Zach offered a meek chuckle, but neither spoke again as Zach steered the Civic through the dilapidated main street and out the other side, toward his grandfather’s farm.
Courtney stayed in the car. Zach promised a brief introduction to the lawyer and real estate agent, and then they’d be off to Springdale for the night. She picked at her fingernails while the three men stood and talked on the lawn in front of the family farm house, discussing, she hoped, the sum Zach could earn from a sale of the land his father left upon his death. Zach Galen was the last of the family line, his own parents dead from cancer and heart disease, and the farm with all its surrounding fields were now his.
Zach glanced over at the car, and Courtney waved with a return smile. He carried himself with ease, an amateur musician trying to make his way in Kansas City. Once they met, introduced by mutual friends after a show in a smoky club, she lost herself to the easy wave in his hair and the thick dimples that pulled back at the edges of his mouth when he smiled. At least he looked like a rock star.
The other two men appeared grey, maybe an effect of the pale sky. Since leaving the city, the world had looked less colorful, but Courtney couldn’t quite understand. The country air was supposed to be cleaner. Fresh air, clean living, right? She turned around and scanned the empty field behind the car. Clean living.
Zach approached the car and tapped on the window. She lowered it.
“I think we’re going to stay here tonight,” he said.
She opened her mouth, paused, and said, “I didn’t think the Hollow had any hotels.”
Zach smiled. “No, Court. We’re going to stay here, at the farm.” Zach glanced behind him. “Mr. Olson, the realtor thinks it would be a good idea, you know. Make it look like I cared about being part of the town.” He knelt so he could look at Courtney face to face. “It’s only one night, babe. Besides, Springdale isn’t much bigger. Just the one motel with twenty rooms.”
She nodded. “Just the one night.”
“C’mon, I want to introduce you.” Zach opened her door and led her from the car.
As far as Courtney was concerned, the men were bad clones of one another. Grant Olson, identified as such by the name badge he wore, emblazoned by the red and gold logo of Valley Realty, was slightly taller than the lawyer. Both were clad in the same sort of tan-grey suit, the color of which changed in shadow or direct sunlight.
“Gentlemen, this is my girlfriend, Courtney Bauman.”
Courtney winced at the mention of her as “girlfriend” although no more formal descriptor existed. She thought the men bristled a bit too, both glancing down at her stomach when Zach said the word. “Hello,” she offered.
“Grant Olson, but you probably already know that.” He tapped his name badge with pale, waxen fingers.
“Please to meet you, Miss Bauman.” The other man reached out his hand, his fingers painted with the same strange translucence as Olson’s. “My name is Joe Weedeman. Mr. Galen’s lawyer.” He blinked. “The deceased Mr. Galen, that is. Zach’s grandfather.”
She took his hand, surprised that it was warm. Both looked like they wore a good layer of frost.
“They were just telling me about the farm, Court.”
Olson stepped closer to Courtney, gently turning her to face the road across from the house. “I was just about to explain the legend of the hollow field,” he said, pointing toward the empty space just beyond the road.
“All I see is a bunch of dirt,” Courtney said.
The two local men exchanged a quick glance. They smiled. “Exactly the point, miss,” Weedeman said. “But it’s hungry dirt.”
“I don’t like those men,” Courtney said as she undressed. “And I hate these damn pregnancy clothes. This stupid elastic.” She snapped the navy band at the top of her jeans.
Zach wrapped his arms around her from behind, rubbing his fingertips over her bulging belly. “I think you look cute, especially out of the jeans.” He pushed against her buttocks.
“All I feel is fat. Fat and tired.”
Disappointed, Zach released her and grabbed his guitar from the case on the floor. “A lullaby, then.” He began at a moderate pace, finger-picking a gentle tune that soon faded into a slow, quiet rhythm.
Courtney crawled into bed and pulled the comforter around her neck. The house was silent save for the slow vibration of guitar strings. Dark too. She wasn’t used to that much darkness. After tonight, he’ll be ready to go, she thought. She tried to think more, but the trip had worn on her, the music rang too sweet, and she slipped into sleep.
She was in the driver’s seat of Zach’s Civic with her foot smashed against the accelerator. The needle on the speedometer had already crested eighty-five, and now flickered at the bottom of the gauge. Her eyes were stone. Her hands stone upon the steering wheel. Her foot was stone too, crushing the gas pedal.
I shouldn’t drive this fast — the baby. She glanced down at her flat stomach. The baby?
A flash, she lurched, found herself lying on her back, facing the stars. Faces surrounded her, grey, leering faces. They smiled, opened their mouths, and rats writhed out, crawling down dark limbs, pouring toward her —
Courtney woke, sweating, under the pinching discomfort of a Braxton-hicks contraction. “Shit,” she muttered. Zach was gone. When the contraction subsided, she slipped from the bed, bristling at the icy air in the farm house. The place reeked of dirt and mud with years of farm work floating in the air.
She found Zach in front of the picture window in the living room.
“It’s so quiet out here,” he said without facing her.
Courtney moved behind him, reached out to touch him with one hand, but drew back at the last moment. “Come back to bed.”
He nodded, a bobbing black silhouette against the blue-black night sky. “In a minute.” He turned to her, his eyes shimmering for a moment, catching the glint of star light. “Why do you think they call it hollow?” His hand rose and pointed to the field across the road.
Zach’s promised one night had become most of a week. Complications with the will, he said. Trying to squeeze the largest sum from the farmland, he said. Desire to know his grandfather’s land before parsing it out, he said. After four consecutive nights of Broughton’s Hollow Diner fare — the leftovers being both breakfast and lunch the next day — Courtney had enough. “I’m going to that little grocery, the one next to the only gas station in this god-forsaken hole,” she told Zach as she left the house.
He shrugged, eyes fixed across the road.
She took the Civic, leaving Zach on the porch with his guitar resting across his lap. He hadn’t played in three days. He hadn’t done much of anything for the last three days except take long walks around the property. Courtney pushed the accelerator into the floor, throwing a cloud of dust in her wake. She eased off as the car began to fishtail. “Careful, careful. Let it go Court,” she muttered to herself.
On the way into town, she passed one of the four churches. It stood like a battered sentinel on the edge of the village. Paint hung in limp strips and the roof over the front stoop sagged slightly. The marquee was empty save for a dangling lower case t and the permanent St. Joseph’s Church inscribed at the top. Courtney smiled as she drove past. Even the churches look dead around here.
The Hollow’s only grocery store was attached to the town’s only working gas station. Another two empty husks stood idle at opposite ends of the town, their abandoned pumps standing at attention like rusty soldiers from a forgotten war. Courtney circled the village twice before mustering the courage to pull into the parking lot at Earl’s Thriftway. Two older men sat on a bench outside the sliding glass door, both with eyes locked on Courtney as she climbed out of the car.