“No, Wesley.” She stuck out a hand as though to brace his chest. “You know better than to get near Miss Splitz’s excavating machine so soon after surfacing. It’s a big old unpredictable cottonmouth ‘til it cools some. Look!” She felt a rush of longing as jets of steam escaped the rivets of the roof hatch. “Even those inside take their time when exiting,” she murmured.
The roof hatch cranked up. Aunt Josephine was first to emerge, un-crumpling herself as she went with all the decorum of a farm hand. She dropped heavily onto the ground, agitating the dust. For a brief moment, she applied her thumbs to her spine and arched backwards. Then she made for the front of the vehicle, kicking out stiff legs as she walked.
Carrie-Anne’s gaze returned to the roof hatch. He was visible now as a coil of flesh that stretched out to become a tall, thin figure. Her heart got hot at the sight of him. He raised a hand to wave.
There wasn’t chance to respond. Her aunt was shouting and gesticulating towards the huge steaming drill. Virgil answered her and threw an arm towards the house.
He’s waving her away, thought Carrie-Anne admiringly.
Sure enough, the old maid turned heel and began to stomp towards the house.
Carrie-Anne watched Virgil slide down off the Burrower’s roof. With his shirt sleeves rolled and one suspender dangling loose from his waist, he strode up to the drill and dipped under it, one arm raised as a shield against the heat. Virgil’s in-depth mechanical knowledge made Carrie-Anne aware of her own internal workings; he seemed to grasp them too. And while she wanted to keep her eyes on him, her aunt was already at the garden gate.
“...peach of a ride ‘til we hit that friggin’ boulder. Now the damn drill’s breached. Virgil best check the depth of those gorges good and proper else I’ll be roastin’ his sweet cherry ass on old Bessie.” Aunt Josephine plonked down on the porch steps, untied her boots and kicked them off. She didn’t falter in her monologue. “...not like we weren’t prepared. Hit wet sand and Virgil was gonna switch from steam to soot mix, gloop the walls to stop them caving in. But we didn’t find one patch of moisture. ‘Course it’s bone dry up here on the surface. Just the same, no water bodies, not even fifty foot below? It’s strange. Not strange, it’s unnatural.”
The old woman stopped prattling suddenly. Her hooded gaze fell on Wesley.
“Help your momma black the stove?”
Wesley sucked his lip and nodded.
“Kept the dirt from growin’ between them fat little toes?”
The kid caught a foot up in a hand and used his fingers to scoop between the toes.
“Am all clean, Miss Splitz.”
The old woman gurned at him and he giggled.
“Here.” She held out a fist.
Wesley dropped his foot. He ran over, offering up cupped hands, and Aunt Josephine opened her fist over them.
“Thank you, Miss Splitz.” The boy eyed his prize then pocketed it.
Carrie-Anne smiled; she knew the ritual. The treasure was a mundane stone recovered from several miles below ground. Wesley would add it to his collection.
Hand on the stair rail, Aunt Josephine levered herself up. Stalking over to the front door, she paused to cut her eye at Carrie-Anne.
“Told lover boy you’d’ve shacked up with a new fella by now.” She slung her gaze over to the field where Virgil had shifted his attention to the cooling engine.
Carrie-Anne felt panic worm between her eyes.
Her aunt must’ve noticed.
“He missed you,” she relented, and shouldered the flyscreen door and disappeared inside. Wesley followed after like a child bound to a witch by invisible silken thread.
Carrie-Anne rested her forehead against the corner strut. Eyelids lulling, she watched the ghost of a man at work out in the field. Minutes passed. He became less and less solid. Late afternoon ebbed and swelled around her. A cicada soloed ahead of the insect symphony at sundown. Through the open bathroom window, she could hear Aunt Josephine’s prattle and the slow pour from a water jug as Julie endeavoured to clean up her mistress. Wood creaked; to Carrie-Anne, it was the sound of the house groaning under the weight of memories impregnating its walls. She listened past the familiar sounds of her environment, out to the dusting plateau of farmland and the 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.