Dig, Page 2

CHAPTER ONE

  Loretta Gates

  The sun was hot by 9:00 and there was already a thick, soupy quality to the air. Loretta Gates stretched to ease a hitch in her back. Dark patches of sweat grew in the armpits of her brown PEACE t-shirt and along the waistband of her gray capris. It dripped into places she didn’t like to mention. Loretta was a woman who never married, was never loved by anyone but her father and who never grew close enough to a friend, lover or otherwise to have such discussions. She didn’t speak of such things with her own doctor if it could be helped.

  She worked for thirty years in a textile mill that sat on the west bank of the Cape Fear River and retired at fifty-six. Pretty as a young woman, the years of hard work were now mapped onto her face and hands, but she was still an intimidating figure, never fragile. She had lived in the same hulking, pine-log house outside of the small port town of Smithville, NC since she was born. Her mother passed when she was still in grade school, her father, when she was thirty-five, back in 1977. Since then, she’d lived alone. She was accustomed to it and she also liked it that way.

  In the early 1800’s, the Gates family had owned eight hundred and ninety-two acres on the backside of what was now Leonard Street. Her great grandfather sold most of it to fuel his habits and to build and maintain his obsession—workings that she herself was still using. Her grandfather, known to her as Poppa Rob, hung on with broken teeth and torn nails to the last sixty acres all through the Great Depression.

  Robert Jr., Loretta’s father, refused to sell a single square inch of land when the good old American subdivisions came through and began to populate the area in the 1960’s. Once that development was done, her childhood home sat just across the highway from the north end of 11th street, Smithville, North Carolina, US of A. That was where she was today—June 24th, 2005—sweeping the ever-falling, goddamned pine straw from her front walk.

  Her family home was only a few miles from the ocean, even closer to the Intracoastal Waterway. She enjoyed the salty breezes and the smell of decaying cypress, the smell of the pines and the buzzing of insects. Loretta walked down to the waterway often, checking on the progress of summer tourism and hating it. They had no business in her small town. No business at all.

  Occasionally, she bought ice cream from a young local man who sold out of a truck at the park next to the fishing pier. It was the one treat she allowed herself and it was when she ate her ice cream that Loretta thought back about her life. She was sixty-three years old, almost sixty-four. A long time to be alone, but Loretta reckoned she had it just about perfected.

  The thieves came often. They dressed as real estate agents, as developers, as contractors looking to subdivide her property and put a nice shopping center or an assisted living community or apartments on her land. One came dressed as a preacher asking if she might donate a portion of the land so he might build a church. “It would set you right with the Lord, Miss Gates,” he had said.

  “Me and the Lord aren’t on speaking terms, mister,” she told him. “And I’m all right with that.” She punctuated the statement with a snap of the latch on her front door and hadn’t even watched out the window to see him leave. She was busy. There were things to do.

  They all had the same story. Each of those thieves said her land was nothing but scrub oak and pine trees. Sand and fire ants. She ought to sell. There was no need to keep living there, an old lady like herself. She would be much more comfortable if she only had a small apartment to care for. Somewhere closer to family, closer to convenience. They were all being generous—they had her best interest in mind.

  “Aw, hell, Miss Gates. This land ain’t worth half of what we’re offering you,” a smug Jackson W. Arnett had told her. He stood right there on her front porch and said it, the wrinkled, tanned skin around his eyes looking like cobwebs cut into gingerbread dough. He was sweating, she remembered, as the day had been powerful hot. Hellish.

  Loretta looked at the rude, damnable man and smiled, watching a bead of sweat drip from his forehead and follow the cobwebs to his chin where it finally fell to his white shirt in a translucent splat. Then, just like her father had done in the sixties, she said in no uncertain terms, “Mr. Arnett, please go on back to wherever you come from and shove your money straight up your ass. This land is Gates’ land, and until the earth comes up and swallow it whole, Gates’ land it will always be.”

  The thought brought a crooked grin to her face as she swept the walk and pulled weeds from her flower beds. It faded when she got a sand spur caught in the side of her sandaled foot.

  “Ooh, shit on all you little bastards,” she said. It sounded like bar-stids, but bastards was her intention.

  There was no breeze that day. The only movement in the stifling, wet air came when a car drove by and stirred up the grit from the road. It silenced the cicadas, birds and other creatures for a moment but as the dust settled and the world seemed almost still in the heat, the animals got back to their songs. She mopped her forehead with a rag and then tucked one end of it into her back pocket to dangle like and off-center tail.

  Once she was satisfied her walk was swept free of fallen pine needles and various other debris, satisfied the weeds that invaded her flower bed on the house side of that walkway were pulled and discarded, satisfied things were in order as she defined it, Loretta put curled fingers to her hips, made a HUMPH noise and the crooked smirk came back to her face.

  “Job well done, ‘Retta,” she said right out loud to no one.

  Up on her porch, a plank wood deck covered by an extension of the log home’s roof, she gathered a dust pan and went back to the walk to scoop up the pile she had swept. Once it was all in the pan, she walked it out to the edge of the property and dumped it into the drainage ditch to be rinsed away with the next rain.

  Another car drove by, followed by another, then a third. The last one was dented and painted blue where it wasn’t rusty. Heavy Metal played so loud the panels of the vehicle rattled and all to the joy of the teenagers inside. Each had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “Hey baby!” one shouted, followed by whistles, laughter and some howls.

  She knew they were joking. Boys didn’t whistle at old women. In point of fact, no man had whistled or howled at her in near forty years. They were ignorant forty years ago and in Loretta’s estimation, not much had changed. She waved after them like she was shooing a stray dog, a frown on her face.

  “You’ll get yours, boys,” she said, and mopped her brow with the rag again. “Karma is a bitch.” She believed that, had seen it in person. “A bigger bitch has yet to be met.”

  A glance in each direction showed no traffic on the road and she walked across her street to the mailbox. She retrieved a few pieces of junk mail, a renewal slip for her newspaper subscription and a bill from the electric company. “Bah,” she said.

  Back on her porch, Loretta placed her broom and dust pan in a Rubbermaid locker that sat at one end. She surveyed the flower bed and walkway once more before going inside. Everything was in its place. Appearance was everything to those people out there. The thieves never looked beyond it. If she slipped up, even just a little, they would come in and take her home away. She knew they would. They would find any excuse to steal from her.

  “Job well done,” she said again and shut the door.

  Inside the house, Loretta fanned herself with the rag from her pocket, thankful for the air conditioning. Her home was comfortable, large and with plenty of natural light. The back of the main room went up two stories into the A-framed roof and was windowed near all the way to its peak. A loft looked out over the acres of woodland that made up her back yard and was her favorite place to sit and think. There was a chair up there with a small side table. She liked the birds and the wildlife that came through, foraging for food. The animals never came right up close to the house, but close enough that she could watch through her binoculars. They sat on the table next to an orchid in a small vase. Often, she sat up there and watched out
those windows at the hummingbirds or the lizards that skittered along the ground and up the trees.

  There was a pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator and she filled a glass from it before planting her bottom in her swivel bar stool next to the window. Time to rest. Time to watch the animals. Time to relax. She would have done just that if the smell hadn’t hit her. A thick smell, pungent and painful to inhale like sulfur and something burning. It caused her eyes to water, but it caused no alarm as the scent was familiar and it filled her with equal parts of exhilaration and dread.

  “Ugh,” she sighed. “Ain’t never a moment’s rest round here.”

  She gulped the cold, sweet liquid and then set the glass down. Beads of condensation fell from the sides of the vessel to the butcher block counter and pooled there as Loretta walked back to her bedroom, the same bedroom where her father had slept, where Poppa Rob had slept, and where his father had slept. She opened the closet and pulled a pickaxe and shovel from their resting places in the corner, then a pair of leather gloves from a shelf on the side wall. With the gloves on, Loretta tossed the tools up over her shoulder and then leaned over to pull up on a wrought iron ring. The old hatch groaned opened on ancient springs, but then held steady like an obedient soldier. There were steps in front of her that lead down into the darkness, and into that familiar stink.

  She descended them, and felt the stench grow thicker, filling her head with urgency and thoughts best not thunk—violence, depravity, selfish, terrible acts. She yanked open a small metal electrical panel and flipped six breakers inside. Light flooded the area around her, then further down fluorescent lamps flickered to life. Beyond that, individual bulbs hung on strands of green wire just like Howe Street during the holidays.

  The stairs ended at a three-foot-wide earthen walkway that hugged the wall of a giant stone tube some fifty feet across. The walkway snaked downward like the inner threads of a steel nut, spiraling into the ground as far as she could see. Beyond that, the cavern turned and twisted and Loretta ventured along the path, down lifts and rickety ladders which were illuminated by the strung up lights—actual Christmas lights at the bottom—but those lights only carried her so far. For the rest of the trip, she needed lanterns. Lanterns that were placed, along with boxes of batteries, in strategic locations.

  The walk ate up almost two hours. It was a five mile hike if you measured, but three miles straight down into the earth was a fair estimation. It was cool down there and smelled like the charred remains of a campfire mixed with rot and sulfur. At the bottom, she found the place where she had left off the day before. Another lantern waited for her along with another box of batteries. She set her tools down, all but the shovel, clicked on a second lantern and just like her father, her Poppa Rob, his father and three other generations before her, Loretta began to dig.