Dodge Charger parked in the driveway. As he reached for the car door handle, he scanned the surroundings in all directions and finally noticed me standing in the shade of the oak grove. He dipped his right shoulder slightly and his pistol appeared in his hand with astonishing speed. He held the gun waist high and aimed the gun barrel at me. I’d seen actors pull guns from holsters that fast in cowboy movies, but I didn’t think it was actually possible for a person to do it.
“Hey, Sport,” he said in a baritone voice. “Get over here. Now!”
I turned instinctively and ran. There were two quick booms from his gun as I went full-tilt down the narrow trail. One of the bullets hit the trunk of a tree as I passed; splintering the wood as if it had been hit with an axe. The game trail zigged and zagged through the forest as I ran pell-mell towards the clearing. My arms were pumping, my feet barely touching the ground as I flew past tree branches that slashed at my face and forearms. With a hundred yards left to reach the clearing, I heard the big pistol fire again, and I dove from the trail into brambles, ivy, wild grass and fallen tree limbs. I smashed through the undergrowth until I ran headlong into a tree branch. Temporarily dazed, I lay on a carpet of oak leaves with the sunlight cutting through the air above me in ribbons of dusty gold.
I rolled onto my hands and knees and began to crawl, staying low. As I reached an area where the undergrowth was less dense, I rose to my feet. Disoriented from my collision with the tree, I’d l
ost track of where I was headed, and I exited the forest onto the trail a few dozen yards past where my hunter stood, his gun hanging at his side. Lucky me, though. His back was to me. Then he looked over his shoulder at me and smiled.
I ducked and ran again, with a few quick strides taking me out of the shade of the forest and into the sunny, circular opening. I sprinted for the protection that the oil well could give me. I heard and felt the gun boom again as I reached the far side of the well’s motor housing.
I paused, pressing flat against the throbbing motor housing. The smell of the oil was intense, the iron-rich dirt at my feet a brilliant rust red. The oil well’s black surface gave off heat in the summer sun like a chef’s griddle, and I pulled away from it, taking a deep breath and running flat-out for the far side of the circular opening. I’d rather take my chances with the dog pack than with the gunman.
The gun thundered behind me once more with gut-shattering force as I passed the hole I’d dug for the solar still. I threw myself to the ground and then rolled into the hole, buying myself a few seconds’ safety. I lay atop the plastic sheet, my breath coming in gasps.
In frenzy, I pulled the backpack off and grabbed at the zipper with sweaty, filthy fingers. The air stank of oil, dirt, and hot plastic. My arms and face were ribboned with cuts from tree branches, my skin wet with sweat. My heart jackhammered in my chest.
I felt the familiar heaviness of my father’s Army Colt .45 in my hand. I pulled it free of the backpack and gripped the butt of the pistol with both hands, interlocking my fingers like a child praying before bedtime. I flipped the safety off. The moment had an air of hallucinatory unreality. Was I actually here? Was I dreaming, or actually about to die? From above, I probably looked like I’d been buried with a pistol to hold against my chest instead of a small bouquet of posies.