drone of nothingness.
Her flesh crackled. Her eyes shot wide.
Virgil stood on the porch a couple of paces away.
Carrie-Anne’s first reaction was indignation at his materialising like that when she expected to watch him approach from the distance of the field, to get used to him closing in. Her anger was blunted by the sight of him, hands and forearms etched in coke dust, shirt savaged at the neck. Lifting her eyes, she saw a death mask of skin so terribly white and dried to the bone. He went against what common decency said a man should look like. Yet his was a salt-preserved masculinity which made her drip away from herself.
Carrie-Anne let go of the strut and wrapped her arms around her waist. Virgil kept on staring. She felt transparent.
“Lose your tongue as well as your mind this trip, Virgil Roberts?”
He smiled and the death aspect was replaced by tangible sensuality. Now she saw a slender man with well- worked shoulders, high cheekbones and generous lips in need of moisture. Only his eyes remained strange with their misted irises and pupils gone over from black to lead grey.
“I was drinking you in, Carrie-Anne Valentine,” he said quietly.
The gauze door yawned on its hinges and Wesley emerged from the house.
“Yu Gin Sour, Mister Roberts.”
The glass was offered up. Virgil gulped from it, his gaze on Carrie-Anne. She felt his stare graze her flesh like a steam burn.
Bromide had been parched for months now, and in spite of its draw as a spa town not fifteen years past when the railroad carved through the district and millionaire, Robert Galbreath, found a hole into which to sink his oil money. Back then the town supported three general stores, two drugstores, a bank, a meat market, two hardware stores, two restaurants, a blacksmith’s and a dry goods. Four grand hotels wined, dined and bed-timed. A public bath house doused and rinsed. Meanwhile, Bromide’s unique geology gave rise to a cotton gin and yard, a rock crusher and quarry, a wagon maker, a sawmill, a gristmill, and even a bottler who shipped out the medicinal waters.
But fame is nothing if not fickle. Come 1930, folk moved further afield. As quickly as it was raised, the town was brought to the ground. The excursion trains were cancelled, the bank closed, the hotels emptied. Five years more and Bromide looked set to simply blow away like a handful of dust.
Knees in the dirt, Reg Wilhoit wondered which piece of his town’s history he worked up beneath his fingernails. Not much left to see of old Bromide now. Just slim pickings like the Baptist Church, a double-doored cattle barn of a place built of the usual dreary stone whose pews were regularly buffed, as if that would be enough to wipe the grime offa the place. There was the shack of the Post Office, which stank of old maid and kerosene given Mrs Johnson’s partiality to warm her knees by a stove. And there were another forty or so dwellings still bothered by human breath. Mostly though, ruins scattered a three mile radius, like markers to a ghost town.
“Ya need a hand there, Mister Wilhoit?”
The old man shone his eyes up. Preacher Richards’ boy blocked out the sun.
Reg could guess how he looked to the kid. Seat of his pants patched. White cotton candy hair around a craggy face. Bent over like that. A marionette cut from its strings.
“Them calipers giving you gyp? Come on.” Ben stuck out a hand the size of a rib steak. “Let’s be havin’ you.”
“I’m fine, I tell ya.”
Reg tossed out a fistful of dirt; luckily for Ben, no wind meant it sifted back down to the ground rather than flick up into his eyes. Not that the kid noticed.
But he wouldn’t, mused Reg. Nice boy like that would’ve been raised with Preacher Richards’ good grace. Yet sometimes manners got in the way. He wished to hell the kid’d kept on walking and not had to go and play Samaritan.
“Move it along, kiddo. Got a cramp in this knee’s all.” Sidewaysing onto his ass, Reg rapped one of the steel side bars of his left leg brace.
The Preacher’s son offered him a big dumb smile. But there was a wary glint to the eye.
“Alright then, Mister Wilhoit. I’ll just be at the store getting’ Momma her sewing notions. Hollerin’ distance if you need me.” Ben pointed to the far end of Main. Reg squinted over at the rubble shack of the General Store, one of a handful of buildings to survive fire or abandonment and keep on serving what was left of the community. Same way it always had.
The old man said nothing, just stayed still as a tombstone, ass in the dirt.
“Alright then,” repeated the lad. He tipped his cap and set off, letting the sunlight back in like a holy blaze.
Reg watched him go. Then he bent forward and dug his fingers into the dry dirt again.
Virgil drove his knife through the pork. Eying the mashed potatoes, gravy, black-eyed peas, and collard greens, he pressed a little of everything onto his fork.
“Fine pork shoulder, Julie,” he announced as the maid re-entered the room carrying a jug of iced water. “You get it from Bobby Buford’s farm?”
Julie flashed her generous smile. “Bobby Buford’s, Mister Roberts. Quality hogs he’s got penned. Decent price he charges too, ‘cept we always exchange goods of course. Mister Bulford, he’s all gone on my cornbread and fresh picked tomatoes. It’s so warm, see. I got to planting unseasonably early.”
“Sure is a helluva dry spell. Not that visitors to Boar House would notice with a garden this lush.” Virgil leant in on his elbows, knife and fork laid over one another like a silver cross. “How’d you do it, Julie? How’d you grow vegetables and herbs like you do when the field opposite is shredding its epidermis quicker than a rattlesnake?”
“’Cause I designed the best irrigation system in the state. And ‘cause Julie gets a big ole milk churn and hauls ass to the well night and day to keep the system’s water butts topped up.” Jos jammed her own elbows onto the table. “Sissy boy like you’d struggle to lift that churn five yards.”
“Better a sissy boy than a bad-tempered gasbag,” shot Virgil from the opposite end of the table.
Jos got a sour twist to her mouth. “Better a bad-tempered gasbag than an incompetent navigator.”
“Oh, come on now!” Virgil was peppered on the inside. His skin got some colour to it. “Much as I’d love to look into a crystal ball and know what’s gonna hit before we get there, you know as well as me we can hit waterlogged sand or a boulder anytime underground. Because of water pockets, we got the soot mix, and as backup, the tar tap. Because of boulders, we got a Tungsten Carbide drill bit.” He raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you need an early night, Jos? All this hard work and staying up late is bound to make an old crone cranky.”
Jos stabbed at her greens. She ladled in a mouthful and chewed it up into one cheek. “It’s your job to survey the route. Establish the orientation of bedding planes and steer us clear of joints in the rock,” she insisted, adding aside, “Julie, you go get your supper now.” Her gaze cut back to Virgil. She swallowed the mouthful. “We hit that last stretch of gravel hard and we hit it clumsy. Now we gotta pray there ain’t a hairline fracture in the bit.”
Virgil dug in fingers at his hairline. “And if there is, it’ll blow itself and us to kingdom come.” He dragged his hands back over his scalp. “I got my nose into every inch of the Burrower this afternoon. Like the one who built her, she’s a tough old bird.”
He allowed himself a smile. Sure, he was smarting that Jos felt the need to pin the blame on him – and maybe if he’d surveyed the field’s surface for the thousandth time, he’d have guessed at that curl of gravel a few hundred yards below. But, no... Virgil kept his smile in place. Deep down, he knew there was no magic way to see exactly what lay in the Burrower’s path, only estimations based on months’ worth of surveys of the rock formations up top. He also knew that while Jos’d take a bullet before she’d admit it, they were both dog tired – which was why their usual banter had a caustic edge.
Luckily, there was Carrie-Anne to agitate the atmosphere.
“You know, Aunt Josephine, there hasn’t been a scrap of wind these past four days you and Virgil have been down under. Not a scrap. Still the dust creeps in under the doors and windows. I was up before cockcrow this morning. When I saw a fresh layer over this place, my first thought was how come there’s any ground left for the Burrower to dig through?” Carrie-Anne threw out her hands to indicate the panelled dining room, and, presumably,
