“Ow! I see why you have this oversuspended monster now.” A larger bump than normal jolted Jodi against the harness. “And boy am I glad we put the equipment in those transport cases.”
“I wouldn’t have pulled out of the driveway if you hadn’t. You want to keep doing work on our vacation, I’m at least going to make sure you can’t wreck half the lab’s equipment getting there. ‘Sides, that one weren’t nothing. Right after winter you should see the potholes we get and have to fill in afore—I mean, before—we can really drive the road well.” I kicked myself mentally. One night sleeping over in a southern West Virginia motel on the way and a few stops at regional gas stations and I was already falling back into dialect. Pretty soon Jodi wouldn’t even understand me.
“No bigger than the one on Seventeenth last month,” Jodi said dismissingly. I had to remember that New Yorkers are like Texans: their potholes are worse, their taxicab drivers more dangerous, and their people tougher than anyone else, damn what the facts might be.
“Construction areas don’t count as potholes.” I responded. “Holy—!”
I slammed on the brakes just in time to keep from going over into the ravine that now cut squarely across the packed and oiled rock-dirt roadway leading to the Slade homestead. Last time I’d been here there hadn’t been a sign of such a thing; now it yawned, a raw gash in the earth, fully forty feet from the edge I sat on to the other side, eight feet deep on the right dropping to ten or twelve on the left as it passed out of sight into the old-growth forest.
We sat there for a few moments in silence, me waiting for my heart to stop pounding before I slowly backed the truck a few more feet from the edge, just in case. Jodi turned to me. “So you had to prove me wrong. Okay, that is bigger than the one on Seventeenth.” She looked at the ravine with slightly wide eyes, the only sign she was going to let this disturb her New York sangfroid. “So, what, are we supposed to fill that in with our bare hands?”
“Stay here a minute.” I reached down into the bag and grabbed the crowbar.
I walked to the edge, so I could look to the left and right. I could see, down below, the mound of jumbled dirt, trees, and rocks which marked the slide. The thing that bothered me—really, really bothered me—was how straight and selective this was. The slide started about fifty feet up the slope, cut across the road in a perfect right angle, and ended about a hundred feet below. I poked at the dirt with the crowbar; it crumbled like normal, not too wet, packed hard where the road was. There wasn’t any sign of the usual slumping you get when the earth’s moving because it’s gotten too soggy and all. The road looked like someone had just cut a piece out of it with a giant knife, like a Bunyan-sized slice of earth pie. I listened. Not a sound except some water dripping off the trees in the fog—and the fog wasn’t common this time of year, either. Seemed like the air was colder here than ought be. No animal sounds, the critters were quiet.
Maybe Mamma had been premature. This sure ’nuff looked like that kind of trouble to me.
Well, no help for it now. I studied the lay of the land. Awfully steep in parts but . . . I could probably make it around the upper end. Old-growth forest has some advantages, like usually bigger distances between the trees. I got back into the truck. “Jodi, get out and wait a ways down. I’ll try and drive around.”
“If you aren’t scared to drive it, I’m not scared to ride it. And it’s chilly out there.”
“I am scared to drive it, but I ain’t leavin’ the truck parked here neither!” I heard my voice head all the way back home. Shoot, this wasn’t good. “Look, Jodi, sweetheart, this kind of driving’s really tricky, and I’ll do better if I’m not worrying about you as a passenger while I’m trying to hold her steady on the slope.”