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PART TWO
THE LAST HOLE
29
There was a change in the weather.
For the worse.
The air became unbearably humid. Stanley was drenched in sweat. Beads of moisture ran down the handle of his shovel. It was almost as if the temperature had gotten so hot that the air itself was sweating.
A loud boom of thunder echoed across the empty lake.
A storm was way off to the west, beyond the mountains. Stanley could count more than thirty seconds between the flash of lightning and the clap of thunder. That was how far away the storm was. Sound travels a great distance across a barren wasteland.
Usually, Stanley couldn’t see the mountains at this time of day. The only time they were visible was just at sunup, before the air became hazy. Now, however, the sky was very dark off to the west, and every time the lightning flashed, the dark shape of the mountains would briefly appear.
“C’mon, rain!” shouted Armpit. “Blow this way!”
“Maybe it’ll rain so hard it will fill up the whole lake,” said Squid. “We can go swimming.”
“Forty days and forty nights,” said X-Ray. “Guess we better start building us an ark. Get two of each animal, right?”
“Right,” said Zigzag. “Two rattlesnakes. Two scorpions. Two yellow-spotted lizards.”
The humidity, or maybe the electricity in the air, had made Zigzag’s head even more wild-looking. His frizzy blond hair stuck almost straight out.
The horizon lit up with a huge web of lightning. In that split second Stanley thought he saw an unusual rock formation on top of one of the mountain peaks. The peak looked to him exactly like a giant fist, with the thumb sticking straight up.
Then it was gone.
And Stanley wasn’t sure whether he’d seen it or not.
“I found refuge on God’s thumb.”
That was what his great-grandfather had supposedly said after Kate Barlow had robbed him and left him stranded in the desert.
No one ever knew what he meant by that. He was delirious when he said it.
“But how could he live for three weeks without food or water?” Stanley had asked his father.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there,” replied his father. “I wasn’t born yet. My father wasn’t born yet. My grandmother, your great-grandmother, was a nurse in the hospital where they treated him. He’d always talked about how she’d dab his forehead with a cool wet cloth. He said that’s why he fell in love with her. He thought she was an angel.”
“A real angel?”
His father didn’t know.
“What about after he got better? Did he ever say what he meant by God’s thumb, or how he survived?”
“No. He just blamed his no-good-pig-stealing-father.”
The storm moved off farther west, along with any hope of rain. But the image of the fist and thumb remained in Stanley’s head. Although, instead of lightning flashing behind the thumb, in Stanley’s mind, the lightning was coming out of the thumb, as if it were the thumb of God.
30
The next day was Zigzag’s birthday. Or so he said. Zigzag lay in his cot as everyone headed outside. “I get to sleep in, because it’s my birthday.”
Then a little while later he cut into the breakfast line, just in front of Squid. Squid told him to go to the end of the line. “Hey, it’s my birthday,” Zigzag said, staying where he was.
