by Jack Dann
"What's wrong?" she said to the shrouded figure. "I don't know—I mean, nothing, I guess." The moon appeared again. "Was that a cloud?"
"I don't see a cloud," said Paul, gesturing at the broad belt of stars. "The night's clear."
"Maybe you saw a UFO," said Carroll, her voice light.
"You okay?" Ginger touched his face. "Jesus, you're shivering." She held him tightly.
Steve's words were almost too low to hear. "It swam across the moon."
"What did?"
"I'm cold too," said Carroll. "Let's go back down." Nobody argued. Ginger remembered to put the metal cans into a paper sack and tied it to her belt with a hair ribbon. Steve didn't say anything more for a while, but the others all could hear his teeth chatter. When they were halfway down, the moon finally set beyond the valley rim. Farther on, Paul stepped on a loose patch of shale, slipped, cursed, began to slide beyond the lip of the sheer rock face. Carroll grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
"Thanks, Irene." His voice shook slightly, belying the tone of the words.
"Funny," she said.
"I don't get it," said Ginger.
Paul whistled a few bars of the song.
"Good night," said Carroll. "You do what you've got to."
"And I'm grateful for that." Paul took a deep breath. "Let's get down to the car."
When they were on the winding road and driving back toward Fremont, Ginger said, "What did you see up there, Steve?"
"Nothing. I guess I just remembered a dream."
"Some dream." She touched his shoulder. "You're still cold."
Carroll said, "So am I."
Paul took his right hand off the wheel to cover her hand. "We all are."
"I feel all right." Ginger sounded puzzled.
All the way into town, Steve felt he had drowned.
The Amble Inn in Thermopolis was built in the shadow of Round Top Mountain. On the slope above the Inn, huge letters formed from whitewashed stones proclaimed: world's largest mineral hot spring. Whether at night or noon, the inscription invariably reminded Steve of the Hollywood Sign. Early in his return from California, he realized the futility of jumping off the second letter O. The stones were laid flush with the steep pitch of the ground. Would-be-suicides could only roll down the hill until they collided with the log side of the inn.
On Friday and Saturday nights, the parking lot of the Amble Inn was filled almost exclusively with four-wheel-drive vehicles and conventional pickups. Most of them had black-enameled gun racks up in the rear window behind the seat. Steve's Chevy had a rack, but that was because he had bought the truck used. He had considered buying a toy rifle, one that shot caps or rubber darts, at a Penney's Christmas catalogue sale. But like so many other projects, he never seemed to get around to it.
Tonight was the first Saturday night in June and Steve had money in his pocket from the paycheck he had cashed at Safeway. He had no reason to celebrate; but then he had no reason not to celebrate. So a little after nine he went to the Amble Inn to drink tequila hookers and listen to the music.
The inn was uncharacteristically crowded for so early in the evening, but Steve secured a small table close to the dance floor when a guy threw up and his girl had to take him home. Dancing couples covered the floor though the headline act, Mountain Flyer, wouldn't be on until eleven. The warmup group was a Montana band called the Great Falls Dead. They had more enthusiasm than talent, but they had the crowd dancing.
Steve threw down the shots, sucked limes, licked the salt, intermittently tapped his hand on the table to the music, and felt vaguely melancholy. Smoke drifted around him, almost as thick as the special-effects fog in a bad horror movie. The inn's dance floor was in a dim, domed room lined with rough pine.
He suddenly stared, puzzled by a flash of near-recognition. He had been watching one dancer in particular, a tall woman with curly raven hair, who had danced with a succession of cowboys. When he looked at her face, he thought he saw someone familiar. When he looked at her body, he wondered whether she wore underwear beneath the wide-weave red knit dress.
The Great Falls Dead launched into "Good-hearted Woman" and the floor was instantly filled with dancers. Across the room, someone squealed, "Willieee!" This time the woman in red danced very close to Steve's table. Her high cheekbones looked hauntingly familiar. Her hair, he thought. If it were longer— She met his eyes and smiled at him.
The set ended, her partner drifted off toward the bar, but she remained standing beside his table. "Carroll?" he said, "Carroll?"
She stood there smiling, with right hand on hip. "I wondered when you'd figure it out."
Steve shoved his chair back and got up from the table. She moved very easily into his arms for a hug. "It's been a long time."
"It has."
"Fourteen years? Fifteen?"
"Something like that."
He asked her to sit at his table, and she did. She sipped a Campari-and-tonic as they talked. He switched to beer. The years unreeled. The Great Falls Dead pounded out a medley of country standards behind them.
". . . I never should have married, Steve. I was wrong for Paul. He was wrong for me."
". . . thought about getting married. I met a lot of women in Hollywood, but nothing ever seemed . . ."
". . . all the wrong reasons . . ."
". . . did end up in a few made-for-TV movies. Bad stuff. I was always cast as the assistant manager in a hold-up scene, or got killed by the werewolf right near the beginning. I think there's something like ninety percent of all actors who are unemployed at any given moment, so I said . . ."
"You really came back here? How long ago?"
". . . to hell with it . . ."
"How long ago?"
". . . and sort of slunk back to Wyoming. I don't know. Several years ago. How long were you married, anyway?"
". . .a year, more or less. What do you do here?"
". . . beer's getting warm. Think I'll get a pitcher . . ."
"What do you do here?"
". . . better cold. Not much. I get along. You . . ."
". . . lived in Taos for a time. Then Santa Fe. Bummed around the Southwest a lot. A friend got me into photography. Then I was sick for a while and that's when I tried painting . . ."
". . . landscapes of the Tetons to sell to tourists?"
"Hardly. A lot of landscapes, but trailer camps and oil fields and perspective vistas of 1-80 across the Red Desert . . ."
"I tried taking pictures once . . . kept forgetting to load the camera."
". . . and then I ended up half-owner of a gallery called Good Stuff. My partner throws pots."
". . . must be dangerous . . ."
". . . located on Main Street in Lander . . ."
". . . going through. Think maybe I've seen it . . ."
"What do you do here?"
The comparative silence seemed to echo as the band ended its set. "Very little," said Steve. "I worked a while as a hand on the Two Bar. Spent some time being a roughneck in the fields up around Buffalo. I've got a pickup—do some short-hauling for local businessmen who don't want to hire a trucker. I ran a little pot. Basically I do whatever I can find. You know."
Carroll said, "Yes, I do know." The silence lengthened between them. Finally she said, "Why did you come back here? Was it because—"
"—because I'd failed?" Steve said, answering her hesitation. He looked at her steadily. "I thought about that a long time. I decided that I could fail anywhere, so I came back here." He shrugged. "I love it. I love the space."
"A lot of us have come back," Carroll said. "Ginger and Paul are here."
Steve was startled. He looked at the tables around them.
"Not tonight," said Carroll. "We'll see them tomorrow. They want to see you."
"Are you and Paul back—" he started to say.
She held up her palm. "Hardly. We're not exactly on the same wavelength. That's one thing that hasn't changed. He ended up being the sort of thing you thought you'd becom
e."
Steve didn't remember what that was.
"Paul went to the School of Mines in Colorado. Now he's the chief exploratory geologist for Enerco."
"Not bad," said Steve.
"Not good," said Carroll. "He spent a decade in South America and the Middle East. Now he's come back home. He wants to gut the state like a fish."
"Coal?"
"And oil. And uranium. And gas. Enerco's got its thumb in a lot of holes." Her voice had lowered, sounded angry. "Anyway, we are having a reunion tomorrow, of sorts. And Ginger will be there."
Steve poured out the last of the beer. "I thought for sure she'd be in California."
"Never made it," said Carroll. "Scholarships fell through. Parents said they wouldn't support her if she went back to the West Coast—you know how one hundred and five percent converted immigrants are. So Ginger went to school in Laramie and ended up with a degree in elementary education. She did marry a grad student in journalism. After the divorce five or six years later, she let him keep the kid."
Steve said, "So Ginger never got to be an ace reporter."
"Oh, she did. Now she's the best writer the Salt Creek Gazette's got. Ginger's the darling of the environmental groups and the bane of the energy corporations."
"I'll be damned," he said. He accidentally knocked his glass off the table with his forearm. Reaching to retrieve the glass, he knocked over the empty pitcher.
"I think you're tired," Carroll said.
"I think you're right."
"You ought to go home and sack out." He nodded. "I don't want to drive all the way back to Lander tonight," Carroll said. "Have you got room for me?"
When they reached the small house Steve rented off Highway 170, Carroll grimaced at the heaps of dirty clothes making soft moraines in the living room. "I'll clear off the couch," she said. "I've got a sleeping bag in my car."
Steve hesitated a long several seconds and lightly touched her shoulders. "You don't have to sleep on the couch unless you want to. All those years ago . . . You know, all through high school I had a crush on you? I was too shy to say anything."
She smiled and allowed his hands to remain. "I thought you were pretty nice too. A little shy, but cute. Definitely an underachiever."
They remained standing, faces a few inches apart, for a while longer. "Well?" he said.
"It's been a lot of years," Carroll said. "I'll sleep on the couch."
Steve said disappointedly, "Not even out of charity?"
"Especially not for charity." She smiled. "But don't discount the future." She kissed him gently on the lips.
Steve slept soundly that night. He dreamed of sliding endlessly through a warm, fluid current. It was not a nightmare. Not even when he realized he had fins rather than hands and feet.
Morning brought rain.
When he awoke; the first thing Steve heard was the drumming of steady drizzle on the roof. The daylight outside the window was filtered gray by the sheets of water running down the pane. Steve leaned off the bed, picked up his watch from the floor, but it had stopped. He heard the sounds of someone moving in the living room and called, "Carroll? You up?"
Her voice was a soft contralto. "I am."
"What time is it?"
"Just after eight."
Steve started to get out of bed, but groaned and clasped the crown of his head with both hands. Carroll stood framed in the doorway and looked sympathetic. "What time's the reunion?" he said.
"When we get there. I called Paul a little earlier. He's tied up with some sort of meeting in Casper until late afternoon. He wants us to meet him in Shoshoni."
"What about Ginger?"
They both heard the knock on the front door. Carroll turned her head away from the bedroom, then looked back at Steve. "Right on cue," she said. "Ginger didn't want to wait until tonight." She started for the door, said back over her shoulder, "You might want to put on some clothes."
Steve pulled on his least filthy jeans and a sweatshirt labeled amax town-league volleyball across the chest. He heard the front door open and close, and words murmured in his living room. When he exited the bedroom he found Carroll talking on the couch with a short, blonde stranger who only slightly resembled the long-ago image he'd packed in his mind. Her hair was long and tied in a braid. Her gaze was direct and more inquisitive than he remembered.
She looked up at him and said, "I like the mustache. You look a hell of a lot better now than you ever did then."
"Except for the mustache," Steve said, "I could say the same."
The two women seemed amazed when Steve negotiated the disaster area that was the kitchen and extracted eggs and Chinese vegetables from the refrigerator. He served the huge omelet with toast and freshly brewed coffee in the living room. They all balanced plates on laps.
"Do you ever read the Gazoo?" said Ginger.
"Gazoo?"
"The Salt Creek Gazette" said Carroll.
Steve said, "I don't read any papers."
"I just finished a piece on Paul's company," said Ginger.
"Enerco?" Steve refilled all their cups.
Ginger shook her head. "A wholly owned subsidiary called Native American Resources. Pretty clever, huh? " Steve looked blank. "Not a poor damned Indian in the whole operation. The name's strictly sham while the company's been picking up an incredible number of mineral leases on the reservation. Paul's been concentrating on an enormous new coal field his teams have mapped out. It makes up a substantial proportion of the reservation's best lands."
"Including some sacred sites," said Carroll.
"Nearly a million acres," said Ginger. "That's more than a thousand square miles."
"The land's never the same," said Carroll, "no matter how much goes into reclamation, no matter how tight the EPA says they are."
Steve looked from one to the other. "I may not read the papers," he said, "but no one's holding a gun to anyone else's head."
"Might as well be," said Ginger. "If the Native American Resources deal goes through, the mineral royalty payments to the tribes'll go up precipitously."
Steve spread his palms. "Isn't that good?"
Ginger shook her head vehemently. "It's economic blackmail to keep the tribes from developing their own resources at their own pace."
"Slogans," said Steve. "The country needs the energy. If the tribes don't have the investment capital—"
"They would if they weren't bought off with individual royalty payments."
"The tribes have a choice—"
"—with the prospect of immediate gain dangled in front of them by NAR."
"I can tell it's Sunday," said Steve, "even if I haven't been inside a church door in fifteen years. I'm being preached at."
"If you'd get off your ass and think," said Ginger, "nobody'd have to lecture you."
Steve grinned. "I don't think with my ass."
"Look," said Carroll. "It's stopped raining."
Ginger stared at Steve. He took advantage of Carroll's diversion and said, "Anyone for a walk?"
The air outside was cool and rain-washed. It soothed tempers. The trio walked through the fresh morning along the cottonwood-lined creek. Meadowlarks sang. The rain front had moved far to the east; the rest of the sky was bright blue.
"Hell of a country, isn't it?" said Steve.
"Not for much longer if—" Ginger began.
"Gin," Carroll said warningly.
They strolled for another hour, angling south where they could see the hills as soft as blanket folds. The tree-lined draws snaked like green veins down the hillsides. The earth, Steve thought, seemed gathered, somehow expectant.
"How's Danny?" Carroll said to Ginger.
"He's terrific. Kid wants to become an astronaut." A grin split her face. "Bob's letting me have him for August."
"Look at that," said Steve, pointing.
The women looked. "I don't see anything," said Ginger.
"Southeast," Steve said. "Right above the head of the canyon."
"There—I'm not sure." Carroll shaded her eyes. "I thought I saw something, but it was just a shadow."
"Nothing there," said Ginger.
"Are you both blind?" said Steve, astonished. "There was something in the air. It was dark and cigar-shaped. It was there when I pointed."
"Sorry," said Ginger, "didn't see a thing."
"Well, it was there," Steve said, disgruntled.
Carroll continued to stare off toward the pass. "I saw it too, but just for a second. I didn't see where it went."
"Damnedest thing. I don't think it was a plane. It just sort of cruised along, and then it was gone."
"All I saw was something blurry," Carroll said. "Maybe it was a UFO."
"Oh, you guys," Ginger said with an air of dawning comprehension. "Just like prom night, right? Just a joke."
Steve slowly shook his head. "I really saw something then, and I saw this now. This time Carroll saw it too." She nodded in agreement. He tasted salt.
The wind started to rise from the north, kicking up early spring weeds that had already died and begun to dry.
"I'm getting cold," said Ginger. "Let's go back to the house."
"Steve," said Carroll, "you're shaking."
They hurried him back across the land.
PHOSPHORIC FORMATION
PERMIAN
225-270 MILLION YEARS
They rested for a while at the house; drank coffee and talked of the past, of what had happened and what had not. Then Carroll suggested they leave for the reunion. After a small confusion, Ginger rolled up the windows and locked her Saab and Carroll locked her Pinto.
"I hate having to do this," said Carroll.
"There's no choice anymore," Steve said. "Too many people around now who don't know the rules."
The three of them got into Steve's pickup. In fifteen minutes they had traversed the doglegs of U.S. 20 through Thermopolis and crossed the Big Horn River. They passed the massive mobile-home park with its trailers and RVs sprawling in carapaced glitter.
The flood of hot June sunshine washed over them as they passed between the twin bluffs, red with iron, and descended into the miles and years of canyon.
TENSLEEP FORMATION