Inhabited

by Charlie Quimby

  Where is he?

  A ballpark meeting before tomorrow’s appointment felt less fraught than having Brian come to the house, but now it seems a mistake. Seeing the whole town has shown up to eavesdrop, perhaps he turned around. Or consulted his own lawyer. Or changed his mind and slipped further off the grid. Maybe Eco-Babe is not history after all. Why, that little pickup might be able to tow his campito if they drove slow, stayed south and avoided the passes.

  Don’t start in again!

  I have to consider the possibilities.

  No you don’t. You worry too much. Just wait. It’ll be like this baseball game. All the anticipation. It seems like nothing will happen and then something always does.

  You’ve never said what happened to you that day.

  Why does that matter now?

  It would be nice to know the truth before I talk to the DA.

  Well, my testimony will be unavailable, but try this: It was an accident. Call it a misadventure if that makes you feel better.

  It doesn’t. It makes me feel worse.

  Gee, I’m sorry I don’t have a bedtime story version of it.

  It makes me feel…

  Like you should have done something—say, thrown your body in front of the church bus that day? Spent the prior ten years hounding me into being a fraidy-cat? Nobody gets to foresee everything or tie up all the loose ends. You were an awesome sister.

  Now try something you can actually achieve, like going on with your life. In the end, what you or Sister Rose or Mother Teresa accomplish all amounts to the same thing. Trust me, everyone here thinks so. Well, Shakespeare and Edison are being contrarian asses, but their last day of immortality is coming.

  Will I get to keep my sense of humor after I die?

  Yeah. It comes in handy. I’m not so sure, though, how well irony plays in jail.

  There’s a chance they might not even prosecute. Too much time has passed.

  Thus vindicating procrastinators everywhere.

  Oh, I miss you, Hel.

  Enjoy the game, Madge.

  Vaughn Hobart sits in full sunshine high in the cheap seats. She greets him with a peck on the cheek, which under other circumstances would never have entered her mind. The lofty perch gives her a good view of the late entrants.

  The PA announcer directs attention to the right field corner and he clicks on a pre-recorded drum roll. The crowd rises as one to greet Officer Amy Hostetter mounted upon her therapy horse, riding without a tender, guiding its hooves through foul territory. The grounds crew, keeping their fingers crossed, joins the ovation.

  Amy dismounts near the bullpen and Leonard Self takes the reins. The announcer introduces the police chief, Lew Hungerman and the director of the Wounded Warrior Riding Program, rolling out the names as if the Rockies cleanup hitter were coming to bat with the bases loaded. They conduct Amy to the pitcher’s mound. She accepts one end of the foam board facsimile of Betterment Health’s two-thousand-dollar check. The program director takes the other corner, freeing Hungerman to hug Amy and wave to his guests in the skybox. Applause ripples again.

  The police chief salutes and hands Amy a baseball, then her entourage steps away from the mound. The crowd remains standing. Movement stops in the aisles. Amy turns to the fans in left-centerfield and waves all the way around to right. Instead of stepping in front of the mound, she aligns her foot with the pitching rubber. She gathers herself into the set position and looks down at the ball in her hands. Without a glove, the pose seems prayerful but perhaps the pause is to steady herself. Her arm draws back and sends the pitch looping to the catcher’s target. Cheers erupt. Across the stadium, men clap each other on the back, women examine the sky, noses blow into hot dog napkins and knuckles brush cheekbones. When the catcher tucks away the mask and walks the ball back, Meg sees it is Amy’s old partner, Tony Martin.

  After a singer wobbles through an over-embellished national anthem, Leonard walks the horse back to the trailer. The Grand Junction Rockies take the field against the Idaho Falls Chukars. The umpires confer with the managers. Amy Hostetter has disappeared, assimilated into the crowd.

  By the scoreless sixth inning the upbeat tone set by Amy’s public return has dissipated. With two outs and two strikes on the batter, two runners appear about to be stranded. Vaughn’s back is aching from the bleachers and he takes a stroll to see if Leonard has left yet with the horse trailer. Meg checks her phone. Damn Brian’s aversion to mobile devices. Once she’d thought it quirky, a consequence of his pared-down, out-of-the-way existence. Now it feels selfish and evasive, the way she must have seemed to him. Like those two men on base, they were both ready to run on anything.

  The crowd’s roar pulls her attention back to the play. A Chukar outfielder dashes back after a high fly slicing down the right-field line. He can only watch the ball soar over the fence, waving his glove toward foul territory, as if he could move the ball or sway the umpires. The runners, already racing at the crack of the bat, throttle back as the first base umpire points his finger skyward, indicating a home run, while the home plate umpire raises both hands to signal foul. Fielders throw up their arms; the runners continue home, then halt in confusion. Both managers emerge steaming from their dugouts. The umpires move away to deliberate. Home field fans scream that the ball was fair, obviously inside the foul pole. The less certain troop down to concessions for a final beer before the seventh-inning last call.

  The conference drags on. There can be no compromise, provisional call or appeal to a replay. The umpires had a fleeting second to judge whether a three-inch-diameter baseball eclipsed a pole three-hundred-fifty feet away, and now they must be decisive even if in doubt. Either a foul ball returns the game to a scoreless deadlock or three runs score and perhaps determine the outcome.

  Distracted in this equivocal twilight, Meg has no idea what the ruling should be. So how will they trace across the decades an arc that even she and Brian did not see the same? A system, so blinded, must conspire with the only witnesses to render justice.

  She spies Brian now, shouldering against the flow, peering into the crowd. He will not see her high up behind the masses standing, stretching and departing, so she springs down the steps. The announcer urges everyone to stay for the fireworks after the game. Meg plunges through the throng, calling Brian’s name. He stops to extract the familiar note from the hubbub. When he turns, his expression of relief delivers all she could ask of this night. The Jetta’s dead. She hands him the keys to her car and points him toward the exit. When a clamor from the crowd arises behind them, Brian looks to her for an interpretation. He thought the game was over.

  It seems like nothing happens and then something does.

  Somewhere in the darkened lot a scuffed baseball lies under a car. The hero’s bat is stuffed into a bag. He will use it again and again until it splinters one night in Missoula. In the morning, the anonymous ball will be found, join a sandlot game and be handed around until its cover falls off. The players will scatter but they will remember the grass they grew up on and when they return they will see the river has kept the valley green, though its edges remain brown as ever. The city lights will have washed out more of the night sky but the stars will still be up there with the planets, inhabited or not.

  Across the asphalt, Meg sees her car’s parking lamps blink and, if she is not mistaken, she hears the quiet thrum of an engine come to life.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing about one’s semi-hometown is rich with resonance and fraught with peril. The Grand Junction that appears in Inhabited is reasonably accurate as a landscape, slightly altered as a built environment, approximate as to timelines and historical events, and invented once we get to characters and the story. For example, the tamarisk jungle on the Colorado River did exist when I set my first novel there. By the time I put it in Inhabited and wrote this note, it was a disc golf course.

  The idea for Inhabited also grew out of my experiences as a volunteer at the Day Center run by Catholic Outrea
ch of the Grand Valley. My interest in the issues began after being introduced to homeless families and children at People Serving People in Minneapolis. Working with kids in that shelter’s preschool was inspiring, but I didn’t find a similar opportunity in Colorado. At first, I thought it would be a comedown to be stuck in a day center handing out toothbrushes to street people. Ironically, it proved to be a great gift. Inhabited is in part a testament of how my mind continued to be opened. The place afforded me the chance to reflect on “the boundaries of kinship” and our human capacities for resilience and change.

  While I made efforts to be accurate, the portrayal of homelessness in this novel represents a particular region and only a subset of the many people who live without stable shelter in our country. In parts of the west, a milder climate and open space means more people are willing to risk living outdoors. Rural or urban, homelessness is linked to the outdoors in a way that should expand our definition of what is an environmental issue. Although the political and economic tensions presented in the novel are real, the Grand Junction community has come together in a much more compassionate and effective way than its fictional counterpart. To learn more, visit the Faces and Voices project at: www.facesandvoices.org.

  Thanks in particular to Patricia Boom, who was director of the Day Center for most of my years there, Blair Weaver, the current director, and to the many individuals in the Grand Valley who opened up their lives to my questions and observation, including Carl Bartlett, James Easterling, Kelvin Gross, Tracy Gross, Brad Sweet, Rick Naimish, Marshall Harrow, Ken Halverson, Mark Hirschberg, Tracy Brado and John McDugle. Sherry Cole and Sandra Clark provided valuable insight from a social services perspective; Paul Quimby, Cindy Cohn and Cory Tomps helped me understand outreach from the law enforcement side.

  I am also indebted to friends with family members who have experienced homelessness or extreme dysfunction. As with a loved one’s suicide, relatives feel pain and guilt for feeling unable to help, and their stories often remain unspoken. Kate Ligare, Steve Hustead, Shirl McGuire-Belden, BK Loren and others, your hearts beat in this book.

  Early readers Teresa Coons, Susan Fraker, George Orbanek, Margo Mejia and her book club helped me know I was on track. Jim Kalitowski, Bill Wagner, Jay Perkins, Gerry Cowhig, Jane Quimby and Margaret Chutich offered expert advice on content matters. Doug Quimby’s multiple readings helped me refine a character and plot points.

  Thanks also to Mark Bailey and Kirsten Allen of Torrey House Press for championing diverse writing about the environment in general and the West in particular, and to the always responsive Anne Terashima, to whom I still owe a beer. Nancy Stauffer Cahoon has generously given frank advice and Margie Wilson of Grand Valley Books has been an exemplar of the independent booksellers who support authors and enrich their communities’ retail and cultural life.

  About Charlie Quimby

  Charlie Quimby is the author of Monument Road, an Indie Next pick and Booklist Editors’ Choice in 2013. He began his writing career as playwright and arts journalist, veered into corporate communications and then founded a marketing agency that now purrs along without him. Along the way, he collected awards and developed the notion he had a few good novels in him. A native Coloradan and adopted Minnesotan, he is at home in both places.

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