Sleepwalk (3 page)

“Maybe Jeff’s not going to show up,” Gina Alvarez said, reaching out to turn the volume down. She was curled up on the seat next to Jed, her head cradled against his shoulder. The remains of a hamburger and a shake were balanced on the dash, and when Gina felt a slight pressure on her shoulder, she reached out, picked up the last of the fries and stuck it in Jed’s mouth.

“He’ll be here,” Jed told her, munching on the fry. “He was gonna get some beer.”

Gina stiffened, then sat up and moved to the far side of the car, her eyes flicking to the backseat, where Heather Fredericks was necking with Randy Sparks. “You didn’t say anyone was bringing beer,” she said, her voice taking on an accusatory tone.

Jed grinned at her, that cocky, half-mocking grin that never failed to quicken her heartbeat. “If I had, you wouldn’t have come, would you?”

Gina hesitated, then shrugged. “Maybe,” she temporized. “Maybe I would, and maybe I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t,” Jed declared knowingly. “You’d have given me one of your lectures on the evils of alcohol, and then shut the door in my face.”

“I would not!” Gina replied. “How come everyone always acts like I’m some kind of goody-goody?”

“Because you are,” Heather Fredericks replied from the backseat, squirming loose from Randy’s arms and buttoning up her blouse.

“I am not,” Gina protested. “But what happens if we get caught?”

Jed sighed in mock exasperation. “We’re not going to get caught,” he told her. “All we’re gonna do is go out and drag the highway for a while, then go up into the canyon and have a couple of beers. What’s the big deal?”

Gina thought it over, and decided that maybe he was right—maybe it wasn’t a big deal. Almost all the kids she knew—certainly all of Jed’s friends—got a couple of six-packs practically every weekend and went up into Mordida Canyon. And it wasn’t as though they did anything really wrong. They just went for a swim, then sat around on the beach, listening to the radio and talking. And if she didn’t go, all she’d wind up doing was sitting at home with her little sister, watching television.

Her mother would be furious if she found out, but it was Friday night, and she’d be working at the café until at least one in the morning. By then Gina would be home in bed, asleep.

A pair of headlights swept across the ugly orange walls of the A&W stand in front of them, and a horn blasted as Jeff Hankins pulled up next to the LTD in his ancient Plymouth. He revved the engine threateningly,
then called to Jed, “Still think that piece of junk can take me?”

Jed snickered, and switched on the Ford’s engine. “Only one way to find out, isn’t there?” he yelled back. As he dropped the transmission into reverse, the car jerked backward with enough force to throw Gina against the dashboard. She shoved herself back onto the seat and pulled the seat belt around her waist. “What’s the matter?” Jed teased her. “Think I’ve forgotten how to drive?”

“I think if you roll the car over, I want to stay where I am,” Gina told him.

They were out of the parking lot now, and a moment later Jeff Hankins pulled his Plymouth up next to the LTD. “The canyon?” he asked.

“You got it,” Jed replied. “Anytime you’re ready.”

Jeff nodded, then suddenly popped his clutch, and the Plymouth, its tires screaming, shot forward. A split second later Jed jammed his foot onto the LTD’s accelerator. By the time he was ready to shift into second gear, he’d come abreast of the Plymouth, but as he shoved the gearshift up into second, the Plymouth pulled ahead of him again.

“Shit,” he yelled. “What the hell’s he done to that thing?”

“Stuck in a new carburetor,” Randy said from the backseat. “I got a buck that says he beats you.”

Jed gunned the engine, then shifted again, but the Plymouth was far ahead of him now, its taillights mocking him as Jeff raced out of town. The road ran straight for a mile, then turned right for another mile before coming to the canyon turnoff. Jed broke into a grin as he spotted a side road ahead. “You’re on!” he shouted, then hit the brakes and spun the wheel.

The LTD slewed around, then left the pavement and shot onto a dirt track that angled off from the main road.

Randy Sparks jerked around to see the Plymouth disappearing into the distance. “Hey, what the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“Cutting cross-country!” Jed shifted down and tightened his grip on the wheel as the Ford lumbered along the rough track.

“Are you nuts? You’ll tear the pan out.”

They hit a bump and the car thudded as its suspension hit bottom. Then a roaring filled the night.

“Oh, Christ,” Jed muttered. “There goes the muffler.”

The car lurched down the rutted road, its undercarriage slamming hard every few seconds. In the distance Gina could see Jeff Hankins’s Plymouth making the turn on the main road. Jed saw it too, put the LTD into a lower gear and gunned the engine. The roar from the unmuffled manifold rose, but the car shot forward.

When he hit the main road again less than a minute later, Jed was only ten yards ahead of the Plymouth. He spun the wheel once more and skidded across the road. The tires on the right side of the car left the pavement, hit the gravel along the shoulder, and finally dropped into the ditch next to the road. The steering wheel wrenched loose from Jed’s grip and spun around.

The car flipped, rolled over, and came to a stop upside down, its wheels spinning slowly. There was a sudden silence as the engine died, then a screaming of tires as Jeff Hankins braked to a stop.

A moment later Jeff and his girlfriend, JoAnna Garcia, were in the ditch, staring numbly into the ruined LTD.

“Heather!” JoAnna screamed, finally finding her voice. “Gina! Oh, my God. Are you all right?”

“Get the door open,” Gina mumbled. She was still strapped to the seat, suspended upside down, her head brushing against the roof of the car. She fumbled with the seat belt for a moment, got it loose, and dropped in a heap onto the roof itself. JoAnna struggled with the wrecked door. One of its hinges already broken, it squealed in protest, then fell off into the ditch. A moment later Randy Sparks managed to force the rear door open too, and the four teenagers began creeping out of the wreckage.

Heather Fredericks had a cut on her right arm and a bump on her head, and Randy Sparks’s left hand was bleeding, but otherwise they seemed uninjured.

“What the hell were you doing?” Jeff demanded, as his relief that his friends were all right gave way to anger. “You could have killed yourself and everybody else, too!”

Jed Arnold hardly heard Jeff’s words. He was staring dolefully at the wreckage of his car. Already he could hear his father yelling at him. His father hadn’t wanted him to buy the car at all, and now …

His thoughts were interrupted by the distant wail of a siren. He looked up to see the flashing red and blue lights of a police car coming toward them through the night.

Jed sat alone in the little police station in the basement of the City Hall, waiting for his father to come and pick him up. His friends had left an hour ago, Randy Sparks, Gina, and Heather having been escorted to the
hospital to have their injuries taken care of, Jeff and JoAnna sent home.

But Jed was still waiting. His father was working the swing shift at the refinery and wouldn’t get off until midnight. Jed had done his best to talk Billy Clark into letting him go, but the deputy had only looked at him coldly.

“You damn near killed yourself and three other kids tonight, you damn half-breed.” Jed’s eyes had blazed with cold fury at the term, but he’d kept silent. “You really think I’m just going to let you go?” the cop went on. “You’ve been making trouble around here long enough, but this time you’re not getting off.” He’d fingerprinted Jed, taken mug shots, then locked him in the station’s single holding cell while he’d written up a report and a citation against Jed for reckless driving and endangerment of human life.

In the cell, Jed waited silently until his father finally showed up a little after midnight.

With no words exchanged between them, Jed signed for his things, and showed no emotion at all as his father led him out of the police station and drove him home.

He listened equally silently as Frank Arnold lectured him on the stupidity of what he’d done and told him he could forget about getting the car fixed.

At last Jed went to bed, but he didn’t sleep.

Instead he lay awake, remembering Billy Clark’s words, and knowing Clark was only saying what nearly everyone else in Borrego thought.

He, Jed Arnold, wasn’t white, and he wasn’t Indian.

He was something else, something halfway in between.

Sometimes—like now—he felt as if he didn’t fit in anywhere.

It was at times like this, late at night, when he was all alone, that all the fury contained within him would threaten to erupt to the surface.

It was at times like this that he wondered if someday the rage might overflow and he might actually kill someone.

Or maybe even kill himself.

That, as he well knew, was always an option too.

A week after Rita Moreland’s phone call, Judith Sheffield was on her way to Borrego. Immediately after the conversation, there had been a moment of panic as she wondered whether she’d been rash to accept the offer, but by the next morning, when for the first time in months she’d awakened with a sense of actually looking forward to the day, rather than dreading it, she knew she’d made the right decision.

For the next five days she dealt with the details of making the move.

It was surprisingly simple. Her landlord was actually relieved when she told him she’d changed her mind about renewing her lease—he had three people willing to take the apartment at a rent far higher than Judith would have paid. And the new tenant, anxious to move in as quickly as possible, instantly agreed to buy whatever furniture Judith left behind.

She left all of it, packing only her clothes and personal belongings into the foot locker she’d been using as
a coffee table, and shipping her books and records ahead.

The moment she dreaded most—the moment of telling Floyd Morales that she wasn’t signing the contract for next year—turned out to be almost as easy.

“Well, you’re certainly not making my life any easier,” the principal had commented. “But I can’t say that I blame you. There’ve been plenty of times when I’ve thought about getting the hell out of here myself.”

Judith’s brows had risen, but Morales had only shrugged. “What can I do? I grew up here … my family lives here—maybe I feel like I owe them something.” But then his gaze had drifted to the window and the littered playing field, fenced in like a prison, that lay beyond his office. “I don’t know,” he’d mused. “Sometimes it feels so hopeless.” At last he’d straightened up and taken on his usual briskness. “But there are still kids who want an education, and deserve one. So I guess I just can’t give up and go away.”

Judith felt the sting of his words. “Is that what you think? That I’m giving up? Cutting and running?”

Morales had apologized immediately. “Of course not. In fact, you’re doing exactly what I did when I came back here after college. You’re going home, and helping them out. Nobody can condemn that.” He’d offered her his hand. “They’re lucky to be getting you. You have a way with the kids.”

Judith had grinned ruefully. “I wish that were true.”

“It is,” Morales had insisted. “I know it’s been rough, but you’ve had less trouble with the kids than most of the teachers. And you’ve turned at least half a dozen of them around. Kept them in school when they were on the verge of dropping out.”

“Half a dozen,” Judith had repeated. “Out of how
many hundred? Somehow, it doesn’t seem like much to me.”

Still, as she’d left the school for the last time, she felt a sharp pang of regret. There were a few students—not too many, but some—to whom she wished she’d been able to say good-bye.

The next morning, when she read an account of a gang fight the night before and found that one of her best students hadn’t survived it, the last of her regrets evaporated.

Now, as she drove the final fifty miles north from Interstate 40, up into the neck of land between the Navajo reservation to the west and the Apache lands to the east, she was still certain she’d done the right thing.

The New Mexican sky, an immense expanse of brilliant blue that seemed—impossibly—to have grown even larger than she remembered from her childhood, spread above her, dwarfing even the mesas that rose from the desert floor in the distance.

She was tempted to turn off the highway for an hour or so and pay a short visit to the vast ruins at Chaco Canyon, but as she came to the turnoff, she changed her mind, suddenly eager to see Borrego once more.

Borrego.

The town she’d grown up in, but never, until last week, expected to come back to.

She came over the last rise in the gently rolling desert floor and pulled over to the side of the road, parked the Honda on the shoulder and got out of the car. She perched on the hood, staring out at the town in the distance.

Borrego could have been beautiful: sprawled at the foot of one of the mesas, it lay near the mouth of Mordida Canyon, a deep, narrow gorge that, though
only the tiniest fraction of the size of the Grand Canyon to the west, had a unique beauty all its own, its flat bottom dotted with cottonwoods, a gentle stream flowing through it year ’round.

The town hadn’t been built on the river, for the Mordida, like all the other streams in the region, could turn into a raging torrent within a few moments, fueled by the torrential rains that could pour out of the desert sky with no warning at all.

Not that the Mordida was a threat to the town any longer; indeed, the river had been safe from flash floods for more than fifty years, ever since a small dam had been constructed across one of the canyon’s narrows, generating the electricity needed to power the refinery that old Samuel Moreland had built when he discovered oil in the area.

For that was what Borrego really was—an oil town. But not a boom town like the bonanza towns of Texas. No, Borrego was only a tiny service village, a place for the refinery workers to live, along with the drillers and the crews who looked after the dam. As the oil reserves around Borrego had always been limited, so too had the prospects for the town, which had reached its peak shortly after the dam and refinery had been constructed. Ever since, it had slowly been declining. The Sheffields had moved from Borrego to Los Angeles for just that reason, when Judith was sixteen. Now, squinting against the glare of the sun, she could just make out the worn buildings that made up the town.