“Jackie, this is a good story.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this is news. I can write about this.”
“Aren’t you way too close to this to be objective?”
“You don’t think I can do it.”
“Don’t make this about me.”
“An article opens the door. It’s access.”
Jackie crosses her arms, her face pinched, listing the reasons Susan should reconsider, but Susan focuses instead on a list of questions. All her thoughts line up along the tracks. There is one, and another, and the next. This is a problem she didn’t create; there’s a calm in that. This is something she can do.
19
RAY AND THE DUNBARS sit on the bank, a trio of sitting ducks, and watch Benny Fisk from the DNR collect water samples. Fisk wades into the creek in hip waders, a kerchief folded into his top right pocket. Every few minutes, he takes it out to wipe off drops of water that have splashed onto his chest or arms. Several times he says, in response to Susan and Jackie’s questions, that he’ll “have to run that up the flagpole.” Twice he mentions the “limitations of his jurisdiction.” When Susan asks his personal opinion, he takes the rubber glove off his right hand and looks at Ray with an arched eyebrow. “My opinion belongs to my boss. Ain’t that right, Stark.”
Ray makes the corners of his mouth rise. “Well, if that’s about all for the day, I guess I’ll head.” He salutes Fisk, turns, and walks.
“Ray, wait up.” Susan catches him on the other side of the willows, her cheerleader legs quick across the rocks. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”
His mood lifts upward, above the willows and the scrub oak, up into the wide cloudless afternoon.
“Anything.”
“Would you help me interview some of the guys you know who work in the gas patch?”
“Come on, Sue. You don’t want to get yourself stuck in the middle of that circus.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to ask them?”
“A story in the paper’s not gonna change anything.”
“Oh?”
“You think the state cares about this? Why’d it take them five days to get out here to test the water?”
“Exactly. That’s a great question.”
“Sue, don’t try to be some kind of hero. It won’t end well.”
“I thought you would understand.” In the shade of the oaks, her upturned face is the color of a deep bruise. “Forget I asked.”
Quickly, she walks away from him, her shoulders bent and so very small.
“Hold up, Sue. I’m not saying you’re not a good reporter.”
When she doesn’t wait, when he tracks her back to the bank, she’s already asking Fisk to tell her exactly what he’s sampling, and oh Benny where did you go to college, and how long have you worked as a biologist, and it must be such fulfilling work. Fisk puffs up like a goddamn chub. She doesn’t look at Ray, not once.
“Sue, shouldn’t we move pipe before dark?”
“No, you head home.” She threads her arm into the crook of her sister’s elbow. “We wouldn’t want you to be late for dinner.”
“Are you sure? It won’t take me any time at all.”
Jackie starts to say something but Susan steps in front of her, her hand grabbing her sister’s arm. “I’d hate for Camila to worry.”
It isn’t the first time he’s been dismissed, just the first time she’s done it, like some bullshit salute. And everything he’s been keeping tamped down inside of himself in the days since he lit the creek on fire, everything he’s been working so hard to keep steady, rips loose. He hasn’t told any of them how fire brings it all back. He hasn’t put that on them. He never would. On his way out, he kicks the gate until his toe is numb. Then he drives to the Skyline. Whiskey. Line it up.
After hours of throwing darts against himself, he’s getting in his car to drive all of one mile when Ty, Officer Fucking Friendly, grabs his elbow and tells him he’ll give him a ride, that he’s had too much. Ray tells him to fuck off. He walks home.
But he isn’t ready to go inside. Not yet. He sits on the swing and stares at the pool of yellow light in the girls’ bedroom window. And pretty quick, he is staring at the house but it’s not what he sees.
Light her up.
She had on a burka and she just kept walking at them, which wasn’t normal, especially after they yelled at her to stop. He and his guys didn’t have good armor or radio equipment. And the way she held that brown paper bag, like some sort of shield. So command said light her up, and they did. Not Jonny with an M4. Not Caleb with a 50-caliber machine gun. Not TJ or Gustavo with a grenade. It was Ski and him at the Mark 19.
Then the dust set down.
In the middle of the road was a piece of bread and body parts the size of marbles.
Her bag had groceries in it. She’d been trying to give them food. They—he and Ski, not Jonny or Fred or Andy, but he and Ski—they’d blown her to pieces.
It’d been months of bullshit sweep missions, driving around waiting to get their own ass blown up. Not one person could say what the fuck they were doing in Iraq. But he was still stupid enough to think his sergeant might care that he, Ray Stark, military police, thought it wrong about the woman with the groceries, that this wasn’t the war he’d come to fight.
You goddamn loser.
That’s what sergeant called him. Like he reached inside Ray’s lungs and squeezed. They’d been on an overpass, looking down on what passes for a street, a goddamn puddle was all it was, that was maybe empty, maybe not.
That attitude jeopardizes your whole squad. You’ll kill your guys with talk like that. I hear you talk like that again, your honorable discharge is fucked. Your choice, Stark. Go ahead and do it. Fuck up your own goddamn loser life.
He wouldn’t do anything to hurt his guys and not his girls at home neither, so of course he shut up. Took the shit-burning duty sergeant assigned him and kept quiet about it. Every day for a month he’d haul the metal half-barrels away, from under what stood as a john, out to the sand. Thousands of people’s shit. Fifty gallons at a time. Sweet and sick. Hit it with diesel and a match and while a big-ass plume of smoke went up, he stirred the pot. Time it took to get done, he was covered in soot, shit soot, the taste of it in his mouth even with a bandana over his face.
Then there was the thing with that kid in Sadr City in the car. The kid he killed. And then there was the dog he shot for drinking from a puddle of human blood.
For the next few months, he collapsed into himself. It was not something a person watching him might notice, not that people watched him much. But he felt like there were two of him from then on. The person with skin, who followed the rules and said very little. And then on the inside was the other part of him, the one who felt nothing, who tasted nothing, who didn’t dream, who saw a sunset and thought of apocalypse.
But then Marcus Wilson died. And for days afterward, the grief in him rose above his will to toe the line, and it was then that Ken Singer from the Washington Post asked him for a quote. Even though Ray’d been told, You talk to a reporter, you go to jail. Even though the smell of shit smoke still stuck to his underwear.
He talked. He talked about the trucks with no armor, about the colonel and the hundred-dollar bills he gave civilians on his daily walks, thousand dollars a day, about the books he stacked in the barrack walls for extra protection. The interview was two hours, longer than he’d ever talked in one sitting.
In the article that ran six weeks later, Singer didn’t mention one thing Ray had said. Like it wasn’t interesting. Like none of it mattered. His only quote wasn’t even something he would ever say. “This war is a nonexistent national emergency,” said Ray Stark, Military Police blah blah blah.
He didn’t go to jail; there was that, at least. Major said if the band was doubled up as personal security detachment to the general, they sure as hell couldn’t afford to waste his boots on the ground. Ray got fined a couple t
housand dollars and he got demoted and he kept to himself, stopped trying to change anything.
In the cold Colorado air, he is sweating through his wool shirt; his hands shake and he makes a fist. He stares at the window into his kids’ room and imagines them asleep. He’s so tired. Of himself especially. Of all his ideas about the way life is and isn’t going to go.
And there’s Sue Dunbar, taking a chance on herself. No reason she shouldn’t. She’d come with him years ago to write about wildfires and she nailed the story. Every detail was right. It wasn’t that anything at the Forest Service changed particularly, not enough, but there was something about the way she listened that made a person feel like their life mattered.
In the dead quiet of the house, he calls Dunbars’.
“Sue, I’ll do it. I’ll set you up some interviews.”
“You will? You’re sure?”
“I’m sorry about what I said before. I’m glad you’re writing again. I think you’ll do good, better than that.”
“You have no idea how much that means to me.”
“I’m real glad, Sue. See you tomorrow.”
Camila stands in the doorway, watching him, even her eyes listening.
20
ON THE FIRST EVENING Jackie feels good enough to move hand-line, a day that smells of sage and loam, the smell of every spring, she sends Ray and Sue to move pipe in the field below, eager to test her capacity for working alone.
She drags the first pipe sixty feet. Slowly. Chicken does what he can to help, which is to bark at imaginary coyotes and to sniff his own ass. The aluminum is cold to the touch, the sprinkler heads tricky to keep upright. Every muscle in her body appears to have atrophied. Her heart pounds. Sweat beads. But one pipe becomes four, and then seven. She can do the work. She celebrates by keeping at it. She moves across the field, feeling the soft give of the land beneath her feet. She breathes in the smell of wet soil and the promise that the work will create something bigger and more important than herself. It isn’t the first time in the past few weeks that she has considered how this ambition is not so different from the ambition of being a doctor. It is a dangerous thought, and she pushes it away.
Dad and Uncle Ellis used to sit in the evening, drinks in hand, and watch the sprinklers. She used to tease them about that, said they should buy a VCR, but she wouldn’t say that now. The light does make the water sparkle and the water does make, eventually, a bright blanket of green grass. She wonders if Tim would think this was beautiful. She wonders at herself thinking about Tim. In the field below, Ray and Susan work in tandem, their voices rising and falling in a duet of muted conversation.
The night before, Susan got off the phone with Ray and danced around the room in her sock feet. Then she made a pot of coffee and stayed up for hours making lists of questions and sources, reading through things she’d printed earlier at the library. Jackie sat awake in bed, listening to her sister. Cold reached her under the covers, worry beating away sleep, remembering those mornings before school in Ray’s old Ford.
The Ford was a 1969 and Ray called her Big Blue. He would work for his granddad at sunrise and then swing by their place. Susan always slid into the truck first, so she could sit next to Ray and make him laugh, and on those days Susan always wore her hair down and curled. On those days, Susan shed her need to be cool, and softened into her old self, the one who was goofy and curious and even shy. Jackie had loved it.
Those rides to school had ceased when Camila convinced Ray to join the swim team, which practiced in the mornings. Susan immediately had sex with the quarterback, Ray’s best friend, traded him for the point guard, Ray’s sister’s ex, and finally dumped him for the editor of the newspaper. Jackie never saw any of them make Susan laugh.
In the field below, Ray and Susan finish their set and get the sprinklers started, talking close together in the fading light. Jackie’s set almost finished, she tries to pick up the pace but finds her arms and body are heavy. The sun has slid behind the mesa. A coyote calls across the field and Chicken sits back and howls, the early evening sliced through with sound. Ray walks toward them and she pushes away her exhaustion to connect the final pipe, for the satisfaction of finishing alone. She reaches for the opener and cranks.
Freezing water blasts her in the face, in the groin. With a stick, she pokes at the gasket to move and reseat it. Water sprays into her eyes, her ears.
“You all right, Jackie?” Ray shouts behind her, his footsteps clomping through the wet grass.
She keeps poking it, swearing under her breath. Ray looks down at her handiwork, not telling her what to do, not his way, and when she gets it fixed, the water moving back in the direction it was meant, she wipes her face with her shirt and smiles.
“I was thirsty.”
“Ha. You look cold.”
“I’m fine, really. I finished the set.”
“Good girl.”
Susan runs up behind them. “Jackie, you’ve got to get that water off of you. You’re sopping. Go, hurry, back to the house.”
Jackie looks down at herself and then looks at Ray and finally at Susan.
“This is what I’ve been saying, Susie. How can you think about writing an article about this? You’re irrational about it.”
Susan puts her hand on Jackie’s arm. “How much is that gas contract influencing your lack of curiosity about all this? Don’t be a sucker, Jackie.”
Jackie starts to say something and then stops, surprised. “You sound like your old self.”
“Jackson, go home.” Susan nods toward the house. “And don’t be an idiot, get dry. We’ll finish.”
Jackie marches across the mesa, the dark sliding around her. Ray and Susan’s laughter bounces off the poplars, off the clouds, back into her face. She takes hold of her own hand, as if she could fix her own isolation.
At home she heads straight for the telephone, wet hair dripping behind her across the kitchen linoleum. His voice mail clicks on right away.
Hey, it’s Tim. Leave a mess; I’ll pick it up.
She holds the receiver in her hand, unsure what to say. Tim, of course, is on the Uinta for five days. Her voice is full of poverty. She hangs up mid-sentence.
If she were in Denver, she’d be giving report at changeover. If she were in Denver, she and Jean would go for a run afterward and Jean would make her laugh about something she saw that day and then they’d go have a beer at the dive down the street from their apartment. Jackie goes to the phone again and dials.
“Jackie Dunbar, is it really you? You sound tired. Is it awful?”
“Oh, it’s not so bad.” Jackie forces herself to laugh and hopes it’s been long enough that Jean won’t recognize it for a fake. “It’s not like the hospital.”
“I miss you. It’s not the same without you here.”
“I miss you too.” Jackie smiles at her reflection in the window glass. She pictures Jean’s nose ring, her black fingernail polish, her silver bracelets. At the funeral, she had stood behind Jackie, touching her shoulder every now and again. “When can you come visit me out here in my own personal wasteland?”
“I’ve meant to come a hundred times. I’m just so busy with the path rotation in Dr. Gown’s lab. And I’m doing that research project, which is way more work than I thought. When are you coming back?”
“There’s so much to do here. I don’t know when I can get back.”
“Your dad would expect you to finish school.”
Jean’s confident voice sounds incredibly far away. Jean grew up on Lynx Lane, a cul-de-sac named for the animals it replaced. Her parents, both still alive, are doctors. Their coffee table stacked with medical journals and issues of The New Yorker. Jean’s embrace of Jackie, her referencing her as a best friend, had at one point been a sign of Jackie’s entrance into a world with options, a world of people where no one from Silt had ever gone. Suddenly, the words in Jackie’s mouth are slow to form, the effort of making them exhausting.
“The last thing my dad would wa
nt would be the ranch to go under.” The receiver is cold against her cheek.
“Did he ever say that?”
“He wasn’t really making sense by the time I got here. He died really fast. I thought I told you that.”
“Don’t be like that. I’ve been thinking about you so much.”
“You sound good. I’m really glad for you.”
“Listen, I hate to do this, I’m really sorry, but I have to go. I have a date with that guy Robert and I was supposed to be there five minutes ago.”
Jackie stares out the window into the empty darkness.
“The mouth breather?”
“I know. But he’s so fun to talk to.”
“Well go have fun. I have a hot date with my local television station.”
Jackie says goodbye and hangs up, shivering in her wet clothes. The clock ticks against the faded wall. It occurs to her that this feeling is something her dad or sister may have shared on any one of the times she herself had called home. Always, she had been the first to get off the phone. Jackie shivers in her wet clothes and watches the clock tick against the faded wall until the minutes have consumed her wasted time.
21
THE SKYLINE SMELLS LIKE cigarettes, stale beer, and men, which is to say it hasn’t changed. The Happy Birthday banner still hangs over the door. Behind the bar, a wooden-framed Denver Broncos poster shares the wall with a stuffed coyote. There’s a stack of bills on the edge of the pool table and shots of Irish whiskey on the bar. Delores is good at her job; she doesn’t ask Susan about where she’s been, doesn’t say anything about the last time Susan was there and the man she was with then.
“What can I get you, darlin’?”
Susan asks for a club soda—she is there to work—but then she rethinks that and asks for a Bud Light. A reporter should always blend. Her clothes are right, absolutely, positively: jeans, boots, wool cardigan. She fingers her turquoise earrings, a present from Jackie years ago. She’d put them on for good luck but realizes now they were a misstep. A sign of personality. So too, she thinks, is the concealer smeared under her eyes, the lip gloss. She’s been afraid to shower, just doing sponge baths with baby wipes. Her long hair, even in a bun, is terrible.
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