The Pits

florida. horror. fiction.

Photo by Dion Potkamp on Unsplash

Earl picked me up in that old Bronco, a high-sided box of a car that always felt like it was going to turn over. He was graduating in two weeks and I wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend for the first time since Freshman year.

We drove out Palmetto Road to get Twistee Treat and he asked me if I’d ever been to the mines.

“Not since a field trip in second grade,” I told him. I remembered how tiny I felt standing next to the phosphate pits, the machines digging them out as big as my house. The mine stacks were absolute mountains of discarded sand and gravel, piled high in a ring around the pit.

“The tour guide told us the diggers were called draglines and I thought she said drag lions. I called them that forever.”

“You wanna drive out there? See the drag lions up close? Do you know phosphate glows in the dark?”

“What? No it doesn’t. Are you serious?”

“I’m so serious. The stacks are radioactive.” He wiggled his fingers in front of my face and I swatted them.

“Stop,” I said, and he did. He froze with a smirk straight from the devil, his green eyes locked on mine. I was toast. “Ok. Show me the rocks, idiot.”

So yeah. It was just that dumb. We drove out to the mines at ten o’clock because Earl Dixon convinced me that rocks glow in the dark. And because I thought we were going to make out in his Bronco, one time, before he graduated and left me behind forever.

We were told at school that Florida is flat, but that’s not true if you live near the mines. I looked out at mountain ranges of mine waste from the backseat of my parents’ car every day of my life. Driving to ballet class, home from the grocery store. Any time you looked south, they were there, like a row of rounded teeth.

They rose out of the freight cars too, big white humps going by like whales’ backs curving out of the ocean, while you waited at the train track for ten minutes just trying to get to the Burger King.

Whatever the hell phosphate was. All I remember is they used to tell us it was in Coke. Some kind of preservative I guess, but it seemed like a lot of work for Coke.

It’s not like our parents worked in the mines or anything. It was pretty much automated by the eighties, one guy operating a dragline, maybe one other guy in the office in case his wife called. But my grandpa was an ad man for the phosphate company and sometimes he brought home a big black shark tooth they found in the pit. It was more like that.

Earl pulled around the back of the mine and parked. The draglines were still and quiet, but their long crane arms were lit with a string of bulbs like Christmas lights. He knew there was a gap in the chain link, where a stream of white sludge flowed out of the pit. Of course he did. Why would I be the first girl he tried the glowing rocks on?

As soon as we came around the side there were floodlights so bright it could have been daytime. The pit was dusty and white, pockmarked and forbidden, the surface of the moon, right there on Palmetto Road.

“Aw man,” Earl said. “They got all the lights on. We won’t be able to see ‘em glow.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“Let’s go to the top.” I followed his eyes to the top of the white hill next to the pit. It was fifty feet up.

“There’s no way—“

But he was gone, running at that hill. Every boy is an idiot, even the tall ones.

The stack was a loose pile of rocks that shifted under our steps. There was dust all over my hands as I scrambled to keep up.

“This isn’t really radioactive, right? You were just teasing me?”

“No, I think it really is. But like, only a little.” He looked back at me and that’s how I remember him. Floppy hair plastered to his forehead. Eyes beaming trouble and nonsense. He was wearing a denim jacket and he must have been sweating to death inside it in that Florida May. But it did look cool.

“There’s a big case going on at Meadow Glen. My dad says their houses are nuclear or something because of the pits. Don’t get it in your mouth.”

Meadow Glen was a really nice neighborhood. Earl was so totally full of shit.

I slowed down to hide my panting and he got to the top before me. I was starting to get mad he didn’t wait up, but it gave me time to right myself. I wanted to wipe the sweat off my face, but I knew if I did I would paint myself white, so I rubbed my forehead on my shoulder. I hoped I smelled ok. Making out on a pile of rocks was not my dream come true, but I’d settle.

He went over the other side so fast it was like he jumped.

I heard a yell but it was cut short, like someone clapped a hand on Earl’s mouth, and then rocks hissing, sliding down that stack in waves. I ran to the top, my feet sinking each time they came down, like running in wet sand.

At the bottom of the mountain, in the white mud, I saw Earl’s jacket floating, then his jeans. But the legs were going weird directions. I thought he took his clothes off and threw them in the pit to trick me. I looked around for him and I felt like I was going to puke. Like my guts understood something my head did not.

There was a splash of pink on the rocks, and I guess I knew then without really knowing. I took off running down the mountain as fast as I could, sliding for long stretches so I wouldn’t go headfirst. When I got to the bottom the backs of my thighs were skinned up, white dusty and bleeding everywhere.

I ran to the Bronco and the keys were in it and I started driving without even adjusting the seat. I was half-standing trying to reach the pedals. The radio came on and I couldn’t comprehend it at all, I only noticed my head was full of sound. The Bronco fishtailed on the gravel and I hauled out of there.

The mine was so bright, I didn’t even turn on the headlights.

Ten seconds later I was speeding through the dark and I realized my lights were off going fifty on an unpaved road. The terrain was bumpy and that top-heavy truck was bouncing all over and I came to half of my senses for a second. I let off the gas while I was punching buttons and twisting levers on the dash. I managed to turn off the radio, and all of a sudden I got the lights on and saw I wasn’t on the road.

The Bronco was in a grassy clearing, heading toward a bunch of oak trees. I slammed on the brakes and flew forward against the steering wheel, knocking the breath out of me. I gasped for air like it was the first time I breathed since leaving the mine, and then everything was quiet.

The oak trees were old and gnarled, full of Spanish moss that hung down like stringy grey hair. In between them there was nothing but black, not a streetlight or a trailer park or any sign of the mine lights. They loomed over me like they were keeping a secret. Those trees looked wrong, they were meant for the dark.

I jammed the Bronco in reverse and looked in the rear view and that’s when I noticed the headstones, sticking out from the grass like a bunch of crooked teeth, bathed red in the brake lights.

For a second, I had this funny idea that Earl set it all up, that this whole graveyard was a prank because he wanted to scare me. The headstones were scattered every which way. It looked hurried. It looked fake.

And that’s when my slow brain finally caught up. Earl was dead.

This was all real, every bit of it. The pink on the gravel and the Spanish moss and the hidden graveyard. I hadn’t even checked on him, I just ran away.

All of a sudden I could smell the grass and the trees and the moss, this watery green air that crawled into my nose on jello legs. The backs of my thighs were drying stuck to the Bronco seat and the clean, dry smell of the phosphate was doused in slime and blood and algae.

I spun the tires in the grass but the Bronco didn’t move one inch. Grass and mud kicked up all over the headstones and the moss leaned over like it was going to swallow the whole place. I wondered if I was dead already.

I started screaming and I screamed until I tasted blood. Not screaming for help but because I had no other options, banging my fists on the steering wheel and wishing so hard. Wishing so hard that none of this was what it was.

*

They found me out back of the mine the next day. I was balled up by the fence, coated head to toe in white dust except for the backs of my thighs, still oozing blood from my slide down the hill. I didn’t watch when they got Earl out of there, or maybe I did. I can’t remember.

I tried to show them where the Bronco was but we never could find it. Long chains of volunteers trudged through the fields, searching for hidden gravestones. We’d retrace the drive, me in the hard back seat of a cop car, radio stuttering up front. We’d go down the mine road, gravel grinding under the tires, turn left, turn right. We tried after dark. We tried turning off where there was no turnoff— into churning seas of tall grass, swampy ditches full of twinkling gators’ eyes. We tried everything but driving blindfolded.

Every time, we’d end up back on Palmetto Road and everything would be regular. The cop would face me with some hard emotion on his jaw, depending how he regarded my role in the thing.

From the backseat, I’d look out at the orange juice sky and wonder when everything flipped. White Florida mountains out there chewing up the horizon, threatening to glow.