I didn’t reply. We drove on in silence, both of us lost in our own thoughts. Carl whipped around a fallen tree limb and turned into my lane. As we drove through the hollow, I looked out on the flooded pasture and froze.
“Carl, stop!”
He slammed the brake pedal and the truck fishtailed, skidding to a halt.
“Take a look at that.” I pointed out the window.
In the middle of the pasture, amidst the water puddles and mud, was a hole much bigger than the one in my backyard. A trenchlike track marked where something had slithered out of it and crawled away through the mud. It looked like the marks a snake would make—if the snake were as thick as a cow.
“Something weird is going on, Teddy. That ain’t a normal hole.”
“Anybody ever tell youthat you’re the master of understatement?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I sighed. “Let’s just go have a look at that track. Best bring your rifle.”
We stepped out into the rain again and walked into the pasture. We hadn’t gone five steps before we sank into the mud up past our ankles.
Carl pulled his foot free with a loud sucking sound, and shook the mud off of it.
I chuckled. “At least you didn’t lose your shoe again.”
“This is no good, Teddy. We’re gonna get stuck out here.”
Reluctantly, I agreed with him. I took one last look at the hole and noticed the rainwater was running down inside it. Already, the walls of the hole were collapsing. I thought about Steve Porter’s missing hunting cabin again and what had happened to Carl’s house.
As long as it doesn’t get closer to mine, I thought.
“Let’s go on home and get dry,” I said, slogging back to the truck. “I’ll fix us some dinner. And I reckon you’d better sleep here, on account of your house caving in and all.”
Carl looked grateful. “That’d be good. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I was hoping you’d offer. I sure do appreciate it, Teddy.”
I waved my hand. “Don’t mention it. That’s what friends are for. Can’t very well let you sleep outside in the rain. Besides, it’ll be good to watch each other’s backs.”
“You mean from Earl? You think there’s gonna be trouble?”
I nodded. I did think Earl Harper was going to be trouble. But I was thinking about other things as well. I was thinking about that white fuzz I’d seen in the woods and what I’d heard crashing around after me. I was thinking about holes and bloodstains and trails of white, glistening slime that smelled like sex.
And worms. I was thinking about worms.
Worms big enough to eat a bird.
I was thinking about the things that grow up out of the dust of the earth and destroy the hope of man.
CHAPTER FOUR
For the second time that day (well, the third for me, and the second for Carl), we shrugged out of our wet clothes and put on some dry ones. Lucky for him we were about the same size and he could pull stuff out of my closet. Our boots were soaked clean through, and I cranked up the kerosene heater and sat them next to it to dry out. Then, while Carl propped his bare feet up and flipped through a four-month-old copy of American Sportsman, I fixed us dinner in a pot on top of the heater: a hodge-podge stew of canned deer meat, beans, carrots, tomatoes, and corn. The aroma filled the house, and both our stomachs grumbled in anticipation. My mouth was watering.
I brought the battery-operated tape player into the living room and put on some music, one of those compilation tapes you could buy at the Wal-Mart for a dollar, with bluegrass and country music for old folks like us. When the stew was ready, we ate in silence, listening to Porter Wagoner’s “Misery Loves Company,” Marty Robbins’s “El Paso City” (the version from the 70s, rather than his 50s song “El Paso”), Claude King’s “Wolverton Mountain,” the Texas Playboys’s “Rose of San Antoine,” and Henson Cargill’s “Skip A Rope.” Carl joined in with Waylon Jennings for a trip to “Luckenbach, Texas” and wailed about getting back to the basics of love while I suffered and wished for some cotton to put in my ears. He sounded like a cat in a burlap sack that had just been tossed into a pond after being dragged across a hot tin roof. For an encore, Carl sang along with Jack Green on “There Goes My Everything,” and I finally told him to be quiet and eat his supper. He did, accompanied by burps and slurping noises.
Despite his terrible singing voice and even worse table manners, it felt good to have him there. I hadn’t realized just how lonely I’d been until his arrival. I was surprised that we didn’t talk more during that dinner. For the last few weeks, Carl only had his dog to talk to and I’d been conversing with myself. You’d think we would have been a pair of Chatty Sarah dolls, but we weren’t. The only sounds we made were the grunts and sighs of contentment when we’d finished. I guess we didn’t need to talk. It felt good just to have somebody there with me. To know that there was somebody else still alive.
Carl pushed his empty paper plate away and let out a window-rattling belch.
“Liked it, did you?” I asked.
“My compliments to the chef. So, what do you think happened to all the folks that got evacuated? All of our friends, I mean? Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they took them to White Sulphur Springs.”
White Sulphur Springs had once been the site of the underground Pentagon. I don’t know if that’s what it really was, but that’s what the locals called it. It was a government base carved into the limestone beneath the mountains; an impregnable, indestructible concrete and steel bunker that supposedly would be used to house our elected officials in case of a nuclear war. Vice President Cheney had gone there on September 11th, when the country came under attack. They had bunkers like that all over the country back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, before Ronald Reagan won the Cold War; back when Iraq was still our friend and George Bush, Sr. was attending cocktail parties with Saddam Hussein. I knew of one near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and another in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, and a third in Gardner, Illinois. And then there was the NORAD base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. But the one in White Sulphur Springs was ours, and we had a strange pride about it, even after it was decommissioned and opened up to tourists. Of course, Earl Harper said it wasn’t really decommissioned and was now being used as an advance staging area for United Nations security force invaders. But then again, Earl said the same thing about Fred Laudermilk’s grain silo down in Renick.
Carl undid the top button of his pants and patted his stomach. He sighed with contentment. “That was a fine meal, Teddy. Best I’ve had in quite awhile. I’m fit to burst.”
“Glad you liked it. If we ever run into Nancy again, we’ll have to compliment her on her canning abilities. Most of that was food I took from her cupboard.”
“I reckon so.”
“We’ll have the leftovers for breakfast. And I won’t even make you do the dishes.”
Carl looked around the kitchen. “What have you been doing with the paper plates, anyway?”
“Throwing them outside.”
“But Teddy, that’s littering!”
I pointed to the window. “Do you think it really matters at this point?”
“I guess not. Don’t suppose Smoky the Bear will be showing up anytime soon.”
He was right about one thing, though. It had been a good meal. Damn good. And now I was craving some tobacco again. I think the nicotine desire is at its very worst after you’ve eaten.
To distract myself, I cleared the paper plates and Styrofoam bowls from the table and put them in the trash. I’d been carrying the garbage bags down to the tree line once a week, and tossing them into the forest. Broke my heart to do so because, like Carl had said, it was littering. But I couldn’t just let it pile up inside the house, and burning it outside like I used to do just wasn’t possible anymore.