Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  “What kind of dad was he?”

  “The Yeti?” She snorted. “Mostly, he wasn’t there. Before my mom left, I did my schoolwork in her office while she did her research, then we’d do something outside. The Yeti was in his workshop from breakfast until dinner, sometimes until after bedtime. It was a big treat for me to get to bring him supper, and he’d sit and talk to me while he ate, ask about my day. I’d try to get him to tell me about his day, but even then he was secretive. I was eight or nine years old, who the fuck was I going to tell? Sometimes I think that’s why I became a journalist, all those years trying to dig into my dad’s hidden life.”

  “And after your mom left?”

  She sighed. “The Yeti was always kind of a cipher,” she said. “Always in his head. But after she left, he just got more, I don’t know, more abstract. His mind so deeply inside whatever he was working on, he’d put on the kettle for tea and stand there thinking while the kettle whistled until it boiled dry.”

  She reached the freeway and ran the truck up into third gear, the big engine revving high as she merged into the heavy late-afternoon traffic and worked her way through the Portland interchanges. When she hit 84, she found the left lane and shifted into fourth behind a big two-trailer semi that was really moving. The pickup rocked in its wake, but June was busy remembering.

  “He’d get really angry if I interrupted him while he was in his head. And I was a kid, right? That’s pretty much what kids do, interrupt their parents. You saw him on the floatplane dock. He never hit me, but he was huge. And when he got angry, he seemed to get even bigger. He was terrifying.”

  The big two-trailer semi slowed behind a line of cars, and June closed the distance behind it, drafting in its slipstream. It made Peter nervous, but he knew she was a good driver and he wanted her to keep talking.

  “When I think of him like that, all wrapped up in his rage, I can absolutely believe that he had my mom killed. Over a fucking idea, because that’s all an algorithm is, really, an organized idea. And he’d never apologize, not really, but eventually he’d find me, wherever I’d fled to, and sit beside me and quietly talk about how dangerous the world was, how he was doing everything he could to protect me. I just don’t understand how he could be both of those people, so angry and so protective, at the same time.”

  “That sounds hard,” he said quietly.

  “Well, I wasn’t completely alone,” she said. “He had some researchers there, doing their own work. We all kind of tiptoed around the Yeti, and a few of them sort of adopted me. Sally Sanchez in particular, she was kinda my backup mom. She went out of her way to make sure I got fed and did my schoolwork. She talked me through my first period, bought me my first bra.”

  “Tell me about the other people. What did they do?”

  “Sally was an agricultural researcher, she came one summer to test different designs of greenhouses and just stayed on. My dad wanted the valley to be able to feed itself, so we had orchards and big vegetable gardens, fields of wheat and corn and soybeans. By the time I left, Sally was running the whole ag project. Other scientists got grants to come work on a specific project for a year or two, sometimes a half-dozen people at a time. People doing solar power experiments, making 3-D printers, miniature battery technology, all this stuff that my dad said would help the valley, and by extension everyplace else. Sally was kind of the den mother, she’d been there the longest. She organized Saturday night dinners, and everyone would come, ag workers and researchers and whatever family they brought.” She smiled, and Peter could see what she’d looked like as a little girl. “That was always the high point of my week.”

  The big two-trailer semi was really bogged down now. It was in the wrong lane and it couldn’t accelerate fast enough to keep irate commuters from dodging in front of it, which just slowed it more. June found a hole in the middle lane, hit the gas and flew ahead of the semi, the road opening up ahead of them.

  “But there were really no other kids, you know? I mean, what kind of way is that to raise your daughter? I was a teenage girl, and I had nobody else my age to talk to. I’d ask him to go skiing on Mount Hood and he’d say it was too dangerous. Shit, I’d been climbing rocks and trees and skiing in the valley since I was five. What was so dangerous about Mount Hood? But it wasn’t the skiing he was worried about. It was the Taliban and al Qaeda and the war and the government, the whole wide world out of his control. Nothing was safe.”

  He watched the memory play across her face. Wanting to be protected, and wanting to be free from that protection. She said, “I could do anything I wanted as long as I didn’t leave the valley. But at a certain point I just wanted more. I wanted the world.”

  “And he didn’t want you to have it?”

  “I don’t know what he wanted. I’m sure he loved me, in his fucked-up way. But I barely saw him. He was always busy in his workshop. People showed up from outside the valley and they’d go into his workshop with him, something I never got to do.” She looked at Peter. “The first time I ran away, I think I just wanted him to talk to me.”

  “What did he do in his workshop?” asked Peter.

  “I’d guess he did a lot of different things,” she said. “But the one thing I know about is building airplanes,” she said. “Little ones, you know, remote-controlled. He’d always liked that. He’d flown his own plane when I was a little kid, but had to give it up. Something happened. He had these little microseizures and they took his license away.”

  Remote-controlled planes. Peter glanced out the window. Angled his head to peer skyward.

  “What?” said June. She was looking at him.

  “Nothing.” He levered a smile onto his face.

  She looked harder. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing right now.” He glanced out the window again. “A few times something I thought was a big bird, circling up high. But now I’m pretty sure it’s not, because when the sun hits it just right, I’ll get a flash of gold.” He looked back at June. “Have you noticed anything like that?”

  She sighed. “Yeah. Since California. I think it’s my dad.”

  He reached out and put his hand on hers. They drove like that until the freeway came to a long uphill grade and the truck began to slow. She had to let go of his hand to shift gears.

  46

  They were quiet as June drove east, each lost in their own thoughts watching the landscape scroll by. Peter was wondering about the Yeti and what he might have gotten up to in the fifteen years since his daughter left home. And he wondered about June.

  She took the exit for the Deschutes River Recreation Area, where they planned to camp for the night. Lewis needed the time to get down the falls. Peter had no idea what Manny would do. For all he knew, Manny had a friend with a surplus Huey who’d drop them directly into the valley. Lacking a helicopter, Manny and his guys were more than capable of any technical climb necessary to get where he needed to go.

  They found a site by the melt-swollen Deschutes and set up camp, not speaking more than necessary to get things done. Peter had a crate of scrap lumber in the truck, and he built a small fire in the rusty iron ring. June sat in one of his little folding chairs and watched the kindling ignite.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Peter finally said. This was part of what he’d been thinking about, how to get to this. “Your dad could have an army in there. And I’m guessing Chip will be right behind us, with everything he’s got.”

  June stared at him across the fire, her eyes alight in the flickering flame. He had no idea what she was thinking.

  “I think you should stay here,” he said. “Where it’s safe. When it’s over, Lewis or I will come get you.”

  June shook her head. “I need to see him,” she said. “If he’s really part of this, I have to be part of ending it. Or I’ll never resolve it myself, in my own mind. I’ll keep falling for the wrong guy.”

/>   Peter had wondered when they’d get to this part.

  “Am I the wrong guy?”

  She gave him a richly layered smile. “You’re the right guy for right now,” she said. “You might be the first right guy I’ve ever been with. But I’m still a work in progress. I can’t make any promises, no matter how things turn out tomorrow.”

  She didn’t say this: You’re a killer, Peter. And I like you, I’ve slept with you. Might even be falling in love with you. So what does that say about me? And you’re damaged. You’re unemployed, you have no fixed address, your life is a mess. You can’t even sleep inside. A girl wants to stay in a nice hotel every once in a while. A girl wants to have a home.

  But she didn’t need to say it. Because he could already hear it in his head.

  Instead she stood up and walked over to him, leaned in close for a kiss. A soft, deep kiss. When he closed his eyes it was like falling off a cliff.

  Like flying, until you hit the ground.

  She broke the kiss and stood up. She was barefoot. She unfastened her jeans with great deliberateness, then let them fall and stepped slowly out of them. She began to unbutton her shirt. The firelight illuminated her skin like an ancient manuscript. She wore a lacy black bra and black panties that looked like coal against the paleness of her flesh. The tops of her breasts were dappled with freckles.

  He wondered if she’d already made up her mind.

  When she reached behind her back to unhook her bra, he found that he didn’t care, not at that particular moment.

  He scooped her up and carried her into the tent.

  If a shadow flew overhead at that moment, glinting gold off the setting sun, neither of them noticed.

  47

  The next morning they crossed the wide Columbia River back into Washington on a high concrete bridge almost half a mile long.

  It was still early morning and the air was incredibly clear, somehow scrubbed of all impurities. At the top of the span, they could see for miles up and down the river and along the wrinkled brown bluffs where green trees and brush grew in the creases cut by water. The sky was a distant faded blue. This was not the wet climate of Seattle. Past the western wall of the Cascades lay this high desert of small farming communities, vacation homes, orchards and vineyards, anchorites and mystics.

  They stopped in Maryhill for gas. While Peter worked the pump, June held out the keys and absently watched the sky.

  They turned west again on 12, following the river back toward the sea for a few miles. Peter drove and June stared out the window, her head tilted up toward the blue. With each mile, the creased landscape grew greener. At Lyle, they took 142 north along the Klickitat River, a narrow winding highway with signs warning of falling rocks. After a while they turned onto a lumpy unnamed road through an increasingly vertical landscape toward the narrow valley where June had grown up.

  “How did you finally get out?” Peter asked.

  “I walked,” she said. “I found a way up the ridge at the head of the valley, a goat path or something up to the head of the waterfall. There was a big alpine meadow, and then mountains as far as I could see. Over a few weeks I went farther and farther, trying to find some kind of trail out, but I couldn’t go far enough because I had to get back for dinner each night. Finally I took a pack and some food and a sleeping bag and some warm clothes and all the money I could find and just went.”

  Peter imagined her at fifteen, furious and alone and so desperate to leave the safety of the prison her father had made for her that she’d climb a waterfall to hike without a map into the rugged unknown wilderness.

  “You found a road,” he said. “Then what? You hitchhiked to California?”

  She shook her head. “I bought a motorcycle, a little Yamaha 50, a couple miles outside of White Salmon. Guy had it parked out in front of his house. I’d never even been on one before, but I’d been cranking an old mountain bike around the valley trails for years, so I had pretty good balance. Before he’d sell it to me, he made me show him I could ride, and that I could pick it back up if I dumped it over. It was his son’s bike, he’d died in the first weeks of the war. The guy gave me the helmet for nothing, came back out with a couple of sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and some cold Cokes. I didn’t tell him anything but he must have seen something. He said he didn’t know what I was running from but he hoped I found what I was looking for.”

  “And you did.”

  “Back roads through three states on a little dirt bike not even street legal,” she said. “I should have been picked up by the cops a hundred times.”

  “Or the child molesters.”

  “Oh, they were scared of me,” she said.

  Peter didn’t doubt it. He was a little scared of her himself.

  She peered out the windshield at the rugged roadside. “Things have changed some out here, but not that much. A few more houses. Still pretty rough.”

  They approached a gravel turnoff at the edge of a lumpy tilted hay field, the road marked only by a giant black boulder with a green cap of lichen and a blaze of white paint across its face. The boulder was unlike anything he had seen in that country, what geologists would call an erratic. Ejected by a volcano or dragged by a glacier in some previous age, and big enough that no farmer could remove it without blowing his seed money on dynamite, so it remained where it was.

  “This is us,” said June. There was something in her voice, but she didn’t say anything more. Peter slowed for the turn then hit the gas again, the big rumbling engine pushing them forward.

  The gravel turned to dirt as it skirted the hay field, heading steadily uphill, then picked up a watercourse that looked small until you saw the depth and velocity of the water. It seemed to come directly through the wall of the mountain ahead of them.

  Then river and road changed direction and some trick of the terrain unfolded into a narrow defile through which both river and road squeezed. At the entrance was a simple wooden sign with peeling paint:

  Agricultural Research Facility

  Private Property No Trespassing

  This Means You!

  At the tightest point, the passage had evidently once been only a narrow river canyon made by water cutting through stone over thousands of years.

  Someone had built a one-lane slotted-steel bridge maybe a hundred feet long, with walls of living rock forty feet tall on both sides and the river tumbling white beneath it. Peter imagined the bridge-builders on some kind of work raft, two men drilling holes and bolting brackets deep into the stone while a third managed the ropes and pulleys that held the whole floating enterprise in place.

  From the look of the thing it had been there for fifty years or more. He couldn’t decide if they were lunatics or geniuses. But they couldn’t have designed a more defensible point if they’d tried. Park a bulldozer on the narrow span and whatever lay beyond would be yours to keep. Unless Uncle Sam came along with a couple of Apache gunships, but at that point your problems were probably fairly serious already.

  The defensive possibilities had clearly occurred to someone besides Peter. At the end of the defile, a tall wall of steel stood mounted to giant I-beams rising from the road bed, blocking the way. A gate.

  “This was what did it,” said June. “This fucking gate. He said it was for security reasons, to keep people out, but I knew he was trying to keep me in, too.”

  Peter smiled. “You stole his truck to go skiing, alone at thirteen,” he said. “That’s dangerous. If you were my daughter, I’d have tried to keep you home, too.”

  “Don’t say that.” Her voice was sharp. “It wasn’t my fault. He wanted to wall off the whole world. He had keypads installed on the goddamn barns. What did we need that kind of security for? My dad was some kind of goofy-ass backyard scientist and paranoid survival nut. Who would care what the fuck he was up to?”

  Well, thought Peter, he’s sure as hell u
p to something now.

  The gate looked more and more like the drawbridge to some rough keep, hidden and secret from the world. He wished Lewis had been able to find out more about the man who had built it. After Sasha Kolodny’s last business had collapsed, the man had essentially disappeared.

  He looked sideways at her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I don’t want to do this at all,” she said, staring at the gate. “What choice do I have? I have to find out if my father—”

  She wiped her sleeve across her eyes. Cleared her throat.

  “If my father killed my mother.”

  Without another word, she opened her door and hopped out of the truck.

  Peter followed. Below a small overhang by the gate, a yellow walkie-talkie hung from a thin black wire. It was an older version of the radios he and Lewis had bought the day before.

  Peter traced the wire with his eyes and realized it was a charging cord connected to a storage battery and a little solar panel mounted on the shelter’s roof. Simple and low-tech. If the walkie-talkie died, they could just buy another pair. But it wasn’t entirely low-tech. He looked closer and saw a small fish-eye lens whose view would cover the entire passage.

  June lifted the radio, turned it on, and pressed the talk button. “Anyone home?”

  There was no crackle of static, and no answer.

  She tried again. “Anyone home? This is June Cassidy. I used to live here. Hello?”

  Peter stepped away from the overhang and looked up. He saw a small shadow in the sky, circling. It could be a turkey vulture, expertly riding the thermals. It could be something else.

  “I think the Yeti’s expecting us.”

  He put both hands against the heavy steel and pushed. It took some effort because of its weight, but the gate was beautifully balanced, and once in motion it swung inexorably open until Peter curled his fingers around the edge and fought it to a stop. Now he could see the structure of the thing, thick reinforced steel hanging on giant pintles, the latch bolts concealed within a broad armature, the whole thing simple and strong and designed to last for generations in the dry air with no more maintenance than some kind of grease for the hinges. There was another solar panel mounted on the back, with another storage battery. It looked like it powered some kind of remote-controlled electromagnet for the latch bolts.