Dead Time

by Stephen White

  “And that water is moving. The drop in altitude through the Grand Canyon is sharp. In rivers, gravity rules—the bigger the drop, the faster the water. Look outside.” She pointed out the window.

  “The Grand Canyon is all about geology. Rocks. Over time, a lot of those rocks you see on the canyon walls are going to end up in the river. In the sections where there’s a sudden drop in elevation, there’s going to be fast water, and where there are rocks or narrows in the canyon, or both, there’re going to be rapids. The section of the Colorado that rumbles through the Grand Canyon is not made for bathers. Get in over your knees, slip just a tiny bit, or drift a few feet out of an eddy where you think you’re safe—or worse, get pulled into the edge of a rapid—bing, the river knocks you over, starts pulling you downstream. Bang, you hit your head. Boom, you’re dying before you know your hair’s wet.

  “No life jacket on? Fortunate enough not to hit your head? Some are strong enough or lucky enough to swim out of a fast-moving river. Most drown. Still lucky, don’t drown? Hypothermia will get you. Fifty-eight degrees is cold, Sam. It’s a hundred degrees outside and still you freeze to death. Doesn’t matter what way she does it—head injury, exhaustion, or hypothermia—if the river wants to get you, you end up got. Dead.

  “A couple guys wrote a book about all the ways that people have died in the Grand Canyon since John Wesley Powell’s expedition first floated down the Colorado. One of the authors was a ranger, like me. It’s an interesting read. You can get a copy at the gift shop, if you want.

  “A good number of the people who died here died from nothing more than bad luck. A rock’ll break free and tumble down a slope and it’ll fall on someone’s head. A thunderstorm’ll blow up out of sight of the canyon floor and the first lightning strike of the afternoon will hit a guy who’s doing everything else right. And there’ve always been flash floods. Don’t forget those. The canyon exists partly because of a billion years of flash floods. Flash floods have gotten plenty of folks.

  “But mostly the book tells story after story about people forgetting common sense, not preparing for the weather, ignoring warnings, overestimating themselves, or underestimating the canyon or the river. Sometimes all of the above in the same afternoon. Rangers see it on every shift.”

  Sam had been a cop long enough to know about all the ways that arrogance and hubris can be fatal. “But it isn’t an accident that you think happened to Jaana? Is it?”

  “Read that book. When the canyon kills people or the river kills people, stupidity is usually an accomplice. That’s what most likely happened to Jaana.”

  “If I arrested people based on who was most likely to commit a crime, I’d be arresting a lot of innocent people. You seem reluctant to share your appraisal,” Sam told Ramona.

  She said, “Okay, this is opinion. I’ve read the file, that’s it. You understand? I inherited a file, and I’m curious about solving the puzzle. Got it?”

  Sam told Ranger Ramona he understood.

  He told me that they both knew the caveats were crap. Ramona had a theory.

  “What do I think? Someday I’ll come in to work and some hiker or some river guide will call in and tell us they found a jawbone or a femur forty miles downstream. It’ll be hers. Jaana’s. That’ll be the end of the story. It’ll turn out the river got her in one of the ways the river gets people. How did she end up in the river? Probably never know.”

  “Forty miles?”

  “Twenty. Maybe fifty. Or sixty. River is like a damn conveyor belt.”

  “I think I understand what you’re saying,” Sam said. “About what’s most likely. But I still think you have an opinion about what did happen.”

  Sam said that Ranger Ramona stared at him for a good half minute before she said, “The guy she was with that day? I don’t like him.”

  Sam flipped pages in the front of the file. Found the photograph of the man Jaana had been camping with in the first section. “This guy? Nicholas Paulson?” he asked.

  “That guy. Nicholas Paulson.”

  “Tell me about him over supper?” Sam said.

  “I’d like that,” Ramona said.

  Sam took Ranger Ramona to supper.

  Jaana’s date the night she had disappeared—the young guy from Vegas with a Mustang convertible—was the initial topic of conversation.

  Ranger Ramona wasn’t enamored with him. Sam asked if she’d ever met him. She had not. Her predecessor had interviewed all the witnesses to Jaana’s disappearance.

  “I’ve met plenty of guys like him in Vegas, though. I can cull one out of any herd of rich boys.”

  “Yeah?” Sam said, hoping for elucidation. He got it.

  “A Daddy’s-money boy. Pretty. Privileged. No sense of responsibility. Bad things are what happen to other people. That kind of attitude.”

  “Vegas money?” Sam asked.

  “Developer. Resorts. Casinos. Bellagio? Mirage, maybe? I don’t remember what they were building back then. Big bucks. He’d picked Jaana up at some club along with one of her girlfriends. That’s how they met. She’d go to Vegas and party with him and his friends on her days off. You can read it. It’s in the file.”

  “She’d been seeing him in Las Vegas?” Sam had asked.

  “Few times, he said. Going down to the river was her idea. He says he’d never been. Had only ever seen the canyon from a helicopter.”

  “You said you don’t like him? As a suspect? Or as a man?”

  “Guy didn’t care she was gone. Seemed inconvenienced that he had to stick around for the investigation. She was disposable to him.”

  “He have a motive?”

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense. If he wanted to get rid of Jaana, all he had to do was not put her name on the list at whatever club he was partying at on the Strip.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Sam wasn’t one prone to storytelling tangents, especially personal ones, so I shut up and listened when he departed his Grand Canyon story and began telling me that Ranger Ramona reminded him of his ex-wife, Sherry, when they were young—mostly in good ways. The Park Service ranger, he said, was soft and warm and touched him a lot during the meal. She had a hair-trigger laugh and dancing eyes that made him think she was paying attention when he was talking.

  As surprised as I was by Sam’s spontaneous digression about his personal impressions of the female ranger, I was even more surprised when he went off on a long, unexpected muse about Ranger Ramona’s romantic disposition.

  “She has this thing about unreliable lovers,” he said. “‘Unreliable lovers’—that’s what she calls ’em. It’s well thought out—it’s like she’s developed a theory about it. We were all done with supper and we were each having a piece of lemon meringue pie—she’s not the dieter type. Dessert was her idea. She said the pie would be good, and it was good. And she looks up at me and says that when I first introduced myself to her that afternoon, her first impression of me was that I would probably be an interesting but unreliable lover.”

  “She did?” I said. “Just like that?”

  “Out of the damn blue. I don’t recall what we were talking about when that came out, but it wasn’t about sex. I would recall if it was. I tend to remember my conversations about sex. They’re not frequent.”

  “What if it wasn’t out of the blue? What if she thought that Jaana’s date was an unreliable lover? That’s why it was on her mind.”

  “Possible,” Sam said. “Sometimes you’re smarter than I suspect, Alan.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “Up until this past spring, Ranger Ramona had been seeing a guy from Turkey who owns a restaurant in Flagstaff—an Applebee’s, I think she said. Maybe it’s a Chili’s. I don’t know. She said he was an unreliable lover. I got the impression she’s concluded that it’s a Turkish thing, that all Turks—at least the men—are unreliable lovers. But it was clear that it’s not a trait she considers exclusive to the Turks.”

  “That’s what I he
ar too,” I said, intending the comment to be nothing more than a conversation lubricant. I was curious to know more specifically what Ranger Ramona meant by “unreliable.” Was she talking fidelity? Or something more immediately related to the carnal act? Something that modern blue pharmaceuticals promised to cure if the unreliable man could overcome his phobia of priapism. I harbored a concern that if I asked for clarification, I would interfere with Sam’s spirited homily about his evening out and about his impressions of Ranger Ramona’s investigatory and romantic biases.

  I did know that prior to the previous spring, when Sam and I had descended together into our joint hell, trying to protect our families from a man determined to eke vengeance from us where we were most vulnerable, there was no way the conversation we were having could have occurred. While he told me the unlikely story of his time with Ranger Ramona, I realized that it was possible that our friendship might be evolving in ways that would give me comfort.

  I came to a quick conclusion that the current intimacy between us was only possible because he had come to view me as being his equal in terms of being flawed. He would get no argument from me. I suspected he knew that.

  “There are lots of ways to interpret that,” I said. “Unreliable lovers.”

  “Don’t shrink out on me, Alan.”

  “What?” I said, fearing I’d gone too far.

  “People are complicated,” Sam said. “But most of the time they’re complicated in uncomplicated ways. For even more uncomplicated reasons.”

  While I weighed Sam’s wisdom—my initial impression was that there was some truth there—I swallowed my lingering curiosity about the meaning of the ranger’s use of “unreliable” and washed it down with some of the bottled water I’d pulled from the refrigerator.

  It wasn’t my evening beverage of choice. During my earlier inventory of the condo’s meager kitchen stores I had spotted a bottle of designer vodka in the freezer. I was tempted to wander back inside from the balcony and pour myself a few inches while I talked with Sam.

  I hadn’t done that in a while. Quaffed vodka alone at night. At first, “a while” had been a week. Recently, “a while” had developed into something I could measure in months. Low-single-digit months, but months nonetheless. For me that was progress. Before the progress, I’d had a longer stretch of months when I’d drunk alone frequently. Even daily. Not drinking vodka alone was another way I was doing better.

  Sam continued his story about dinner with Ranger Ramona. “Why do women want to sleep with me?” he said, jolting me out of my introspection. “I don’t get it. I’m not out looking. And I got no illusions here—I’m not the most handsome guy. If women actually choose me out of the lineup of available men, jeez, what does that say about how the world must look to them? Dear Lord.”

  I knew men who would ask the first question that Sam asked—the “Why do women want to sleep with me?” question—in a manner that could be described only as boastful. But braggadocio wasn’t one of Sam’s vanities. I waited a judicious amount of time for him to continue the line of thought on his own, suspecting that his query to me was rhetorical and that any answer I floated would end up being the equivalent of using my fingernails to clean a viper’s fangs.

  During the ensuing silence my attention drifted to the whine of a siren approaching from the north. I tracked it as it neared Merideth’s building and then disappeared toward the south. The sound came close, but I never spotted the lights of the emergency vehicle.

  Sam said, “I’m waiting.”

  “You actually want an answer?”

  “You’re the relationship genius. It’d be easier if they didn’t. Want me. If women saw me as a…schlub. I don’t see myself as the guy women want to sleep with.”

  Me? A relationship genius? Given the status of the romantic relationships in my life, I suspected that Sam was indulging in a little irony. I could have called him on it, but instead rode his momentum. “Maybe that’s why they do, Sam. Because you don’t seem to be asking.”

  He harrumphed. I didn’t know too many people who actually harrumphed. Sam was one of the few. I feared he’d taken my reply to his question as a platitude and that I’d lost him.

  He scoffed. “Even if that’s true, so what? Bullshit. Women choose me. It’s baffling, but it doesn’t give me a free pass. In the end, I choose them, too. Me.”

  “Was Ranger Ramona right?” My question earned me some silence. I made the mistake of assuming that Sam had not understood my question, so I expounded. “With her impression? Are you an unreliable lover?”

  “Did you really fucking just ask me that?” Sam said.

  “Yeah,” I said, wishing I hadn’t just asked him that.

  “How about we leave it that she didn’t get a chance to find out about my reliability, romantic or otherwise. Have you been paying any attention to my life lately, Alan? My marriage? My suspension? Losing Carmen? I swear it’s like my dick has become a weapon of mass destruction. I’m doing everything I can to keep the damn thing in the bunker.”

  “How’s that going for you, Sam?”

  I was surprised that he answered. “Ranger Ramona was tempting, Alan. But I’ve been celibate since Carmen and I split. Plan to stay that way until I figure things out.”

  I thought he sounded like me counting the nights since I’d drunk alone.

  “Anyway,” Sam said, “Ranger Ramona likes to talk politics.”

  Sam liked to talk politics too. He had a fantastical version of Ronald Reagan’s tenure in office that he trotted out with some frequency. I said, “Ramona’s flavor is not your flavor, I take it.”

  “She tried to convince me that George Bush’s last act as president will be to pardon the entire executive branch above a certain pay grade.”

  Sam’s appraisal of Ramona’s prediction was only a few degrees short of mocking, as though she had revealed that it was her belief that it had been a cadre of wizards who had dug the Grand Canyon.

  “What do you think?” I asked Sam, although I had a pretty good idea already, based on a contentious discussion we’d had about Scooter Libby’s pardon.

  “I think you and I are better off talking about sex, Alan.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Sam did veer off the sex-talk highway, but he didn’t go far. Kind of a frontage road.

  He allowed that he thought women—Ranger Ramona was a prime example—were becoming as romantically cynical as men. They had grown wary of love, and were choosing sex from the menu of substitutes.

  I was about to tell him about my recent experiences with Ottavia and Amy. But I didn’t get a chance. Sam’s romantically cynical side road turned out to be nothing more than a cul-de-sac. He quickly moved back to cop talk. Sam said he wasn’t convinced that Ranger Ramona’s finger-pointing at Nick Paulson was any more than a hunch.

  “Cops,” he explained, “don’t like other cops’ hunches. We only like our own.”

  After his supper with Ranger Ramona had concluded—and after Sam came to a decision that, unlike Ramona, he wasn’t looking to extend the evening’s social activities beyond dinner and dessert—she set him up in a gloomy conference room in the ranger station and told him he could read the case file all night if that was what “rocked his boat.” Just in case her meaning was not abundantly clear, she tagged on a coda that if he was still around in the morning, she would be more than happy to buy him a hot breakfast while she answered any fresh questions that he might develop from his perusal of the case file. If he liked the pie with supper, she promised, he’d love the sticky buns at breakfast.

  Sam swore to me that the last comment had been innocent.

  He did want to read Jaana’s file, and accepted that part of the offer. He told Ranger Ramona that they’d have to see about breakfast.

  She said good night and left him in the conference room.

  Ranger Ramona’s next move ambushed Sam. She returned to the conference room less than an hour after she had left. She sat down next to him, reached over, and close
d the file he was reading. She then suggested that were he so inclined, he could do other things until morning. “Unreliable lover or not,” she said.

  When he opened his mouth to reply, she touched a fingertip to his lips and stuffed a hand-drawn map to her place into his shirt pocket. She removed her finger at the same moment that she leaned in and gave him a soft kiss. She left the room without waiting for an RSVP.

  Sam admitted that he had been tempted—her politics aside, he’d already allowed that Ramona was his type—but that he ultimately decided it was a bad idea. He added that he thought she’d expected the rejection from him, which I thought was a peculiar insight for Sam, considering his recent history with women.

  He departed the empty conference room at two fifteen the next morning with a topo map of the park, a couple of pages of notes he’d taken, and a string of questions in his head about what had actually happened to Jaana the night she had disappeared.

  Sam told me he left a note for Ranger Ramona detailing his new questions. He had thought long and hard about whether to leave her his cell-phone number. Ultimately, he did.

  His questions? He wanted to know if the park’s visitor logs showed Nick Paulson returning to the canyon floor around the time the hiking boots were found. Sam’s second question also had to do with footwear—it was about a solitary lime green sneaker.

  Sam drove away from the Visitor’s Center at the rim of the Grand Canyon alone and in the dark. He pointed his Cherokee into the high desert. He drove until he arrived in St. George, Utah, just before dawn, picked a motel that wasn’t part of a chain, and requested a room as far away from Interstate 15 as possible. That was where he slept for six hours before finishing the long drive to Las Vegas to talk to Nick Paulson in person.