There were no neighbors to gossip with and there were only so many days she could drive downtown and funnel through Main Street with oil field traffic and not lose her mind.
Today she couldn’t even do that because Harold’s truck wouldn’t start in the garage that morning—he’d left his pickup door ajar all night and the battery ran down—so he’d taken her 2009 Kia Spectra to work. So she was stuck, in more ways than one.
She dried her hands on a towel while she walked through the living room and out through the front door.
Amanda noted that the framed high school graduation photographs of her two children—stolid, married Brian and divorced, frowsy Tammy—were tilted at odd angles on the wall as a result of the explosions. She made a note to herself to straighten them later.
She stood on her concrete porch and continued to dry her hands while she looked around. The unfinished houses on either side of hers were framed but not yet covered by sheeting. The rest of the “houses” on the block were no more than concrete foundations set in the ground.
There was no frost on the grass because there was no grass, only bare frozen dirt.
She turned toward the south and was surprised to see a man standing with his back to her on the edge of the chalky bluff that overlooked the town of Grimstad. He was a block and a half away.
There were no pedestrians in the Subdivision of Sadness. Not even door-to-door solicitors ventured up there. The only people Amanda ever encountered were drunk teenagers roaring around throwing empty beer cans on Friday nights and an occasional patrol by the sheriff’s department.
Rather than call out to him, Amanda decided to see for herself what he was up to. Plus, the edge of the bluff would give her a very good view of what had happened in town.
She walked across the dirt of her own property and over the “lawns” of the adjacent houses without using the sidewalk. She knew no one was going to object.
As she got closer to him she could see a fist of black smoke punch from the distant industrial park into the pale blue North Dakota sky. She also noticed the tan Ford F-150 CrewCab pickup parked at the curb further up the bluff. It had North Dakota plates and it looked like a farm vehicle. There was a tangle of rusted baling wire in the back of it and a shovel poked out from a slot in the top of the bedwall.
So he hadn’t arrived on foot after all.
“Hey there,” she said when she was less than ten feet away from him, “did you see what happened?”
He turned, startled.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on ya.”
He was an unremarkable man, she thought. Late fifties, early sixties. He was square-built but doughy and he had large hands and a wide pale Slavic face. Dyed jet-black hair and drooping mustache, thick plastic horn-rimmed glasses. Ball cap without a logo. He wore an oversized worn Carhartt parka with a hood, denims stained with grease, and scuffed heavy trucker boots with thick crepe soles. He looked like a lot of the men around town: oil field workers, tool pushers, ex-farmers hustling for a job. He could be Harold, she thought.
He said, “I saw it happen. I was driving down the road and I looked out. There were two explosions down there. I can still see them in my eyes—the flashes, I mean—but they’re just now starting to fade away.”
As he spoke to her she noticed that he lowered a cell phone he was holding in his right hand into his coat pocket. And that a transmitter of some kind hung around his neck by a lanyard.
“So what did happen?” she asked.
“Some kind of explosion.”
“Well of course it was an explosion,” she said, blowing out a puff of air and rolling her eyes. “I know what an explosion sounds like. They’re blowing things up in the oil patch all the time.
“But where did it happen?” she asked. “It sounded close.”
“Down there, I guess,” he said as he stepped aside so she could better see the plume of black smoke.
“No kidding,” she said, approaching the lip of the bluff.
He got close. Shoulder to shoulder almost. She continued to dry her hands by working them within the towel. She noticed he was watching her hands in the towel so she stopped moving them.
“Looks like it was at the industrial park,” she said. “I thought that place was pretty much empty these days. Most of the service companies are long gone.”
He grunted.
“Hell of a bang,” she said. “It rattled the glass in my windows. It reminded me of a couple of years ago when some careless man drove his pickup head-on into that oil train over in the train yard. Were you here then?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what I’m talking about. That was a hell of a mess and it could have blown up the whole town. Too bad it didn’t happen,” she said with a bitter laugh.
He said nothing.
Sirens in town cut through the stillness. She saw a flash from the wigwag lights of an ambulance as it sped through Grimstad toward the industrial park.
“Oh no,” she said. “It looks like maybe some people got hurt.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything.
“So you actually saw the explosion?” she asked.
“Yeah. There’s a truck down there where the fire is. The truck was backing in and it blew up.”
“What was it, an oil tanker?”
“Looked like a normal trailer in back,” he said, shrugging.
“I’m glad it didn’t happen out there in the oil patch,” she said, gesturing toward the flat yellow prairie that was laced with gravel roads connecting working oil rigs as far as she could see. “My husband works out there.”
She thought it important just then to bring up the fact that she had a husband. Even if it was Harold.
There were so many sirens going now that they merged into a high whine that hurt her ears. Emergency vehicles from every direction were converging on the industrial park.
“I wonder if they’ll tell us what happened on the radio,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“So you were just driving by and you looked out and saw it happen. Maybe you should call the sheriff and tell him what you saw.”
He didn’t look at her when he said, “I just seen two flashes of light. That’s not exactly unknown information, I wouldn’t think.”
“But about the truck. You said you saw the truck blow up.”
“I think they can probably figure that out,” he said.
She nodded. No point arguing with that.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “what were you doing up here that you saw the explosions happen?”
“I do mind.”
When she looked up at him he was glaring at her. His eyes were flat and he had no expression on his face. She felt a chill that started at the base of her scalp and rolled down her backbone.
It wasn’t his face, tone, or expression that scared her. It was something else she couldn’t explain. Maybe how still he was.
“Well,” she said, trying to keep the lilt in her voice, “I guess I better get back to the house so I can listen to the radio.”
She stepped back to turn around and he stepped back as well to keep even with her.