Abe and Tash take off the backpacks and get out Abe’s freeway rescue tools. Abe shakes his head at the sight of them. “I really shouldn’t have taken these, we always have spares but you never know.…” He picks up an oscilloscopic saw, Tash a needlejack, and they crack the surface and chop a hole fairly quickly. It’s noisy work, but the ambient white noise of the city covers most of the sound. They put on work gloves and start pulling up broken blocks of concrete. The blocks are only about four inches thick, so there isn’t much problem. Stuck to the undersides of the pieces are inch-thick crusts of old asphalt. “They just poured it right over the old surface,” Jim says. “Great stratification at this site.”

Soon there’s a square hole about four feet on a side, there in the parking lot. “They’re going to think someone was trying to break in and steal the secret donut formulas,” says Tash. He and Sandy sing the Fluffy advertisement in a soft falsetto:

All sugar lovers in the know

Love what we leave in that round hole.…

“Well, Jim?” Tash inquires. “I don’t see any El Modena Elementary School. Looks like dirt to me.”

“Of course. That’s the fill. We’ve got to clear it out.”

Sandy hands Jim a short-handled aluminum shovel. “Your turn.”

So Jim goes to work.

He is not strong; he was the flyweight on their wrestling team, in the 123-pound class despite medium height, and he relied more on speed than brute force, even when Coach “Mad Dog” Beagle had them lifting weights four hours every day.

Nor is he skillful; every stab and scoop of the shovel yields only a handful of dirt. Disgusted with these results, he puts one foot forward, takes the shovel in both hands, raises it far overhead, brings it down in a vicious strike—only to be jerked to a halt by Tashi’s big hand grabbing the stock in midair. “Goddamn, Jim, you were just about to amputate your own foot! Watch what you’re doing, will you?”

“Ahh, hahahahahahaha…”

But he is enthusiastic. And eventually the hole is about two feet deep, and Jim is having serious trouble keeping dirt from his side walls from sliding down to the bottom of the hole. Abe takes over and makes better progress. An hour or so after the start of the operation, he drives the shovel down and there is a wooden thunk. “Oh ho! Yo ho ho, in fact! Buried treasure.”

Abe clears dirt away from a big beam of wood. It’s solid hardwood, dry and unrotted. Next to it they find a dressed stone block, one side beveled and fluted.

“All right!” Jim exclaims. “This is it! This is the kind of foundation stone that’s supposed to have the date on it.”