Steve Tem - Excavation

The turbulent descent into Louisville jostled Reed out of his sleep, and from a dream he imagined must have turned bad as soon as he crossed the state line. His father was screaming at him—for one of the usual infractions, although he couldn’t visualize it specifically—his father’s face red in that way that had always frightened him, like a cherry red balloon so full of air it was finally going to explode, leaving pieces of skin and bone all over Reed’s face.

His father’s mouth opened so wide he could see the back of the mouth, the gold-filled molars, the pink and vibrant uvula like a fetus in spasm. And for a brief moment, fantastically, Reed knew that this was no human being’s mouth. His father was going to eat him alive.

Reed opened his eyes wide and stared out the window at the dark sky. The plane tilted sharply as it made its approach, until suddenly it seemed as if Reed were staring straight down into the lights of the city. Two red lights, almost beacons, near the city’s center transfixed him. Like eyes. The luminous twin spaghetti trails of traffic curved beneath his window like a feral grin. He traced the grin on the cool glass with his fingers and chilled. He would be catching the train in an hour, and even then he would be several hours away from Simpson Greeks, probably not arriving until well after dark. But the Creeks would be a familiar smile, he told himself, albeit a lazy one. Nothing ever changed in the Creeks; nothing ever happened there.

Charlie’s Ford almost stalled heading up the hill into town. He had no doubt he was going to make it—the old Ford came within a hair of stalling on that hill every morning—but it was embarrassing, and as he did every morning he checked over his shoulder and looked past the first bridge toward the boarding house to see if Joe Manors was out there on the road laughing at him. He wasn’t, but he’d be out there any minute. But when Charlie gunned the engine the truck shot up the hill, and his pride was secured for another morning.

The town proper had been moved up on this little ridge eighty years ago. It used to be down by the Creeks, only a little ways past the bridge that led to the Pierce place. But that site had proved to be too prone to minor flooding from the Creeks, and so some of the merchants had decided to move it a little higher. The old site was pastureland now, although a curious spirit could still find a lot of the area’s history just by digging into the soil around there. Charlie had done it himself once upon a time, finding old tools and brass buttons, even a cracked glass picture. But the picture was faded; water had near erased it.

Then a couple of kids had been scared real bad down there—Charlie had never been quite sure what it had all been about; from the way they’d described it, it had sounded like a patch of shifting earth, or a bog. “The ground came alive!” one of them had shouted, near to sobbing. There were small bogs here and there all through those mountains, he’d told them. But they’d been real scared—everybody could see that. Then something similar had happened with Ames Nickles’s elder brother. He’d died of a heart attack two hours after being scared there. And Inez herself had claimed seeing lights out there. So nobody went down to the old town site anymore, or excavated much anywhere around the ridge.

And Charlie didn’t either. He thought the fear a bit foolish, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to go down there just the same. “Everything finally comes to life in these hills,” his daddy used to say, and supposedly he’d heard that from his grandaddy. And Charlie Simpson did believe that, he surely did.

Before they moved the town, they built a big slab out of rocks and bricks and mortar—whatever they could find—on the upslope part of the townsite. Then they rebuilt the stores on top of that. The story was this was meant to provide a good foundation—the front part made a sidewalk almost a foot off the roadbed—and in case of heavy rains the muds wouldn’t push out the foundations or rot the wood.

The other, big reason, Charlie thought, was that way they wouldn’t have to dig into that ridge, or even level off any rough spots. Profoundly lazy folk, his forebears. Of course, maybe even then they had qualms about digging down under the Simpson Creeks dirt. You heard about strange things happening—people disappearing or going crazy or two-headed calves being born—all over these hills, as if they were a magnet for anything outside your everyday limits.

In any case the road had sunk some over the years, making the sidewalk pretty high to climb up onto comfortably, so they’d added steps here and there. And the slab itself had been so piecemeal it was getting bad cracks. Jake Parkey had the first house on the left as you went into town—butted up right against the end of that slab—and his wife Doris was always complaining that there were things living inside the slab. Half-crazy, she seemed most of the time. It was too bad; when Jake had married her twenty years ago she was thought to be the prettiest woman around. Women seemed to age quickly in the mountains; the hills took something from them, a little more each year. Doris’s beautiful blonde hair had turned the color of a mud creek stained yellow with mine acid.

She said she could hear them scratching around in there at night. Nobody else could hear them, although during the day you might see a mouse or a harmless black snake crawling into one of the cracks. Doris kept saying that the reason no one else heard them was because they only made noise at night and their house was closest to the slab and besides her Jake slept too soundly to hear anything short of the heavens busting open and the Angel Gabriel coming down into their bedroom. They had a roomer, Mr. Emmanuel, a mining inspector with the Nole Company Mines, but he was gone a great deal of the time.

The Nole Company was responsible not only for the flood of years back, but for the gray- and rust-colored backdrop to the town: row upon row of two- and three-room shacks stacked up the sides of the ridge all the way to the Nole’s hills of mine waste sitting above the town. These cabins had been for the miners when the Nole Company was booming; now all but a few were empty.

As Charlie Simpson drove into town he always took a long look at the Parkey place, seeing if that Mr. Emmanuel was around. He’d never trusted that Emmanuel fellow; he was an odd bird. Dressed like someone from the city, even when he was working. Dark skin and a too-neat mustache, tight corduroy pants, and always a tweed or a corduroy coat. He’d even seen the man wearing one of those two coats with his jeans. The other reason he looked at the Parkey place, of course, was to avoid looking at the two abandoned buildings across the street. First one was the old Simpson Hotel, pretty elegant for those parts, a Victorian structure run by his grandfather and now boarded up, the entire second and third stories a tangle of charcoal and the harder support beams that had escaped the ‘38 fire. The other was just an empty storefront, container for a variety of businesses over the years, from a furniture maker’s to an old lady’s confectionery. It made him sad to look at them; they hadn’t been occupied in years, making them sure signs that all growth in the Creeks had stopped and wasn’t likely to continue. He thought about them the same way he thought about headstones.

The first building up on the slab, right next to the Parkey place, was Ben Taylor’s Feed Store. He had a house about fifty feet behind it, on a plot his daddy’d dug out of the slope there. The Taylors always had a hard time of it; they had never been too well off, and during the flood Ben’s brother Alec and his family had all been drowned, most of the property washed away. All but Alec’s boy Reed, Charlie reminded himself. Reed had run away a few years before and hadn’t been heard from since. Charlie had heard Alec Taylor had been a big man with a whip, and most people seemed to think Reed had made the right decision. Ben Taylor was another case entirely—a large, strong man, but there wasn’t a gentler soul ever born. Charlie had always been impressed by the kind way Ben handled Doris Parkey’s goings on. Doris would be in Ben’s store most everyday asking him if he had heard things under the slab. Ben would always scratch his head with one of those great big hands of his, and you could see his face getting soft as dough as he’d say, “Well, now there might have been something a few days ago, Missus Parkey, but I’ve been so busy I didn’t really notice. But I suspect you’re much more knowledgeable about them things than I am.” Then he would always promise to try to notice better next time.