Since he was among the last to see Jimmy alive, Isaac felt obligated to attend and maybe Wesley would, too. It stung that he’d lost track of Wesley after the fire. Isaac had thought they were better friends. The street word was that Wesley had been the one who tipped the police about Screech and Dexter for setting the booby trap that hurt the officer. That certain druggies were looking to get back at him. Wesley could handle himself, but maybe he’d chosen not to fight and left town instead.
Disappearance was a simple fact of life, a strategy everyone used at some time on the river. You hid because you lacked the fortifications against trouble. You fled warrants and avoided paying debts. You holed up when you were sick or depressed. Sure, people looked out for each other. But no one wondered why you hadn’t been out to mow your lawn. No one missed hearing your stereo or your heels clacking on the floorboards overhead. No one called to ask why you’d missed work. It wasn’t unusual to see a car parked somewhere for too long. Your mail could go uncollected for weeks. And sometimes when people did notice they thought, good riddance.
Standing on the steep bluff above The Point, Isaac could see the entire wooded triangle formed by the railroad tracks and junction of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers. Isolated by the water and the bluff, The Point had been left untouched by the original claimants and ignored by their heirs. More than a century later, the title remained in the names of long-dead men, the land unvalued and untaxed. It might as well have been the moon or a new volcanic island. It was ripe for colonization. Sheltered from view and close to downtown, it had attracted squatters who established a community that ebbed and flowed with the weather, grudges and police raids. In a given season, it could be dangerous or peaceful, closed or welcoming, and ranging from half a dozen inhabitants to several score.
After decades of tolerance, the railroad declared The Point a safety hazard and announced plans to cut off access. Maybe the company was truly concerned. Maybe it was just part of the general war on vagrancy. The Homeless Coalition negotiated the camp’s departure and a hundred volunteers helped the occupants move and clean up the site. The railroad had leveled a shielding berm and put up a fence. The Point was uninhabitable now. Like the entire riverfront was becoming.
From above, Isaac could see the outlines left by the winter roundhouse, the fire pits and the individual tents. Steps carved in the bluff by the former inhabitants had begun to erode. He descended, prepared to arrive on his ass.
Trow acted as greeter and guide around the end of the fence. Already the gathering included a mix of Jimmy’s drinking buddies, recovery friends, two of his caseworkers and assorted others, maybe twenty-five in all. An aluminum fishing boat beat upriver toward The Point, and when they saw Sylvia in the bow three men went down to pull it onto the beach. Sylvia disembarked clutching a cardboard box. She introduced Jimmy’s mother. Mrs. Johncock’s long, homemade dress and sun-dazed expression made her look like one of the re-enactors at the History Farm, here and living in a different reality. The third passenger, Sister Rose, surprised everyone with her disguise of a broad-brimmed yellow hat, cornflower blue culottes and green rubber gardening boots.
The assembly formed a circle in the sand. Sister Rose began by saying that despite the tragedies of his life Jimmy had known God’s love. Everyone here had been an expression of it. Sylvia talked about Jimmy’s gentle soul, how he’d never hurt a flea, then corrected herself. Half the audience knew fleas first-hand. Tony Martin, a cop from the outreach team, said he had learned from Jimmy the difference between helping and saving someone; that serving was necessary because protecting wasn’t always possible. Trow said JJ used to occupy a tent next to him. He drew a white stone from his pocket and laid it on the spot under a tree. And now he lives in the place where everything is new, Trow said solemnly, as if he were quoting the Bible.
Jimmy’s friend Casey produced a vodka flask and sloshed a bit over the same ground, then he waded out onto a shoal and let the rest of it drizzle into the line where the green Gunnison met the brown Colorado. Isaac suspected then Casey had used water instead of vodka. Sylvia brought out the ashes and Tony Martin escorted Jimmy’s mother into the shallows. Mrs. Johncock, Sylvia and Tony took turns casting crumbles of Jimmy to the two rivers, the bits hitting the water like roils of water skippers. Then Sylvia invited others to join in if they wanted. Some did, taking their pinches and strewing them. Isaac stayed on the beach, not wanting to deprive someone who had loved Jimmy better. Casey stuffed some kernels of bone into the bottle, replaced the cap and launched it. Everyone watched until it floated out of sight, then Jimmy’s mother shook out the plastic bag that had contained the ashes and stuffed it back inside the box. She wiped her hands on her dress, which was soaked well above the hem. The others brushed their palms in unison as if they had reached agreement, that it was all right, finally, for them to give up on Jimmy Johncock.
Trends always become outdated. Dwell in the present and be true to yourself.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
Whenever Meg opened the door of a property she was showing, it seemed the home took in an expectant breath. But of course the hopefulness belonged to her, her client and the seller, all asking: Is this going to be the one? Such alignment was rare in life—all the parties wanting the same thing, even for a moment. Usually, the moment did not last.
During the drive with Hungerman, Meg’s mood had shifted away from that simplistic, anticipatory state. Now she saw the complications. She had started out as a local ambassador, steering Hungerman from the grittier sides of town, introducing him to more of the right people, rooting for a deal to go through. Nothing official; for the time being she was just Eve’s girl on the spot. Then how quickly he had drawn her over to his side. She had too blithely signed the non-disclosure. Remembering Donnie’s refusal, she hoped it wasn’t a mistake. Now, before she asked Eve if there were any other sites in the running, she had to check if her agreement applied to Idaho.
While Ashley retrieved the form, Meg looked up Idaho Falls. Same elevation and similar population. A market hub serving two states. A downtown greenbelt along a manicured river. Irrigated agriculture. Remnants of the Atomic Energy Commission and its residue there, also. Proud of its homegrown culture. 100 Best Adventure Towns with minor league baseball. Some differences, too. Colder and wetter, a very small branch of the state university, far more religious, less of a medical center. Still, too similar to be a coincidence.
Ashley presented a folder, which contained the agreement and its envelope. Oh well. Meg had handed over the envelope from Hungerman and told her to file it. Ashley Cassel was sweet and willing, but it was taxing trying to bring along an employee who was never going to measure up. She would remain ensconced at reception until some nice Mormon boy decided she was Temple-worthy.
“You don’t have to save the envelopes, Ashley.”
The girl bit her lower lip. “But I didn’t know what else to do with the rest.”
The rest? A white index card lettered in two different hands:
YOU MUST ASK FOR WHAT YOU REALLY WANT.
I think this line was meant for both of us.
–Lew
Even without paperwork, all relationships had elements of confidentiality and concealment. Normally, she’d tell Eve about an invitation to fly away for the weekend. She’d name the man or not. It would become a joke or a secret between them. Big deal or no big deal, she could trust her friend. But here there were millions at stake for the city and layers of intrigue she had only begun to fathom. She had not asked for this breach from business into her personal life. What were her obligations to a man once their relationship was on paper?
From the sound on the line, Donnie Barclay was busy turning gasoline into noise. One of his ATVs or some giant machine was shaking the earth on his behalf. He rarely got his hands dirty any more but he still enjoyed raising dust. He could talk if she came by the gravel pit, he said. She confirmed its location, a few miles from her house, beyond the mall on
the opposite side of the river, shielded from the highway by prairie dog lots filled with RVs for sale and disassembled oil rigs huddled together like abandoned city blocks. Dump loads of fill lined the road to the gravel pit. From their stages of erosion, a decade or more of deposits awaited the reckoning blade that would level them into something more salable.
Donnie met her at the gate in a utility vehicle with bug-eyed headlights. He handed her a hardhat and safety glasses, neither of which he wore, and extended a pair of blue earplugs, which she declined. She’d come to hear what he had to say.
“Put ’em in,” he said, rolling a tip to show how it was done. “No sense going deaf before you have to.”
The gravel pit mined an ancient floodplain terrace left when the river changed course. At its bottom four stories down, a mantis-like machine gulped scoops of sand and river rock fed from a beeping loader. The material was conveyed on belts and rollers and agitated through heavy screens. Rocks the size of footballs hopped toward relentless crushers that hammered them and then trundled over their remains. The machine’s splayed arms disgorged graded pyramids of sand and aggregate. Donnie zoomed down into the bedlam, shouting over the ruckus. They might as well have been conversing on a freight train under heavy machine-gun fire. He drove out again and parked under a stressed and lonely cottonwood knuckled into the lip of the pit.
He extracted his earplugs and Meg followed his example. The quiet here was relative. Nearby a pump chugged, sucking water from the floor of the mine and discharging it to a channel that gushed down to the river.
She unfolded her jumble of excitement and misgivings. Almost everything.
“Whoa. If I’d known all that, I’d’ve met you for a cocktail,” he said.
“Nothing’s totally bad in itself. It just feels like everything’s colliding.”
“It’s tough to do good by everybody. Sometimes you just have to hash out who you’re going to disappoint,” he said.
“But I care about everybody. There’s the community’s stake, too.”
“We do like to tell ourselves that, don’t we? Love thy neighbor and all. You got to look at it different. Not make it personal. Think about who you’d rather piss off.”
Or who she can trust. She didn’t know if Wesley was a champion for homeless people about to pull off something great or a deluded vet with PTSD who just wanted to be left alone. Hungerman’s project seemed the town’s best hope to turn things around, but when she got in close, alarm bells went off. Both of them wanted something from her to a disturbing degree. She asked Donnie what he expected out of this, because he didn’t seem motivated by the money.
“Maybe not. I’ll still pull over for a big sack of cash on the side of the road, though. And you bet I’d get twitchy writing a check with more than one comma. I’m only rich like Cowboy Bob is a poet—not the same thing as the full deal.”
Meg wondered if Donnie knew any full-deal poets. He spit just off the floorboards of his ATV and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“See, the more money enters in, the harder it is to see people straight. Hard even to sort out for yourself. Being able to ride across my land is worth more to me than a six-million-dollar road job. But if I trade the paving contract for a ride on a horse, I’m a fool, so I take both. It’s not that the goodness of something turns to greed when it gets big. In my book, greed is buying your Cadillac with the widow’s investment funds. It’s cheating on your taxes. Greed is screwing the people who work for you as if you were God on a bad day. Greed is an ugly little thing. It’s about loving yourself too much, and money has very little to do with it.
“So Lew has a big idea that he says will benefit a lot of people. If it doesn’t, he’ll look like a crook. If it succeeds and he makes a pile, he’ll still probably be called a crook because of the toes he stepped on or the people he squeezed out. So what? Point is, you don’t get to decide what other people think of you. Nobody’s ever punished for all their wrongdoing or rewarded for all their goodness. In fact, sins often prove most profitable. And being too damn righteous can get you killed. I try to be a little bit of both and let God do the math.”
“So does that mean you’re behind Lew?”
“I’m not in front or behind him. Right now I’m where I can keep an eye on him. At this point in my life, I’ve got no great need to build that parking ramp. But somebody is going to do it, and I’d rather it was me. We’ll do a good job, but I never know when I’m pouring the concrete how things’ll turn out in the greater scheme. Look at damn Las Colonias—who knew about radiation back then? We thought nukes would make the Russians behave, give us watches that glowed in the dark! You think you’ve done good and then you find out otherwise. Or maybe you thought you made a mess and it turns out okay.
“This crater here may look like hell right now, but those connected lakes up-river? Those quiet potholes all the way to Palisade where you’ve got your bike trails and your bird habitat and your fishing holes? Fifty, a hundred years ago, they were gravel mines and now they’re amenities. And meanwhile, there’s a city with jobs and houses and an airport and a college that wouldn’t have been here on this crappy, salt-encrusted dirt if those old boys hadn’t dug out the river bottoms for a living. Where were we?”
“Hungerman. Greed. Progress.”
Donnie started up the ATV and bumped down the track of the discharge hose to the bike trail where motorized vehicles were prohibited. Meg braced herself as he gunned along the path.
“Look here. This dinky little stretch of the river’s posted for hunting. The bikers freak out. Well, guess what? Us hunters love this river, too, and we’ll know a hell of a lot sooner when the habitat’s got problems than some fat-tire tourist blowing through on his way to the brewpub. I’m paying tax money right now so they can grind out all this tamarisk, which was originally put in by the Army Corps of Engineers to shore up the riverbanks. More folks from out of town come to do what was good for us.”
Donnie turned a sharp radius and sped back, ignoring the glares from a pair of approaching cyclists. “Look now,” he said. “From an angle, the baffles in this fence screen off my operation. Moving like this, you can hardly see through it. But if you stop at the right angle, you can. There we are, offending gentle sensibilities. What I’m saying is, progress and doing good is always part fuck-up, excuse my French. You can’t always predict which part.”
The ATV bucked up the hill and followed the fence around to where Meg had parked. He stepped off the machine and opened his arms. A hug and his usual fractured platitudes. Donnie knew how to deliver comfort. Yes, the fate of mankind didn’t depend on Meg Mogrin.
“I can’t tell you what’s in Hungerman’s soul,” Donnie said as he released her. “It’s hard enough to know what’s in mine. Don’t worry about Sister Rose. Yeah, who wants to let down a nun? But your chances are pretty good that she’ll forgive you. City Council? You’d be good and I’d vote for you but you wouldn’t like it. I’d have to drive you around the gravel pit once a month to keep you sane. That Chambers fellow may be trying to do good, but Jesus, nobody wants that camp around them. They’re getting too bold, if you ask me. We had one up in our neighborhood this week, sticking fliers in the mailboxes—about some glass eye he found in Columbus Canyon. That’s illegal, you know. According to the cops, he’s tacked up posters around town, too. That’s illegal posting. He’s lucky they didn’t charge him.”
“What was he doing way out by your house?”
“The canyon’s behind us in the Monument. He thought the neighbors might know something.”
“I thought you were by Red Canyon.”
“There’s two canyons. This one’s hard to get to and there’s no signs to mark it, so people don’t think of it. But everybody knows it.” Donnie pinched his lower lip. “It’s that canyon you see below Cold Shivers Point.”
Cold Shivers. It had been nothing but the rim of an empty bowl filled with air and heartbreak. But of course the bowl was a canyon and the canyon had
a bottom and the bottom collected whatever was thrown into the air. A girl. A man. A glass eye. Brian had said he’d taken care of it. God, to think there might be some other it.
She drove through town, not knowing exactly why she was looking. We Buy Ugly Houses. Lost. Work at Home. No one would notice that poster in all this clutter. Perhaps they all had been taken down. Anyway, no one besides her would connect a glass eye found in Columbus Canyon to Neulan Kornhauer—unless Neulan had a glass eye...and Donnie had called the police! Calm yourself. She turned north toward her office. Then she saw it, on a light stanchion near a boarded-up Travelodge where a man squatted on the pavement wiping sticks with a rag. The abridged motel sign above his head read: AVE O GE. She circled the block, parked in the grocery store lot nearby and crossed the street. The man looked up hopefully. She could smell the varnish and see that he’d set up a folk art crucifix assembly line. No thank you.
The white cardstock sign featured a marker-drawn illustration of an eye shaped like an artist palette. She snapped a quick picture with her phone. At the corner, a flashing orange hand and robot voice counseled her to wait...wait...wait. She crossed and skulked back toward the car.
Neulan had been dead to her. And now, until she could be sure about what this eye meant, he was alive again. Brian did say that he’d taken care of the body. But he had kept the details close and she had never wanted to know. There’d been a fire, she thought, a burial. But there had been a violent landing and weeks had passed. It had been night and Brian might not have thought to search the ground. Was a glass eye like a fingerprint? Could it be traced? Did Neulan have any friends who would know? Too many questions. She had to be careful. Seeking information only increased the danger that this would rise again.
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