Neveah watched Earth open its maw wide and hungry. She heard it yowl like a hound dog, long and loud, but different, something she never seen or heard before, like a Smoke Wolf. Ain’t a thing on Earth that could make a sound like that except Earth itself, she thought.

She sat watching from a cement block large enough for two at the edge of the woods behind her house. From that spot, she could see the whole quarry surrounded by thick trees, the pit itself large and bowl-shaped, like God reached right outta the sky and scooped with two hands. The quarry sat abandoned Nevaeh’s whole life, maybe longer, full of miner’s equipment and water a blue so beautiful it hurt.

One of Mama’s boyfriends reckoned that anything beautiful was bound to be a trap, except Heaven. He weren’t really talking to Nevaeh, just talking to hear his own voice, and she didn’t know what it meant at the time anyway, didn’t know if he were referring to Mama or his muscle car or that water in all its good-looking blue. She hadn’t seen that boyfriend since last summer, and anyway, the water didn’t stay blue after folks got to swimming in it. It turned the color of algae on turtles, or brown like dirt, or as grey as the oak trees, especially in the autumn after all the birds flown South somewhere. All that color changing reminded Neveah of the mood rings all the girls in fifth-grade had except her.

Mama said she don’t believe in mood rings, but there’s a whole lotta things Mama don’t believe in, like washing hair every night, or throwing food away just cause the packaging say to (she could hear Mama say But it don’t look expired now, does it?), or going to the doctor if it’s only something little that’s broke, like a toe or a rib. They can’t do nothing for it anyway, Mama said. They’re just gonna charge you to look at it.

Mama said when it was hot like this, it was God punishing them, them being Nevaeh and Mama, or Mama’s boyfriends, or the Davis family who live fifteen of them down in that one house, the youngest ones always dressed the way God made them, doors slamming all night. God was always making Nevaeh nervous, knowing things she didn’t.

Nevaeh didn’t mind the summer. She didn’t feel punished. Sure, summer came hot and heavy like tears, so hot ain’t nobody know what to do with themselves, Mama said. But Nevaeh knew. She slunk through the woods, same as the coyotes and foxes and bobcats, lying underneath dewberry bushes with her mouth open, the fruit so cooked it fell right off the branches without even touching them.

Last summer, Nevaeh found a coyote washed up on the side of the riverbank, dead a week, maybe longer, the sun drying it, skin as brown as silt and pulled tight over the skeleton. Nevaeh heaved the rest of the coyote up out of the river, half dragged it underneath a tree, closed its mouth back up. She spent the rest of the afternoon gathering flowers for it, braiding painted lady and ivy and long strands of willow she draped round its neck like jewelry.  Standing over the coyote and its little green necklace, she cried like never before, howls and wails and keening, as if the coyote were somebody she knew and loved.

She hadn’t known nobody to mourn before, not her daddy who left before she was old enough to know who he was, not any siblings. She had a sister, once, who she couldn’t remember neither, and Mama wouldn’t never talk about it, thought it was unlucky, like there was still luck to run out.

But there was a lot of things Nevaeh didn’t know last summer until it happened the first time. When she saw Earth’s maw and heard Earth’s sounds, she wouldn’t have known what she was seeing if it wasn’t for that coyote, but now she seen the coyote and she seen Earth’s maw and nothing could surprise her now, she thought.

When it happened the second time, it took her a long while to decide if she wanted to tell somebody, and when she did, it was Billy Johnson. Billy lived down the street and thought he was better than the rest of them cause his daddy did something important for work, even though every time you ask Billy what his daddy did, it was something different. Nevaeh hadn’t once seen Billy’s dad, and she was pretty damn sure Billy hadn’t seen him either.

By then, it was winter, and Earth swung the other way round. The pipes froze, and there sometimes wasn’t water for a week, maybe more, so she couldn’t wash her hair every night even if she wanted to. A week’s too long, says Mama. One night, two nights, that’s fine, but a whole week and you might as well be one of them hoppers. One of them hoppers was what Mama called the folks who lived out of their tarps and tents underneath the railroad bridges. When she was younger, Nevaeh thought if she walked along the train tracks, over the bridge, they’d give her a riddle like in storybooks. But now she was ten, and she knew better, and the hoppers never talked to her anyway, just yelled things at one another or sat quiet.

Billy said next summer he oughta see Earth’s maw, even though she told him it was in the quarry. Billy wasn't no swimmer, he said. He liked to walk along the railroad bridge and throw things down at the hoppers and watch them fight over it. Billy said her mama got it wrong, that it’s the train cars that are hoppers, and the people riding them are hitchers, or hobos, but she hadn’t asked Mama about this yet.

So the next summer, Billy came with her, only cause he didn’t believe her about Earth’s maw, said she was making it up. Got them snakes in your head. Said her mama was the type of woman to make shit up just to make shit up, and Nevaeh was going the same way.

She and Billy spent a whole afternoon watching, but all they saw was Rodney or Michael or one of Mama’s other boyfriends swimming. The water was algae-green that day, with Rodney or Michael’s beer and several stubbed cigarettes on the bank of the quarry, baking in the sun.

Sometimes, Mama’s boyfriends saw Nevaeh at the edge of the woods watching, asked if she don’t want to come down and swim too, if she don’t want a sip of beer. They wouldn’t tell her Mama, they said, but Nevaeh was always juberus of Mama’s boyfriends, told them she didn’t like beer, and anyway, animals wouldn’t even drink out of that water, so she sure as hell wasn’t gonna swim in it.

But that day she was with Billy, so Rodney or Michael or whoever it was left Nevaeh alone, and she and Billy sat there the whole afternoon until Billy said See? I told you ain’t nothing happening with Earth, and he wanted to get a pop from the gas station.

Nevaeh told Billy he gotta be patient. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it would come. She’d seen it twice now, and nothing ever happened just twice. But Billy didn’t wanna wait, said he wasted one fine summer day watching nothing and he wasn’t gonna spend the rest of his fine summer days watching nothing neither, not when he could be at the river fishing or trading cards or shooting BBs.

But Nevaeh waited until one of the last days of summer. She sat watching the quarry, and she knew which boyfriend of Mama’s this one was: Tim, slick-faced and pale. He didn’t like Nevaeh cause one night he drank too much and tried to make a pass at her after Mama had fallen asleep, and the next morning he woke up more backward than Nevaeh’s name and felt ashamed of himself.

Nevaeh didn’t tell her Mama cause Mama always said whatever they don’t need to know, don’t tell them. Mama really meant the police, or the teachers at school, or the doctor, or anyone else poking where they shouldn’t, but Nevaeh took it to mean anyone.

Nevaeh knew it would be Tim the way cows know it’s fixing to rain or dogs know someone’s at the door before they knock. She watched him swimming his clumsy, exaggerated laps back and forth, leaves and skitterbugs and cottonwood all over the water’s surface. He saw her watching, tried to wave and stopped himself, so it looked like a flinch.

He climbed out of the quarry edge and walk around to the other side of the basin. Hardly anyone ever jumped from that side, ten or fifteen feet above the surface. That’s what’s not right about quarries, no one knows what’s underneath that water, if there’s broke machinery or poison minerals or large rocks or sinkholes or whatever God puts at the bottom of those basins. Nevaeh thought about telling him this, telling him about those two men before him, but then she thought about God, and Billy, and her coyote, and what Mama said, and it seemed to her God was the only one supposed to know things, the rest just gotta look out for themself, make do with knowing only what they find out on they own.

Nevaeh watched his knees bend and extend, his scrawny arms above his head, the splash after he dove, and she saw it, heard it, felt it that third time.

When the police came later to Mama’s house, Nevaeh said she didn’t know where Tim went to, can’t even remember when she last saw him. The police came back again a week later, said they done questioned the whole holler, and the Johnson boy down the street knew something about it, said Nevaeh did too, said he went with her to the quarry where she said it happened. Nevaeh said again she didn’t know nothing, said she saw folks swimming down there, sure, but that was it, that was all her and Billy saw. And that was it, far as she was concerned. Saw them swimming and didn’t see them come back up. Saw it the first time with a hopper, saw it a second time with the man who didn’t trust nothing beautiful, who didn’t take his own advice about traps.

The officer standing on Mama’s front porch tried to look her in the eyes. Neveah stared down at the ground, ten years of summer stuck to the bottom of her feet. We don’t know nothing about what’s down in that quarry, he said. Ain’t safe. You jump right in, you disturb them donnicks, them walls—the sediment, he called it—you disturb that sediment, it suck you right under. Trap you. Ain’t no one coming back up after that.

I know, Nevaeh said. She saw it in her mind, heard that sound, the sound only Earth can make, its maw wide open and hungry, the howl long and loud and like nothing she heard elsewhere, like the howl of a Smoke Wolf.