Nightmare Country (15 page)

“Have a beer and chat, Doc?” Harry's eyes looked chiseled out in shadow. Of the various scars that were visible, the one running from his chin and down his neck was definitely the kind he'd wear for life. But the few long hairs that had hung in his face the last time Thad had seen him were once more swept neatly back over the bald spot.

“Sure, why not?” Thad didn't know if he was ready to talk to a fellow survivor yet, but he couldn't ignore the plea in Harry's voice. “Thought all the boys from lower Alabama that are left would have headed for safer waters by now.”

“Couple of us stayed behind to … mediate with the authorities and families back home and …” Harry shrugged and handed Thad two of the Belicans. “You know, there might still be word on the others. Could of been another boat out there we didn't see that picked somebody up, and word hasn't got back yet.”

“After yesterday, I wouldn't swear to anything's being impossible.”

“Heard about the dog,” Harry said as the little bitch left her corner and walked fairly steadily to the darkness under the couch. “Boy, the dogs down here sure know how to slink, don't they?”

“I suppose the surgery yesterday is the talk of the island.”

“Well, you were upset. We all were. A crazy vet carving on a stray dog's a lot easier to talk about than …”

“Two afternoons in one day?”

“Yeah, and that … thing that came up out of the water.”

Thad pushed aside his work again so they could sit at the table.

“I just can't believe ol' Bo's really gone. The others maybe, but not Bo. He was so alive and tough. You'd have to work overtime to kill a guy like that.” Harry looked at the window that was slatted shut, at the corner where the dog had been, at the table—obviously making an effort to keep his eyes dry. “And poor Sue Ellen trying to ride herd on that bunch of hell-raisers of theirs.”

He emptied the bottle and rolled it around in his hand, staring at it but not seeing it. “'Course, they ain't going to hurt financially. That's one thing. Ol' Bo was worth bucks.”

“Doing what?”

“Owned a string of fast-food joints. Used to kid him about bein' the hamburger king of Alabama.” He lost the battle of the tears, and they streamed down his cheeks. “Shit!”

Thad decided it took someone from the deep South to give that word the proper inflection. “Martha gone home yet?”

“Won't budge. Dixie keeps trying to get her on a plane for the States, but she's still waiting for her Greg—like she expects him to walk on the waters or something.”

“Like you waiting for Bo?”

“Yeah, I guess. Did you know Martha pulled you into the boat almost single-handed? We all thought you was dead, and we were busy just hanging on. She wouldn't give up, and it was either help drag you in or lose her over the side. Saved your life's what she did.”

Thad regretted the few impatient thoughts he'd had of Martha Durwent. “I've been going through my Dad's writings and research, hoping he had a lead on all this. Haven't been able to put anything coherent together yet.”

“Beats cuttin' up dogs. Think something happened to him like what happened to the others?”

“Maybe. But no one's come up with any boats missing with him.”

“The Metnál isn't in the Bermuda Triangle, is it?”

“Most of these writers place it east and slightly north of here. One of them charts the western edge as far as the tip of Yucatan, which is probably something like three, four hundred miles north of the Metnál. But there are stories of people and craft missing, time getting all mixed up, and people and navigational instruments getting confused in the Triangle—similar to what we experienced.”

“So what else did you dredge up, even if it isn't coherent?”

Thad scanned his notepad. “This is going to sound dumb.”

“Hell, I was out there, man, you don't get any dumber than what happened.”

“Okay … uh, some people, including my father, believe man didn't descend from the ape but had a high level of civilization before the Mediterranean cultures developed. It was lost or destroyed or just died, and the Phoenicians and Greeks and Egyptians and Mayans, et cetera, were merely tiny outposts of survival for a dying culture. Everything we know now was known better tens of thousands of years ago and is just being rediscovered.”

“Horseshit. Man, you sure don't read your Bible. That's where the truth is at. There's just no question. And what's all this got to do with the thing in the water out there?”

“Nothing, as far as I can see—I think it's all hogwash, and for different reasons. But my father thought there are some hidden vestiges of this civilization in the form of machines left that still work or get out of control. Why these machines didn't oxidize and turn to dust like everything else that old, he didn't explain. But he claims to have seen one of these things himself.”

“Where?”

“That he doesn't say. Or if he does, I haven't found it.”

Harry Rothnel stared at Thad with a full measure of pity, looked away as if embarrassed, and then said very quietly, “Your dog's peeing on the floor, Doc.”

15

Tamara drove across dry rolling plain toward Cheyenne, morning sun in her eyes, edginess playing along her nerve ends because she'd not had time for her run and because she'd left Adrian alone.

Three full days of teachers' meetings before the start of school the next week. But Adrian was twelve. She'd had jobs in Iowa City taking care of other people's children.
So stop fretting, Mother
.

There was little in the way of fattening food in the apartment, no stores to buy any. She'd be happy with her stereo and books. Adrian had been ignoring her whenever possible anyway, so Tamara's absence shouldn't increase her loneliness.

Tamara slowed the Toyota to watch a small band of antelope leap the fence on one side of the ditch, cross the road, and bound over the opposite fence. Their pronged horns reminded her of old-fashioned can openers. They had strawberry-brown coats, white bellies, and streaks at the throat.

The creatures brought a sense of proportion to her day. Tamara could use some time away from Adrian and the shoddy settlement where every problem loomed so large because there was nothing else to think about. She straightened her spine and began to look forward to a day of intelligent adult company, not that of crazies like Augie and Jerusha. She was a professional now, and about to take part in professional meetings. Tamara hummed to the tune of tires on asphalt.

Coming back that evening, her stomach growled with hunger and with anger at all the coffee she'd downed to keep awake. Her bladder shot warning pains at her groin. Her tailbone ached with too much sitting, and her shoulders drooped with fatigue. Tamara'd had no idea boredom could be so tiring.

“The total waste of a whole day!” she said to a windshield aglare this time with the setting sun.

As the ugly mountain came in sight and her stomach, bladder, and aching head all demanded immediate attention, Tamara understood why her working-women friends used to say they wished they had a wife. It would have been wonderful to come home now to dinner prepared, to put her feet up afterward and read the paper while someone else did the dishes, to shower and go to bed early in order to build up the stamina to endure another day like this one.

Adrian stood at the sink when Tamara entered the apartment and dashed for the bathroom. It wasn't until she stepped out that she registered the smell of cooking food and an elegantly set table. Adrian was tossing a salad in Miriam Kopecky's silver salad bowl and had lit candles. The oven door stood open, and the fragrance of roasting beef forced Tamara to swallow squirting saliva.

“I didn't know how to make gravy,” Adrian said matter-of-factly, “so I baked the potatoes and we can have them with margarine.”

“But how did you know how to do the rest? That roast was frozen …”

“Jerusha told me how to thaw it and when to put stuff in the oven.” Adrian took out a covered dish of string beans and tomatoes. “Sit down.”

The next day Tamara returned to find the leftover roast chopped up in a delicious casserole with rice and vegetables. And the stereo playing softly!

Jerusha didn't like too much noise. Jerusha had helped Adrian think of something to do with the leftover roast.

“Honey, you don't hang around Jerusha's apartment all day, do you?”

“No. Jerusha has to rest a lot. Vinnie and I took a walk today, but her snotty brother tagged along and spoiled it. The Baggette kids came home from their grandma's today. They're nerds. Larry Johnson comes home this weekend. He went on a fishing trip with his uncle. Jerusha's chickens got out, and we had to round them up before the Hanleys' dog got to 'em. We helped Vinnie's mom wash the baby.”

Tamara was pleased at the reversal in Adrian's behavior, her interest in someone other than herself—but uneasy at the suddenness of it.

By Friday evening when she staggered in carrying stacks of forms, questionnaires, outlines, and plans, she was too dispirited to care. And too grateful for the creamed-egg-and-noodle dish Adrian put before her to comment on their recent cholesterol intake or the fact that the fresh eggs had come from Jerusha's hen house.

The next afternoon there was a cloud in the sky. Tamara left Adrian with her nose in a book and went out to see it. It was not a large cloud and it obviously didn't plan to do anything, but it did break up the tedious consistency of blue sky. She remembered ironically of having prayed for a break in the rain in Columbus and for the sun to shine. Any change in this changeless place was worth remarking.

Tamara wandered up the road to the company fence and along it until it ended at the base of the mountain. A track with old gondola cars and weeds growing between the ties lay along an embankment, and she followed it into no-trespassing territory.

Some stockpiles of limestone nudged up against the mountain and looked like giant snowbanks next to its iron-stained sides. The mining operation's buildings spread around the mountain's curve and formed a separate town, larger than the one down the road near the school. Metal sheds, obviously in use, sat next to wooden shacks with their roofs fallen in. An ancient outhouse leaned away from a rail siding as if blowing in the windy wake of a motionless ore car loaded with rock.

A shack with a flat tar-paper roof still had glass in its windows, antique glass—murky, dirty. And a once-painted door with a porcelain doorknob and an elaborate bronze knocker that belonged to other years and richer doors and merely thudded when she dropped it against the striker. She could see a wooden table just below the window and a spider making hairlike tracks in the dust across a patch of sunlit surface.

“There's some history there you're looking at,” a voice said behind her, and she swung around to find Russ Burnham in pin-striped coveralls and a hard hat with padded metal earmuffs swung back out of the way. “Used to be the chemist's shack.”

“I … probably shouldn't be here.”

“Used to check samples of the rock that came out of the mine every day.” The corners of his eyes crinkled and his ears stuck out below the helmet. “Up until a few years ago, used to run an average of ninety-seven, ninety-eight percent. Purest anywhere in the country.”

He slapped heavy gloves against his leg, and white dust flew. His workshoes were white to the laces, as if he'd been walking through powdered sugar. “Yeah, been producing since 1905. Used to use horses to pull wooden cars out of the mine. Company'd send men down to Denver, Larimer Street. Hire drunks out of the gutter, bring 'em up, put 'em to work. Nobody sober wanted to come out here. Made for some pretty rowdy times and some pretty tall tales.”

“Russ, I know the sign says not to come up here, but I was curious—”

“'Course we're more mechanized now, don't need many men. Still hell trying to find and keep those we do, though.” He pointed to a sagging shed next to a snow fence. “That used to be the magazine, held explosives. Mostly ammonium nitrate. See those big doors? That's the three-hundred-foot portal. Three hundred feet from the top of the mountain. That part of the mountain's almost hollow after years of mining, and that portal's sealed off. One good earthquake, and that whole baby'd cave in.”

Tamara laughed and threw up her arms. “All right. All right, you're hired. I'll bring my students up for a guided tour.”

“I only guide teachers.” The eye crinkles disappeared. “If you're going to teach in a company town, you ought to know something about it. Curiosity's been known to kill more than cats.”

He snorted and spit into the weeds. “Now, come around here and look down.” He led her to the curve in the mountainside, where the ground fell away sharply. “You can't see it from here, but down there's the six-hundred-foot portal, where we're working now.”

“Aren't you afraid the hollowed-out top half will cave in on the tunnels and miners below?”

“Yeah, but like I said, it'd take a earthquake. Which has never been known to happen here. 'Course I don't imagine the Indians and buffalo kept much in the way of records. I think the company'll shut down here soon. Cheaper to surface-mine limestone. And the purity's giving out.”

“It's odd to have the bowels of the mountain so white and the outside so rusty-colored.”

“Unusual land formation, all right. There're a few others like it. Those big buildings at the other end of the tracks down there are the crusher, where all the noise comes from, and the screening plant. Back up on this level here, that foundation used to be the hotel for single miners and that great heap of boards behind it was the old icehouse.”

“Hey, boss?” A man with a light on his helmet strode up the road from the lower level. “She's back down there again. Says she's checkin' on our progress. What the hell's that supposed to mean?”