by Dan Flanigan
“It’s a long way back off the road,” said George. “I drove up there this morning. Acted like a tourist who’d gotten himself lost. I stopped fifty yards from the house and looked around like a bumpkin. Then I stomped my foot and banged on the fender of the car with my hand like I was mad as hell and drove off.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
“What’s back there?”
“A tiny little house and a barn backed up against the foothills. There was an old pickup truck parked in the front.”
O’Keefe saw a cloud of dust billowing along the dirt road toward them. There would be a vehicle in front of the dust cloud, most likely the pickup truck George had just told him about. He jammed the accelerator to the floor. It might be her in the vehicle, and she might recognize him and spoil his plan.
“Take those binoculars back there,” he told George, “and see what you can see out the back window.”
George climbed in the back, and O’Keefe slowed down. “It’s the pickup truck, all right,” George said, “but it went the other way. You want to go after it?”
“No.”
“Well, what do we do now?” George asked as he climbed back into the front seat.
“Well, what you’re gonna do is go make a reservation on the next plane out of Tucson and leave the rest to me.”
“Why?”
O’Keefe had not prepared an appropriate lie. He would have to tell George the truth, to the extent that he possessed any notion of the truth anymore.
“This is my deal, George. I just want to play it the rest of the way alone.”
“Yeah. Real smart. You did a real good job playing it alone down at that mink farm.”
“Hey, George. Fuck you.”
George had to restrain himself. He was tempted to whip O’Keefe’s ass right there in the car. He had achieved it twice in grade school and once in high school and was pretty sure he could do it again. Silly, self-centered asshole. O’Keefe and Harrigan were just alike. They thought they were some kind of special. Grail knights and all that baloney. They thought they had some kind of direct line of communication to the Upper Sphere or something. They tried to keep everything important to themselves and not share it with anyone. Terminal uniqueness.
“Well, fuck you too,” George said. “I wash my hands of your dumb ass right here and now.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. At the motel George jumped out of the van even before O’Keefe had come to a full stop.
“I’ll leave my room key at the desk if you want to use it,” George said. “But maybe you want your own special room.”
“Come on, George.”
George slammed the van door and walked off. Maybe he should have tried to explain it better to George, but he didn’t really know how. Surely George would get over it. All he needed now was some food to stow in his backpack and a good map. The food was easy enough to obtain, but he had to drive to Bisbee to secure a small-scale contour map of the area, which turned out to be so minutely detailed that it even showed the ranch house and barn. Only the one dirt road led to the house, and he did not want to approach that way. Even if she was alone, he did not want her to see him before he saw her.
National forest land bordered the ranch on both the west and south and it allowed public access for hiking, camping, and backpacking. He planned to drive as deep into the forest as he could and then strike out on foot to the east. The route would require him to climb over several steep ridges, then he would hike north a mile or more, and if he had remembered and correctly applied what they had taught him in the Marine Corps about reading a map with a compass, he would arrive directly behind the ranch house, which could be seen with binoculars from any number of hills that rose steeply behind it.
He woke up the next morning before dawn and loaded his backpack. Minimal food, the .45 caliber pistol, the M-16 disassembled into its pieces, several bandoliers of ammunition, two hand grenades. He wasn’t about to let anyone catch him unprepared this time. He had heard the desert got very cold at night and wished he had room to carry a small tent in addition to his sleeping bag, but he was traveling too heavy already. Besides the backpack bulging with the heavy metal of the guns, he would have the big water bag to lug around in those mountains. It had been a long time since he had humped like a grunt, and he had never done it in a desert, which made him a little afraid, but he remembered another thing the Marine Corps had taught him besides how to read a map with a compass, which was that no matter how hard it got, you could always take worse.
CHAPTER 23
AFTER ASCENDING THE first ridgeline, O’Keefe stopped for a rest. He was breathing too hard, and his calf muscles quivered and shuddered, suffering from something like shock. If he was reading the map right, he had veered only slightly off course in the first two hours, a deviation he could correct on the next leg of the journey, which would take him down the ridge he now stood on and across the wide flat plain below.
The plain was probably a half mile across, a sea of light greens—mesquite, palo verde, prickly pear cactus, cholla, ocotillo, agave, saguaro. On the far side of the plain a series of ridges, one behind the other, each progressively steeper, thrust abruptly up from the desert floor. It looked like a staircase for titans. The map told him the land would plunge down on the other side of the staircase into another long, flat plain, the bottom of a bowl, rimmed by mountains to the south and foothills to the east, west, and north. When he reached the bottom of the bowl, he would turn left, to the north, traverse the bottom of the bowl, and then climb up some foothills from which he should be able to observe the ranch house with his binoculars.
He guessed there might not be another human being within miles. Except for her in that ranch house—or perhaps her and someone else, a painful thought, but more than possible, in fact probable. Moving through the landscape, he began to understand why Tag loved this place, Arizona, so much. This was his first encounter with the high desert, but it felt to him that he had finally come home. The blue diamond sky sat on his shoulder. The sun, a different sun than had ever shined on him, imparted to this sorcerer’s kingdom a brightness and clarity so exquisite it was almost physically painful to behold. Nothing could be simpler, or more complex, than this world of sun and dust, rocks and dirt and sky, where wind and slow time had, like Bach in his fugues, worked innumerable variations on a single theme. As he stood on the ridge, seeing for miles, no human busyness to distract him, a new intuition began to stir within him, an acceptance of something he had all his life been vainly resisting, and he thought that, maybe for the very first time in his sojourn on earth, he was standing on firm ground.
Crossing the plain, meandering around the spikes of the cacti, he tried to prepare himself mentally for the long climb up the staircase of ridges, which would be an agony of plodding, lungs straining to provide air to the leg muscles screaming for oxygen. Just put one foot in front of the other. Don’t look up unless you must in order to see where you are and get your bearings. Don’t stop for a rest because you won’t ever want to get up again. Watch where you’re stepping, in this desert a sprained ankle means death. Above all remember there is nothing you cannot endure in search of a treasure hard to attain.
A few yards before he reached the top of the staircase he collapsed, too exhausted even to take off his backpack or unsling the water bag and take the drink he wanted so badly. He lay face to the sun like a turtle turned upside down with no foreseeable prospect of ever righting itself again. His stomach muscles convulsed, heaving a gag into his throat, and he turned his face sideways and retched, emptying the contents of his stomach onto the ground next to him, his quivering body achieving a kind of peace in this renunciation.
He drifted off into sleep and dreamt of Tag crying out for him, her voice constantly receding though he strove madly to reach her through fire and smoke. When he finally found her, it was not Tag at all, it was Kelly’s face on the body of Tag, and
she asked him if he had bought the bicycle yet.
The view from the top of the staircase bestowed worth on the pain of the climb. He thought he could probably see all the way to Mexico. The mountains in the distance shimmered in the heat and slowly swirling dust. Through his binoculars he could see the state highway and also the dirt road that meandered from the highway to the ranch house. The ranch house remained hidden, shielded from view by the foothills behind it.
He did not reach the ridgeline above the ranch house until late in the afternoon, and it took him another hour to find the best place on the ridge from which to observe the house without being seen himself—three or four square yards of flat, bare ground behind two immense boulders. He found a crevice between the boulders where he could stand, prop his elbows against the rock, and train his binoculars on the house. But he could see only the house, not the barn behind it that George had told him about. He crawled on his belly around the boulders and down the ridge until he could see the area behind the house. He sat behind an ocotillo, legs folded as if he were meditating, and studied the scene. The house was small and rudimentary, probably no more than a back porch, a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, and one other room that served as both living and dining room. The barn, though he would have called it something much less than a barn, sat to his left, twenty yards or so behind the house. Back from the barn, to his right, a small corral penned in two horses. Directly across from the barn, separated by a few yards of flat ground trodden bare by boots and hooves, hunched a row of huge boulders that looked like someone had deliberately placed them there to provide symmetry to the scene.
The barn, the corral, and the boulders formed a U shape behind the house. One of the horses in the corral was brown, the other a palomino. Pegasus. The horses looked toward the house as if waiting for someone, and it was not long before the someone they waited for came out of the house, walking toward the corral. At first he thought it was a young boy, lean in his jeans and cowboy shirt, long hair for a boy, at least the way most boys wore it these days, hair that covered his ears and his shirt collar at the back of his neck. But it turned out not to be a boy at all. He could tell it was her by her walk—even in her cowboy boots, the walk of that girl he had first seen on the television screen, the girl wearing the mink, the girl with the beauty that stabbed you in the heart.
She fed the horses and returned to the house. Pegasus whinnied in protest, wanting her back, and O’Keefe himself had a hard time keeping from scrambling down the hill after her, but he remembered that she had once before run away from him. She was a mystery he had not yet solved, and it took a little time and a little patience to solve a mystery. From behind the two boulders he watched the setting sun color the mountains sandy-red and ate his dinner out of a can. He recalled with disgust the C-rations he had eaten in the Marine Corps. Ham and lima beans, lukewarm lumps of congealed slime. He almost chuckled, remembering they had called them “ham and motherfuckers.” Before nightfall he assembled the M-16 and laid out his other equipment so he could put it on at a moment’s notice—cartridge belt beaded with rounds for the M-16, a grenade on each side of the belt and a canteen hooked to its rear, first-aid kit and Swiss army knife in a pouch that snapped around the cartridge belt, the .45 caliber pistol in its shoulder holster, binoculars on a lanyard so he could hang them around his neck. He almost laughed at himself for toting all this destruction around in search of that wisp of a girl, but he kept thinking about that night in the cabin, the fire and smoke and whizzing steel, when it seemed like Vietnam had come to him instead of he to it.
Nightfall brought cold and a sky full of stars. The night sky must be another reason she loved Arizona so much. He heard coyotes howling somewhere.
He woke up before dawn and crawled reluctantly out of the sleeping bag, his cotton turtleneck and heavy wool sweater no match for the cold. He ignited fuel tablets beneath his small camp stove and heated a cup of water for coffee, which failed to warm him in the slightest. Nothing could get colder than a soldier on maneuvers. By dawn he had resumed his place behind the ocotillo. Soon after first light she came out of the house to the corral and took Pegasus into the barn. When she came out again, the horse was fully saddled. She swung up into the saddle and gently coaxed the horse into a quick trot onto a path that started behind the big boulders across from the barn and led down the far side of the corral into a small canyon.
O’Keefe crawled back to his place behind the two boulders and trained his binoculars eastward. He ducked down as she emerged from the canyon onto a ridge not more than two hundred yards away from him and skillfully guided the horse down the ridge. When she reached the bottom of the bowl, she pointed the horse in a southeasterly direction and let him walk at his pleasure. O’Keefe decided to follow her, wondering if it would be the right time to make his presence known to her. She seemed to be alone in the house.
Keeping out of her line of sight, he followed her across the bowl. He alternately lost her and found her. As he walked, he flushed lizards, jackrabbits, and cottontails, bustling families of quail, and various other birds whose names he did not know, and it amazed him how this desert seemed to burst with life. Once he thought he had lost her completely, until he stopped on top of a rise in the ground and scanned the landscape with the binoculars. Below him, about halfway across the bowl, she rode toward a stand of tall cottonwoods, which seemed out of place amid the other desert vegetation. He jogged in a beeline toward the west of the stand of cottonwoods where he might be able to see what was on the other side of the trees. When he arrived there and caught his breath from the jogging, he focused his binoculars on the cottonwoods.
It was an oasis of sorts, a pool of water no larger than a small pond, probably fed, he speculated, by an underground spring. The trees grew up to the edge of the pool and blocked his view so he could not see her, but he did glimpse the horse standing riderless on the tiny shoreline and munching on the grass that grew there. The pool was surrounded by rock except for the side where the horse was standing.
She stayed in the cottonwoods for more than an hour. When she came out, she came out at a gallop, heading back across the bowl in the direction of the house.
When he returned to his watching place behind the ocotillo, Pegasus was drinking from a trough in the corral, and he guessed that Tag must be back in the house. The old truck had not been moved since the day before. He used the long minutes and hours to try to memorize the scene below so he could traverse the area between the ridge and the ranch house blindfolded if he must.
After dark, he crept down to the house. When he passed the corral, the horses whinnied loudly in fear, and he dashed around to the back of the barn. The screen door on the back porch creaked open, and boot soles crunched on dry dirt. A flashlight beam hit the horses, then arced around the corral, over toward the boulders, back to the corral, and toward the barn. Then the light switched off, the boots crunched on the dry dirt again, and the screen door creaked open and then closed. He crawled slowly underneath the windows at the side of the house toward a window at the front that appeared to be open. Through the open window he could hear nothing except what sounded like someone washing dishes. He raised himself to the window, looking inside and back toward the rear of the house.
The house was so small you could see the back door from the front door. A waist-high breakfast bar separated the dining and living area from the kitchen. He could see her waist and chest and hands washing dishes in the kitchen. A cabinet above the sink concealed her face. He had to expose himself more to see into the living-room area, and when he did, Lenny Parker seemed to be looking right at him.
But Lenny did not seem to see him. Lenny was staring instead just above the window, an absent-minded stare, the stare of a man in the grip of depression. In his arms he cradled a double-barreled shotgun. O’Keefe froze, afraid that even the slightest movement would jar Lenny out of his reverie and catch his attention. When Lenny stopped staring at the wall and started staring at his lap instead, O’Keefe duck
ed back down below the window.
He had convinced himself that she was alone. He would be able to hear them talking through the window, but he did not really want to hear whatever they might say.
“You’ve got to eat something tonight,” she said. “You can’t keep going on without eating.”
“I’m not hungry. What I am is going crazy. This place is driving me crazy. This waiting is driving me crazy.” It was a whine, the semi-hysterical wheedle, not the gentle, schoolmarm voice he had used with the investors.
“Only two more days and we’re across,” Tag said.
“We’re not gonna make it. I know we’re not gonna make it.”
“We’ll make it as long as you don’t turn into a basket case on me.”
“This was crazy. This whole thing was crazy.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you started it.”
“I keep asking myself ‘Why?’ Why, Tag?”
“It’s too late for that now.”
“It’s too late for everything now,” he said, and for the first time in the conversation, he did not whine. He spoke as if he had seen the end of something and had resolved to accept it.
O’Keefe slithered up the side of the window so he could just barely peek inside. Lenny looked as if he had not shaved or even washed for several days. His hair spiked up in clumps here and there where he had been sleeping on it. He was pale and gaunt, as if he were wasting away. A bare pillow and a rough, green, army blanket were knotted in a wad at one end of the couch. Tag sat there staring at the wall. Lenny sat there staring at her. Lenny clicked the safety catch of the shotgun on and off, on and off.
“Where’d you put the stuff?” he said.
“No more, Lenny. Please, no more.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
She hung her head, despairing, in agreement with him.
“You’re gonna leave me after we get across, aren’t you?”