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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Dead Dry
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“Okay, a lad from the regiment walks into the apothecary’s and says—”
“We’re burning daylight, Julia.” Losing my last shred of patience, I said, “Besides, why are you still telling Scottish jokes? The man’s dead. As I recall, you’re of English extraction.”
Julia stared into her beer. She said, “For all I know, he did figure out how to change his beneficiary.”
“Afton?”
Julia’s face crumpled with pain. Tears swam in her eyes.
I said, “You still want him. After all this—”
“I was always shooting myself in the foot around him,” she moaned. She put her head down on the table and bawled.
I leaned back in my chair, resigning myself to a long conversation. “You’re being too hard on yourself. He was a difficult man.”
“That’s what everyone says. And you’re right, he was difficult. Damn it, Em, I should have just had my little affair with him and
skipped
the marriage.”
I didn’t want to hear about what went wrong in Julia McWain’s marriage. I wanted to think that getting married could be a solution, not the beginning of a problem.
Julia took another long draft of her beer, set it down, and began to write on her cocktail napkin with her finger. “My friends kept telling me I was resisting change. ‘La, la, la, you’re resisting change,’ they’d say, ‘It’s time to move
on. Let it go. It’s his karma to run after younger women. It’s his loss.’ Bunch of New Age la-la freaks. But she had something I didn’t, that’s what he said.”
“What do you think, Gilda was a better woman to him?”
“She’s prettier.”
“You’ll find someone else,” I said, chagrined that I couldn’t come up with a less feeble platitude.
“Easy for you to say. You just float through life.”
“Float? I haven’t had a date in years.”
This seemed to perk her up a bit. “None at all?”
I said, “Well, there
is
this guy I know.”
“Yeah? A guy guy, or … a
guy.
”
“Well … a
guy.
I mean, he’s really, really attractive and all.”
“Available?”
“Yes.”
“Interested?”
“Maybe.”
Julia put her bottle to her lips and aimed the bottom of it at me. She gave her eyebrows a quick pump. Lowered the bottle. “This is interesting. Em Hansen thinking about an attractive
guy.
I thought hell would freeze over first.”
“Oh, come on, Julia. I’ve been involved with men before.”
“Oh, sure. Once every decade, whether you need to or not. For five minutes, tops.”
“Now, that’s not fair! There’ve been guys … I just haven’t brought them all around to meet you.”
“Like who?”
“Well, since I’ve been living in Salt Lake, for instance, there’ve been two worth mentioning.”
“Mention, then.”
“Well, there was this guy Ray. He was a cop. Really good looking, and a solid guy, really. Wanted me to marry him.”
“And?”
“Well, it didn’t work out.” I shrugged my shoulders.
“Why not?”
“Well, he’s a Mormon, so he needed me to join his church, see, and—”
Julia cut me off with a snort that shot beer up her nose.
She had stopped crying, so I kept going with the topic. I said, “Okay, but it was serious. I really felt something for him.”
“Something. Were you in love with him?”
“Oh, now, you’ve got to go and ask the difficult questions. I really, truly
wanted
him.”
“You mean in bed.” She shook her head. “That’s sex. You’d know it if you were in love with him.” She thumped her chest. “That, you feel here, not the other place.” She shrugged. “Or at least, that’s what people tell me.”
“Thanks for the anatomy lesson.”
“Okay, you said there were two worth mentioning.”
“The other was this guy Jack. Now, Jack was really something. Great in bed. Gorgeous. Funny. Full of shit, you know? With him I felt it both places.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, he went away. But I guess you could say I was really in love with Jack.”
“
Gonzo
for Jack is what it sounds like. All pressy-body and no stickum.”
“That I can’t argue. But for a while, it was really nice.” I glanced at the Budweiser clock above the bar.
Julia said, “So tell me about this new guy. This
guy.
”
“Well, this one is a really, truly nice guy. Wears well. Doesn’t push anything on me. He has a sense of humor, but he’s not just a joker. He can even cook, sort of. He’s smart and likes to go for hikes and—”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s a pilot.”
“Oh, a flyboy. Nice. Military? They’ve got an Air National Guard in Utah, don’t they?”
“He
was
military. Navy. Flew an EA-6 in Desert Storm, but now that he’s civilian, he’s designing a new twin-engine prop-drive aircraft. He’s got a jet-engine version of
the same airframe on the drawing board. He’s got the prototype together, and he’s looking for investors to put it into production. Smart guy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Fritz Calder.”
“So then, here’s the twenty thousand dollar question: What do you need from Fritz?”
“I … well, maybe that is the question. I can’t decide what I want with Fritz.”
“
Need,
Em. My question was not what you want from him, but what you
need.
” Her eyes clouded and focused inward. “It’s so easy to want a man who can’t give you what you need. Especially if you don’t know what you want and need from yourself.”
“Now you’ve truly lost me.”
Julia stared into my eyes. “We go through the first half of our lives thinking that a man is the solution, but you know what? He’s really just a mirror. When you think you’re looking at the man, you’re only looking at your own needs and longing staring right back out at you.”
This was Julia: Half crazy but still half wise. I tried on her idea. What did I see when I looked into Fritz’s eyes? And what did I want? I wanted a child, I knew that much, and if I didn’t get going, it was going to be too damned late. I wanted a man to be with and love forever, who could love me. A love that would fill me to the brim. A love that would make me nuts with pleasure.
Julia said, “You’re as crazy as I am, Em.” She glanced out the window. The sky was beginning to spit the first big drops of the coming storm. She said, “I don’t know about you, but I gotta go.” She stood up abruptly. “Just remember to look into the mirror, Em. Next time you see this man, look straight into him and ask yourself not just what you see looking back at you, but
who.
”
 
 
FRITZ CALDER SAILED TOWARD THE TOWERING CLOUDS in the twin-engine aircraft he had designed, pushing it to its maximums, cursing the lack of a tailwind. Under the hush of his noise-canceling headphones, it was totally silent except for the gentle whine of the engines. His attention was fixed on the far horizon, but he glanced repeatedly at his instruments. The weather radar screen glowed with concentrations of orange and red shapes along a line that ran north and south over Colorado’s Front Range, directly across his path. In the distance the flickering lightning within the squall line bloomed with random strobes behind the cloud buildups. It reminded him of his months at sea in the Indian Ocean.
But on this day, he rode to war against an enemy whose face he could not see, and the targets on his radar screen told him that he must first evade the enormous dark clouds that stretched along the eastern flank of the Rockies from north of Boulder clear down past Colorado Springs. The cloud mass was forty thousand feet tall. Because—as the lack of tailwinds advised him—there were no winds aloft,
a strange and ominous condition in itself, the tops of these behemoth thunderheads had not blown over into the classic anvil shape. Any pilot worth his salt knew what that meant. The hot, moist air was rising with terrifying force and probably carrying hail the size of golf balls. He’d have to divert far to the north or south to avoid them, continue east out toward Kansas and then turn west again before making his approach into Centennial, rather than risk being thrashed to splinters in the titanic updrafts those clouds represented.
He focused his mind on the job of flying. He was flying to Centennial, where he’d pick up a car and continue to Castle Rock, where he would find Em. Find her and keep her safe, because each time he looked inside his own soul, he saw her, bright and shimmering, looking out at him.
 
 
THE BIG, SPLASHING DROPS OF RAIN COALESCED INTO a cold, hammering downpour as I jacked the Jeep up to attach the spare tire. In no time at all, the air around us went dark with slanting lines of water. It covered the road until it glistened and began to run off. It hammered the roof of the Jeep. It wet us to the skin and chilled us to the bone.
With water coursing down my nose and dripping from my hair, I turned the crank as fast as I could, first up to get the blown tire off and the spare tire on, and then down almost too fast, dropping the Jeep back onto the road. Julia stood by helplessly, her knee so stiff and painful now that she held it straight.
“Get back in the car,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do out here.”
Julia raised the back door of the Jeep and got out a jacket with a hood. “Here, wear this at least,” she said.
I put it on to humor her, but I was already soaked to the skin. It was a faded red and had MCWAIN GEOLOGICAL CONSULTING embroidered across the right breast pocket, to
match the logo painted on the doors of the Jeep. “When did you have this made up?”
“Just before we bought the ranch. I thought Afton would like it. It seems I didn’t understand his ethic or at least the one he was changing to. Something about being made in a Third World country where they use child labor and adult semi-slavery.”
“There’s some truth to all that, isn’t there?”
“Yeah, but as long as he’s feeling so tender-hearted about children and overburdened adults, how about the ones he left behind in Denver?”
I shook my head as I cranked the second to the last lug nut back into place.
Julia huddled underneath the raised tailgate and shivered.
It began to hail. Big, white Ping-Pong ball–sized lumps of ice came spitting out of the sky like a Dr. Seuss story gone deadly. I jumped under the cover of the open tailgate. Julia motioned for me to climb in with her so she could lower it in case the hail started breaking glass. When she managed to pull the thing down on her foot, she began to invent whole new combinations of swear words.
The drumming of the hailstones on the roof of the Jeep was deafening. The individual stones came larger and larger. A particularly large stone hit the windshield, breaking the glass into a perfect spider’s web of cracks, and I could see them ricocheting off the rental car. I shouted, “Both vehicles are going to look like golf balls when this is over!”
“Sons of bitches, bastards all,” growled Julia.
“How’s your insurance?” I inquired.
“Passable. Big deductible.”
“Life sure can suck.”
“Amen, sister.”
The hail passed, but the rain kept coming, even faster. The ruined windshield coursed with water, but held, letting only a thin stream of water through. “I’m going to finish up quick while I can,” I said.
“If you insist on going back out there, use this,” she said,
handing me a hard hat emblazoned with the McWain logo.
I loosened the fitting band and put it on. “You might have given this to me earlier,” I said. “It would have spared my coiffure.”
“Yeah, you and the gilded Gilda. Hey, now that we have four tires under this thing again, let’s drive up to the ranch and spin mud all over her fucking yurt.”
“Whoa there,” I said. “You want to watch that temper of yours, Julia. If that Upton guy doesn’t file a complaint on you for punching him out, then mixing it up with Gilda will certainly do the trick.”
Julia growled, “You’re right. I’d better keep my distance. If I get within striking distance of that bloodsucking tick, she’s dead.”
“Watch who you say that around, Julia.”
She broke into fresh tears. “You don’t think I’d actually do something
that
stupid, do you?”
“No. You’re stupid enough to marry a man so selfish he leaves you without a spare tire in a field vehicle, and you’re stupid enough to drive up a dirt road without replacing it, but both of those are stupidity against yourself. You are not so stupid that you’d be stupid at someone else.” I launched myself over the back of the seat and ventured forth again into the downpour.
A fresh onslaught of rain came rushing down the hill like an advancing curtain. Just before it drove down upon me, Julia rolled down the window and cried, “What’s that?”
I turned to see where she was pointing, up toward the McWain ranch. “I don’t see anything,” I hollered.
“I thought I saw something moving up on the nearest ridge, just a couple hundred yards away.”
I squinted into the rain but saw nothing. “Do you still see it?”
“No …” She was huddled in the car, shivering. Afraid.
I set to work, hurrying as I tightened the final lug nuts. In half a minute, I was done, and I climbed back into the
Jeep, this time in the driver’s seat. For a moment, I contemplated the mess the hail had made of the windshield. I could barely see through it.
Julia climbed forward over the seats. She said, “I’ll drive.”
“The hell you will. This thing has a standard shift.”
“But—”
“I’ll just pull up next to the rental car. You can drive that. You need to get back to Denver, right? It’s your left knee that’s messed up, but you can drive the automatic shift just fine.”
“But I’m not listed on the insurance.”
“I can phone the rental company and have you listed. What, would you prefer I drive you to Denver? And then figure out how you’re going to come back and get the Jeep? No, we’ll switch and I can drop the Jeep off and pick up the rental on my way to the airport.” I started up the Jeep and eased it forward to pull up next to the sedan, watching through the right-hand window to make sure I wasn’t getting too close, because I could barely see through the windshield. “The keys are in it,” I said. “I’ll meet you at your house in an hour or so.”
She looked at her wounded leg. She tried to bend it. She winced. Then she grabbed her cell phone out of its cradle on the dashboard and prepared to get out. “You’re following me, aren’t you?”
“I have one more thing I want to do first.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“I’ve got to sample a few of those red clay soils, like just along here toward Johnson’s ranch. And chert pebbles. I saw some sticking out of a cut bank down by where Jarre and Plum Creeks come together.”
“N-n-no!”
“No?” I put a hand on her. “You’re shivering, Julia. Get into that rental car and push up the heat.”
“I can’t leave you out here by yourself! What if you got
hypothermic? And what if I have trouble driving that thing? Follow me, Em,
please
!”
“Come on, I’m a tough old ranch girl. I want to go home, and I can’t go until I grab those samples. I’m already up here and soaking wet, so what do I have to lose? It’ll take me five minutes and I’m out of here. You run along. If you have any trouble, I’ll be coming along behind you. Take 67 to 85 and 85 to I-25. It’ll be safest. You have trouble, call me on my cell phone.”
Her eyes shone with anxiety and her teeth were bared in horror.
I said, “Julia, get out of here! Your lips are turning blue. Come on, the hail’s stopped. I want to get those samples and get my butt home to Utah.”
Julia at last did as I said, giving me one last bedraggled look and slipping quickly from one vehicle to the other. She started up the rental car and drove away.
I waited for a minute, listening to the rain, trying to let it be okay that I simply couldn’t tolerate another moment of Julia’s craziness. What had happened to my old friend? Had life become so damned disappointing that she couldn’t pull herself together any better than this? Small thoughts trickled through my mind, the kind that point toward partings of the way, little justifications and rationalizations and one great big, nasty, in-my-face realization that some people move on with life and others fall behind.
The windshield wipers slapped back and forth, doing almost no good against the fractured glass. The clouds and rain had settled in so thickly now that I saw fit to turn on the headlights. I looked at the clock on the dash. It was only three in the afternoon, but it looked like dusk.
I took a deep breath and put the Jeep back in gear, but did not let out the clutch. Now that I was alone, I discovered that I was in fact feeling a little anxious myself.
Why would grabbing a sample frighten me?
I asked myself.
I’m simply saving an extra trip. I’m not nosing around on anybody’s property. And it’s not the storm; I’ve ridden horseback
twenty miles in rains as hard as this. So what’s my problem?
Okay,
I admitted to myself,
so the windshield’s screwed up and three of your tires are bald. How’s that so different from driving Dad’s tractor to harvest alfalfa?
I tried to calm myself, tried to think of something quiet and reassuring. The image of Fritz opened in my mind like a deck of cards fanning out smoothly, lined up by number and suit, except for one joker where a Jack should be, which made me smile. What had Julia said? I should look at him as a mirror?
Another bolt of lightning hit, followed within ten seconds by a crash of thunder. The center of the storm was moving closer. It was time to grab my samples or give up.
I glanced around to make certain that there was plenty of higher ground around me so that I wouldn’t become a lightning rod. Twisting my face with the mental effort of trying to see through the small portion of the windshield that wasn’t smashed, I headed up the dirt road that led toward Bart Johnson’s ranch and drove along past the corner where the fence turned to the juncture with his entrance track. I was almost sad that the Rhodesian ridgeback wasn’t there to bark at me. The place was just a sea of running rain and mud, disconsolate and cold.
I set the brake and hopped out, leaving the Jeep in the center of the road so it wouldn’t slide off into the ditch, the engine and the wipers running for whatever good they might do, and scratched quickly at the bank where it was dripping red like the blood of Mother Earth. Stuffing a wad of clay into the pocket of my jeans, I hopped back into the Jeep, closed the door, and removed the hard hat at last. My hair stuck to my forehead like paste. I thought of digging for another plastic bag for my so-called evidence but decided that it made no substantive difference whether it was hermetically sealed at the site anyway—this evidence was hardly conclusive of much of anything—so I left the muck where it was, cold and wet against my thigh.
As I eased the Jeep back into gear, I felt the tires slip. Cursing Julia for driving a car that not only lacked a spare but needed new tread, I put my foot on the brake and reached for the lever that would shift it into four-wheel drive. As my hand landed on the lever, I heard a horn sound behind me.
The lever wouldn’t go into all-wheel gear. “Old-fashioned piece of junk!” I cursed, trying it a second and a third time.
The horn sounded behind me again, longer, more insistent.
I switched on the rear wiper blade, straightened up, and peered into the rear-view mirror. All I could see through the coursing rain and gloom was the muddy glow of a pair of headlights, high up like another SUV, but wider, like a truck. Cursing my luck at finding myself in front of a rancher in a hurry, I belayed the attempt to put Julia’s Jeep in four-wheel drive and instead pressed down on the accelerator. The tires spun then caught and the Jeep began to roll forward. Racking it up through the gears, I glanced into the mirror again. The other vehicle was still close behind me, even closer now, and the driver again sounded its horn. I drove faster, then tapped the brakes to flash red lights in the driver’s eyes, get him to back off. The truck careened in and rammed my rear bumper. Stunned, I glanced backward over my shoulder. In a flash of lightning, I saw two fists clutched across the top of the steering wheel of the vehicle behind me and above that, the brim of a hat. The driver was so intent on riding up my back that he was bent almost to the wheel.
My heart rattled in my chest. Half scared and half furious, I stepped on it, hurrying to get away from this idiot. The horn sounded again. In one last glance at the rear-view mirror, I saw the high headlights hurtling toward me. Again he rammed me, jerking my neck. No longer thinking about what I was doing, I stood on the gas pedal so hard my butt lifted off the seat.
Acceleration did not happen. Instead, I began sliding.
Panicking, I racked the Jeep into lower gear and again floored it, hoping I could regain traction. The Jeep’s wiper blades slapped frantically, but did nothing to clear the shattered glass. I felt the road pitch downhill. I was going at least forty miles per hour on an exquisitely slick surface with rocks to both sides. In a flash of lightning, I saw the vague outlines of the road swerving off to the right. I tapped the brakes then released them. I was caught between two hells, afraid to accelerate but certain that I should not stop. My back end swung out madly to the left. The big truck slewed wildly up on my right and turned toward me, ramming my rear wheel well. I felt the Jeep spin. It pirouetted crazily across the road, hit the ditch with a sickening lurch, and began to roll.

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