AS IT TURNED OUT, WE finished our excavations—me and the pool guys—at about the same time; in no small part because they’d lent me their conveyor belt over the weekend, which enabled me to move earth from the garage into the payload of my truck as fast as I could dig it out. Not that I couldn’t have managed without it—I felt strong, as I said, stronger than I’d felt in years, as if the car and the voice had somehow infused me with super-strength. Nor had my new vitality gone unremarked, especially at Home Depot—which I’d been haunting like a wraith, primarily for support beams—where I was asked more than once what supplements I’d been taking.
Regardless, 48 hours (and several dump loads to my friend’s farm) later, it was done, and I was hosing off what a web search had told me was a 1966
