Whatever we throw into the pit echoes. Sticks, cinderblocks, bricks, chairs, dishware, tarps of rain-soaked leaves, trash. All of it. It goes flatlining into the pit, kisses the rocky bottom, and then it’s back again, the vaporous shape of it in the air, one more time, before it’s gone.
Our Uncle has been dumping his shit there for years and we still cannot see the bottom—the foothills have their deep pockets, places designed to swallow. He used to sit next to it all day, when the cicadas ribbed and his shop closed for slow season. We fed ice cubes to Cletus from the soda cooler while he flicked Dr. Pepper tabs into the hole like a cheap wish. Cletus would jowl on the cubes, and the set of bells Uncle welded to his collar tag would jingle in tandem with the pit’s hollow tune. Uncle would say Do you hear that, boys? That’s what twenty-five years sounds like, and we would laugh the only laugh possible when you do not understand.
Sometimes, after Uncle went to bed, we would sneak out with Cletus and drop marbles into the deep black, hearing it ricochet on the bushings of snagged bike chains, can-dent catacombs, rusty engine blocks and wheel wells. Then it’d finally reach the bottom, and it all came rising again like chimney smoke. We imagined this was the same process bats used to fly though caves, by creating outlines—navigating shape through absence. We’d click our tongues and whistle, and Cletus would bark, and through the pit’s response we mapped the topographies of every scrap, creating little worlds beneath our feet where things discarded held court with our voices.
We grew up, of course. Found jobs, graduated high school, got married, had children, made our own messes. We’d still visit Uncle every now and then, to shoot the shit about his shop, to dump our own unwanteds into the pit. Yet whatever we tossed now—bottles, expired food or baby clothes outgrown, never fully reached the base. What we heard instead was a clatter, a discordant dice-in-a-cup response that shattered into the sky from the lip of the hole. Uncle would just shrug at us and walk up the hill, Cletus matted and grey-jawed and weary at his heels. A part of us wondered what Uncle heard when he contributed to the pit now, if he heard it twice, or even once.
The last thing we ever saw Uncle discard was the collar. We hadn’t seen him cry our entire lives, but loss turned him into a spigot. We held him close and bore his musky uncle-smell. We drank Dr. Pepper with him on the porch. We told him it was okay to keep the collar, that it wouldn’t take much space, but respected his choice to see it go just the same. When the red nylon was finally swallowed from the drop, we listened for the bearings in the bells by the tag. It rang once, rang twice, then no more. There was no final landing, no flapping echo of Cletus into the sky like a vessel on angel’s wings.
Uncle stayed out there for the rest of the night, his cheek turned slightly, like he was still waiting for it to happen.
We don’t add to the pit anymore. If we do, it is a shovel of woodchips, a communion palm of dirt. We offer these things as tribute before hiking up the hill to the house, where Uncle sits in his dim garage, sorting his parts—not because we think the pit will ever be full, but because some things aren’t meant to be heard twice.
