1.
“Can I look in?” I asked.
He couldn’t hear me over the sound of the dump truck and started to climb out of the hole.
I walked closer.
“I was wondering if I could look in,” I said loudly.
“Sure,” he said. “Here’s the water main.”
He was standing in a pit about four feet deep on the east side of the street. His boots were a foot-deep in brown clay-y, ooze-y mud. He poked his shovel in the corner of the pit to show me the water main. I saw nothing but ooze-y, clay-y slop.
2.
He pointed toward the middle of the street near where last night a guy named Derrick had sprayed bright yellow one-call marks locating the gas lines.
“The water main might be leaking somewhere up there.” he said.
“A bit more street to dig up,” I said.
“Yep,” he said. “Not sure how far.” And then he glanced quickly up.
“I hope you weren’t planning to go to sleep until about 2 or 3am. We’ll be banging out here until then. And we just called in the big trucks.”
I laughed.
3.
It’s 9:40pm now. There has been no crashing. No smashing. No banging. No big trucks.
And the fair and industrious Trudy just announced that the water is back on.