End Times

by Anna Schumacher

  Her meaningful look kicked his smile back into place. “Yes, yes, right.” He cleared his throat. “As Pastor Ted was saying, we’re blessed in many ways. And about that oil . . .” He struggled for words, then stopped and tried a different tactic. “Floyd, you know, the Varleys and the Peytons go back quite a ways,” he said.

  “I do,” Floyd agreed. “Our great-grandfathers settled this land together, and our grandfathers were the best of friends.”

  “Exactly.” Vince’s grin inched wider. “That’s why my grandpa John just about gave your grandpa Noah that land your trailer is on today.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know it,” Floyd said mildly. “Selling that whole parcel for one measly dollar was just about the kindest act one man could do for another, particularly with our family hurting so hard at the time—and that’s why I keep the deed framed in our living room, so I can remember that kindness every day.”

  “It’s a code to live by.” Karen nodded approvingly. “If only we could all be as good and godly as that man.”

  “So—you kept the deed.” Vince’s lips set in a tight line.

  “Of course. It’s as precious to me as our family photos—though maybe not as pretty.” Floyd laughed heartily.

  Vince’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you think, given the circumstances, we deserve a cut?”

  “After all, if it weren’t for Vince’s grandfather’s generosity, your family wouldn’t be sitting on that oil at all!” Deirdre cut in.

  “Oh, you two don’t need to go showering me with logic like that.” Floyd was still chuckling. “If you thought I’d forget your great-granddad’s kindness, I’m afraid you must not think very much of me at all. When that oil money starts coming in, Vince, I’d say it’s only fair that half of it should go to your family. For history’s sake—and for the sake of our grandchild.”

  Daphne started. Half the oil money? To a family that clearly wouldn’t have shared as much as a cent if the tables were turned? She wanted to believe that Floyd was doing the right thing, but it seemed like he’d lost his mind.

  Across the table, Karen’s face went white. She reached for her lemonade with a shaking hand and took a long gulp. When she saw Daphne looking at her, she offered a weak smile before abruptly averting her eyes, turning her attention back to the Varleys.

  “Well, that’s awful big of you, Floyd,” Vince boomed, beaming. “I should have known I could count on you to make the right choice.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Floyd said.

  “So, I’ll have you down to my office later this week, and we can have my lawyer finalize everything, then.” Vince was suddenly all business. “Does tomorrow work for you—say, ten A.M.?”

  “Oh, I don’t know that we need to go involving lawyers and all that.” Floyd chuckled. “Like your grandpa, I’m a man of my word.”

  “But,” Vince began. “How . . . ?”

  Floyd’s laugh boomed across the church’s lawn. “How long have we known each other, Vince? Since our mamas used to put us down on the living room floor to crawl around together so they could get down to some good old-fashioned gossip?”

  Vince nodded.

  “And in all that time, have you ever known me to go back on my word?”

  “No,” Vince admitted. But he looked troubled.

  “Let’s shake on it, then.” Floyd stuck out his hand. After a moment, Vince met it with a vigorous pump.

  “Yay!” Janie erupted, clapping her hands. “Doug, honey, we’re gonna have the richest baby Carbon County’s ever seen!”

  “It’ll be a baller,” Doug agreed. “We can get it a diamond binkie and stuff.”

  Everyone laughed, and Karen turned to Deirdre. Doug’s mom had regained her fragile smile, but her cheeks were still waxy and pale. “So I guess we’ll be seeing quite a bit more of you all, then. Maybe you and I can get together and plan a nice baby shower.”

  “That sounds lovely,” Deirdre said in a voice like cut glass. She checked her slim silver watch. “We have to be going, though. So much to do. Enjoy the Bundt cake!”

  There was a rustle of goodbyes as the Varleys stood to leave. Doug kissed Janie lightly on the forehead. “I’ll text you later, ’kay?”

  “Yay!” Janie said by way of response. She waited until they were just out of earshot before putting her hands together in prayer and raising her face to the heavens. “Oh, thank you, Lord, for finally making the Varleys accept this child.” She turned to Daphne. “That sure was a long time coming!”

  “Janie.” Daphne knew there was no nice way to say it. “Don’t you think maybe this has more to do with the oil money than the baby?”

  Janie’s pink-frosted mouth fell open, and Daphne wondered if she’d gone too far.

  But Janie just laughed. “Honestly, who cares? The important thing is that they accept the child. Maybe that’s why God led us to the oil in the first place. God and you, of course.”

  “Not me,” Daphne corrected. “I wish everyone would stop saying that. Floyd, you studied the rocks. You made an educated guess. I had nothing to do with it.”

  The three Peytons stared at her, and for the second time in five minutes, she wondered if she’d gone too far. She’d wanted to temper her opinion, to let them believe whatever they wanted to believe, but she couldn’t handle everyone heaping praise on her, giving her credit that she’d never deserve. She was still a killer, still taking advantage of relatives who didn’t know, still living in their house inside the delicate bubble of her lie.

  The crease between Floyd’s eyebrows deepened, but a moment later they relaxed. He smiled.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” he repeated.

  “EVERYONE, say hello to the new guy.” Dale addressed the rig workers clustered around the admin hut, most still wolfing down last-minute energy bars and wiping the sleep from their eyes. “This is Owen Green—the lucky guy who scored the last roustabout position on our crew.”

  Daphne’s face flushed as she finished tightening the laces on her work boots. She stood quickly, just in time to meet Owen’s eyes. He looked strong and well rested, his pale skin glowing in the early morning sunlight.

  For a moment she felt dizzy, like she’d skipped breakfast or given herself a head-rush by standing up too fast. Then the corners of her mouth tugged into a smile, returning his.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do, so let’s get to it!” Dale rubbed his hands together and rattled off a list of names and assignments for the day. Daphne, Owen, and a handful of other roustabouts were in charge of digging a ditch in the far corner of the oilfield.

  “Hey, thanks for the heads-up about this,” Owen said, lightly touching her arm as they headed for the maintenance shed. The same hot, tingly sensation that she’d felt talking to him in the parking lot of Elmer’s Gas ’n’ Grocery rushed to the surface of her skin. “Dale’s a good guy—as soon as I told him I rebuilt my bike from scratch, he offered me a job.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Daphne said, selecting a shovel. “Life around here is pretty grueling.”

  “You think I can’t handle it?” Owen teased. He took the shovel from her hands. “Let me carry that for you.”

  “I can carry my own gear!” Daphne made a grab at the shovel, but he held it above his head, out of her reach. “Now you’re making it seem like I’m the one who can’t handle things around here,” she said, exasperated.

  “I never said that.” Owen shouldered her shovel along with his own and started across the field. “I’m just being a gentleman.”

  “Yeah, well, this isn’t exactly a debutante ball.” She fell into step, her long strides matching his.

  He glanced at her sideways. “And, let me guess, you’re not exactly a debutante?”

  Blood rushed to her face. “Do I look like one?” she countered, gesturing to her cargo pants and steel-toed work boots.

&nbs
p; “You look like something,” Owen responded cryptically.

  They reached the far end of the field, where the outlines of the ditch had been marked in blue construction tape.

  “This is where we start digging,” Daphne said. “So you better give me back that shovel, unless you want to work for both of us.”

  “I would if I could.” Owen tossed it to her, and she caught it with one hand. He raised an eyebrow. “Good reflexes.”

  “I don’t sleep on the job.” She jabbed the blade deep into the earth and wriggled it around to loosen the dirt. She could still feel Owen’s eyes on her, and for a moment she was horribly self-conscious: She had already started to sweat, and the bottoms of her cargo pants were covered in dirt.

  She tunneled in, focusing on her work. There was something comforting in the physical labor: The simple act of transferring dirt from one place to another seemed solid and sensible compared with the weird stew of sensations brewing inside of her, and she soon lost herself to the repetition of the movements.

  By the time Dale came by to call a break, a deep Y of perspiration had soaked the back of her shirt. The ditch was starting to take shape, a long, low trench in the ground. She looked up in time to see Owen shrug off his hard hat and wipe his brow. His thick black hair stood out in all directions, and his white T-shirt clung to his chest, outlining the taut muscles beneath.

  “Want to grab a snack?” he asked.

  “I’m actually not that hungry,” she confessed. Something about the way Owen looked at her made her feel like her stomach was full of bubbles, and even though she was usually ravenous by the mid-morning break, at the moment a snack was the last thing on her mind.

  “Cool, me either. I still haven’t really gotten the lay of the land here. How ’bout giving me a tour?”

  The rest of the roustabouts were heading toward the canteen, dreaming out loud of ice cream bars and sodas. “You coming?” Eric, a nineteen-year-old from Nebraska who slept in his truck and sent all his money home to his wife and baby, called to Daphne. She shook her head, and he arched an eyebrow, asking her a silent question before turning back to the rest of the crew without saying another word.

  “You’re pretty popular around here,” Owen observed.

  She shrugged. “Everyone was a little weird about having a girl on the team at first, but now they’re used to it.”

  “Looks to me like you work as hard as anyone,” he said. “Maybe harder. I don’t think I even saw you stop to take a water break.”

  “You were watching that closely?” she challenged.

  He grinned mysteriously. “Maybe. So do I get the grand tour or what? Let me guess—this is the ditch.”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “It will be. And over there, that’s going to be another ditch. And there . . . well, guess.”

  “A third ditch?”

  “Bingo.” She started across the oilfield, pointing out landmarks along the way: the place where the derrick would go once it was trucked in, the company vehicles, the sheds where they kept the tools and calibrators and drilling mud. They crossed through the grove of pines and into the ravine behind the trailer, where Uncle Floyd had bought a small plaque to mark the spot where the oil had first been found.

  “Here God’s blessing touched us,” Owen read. “Site of the first Carbon County oil discovery, made by Daphne Peyton on May 28. And may His blessings keep coming.”

  He turned to her. “You were the one who found the oil?”

  “Not really.” She brushed some dirt from her sleeve, wondering what had possessed her to bring Owen to the ravine.

  “That’s not what the plaque says.”

  “Well, it was kind of a group effort,” she relented, telling him an abbreviated version of the story with Rick Bodey and the dipstick.

  “And that’s how all this happened?” Owen gestured to the trailers and huts and rows of construction vehicles, the crews in hard hats bustling around.

  “Basically, yeah.” Daphne looked down at the ground, where a faint slick of oil was still visible on the rocks. “It all started here.”

  “That’s crazy.” Owen crouched in the ravine and touched the oil slick, a bemused smile on his face. “There was oil under here all along, and it took you to come along and realize it.”

  He stood, examining his fingers where he’d touched the oil.

  “Whoa.” His voice dropped, and a trace of fear flashed across his eyes. “That’s weird.”

  Daphne looked at his hand, and a cold shudder of dread seized her body. On the tips of his fingers, where the oil should have been, was a shimmering patch of deep red blood.

  She stood gazing at it for a long moment, waves of frigid nausea crashing in her stomach. A droplet fell from his hand to the ground, cascading in slow motion until it plopped red and ominous onto the stones below.

  “I must have cut my hand on a rock,” Owen murmured, wiping the blood on his T-shirt so that it left a long, bright streak like a scar. His eyes had darkened to the color of moss in a rainstorm, and his playful smile was gone.

  “Are you okay?” Daphne asked uncertainly. “There’s a first aid kit in every hut; we can go get you a Band-Aid.”

  He nodded shakily. “Maybe that’s a good idea,” he said.

  They hurried to the nearest trailer. Once inside, Daphne grabbed the first aid kit from the wall and riffled through it.

  “Let me see,” she commanded, opening an antiseptic wipe.

  Owen held out his hand, and she took it in hers, ignoring the prickles of heat that rushed up her arm. She examined his fingers closely, turning them over in her palm and swiping at the flesh carefully with the wipe.

  But she couldn’t find any sign of a cut, not even the faintest scrape. His palms were rough and cool, with smooth callouses on his fingertips from the hours he put in at the track. But the skin was intact.

  She glanced up at him to see if he was seeing what she was seeing, but he was looking at her. Her palms went clammy as their eyes met, and she quickly let go of his hand.

  “We have to get back,” she said apologetically, tossing the unused Band-Aid in the trash and returning the first aid kit. “Dale will get mad.”

  “It’s fine.” Owen was already pulling on his work gloves. His skin looked pale, but maybe it was just the trailer’s fluorescent lighting. “It was probably just one of those things that bleeds all over the place and then disappears, like a paper cut.”

  “Probably,” Daphne agreed. They hurried back to the ditch, their banter forgotten in the strangeness of the incident and their rush to get back to work. But for the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening, as the ditch grew deeper and the ache in her arms became a burn and Owen worked silently and tirelessly by her side, Daphne couldn’t shake the image of the blood from her mind. There hadn’t been a cut—she was sure of it.

  It was almost like the oil had turned to blood at his touch.

  JANIE leaned close to the bathroom mirror, brushing sparkling shadow over her eyelids.

  “You should let me do your makeup,” she called.

  “Why?” Daphne stared up at the trailer’s ceiling, trying to muster the energy to sit up. It was Friday night, and she’d just come off a grueling shift at the rig that left every muscle in her body feeling like a stage for tap-dancing fire ants. “We’re just going to the track, right?”

  “Oh, no reason.” There was something forced about Janie’s casual tone. “It’s just that you’re so pretty, and you never do anything about it. I could totally bring out your eyes.”

  “Maybe next time.” Daphne felt bad turning Janie down: She knew it would make her cousin happy, and it was the least she could do while she was sleeping on the Peytons’ couch, eating their food, and keeping secrets from them about her past. But she was just too tired. She finally picked herself up off the couch, telling Janie she’d wait for
her outside.

  The trailer’s screen door banged shut as she stepped into the first golden tinge of sunset. One of the contractors waved as he hurried past, covered in dust and yelling into a walkie-talkie over the screech of static, heading toward the new oil derrick.

  It had arrived that morning, trucked in on a doublewide flatbed surrounded by a phalanx of safety vehicles flashing amber lights. Now it sat in pieces about a half mile from the Peytons’ trailer, huge chunks of metal scaffolding waiting to be assembled into a tower that would reach ten stories into the sky.

  She turned at the sound of Doug’s truck pulling into the driveway, spraying gravel as it skidded to a stop.

  “Hey, Daff!” He leaned out the window, beady eyes grinning. “You ready for our hot date?” He licked his lips suggestively, and her stomach turned. Just looking at his oversize head made her feel ill.

  “I’ll get Janie,” she said curtly. But her cousin had already emerged on the steps, stuffed into a hot pink sundress and blinking rapidly to dry her mascara.

  “Hi, boys!” she called, waddling down the steps.

  “Boys?” Daphne turned just in time to see Trey climb out of the truck, holding the door open to help them in. He wore a button-down shirt over khaki shorts, and his blond hair was combed neatly against his scalp.

  “Hey,” he said to Daphne, ducking his head.

  “Hi, Trey,” Daphne said, surprised. Nobody had told her he was catching a ride.

  “You girls ready to roll?” Doug asked. He put the truck in reverse and backed up abruptly, gravel skittering against the windows.

  “Watch it!” Janie called. “We don’t even have our seatbelts on yet!”

  “Well, hurry up and buckle ’em.” Doug was already barreling down the road, swerving around a slow-moving water truck and jouncing over a series of potholes. Global Oil’s construction vehicles had chewed up the road to the consistency of hamburger meat, and it had developed a treacherous pattern of potholes in protest.

  Daphne pressed her forehead to the glass and watched the dust clouds drift and the day fade and the low, scrappy mountains rush by. The scenery danced to a blur out the window, like a painting gone over one too many times with a brush. Her head thudded against the ceiling as they careened over another bump.