CHARLIE HAS THE PICKAXE and I have a backpack full of rocks.
The plan, which makes perfect sense in our ten-year-old brains, is to dig until we find Underground.
Underground is exactly what it sounds like and everything else we can imagine: somewhere, right beneath our feet, is Underground, and if it’s a place then surely it has tunnels and lights and danger and adventure. Treasure, in Underground, surely abounds.
So we strap my dad’s pickaxe to Charlie’s back with red bungee cords, load my backpack with stones small enough to throw but big enough to fend off any Underground monsters, and carry shovels deep into my parents’ backyard. Our dig site—our entry point—is already littered with provisions: unopened Gatorade bottles, a kiddie pool where the things we find will go, a souped-up metal detector, and a wheelbarrow, full of tools we pulled off the garage wall.
“What are you going to do with your booty?” I ask, half out of breath from the homemade anchor on my back but still wrecked by how funny the word “booty” is.
Charlie’s face is red from lugging tools back and forth and he keeps reaching back to adjust the pickaxe that’s digging into his hip. “With my booty, first thing I’m going to do is buy a pool to put all my booty in.”
Charlie is equally infected by booty.
“A booty pool!”
“Booty pool!” Charlie yells.
We dump our tools to the side as we get to the site. The location isn’t arbitrary, on account of the military-grade metal detector I’ve cobbled together.
Forty minutes later there’s a minor canyon dug in my parents’ lawn. It’s Charlie’s turn to tear up the ground to make digging easier.
He brings the pick down and we hear exactly what we’ve been waiting for: the metallic pang of iron hitting fame and/or fortune.
“The shit was that?” he says, the tool still sunk into the ground, his eyes locked on mine.
“Keep digging keep digging keep digging!” He tears the pickaxe out of the ground, heaves it above his head, and brings it down. Again and again, trying to loosen the earth. “Wait!” I say, throwing my hands out. “Wait, stop!”
“What, why?” he asks, pickaxe hovering above his head for a minute before falling backward. “What is it?” The energy in his voice has a heroic edge to it, like he’s expecting me to say that I hear someone coming, or see one of the monsters we’re prepared for.
“What if the treasure isn’t in a trunk?”
“What?” The heroic edge is gone.
“What if the treasure isn’t in a big metal box?”
“I don—”
“We need to stop hitting it with a pickaxe.”
The realization that he is potentially littering our priceless heirloom with puncture wounds sweeps across his face. “Aw shit, you’re right. We’ve gotta dig. Gotta dig dig dig dig!”
We trade out and I dig.
Four feet in the ground, I work the best I can to uncover the shape that is becoming less and less boxlike with each shovel-ful of dirt I pull out.
The thing in the dirt starts to take shape and it definitely doesn’t seem big enough to be worth a booty pool. But it’s solid; no matter how hard we hit it, no matter how much we dig around it, it remains where it was planted.
Eventually we have a length of it uncovered, however caked in black earth it may be.
We’ve dug enough of a crater that we can sit with our backs against the cool earth. Charlie wipes at the dirt coating his arm and says, “You think it’s, like, part of a ship? Or like a whole ship?”
Then I say a word I’ve only ever heard in movies and have never yet said myself:
“Fuck.”
I scramble to my knees, grab the Gatorade that’s sitting next to me, and dump some on the hopefully-a-treasure still trapped in the earth.
“What are you doing!” he yells, mostly in disbelief that I’d pour Gatorade on our artifact.
The dirt cascades off in black ribbons and even before the yellow sports drink is done dripping off we see the words Guthrie Gas and Power written on a very damaged pipe.
First there’s confusion on his face, then surprise. “I think we almost blew up the neighborhood,” he says, smiling.