by Torey Hayden
“Fergus then vanished for about three or four months. Alan believed we’d chased him off and I only hoped we had. But then I was coming back to the ranch one afternoon, there was a car parked in a pull-out to a picnic grounds, near where our road meets the highway. No one was in the car, but in the rear window the words ‘My queen’ had been written in the dust. It sounds like such a small thing … words written in dust on a back window … but it was like an arrow through my heart.
“Alan was at a cattle auction in Denver, so I was alone on the ranch for about three days, and I was sure somehow Fergus knew this. That was the scariest part about him, that he always knew what was going on in my life.
“It was almost a parody of that occasion back when I was in medical school, that night when he’d brought wine to my apartment to welcome me back from the conference, because on this occasion too, he came right up to the front door, wine in hand, and acted as if I were expecting him and would be glad to see him.
“Conor was already in bed, so it was just me, alone. Fifteen miles from anywhere. My instinct was to slam the door in his face and lock it, but I thought that would upset him. I was scared to do that. Instead, I decided to play it cool. I let him in. I let him open the bottle of wine. I let him waffle on about how he was getting all these visions about the ‘new world’, not just voices anymore but actual visions that he wanted to share with me. Back in the old days I would have thought this sounded very important and mystical, but by that point, quite frankly, he only sounded deranged. I let him talk and drank wine with him and all the while I was madly calculating how best to trigger the security system without his being aware of it.
“When he went upstairs to use the bathroom, I thought here was my chance. I lifted the phone to dial 911 and that’s when I realized he’d cut the line.
“I was so terrified, James. Fergus had to have cut the line before he came to the door, so clearly he had been intending to do something all along. I was desperate to escape, but Conor was upstairs in bed.
“When he came back into the room, I could tell what he intended to do. He pushed me to the ground.
“The rest was just … Well, I think raping me was the whole point of everything. He wanted that kind of power over me, needed it – the humiliation, the degradation – so I didn’t struggle. I thought I’m not going to be able to save Conor, if I get myself killed.
“And when it was over … He got up. But he didn’t just walk away. He pulled out his cock and he pissed on me. Then he kicked me. Hard. Here, in the small of my back. As if I were nothing but a dog. Then the door slammed and he was gone.”
There was a long pause. Deep silence settled in around them. James looked at her, but he didn’t speak.
“That was the end of it,” Laura said softly. “The real end. He left me lying there in a pool of piss and I never saw him again. Somehow I knew I wouldn’t. That was the real conclusion of our relationship.”
“And Morgana’s conception?”
Laura nodded.
“Does Alan know the truth about her parentage?”
Laura bowed her head. “I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I can’t imagine he doesn’t see it. But then again, I’m always seeing more than other people see.”
“Was there any chance Conor witnessed any of this between you and Fergus on this last night?” James asked.
“No. He was upstairs in bed asleep.”
“Any idea where Fergus is now?”
“In Hell, I hope.”
Chapter Forty-Four
“A picnic?” Becky said sceptically. She pressed her face against the living room window and peered up at the sky. “People usually don’t go on picnics in the winter, Daddy.”
“It isn’t winter. Technically, it’s spring.”
“I don’t think so,” Mikey said. “Stuff’s supposed to grow in the spring. Everything I see is dead.”
“Why do you want to go on a picnic anyway?” Becky asked. “Let’s just go to the mall.”
“And then afterwards we can watch Spiderman!” Mikey cried and leaped off the edge of the chair in imitation of his hero.
“Because there’s more to life than shopping and watching DVDs. You can do that in New York. Let’s do something special together that we can only do in South Dakota.”
“Like what?” asked Becky, her tone still sceptical.
“What about the Badlands? You’ve never been out there.”
“Badlands? What’s that? Is it a beach?” Becky asked.
“Badlands! Badlands! That’s where they got lots of crooks!” Mikey screeched. He pushed Becky off the couch.
“Stop it! Daddy, make him stop. He’s being a pain. Give him time out. That’s what Mum does.”
“Mikey, settle down.”
“He’s so stupid,” Becky muttered. “He thinks he’s so smart, but really he’s stupid.”
“You need exercise, don’t you, young man?” James said, lifting Mikey way up in the air above his head. “That’s half your problem. So we’re going to run your steam off. Come on. Get your shoes on. Let’s get this picnic under way.”
Admittedly, it wasn’t really a day for a picnic. Thin high cloud made the sunlight wan and the sky milky. A distinctly cool breeze fluttered the roadside buffalo grass as James followed the interstate east across the high plains.
He wasn’t quite sure why he’d been drawn to the idea of going out to the Badlands. He’d only been once since arriving in South Dakota. It’d been July and so searingly hot that he hadn’t even bothered to get out of the car. He just drove on through the park.
James knew his wanting to go there now had something to do with Laura, with his confused wavering between belief and betrayal, as if something in the alien landscape that had so nurtured her might speak to him too. Mikey had won the coin-flip for the prize of sitting in the front seat on the trip out, but this privilege seemed wasted on him. He had brought two small toy planes along and spent most of the journey engrossed in circling them noisily in the space in front of him. Becky sat in the back and sulked.
“I ought to get to sit up front. I’m older,” she muttered.
James ignored her protests and Mikey’s loud flying noises.
“I always get to sit up front at home. Mum lets me.”
“I’m sure not every time,” James replied.
“He’s just zooming his stupid planes around and he could do that in the back.”
This was true enough but James didn’t say that.
“It’s not fair. We never do anything I want. Mikey always gets to pick.”
“Mikey didn’t pick. He won it fair and square.”
“Well, I didn’t want to come on this picnic. Why couldn’t we just stay home?”
“Because you can ‘stay home’ at home,” James replied. “You’ve just flown 2000 miles to do something different.”
“Then I ought to have got to choose where we’re going,” she muttered. “I wanted to have a picnic at the beach.”
“Becky, we’re in the middle of the continent. There is no beach. You’ll like the Badlands. They’re just like a beach, only hilly. And with no water.”
Glum silence.
Oblivious, Mikey crash-landed one of his planes on the dashboard, making accompanying explosive noises.
“Mikey, don’t do that. This is Uncle Lars’s car and he won’t want scratches.”
“I’m going to be a pilot when I grow up,” Mikey replied.
“Not if you fly your planes like that, you won’t. Why don’t you look out the window for a while?”
“At what?” he asked, peering out at the passing prairie.
“Look for pronghorn antelope. When Daddy first came out here from New York, that was the most exciting part of the journey. I had been driving and driving and driving all the way from New York City and I was so tired. I thought, ‘I’m never going to get to Rapid City. I’m never going to see this new place.’ And then I looked out the window and there was a whole herd of pronghorn antel
ope in a field near the road. There must have been about twenty of them and I thought, ‘I’m here! I’m really in the West.’”
“Why did you want to be in West?” Mikey asked.
“When a person says ‘the West’ they mean the wide open spaces. Where there are real cowboys. Where the Native Americans used to hunt buffalo.”
“Why did you want to be where cowboys are?”
“Because he didn’t want to be in New York anymore,” Becky piped up. “Daddy didn’t want to live with us.”
“No, Becky, that’s not true. My moving was a grown-up decision between Mum and me. I didn’t want to leave you and Mikey.”
“Are you a cowboy now, Daddy?” Mikey asked.
“Mum says you ran away. When her and Uncle Joey are talking, that’s what she always says. ‘James ran away from his responsibilities.’”
“Did you run away to be a cowboy, Daddy?” Mikey asked.
“No, I did not run away to be a cowboy, Mikey. I didn’t run away at all.”
“Uncle Joey says –”
“Becky, let’s call a moratorium on what Uncle Joey says, okay? Know what ‘moratorium’ means? It’s a nice way of saying it’s time to shut up about Uncle Joey’s opinions. And Mum’s too, for that matter. Because we’re here now, and you’re with me and we’re going to have a wonderful time.”
Mikey looked over. “Did you run away to hunt buffalo, Daddy?”
The eerie thing to James was how, in this broad, flat expanse of grassland, the Badlands could stay hidden so long. Even after they’d passed through the national park entrance, the monotonous sweep of plains continued unbroken right up to the first viewpoint. Then, within the distance of a man’s arm span, the world suddenly sank away, transformed into a jagged panorama of spires and shadows that stretched as vastly towards the horizon as the grassland had before.
“Wow,” Becky murmured, impressed. She leaned against the viewpoint railing. “It must be like a million feet down to the bottom.”
“Pretty far,” James replied.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t want to fall down there.”
“No. Me neither,” James said.
Mikey was more interested in the steps leading from the car park down to the lower viewing area. He kept running up and down them, fast as he could.
“Are we going to have our picnic here?” Becky asked.
“Yup. That sign says there’s some picnic tables just a little further along. Then you guys can have a good run-around.”
“You know,” Becky said, “this place is sort of like the beach with all this dirt. Sort of like Long Island, only without any ocean.”
“Don’t kid me,” James replied. “Long Island doesn’t have any beaches that look this good!”
It felt as if they were the only people to visit the park. No cars drove by. No one else showed up to look at the view. Other than the chatter of a few hardy birds, it was startlingly silent.
The sky had remained overcast but the wind had died down, so it grew pleasantly warm for March. The kids shed their coats and scrambled noisily up and down the grassless pinnacles beside the picnic area while James set out the food. Then they tucked into cold chicken and potato salad before the kids ran off to play again.
Mikey appeared back at the picnic table. “I got to go to the bathroom, Dad.”
“There are toilets right over there. See? Get Becky to take you; she probably needs to go too. Becky?”
The two children trotted off while James put things away, pausing to pick all the candy wrappers out of Lars’s Jeep. They couldn’t have been gone for more than five minutes before he heard Becky yelling. Her expression panicky, she came running back down the path.
“Daddy! Daddy! Come quick!”
James dashed over. “What’s wrong?”
“You got to come help Mikey. He’s got stuck.”
“Stuck? Where? How did that happen?”
“Well, I don’t know. I was going to the bathroom.” She grabbed James’s hand to pull him faster. “But when I came out he’d gone down this path on the other side of the toilet building and now he can’t get back up again.”
When James reached the toilets, he saw no path anywhere near.
“No, over here. This way. Down there.”
Below the viewpoint railing the ground fell away into a bizarre wonderland of spires and gullies all formed from the same pale, crumbly, unstable soil. Although it might have been nothing more than the eroded course of winter run-off, a path of sorts appeared to begin near the drainage ditch along side the guard rail. It dropped almost straight down the slope and then snaked out of sight around a massive columnar pinnacle. About thirty feet down Mikey was on all fours, clinging to a leafless bit of brush.
“Oh holy Jesus, Becky, how did he get down there? Why weren’t you watching him? That’s what I sent you along for.”
“I was going to the bathroom, Dad. I couldn’t watch him and do that at the same time.”
“Mikey? Mikey, are you all right?” James could tell he was crying. “Just stay there. Don’t try to move. Daddy will get you.”
But how? James glanced around him. There was not another soul anywhere. He had seen absolutely no one since driving away from the park ranger in the booth at the entrance to the park. He pulled out his mobile phone. No signal.
James gazed across the vast panorama. The floor of the basin was literally hundreds of feet below.
Tentatively, he slipped through the guard railing. The path was very steep and the soil alarmingly loose. Heights had never been his thing and he had no delusions about being a wilderness man, so the thumping racket his heart made in his ears was a definite hindrance. Inch by inch, James managed to lower himself down to where his son was clinging.
“You’re okay, buddy. Just hold on. Don’t move.”
Mikey was sobbing.
Reaching an arm out, James gripped the fabric of Mikey’s sweatshirt and pulled him up. “Got you. There we are. All safe. Daddy’s got you.”
“I haven’t got my shoe,” Mikey cried.
“What?”
“We were playing and Becky threw it down there. See? And I can’t get it.” He pointed down the gully.
James steadied himself on the path. “Mikey, you should never have tried to get it by yourself.”
Mikey sobbed anew.
Craning to look down the steep-sided gorge, James saw Mikey’s other shoe lying far down in the dust. His knees went to jelly. “We’re just going to leave your shoe there, Mikey. We’ve actually got other problems to worry about. Daddy’s a little concerned about how crumbly the soil is. I’m not sure we can get back up the way we just came down without slipping.”
Mikey cried harder.
“Listen, sport, we’re having an adventure here, aren’t we? Think what you can tell your friends when you get home. Yes? Exciting, huh? So here’s what we’re going to do. You stay right here and keep holding onto this bit of bush. Let Daddy get by you. I’m just going to look around this sticky-out bit of rock and see where the path goes, because maybe we can get back up easier on the other side. Don’t move. Okay?”
Mikey nodded fervently
James edged his way along until he cleared the knobby pinnacle. From there, the path broadened slightly. He slipped around a second corner.
Startled, he halted abruptly.
Ahead of him, the path dead-ended on a ledge of rock perhaps five feet wide. Beneath the ledge, the wind-ravaged land dropped away precipitously to the basin floor hundreds of feet below. The opposite end of the ledge met the upward spiral of an adjacent pinnacle of soil. At that juncture, three ponderosa pines grew, their green, bushy-needled lushness an unexpected contrast to the desolate hillside.
Three trees on the moon.
Chapter Forty-Five
“Axsnother picnic?” Becky said in amazement as James loaded them into the car.
“What about having Morgana along?” James said and started the engine. “You were exchanging emails last nigh
t. Wouldn’t it be nice to see her?”
“You want to have another picnic tonight?” Becky asked suspiciously.
“I’ll phone Morgana’s mum and ask,” James said.
“Why do you want a picnic at night?” Mikey asked.
“No, not at night. Just in the evening. At dusk. We could make a fire in one of the campfire pits and roast marshmallows. That would be fun.”
“When am I going to get new shoes?” Mikey asked. “’Cause I can’t go around with just one.”
“Daddy, I’m not sure I want to do this,” Becky said. “One picnic is enough in a day. I don’t think I want a picnic for dinner too.”
“We’re going to invite Morgana’s brother too. You haven’t met him. He’s quite a big boy. He’s going to be ten soon. We’ll invite both of them along.”
Becky touched his arm. “Daddy, are you listening to me? I said I’m not sure I want to.”
James looked over. “Well, I’m sorry, Becky, because we’re going to do it. I know we’ve already done a lot of things today that I’ve wanted to do, and you’ve been very good about it and I’m proud of you, but hang in there with me a little longer, okay? I want to do this one more thing.”
“Why, Daddy?” she asked.
“I just do. And tomorrow we’ll do anything you guys want, all right?” James grinned at her.
“Can we watch Spiderman again?” Mikey cried out from the back seat. “’Cause that’s what I want to do!”
“Yeah, cowboy, anything you want,” James replied.
From the tone of Laura’s voice, it was obvious she was as bewildered by this evening picnic idea as Becky was. “And Conor?” she asked quizzically. “You want Conor to come as well?”