"It's wood," Mr. Harvey said. "It keeps the entrance from collapsing.
Other than that it's all made out of earth."

"What is it?" I asked. I was no longer cold or weirded out by the look
he had given me. I was like I was in science class: I was curious.
"Come and see,"

It was awkward to get into, that much he admitted once we were both
inside the hole. But I was so amazed by how he had made a chimney that
would draw smoke out if he ever chose to build a fire that the
awkwardness of getting in and out of the hole wasn't even on my mind.
You could add to that that escape wasn't a concept I had any real
experience with. The worst I'd had to escape was Artie, a strangelooking
kid at school whose father was a mortician. He liked to pretend
he was carrying a needle full of embalming fluid around with him. On his
notebooks he would draw needles spilling dark drips.

"This is neato!" I said to Mr. Harvey. He could have been the
hunchback of Notre Dame, whom we had read about in French class. I
didn't care. I completely reverted. I was my brother Buckley on our daytrip
to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he'd fallen in
love with the huge skeletons on display. I hadn't used the word neato in
public since elementary school.

"Like taking candy from a baby," Franny said.

I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. Life is a
perpetual yesterday for us. It was the size of a small room, the mud
room in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where
Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other. I
could almost stand up in it, but Mr. Harvey had to stoop. He'd created a
bench along the sides of it by the way he'd dug it out. He immediately
sat down.

"Look around," he said.

I stared at it in amazement, the dug-out shelf above him where he had
placed matches, a row of batteries, and a battery-powered fluorescent
lamp that cast the only light in the room, an eerie light that would
make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.

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