The vacant lot beside the church had been vacant as long as anyone could remember. Not maintained vacant. Just vacant. Grass and dirt and a few rocks and a rusted piece of something that had been there so long nobody remembered what it had been part of. The church used the lot for overflow parking on Easter and Christmas and the rest of the year it belonged to whoever needed it for whatever they needed it for which was usually nothing.

It was Trout’s idea.

The theory was straightforward. China was on the other side of the earth. The other side of the earth was directly down. Therefore if you dug straight down far enough you would reach China. This was not original thinking. It was inherited thinking, the kind that passed from older kids to younger kids the way most operational knowledge passed, already missing some pieces, but structurally sound enough to act on.

Pee Wee heard the theory and looked at the vacant lot.

“Shovels,” he said.

“Two,” Trout said.

This was the full extent of the planning.

Carol and Kathy came the second day. Not because they were invited specifically. They came because they were there, the way they were often there, the two of them together in the way sisters were together, and the hole was already a foot deep and interesting enough to generate questions.

Carol looked at it.

“What is it,” she said.

“China,” Pee Wee said.

Carol looked at her sister. Kathy looked at the hole and then at the shovels and then at her dress which was not a digging dress.

“We’ll need different clothes,” she said.

They came back in twenty minutes in different clothes and they were four after that.

Trout’s parents thought it would last three days. Good exercise his father said. Learning experience his mother said. She meant the earth layers and what you found in them which turned out to be mostly more dirt and some clay and one interesting rock that nobody could identify and kept anyway.

Three days came and went.

The hole got deeper.

There was a system. Two dug while two moved dirt. The dirt went to the side of the lot away from the church where it accumulated in a pile that grew proportionally with the hole, which meant as the hole got serious so did the pile, and at some point Pee Wee looked at the pile and had the idea about the fort.

Not a dirt pile. A fort.

The pile was already substantial. You could hollow it from the inside and shore the walls with branches and put a roof on and cut tunnels off to the sides and have something that people who had never been to China had never built before.

They built it the way they built everything, without a plan, by doing the next obvious thing until the next obvious thing was done. Three tunnels off the main chamber. Low enough that you had to crawl. A sloped entryway that angled down so the inside stayed dry. A branch roof weighted with dirt that held its shape through two rainstorms and a week of heat.

Pee Wee assessed it when it was finished.

“Even,” he said.

It was.

When it rained the hole filled. Not a little. Waist deep on a ten year old, which on Pee Wee was different than on Trout but both of them jumped in anyway and stood in it while the rain was still coming down and the water was cold and brown and had things floating in it that were better not examined.

Carol stood at the edge and looked at them.

“No,” she said.

Kathy stood beside her and also said no with her whole posture without saying anything. The boys stood in the water.

“It’s fine,” Pee Wee said.

Carol looked at the things floating in the water. She looked at Pee Wee. She did not dignify this with a response.

By August the hole was eight feet across and seven feet deep. People came by on slow days and stood at the edge and looked down into it. Carol’s father came once and stood there a while with his thumb hooked in his pocket and looked at the depth and the shored walls and the drainage they’d figured out along one side.

He didn’t say much. Just looked at it the way he looked at things that had been done correctly with the materials available.

He went back to the store.

Word got around anyway. In a town of twenty-two houses a hole eight feet across and seven feet deep in the vacant lot beside the church was not a private achievement.

They were briefly famous.

Not for finding China. For the hole itself and what was next to it.

Kathy was eleven. This was the relevant fact when it came time to play house in the fort. Not discussed. Not decided. Just the operational logic of age applied automatically by everyone present simultaneously.

Kathy was the mother.

Carol was the sister.

Trout and Pee Wee were the brothers because the alternative had been considered for approximately one second by both boys independently and rejected without discussion or eye contact.

Nobody said this out loud. It was just understood the way things were understood between people who spent enough time together in a dirt hole that summer, that certain arrangements were obvious and certain others were not available and everyone knew which was which without a meeting about it.

Kathy ran the household with the same seriousness she brought to most things. There were rules about the tunnels and rules about the entryway and rules about tracking mud into the main chamber which was nearly impossible to comply with given that everything was made of mud but the rule existed and was respected in principle.

Carol maintained the rule about the floating things in the rainwater.

The boys maintained nothing officially but showed up every day.

It went on like that through August. The hole did not reach China. Nobody had genuinely expected it to, or perhaps they had in the way you expected things at ten, which was not the same as expecting things at thirty, more like holding the possibility open while doing the work because the work was worth doing regardless and China was as good a reason as any to keep going.

The fort was real.

That was enough.

School started the first week of September. Not a decision. Not an ending. Just a fact that arrived the way facts arrived in that world, on a calendar, without asking.

The hole was still there.

The fort was still there.

The branch roof held through the first fall rain and the second one and probably others after that. The tunnels stayed open into October at least. The interesting rock that nobody could identify sat on the shelf in Trout’s room where he had put it in June and where it would stay until he forgot what it was from.

Nobody filled the hole in.

Nobody went back to finish it either.

China was still down there somewhere, on the other side of everything, exactly as far away as it had always been.

The dirt knew the way.

It just wasn’t saying.

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