Every day after school, eleven-year-old Seymour walks past the sign
COMING SOON
CUSTOM TOWNHOMES AND COTTAGES
PREMIER HOMESITES AVAILABLE
and drops his backpack on the love seat in the living room and postholes up through the snow to the big dead ponderosa, and every few days Trustyfriend is there, listening to the squeaks of voles, and the scratchings of mice, and the beating inside Seymour’s chest.
But on the first warm morning in April, two dump trucks and a flatbed carrying a steamroller stop in front of the double-wide. Airbrakes moan and walkie-talkies squawk and trucks beep, and by Friday after school, Arcady Lane is paved.
Seymour crouches on the brand-new asphalt at the tail end of a spring rain. Everything smells of fresh tar. With two fingers he tweezers up a stranded earthworm, hardly more than a waterlogged pink string. This worm did not expect rain to wash it from its tunnels onto pavement, did it? To find itself on this strange new impenetrable surface?
Two clouds separate and sunlight spills onto the street, and Seymour glances to his left, and the bodies of what might be fifty thousand earthworms catch the light. Worms, he realizes, cover the whole blacktop. Thousands upon thousands. He deposits the first at the base of a huckleberry bush, rescues a second, then a third. The pines drip; the asphalt steams; the worms thresh.
He rescues twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six. Clouds seal off the sun. A truck turns off Cross Road and approaches, crushing the bodies of how many? Faster. Pick up the pace. Forty-three worms forty-four forty-five. He expects the truck to stop, an adult to climb out, wave the boy over, offer an explanation. The truck keeps going.
* * *
Surveyors park white pickups at the end of the road and climb through the trees behind the house. They set up tripods, tie ribbons around trunks. By late April, chain saws are droning in the woods.
As he walks home from school, fear buzzes in Seymour’s ears. He imagines looking down at the forest from above: there’s the double-wide, the dwindling forest, the clearing at the center. There’s Trustyfriend, sitting on his limb, an oval with two eyes surrounded by 27,027 dots in rings.
Bunny is at the kitchen table, lost behind a drift of bills. “Oh, Possum, it’s not our property. They can do whatever they want with it.”
“Why?”
“Because those are the rules.”
He presses his forehead to the sliding door. She tears out a check, licks an envelope. “Know what? Those saws could mean good news for us. Remember Geoff-with-a-G from work? He says that lots at the top of Eden’s Gate might go for two hundred thousand.”
Darkness is falling. Bunny says the number a second time.
* * *
Trucks grumble past the double-wide loaded with logs; bulldozers punch through the end of Arcady Lane and cut a Z-shaped extension up the hillside. Every day, as soon as the last truck leaves, Seymour walks the new roadway with his earmuffs on.
Sewage pipes loll like fallen pillars in front of mounds of debris; great coils of cables lie here and there. The air smells of shattered wood, sawdust, and gasoline.
NeedleMen lie crushed in the mud. Our legs are broken, they murmur in their xylophone voices. Our cities are ruined. Halfway up the hill, Trustyfriend’s clearing has become a tire-churned welter of roots and branches. For now the big dead ponderosa still stands. Seymour trawls his gaze along every limb, every branch, until his neck aches from looking.
Empty empty empty empty.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Can you hear me?”
* * *
He does not see Trustyfriend for four weeks. Five. Five and a half. Every day more light spills into what was, hours before, forest.
Realty signs sprout up and down the newly paved road, two with SOLD placards already attached. Seymour takes a flyer. Live the Lakeport lifestyle, it reads, that you’ve always wanted. There’s a map of homesites, a drone photograph with the lake in the distance.
At the library Marian tells him that the Eden’s Gate people jumped through all the planning and zoning hoops, hosted a public hearing, handed out some seriously delicious cupcakes with their logo in the frosting. She says they even purchased the crumbling old Victorian next to the library and plan to remodel it as a showroom.
“Development,” she says, “has always been part of the story of this town.” From a file cabinet in Local History she produces black-and-white prints from a century ago. Six lumbermen stand shoulder to shoulder on the stump of a felled cedar. Fishermen hold yard-long salmon up by their gills. Several hundred beaver pelts hang from a cabin wall.
Looking at the images starts the roar murmuring at the base of Seymour’s spine. In a vision he imagines a hundred thousand NeedleMen rising from the ruins of the forest and marching on the contractors’ trucks, a vast army, fearless despite the incredible odds, swinging tiny picks at tires, driving nails through men’s boots. Plumbing vans go up in flames.