Dirt Man

Midnight and Dirt Man is singing again. He's been at it every night for weeks. Lately he's on a Beatles kick, can do all the parts in "Love Me Do," even imitate the harmonic riff using, I suspect, two thick blades of grass. Tonight it's "Come Together"—I can hear him out there in the backyard, beat-boxing the drums.

Moonlight seeps through the blinds and lays stripes on the bedclothes. I turn my head from right to left, my body from one side to the other, trying to approximate a sleeping position while listening to him sing. Finally I sit up and push back the covers and get out on my side of the bed. It would be more efficient to get out on Harry's side, as it's closer to the bathroom. Blame force of habit. I take off my T-shirt and put on my new robe, made of something called near-cashmere, a delicate gray fabric that clings to the slope of my breasts. I purchased the robe with Dirt Man in mind, in case he decides to look at me. To let me unearth his eyes.

In the bathroom mirror I examine my face in the moonlight—pale, lined forehead, sharp cheekbones with shadows beneath, long, silvering hair in a side-braid—and make my way down the hall to check on Kate. She's asleep, one arm flung out, palm up. In the family room paned moonlight slants down the couch and spills onto the rug. The back door opens without a sound. I step outside and stand in the shadow of the house, waiting for the door to click shut behind me.

The night is warm. A cricket chimes in the rock garden beneath the butterfly bush; in the air, the wet stink of blooming Bartlett pears. Lichen-swathed boulders jut up from the grass. I step through the azalea bushes and jump down from the rock ledge to get the trowel and canvas gloves I keep beneath an inverted bucket. Dirt Man won't let me touch him with my bare hands. Once I forgot to put on gloves and accidentally touched his thigh. I didn't know it was a thigh. I was trying to extract a pontilled umbrella ink bottle, chocolate-colored, from beneath a tendon-like root, but when I touched the packed dirt just above what I realized—too late—was his knee, I felt the ground shudder. The leg twisted like a funnel cloud and he burrowed away, taking the ink bottle with him. It was two weeks before he came up again.

He is very come-hither-get-away, my Dirt Man.

I find the spot beside the trunk of the maple with the disc swing dangling from its dingy, rotting rope. Remove the stakes holding down the tarp and push it aside, pull up some grass around an exposed root, using the trowel to loosen the soil. It's been a rainy March, and the upturned earth churns with nightcrawlers. He's singing Dylan now. Plaintive falsetto. I lie flat and knock the bare patch I've made three times.

I'm here, Dirt Man, I say.

The singing stops. The ground beneath me heaves up, down: a single belly-breath.

Are you wearing the gloves? he asks.

Always, I say.

Dig away then, he says. I have so much to tell you.

________

I am a sky person by nature. Raised in the desert, where trees stayed low and the earth yielded nothing, to those of us inclined to dig, but a subsurface layer of hard red clay. Rumors would circulate: Brandon dug up a piece of Indian pottery; Stephanie found an Apache arrowhead. Tiny evidences our land belonged to someone else. I grew up and left the desert for NYU to study art history—my thesis was on the historical use of stained glass in sacred spaces—and met Harry at a theater party after one of his Godot performances. We were both freshmen. An agent signed him that year solely because of his opening scene: Estragon alone on stage, scruffy...