CHAPTER 1: THE RECOIL OF GASOLINE
The heat came off the block of the twelve-horsepower engine in rhythmic, oily waves, cooking the scent of bitter dandelion sap into the scruff of his chin. He had his right work boot pinned to the hydrostatic pedal, the green machine creeping at three miles an hour along the edge of the unpaved ditch where the residential asphalt gave up and turned into wild rye. Then the shadow fell across his steering wheel. It wasn’t a soft shadow; it was thick, rigid, and smelled of heavy laundry detergent and stale air-conditioning.
“Kill it,” she said.
Her mouth was a flat, gray line beneath her sunglasses. She didn’t look at his face; she looked at the iron housing of the deck where the safety discharge chute threw a fine spray of grit against the tips of her clean white sneakers. She had her short, gray-blonde hair tucked behind her ears, her posture pitched forward like a fence post that had taken a bad lean after a hard winter.
He didn’t drop the throttle. He simply backed his boot off the pedal, letting the transmission whine to a dead halt three inches from her patterned leggings. The grass between them was nearly ten inches high, seed-heavy and yellowing from three weeks without rain. A line of six pink plastic survey flags poked out of the weeds like miniature warning spikes, spaced exactly two feet apart.
“I’m on the county strip, ma’am,” he said. His voice was dry, the words scraping out of his throat with the texture of the dust he’d been swallowing since seven that morning. His shirtless torso was covered in a film of grease and green flecks that stuck to the hollows of his collarbones.
“You’re on my property,” she snapped, her index finger jabbing down toward the first pink marker. The plastic shaft vibrated from the force of her gesture. “Those flags were set by a professional. If you take one more inch off this side, I’m having your rig impounded for criminal mischief. I’ve already called the township.”
He didn’t argue. He knew the look of a woman who spent her mornings tracking code violations through a pair of kitchen blinds. He watched her left hand; it was clamped around a blue plastic folder, the edges of white paper swelling out from the seal like a deck of cards she’d been shuffling all day. Underneath her purple tee, her chest rose and fell in short, shallow jerks.
Farther back, across the blacktop, a front door on a ranch house clicked shut. A neighbor in a gray undershirt stepped onto a concrete porch, holding a yellow ceramic mug, his eyes locking onto the green machine idling in the weeds.
The contractor reached down with his left hand, his fingers tracing the coarse plastic of the ignition key. He turned it back. The engine gave a violent, throat-clearing rattle, the belt under the deck squealing once before the absolute silence of the suburban street slammed down over the yard. The only sound left was the slow, metallic tick-tick-tick of the exhaust manifold contracting in the July heat.
He swung his leg over the high-backed vinyl seat, his work boots sinking into the dry thatch. As his heels hit the ground, he noticed a fresh patch of dark, wet earth right beneath the fourth survey flag—an oil-black circle no bigger than a silver dollar, smelling faintly of sulfur and rusted iron, bubbling out from a gap where the sod had been recently sliced away.
