Holes

As they approach the mountain, Stanley and Zero start to use weeds on the ground to help with their footing. Even though Stanley needs to rest, he’s “afraid they’d never get started again” (168). Zero throws up and gnats surround the puke, which helps Stanley realize they must be close to water if there are weeds and bugs around. After this realization, Zero collapses.

Stanley lifts Zero over his right shoulder and carries him the rest of the way. He feels “strength somewhere deep inside himself…as if the rock had absorbed his energy and now acted like a kind of giant magnet pulling him toward it” (170). Stanley keeps searching for water, and after he slips in mud, realizes that water is necessary to make mud. He digs a hole in the wettest mud he can find and manages to drink water from it. Stanley drizzles water on Zero’s face. As Stanley continues to dig, he finds an onion in the mud and eats half of it. He gives the other half to Zero.

The next day, Zero doesn’t seem to be getting better. Even though Stanley wants to get their supplies, he is afraid Zero will die while he is gone. However, Stanley did walk the last few steps to touch Big Thumb. When he returns to Zero, Zero tells him that he is the one who stole Clyde Livingston’s shoes from the shelter, but that he didn’t know that the shoes were important. Stanley doesn’t believe Zero and thinks he is delirious. As Zero falls asleep, “Stanley softly [sings] him the song that had been in his family for generations” (175).

The story has a flashback to when Sam was selling onions more than 100 years ago. Mrs. Gladys Tennyson runs to Sam to tell him that his onion tonic saved her daughter from a terrible stomach sickness.

In the present, Stanley realizes that the mountain is covered in onions. He and Zero eat onions and sleep for the next couple of days. Zero is still sick but seems to be getting better, so Stanley leaves to get the shovel and the bag of jars that he left farther down the mountain. He keeps feeling as though he has gone too far while looking for the supplies because “it would have been impossible to have carried Zero up the hill” from where Stanley was looking (181). After a while, Stanley finds the supplies and then struggles to make his way back up the mountain.

Zero tells Stanley about how he was homeless but avoided shelters because he didn’t want to become a ward of the state. Zero had needed new shoes, so he had taken the ones on display at the shelter without realizing they were Clyde Livingston’s because he couldn’t read the sign next to the shoes. When Zero realized the shoes were important because people were looking for them, he wore them out of the shelter and then put them on top of a car. The next day, Zero was arrested for trying to steal a new pair of sneakers.

About a week after Stanley and Zero make it to Big Thumb, Stanley realizes he is happy, and “it occurred to him that he couldn’t remember the last time he felt happiness” (186). Zero had said that none of this would have happened if he hadn’t taken the shoes from the shelter, but Stanley believes that what had happened was “more than a coincidence. It had to be destiny” (187). Stanley thinks about how their lives would be better with some money and remembers finding Kissin’ Kate Barlow’s golden lipstick tube. He wakes Zero up and tells him they need to dig one more hole.

On the way back to the camp, Zero tells Stanley more about his upbringing. Stanley has a lot of questions but keeps them to himself because “Zero didn’t like answering questions” (190). Zero tells him about how his mother would leave him alone in certain areas and that he would have to wait for her to return, until one day she didn’t return at all. Zero stayed at Laney Park, a park that Stanley had been to before, for more than a month waiting for his mother. As they walk, Zero and Stanley try not to drink a lot of water and debate if they are going in the correct direction. After a while, they make it back to the camp and find the hole in which Stanley found the gold lipstick tube. They wait in the hole for the camp to go to sleep.