When we dug up those first clay shards, they seemed nothing more than pesky rubble. But Lucius, our foreman, made a big fuss, halted our backhoes and trackhoes, waving his banana-yellow hardhat in the air until all engines silenced. We leaned back in our seats, rested chins against shovels, lighted up smokes, while he scrounged around the churned earth. Lucius gathered one shard and then another, filling his hardhat until it was fuller than our kids’ baskets at the South Lansing Episcopalian’s Easter egg hunt.
“This is bad juju,” he said. “Real bad, bad news, boys.”
A stall could crush us. October in Michigan meant winter could slam us any day, freeze the ground and kill our work. And if we didn’t dig, then concrete wouldn’t pour, and foundations wouldn’t set, and frames wouldn’t rise, and then no more homebuilding for no one. So who had most to lose? Some dead people’s trash or forty people’s jobs for the next five months? And what about the family who needed a home? There was a housing shortage in America, everyone was saying. Surely worse in Michigan—the coalmine canary of every recession—getting worse and worse every minute we didn’t dig.
We moved on to get a jump on the neighboring plot while Lucius groomed the ground. Leave him worrying. We had a housing crisis to abate. We were the excavation crew. We were the job makers, the home stakers, the contractors trenching the frontline.
We ran machines for a half-hour on this new plot before the flints started churning up. Once Lucius spied those, he ordered engines off and buckets up once again. He was back playing in the sandbox, filling his shirt with spearheads, ax heads, knives, then what looked like shitty spoons, but no forks. We supposed those fragile tines didn’t survive a few hundred years of burial so well. Not much does when just a yard of dirt weighs as much as a VW Beetle. Then we wondered whether primitive people might’ve been too primitive to design a fork. Maybe in one thousand more years some excavator equipped with lasers might have to ponder the primitiveness of our broken toilets and laundry detergent jugs and, like us, debate the value of preservation versus progress. But progress progresses on. When we’re dead, let our bodies lie right along with our mountains of garbage.
We opened brown bags and gnawed on sandwiches at ten in the morning, not even hungry yet, but you eat when you can and break when you must. Some of us hopped into the dirt with Lucius, getting all excited about some dully chiseled stones. When we grew tired of waiting, we moved to yet the next plot, but a few feet down we shook up more goddamn pot shards. We couldn’t keep on this stopping and starting. So, here’s what we do, we proposed. We all get hands dirty, pick and stash in Ted’s F150. One artifact left in the dirt if the inspector showed and we’d be stopped working for weeks, well past first freeze. Maybe never come back here to make jobs for forty men and homes for a dozen families who would compete with over-asking offers.
Ted’s truck bed filled in two hours. We tossed a tarp over and called it a day. Sleep on it. Start fresh tomorrow with a plan.
Plan the next day was to fill Miguel’s truck.
So, even though Lucius had yellow-taped the site, we scraped more layers, crossing our fingers to find no more misshapen spoons or arrowheads. What we got instead were bones, bones and big old stones that could’ve been grave markers pocked with what could’ve been writing, but we couldn’t read the language, if it even was one, if the no-fork people could even speak. Even if they could, it wouldn’t be words that could write a paycheck, a bid, a contract—nothing anyone really needed. We pushed on with the plan and packed up Miguel’s truck, who was none too happy about the bones and stones. He’d agreed to shards, not people, not human remains.
“We’re well beyond bad juju. This is desecration. We’re pissing on graves,” Lucius said, getting all high and mighty as he handed up a femur.
Collecting tibias and fibulas made us wince. The trick to extracting skulls was to tuck the face into your armpit so the rest of the crew wouldn’t suffer your new secret. Then you’d see another fella hunched over a dingy orb, sneaking fast to Miguel’s truck. We were all guilty. A big, guilty family. We had families at home, of course, but they barely knew what we did here, and how could we explain the hourly wages of absence? We removed. We made space. Our trade was extraction, so we all tried to pretend this mess was the usual fare of tree roots and rocks.
Boss Lou called around noon to say the city was coming. The inspector was doing monthly checks for safety, property lines, permits.
We cleaned the site real nice, snatched up every last bone and stashed them until we’d filled three truck beds, then tarped those suckers, careful as drug smugglers. The inspector showed up wearing a yellow shirt as pastel as church wear. Who would risk such light colors working with dirt? Had a tie, too. Carried an iPad. Nice shoes. We pretended to be busy, yet held off on moving another inch of dirt.
Inspector’s name was Carl. Anyone who got in his path received a handshake. “What you’re doing is of dire importance to the great state of Michigan, to this whole country, boys,” Carl announced. “You know how bad this housing crisis is? Did you know there’s a shortage of skilled tradesmen?” And when he noticed Angela he corrected. “Skilled tradespeople, that is. You all are an endangered species, ever since that darn recession. I harbor immense respect for you boys. You people, I mean.”
“Feel free to join us,” Angela said, holding out a shovel.
“Ha, ha. I wish,” Carl said. “If not for my back.”
The rest of us ducked our heads behind excavator panel doors. Lucius scooted along the measuring wheel. Miguel peered into the optical level perched on its bird legs. We endangered species put on a good show of doing nothing.
“What’s this here?” Carl said, toeing a pale protrusion in the dirt. He bent to pull at it, and he yanked so hard he let out a squealy fart that we all pretended not to hear. Inspector Carl fell over backwards, dirt flinging all over his pastel polo. Lucius rushed to pluck his iPad from the ground. Angela offered a hand. He was still holding what he’d found—spear-looking thing long as his leg. We clenched jaws at another primitive tool that would send us packing.
“Whoa, boy. Yikes, that’s not great. Come on over with the shovels, guys. I mean guys and girls. I mean skilled tradespeople.” Soon enough, we’d undug eye socket, mandible, giant teeth peppering each shovelful. The skull of a giant stared back at us.
“Wooly mammoth,” Lucius said, placing his bright yellow hardhat over his heart.
“Probably just some elephant,” some of us said. “Nothing special.”
“No elephant ever lived in Michigan that wasn’t shitting up a zoo,” Angela said.
We stared into blackened sockets, a gaping crater where a trunk would’ve attached. We waited for Carl to doom us. But Carl dropped the mammoth tusk and took up his iPad. “How I see it is, this thing’s extinct, but you guys are endangered. How I see it is, you got some truck beds around here that might be able to sneak this right on out of here and off by the roads that line the lake, where loads get extra slippy. You guys and girl seeing it how I’m seeing it?”
Miguel lifted his truck’s tarp then to show him our stockpile of trouble. Carl covered his eyes with the iPad and squeezed out another fart. “Don’t show me that. Egad, boys.” He hustled to his car, told us through the window that we were cleared to proceed in our trade of filling this great state’s desperate need for more houses.
But we already knew all about that need. Some of us had turned to demo during the recession, leveling whole blocks in Detroit. Motor City reverted to field until there was nowhere left to live.
“My report here says all clear, boys—and girl,” Carl said and zoomed off.
The mammoth’s skull measured too big for any truck, would even outsize Boss Lou’s eight-foot extended bed that still looked as black and shiny as the day he bought it. Only place cavernous enough for that massive skull was inside the covered trailer Boss Lou kept parked on site. To fit it, we had to evict most of the tools. Without shelter, they’d soon start rusting. Rust always finds a way. We felt like it was creeping up our throats, between our toes, under our fingernails. Invading our softest nooks.
Over the next days, the skull became the jobsite’s creepy-ass mascot. We named him Bruno. During breaks, we blew cigarette smoke into its gaping eye sockets. We hid inside its braincase to sneak naps. Some of us whispered confessions into its ear canals.
We fell into a routine, filling Miguel’s bed so he could dump artifacts in some secret spot in the woods or in the lake—we tried not to ask. We were making progress, though it was slow going. It started to feel like work again. Until the backhoe bucket thudded. We hoped for just a stubborn boulder like in the good old days when all we had to worry about was how to move a few tons of granite.
Turned out it was a box, thick-ass wood, ancient-looking nails overcome by that sneaky rust. We dug it out and craned it above ground. Everyone rounded up, sucking smokes, abiding by our new ritual of breaks signaled by worry and wait. Miguel said we shouldn’t open it. Lucius told him to be extra careful about dumping this one.
“How about you dump it?” Miguel said.
“How about you shut up and do your job?” Lucius said.
“What even is my job these days?” They got up in each other’s faces. Then came a pound, a creaking. Angela was opening that goddamn box that no one had any business opening.
Dust swirled up, plumed in a shape that looked absolutely not right. We were a crew who knew dirt, all kinds, every shape it can take. A geologist would sell his left nut to know earth like we knew, and we knew this dust acted wrong. We swore we could hear it whistling some sad, discordant melody. Our skin prickled. Lucius tugged his hardhat tighter. Angela peered in. We neared because we were still a crew, weren’t we?
Inside, bones—more bones—these ones preserved from the subterranean shifting of centuries that slurried all other bones. Here, the box framed a tiny, skeletal human. “It’s a little girl,” Miguel said, the first to speak the curse. She wore a tarnished crown atop her skull, and a tattered dress covered her torso. “I ain’t dumping that in the lake,” Miguel said.
“You sure as shit ain’t,” Angela said.
“We can’t leave her here,” Lucius said, and of course he was right.
So, Angela climbed into an excavator cab. She swung the boom and lowered the bucket so we could load the blackened box, so we could save potential homes. Even a little girl’s bones couldn’t stop production.
The truck beds were all full, save for Lucius’s, who’d managed, so far, to avoid carrying a load heavy with secrets. And, sure, he fought the proposal, reminded us that he was foreman, that his word was sacred as Boss Lou’s. He cussed and tugged Miguel’s shirt so hard the neckline tore. We heaved the box in his bed, secured the tarp, tossed up the tailgate.
“What am I supposed to do with her?” Lucius asked.
“What’s right,” Angela said. “Just do what’s right.”
She said this from the excavator’s cab, all up on her high horse, but she was just as dirt-smeared as all of us at the end of each day. It wasn’t like we weren’t all thinking of our own sweet daughters back at home, who would barely notice our return from shift’s end. All of us understood that every daughter needed a house more than a grave. Land was for the living. If we didn’t believe that, we might as well drive a skid loader into the lake.
Lucius was last to leave that day. He lingered, pleading, bargaining a wad of sweaty dollar bills he pulled from the liner of his banana-yellow hardhat, if anyone else might take her. The last of us left him in our rearview, his head down, trudging toward the inevitable commute home escorting an ancient girl’s casket.
Next day, Lucius was late. Yet the work went on without boss, without foreman, as it always did. We dug. We made progress. No major surprises besides the usual pot shards and broken spoons and scattered bones. Miguel said he’d been looking online, said a full tyrannosaurus could fetch 1.5 million, though the velociraptor was hot these days. Dinosaurs seemed too much to hope for, but we’d all been researching online auctions for arrowheads. If you didn’t get busted, it could pay well. We knew, too, what Wooly Bruno was worth—more than Boss Lou’s new truck. But who got the money? How would the split work? Or was this a finders-keepers situation?
We’d all been thinking about how maybe it was time for a few less of us endangered tradespeople in the world once we retired selling bones. Illegal bone sales did, in fact, pay better than homebuilding. But before we addressed the mammoth in the room, Lucius pulled up.
We started in on him, the usual torture for lateness with jokes about senility, laziness, diarrhea. But his grimace when he exited the truck quieted us. Behind him, a glowing aura appeared looking like a cab full of bong smoke. The smoke didn’t dissipate. It morphed into a human silhouette, that of a little girl wearing a crown and an ankle-length purple dress. The previously tattered dress now shined in vibrant plum, as if fresh off the Walmart clothing rack.
“Hark! You shall build for me here,” the smoke said, pointing a wispy finger.
Lucius wide-eyed us, shaking his head, lips pursed. He said, “We’ll get right on it, your highness.”
But we weren’t getting on anything. We stood gawking.
“Nary a moment to waste, humble laborers. Maketh haste. Chop chop. Get thee to it,” the smoke girl said to us.
Angela stepped forward, fists clenched. We could’ve hugged her for manning up. She said, “Someone else owns this land. They already bought it for a new subdivision. I’m sorry to disappoint you, honey.”
The smoke blazed, flashed like sparklers fizzing inside. Lucius opened his mouth, but it was too late for warnings. The girl narrowed her smoke body into a funnel, aimed at Angela, siphoned right up her nostrils. Angela wriggled around for a bit before her body straightened stiff as rebar. She dropped to her knees and scooped dirt between cupped hands. She mashed the dirt into her open jaw, and we shouted at Angela, but what could we say? Don’t eat dirt? Angela’s mind was off taking a smoke break in Alaska. The ghost girl was in control, and she was a punishing tyrant, waiting until Angela had eaten a couple pounds of dirt before shooting back out her nose in a purple plume. Angela choked, coughing up dirt, along with what looked like an arrowhead.
“Build now, laborers,” the ghost girl said, standing again by Lucius. “You bunch of cunty cocksucker shovel jockeys.”
“She learns everything you know when she gets in your head,” Lucius said. “She made me eat kitty litter last night.”
“That is correct, my page,” the smoke said, looking all smug and proud. “You dig dirt and I dig minds. And now, all you dick-scratching hoe hands, I bestow the privilege to raise my new kingdom from the ashes.”
“Miss, your highness, ma’am,” Miguel said, removing his hat and bowing a little, “all that’s zoned to get built around here are houses. Even if we could build a castle or whatever, they’d stop us.” He pointed down the way at some of the two-story cookie cutters that were going up where we’d excavated last month.
“Then let us build down,” the smoke said.
She spent the rest of the day hovering over us while we returned to our machines. We tried our damnedest to ignore the purplish cloud stretched like a sinking ceiling. Some of us snuck on the hardhats we so often ignored. George stuffed orange earplugs up his nostrils. We still uncovered relics, ax heads, jagged bricks, decaying fertility statue, the usual smattering of vertebrae and ribs. Whenever we tried to stow a finding in Miguel’s truck, the purple smoke-cloud flashed and commanded, “Leave that shit where it doth lie.”
We operated our machines fretfully, tracks and tires crunching smithereens out of the ancient junk below us, buckets snapping bones, eviscerating all evidence of previous life. Which had probably always been the case. Weren’t we always doing just that? Eventually everything gets buried, rots, becomes dirt. Ashes to ashes and all that. Jesus’s atoms might be smothered under your house’s foundation and you’d never know.
We excavated deeper, clumsying our downward dig. While we dug, we worried how we’d break the news to our new ghostly foreman: we didn’t have the materials nor the ability to build. A few of us spent some time as wood butchers or drywall wranglers, but we’d left those trades behind. We should’ve left the trades all together, escaped when the getting was good. Though it had never been all that good. We always lost, the tradespeople—no retirement, no severance, never able to even resell our tools for what they were worth. The lucky refugees retrained from scratch. Skilled labor, meet office job, paper pusher, number cruncher, kitchen runner, warehouse cowboy.
By day’s end, we managed to slip home to our wives and girlfriends who wouldn’t hug us until we’d showered away the grime. After we cleaned, alone we stared into our blue screens to research recent eBay sales of human skulls. Then we stood outside our daughters’ closed bedroom doors and wondered if the smoke girl’s father had also been too busy with royal matters—eating fancy mutton on his throne or whatever—to talk to his daughter. All of us loitered in hallways except Lucius who’d unintentionally taken under his ward the ghost princess of dirt.
He returned to work the next day looking like ripped-up tree roots. We felt his ache when we observed our neatly squared foundation plot, perfectly ready for the concrete crew to dump mud. We’d taken this plot as far as we knew how, and now we’d have to break the news to the smoke girl. If we ever saw Boss Lou and his fancy truck, we might demand he step up. But all that remained was all of us. In our shared terror, we’d have to be the ones. We gathered under her purple cloud. Miguel started: “Your highness, we have an update on your new kingdom.” We waited for him to continue, prayed he would, but he fucked us. “And my colleagues will tell you more.”
We craned necks up and took turns, sentence by sentence, the bad news hopping from one set of lips to another: We couldn’t do it. We had little idea how to build. We had no materials. We dug. We only dug. We were just boys and one girl in a sandbox, operating expensive machines. Well, we were more than that maybe. We knew the earth. We knew all types of dirt. It spoke to us sometimes. We could hear it. We knew a square yard of the stuff could crush a man’s ribcage. We knew what dirt moved smoothly and what stubborn clay would doom progress. We knew from the smell of the bucket teeth’s first tearing. We knew what formation of rocks foretold boulders ahead, steadfast behemoths, and we even knew how to move those. But we didn’t know how to build anything like she deserved.
While we talked, her face formed above us through the purple smoke. Every now and then a leg or fingers or the hem of her skirt would protrude from her cloud. Her face flickered, frown to scowl to sneer.
Eventually, her face broke, and smoke spiraled into Miguel’s nose. He convulsed, dropped to his knees. Angela and Lucius spit reflexively, as if regurgitating gravel. The smoke spilled back out in a gargantuan exhalation like all our smoke breaks for the week combined into one breath. Miguel stood, jogged toward his truck, drove away.
But the smoke-ghost girl wasn’t done with us. She shot into George and then Ted and Rafael. She moved through them quickly, dropping them each to their knees, fingers mingling into the churned earth. She doubled back for Lucius and then Angela. Dropped them, too. The cloud passed through each of us, plumbed the depths of our lungs, aspirated into our blood stream, became our every molecule. She now knew every grain of us. And more: we learned her. Her father flashed, his silhouette a tiny pinprick on the horizon over a moldering field. We smelled the spoiled earth, the pestilence that had ruined her family, ours. The heat of burning crop on our face, our mother’s sobs, our sister’s coarse cough, the silence after.
Then she receded from us. The smoke girl left our bodies cold and empty.
Living felt doubly lonely after experiencing shared existence. Now we knew her every disappointment. We’d felt the heat of her sister’s fever burning through the smoke girl’s skull, how her mother’s tears singed, how the girl wasn’t royalty, but would’ve been dowried off to a suitor twice her age. We knew the taste of her terrific dread, of some strange man owning her, had she not died. She took from us as much as she gave, filling each of us so much that we forgot our routes home after shift.
All we now knew was that we had to dig.
George and Angela worked the crane-necked buckets deep as they reached. We smoothed ramps that zigzagged down. The cut was still only as wide as a few houses, but quickly we’d dug deep enough that four houses could’ve stacked. We were inverting home, driven by the emptiness that coursed through us. When we paused in our work, wiping sweat from our scalps, above us the purple smoke-cloud pulsed, matching our breaths.
We dug through clay, through sand and silt, down into the pale gravel of the subsoil. We dug through illuviation trails, through veins of humus and sparkling fragments. We dug past bones that no longer resembled any trace of humanity, of any beast from our known world. Our shovels and buckets breached the primordial. We ignored these new, foreign materials. We ignored even the bolts of copper and quartz, gold and silver.
We dug as the sky dimmed. We flipped on the work lights at dusk. Soon the cords wouldn’t reach far enough to illuminate the night that cast our hole in pitch. We all turned purple then, hued by the light her cloud provided. We hauled up gravel in backhoe buckets. The walls of our work narrowed, and if they gave, we’d be crushed. But the memory of rasping cough and tears and fever and fear urged us onward. Our ramps grew too thin and treacherous for the machines, so we raised five-gallon buckets with ropes. We resorted to shovels and gloved hands until we scraped against bedrock.
Above us, a faint horn resounded. It was Miguel’s truck. He tossed down wadded-up paper balls, messages explaining that he’d brought back the exhumed relics he’d been hiding. We imagined he’d dumped them in the lake, but it turned out he couldn’t bring himself to discard them. They’d all been preserved, and now they’d returned.
For what purpose, we wondered. But we knew before the next crumbled paper ball replied: To build. We didn’t know how to construct those cookie-cutter homes that lined the streets, the ones made from lumber and drywall, vinyl and glass and copper and plastic, the precious materials to fix our country’s housing crisis. These scavenged materials, though—bone and relic—no one knew how to piece these together. We could build any way we chose.
The purple cloud rumbled above. Down came the pot shards, lowered in five-gallon buckets tied to red rope. We scraped clay from the walls to unite the pieces. We sat in a circle, assembling for hours, until our backs ached. The primitive tools and arrowheads came next, and we affixed them to our walls. Then came the bones, floating down on red ropes. Bruno’s bones stood taller than George. We drove these into the ground like columns.
We couldn’t guess how much time had passed, if it had been days or weeks. We built high enough to finally see sky peeking blue beyond the purple cloud. Our underground castle had nearly reached the surface. Our purple smoke girl above us neared close enough that we thought we could see a smile formed within the haze.
And then another face appeared over the rim. “Just came to check on my endangered skilled tradesmen and woman, and imagine my surprise,” Carl said. “This here might violate a few regulations, I fear.” His iPad appeared, snapping pictures with its sickly flash bulb.
“Gee whiz, this is something, but perhaps not what our housing crisis most needs in this moment of great scarcity.” He looked up then at the smoke-girl cloud sheltering us. “And I do have some small concerns about those emissions.”
We climbed out and surrounded Carl. “But no one’s getting in trouble,” he said. “We need all of you. I’m certainly not going to threaten an endangered species. All you need to do is dump some dirt in here. Just fill her back up. I didn’t see anything.”
Miguel snatched the iPad from his hands, chucked it down the hole. We waited for the smoke girl to do her thing, to dive through the depths of inspector Carl’s mind and convince him. But she lingered, only floating, the purple blanching, going pale as Carl’s pastel polo.
“Just cover it up and we can get on building homes for America, boys,” he said as he neared. “And girl,” he said as Angela gripped his shirt. “Just some dirt smoothed nice is all we need, friends. Then we can move on. Onward and upward,” he said, as we crowded, close enough that he might read our minds, assess the depths of our determination. But he bolted to his truck, the tires spitting gravel over our site.
Back at our project, our castle, we’d returned every ancient fleck to the earth, save one: Bruno the mammoth skull. We backed up the trailer, strapped Wooly Bruno to the crane, and each of us touched jaw, our fingertips grazing ancient bone. Down she went, the crown to our subterranean kingdom, perched atop all that had once been forgotten.
The purple smoke formed its funnel again, and we braced our lungs. She didn’t enter us, though. Instead, into the mammoth skull she went, filling its cavities until the massive eye sockets glowed purple. It was beautiful. Lucius patted the mandible. Angela dragged a broken tusk over to the skull.
Oh, yes, we all wanted to stay. But only Lucius did. He removed his banana-yellow hardhat and tossed it below, where Carl’s iPad had disappeared. He climbed into Bruno, nestled into the braincase, hugged in purple smoke. As much as we wanted to follow, how could we live here? We were top dwellers. We were meant to break ground. We had jobs to do cratering the earth with holes that would become doorsteps. We dug those holes for our daughters who would own their lives and open their doors and twist the deadbolts behind them. They’d try to call them homes, and we would too, for as long as they could keep them, for as long as they could peek out their windows at purple mammoth skulls we hoped might never be disturbed.