CENSUS_What Lurks Beneath

by Marshall Cobb

  “I had a strange conversation with a neighbor. He made it sound like some bad things had taken place on the property. I got curious and did some digging. I guess I didn’t realize the McAlester stuff had gone down on my property—before it was divided up.”

  Wayne stood up and walked the short distance to the coffee maker seated on a side table. The power button was off. With his assistant not on the premises there was no telling how cold, and how old, the coffee in the pot was. Wayne picked up the pot and sloshed the coffee therein toward Dave, who shook his head no in reply. Wayne grabbed one of the nearby mugs and filled it, took a big slug, and then sat back down.

  “Yeah. That was right around the time I’d moved out here from Dallas. That McAlester kid killed his family while they slept and then burned the

  house down around them. Thought God told him to do it or something like that.”

  “They executed him a couple of months ago.” “I heard that.”

  They stared at each other for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time. Wayne was right—Dave was tired. Tired, and now a little leery about dumping his dirty laundry in front of Wayne. Wayne was going to want all the specifics and Dave did not have any.

  You say you have pictures of someone killing a deer—where are the pictures? You’re telling me there wasn’t a single shot that showed the person?

  How’s someone decapitate a wild deer?

  Did it just stand there when someone showed up with a samurai sword?

  “I guess I’m just surprised that none of this ever came up when we were looking at the place.”

  Wayne affected a look between confused and irritated. “You’re saying you think this should’ve showed up on the seller’s disclosure? That killing took place more than a mile down the road in a house that was bulldozed twenty-something years ago. The property was chopped up—that’s a poor choice of words on my part—and much of it has been bought and sold several times since.”

  Wayne stared at Dave to see if he was getting through and, unsatisfied, continued. “You look a little spooked. What’s this neighbor of yours saying?”

  “Nothing specific, which is why I wanted to hear about all of this from you.”

  “You talking to Bill Jennings?”

  Just hearing the name Bill Jennings made Dave’s blood boil. Asshole! “No, Willis.”

  Wayne’s mind shuffled through its rolodex for a couple of seconds and then gave up.

  “Who the hell is Willis?”

  “You know the property a little closer to the highway than mine. It’s got all of the no trespassing signs over the gates and on the trees…”

  Wayne pondered it again and then slapped his desk. “That piece of poor white trash with the excess supply of kids and dogs?”

  Dave nodded and Wayne busted out laughing. “Oh, what wisdom does the mighty Willis offer on this, or any front?”

  Dave regretted everything about this visit at this point and shifted a bit in his chair. He was not going to give Wayne any more ammunition.

  “Nothing specific. He just asked if I knew about the problems with the property before I bought it.”

  “Do you have problems out there?”

  Dave decided to opt for humor. “I’ve got Rasberry crazy ants.”

  Dave’s ploy worked as Wayne had apparently not heard about the arrival of the Brazilian ants. Wayne leaned in, interested. “You’ve got what?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Johnny

  the Bulldozer Guy

  “Johnny, can you hear me?” Dave yelled into the microphone embedded in his ear buds as he drove away from Wayne’s office, competing with an astonishing amount of noise coming from the other end of the connec- tion.

  Johnny was the guy who had mediated the trash pile and, in turn, dug the second pond. Ever since his last encounter with Bill Jennings, Dave had been thinking about, perhaps obsessing over, the idea of some sort of leaking well oozing chemicals into the water. Johnny and his bulldozer kept unusual hours and his voicemail inbox was perpetually full. As a business model Dave found this approach to be problematic, but then again, Johnny and his dozer were always busy.

  Dave had found Johnny via one of the old-timers at the local hardware store. As Dave continued to listen to the rumbling coming over the line he recalled that the hardware guy had warned him that a conversation with Johnny wasn’t a prelude to a Mensa meeting.

  “Johnny?!!”

  “Yeah, this is Johnny.” Johnny was clearly at work within the cab of his dozer, as the typically loud voice was barely audible above of the noise of grinding machinery, and what sounded like the gradual demise of a tree that was in the way.

  “This is Dave Reynolds. You dug that pond for me a while back.”

  Additional grinding noises followed before an unsatisfactory, “Uh huh.” After a somewhat lengthy, noisy pause he continued, “There a problem with the pond or something?”

  Dave cupped the microphone such that it was closer to his mouth. “No, nothing like that. I just wanted to ask you if you’d come across any kind of shut-in well when you were digging around?”

  “A what?”

  Dave, now yelling, “A shut-in or capped oil well? Did you see anything like that?”

  The noise on the other end subsided somewhat as Johnny shifted the dozer into neutral—or at least stopped running over whatever lay in front of him. “Shut-in well? Maybe Mr. Reynolds. I recall running over a slab of concrete down there, underneath that shitload of trash that we had to load up.”

  “What did you do with the concrete?

  The noise started back up on the other end as Johnny unofficially lost in- terest in this conversation that didn’t involve a complaint, or more work. “Nothing. It’s still there but it’s under all the dirt we used to make the wall for the dam.”

  “Is it normal to run across things like that?”

  “I dunno Mr. Reynolds. I just operate a dozer. Speaking of which, I need to get back to it Mr. Reynolds.”

  Dave stared at the highway ahead, no further along in this inquiry versus where he’d started. “Thanks Johnny, I appreciate it.”

  The diesel revved back to full throttle and a series of cracking noises initiated. “You bet Mr. Reynolds.”

  What Lurks Beneath

  The connection terminated, Dave was left alone with his thoughts and the open road. He supposed that there was a registry related to drilling activity maintained by the State, but since he had no mineral rights, no smoking gun in terms of the news from Johnny, and no obvious starting point for a query, he really had no time to initiate; he thought it might be best to just let it go.

  Letting things go didn’t come easily to Dave, but he was saved from this particular rabbit hole for now by the buzzing of his phone, which indicated that still more emails had piled into his inbox in the extremely short span of time that he was on the phone. He knew better than to try and read them while driving, but he did pick his phone up from its perch, and used muscle memory to scroll through the long list of emails to get an idea of just how many people were looking for him.

  He stole a quick glance down and saw a series of bolded, unread mes- sages.

  “Great,” Dave said aloud to no one but his truck, as he dropped the phone back down and continued his drive out to his far-flung client.

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  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Asleep at

  The Laptop

  The following week Marilyn stirred in the large bed and absently reached her arm across the mattress to make reassuring contact with Dave. Find- ing nothing except a pillow, she reached farther, and crossed over to the tipping point of actually being awake. Her reach unrewarded, she pulled the light-blocking mask from her eyes and looked around the room, which was well lit by the incoming light from the eastward facing win- dows. With the exception of Sampson slowly snoring on the floor at the foot of the bed, she was alone.

  A few minutes later, with Sampson trailing behind her, she silently snuck past Adam’s room and began descending the
stairs—motioning back the ever-eager Sampson every few steps so that he didn’t barge past and trip her. Once she’d passed the last step she waved Sampson on and he nearly rolled down the rest of the steps in his eagerness.

  With all the commotion she feared that she’d awakened Adam, but a brief pause was met with silence from his room above. She made her way to the kitchen, and Sampson raced past her to take up his station next to his food bowl. He attempted to create an expression that conveyed the many years he’d suffered along without the benefit of food, or human kindness. Marilyn ignored him and kept walking until she came to the breakfast room.

  Dave, his laptop pushed across the table from him, lay with his face turned sideways, resting on his crossed arms before him. He still wore the somewhat-yellowed white undershirt from the day before as well as his dress slacks, but his bare feet were crossed beneath his chair. Mari- lyn didn’t envy the back pain he was likely going to experience from his choice of a bed, but it was just that—his choice.

  Normally a light sleeper, Dave slumbered on, completely oblivious to her presence. Marilyn took the opportunity to peruse the yellow legal pad sitting next to him. From what she could read (which wasn’t much due to his horrific handwriting and his own attempt at shorthand) he’d been attempting to finish up entering notes and action items from his meetings the day before. A lot of things could be said about Dave, several of them not exactly complimentary, but he definitely worked hard.

  The laptop, which was plugged into the wall on the other side of the table, chirped as some internal process was cued up. As the low hum of the drive kicked in she felt a sense of curiosity that she was not able to stifle. Not knowing what exactly she expected to find, she reached past the still-sleeping Dave and hit the enter key. Immediately she was met with the screen that asked for a password. She entered the same password they used for a variety of websites—Adam2007—and was a little surprised to see that it worked.

  The screen now showed an article pulled up under the web browser. She squinted a little trying to sort out what she was seeing versus what she had expected, and confirmed that the title of the article was “Extreme Low Frequency Electromagnetic Fields.” In the midst of quite a bit of text, an illustration of a large set of power line towers dominated the right side of the screen.

  She frowned, trying to figure out why Dave would be reading about elec- tromagnetic fields. She stared at him as he continued to sleep, and risked hitting the back button on the browser. The page then opened to an ar- ticle on a completely different subject: H2S. She pushed her robe closer

  What Lurks Beneath

  to her chest so it wouldn’t drag on the sleeping Dave, and tried to figure out what this article was about.

  She scanned it enough to know that it was something to do with compli- cations from drilling, and then hit “back” yet again. There was another article about H2S. Another “back,” and yet another, significantly more complex article about the corrosive, dangerous properties of H2S.

  Dave stirred beneath her and she winced and held her breath. He smacked his lips once, but his eyes never opened. Still holding her breath, she clicked back one last time, and was taken away from the world of H2S to an article that discussed the most common symptoms associated with brain tumors.

  Brain tumors? Dave has a brain tumor? She used the down arrow key to scroll down further to get to the symptoms, and was interrupted by Dave’s voice, asking, “See anything you like?”

  She looked down and saw him staring at her with his right eye, which was facing upwards. She pushed back from his laptop, and he groaned loudly as he raised up, grasping his sore neck with one hand, and his equally sore back with the other. He pushed back his chair and unfolded his legs, which led to another round of groaning, then turned and just stared at her.

  “Is there something you want to talk about Dave?” she asked.

  He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then used that same hand to lightly touch his already throbbing temple. He stood, unsteadily, still shaking out the various aches and pains, and frowned. “We have so much to talk about that I’m not even sure I know where to start.”

  She nodded. They were living in limbo at the moment, almost entirely because neither one of them wanted to do anything to upset Adam. It

  189

  would be better for everyone though, if they could get all the dirty laun- dry aired out, and see at the end of the day if they had anything worth saving—besides Adam.

  Her hopes on this front were dashed when Dave continued, “But it’s not going to be today. I’ve got too much to do, and I’m already running behind.”

  He gently pushed by her to get to the kitchen while Marilyn remained facing his empty chair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Cat

  Fishing

  “How much longer, Daddy?”

  Dave caught Adam’s eyes in the rear-view mirror for a second and smiled. “You know that answer. We’ve done this drive enough times.”

  Adam scanned the landscape outside the window and saw a familiar busi- ness—a defunct retail shop of some sort. He also saw that many of the oak trees, which had taken a terrific beating from the long, sweltering summer were finally beginning to lose their leaves. “About fifteen min- utes?”

  “Yep, about—but we also have to stop and get some worms if you want to go fishing.”

  “I want to go fishing.”

  Dave laughed, “I thought you’d say that.” He pushed down a bit further on the accelerator and glanced briefly at the already setting sun. He’d planned on finishing up his second meeting early in the afternoon and then hitting the road to beat the traffic, and the dark. His client had managed to throw that plan on its head when the CFO was an hour late to the meeting, and then wanted to go through everything that had already been discussed from the start, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.

  About twenty-five minutes later Dave and Adam stood on the earthen wall of the lower pond. Dave carefully put down the closed container of worms in the grass with one hand while he held a beefy night crawler he’d just extracted pinched between the thumb and index finger of the other. He avoided the dangling hook that Adam had over-generously presented him while trying to make sure that the place in the grass he had deposited the worms wasn’t next-door to a fire ant mound. He had not had a chance to cut the grass by the pond and the omnipresent fire ant mounds lurked under the tall grass like submerged icebergs.

  The immediate area appeared ant-free, at least for the moment, and Dave grabbed the hook at the end of Adam’s line before it decided to lodge somewhere in his body. He gently pushed the end of Adam’s rod away from his face before it poked him in the eye, which had happened a few times before, and threaded the hook through the body of the worm. A bit of whatever constitutes worm-blood spilled out onto his fingers as it flailed in Dave’s hand. Its ridged, dirt-covered body twisted and pushed against its captor in a fruitless effort to regain the freedom it never really had in the plastic container with nineteen of its former friends.

  Way back in the day, before children, Dave and one of his friends at the time made a habit of going saltwater fishing in Galveston Bay. Their boat was a small, aluminum skiff that was better suited to a pond but they often pushed the boat’s limits by inviting others along. The bait of choice was live shrimp, and whoever sat closest to the bucket had to pull out shrimp for everyone—leading to the affectionate moniker of “shrimp bitch.” As Dave wiped the worm goo onto his jeans he recognized that he can’t relay this story to Adam, while inwardly acknowledging that he was indeed the worm bitch of these proceedings.

  Adam had already caught one small perch on this outing, and between removing and releasing the captured fish, and putting a new worm on the line, there was very little actual fishing for Dave. He finished up this

  particular baiting sequence by pushing the remaining chunk of wriggling worm back across the tip and releasing the line.

  “Thanks Dad,” quipped Adam as he somewhat competently
tossed his line back out into the pond. The orange and yellow bobber placed on Adam’s line found its equilibrium and slowly tracked to the left with the nominal amount of breeze that made its way down to the lower pond.

  Dave bent down to pick up his pole and had barely gripped it before he heard, “Got one!” Adam furiously reeled his line, but there was no sign of his bobber and whatever he had hooked was pulling out more line than Adam was taking in. Dave dropped his rod and grunted his approval as Adam’s line now tracked back to the right and farther away from them. This must be one of the holdover catfish that had been stocked in the upper pond by the prior owner ten or more years ago. Dave had caught several of them and released them down in the lower pond, thinking the extra room might make them grow even larger—and knowing that Adam would love every minute of hooking a ten-pound-plus fish.

  Adam continued to reel against the surging fish but Dave gently patted him on the shoulder and murmured, “Let him run son. That’s a big fish and we only have ten-pound test line on these rods.”

  Adam looked at him, a smile running from ear to ear, and stopped reel- ing in order to grip the rod with both hands. He’d caught one of these lunkers before in the upper pond and had pouted for weeks when Dave released him down here. He’d since taken every effort to remind Dave of this travesty and had exacted a promise that the next fish would be kept

  —and eaten.