He was conscious of a thudding heart, a muddy face, and a drenched shirt. He rubbed his hands over his face and crawled the rest of the way forward.
Finally the voices were very near. He was on his belly, inching up the little slope behind which the torches had vanished. A man said, 'Buster's ready.' The dogs grumbled; some of the men laughed. Coleman Collins said in a sharp voice, 'Take care with that fire, Root. You want to be able to see.'
'Umz plug whuzza right place?' asked someone in a thick voice — presumably Root, for Collins answered, 'I said it was, didn't I? Just watch your tinder. Be careful where you squirt that stuff! We want a blaze, not a conflagration.'
Crawling forward, so scared of being seen that his breath froze in his throat, Tom could now see the lights of the torches — or of Root's conflagration — reddening the trees before him.
'Herbie, you sure this is the set?' asked Mr. Peet.
'Of course this is it,' Collins said.
Herbie?
Tom crawled to the top of the rise and peeked around the trunk of a red maple set glowing by the fire.
Mr. Peet and Coleman Collins stood together beside a leaping fire tended by a thick-bodied man in a yellow T-shirt and baggy carpenter's pants — Root. His head was shaved nearly down to the skull. The others had jabbed their torches into the soft ground and were furiously digging. Dirt flew. 'There's your set right there,' said Collins, pointing to a grassy mound on the other side of the fire. In his lumberjack shut, his face ruddied by the fire, the magician looked extravagantly healthy, muscular as Mr. Peet. 'Where'd you get the dogs this time, Thorn?' he asked.
The man in the army jacket came from the other side of the mound, holding both black dogs by the chains around then — necks. 'Same old shit. Paid 'im fifty-five apiece — claims they're the strongest he had. Couldn't get no bulls.' Thorn's face had been battered into a Halloween jack-o'-lantern. 'Bulls is best, for this.'
'Bulldogs or terriers,' Collins said.
'Bulls is best,' Thorn repeated.
'Thorn, you're an idiot. Give me that bottle again.' Thorn sulkily fetched the whiskey from his pocket. Collins drank and passed the bottle to Mr. Peet. 'Those two will work out fine. I'm pleased. Now, give the chains to Root and help with the pit.'
'Yeah,' Thorn said. He swaggered away to do as he was told.
'Hey, let's send the little one in,' Root called.
'Jesus Christ,' one of the men shoveling dirt said. 'Why not give us a break, huh? Or come over here and shovel for yourself, shithead.'
'Now, . . . ' Mr. Peet said warningly but too late.
Root had wrapped the chains around a tree and was charging the man who held a shovel. The others stopped digging and watched the man plant his feet and swipe at Root with the flat of the shovel. Hit in the side, Root went down. 'Shithead,' the man said.
'Okay, Pease,' Mr. Peet said calmly. 'Root, just hold the dogs. It's too early to try them out. Keep that fire stoked up.'
'Fucking animal asshole,' muttered the one called Pease, taking up his shovel and digging so hard that dirt flew nearly all the way to Root.
Half an hour later, the four men digging had opened up a pit almost five feet deep and four feet long. Root sullenly jerked at the dogs' chains whenever he inexpertly tossed more wood on the fire. Tom watched all this, now and then nearly dozing, mystified. What was it the dogs were to be tried out on? What was the long trench for? It looked uncomfortably like a grave.
Finally the magician said, 'Let's get them stirred up. Seed, you and Rock go to work on the set for a while.'
'Yeah,' said one of the diggers, a fat bearded man who resembled a depraved Burl Ives. He grinned, showing a hockey player's gap where his front teeth should have been.
Seed sprang up out of the trench, followed by another man. They carried their shovels to the mound and immediately began pitching earth from it.
'Faster, faster,' ordered Mr. Peet. 'We want them to know you're there.'
'Shit, they hear us okay,' said Seed, displaying the gap in his teeth.
'You know how many there are, Herbie?' asked Rock.
'One is enough,' Collins answered. 'Look, let's get that other man out of the pit. Snail, you go over to the other side.'
Snail, Seed, Rock, Pease, Thorn, Root: were those names?
The one called Snail crawled from the pit, went to the mound, hefted his shovel and slammed the flat of the blade down onto the earth. 'Shake 'em up good,' he said, and began to pitch dirt as earnestly as Seed and Rock.
They resembled three monstrous dwarfs, these heavy-set men. Snail and Rock had vast tattooed biceps; and when Snail pulled off his shirt, Tom saw that tattoos blanketed his chest: a white skull with black eyeholes housed the tail of a glittering, scaly dragon with eagle's wings.
'Mr. Snail, move those wings for me,' ordered Cole Collins, and the tattooed man laughed and dug more ferociously.
'A goddamned hole,' Snail shouted. 'Here's one of the goddamned holes.'
Thorn jumped out of the pit, bellowing like a lunatic, and charged toward Snail; instead of attacking him, as Tom feared, jolted fully awake by the man's din, Thorn jabbed his shovel in the earth next to Snail and began to peel back the earth over the entrance to the burrow.
'Get that little one in there, Root,' said Mr. Peet.
'Wish we had a bull,' Thorn said from his jack-o'-lantern face. Root pulled the smaller dog up, untied its chain, and pointed it to the uncovered hole. 'Get in there, mutt,' Root said, but the dog needed no command: it streaked into the hole.
'Now, get the other one ready,' said Mr. Peet. 'I'll bet anybody twenty it comes out in under a minute.' He looked at his watch, and Thorn said, 'Twenty.'
Snail's tattoos widened and trembled in the firelight. The effect was so distracting that it was a moment before Tom realized that he was laughing. 'Ground-pounder.'
'A minute,' Thorn said, shrugging his shoulders.
Yelps, growls, barks came from the hole. Then the sound of screaming that Tom had heard in the bedroom.
'Watch your tail, boy,' said Mr. Peet, and a second later the dog came boiling out of the hole. Bright red lines bisected its head.
'Twenty from Thorn,' said Mr. Peet. 'Send in the other one,' and Root positioned the second quivering dog. Pease and Seed, the fat one like Burl Ives, began scrabbling with their shovels on the top of the mound.
For hours it seemed — Tom lay at the base of the red maple, dozing off and waking to some new horror — the dogs nipped into the tunnels Pease and Seed uncovered in the 'set,' emerged whining and bleeding, were sent back in. Money flowed among the eight men, most of it going to Root, Mr. Peet, and Collins. During one of his spells of wakefulness Tom saw Collins grab a shovel from tattooed Snail and attack the 'set' as fiercely as any of the younger men. He realized that Collins was not limping, and was so tired he thought only that in front of these men he would not limp either. 'Paydirt! Paydirt!' the one called Rock kept screaming.
There was another thing, Tom told himself, something else you would not think to notice unless you looked at these men for a long time: they were all very white. Their skin looked compressed, like cheap unhealthy meat, smudgy; they were strong, but they were indoor men.
Indoors, late-night men toiling outside, the ferocity of their labor and their shouts, the guttering torches and the leaping fire, the yells and the exchanges of bills and the bloody dogs — this phantasmagoric scene unrolling before Tom sometimes seemed so unreal he thought he was back in his bed in the windowless room . . . then he was truly asleep, and dreamed that Del was lying on the little hill beside him, explaining things. 'Mr. Snail is the treasurer of a big corporation in Boston, Mr. Seed and Mr. Thorn are both lawyers, Mr. Pease and Mr. Root are major stockholders in U.S. Steel and race in the America's Cup every year — Mr. Peet is the United States Secretary of Commerce.'