Nicknames bind a person to the tribe. This was a claim they always had on Brandon O’Dell because they have only called him Digger, ever. Even the nuns at St. Thomas Aquinas and Father Taggart called him Digger. Digger was ours, the Catholics knew.
It may have been the nickname that had saved him. Finally, after years of being called Digger, he wanted to become a geologist. That meant college and being able to get into college. It was this necessity that reformed him, but that start was still a year away.
Life for the neighborhood boys was divided into two unequal halves. There was having fun; and there was getting caught. Usually, the boys did not get caught because they always looked like a family out with their dad. People would have looked harder at four or five boys out by themselves, but by the end of eighth grade, Digger was 6’4” tall and weighed a lean 230 lbs. This was red hair and freckles atop the frame of an action hero, but from the back, he could have been their dad.
There was something of the supernatural in Digger O’Dell that the nature of Catholics warmed up to. It was not only his mythic size but also his uncanny powers of observation. He always caught on fast. This made him easily bored. Boredom was the devil inside Digger O’Dell.
Digger liked school. He simply could not stay inside of it. Whenever the nun would throw him out of school, Digger studied harder than ever so that he would stay in the same grade as his friends. The Catholics would flunk a boy. The Protestants always passed them.
If they would not let him inside, Digger would hang around. Digger would shinny up the old cast-iron downspouts to look through the windows of the second floor. The nun would rush to the windows, robes flowing, rosary beads rattling, to whap the glass with her pointer until he went away. After the red mop of hair had retreated down the wall, the nun had to become devilishly mean to get them all back in their seats and to settle them all back down again.
When they threw him out in the spring, Father Taggart decided to graduate him into high school just the same. But Digger remained hovering about the school, never far away. His friends were all inside.
The parish had contracted-out for a new gym. Digger watched them excavate the hole; and when the steel started going up, he asked them for a job. Digger did not look or act fourteen.
While carting wheelbarrows full of sand, or while shoveling out for pipe connections, Digger had his eye on the crane. It had tires, not treads, and a fifty-foot boom. He observed to learn which levers did what. He watched them rig the loads with chain slings and shackle them to the hoist hook.
After dinner, Digger and the boys would jimmy-open the door to the construction trailer and steal the keys to the crane. Digger moved it all around the jobsite and practiced rigging loads. One evening they rigged the trailer, hoisted it, and turned it ninety degrees.
He was always careful to replace the crane exactly as the men had left it. To hear them wonder aloud what it was about the jobsite that was different the next morning was almost more than a straight face could bear.
Another evening they had stolen Mr. Hingsbergen’s car keys off his kitchen table and were joy riding in his Chevy. Digger drove. He was passed by six fire trucks barreling down 46th Street. Digger tuned the radio to WIBC, and then turned the car around. Tonight the Holiday on Ice show had come to town. The fairgrounds Coliseum had blown up.
Propane had leaked from a tank. Within the concrete stands, the gas had filled a storage room beneath the seats. This was where all of the propane tanks were stored. When the trail of fumes reached a concession stand’s popcorn machine, it touched off. A block of seats rocketed fifty feet into the air, and then arced down upon the ice show. Skaters scattered among the arms and legs, and the ice turned red.
Digger dropped the boys and the Chevy back at Mr. Hingsbergen’s house, then ran the two blocks to St. Thomas Aquinas. The boys read about him the next morning in the paper.
One last time he took the keys. This time, Digger quickly pried open the door to the construction trailer and left it bent. He loaded all of the chain slings and shackles he could find, and then took off down the street. No one knew the back streets into the fairgrounds any better than the neighborhood boys.
The gruff diesel engine and the downshifting parted the crowd. The police waved the crane through the gate. Surely, the authorities had sent for it. Stand back and let this man work. They watched him rig the loads.
Digger wrapped the sections of concrete and twisted steel weldments with chain slings and shackled them together. Piece by piece, Digger untangled the fallen concrete and steel of the coliseum and lifted it off the injured and the dead. Seventy-four had died; more would have if not for Digger and his crane. The newspaper reporter never guessed the crane operator was fourteen, but the neighbors and Father Taggart knew. Digger O’Dell was theirs.