Dark of the Moon

have a remarkable capacity for bullshit.”
     
    T HE S TRYKER FARMSTEAD was an archaeological dig in waiting: a crumbling homestead, a woodlot full of abandoned farm machinery and a couple of wrecked cars, a windmill without a prop. The farm was built a quarter mile off a gravel road, in a grove of cottonwoods, at the base of a steep hill. Red-rock outcrops stuck out of the hill, while below it, all around the farm buildings, all the way to Bluestem, and really, all the way to Kansas City, was nothing but the darkest of black dirt, a sea of corn, beans, and wheat.
    Among the wrecked buildings, the barn was the exception, and was still substantial. “Don’t have animals in it, but we keep it up for the machinery,” Joan said. “One of the neighbors—you can’t see his place, he’s a mile down the way—rents out the loft, sticks his extra hay up there.”
    The house, a hundred feet across a muddy parking circle from the barn, was little more than a shed. Originally one of the plain, upright, porchless, clapboard farmhouses built on the plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a coal-and wood-burning furnace and a hand pump in the backyard, it had been converted to a farm office and lounge.
    The second level, never fully heated, had been blocked off with insulation and plywood to eliminate heat loss in the winter, Joan said. The utilities had been moved out of the basement to the old back bedroom, and the basement was nothing more than a hole with some rotting shelves holding empty canning jars.
    “Probably could get twenty dollars each for those jars, on eBay,” Joan said.
    “Why don’t you?”
    “I don’t need four hundred dollars.”
     
    T HE FIRST FLOOR had a barely functioning kitchen with a countertop hot plate, a microwave, and a sink, with a table and six chairs; an electric pump fed the sink. Two ruined couches occupied the living room, with mud circles on the floor where the farmhands had tracked through. An aging computer sat on a table in the former dining room, with a Hewlett-Packard printer next to it, and a couple of four-drawer file cabinets pushed against the lathe-and-plaster wall.
    “After the roads got better, it never made much sense to actually live out here,” Joan said, as she showed him through the place. “Everything had to be brought out, and you were living out here in isolation. Most of the time, if you didn’t have animals, there wasn’t much to do. In the winter you did maintenance, in the summer you’d do some spraying and mowing…but basically, you were watching the corn grow, or the wheat, or the beans. By the time I was a kid, we had all that Star Wars machinery, a farm wife could sit up on a Deere in an air-conditioned cab with a cassette deck and listen to rock ’n’ roll and do the harvest by herself. Ninety percent of it was pushing buttons and pulling levers. No need for a house. I mean, it wasn’t that simple…but it almost was.”
    “So you moved to town,” Virgil said.
    “Well, look around,” she said, waving at the horizon. “If you look right over there, you can see one other house, but nobody lives in it. It’s lonely as hell out here. And Dad killed himself right out back, which still gives me the creeps if I’m out here on a winter night.”
    “Nice now, though,” Virgil said. The sun was slanting down toward the horizon, and a few wispy clouds streaked the pale blue sky; there was just enough breeze to stir the leaves on an endless ocean of corn.
    “C’mon,” she said. “I’ll show you why the house is so far from the road. We have to hurry, before it gets too dark. Bring your camera.”
     
    V IRGIL GOT the Nikon out of the truck, with a long image-stabilized zoom, and tagged along past the end of the barn and the rotten timbers of what might once have been a hog pen, past an old pear tree, and a couple of apples, angling downhill to a creek. A footpath, maintained by feet, led along the banks of the creek up toward the hillside. As they got closer, Virgil could see that the creek came out of a crack in the hill, feeding into a broad, shallow stock tank. Overflow from the tank fed the creek.
    “This is about as much water as we ever get,” she said. “We’re a little drier here than farther east. C’mon.”
    She led him straight into the crack in the hillside, a narrow, rocky cleft that widened to twenty feet, slightly climbing, with the water pounding downhill. The spray caught him a couple of times,