Digger 1.0 by Michael Bunker

movements.
    Once the waiter was gone, and after a bite
had been taken of the delicious duck, Jim leaned forward and said,
“Well, Mr. Vo, things are about to change for you and me, that is
if you’ll take a drive with me and listen to a little proposition I
have.”
    Mr. Vo remained intent on the duck he was
cutting. He was listening. But he said nothing.

Chapter 13
     
     
     
     
    Jim checked the rearview mirror as they
merged out onto the big empty of the 405 at nine o’clock that
evening. They drove south with the night, passing sleeping towns
and spreading orange groves and the big rigs pulling through the
night for southern ports. At San Diego they turned left, found the
lonely Highway Eight, and headed out into the emptiness of the
Southwest.
    Mr. Vo watched the night pass and smoked,
cracking the window every time he did so. Later, in a diner east of
Tucson as the morning sun turned to high hot afternoon, over thick
club sandwiches and cold beers, Mr. Vo said, “And you hope no one
will ever think of the tunnels.”
    Jim put down his sandwich, wiped his mouth
and smiled. “ No Mr. Vo, I
don ’t think they will. America is… let me put it this way.
We don’t think like you do. We’re different. Back in your country,
I’d watch your people. I always felt like you guys were thinkin’
the same thoughts the same way. Knew the same things each other
knew. I guess I would say you understood each other. Better than
our side ever did.”
    “We just wanted war to be over,” mumbled Mr.
Vo, fumbling for his lighter. “Whichever side you were on.”
    Jim thought for a moment.
    “Yeah, I guess there was that. But it’s
somethin’ else, though. Somethin’ more than that. We’re different.
We see things differently. Some guy explained it to me once, back
in the jungle. He said you could show an Asian a picture of a tiger
in the jungle and the Asian would tell you it’s a picture of a
jungle. Right?”
    Mr. Vo barely nodded.
    “See, that’s not how Americans see things.
If you showed most Americans a picture of a tiger in the jungle,
they’d tell you it was a picture of a tiger. Why? I don’t know why.
We’re just different that way. See things two ways. We see singular
things and assign a value to them. Your people see the whole
picture.”
    Mr. Vo shook his head, raised his smoldering
cigarette and drew its smoke into his lungs. He turned his head as
if he was watching the wide nothing of the Arizona desert, and
after a bit, smoke spilled out against the yellowed window of the
diner.
    “What that have to do with digging tunnels
in Texas?”
    Jim finished his sandwich and said
nothing.
    Later, at speed, roaring out into the desert
wastes, the top down, Jim Howard shouted over the hurricane winds
that raced across the white leather of the beautiful old Cadillac.
“ Diggin ’ tunnels down in
Texas means, Mr. Vo, that we can play outlaw and we might… never
get caught. That’s what it means, Mr. Vo. It means getting away
with robbery.”
    Mr. Vo cast a strange look at Jim Howard and
continued to smoke and watch the alien desert and the big wide
nothing that was larger than anything he’d ever seen in a land of
rice and rivers and yellow skies that smelled of jasmine. A place
he knew in his heart he could never go back to again. Ever.
    They made Texas that night. Mr. Vo wanted to
stop and buy cigarettes, and Jim asked him to wait for “just a
stretch”.
    “In Texas, Mr. Vo, everything’s far away.
We’ll go get some cigarettes after I show you the reason for my
plan, which is just up ahead, off this road here a bit.”
    They turned off the county road, the big
headlights rolling across wind shifting plains of grass in the
night and a sudden barbed wire fence dotted by old weathered posts.
Then they were in the chalk of the road that led out to his Dad’s
old place.
    What was left of the barn was boarded up and
empty. To Jim it looked wounded. Like a thing that had been hurt so
badly it might never