Jimmy and his two half sisters and the herd of tiny dogs stopped on top of the hill in the shady green woods and looked down into the pool of sunshine below them. The go-kart sat there running, the new muffler keeping it not too loud. Yet. Later it would get louder. Later the chain would get loose. Then it would come off. He’d put it on. It would come back off. He’d put it back on. It would come back off. Back on, back off. It would get to where it would come off all the time. It would get to where it would stay off more than it stayed on. Jimmy would try to fix it. Jimmy wouldn’t know how because the go-kart had not been built with any kind of a chain-tightening system to account for normal chain stretching. It would turn out that Jimmy’s daddy had bought a cheap go-kart, an off-brand piece-of-shit go-kart probably made by some fly-by-night operation that had already landed somewhere else by now. Jimmy would get desperate. Jimmy would do something he wasn’t supposed to do, which was get into his daddy’s tools in the shed. He’d take a good whacking for that one. His little pale butt naked that night getting into the tub would wear five or six deep red stripes from that little escapade. But all this was before all the trouble with the pond. Right now the pond wasn’t even finished. But there was an enormous hole where the great trees had once stood and it was laddered with tracks and that was what had almost taken the children’s breath, sitting in the go-kart, watching the dozer dude work in the clearing he had made in the middle of the woods, a small yellow machine in a large bowl of brown sun-warmed earth. Worms popping up all over. All kinds of birds flying down and getting them with their beaks, stretching them out of their holes until they popped in two, hungry little buddies gobbling those hermaphroditic babies down in the July heat.
The dozer was running backward hard with black smoke pouring from the pipe and the man on the seat was looking over his shoulder. If he saw the children watching him, he didn’t let on. He stopped and lowered the blade and pushed it into the earth, making the dirt pile up on the blade until it almost ran over the back side, and then he pushed the dirt up an incline he was building, digging it out below him, pushing it up, coming back for more, slowly hollowing and hollowing the earth, and the green remaining trees all around held him in partial shade that he kept running in and out of steadily like a shuttle on a loom. Far down the hill sat a redbrick house.
“What’s he doing?” Evelyn, the older half sister, said. She was thirteen. Wore a purple evening gown most of the time. Black patent leather shoes with silver buckles and light blue argyle socks. Freckles and red hair and granny glasses. Wanted to be an architect in Ecuador.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “Looks like a racetrack, don’t it.”
“It’s a drive-in movie theater,” his other half sister, Velma, said. She was eleven, only a year and a half older than Jimmy, had black hair, a different daddy from Evelyn’s. She wore jeans and tops. Knew how to roller skate. Didn’t get to go much. Crazy about Tim McGraw and mayonnaise sandwiches. Would wind up pregnant in Chicago by Navajo progressive country singers by the time she was seventeen.
“Aw shit, it ain’t no drive-in movie theater,” Jimmy said.
“It’s a parking lot,” Evelyn said. She reached down and picked up one of the little dogs. It sniffed Jimmy’s elbow.
“It’s a new hamburger joint,” Jimmy said.
“Now, would they put a hamburger joint out in the woods like this?” Evelyn said, and put down the dog. They sat there watching. The dozer man saw them sitting there and waved briefly, then turned his machine and went the other way with it, scraping and moving more dirt. He was down in the bottom of the big hole, with one side going out at a gradual slant into the remaining trees and the other ending abruptly where all the dirt was being pushed up in a sloping wall almost like a small piece of the Great Wall of China.
“Oh shit!” Jimmy said. “It’s a fucking catfish pond!”
“Don’t say fucking,” Evelyn said. “You don’t even know what it is, you little rotten-tooth fucker.”
“I do, too,” Jimmy said.
“Shit. You wouldn’t know which arm to look under for it. Would you?”
“I would, too,” Jimmy said.
“Okay, which one, then, if you know so damn much?” Evelyn said.
“Well. I know what a motherfucker is,” Jimmy said uncertainly.
“I’m gonna tell,” Velma said.
“Tell what?” Evelyn said.
“Way y’all talking.”
“How we talking?” Evelyn said.
“Dirty,” Velma said.
“Oh you shut up, you little whore,” Evelyn said, and slapped her.
“I’m gonna tell Mama,” Velma said, and cried. Evelyn kicked her off the go-kart where she rolled in the dirt and cried some more.
“I bet he puts some catfish in there,” Jimmy said. Then he hit the gas and the shiny red go-kart spun in a tight circle in the loose dirt, the chain clattering, the herd of tiny dogs cavorting and somersaulting in the dust, they and the little girl chasing the go-kart bouncing back through the brown leaves on the old log road and the green leaves in the shady woods toward the grassless mobile home that was no longer mobile, merely home.