by Ninie Hammon
“Explain to me how you lost a scar-faced woman, an old man, a little kid and a dog!”
“We had tracking devices in their luggage, which they left in the hotel room. We had one in the heel of the woman’s shoe and one in the boy’s … but she bought new shoes and left the old ones—”
“How did they get away?”
“We had eyes on the subjects every minute. They went for dinner at an Italian restaurant and the team leader posted a man in front of the restaurant, one inside and two more out back—one at each end of the alley.”
Yesheb listens with rising fury as the man explains the bathroom fiasco.
“They must have slipped out the back door. Employees of all the shops on the street park in the alley, but only four cars left during the time the subjects were in the restaurant—no passengers in any of them. We photographed them all, standard procedure and we’ll pull license plate numbers—”
“The old man, the grandfather!”
“Had a team waiting in his hotel room prepared to extract the location of the woman and boy with a minimum of noise and blood. But … our man followed the old man into a crowded elevator in the lobby and just as the doors were closing, the old man managed to slip out—”
“He’s a gimpy old man!”
“We’re searching the building for him now, sir, have operatives on every exit. Nobody will get past them! We will wait him out. Eventually, he’ll make a break for it and we’ll have him.”
Yesheb speaks two words through gritted teeth before he breaks the connection.
“Find her!”
He pauses, then places another call. He instructs the person on the other end of the line to arrange for the man he had just spoken with to meet with a tragic and untimely death. Suicide. A swan dive off one of the balconies of the Warwick Hotel.
* * * *
For a moment, Gabriella didn’t recognize her own reflection in the polished metal mirror in the rest stop bathroom on Interstate 70 west of Ellis, Kansas. Oh, it wasn’t just the bilious light from the flickering fluorescent bulb overhead—the kind that’d make the winner of the Boston Marathon look like he was dying of pancreatic cancer. Gabriella’s hair was curly now, forming a yellow cloud of ringlets on the top of her head. The curl was natural; the butter color wasn’t. It was L’Oréal Honey Blonde, because she was worth it, but it wouldn’t be long before her natural blonde grew out enough to blend with the color out of the bottle. The short style was courtesy of the not-too-shabby haircut Theo had given her right before he shaved his head.
When he’d finished both jobs, he’d turned to Ty and asked, “You know the difference ’tween a man with a bad haircut and a woman with a bad haircut?”
Here it comes.
Theo didn’t wait for an answer, of course.
“Six weeks.” Theo paused; timing was everything. “A man with a bad haircut thinks, ‘In six weeks it’ll grow out.’ Now a woman … she get a bad haircut, she be calling Judge Judy. She be going into therapy!”
From there it was one small step into Dueling Groaners.
“Know where you find a one-legged dog?” he asked Ty.
“Wherever you left it,” Ty said, and fired back instantly, “Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Dwayne.”
“Dwayne who?”
“Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning.”
“Know how to prevent diseases caused by biting insects?” Theo’s volley.
“Don’t bite any insects.”
Gabriella was sure that by the time they reached their destination, Ty would be able to repeat the whole trouble-in-River-City sequence from the Music Man in under a minute and burp the melody of the Star Spangled Banner.
And who knew what else he might learn from his Grandpa Slappy, aka Theodosius X. Carmichael. Theo never told her what the X stood for, if, indeed, it stood for anything at all. He did tell her, the first time he showed up unannounced after she and Smokey were married, that “with a name like Theodosius, you learn to fight early and dirty.” He also told her he was likely the only man she’d ever meet who had a nickname for his nickname. As a jazz saxophone player for half a century, he’d been known as Slap Yo Mama Carmichael. That was shortened to Slappy when he added standup comedy to his act. After a while, everyone in his life called him Slappy. Except Gabriella. She called him Theo. It seemed respectful. She could tell he appreciated it, too, though torture and the threat of imminent death wouldn’t have forced him to admit it.
The old man had never come around much. Ty’s father had hated him. The train wreck of Smokey’s life was rooted in his childhood—a mother who died when he was a toddler and a father who crawled into a bottle in his grief and didn’t return for twenty years. Gabriella still had no idea why Theo had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. All he’d said was, “I only got me a little while ’fore I got to be somewhere important. I’ll be moving on in a day or two.”
He’d been in residence at the guest house almost two weeks when Yesheb showed up.
“Did you hear about the parrot that walked into a bar,” Theo began, “and said to the bartender—?”
“Ding! Ding! Ding!” Gabriella had reached her limit. “That sound you hear is the Corny Joke Alarm. Evacuate the building!”
It was feast or famine with Theo. He often ignored what was said to him, acted like he didn’t hear it. And other than an occasional dribble of the conversational ball, the old man had only spoken in monosyllabic grunts since they turned west from Evansville, Indiana, and headed out into the flatlands.
The three fugitives had taken the name Underhill, like Frodo Baggins when he was on the run. But unlike Frodo, they were not taking a direct route to their destination. In the beginning, the zigzagging was about the pursuit Gabriella constantly strained to see behind her in the rearview mirror. She did everything she could think of to leave no trail. Theo always checked them into motels—small ones in out-of-the-way-places, paying cash so nobody’d ask for identification. Paid cash for their meals in truck stops, mom-and-pop cafes and interstate fast-food restaurants. Paid cash for gasoline. And kept going, a moving target—through seventeen states so far.
But in repeated nightmares, Gabriella saw a trail she couldn’t erase—the heart-prints of her terror. Each frantic beat gave off a puff of pale fluorescent blue, sparkly, like snowflakes. The heart-prints hung in the air behind her as she ran away from Yesheb through a dark forest of dead trees. And no matter how fast she ran or how well she hid, he followed the floating puffs of blue and found her. Sometimes, when she looked in the rearview mirror on some lonely road at night, she fancied she saw puffs of sparkling blue hanging in the air behind the car.
As the days stacked up on days, the trip itself, the act of moving on became symbolic of just that—moving on. Every day, she put more distance between her and a life that had become increasingly hollow and meaningless. Leaving that behind became the shedding of a skin—tight at first, but looser as it dried out, disconnected from the lifeblood. And as she crawled out of that skin a little further every day, she felt a newness that was at once freeing and frightening. The new being had not the tough skin she had grown over time to protect it. It was vulnerable, tender and fragile, but it looked at the world with eyes that saw possibility in the peril. Her new freedom made her exquisitely aware of how captive she had become. A prisoner of her idiot agent, of the role she played to market her books and of the madman who chased her.
Oh, she understood her freedom now was limited—not only by the threat behind but by her own soul, still entangled in the tentacles of the past. It would take much more than a cross-country road trip to set her free from the pain of all those years.
She left the rest stop bathroom, got back behind the wheel and drove for another couple of hours before Theo finally spoke up. “Tell me somethin’. Outside of Blazing Saddles, you ever see a black man in a cowboy movie?”
Gabriella sighed. “You didn’t have to come, Theo. Nobody held a gun to
your head.”
“If I’d stayed, somebody’d a held a gun to my head—and pulled the trigger!”
He was probably right about that.
“Speaking of guns to the head …” Theo was quiet for a moment, then began to tick things off with his fingers. “Way I see it, you ’bout to ignore a court-ordered summons for slander—that’s one. You running away from an attempted murder charge—that’s two. And you got an illegal firearm in your glove box—three.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is—if that man show up and you go to the police for help—they gone bust you ’stead of him.”
“Take a look around, Theo.” She gestured toward the world outside the car windows. Theo had been reading a newspaper for the past couple of hours, conspicuously avoiding the grandeur around him. “You think you can dial 911 out here and a cop will show up at your door in five minutes with a SWAT team?”
The bigness they drove through now didn’t feel like the big empty prairie and plains they’d left behind in Kansas and Nebraska. This was not empty bigness. This was majesty. The land had been steadily rising, undulating as they drove west. Beneath a gigantic blue sky with puffy clouds hanging like white dirigibles high above their heads, the road in front of them was visible for miles, a gray ribbon with yellow stripes stretched tight across open grassland dotted with clumps of cedar trees and mesquite bushes. The highway was deserted, not another vehicle of any kind in sight. Specks of houses in the distance were tethered to the highway with winding dirt roads, but all the works of man—highways, roads, fences, buildings—were so dwarfed by the land and sky they seemed utterly insignificant. The darker green of forested hills edged the horizon on both sides of the highway to the north and south. But the green, fenced pastures ahead were stitched to the blue sky with a jagged line of mountains. Purple mountains. Even from this distance, you could see a powdered sugar dusting of snow on the peaks.
A green sign with white lettering flew by the window and Ty announced, “Next stop, Colorado Springs.”
“In case you’re interested,” Gabriella said, “I’ve read that the city’s sometimes called the Protestant Vatican. More than 100 Christian organizations—all the big ones—have headquarters there. Focus on the Family, the Navigators, Young Life—.”
“Six Flags Over Jesus,” Theo muttered.
“The U.S. Air Force Academy’s there, too,” she said.
“Sounds like a great place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there.” Theo said. “Tell me we not staying.”
“We’re not staying.”
“Where are we staying?” Ty asked.
Gabriella hadn’t been explicit about their exact destination. Partly because when they bolted from New York, she thought Theo would soon head out on his own and she didn’t want him to know specifics about where she and Ty were going, just in case … Besides, the one word “Colorado” had been so overwhelming—to Ty because he was ecstatic and to Theo because he was appalled—that neither had asked for a more specific destination.
When her response formed in her head, Gabriella realized she hadn’t said the words out loud in almost thirty years.
“We’re staying in St. Elmo’s Fire.” She felt an exquisite thrill of excitement that popped goose bumps out on her arms. “It’s a cabin in a hanging valley eleven thousand feet up on the side of Mount Antero.”
If ever there was a shock-and-awe statement, that was it. The stunned silence that followed was so thick you could have spread it on toast.
“We’ll stop in Bueny first for supplies.”
“Booney?” Ty asked.
“Bueny—rhymes with puny. Buena Vista. It’s a little town in the Arkansas River Valley at the foot of Mount Princeton. That’s where we’ll rent a jeep.”
“A jeep!” Theo said.
“You have to have four-wheel drive to climb the trail up the side of the mountain to the cabin.”
Ty’s jaw dropped open; Theo looked like he was about to vomit.
Gabriella threw back her head and laughed out loud because … well, just because.
TY STARED AT his mother and couldn’t believe what he saw. She didn’t look the same with short, curly blonde hair, of course, but that’s not what he meant. She looked … different in some other way, too. In a way he didn’t know the words to describe.
In the past few days it had begun to sink in that she had done it. She’d gotten them away from the guy dressed in black who had hurt her in his effort to get at Ty. The boy had his own plan to run away all mapped out when suddenly his mother, grandfather and dog had run away with him! They’d all left the scary man behind and escaped. Ty had been so frightened he hadn’t dared believe it at first. When his mother told him they were going to Colorado, he hadn’t dared hope that it was actually true.
But here they were!
This was a place so huge the bad man would never find them. Ty understood, of course, that this was kind of like a parole, not a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, that even if the Boogie Man didn’t find him, one day he would have to pay for the unspeakable crime he had committed. You didn’t do what he’d done and get away with it! Sooner or later ... But he put that thought firmly out of his mind. For today, he and everybody he loved were safe and that was good enough. And it wasn’t even all.
Ty took a deep breath and let the words sink in. A cabin on the side of a mountain. That you had to get to by jeep!
THEO TOOK A deep breath and let the words sink in. A cabin on the side of a mountain. That you had to get to by jeep!
For a moment he was afraid he was going to puke. He closed his eyes, needed to have his self a serious, sit-down talk with God.
You’ve known me since way before my baby face was puckered up tighter than the drawstring end of a black laundry bag. And don’t none of what’s happening right now come as a surprise to you. But Lord … a cabin on a mountainside?
I don’t hate much in life, but me and mountains is not on good terms. As you is well aware—I don’t do high and I don’t do deep. You know why. You was there. If you hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here.
All these years since that day, I stayed away from oceans, never even went to the beach. Kept my distance from lakes. Rivers, too, of course. And other than airplanes—they don’t count ’less you look out the window and I got better sense—I can’t get higher than a stepladder without getting the trembles.
Now, we talking a mountain!
I get up there, I might die of pure fright, and I got to stay on this earth to see to the boy.
Ain’t it supposed to get easier as you gettin’ down to the end of it—life, I mean? For the record, this is not easier. Just something to consider is all I’m saying. You gone do whatever you gone do. Amen.
He paused, then added,
I appreciate you getting us away from that man. He got a stink like meat gone bad only it ain’t something you can smell with your nose. He evil. I ask for your protection from him and his schemes.
He paused again.
And about this mountain thing … if it was good enough for Moses, I s’pose Theodosius X. Carmichael got no right to complain.
GABRIELLA HAD NO idea she would respond so profoundly to the sight of Mount Princeton. The southernmost mountain among the Collegiate peaks of the Sawatch Range, it was one of Colorado’s 54 “fourteeners,” rising 14,197 feet out of the Arkansas River Valley into the crisp mountain air.
When the mountain appeared above the rock outcrops on the foothills that had blocked its view, Gabriella pulled off on the side of the road, got out of the car and stared up at it, shading her eyes with her hand.
“Oh, Garrett,” she whispered under her breath. “Look at this!” Their word for beautiful leapt into her mind. “It’s bleeg, Garrett, just like I remember it.”
Ty got out and came to stand wordlessly beside her. Theo sat in the car, studiously reading his newspaper.
Because the tallest of its three peaks was in the center and the two on either s
ide were about the same size and shape, Mount Princeton’s aesthetic balance made it arguably the most picturesque mountain in all the Colorado Rockies.
“Is that Mount Antero?” Ty asked.
“No, that’s Mount Princeton. Mount Antero is behind it. You have to drive around the base of Princeton and then up Chalk Creek Canyon beside it to get to the road up Antero. Of course, the roads may be different now. I haven’t been here in …” she stopped to think. “In more than a quarter of a century.”
Gabriella didn’t remember the first time she ever saw Mount Antero but she did remember the last, staring up at it out the rear window of the car with the sound of her mother’s hysterical sobbing in her ears and Garrett beside her, whimpering like a lost kitten.
Her family had come to the cabin that summer when she was seven going on eight for the same reason her parents traveled all over the country every summer—hauling first one, then three children along with them. Phillip and Natalie Griffith were rockhounds. Glass-front display cases exhibiting their finds filled one whole room in their house in Whitehall, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Shimmering, iridescent hematite and tomato-red mica from Virginia, quartz crystals the size of hotdogs and emerald green cat-eye from Arkansas, pink fluorite crystals as delicate as hand-made lace from Tennessee, honey-colored calcite from Missouri and a rainbow of colored geodes from Kentucky, Indiana and Iowa.
The couple had dedicated the whole summer of 1982 to adding aquamarine to their collection and had rented a cabin on Colorado’s Mount Antero because it was the best aquamarine site in the whole country. But the mountain was renowned for more than its gemstones. Mount Antero’s high iron content turned it into a gigantic lightning rod and during the sudden summer storms that sprang up almost every afternoon, lightning writhed in the sky around the peak like sparks off a blown transformer. No place in the Rocky Mountains was more dangerous during a thunderstorm than Mount Antero.
The image of flashing light and the rumble of thunder skittered on little rat feet across Gabriella’s memory and she shuddered.