Snowman (6 page)

"Monte said we've got some kind of public relations problem up at Sierra," Wright began. He had shark-gray eyes, a crab-shaped body, and one of those slick tennis tans that end at the neck.

"I checked with the paper; Ashby put in a two-line obit about the girl," Cathy informed him.

"That's excellent." Wright looked pleased, but she seemed unresponsive. He asked, "What's bothering you?"

"Ashby left town . . . I don't think he's going to quit on this story. I think he wants us to believe he's going to let it go. It's a smokescreen."

Wright shook his head in dismay. "Well, for Christ's sake, fix him."

"How do I do that?" Her voice was losing its timbre, disintegrating. Wright frightened her, and the silence of the other directors was equally unnerving.

"We've got a fund for that reason."

One of the other directors suggested that they buy out Ashby's advertising space for the next six months.

"Ashby's one of those small-town editors," Cathy explained. "Integrity's his stock in trade. I'll have to finesse it, put it on a personal footing."

"Anyone else trouble?"

"The sheriff," Monte replied.

"He's Ashby's closest friend," Cathy said.

"Will he keep his mouth shut?" Wright asked.

"Only if Ashby tells him to," she said.

Wright opened a black folder and looked at an information sheet listing the town officials.

"Garson's just a rubber stamp who Ashby backs each election." His gaze fell on Monte, and he pointed accusingly at him. "Didn't I tell you to buy that fucking rag before we broke ground in Sierra?"

"Charlie," Monte pleaded, "he wouldn't deal. The alternative was to start a rival paper, and none of us knows the first thing about running a paper."

Wright's tan was fading, and he ran a hand through his tinted hair.

"The two of you listen. I want that son of a bitch Ashby sandbagged. I don't care what you have to do." He paused and reached for a cigarette, which he placed in a Water Pik filter; then, after lighting the cigarette, he removed the filter and threw it against the window. His secretary got up from the table, picked it up, and handed it to him.

"Do you want a Valium, Mr. Wright?"

"No, my wife got tickets to
A Chorus Line
and I want to stay awake for the first act." For a few moments he stared blankly at Cathy. No one uttered a word. "Cathy, if some kind of panic breaks out in Sierra, we'll lose twenty-five million dollars. Christ, I never should have allowed us to get into this."

"Charlie, it'll be okay. I'll handle it," Monte said, hoping to reassure him.

Wright glared at the other board members.

"We'll never cross-collateralize again. God, to think that we borrowed money from our own savings-and-loan to finance this project, and then, to compound things, our own insurance company has to make the payout! What'll it run?" he demanded.

"About two hundred thousand," Bill Hammond replied. He had devised the scheme of providing mortgages through the savings-and-loan for approved buyers at the resort. The mortgage business was more profitable than the actual sale of the property. "A quarter of a million if the girl's parents kick up a fuss."

"Maybe the legal department can beat them down on the settlement," Wright noted.

"Let's not look for trouble with them," Monte said. As Wright rose to leave, Monte caught his eye, indicating that there was more to come. It was for Monte a delicate and dangerous moment. His career might collapse on the basis of the material he had prepared. The photographs of Janice's remains and the tracks would be construed as shock tactics. These men could be easily unsettled when faced with the grotesque realities, and he might compromise his position with them. Fear dictates its own laws, and Monte was in a terrifying bind. He opened iris attache case and took the pictures out.

"Christ, this is gruesome," Wright said, and hurriedly passed the photographs on, then gesticulated futilely to Monte. "You said on the phone that some kind of bear was loose. Did a bear kill her?"

"I don't know. The tracks weren't made by any animal we can identify."

Wright poured himself a glass of water from a silver thermos and popped a Valium into his mouth.

"What's up there?" Hammond asked nervously. "I was going to send my kids to the lodge for Christmas."

"Cathy, we'll make whatever money you need available. You don't have to account for any of it. It's all in cash—but somehow you've got to find a way to contain this."

Wright rose from the table and moved sluggishly toward the door.

"I've never seen anything like this," he muttered.

Holiday Inns were all the same; no surprises, ran the commercial. Ashby checked into the one in Westwood. His room looked as if it were made out of disposable plexiglass. They probably just threw the whole thing down the incinerator when the guest left.

Ashby had spent the afternoon at the AAA trying to figure out a route to the reservation. It was inaccessible by plane. Forty miles from Blythe, it showed up as a minute crescent in the heart of the Mojave Desert. The Colorado River angled through it, but there was no sign of a road.

He phoned his secretary and learned that the only newsworthy event was the merciless snowstorm, the heaviest one of the winter thus far. The balmy late-Indian-summer weather in L.A. was a relief.

"You've had calls from Monte and Cathy all day." He was not surprised. "They've been on my back about your story on the girl."

He poured a Scotch from the pint of Dewar's he had bought before checking in. No point in paying room-service prices.

"They give any reason for being so concerned?"

"Not to me."

He swallowed some Scotch. It was wise to play possum.

"Margaret, call them back and read them the obit. That should calm them down. Anything else happening at the lodge?"

"Not that I've heard. It's packed. Seems all the advertising they did paid off."

Over a cold hamburger in the coffee shop, the vision of this mass of visitors rushed through Ashby's mind, and his unease increased. Weren't they all in danger? But if he warned them off, he might be starting needless hysteria. He had no proof of a Snowman—would have none unless Bradford could identify the marks on the body. Besides, he wasn't sure he believed it himself. Wasn't the only Snowman ever seen thousands of miles away in the Himalayas? Did the creature have the ability to reproduce?

In the moonlight the ski lodge was the size of a small pearl from the glacier below the summit of Sierra Mountain. A thin, veinlike crevasse slowly appeared in the glacier. It gradually widened as the fissure expanded, heaving blocks of ice as large as ten-story buildings down the mountainside. New ice channels were forming between the pinnacles of snow, and troughs belched forth as boulders were shifted and trees uprooted. The rumbling sounds could not be heard eighteen thousand feet below at the lodge, and in a few moments the tremors became muted in the vicious hacking of the wind.

Under the surface, frozen rock was being crushed. An opaque light, gray and diffuse, began to sear the frozen ice cascades. An arm sprang through the melting glacier, and the Snowman emerged.

He moved downhill toward the lodge. He took huge strides, and the ice hissed from the heat given off by his body. The blizzard conditions near the summit drove him into a frenzy. He had come down thousands of feet and was now just above the advanced slope. In the distance the lights from below formed a darting jellied viscous pattern. His attention was diverted by the whipping of the cables which the gondolas ran on.

The wind changed direction, and now on the mountain there were other sounds which were familiar. In the guttural rasp of the eddying winds the roars of bears were carried as they prowled the dense forests. He took the scent and hacked down a large fir tree. Intruders threatened his hunting ground.

Ashby started out at six the following morning, to avoid the downtown freeway traffic. The distance to the Desert Center was about two hundred miles, but he had no idea how long after that it would take to reach the reservation. He stopped off at a roadside deli and bought himself a couple of sub sandwiches and a six-pack of Coors. He rolled down all the windows, because the heat was becoming intense. When he reached the desert, sand devils struck his car unexpectedly, causing it to veer from side to side. In the distance, smoking, swirling tornadolike winds rose from the flats as though from a witch's caldron, whipping the sage-brush and yucca. There was a constant hum over the baked terra-cotta arroyos and then the sudden swoop of a shrike and its vicious "chack" as it attacked a spadefoot toad too slow to reach its burrow. Waterless stream beds twisted down the slate mountains. Along the roadside behind cacti tortured into peculiar shapes were rattlers, lizards and Gila monsters. The windshield was smeared with a variety of fire ants and centipedes blown from the ground by the sand devils.

In all the years he had been a reporter, his curiosity had never been so powerfully aroused by a man. It was beyond him to understand how a man like Bradford had given up civilization for this barren life. Bradford's retreat struck him as not only unreasonable but also enigmatic. He could not reconcile the idea that a Rhodes Scholar and an Olympic skier could end up in this desolate no man's land. He was determined to find out why Bradford had punished himself this way. Was he in fact a murderer and this a form of penance?

The glare of the sun became relentless, and after a while the shimmering effect dazed him. He had left the main road and was bouncing along a primitive dirt track. Nothing, he thought, could survive in this heat. Some miles farther he was forced to change his mind. On the roadside was a battered whitewashed adobe hut. Several Indians with washed-out hooded eyes and hardened leather skin toned to dark copper regarded him with a hint of curiosity. Indian jewelry, pottery, and blankets were displayed beside the hut in a fruitless commerce.

Ahead of him, like a group of lost, haunted souls, were a number of Indians working with primitive axes and shovels on a road. Beyond them the road was well made, with a tarred surface. Ashby drove past them along the verge.

The Indians, stripped to the waist, wore ragged shorts and tattered shorn jeans. Sweat gleamed from their chests and backs. They seemed indifferent to his arrival.

The sun had set moments before he reached the entrance of the reservation. The ride had been a nightmarish experience. He had crept along at five miles an hour over the steep rocky trail, which was deeply rutted and a nesting ground for snakes, lizards, and hordes of flying insects which flew at the car in throbbing, maniacal formations as though unleashed like a biblical plague. The Cherokee was caked with mud and patched with dead insects.

Ashby was directed to the Indian agent's house, a log cabin leaning over a high bluff. The agent was a lean, squinting man by the name of Dennis Crawford. He was obviously so pleased to learn that a civilization of sorts still existed that he smiled idiotically at Ashby.

The amenities he offered were minimal: a drafty curtainless bathroom; a group showerhouse, where the water smelled strongly of sulfur; a dinner of greasy salt pork and beans; and enormous shots of raw whiskey in chipped mugs. Crawford also arranged for a group of Indian children to wash Ashby's car.

Whenever Bradford's name was mentioned he fell into a moody reflective silence and drank more whiskey. It wasn't clear if he was playing a poker hand and trying to get paid for information or if Bradford held some power over him.

"When do I get to see Mr. Bradford?" Ashby asked.

"He's not back yet."

"How do you know?"

"The Indians never begin prayers without him," Crawford said obscurely. Then he lapsed into that faraway, dazed posture which shelters old drunks unaccustomed to company. "You'll see something damned peculiar soon as he comes . . ."

At the end of the day the group of men working on the road took their reward in the stream just below the reservation. They peeled off the pickup truck like new recruits from boot camp. They picked up cans of beer from a case which had been left cooling under a large rock at the mouth of the icy stream. Their bodies were smeared with dust, muddied from sweat, and they plunged into the water. They babbled and sang like boys, scrubbed each other's backs with thick borax soap until their skin tingled. It was a fine time, the best part of the day for them. They discussed their progress, which was measured in feet. To build a road without heavy equipment was an accomplishment each man took pride in.

They would spend perhaps half an hour in the water and behave as though they had not seen one another for months. It was impossible to talk in the sun. The effort was too great. Grunts, nods, the occasional question was the extent of their conversation. In the evening, the apparently stolid nature of the men gave way to free joyful expression. When they left the water they would lie on the straw-hard burnt scrub to dry off and drink some more beer. The road would not be mentioned; it was bad form.

The men drove up to the reservation, refreshed and happy. In the last light the fields of vegetables and fruit were an eyesore, hard arid ground which provided bare sustenance to the people. Their diet relied heavily on beans and rice, and some of the children grew up with rickets. In a small compound a dismal attempt was made to raise chickens, but the scraggly birds squawking in the pebbled, muddy runs were undernourished, good only for boiling. Yet another fiasco, the men recognized, were the thirty head of cattle they had purchased from a bankrupt rancher. Agents from the Department of Agriculture had promised to send them feed, but none had arrived, and the cattle, subsisting on burnt grass and shrubs, bellowed hungrily in their stalls.

On the field that ran along the cabins, small boys were playing football. Bits of rag and chamois pads had been sewn together by the women to outfit them with uniforms. A misshapen bloated object was flung through the air and bounced crazily on the ground, and both teams scrambled for it. The women watched for the men over their crude charcoal braziers. Beside them on wooden poles trout hung drying. Everywhere the eye traveled the landscape of poverty incarcerated the people.