The Hole Truth
(1986)*
Lois McMaster Bujold

	When each winter thawed to spring, the chuckholes that pocked the streets of Putnam, Ohio, crept from beneath the ice. As edges of Antarctic glaciers thunder into the sea, so in miniature did the flexing pavement crumble inward, widening the zone of decay on the perimeter of these craters with each passing thunk-ka-CHONK of a pickup truck's wheels.

	So at first no one noticed the new hole in front of Pointer's house. The first man to do so was Waldo Simpson, wheeling into his own driveway one house down. "That sucker busted both mah front shocks," he complained. "Bent 'em right in half. Cost me a hunnert and twenty-eight bucks."

	But the people of Milton Street, bred in patience, waited mutely for the city crews to get around to laying black asphalt scabs over their winter-scarred street. Sometimes it was as late as July, or August, or even the next spring. Meantime, they drove slowly, weaving and darting in unexpected evasion patterns that were the terror of innocent bicyclists.

	Upon driving his car with its new shocks back from the muffler-and-brake-repair shop on Center Street (rumor had it that the mayor's brother-in-law was a silent partner in the enterprise, making the entire interlocking system of chuckhole preservation/car repair a sort of home-grown workfare), Simpson sent to inspect the offending hole. 

	"Damn," he muttered respectfully. "That's a deep one."

	He stared down into palpable blackness. In the camouflage of the spring rains, it was hard to tell the depth of a chuckhole at a glance. The flat sheen of a puddle could conceal either a mere two-inch dip, hardly worth weaving over the center line into the path of an oncoming Peterbilt, or tire-swallowing caverns that squashed springs and snapped dentures loose. But this hole held no water, only a velvety darkness.

	Simpson raised his eyebrows, walked around it, grunted "Huh!" and returned to his garage to continue the tune-up on his lawnmower that had been interrupted twice: once by a trip to buy a spark plug, and a second time to get the new shocks necessitated by the first errand.

=<O>=

	It was not yet warm enough to start the front porch season, when all the neighbors came out of their houses like cicadas emerging from their burrows to blink in the sun and renew old acquaintances suspended since last fall. Therefore it was about a week before anyone else took a close look at the hole.

	A tornado watch the night before had set the more imaginative cowering all evening beside their stereos, tuned to the weather bulletins from Putnam's only radio station, WDIP. To their disappointment, no actual twisters had been sighted in the county. But the high winds had rough-pruned dead branches from the silver maple in front of Pointer's house, and so Bill Pointer pottered about this morning stuffing the debris into a large plastic trash bag. Residents were not permitted to burn trash, and the city garbage crews refused to pick up any refuse not legally bagged.

	A seven-foot branch, its stem marred with black rot and its fan of wilting leaves flickering green-silver-green in the crisp morning breeze, lay half in the gutter. As Pointer bent to pick it up and break it into fragments small enough to fit in his bag (really large limbs defeated this ploy, sometimes he could still fool the garbage men into taking them away by wrapping a bag around the middle of one, in the fashion of a loincloth, his eye was caught by the black blot in the street. Idly, he tested its depth with the end of his branch.

	At first he thought it must be filled with mud, for his branch promptly met a gooey resistance, but one that did not increase with depth. Pointer pushed until he had nothing left to push on but a handful of limp foliage. He pulled back, but the leaves tore in his hand. As he watched, the tips of the branch disappeared into the darkness with a soft sucking sound.

	Started, he fed the ole another branch, and a third. He stopped just short of reaching his hand into the darkness.

	"Whatcha got there, Bill?" asked his neighbor, Harold Krieger, pausing in the act of dragging his trash bags to the curb for tomorrow's pickup. "That one looks like a champion axle-breaker."

	"It's the one that got Simpson's front shocks last week. Hey, c'mere and take a look at this. This is sorta screwy."

	Krieger stepped across the street to stare down into the hole. "Wow," he began, but had to jump out of the way as a rusted-out Buick, its original color obscured by variegated splotches of aborted paint primer jobs, nearly clipped him.

	"Wrong way, you turkey!" Pointer and Krieger screamed in practiced unison. The car honked an angry denial. Milton Street had been one way for eleven years, but you could still sit on your porch on a summer afternoon and count about one car an hour bucking the flow.

	Pointer dropped another stick into the hole. You couldn't see into the blackness, but you could see things going down into the dark, growing dimmer and more obscured until they disappeared at a depth of about two feet.

	"I've never seen anything like it," said Pointer.

	Krieger frowned at it judiciously. "Me neither. Say ..." A gloomy satisfaction lit his eye. "I bet I know what it is, at that. It's a sinkhole. I saw one on the news once, someplace down in Florida—opened up in the middle of a street, cracked the sidewalks. Kept on growing—two houses just tipped right into it. Damndest thing you ever saw. Something about the water table dropping."

	"What did they do about it?"

	"I can't remember. I don't think they said."

	Pointer examined the nearby curb and sidewalk nervously for signs of cracking. "It doesn't seem to be growing."

	Krieger snorted. " 'Course it's growing. It wasn't there before, and it is there now. It had to have grown from something."

	Pointer wrinkled his nose, rather dismayed. "It looks dangerous."

	"Yeah," Krieger agreed. "I suppose we ought to mark it with something."

	"Reminds me of when I was a kid," said Pointer. "Over to Indian Lake in the summer. People used to put empty Clorox bottles upside down on sticks above the sunken logs—the big ones that ate shear pins—as a sort of public service. Probably saved a bunch of water skiers from castration. You don't see public spirit like that any more."

	"Well, let's just ..." Krieger marched to his side of the street, heaved a loaded trash bag from his stack, and plopped it over the hole. "That'll mark it."

	"I don't think it would show up too good at night," Pointer objected. "Bet some sucker'll just plow into it and scatter garbage to the end of the street."

	Krieger's lips screwed up, faintly offended at this ungrateful reception of his good deed, but then he sighed agreement. "Yeah, you're probably right." He grabbed the bag by its twist-tied neck and yanked. It didn't move. He pulled harder.

	"The bag's breaking," Pointer warned, as the black membrane thinned and stretched across the treacherous corner of a frosted flakes box. Krieger desisted hastily.

	The bag shifted, sank a bit more. Its sides bulged at the edges of the hole like a beer belly settling over its belt; then, with an audible pop, it was sucked down. Pointer could see the white twist-tie glimmer for a moment, then the darkness returned. The hole gurgled, and both men jumped back.

	"I'm going to call the city," Pointer announced after a long pause.

=<O>=

	After a very unsatisfactory phone conversation with the city maintenance department ("Everybody claims their chuckholes go to China, Mr. Pointer. We'll get to your street on schedule, I assure you." and an equally dissatisfying call to the Putnam Post, the town's only newspaper ("We've done chuckholes," the reported explained wearily "A two-page photo spread on them, last month.") Pointer returned to his front yard.

	His neighbor Krieger, just now dodging a car in the street, was dragging an extremely battered Big Wheel toward the hole. The bright decals had weathered away, the adjustable seatback was long gone, and the front wheel was flat on one side, ground off halfway to the hub by countless gravel-spinning quick-stops and attempted wheelies.

	"Been trying to get the trash men to pick this up for three weeks," Krieger panted. "They won't take it. Told me to wait for the spring cleaning truck."

	Once a year, the city sent a truck and crew around that promised to pick up anything. Old mattresses, piles of shattered wallboard from the last remodeling project, old lumber, anything. Its pick-up schedule and route were surely one of the most closely guarded secrets in Putnam. Pointer could not recall a single year in which he had managed to anticipate it. The truck came in stealth and departed in silence, and only a few hardy souls who put their junk out weeks in advance, turning their yards into dumps as rain-sodden corrugated cardboard boxes slowly disintegrated and the fibrous stuffing leaked from broken-down chairs to the delight of nesting birds, had ever managed to catch it. They always mentioned it to Pointer about two weeks after the truck went by.

	In the meantime, the charge for dumping a personal load, no matter how small, at the city landfill was a stiff $12.50. The only other known method for getting rid of bulky trash was to sneak down at night and cram it in the Goodwill box at the supermarket parking lot, a dubious practice that Pointer spurned.

	Pointer watched in fearful fascination as the Big Wheel went down the hole. The back end jammed up, until a chunk of asphalt broke away and both chunk and toy vanished. "Is that, huh, safe?"

	"Dunno," said Krieger cheerfully. "I don't see why not. How else would you fix a sinkhole, but by filling it up till it stops sinking?"

	That seemed logical. Pointer remembered some large carpet scraps molding at the back of his garage. The neighborhood cats made them a napping zone and occasionally, judging from the acrid odor they had acquired, a latrine. Rolled lengthwise, they just might fit ...

=<O>=

	By the next morning the hole had widened, to about a yard in diameter. Several neighbors gathered to stare at is uneasily. Instead of filling it, the objects jumped down it seemed to increase its appetite.

	Tom Higgins, who changed his own oil and surreptitiously sprinkled the used gook up and down the alley, now poured in his full drip-pan. It fell slowly, hanging below street level in a peculiar rope for a few moments before dispersing. Herb Smith tossed in three gallon cans of dried-up paint, just for the fascination of it, since he might easily have bagged them with his regular trash. Johnny Oporto shoved in a door panel from a 1974 Ford Maverick that had sat for a decade in his garage waiting to get the dents pounded out and be repaired. The car it had belonged to was itself but a memory.

	When she thought no one was looking, Emily Ludwig, a sociopathic nine-year-old with the personality of a piranha and a nasal whine that could penetrate six-inch concrete, told her younger brother that it was a hole down to the devil, and attempted to force him into it. Five years of Emily had taught him self-defense, however, and he kicked her in the shin and escaped. Listening to her piercing screams, which were clearly audible for at least two city blocks, Pointer had to stifle an overmastering impulse to drop Emily in.

	Some of Milton Street's mothers now began to perceive the hole as a safety hazard. Louise Haines, the most hyper of them, was the first to phone the police. They had dealt with her before, however, and the desk sergeant merely hinted that perhaps her lithium dose was out of whack again. Offended, she hung up and refused to call back.

	Later, one of the other parents got through, and in the afternoon a squad car stopped by. The fresh-faced patrol man got out and stared at the hole a while. About this time (3:30 PM) Nick Baines appeared with a full-sized mattress, pulped and hollowed out at hip level with spring wires poking out of the covering (the mattress was fifteen years old, and Nick weighed nearly 300 pounds). It took some shoving, but the mattress went down, abrading and widening the edges of the hole in its passage. "It's a sinkhole," Nick explained, perhaps reminded of certain city littering ordinances by the policeman's presence. "We're filling it in."

	The young policeman scratched his head, swallowed and spat casually to conceal his amazement. He drove away, but came back later with two orange-painted wooden sawhorses and an oil pot, round and black like an anarchist's bomb topped by a little yellow flame that licked and smoked, and set them around the hole. "It's the best I can do for now," he apologized. "The road maintenance crews are only working the west side this week."

	"Yes, I know," said Pointer.

	A geology professor from the State University branch campus was called in by his cousin, one of the Milton Street residents. The professor pontificated knowingly on sinkholes and limestone cavers and underground streams until he actually saw the hole, and fell strangely silent. A long-time Putnam resident himself, however, the professor was seen late that night by the flickering Halloween light of the oil pot, pulling a cracked and dusty toilet bowl and two frayed snow tires from the back of his station wagon and stuffing them down the hole before speeding off.

	By the next morning the orange sawhorses were teetering on the holes widening edge, and unauthorized dumpers were trickling in from all over town. It began with Milton Street relatives, but it didn't stop there.

	Pointer saw three total strangers come in a pickup truck. The two men made an entire sofa-bed, its wooden frame cracked and its greasy beige upholstery shredded by a tribe of cats, disappear. The woman accompanying them clapped her hands with joy as it sank out of sight.

	The Milton Street Citizen's Committee sprang up to defend itself from foreign trash, or would have, had it been able to present a united front. It degenerated rapidly into a European-style multi-party system, the neatniks versus the don't-cares versus the isolationists.

	Krieger, the natural leader of the don't-cares, put his party's position succinctly. "It don't smell and it don't show. Why worry?"

	The limited-resource theorists, headed by Mrs. Frenkel, observed, "We don't know how deep the hole goes. How can we be sure there will be room for our children's trash?"

	The isolationists, led by Lithium Louise, chipped in with an appeal to deep-seated American paranoiac tradition: "You don't know where their trash has been!"

	Bill Pointer thought a more urgent question was, Where is their trash going? but about this time the Committee dissolved in acrimonious debate, and Pointer left to drink a cold Miller alone in his backyard without voicing the question. When he was done he took the can out to the street and dropped it in the hole.

=<O>=

	The hole's growth slowed, to Pointer's secret relief. Two days later, the City Engineer himself came out.

	"It's about time," said Pointer.

	"You see? Democracy does work on the local level," Smith noted proudly.

	"I heard he gives the street-salting contract to his brother," Ted Fenkel whispered darkly, "and that's why we're short-changed."

	"I thought no-salt was an economy measure just till they got the bond issue passed, along with turning out every second street light and closing the Oak Street Fire Station."

	"Naw, it was the anti-fluoridation lobby. They blocked salting three years ago."

	"I didn't know there was any fluoride in street salt ..."

	The city engineer wore a white hard hat, and walked around with a clipboard. He measured the circumference with a gleaming metal device that looked like a baby buggy wheel on a stick, and consulted with his assistant in a low tone. When he turned past the group of anxious Milton Street residents hovering on the sidewalk, he was smiling.

	"Is it all right?" Louise Haines called in concern. "Can you plug it up?"

	"Is it going to stop spreading?"

	"Are we going to be assessed for this?" Krieger asked, even more anxiously.

	The engineer waved vaguely, and his pace quickened toward his truck. "It's all being taken care of, folks."

	"Taken care of how?" Nick Raines demanded edgily, blocking his path.

	"Well ..." the engineer paused. "You know, Putnam has a long-standing solid waste disposal problem ..."

	Everybody knew; the Post featured weekly articles on it, and the controversy occupied half the letters-to-the-editor column for three days after each article. The proposed incinerator plant required a large bond issue, and the people of Putnam had not passed a bond issue in four years. Then there was the proposed Sully Township landfill site, plagued by lawsuits. Geological reports on potential groundwater contamination varied wildly depending on which side hired the geologists.

	The residents of Putnam agreed that the residents of Sully Township were a selfish bunch, without public spirit. The residents of Sully Township suggested, in inflammatory letters to the Putnam Post, that the residents of Putnam could pile their trash in front of City Hall or compact it and store it in even more intimate places. Garbled quoted from leaked EPA reports flew back and forth like bullets. The president of the League of Women Voters and the Chairwoman of the Sully Township Concerned Citizen's Committee were rumored to be close to trial by combat in city council meetings.

	Meanwhile, the surface of the present landfill had gone from concave to level to convex, and was beginning to bulge ominously, like the side of Mount St. Helens before the eruption. Stiff notes from the EPA threatening to close down the landfill entirely arrived daily at Putnam City Hall.

	"Well?" demanded Baines of the engineer.

	"Well ... We may have found the solution."

	The Milton Street Citizen's Committee was instantly united in the face of their common enemy.

	"You can't make Milton Street into a city dump!"

	"All those big trucks turning around—children play here, you know—they might back over one ..."

	"It's our hole!"

	"Yeah," agreed Waldo Simpson. "I found it. Got the repair bill to prove it, too."

	The engineer sniffed. "Unlike Sully Township," he replied loftily, "this here hole is already city property. The city owns the streets right up to the sidewalks."

	"No way, José!" shouted Krieger. "You got to get a EPA environmental impact study first! That's the law!"

	The engineer shot him a look of loathing at the mention of the EPA. "We'll see," he said stiffly. He slammed the door of his truck loudly and drove off, leaving consternation in his wake.

=<O>=

	The next morning on the way out to water the newly planted petunias in the white-painted tractor tire that was Pointer's concession to the art of landscape gardening, he wandered over to inspect the hole, and maybe move the sawhorses back a tad if necessary. To Pointer's surprise, it wasn't necessary. Far from enlarging, the hole seemed to have shrunk in the night. Between the crater edge of ragged broken pavement and the sharp circle of unsettling midnight was a ring of fine dry dust an inch wide. When Pointer checked it again that evening, it was two inches wide.

	"It's going away," he theorized hopefully. "Back where it came from."

	The Milton Street Citizen's Committee breathed a collective sigh of relief, then broke up into individual forays into garages and attics for last-chance cleaning out. The hole closed more rapidly than it had grown. By the next morning it had shrunk to a tiny black dot.

	"It's gone!" cried Mrs. Ludwig, Emily's mother, ecstatically. "Now I can let the children out!"

	"Not quite," said Pointer. He fed the hole a couple of grass blades, which disappeared just the way the original tree branches had, only in miniature. "Not quite."

	The city engineer revisited Milton Street, and left ten minutes later, his shoulders slumped in bitter disappointment. Upon shouted inquiries from the residents as to when the road gang was going to get out here and patch the thing, he merely pulled his hard hat down over his eyes and muttered, "You're on the schedule."

=<O>=

	Three days later, the paving crew still had not come. Bill Pointer was on his hands and knees rooting out crabgrass clumps in his front lawn. Harold Krieger, whose attitude to the competing grass species in his own lawn was survival of the fittest, stood on the sidewalk kibitzing.

	"Too bad our hole filled up so soon," Krieger mourned. "I never did get around to cleaning out my basement. It was real handy. Still, it wouldn't've been so good if our houses had fallen in. At least it didn't have alligators come to live in it like that one down in Florida."

	"You still think it was a sinkhole?" Pointer paused and straightened up to relieve his back.

	"Sure, what else?"

	"I don't know. I always wondered," Pointer hesitated, "if maybe it might have been ..."

	A soft popping noise from the street startled both men. Their heads swivelled toward it.

	The hole was back, as abruptly as that, and in its full diameter—maybe a bit more. Pointer could not tell how far under the edge of the street the circle might extend.

	By God, maybe I can get rid of that old card table," Krieger cried happily, starting to cross the sidewalk with renewed energy.

	Pointer scrambled to his feet and grabbed Krieger's arm. "Wait—"

	"Why wait? It could go away again at any minute ..."

	"I just wondered—"

	From out of the circle of darkness, movement. A narrow, bronze-gleaming rod was launched like a missile from its silo, to arc through the air and land with a clatter in the street yards away. Both Pointer and Krieger recoiled. Pointer recognized the missile as Nick Baine's old pole lamp, the last piece of trash to be stuffed down the constricting hole last week.

	"... if it might have been a doorway," Pointer finished in a whisper.

	Then the volcano erupted. Cars swerved and traffic backed up as the hole belched forth in as many minutes all the trash it had swallowed in days. Baby buggies, broken toys, black plastic trashbags that exploded like fetid shrapnel on impact with street or sidewalk—whatever the stuff had been the past few weeks, it had experienced time at the same rate as Milton Street—and numerous other objects hauntingly recognizable. A stained and greasy sofa-bed unfolded as it soared, as if planning to glide away into the trees like some vast bat, but it landed in the street with a massive boom that shook the ground and cracked the pavement. A porcelain commode, landing, burst into flying white potsherds. Two tires shot skyward, to bounce down the sides of the accumulating pile and chase each other, rolling all the way to the corner, where they spooked a Subaru into swerving up onto the sidewalk and crashing into an oak tree.

	All the residents of Milton Street rushed onto their front porches, where they prudently remained under cover, to watch aghast as a new mountain formed before their eyes.

	The end came at last. A battered Big Wheel popped from the caldera and clattered end over end down the sides of the pile to fetch up in a mess of scree at the bottom. Then three or four sticks, then a seven-foot branch. Then silence.

	Pointer breathed a shaky sigh, and crept from the shelter of his front porch where he had clung to Krieger.

	Krieger, a sociable man who attended church and Bible study, quavered "The last shall be first, and the first, last ... is that all?"

	"I think so," muttered Pointer. They tiptoed to the foot of the fifteen or twenty-foot-high mountain, which overflowed Pointer's sidewalk and buried his petunia tire, and stared in amazement.

	A muffled foomp broke the silence. Pointer and Krieger jumped back six feet as yet another object hiccuped out of the crater and skidded won the sides. Then another. A third rolled to Pointer's feet.

	"Holy shit!" cried Krieger, forgetting his Christianity again. "What the hell's that? It looks like an electric rutabaga."

	Pointer picked it up gingerly. It was an utterly unintelligible artifact. It seemed to have a set of keys on the side, much too narrow for Pointer's fingers, but they did not give when touched. Its irregular surface flickered briefly with a swirling iridescence that hurt Pointer's eyes, then with a sad peep it faded to a dead grey.

	"I think," he swallowed, as the Milton Street Citizen's Committee huddled fearfully around him, hushing to hear his words, "I think it's somebody else's trash."

	They lifted up their eyes unto the hill, as a fourth glittering object arced out the top and fell like a star onto the corrugated asphalt of Milton Street.

The End