Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Ice Age
"Permanent plague," Gil mutters, as he swings around the tractor and sets his disk in the sideviews. Worse than corn borers 'cause you can't use chemicals. Worse than drought 'cause hell's bet it'll rain someday. He shakes a cigarette loose from his pack and holds it in his teeth until the lighter clicks out. He never imagined it would go this far, them slapping up houses as fast as toolsheds, filling the whole southern half of his valley. City idiots. They brought the crime and the blacks down on themselves. What ever happened to reap what you sow? If he had his say he'd build the city sky-high, let them all live like chickens stacked in cages. Shit. Gil exhales a thick stream of smoke that mushrooms against the windshield of his cab, obliterating, if only for a moment, the sea of gray-roofed houses in front of him. There's a thought. Where's the old Enola Gay when you need her?
It's 7 a.m. and the traffic is up. Cherokees. Troopers. Ford Rangers. Waiting in line. Blinkers flicking. The sign above them at the stone wall entrance reads, "Fox Hollow Estates ... The Best Of Both Worlds." If things were straight, Gil spits out the window, their cars would be axle-deep in Bill Jorgenson's field.
"You know how this back has been eating at me." Two seasons gone by, and Gil can still see the way Jorgenson looked. His face sagging as if he'd already lost some of what he'd been made of. And Jorgenson hadn't come around the car, but instead, kept six feet of steel between them. "Dana's pushing to move near the grandkids." Gil hadstood silently nodding, popping the joint in finger after finger. No sense in saying anything, Jorgenson knew exactly how he felt. Knew him well enough to read his gestures. He didn't watch the green Chevy back down the drive, but went around the shed and fired up the chain saw. Jorgenson could read the sound of that too.
As Gil nears the south end of his field, he toys with the notion of not stopping. He could run her through the ditch, right on over County Road 18, punch his throttle to the floor, and land his tractor in someone's family room. The thought sets a chuckle gurgling in his throat.
He finishes out his row and turns back north, into the landscape he's known all his life—the pine windbreak off to the northwest, planted by his grandmother when they first got the deed, when the farm was only 160 acres and the "J" in Johnson was still pronounced as a "Y." Now, his stead runs a full 480. The clumped black dirt pocked with last season's cornstalks stretches ahead of him defining his weeks of work. Butting against his land, the Platt farm. Jerry Platt's gray clapboard house, hardly visible with the leaves coming in. Beyond the Platts', the tail end of Wilkens's place, its low spot where water stands in wet years, then the land rising up to meet the sky. There, the swaying line of his horizon that forms the shape of a hog's back, the same hog his father knew, the same, his grandfather.
First it was the rich folks buying up the river bluffs, then the small towns busting their seams, the developers scrambling to buy every scrap piece of land in the thirty miles between the river and the city. Used to be that land had a real value, based on what the soil could produce. But the figures on his land keep rising like floodwater, the taxes going up and up, and what's he supposed to do, squeeze twice the yield? Even so, he'd had a bellyful for any greedy bastard who'd agreed to sell. Rolls of bills where their balls should have been.
That was before his farm held the front line. Up close, he could see reasons more than money why a man might roll over. It was the air that was all wrong, packed full of things that didn't belong. The on-and-on racket of lawn mowers. The smell of a hundred barbecues. Come night, their streetlights blocking out his sky. Not that it was going to make him roll. He'd be stiff as a plank when they got his land.
But now, on top of that whole stinking pile, he has got the fact of the other day to reckon with. He has got the fact of the dinosaurs. Gil sets to concentrating on the disk in his mirrors to keep the whole thing from unnerving him again.
It happened on Wednesday. A slow southerly wind. Gil was standing in his field, watching the sky like he'd done all his life, when he felt an emptiness blow through the valley. Felt it unbalance him like a whiskerless cat. Farming, he'd figured, was a private life. This, to him, was a point of pride. Thing was, through all those days of work, when he'd stop and scan the sky for weather, hoping for rain clouds or hoping against them, there had been part of himself that he'd never known, that relied on Jorgenson doing the same. The fact of rain, or the fact of blue sky, had connected every man in the valley, bound their fates, thicker than blood. It came to him quick as a razor cut. Extinction. Wiped out. Just like the dinosaurs. A slow south wind pushing gray clouds and he felt himself being pushed along with them, though there were his boots sunk in the dirt. He could hear his heart drumming hollow in his ears, feel his breath push against his spine. Ribs widening. Stretching long. His own bones, heaving into hard plates.
Gil tilts his head, stretches his neck until it releases with a pop. At least the dinosaurs never knew what hit them. He ends his pass and turns back south, trying to shake the whole thing off. But he sees it, sixty-five million years back, a meteor the size of his valley, slamming into some ocean, raising walls of water, volcanoes erupting all over the place. Then, the death blow, the dust and ash, blocking out: every last piece of sunlight.
No, he doesn't blame the others like he used to, knowing now how it is to have them in his face, honking and waving at him out in the field as if he were some kind of novelty. The others must have felt it too.
Gil runs a hand over his stubbled head and tugs the bill of his cap back snug. The real son of a bitch is Heim. Just the sound of his name works on his last nerve. His selling was the strike of the match. The rest of them burned like a stand of dry pine. Rassmussens. Rudes. Hinkleys. Smithsons. If he could get his hands on Heim. Destroyed the past and the future all in one.
He can't let it get to him. He should set his thoughts on the work at hand, let his mind drop down into that slot that's like thinking, but not. More like cruise control. With spring so late, he'll be doing dog-time as it is. Being in the field is what he'd itched for. Days on end, the snow falling, while he watched Clint, or girly movies on cable, rereading back issues of National Geographic. Record-breaking accumulation. Couldn't see over the drifts from all the plowing he'd done. Even had to start piling it out back of the shed. Damn it if some isn't still there, a stubborn, dirty, icy mound, the kind that cuts your hands like saw teeth.
The houses loom larger as Gil nears, crazy-angled rooftops spilling down the valley. A jigsaw puzzle with every piece gray. In the road, a young girl racing on a bike. A lady lagging a distance back with another kid strapped in behind her seat. The girl flying smack down the center, weaving between the white lines, and the truck coming fast over the hill.
Gil's fist hits the horn. Sun flashing off spinning spokes. Purple bike. Pink shirt. The girl swerving to the side. The truck wrenching back on course. The girl falling silent as a downed bird.
"Holy fucking shit," Gil shouts over the blaring horn, his fist still slammed into it. The lady rushing up to the girl. The girl's leg bleeding all down her sock. With his heart pounding, he rounds out his turn. The lady, in his rearview, holds her hand up toward him, then lowers it to the base of her throat. "This isn't a playground," he yells over his engine, but the lady continues to wave at him.
Gil shuts down in the middle of the field and lays his head against the seat to give his heart time to slow. The sudden quiet hovers around him. Complete morons. Flaming idiots. He lights a cigarette and fills his lungs, blows smoke at the roof of his cab. The sun barely to nine o'clock, and he's never seen the likes.
The light angles thick across the hog's back. A faint cloud of dirt hangs in the distance. Wilkens. Likely just going about his business. Relaxing. Having a hell of a morning. His mind getting to go wherever it wants. That's the way it used to be. Simple. Get up. Get yourself moving. No distractions. Just step up to the day. It's those kinds of things he'd taken for granted. Didn't know he had them till they were gone.
Christ. Those had been Aggie's words. Gil fires the engine and sets back to work. He hates to hear her voice in his head. He sees her, how she'd appeared in the doorway. He, smack in the middle of his bath. A suitcase in her hand, and Janey standing behind her. The hag. He'll never forgive her that exit, buck naked and to his waist in water. At least he'd had clothes on when Irene left. Both of them harping the same song. Lout. Stingy. And who knows what else. Finding his magazines ripped in half and thrown all over the front porch. All the trouble it took to replace them. And Aggie always bringing his age into things. What did she think, he could stop the seasons and wait for her to catch up to him?
Thank God he's over that hump, though sometimes he wonders what Janey'd be looking like. Hell, what was he supposed to do, show up in court and hang his business out in public? She'd be eighteen by now. Somewhere in Oklahoma, and who knows what kind of lies Aggie pushed on her. Hasn't heard boo in eight years. Eight years is long enough for anything to scar over.
Back then, too, it was the air that threw him. No taste of frying wafting out to the porch. No rose-smelling steam fogging the bathroom mirror. No sound of Jane practicing piano, or floorboards creaking over his head. Dead air. Emptiness. Things that were supposed to be floating around weren't. It was about subtraction then.
Gil flips on a call-in show. They're talking about building a dog track, yes or no? He works his row, turns up another, loses himself, finally hitting his rhythm. Calls from Lakeville. Winona. Star Prairie. Not that he leans either way. You won't find him out there wasting his money. No question, if they build it, it will be full-up. The same fools who go in for those lottery tickets. He sees 'em at the grocers, forking it over, picking their numbers from birthdays and whatnot, knowing all the while the odds are the same they'd be hit by lightning while tying their shoes.
The sun has reached near as high as it will, dropping thin-edged light all around. Gil notes the time and that the north sky has grayed. He watches an arrow of geese pass over, watches their dirt shadows trail across the field, then follows their direction back toward the house.
There's leftover roasted chicken and rice, and chocolate pudding that he'd made that morning. The whir of the microwave turns in his ears while he picks a fork from the can by the sink. He eats in the kitchen, heaping mouthfuls, while watching his show on the portable.
"Geology for eight hundred," the freckled lady says.
Gil sets the entire bowl of pudding in front of him and delicately skims ribbons of skin with a spoon.
"What is a kettle?" Gil says, before the contestants have hit their buttons.
"What is a kettle?" the freckled lady says.
"No, I'm sorry. That's incorrect. Doug? Jennifer? Times's running out. I'm sorry. The correct answer ... What is a drumlin? 'Drumlin' is the term we're looking for."
"Bullshit," Gil says, and moves to the living room taking his bowl of pudding along. He punches up Jeopardy on the big screen and riffles through a pile of magazines. January's issue. "Glaciers on the Move." He runs his spoon down the columns of print until he finds the passage he's looking for. The glacier left myriad lake basins behind ... long sinuous ridges of stream-deposited gravel called "eskers"; ice-block potholes called "kettles"; and curious ice-molded hills called "drumlins."
"Shit. Goddamn." Gil kicks the coffee table. He mutes the TV so he can reread. Most of the article he remembers, how it said that the ice age hadn't really left, that it keeps coming back, reasserting itself, and that people today think this warmth is normal, when really, geologically, it'll last a short time.
He is reading about the properties of ice—that unlike almost every other substance, it is lighter as a solid, than as a liquid, that it produces heat while freezing and absorbs it while melting—when he feels the air shift with another presence, and sees a lady through the oval front-door glass.
"Hi. Excuse me. I hope I'm not interrupting." She looks at the spoon in his hand. "I had to come over and thank you in person. My daughter. She's okay."
Gil sees tears in the lady's eyes and realizes she's the one on the bike. She stands half a head taller than he. A looker, with a long dark ponytail.
"She took off so fast, and I couldn't catch up to her. Her leg and her arm are scraped up pretty bad, I gave her some Tylenol and she slept a couple hours. I don't know how we can ever thank you enough, my God, that was so close, I keep seeing it in my head, if you hadn't been there ..." She starts to cry.
"No bother," Gil says and starts to close the door.
"Wait, I'm sorry," she says, wiping her cheeks. "My husband is stopping for groceries on his way home from work. We really hope you'll come for dinner, he wants to thank you in person, he said, and here, Julie drew this for you. I hope six-thirty isn't too late, you'll come, won't you? If you hadn't been there, oh, God. I promise I'll have stopped crying by then."
Gil stares at the pink construction paper in his hand. He didn't even have time to get a word in, to say yes or no about supper before she ran off. It's a crayon picture of a man in overalls. Near him stands some sort of animal. A cow, Gil figures, too big for a dog. Around the man's head there's a yellow circle with lines reaching out like a sun. "Thanks for bloing your horn and saving me! Julie." On the back, in looping pen it says, Sue and Jeff Mackey. 6:30. 16459 Fox Den Lane. He drops it on the table and goes back to his reading.
Gil surveys the sky from his back stoop, then bends to double knot his bootlaces. He picks up his thermos, pats his pocket for smokes, and walks back into the field. A cool wind is blowing out of the north. He stops and turns his nose to it. No smell of rain. Good. His body feels old climbing up to the cab, and the door heavy, as he swings it shut. Better hit the coffee now if he's gonna make the afternoon. He pours from the thermos to the cup between his knees, lights a smoke, sets his disk, and starts back in. The entire sky has clouded over, blanketing the valley with a quiet weight. The woods on the bluff have a hunkered-down look, and the houses, too, the windows dark blanks, as if everyone over there were taking a nap. Of course, he's not going into one of them places. It would be like having tea with the Japs in '45. What's he supposed to do, just walk right over there? Gil throttles down and sweeps back north.
(Continues...)
