Tucker’s Grove (33 page)

Then the black locomotive struck the little circles of silver, but it seemed to impact an invisible wall of concrete. The loc
o
motive smashed together, splitting into ribbons of iron. The boi
l
er burst and orange flame erupted from breache
s in its iron-plated side. The wheels ground to a screaming halt as the other seven cars piled up; and then the whole train exploded again, blasting up into the silent starry sky in a rain of shredded metal. I never saw what happened to the shadow of Alan
on the train
—
maybe he was never there in the first place.

I felt the heat and the push of the shock wave. I stood unmo
v
ing, waiting for a big chunk of shrapnel to kill me after all. But nothing did, and I stared at the wreckage for a few minutes, li
s
tening
to the patter and thunk of broken iron falling to the ground.

After a pause, the insects started singing again.

I bent to pick up my dimes and found that both had been fla
t
tened by the locomotive
’
s momentum, smeared out into glea
m
ing silver ovals. I pocketed them with reverence, as if they were talismans, splinters of the cross
—
they would always be special, a part of unreality that would ruin my chances of a career in sc
i
ence.

I barely remember walking back to my car, but as I dro
ve back to town, I got the shakes really bad. Nobody noticed the difference later, though I found I could face Alan
’
s death, now that I had done something about it. Later on, I realized how you selectively learn to forget the things you can
’
t explain.

Ther
e
’
s always junk scattered along the railroad tracks
—
discarded bits of twisted metal, rusted pieces of machi
n
ery
—
but nobody knows what it is or how it got there. Someday, I
’
m probably going to come back to the Locust Road crossing, and I
’
ll look for a piece
of that black locomotive, to keep with my souvenirs of Alan.

“
I can only stay a week, Dad.”
David sounded apologetic. “
The other paleontologists are already out digging in Montana, and they can
’
t function very well without me.”

“
That
’
s okay.”
Arne Christensen gave a nothing-bothers-me shrug. “
I
’
m glad you came at all. It
’
s been so long.”

David opened the cupboard above the sink where Arne had kept the jelly-jar glasses for the past twenty years. He removed a glass and turned on the fau
cet, but only a thin, murky trickle crept out. He looked at it in disgust.

Arne leaned forward in his worn overalls, making the kitchen chair creak. “
The well
’
s gone bad, Davey
—
what comes out tastes like salty muck. I
’
m getting Harry Warner
’
s rig out here
to drill a new one.”

David tasted a drop with a simultaneous smile and grimace. “
It
’
s called
connate water
, Dad
—
fairly unusual. It
’
s the salt w
a
ter from ancient seas, trapped underground when the rocks were formed a couple hundred million years ago.”

“
No w
onder it tastes like dinosaur piss.”

“
You
’
re off by a few years, but no matter.”
David always liked to explain things, and Arne listened with full attention, since he
’
d never had a chance to go to college
—
too much work to do on the farm. Nevertheless, he f
ound the world endlessly interesting, with or without scientific explanations.

Arne smiled, and his single gold-rimmed tooth flashed in the early morning light. He had always (jokingly) watched the gold prices in the paper, threatening to sell his tooth if
things got too bad on the farm. Fortunately, things looked good this year; he had rented out most of the usable farmland, keeping only about ten acres for himself, now that he was alone.

David set the glass back on the cracked Contact paper in the cupboar
d, as if he hadn
’
t actually wanted a drink but simply needed something to do. Arne ran a dirty fingernail along the edge of the flecked formica of the kitchen table. “
What is it your team is doing out in Montana, again? More dinosaur bones?”

David knew the
subject would fascinate his father. “
We
’
re looking into the K-T extinction event. Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs and a whole list of other organisms just
died
, all at once, probably because of an asteroid impact. To find out more details, we h
ave to dig down sixty-five million years and look at the rocks.”

Arne frowned. “
How do you dig down millions of years?”

David relaxed while talking about his work. “
New rock layers are laid down on top of the old ones. Like a stack of bills
—
new ones on top
, oldest ones on the bottom. The deeper down you dig, the further back in time you go.”

Arne
’
s fatherly pride had never dimmed despite David
’
s o
c
casional intellectual coolness. He was proud that his son knew so many things that he himself had never figured
out, although D
a
vid couldn
’
t help but feel superior to a “
hick farmer”
who had no real geology training.

“
But because of upheavals and weathering,”
David continued, “
the past is closer to the surface in some places
—
and it just so happens that sixty-five m
illion years ago is close to the surface in Montana.”

Though the red-winged blackbird
’
s song sounded like an u
n
oiled hinge, Arne enjoyed the flavor it added to the early mor
n
ing peace. Regretfully, he started the generator on the well-drilling rig, drowni
ng out Nature
’
s noises with industrial racket.

David had been away from the rise-at-dawn farm life for many years now, and he was still asleep inside the old house. The well-drilling rig made one hell of an alarm clock, though, ha
m
mering the bore pipe like
a piledriver with a percussive violence.

Thunnngg

The pipe bit into the dirt.

Thunnngg

The rig pounded it below the surface, like a disoriented mole tunneling toward the center of the Earth.

Arne mused to himself, “
I
’
m drilling back in time.”
Though he didn
’
t entirely understand it all, he was fascinated by David
’
s geological analogy. “
Digging down a million years.”
He would chew on the concept as if it were an old piece of tough jerky.

If you went back in time by digging down into the ground,
then were all the people in those underground earth-homes lite
r
ally “
living in the past?”
He grinned at his own joke; he would have to tell it to David as soon as he woke up.

Thunnngg

There, now the rig had sunk the pipe all the way into yeste
r
day.

Thunnn
gg

And the day before.

Thunnngg

Picking up speed in reverse. Now David was still in college, and his mother had just died.

Thunnngg

David a little boy.

Thunnngg

David just born.

Thunnngg

Arne and Elizabeth first married.

Thunnngg

And that was World War II.

Thunnngg

World War I.

Thunnngg

The Civil War.

Thunnngg

The Revolutionary War.

Thunnngg

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Thunnngg

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Thunnngg

Jesus Christ.

Moses.

Thunnngg

The dinosaurs.

Adam and Eve.

Thunnngg

Even though morning coolness still clutched at the air, Arne discovered he was sweating.

Day after day, the rig hammered each section of pipe up to its neck in the dirt. Arne screwed together another section and set the rig in motion again, letti
ng his thin probe bore through the ancient strata.

The work wasn
’
t too hard, nor too monotonous. The hose dumped water down the shaft, and the rig hammered it into muck, pounding the pipe sluggishly downward. Arne pumped up the gray sludge, spilling it acr
oss the sloping farmyard like a dead lake of wet cement.

Two hundred feet down.

Arne
’
s eyes bounced up and down, watching the center pipe in the rig as it rhythmically rose and fell, like the pendulum on the biggest Grandfather clock of all. He could run t
he rig himself, but David did his best to seem helpful (which mostly entailed standing around and talking a lot, keeping his father company). The summer stillness was broken only by his conversation and the cyclic
thunnngg
of the rig.

The insert pipe came
up, spilling battered sludge, but now a glistening black stain swirled in the gray ooze, like a shadow from the past. As clayish mud continued to spew from the shaft, the black became darker. David bent down in the mud and ran his fingers through the blac
k
ooze. “
You just struck coal!”

Arne was both surprised and proud to see his son so willing to get his fingers dirty. “
Coal? Like real coal?”

David sounded like a lecturing teacher again. “
It
’
s not too uncommon to hit a patch of coal when you dig a well, Da
d. This is probably low-grade stuff, but I can take a sample to a friend of mine so he can analyze it.”

Arne was genuinely amazed. “
So, how far back did I drill?”
Seeing David
’
s puzzled look, he added, “
I mean how many years down did I go? To hit the coal?
”

“
Oh.”
David
’
s face looked like a jumble of jigsaw-puzzle pieces falling into place. “
Let
’
s see, coal would be about three hundred million years ago, during the Carboniferous period. Not too bad for six days work.”

Arne beamed. David saw the expression, s
miled, and d
e
scribed the picture for his father. “
Lots of swamps covered the land. Towering fern-trees, giant insects, big lizards. Volcanoes. The air hot and stifling.”
He raised his eyebrows. “
Do you know what the coal is, Dad? Why it burns?”

“
No.”
He kn
ew David wanted to explain it to him.

“
Rocks don
’
t burn. Anything that burns had to be living at one time. Wood burns because trees spend their lives soaking up sunlight, storing
‘
solar power
’
in their trunks. When you burn wood, you release that sun-energ
y again.

“
Coal is from those big steamy swamps of three-hundred mi
l
lion years ago, all the vegetation crushed under layers and layers of rock over time, squeezed and concentrated. When you burn a lump of coal you
’
re releasing 300-million-year-old sunlight.
”