by John Saul
Jed’s breath caught—how had his grandfather known what was on his mind? But then his grandfather had always seemed to know things without being told. He nodded.
“Your mother was one of those other people—people who can never be happy,” Brown Eagle said. “No matter where they go, or who they’re with. She always had the feeling that everyone else was part of something, but that she was an outsider.” He stopped, placing a hand on Jed’s shoulder. “I think that’s why she did what she did, Jed. I think she finally figured out she wasn’t ever going to be happy—whatever that means—and just gave up.”
Jed glared angrily at the old man, shaking off his gnarled hand. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “It was a lot more than that. It was because of Dad, and everyone else down there.”
Brown Eagle shook his head, but refused to respond to Jed’s anger. “I’m not saying it was her fault. It was just the way things were. She was never happy here, and she was never happy in Borrego. And there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not me, and not your father. It was her nature. She wasn’t of the world, so she left it.”
Jed kicked at the dust beneath his feet, suddenly feeling frightened. His thoughts tumbled over one another as he recognized himself in his grandfather’s words about his mother. Was the same thing going to happen to him too? Was he going to wake up some morning and just decide, to hell with it?
And then the specter of Heather Fredericks rose up in his mind once more, and with it a thought—one he voiced without even meaning to. “Maybe that’s what happened to Heather too.”
Brown Eagle’s eyes narrowed. “The girl who died in the canyon a few days ago?”
Jed nodded. “She killed herself.”
“Is that what they’re saying down in Borrego?” Brown Eagle asked. He shook his head. “It isn’t true. She didn’t jump because she wanted to.”
Jed eyed his grandfather suspiciously.
“No,” Brown Eagle went on, speaking almost to himself now. “She didn’t want to jump at all Someone made her do it.”
Jed’s brows drew together angrily. “That’s not what the cops said,” he challenged.
Brown Eagle shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what they said I was in the kiva when it happened. I saw it.”
Now Jed stared at his grandfather with open incredulity. “Come on,” he said. “If you were in the kiva, you couldn’t have seen it.”
Brown Eagle gazed at his grandson impassively. “Is that what you think?” he asked. “Well, perhaps if you came up here more often, and found out just who you are, you might think otherwise.”
Half an hour later, as they made their way back down the mesa, Judith finally decided the silence had lasted long enough.
“Well? What did you find out?”
Jed glanced at her. “From my grandfather?” he asked, his voice harsh, almost mocking. “Oh, I found out a lot. But not about my mom—about him! You know what? He’s nuts. Stark, raving nuts.”
Judith stared at him. Something, obviously, had happened. But what? Before she could ask him, Jed told her.
“You know what he said? He said Heather didn’t kill herself at all. He said someone killed her, and that he saw it. He was in the kiva, and he saw it. Don’t you just love it? Shit, the old man’s a complete whacko!”
Spurring his horse, he shot ahead, leaving Judith staring after him.
Chapter 7
Jed glared angrily at his father. It was the morning after he’d been up to Kokatí with Jude. By the time he’d returned the day before, his father had already gone to work, and when Frank finally got home a little before midnight, Jed had already gone to bed. So it hadn’t been until a few minutes ago that he finally told his father what had happened in the pueblo. And now his father was angry at him again, as he had been nearly every other day lately. “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Jed muttered, staring into his coffee. “All I said was that Grandpa’s nuts. So what?”
Frank’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know your grandfather, and you don’t know a damned thing about the Kokatí.”
Jed looked up now, his scornful eyes meeting his father’s. “Jeez, Dad, it doesn’t take any brains to figure it out. How the hell could Grandpa have seen what happened to Heather if he was in the kiva? What have they got? Some kind of TV monitor down there?”
Frank shook his head. He remembered the day Alice had died, and something that had happened, something he’d never told his son before. “You remember when your mom died?” he asked. The look in Jed’s eyes, a sudden opaqueness that came into them, spoke more than any words Jed could have said. “Brown Eagle came down here that day,” Frank went on. “He told me what had happened. He said he’d felt funny when he woke up that morning and had gone into the kiva.” His voice dropped, turning husky. “And while he was down there, he saw Alice kill herself.” He fell silent for a moment, then went on, his voice trembling now. “That’s why he came down here that day, Jed. He was hoping he was wrong. But he wasn’t.”
Now it was Jed who was silent, his eyes narrowed to no more than angry slits as he stared at his father. “That’s not true,” he whispered. “If he really thought something was wrong, he’d have come down earlier He’d have stopped her. But he didn’t, did he? So then he claims he saw what happened—”
The phone rang, a harsh jangling that cut through Jed’s words. He fell silent as Frank reached over and picked up the receiver. “Arnold,” he said. He listened for a few moments, grunting responses every now and then. “Okay. I’ll be there right away.” Putting the receiver back on the hook, he stood up. “I’ve got to get out to the plant,” he told Jed. “They’ve got a problem, and they’re shorthanded.”
Jed opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. What the hell good would it do? His father wasn’t going to listen to him anyway. “Great,” he muttered to himself as Frank disappeared out the kitchen door a few minutes later, dressed in the gray overalls that were his work uniform. “Start talking about Mom, then just walk away.” He slammed his fist down on the tabletop, the coffee in his cup slopping over into the saucer. “Well, who cares?” he shouted into the now empty house. “Who the hell cares?”
Frank arrived at the refinery five miles out of town and swung into his accustomed parking spot outside the gate. But instead of going directly into the plant, he crossed the street and stepped into the superintendent’s office. As soon as he saw the frown on Bobbie Packard’s normally sunny face, he knew something else had gone wrong. He glanced past the secretary into Otto Kruger’s office, half expecting to see Kruger’s face glowering with unconcealed rage, but the plant superintendent was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Otto?” he asked. “Out in the plant, making more trouble than they already have?”
The secretary shrugged. “They called him into town for a meeting in Mr. Moreland’s office,” she said. “It sounds like Max might finally be getting ready to sell out.”
Frank felt a surge of anger rise up from his gut, but quickly put it down. It couldn’t be true—it had to be just talk. The rumors had been flying for months, ever since the first feelers from UniChem had begun. But so far Max had insisted that he had no intention of selling the place out, and that if he ever did, it wouldn’t be to some huge, impersonal conglomerate. It would be to the employees of Borrego Oil. So Frank put his brief spate of anger aside and shook his head. No use having Bobbie spreading the rumors all over town. “Take my word for it, Bobbie,” he said. “If Max wants to sell, he’ll come to us first.”
“I don’t know,” Bobbie sighed. “From the way Otto was talking, it sounds like Max is almost broke.” She winked conspiratorially at Frank. “And if you ask me, Otto will do his best to get Max to sell out to UniChem rather than us. He thinks you’d fire him if you ever got the chance.”
Frank’s lips twisted into a wry grin. “And just how would I get the chance?” he asked.
Bobbie giggled. “Come on, Frank. You think if the employees bought this place you wouldn’t wind up on the bo
ard of directors?”
Frank shrugged noncommittally. “Even if I made the board, I’d only have one vote,” he pointed out.
Now Bobbie was carefully repairing an already perfect fingernail. “And everybody else would vote right along with you, as Otto well knows.”
Frank’s grin broadened across his face. “Does Otto know how much you hate him?”
“Of course,” Bobbie said blithely. “But it doesn’t matter, because anybody else who was his secretary would hate him too.”
Frank nodded absently, but his mind was no longer registering Bobbie’s words. He was already wondering if he should call a union meeting for that evening. If there was, indeed, any truth to the rumor that Max was on the verge of selling out, then there was a lot of work to be done.
Months ago he’d found a lawyer and an accountant in Santa Fe and quietly hired them to begin studying the feasibility of an employee buyout of the company. It hadn’t been a difficult job—Borrego Oil was a small company, and the same kind of transfer of ownership had been happening all over the country. He’d been pleased to note that in most cases, the turnaround of those companies into profitable organizations had been nearly immediate; when people were working for themselves, they tended to be a lot more efficient.
More efficient, and more careful, he reflected as he left the office and crossed the street once more, this time to deal with the problem that had brought him out here this morning in the first place. He walked into the loader’s shack to check last night’s output, nodding a greeting to Fred Cummings, and picked up the sheet that showed every gallon of gasoline pumped from the tank farm into the trucks.
He shook his head dolefully as he tried to decipher Fred’s chicken scratchings, and wondered, yet again, why the whole system had yet to be computerized. But he knew the answer—the same lack of money that seemed to be strangling Borrego Oil at every turn. Still, oil prices were slowly rising again, and he’d thought the end of the steady losses was in sight. But then as his eye came to the bottom of the shipment list, he frowned.
Fred had stopped loading at four that morning.
“That’s when the pump went out,” Fred explained. “We tried to fix it, but someone screwed up on parts, and we didn’t have any.”
Frank scowled. He’d personally reviewed the inventory a month ago and given a list to Kruger. Apparently, the parts had never been ordered. “Okay,” he said. “Give me the list of what you need, and I’ll call down to Albuquerque. We should be able to get back in operation by this afternoon.”
But Fred Cummings shook his head. “Won’t work,” he said. “I already talked to the supplier, and they say our credit’s run out. We want parts for the pump, we pay cash.”
Frank’s scowl deepened. “Okay, then let’s fix the parts we have. Can we do that?” he asked, knowing the answer even before he had uttered the words.
“I ’spose we could fix it,” Cummings finally said, avoiding Frank’s gaze. “But it’d take an overtime crew, and Kruger ain’t authorizing overtime.” Still avoiding Frank’s eyes, he picked up his lunch bucket and headed toward the door, but Frank stopped him.
“You could hang around a couple of hours on your own,” he pointed out.
Cummings spat into the dirt outside the door. “ ’Spose I could,” he agreed amiably. “But it’s not my outfit, and I don’t notice Kruger, or Moreland, or anybody else comin’ over to mow my lawn on their own time.”
As Cummings left, Frank swore softly to himself. And yet the man was right—why should he work overtime, knowing full well he wouldn’t get paid for his time? But in the long run, Borrego’s inability to deliver gasoline, even for a day, would only add to the losses, and bring on more cost-cutting. Soon the layoffs would increase, and in the end the layoffs would only drop production even further.
Cursing again, Frank studied the work schedule, looking for a way to pull enough men off their regular jobs to put together a crew to repair the broken pump.
And when Kruger got back, he’d have a little talk with the man. If they weren’t even paying their suppliers anymore, the situation must be a lot worse than anyone had told him.
What the hell was going on?
He picked up the phone to call Jed and explain what was happening. “I’m probably going to be tied up all day,” he said. Jed listened to him silently, but as Frank talked he could picture clearly the dark look that would be coming into the boy’s eyes, the look of resentment that always came over Jed when he had to change his schedule yet again. But there was nothing he could do about it.
By mid-afternoon Frank’s temper was beginning to fray. The broken pump, totally disassembled, lay scattered in the dusty road. Two of his makeshift crew had disappeared after lunch, sent back to their regular jobs by Otto Kruger, who had insisted that the pump would be of little use if the refinery itself had to be shut down because nobody was looking after it. Frank had argued that there had been a general shutdown only two weeks ago, and that every pipe and valve in the place had been thoroughly cleaned and inspected. Right now the plant was quite capable of running itself for a few hours. But Kruger had insisted, and in the end Frank decided the issue wasn’t worth fighting about, since his two other men were going to be occupied for the next couple of hours with repairing the broken shaft of the pump’s motor.
If they could repair it at all. Carlos Alvarez and Jerry Polanski had insisted they could make the weld easily enough, but Frank wasn’t so sure. The shaft looked to him as if it had bent pretty badly when the break had occurred, and he suspected that even if they managed the weld, the pump might tear itself apart again as soon as they reassembled it and started it up.
But now the repair had been made, and Alvarez and Polanski were beginning the process of reassembling the pump. Denied the help of half his crew, Frank pitched in himself, holding the shaft steady while Carlos carefully adjusted the collar that would clamp it to the pump.
“What the hell’s going on?” Otto Kruger’s harsh voice demanded from behind. Frank waited until Carlos had tightened the last bolt before straightening up. Using the bandanna he habitually wore, which was now hanging out of his rear pocket, he mopped the sweat from his brow.
“Just about got her fixed—” he began, but Kruger didn’t let him finish.
“By breaking every union rule in the book?” the superintendent growled. Frank tensed, tightening his grip on his temper. “Alvarez and Polanski aren’t part of the yard crew,” Kruger went on. “It’s not their job to be working on that pump. And you’re a shift foreman, right? That means you make sure your men are doing their jobs. It doesn’t mean you do the work for them.”
Frank felt his anger boiling up from the pit of his belly, but he was damned if he was going to get into a fight with Kruger. Not right here, anyway. “Maybe we’d better go into your office to talk about this, Otto.” His voice was even but his eyes glittered with fury. What the hell was the man trying to do? Weren’t things bad enough without Kruger making it impossible for him to do his job?
“If that’s what you want,” Kruger rumbled. He spat into the dirt, then turned his attention to Alvarez and Polanski. “Leave the pump and get back to your regular jobs.”
Frank saw Carlos’s hand tighten on the wrench he was holding, but he shook his head just enough to tell the man to leave it alone. Without a word, Carlos put the wrench down and turned away from the loading shed. A moment later Jerry Polanski followed him. Only when they’d both disappeared into the plant itself did Kruger turn away and stride across the street to his office. Frank followed him, managing only the tightest of nods for Bobbie Packard as he passed her desk.
Unseen by Kruger, she made a face at the superintendent’s back, then gave Frank a thumbs-up sign.
“Shut the door,” Kruger growled as he slouched low in his chair and propped his feet up on his desk. “No sense airing our problems in front of the hired help, is there?”
Frank closed the door gently, deliberately depriving Kruger of the pleasure
of seeing his anger. “Seems to me we’re both part of the hired help around here,” he observed evenly, retaining his position by the door, but folding his arms across his chest as he leaned back against the wall. “Now why don’t you just tell me what’s going on? Our credit with the suppliers is shot, and the last of the yard crew got laid off a week ago. How the hell am I supposed to fix that pump if I don’t use men from the plant? And don’t give me any shit about it not being my job to work on it, ’cause you and I both know my job’s to keep the shift running, even if I have to do it myself.”
Kruger averted his eyes. “Those layoffs were temporary. We lost a bundle during the shutdown. The men will be hired back as soon as we can afford it.”
“But if we can’t move the gas out of the tanks—” Frank began. Once again Kruger didn’t let him finish.
“As it happens, we should be getting a new loading pump up here within a week or two,” he said. “And since we’ve got no problem with storage, it looks like all your work was sort of a waste of time, wasn’t it?”
It wasn’t only Kruger’s refusal to meet his eyes that roused Frank’s suspicions—it was the smugness in his voice. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Is Max getting a new line of credit?”
Now Kruger smiled, but it was a cruel twisting of his lips. “I ’spose you could call it that,” he said, drawling elaborately. “Anyway, by the time we get the new pump, we should be ready to start hiring the men back.”
Frank Arnold’s eyes bored into Kruger’s. “It’s a sellout, isn’t it?” he asked, but the words came out more as a statement than a question. A cold knot of anger formed in his belly. “Are you telling me Max is selling out?”
Kruger’s hands spread noncommittally. “He hasn’t yet,” he said. His feet left the desk and went to the floor as his chair suddenly straightened and he leaned forward. “But the party’s about over,” he declared, his eyes meeting Frank’s for the first time, “and if I were you I’d start thinking about how I could benefit if someone does buy this place.”