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My contractor buddy,
Jorge, dropped by last week with a wiry little guy sporting
a goatee, a topknot, and a rawhide jacket with silver buttons.
They arrived in time to watch me donate a locknut to the bowels
of my car’s engine compartment. Bad enough there was
no other such nut in my collection of worthless hardware,
it now resided in one of the most notorious black holes in
the universe. In more than 27 years, at least one extra car’s
worth of hardware has disappeared there, so I knew searching
was a futile gesture. But Jorge’s companion said, "Let
me try," and before I had time to wave him off, he leaned
over to study the situation, stared heavenward in deep thought
for a moment, then dived back in with a flourish. Almost at
once he reappeared with not just the locknut, but a throttle
set-screw, two cotter pins, and a pair of tweezers. The whole
act had taken less than 10 seconds. "No big deal,"
he said, brushing aside my amazement. "My name’s
Salty Peters, and Jorge tells me you do a dirt-digging magazine."
"Salty’s
going to help me with a job we’re doing in Malibu,"
Jorge explained. "You and he were in ’Nam at the
same time, so I thought you’d like to buy us a drink
and tell a few lies."
It was true that
Salty and I had been in that Southeast Asian paradise in 1970,
but that was about as far as the similarity went. Where I
slept on a cot and whipped around the countryside at something
slightly below the speed of heat in my fire-belching aluminum
overcast, he spent his time belly-to-the-ground, inching his
way through pitch-black passageways beneath hostile villages
in search of an enemy he was more apt to smell than see. Salty
was a "tunnel rat," a charter member of the gutsiest
group of volunteers of the entire war. He spent his time slithering
into holes no wider than a garbage pail with no clue as to
who or what was down there, what agent of death or mutilation
lay concealed around the next bend.
"Where I grew
up in Kentucky, the mines were our playground," he told
me. "We used to play a game where the object was to sneak
up on the other guys and jump them without being spotted.
I was good at it," he allowed with a grin. "I’d
get this special feeling about where people were, and darned
if they weren’t there," he admitted with some relish.
"I’ve
hired Salty to keep me from tearing up the pipes and wires
on our new job," Jorge explained. "The last time
I did some heavy digging without his help, one of my guys
hooked an unmarked sewer line, and by the time we got finished
repairing it, I was out nearly $15,000 and a day behind schedule.
Worse still, I had to strip and hose off my clothes in the
backyard before Mary would let me in the house." Jorge
settled the matter of Salty’s credentials by saying,
"It’s like he’s got this special radar telling
him where and where not to dig."
"After ’Nam
I figured I was a pretty hot ticket with all the tunnel-rat
stuff, so when I went to work for a contractor in San Diego,
I sort of naturally gravitated toward the underground stuff,"
Salty told me. "Boy, did I get it handed to me!
"There was
this old buzzard named Gifford who’d been around for
a million years. We were about to dig a trench, and he asked
me where my ‘voices’ told me to start. ‘Here,’
I told him, kicking a divot to mark the spot. Gifford pulled
out his wallet and said, ‘Five bucks says you strike
oil.’
"Two feet
and I’ll be dipped if this gusher nearly tore the bucket
off. Old Gifford knew that during World War II, the Army Corps
had put in a pipeline that nobody in the public works department
was aware of." It was then and there that Gifford put
him straight on underground work.
"‘If
you want to know what’s under there,’ he told me,
‘look at all the records you can find, going back as
far as you can, then check with the old-timers to see what
they remember.’ As Gifford said, information’s where
all the magic lies, but the sixth-sense stuff makes for a
great marketing tool."
"Yep,"
I agreed, "it’s clear that money goes to where science
is no match for superstition."
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John an Email
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