Then a moment of panic flashed across his face.
He put her down as tenderly as he would a China doll and smoothed her ruffled hair.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m not fragile and I won’t break. I’m just carrying our baby, that’s all.”
“But how?”
“How? You really don’t know how it happened?”
“Scratch that. I meant when?”
“As best as I can figure, about six weeks ago. Probably that night at the lake, when we made love under the stars.”
He thought for a moment, then said, “I want to name her Starla.”
“What makes you think, pray tell, that it’s going to be a girl?”
“It has to be. Starboy is a stupid name.”
“Number one, Tony, my love, it’s going to be a boy. And number two, just because he was conceived beneath the stars doesn’t mean he has to have star in his name.”
“But why not? It would be cool. And it would remind him of how he came to be.”
“I’m not sure I want him to envision us rolling around naked on a blanket five miles from town.”
He paused and gave his idea some additional thought.
“Maybe you’re right. But why does it have to be a boy?”
“Because the boy should always come first. That way the rest of our children will have a big brother to protect them from bullies.”
“How many should we have?”
“How many do you want?”
“Eleven.”
Hannah gasped. She wasn’t sure whether he was kidding.
Then he smiled.
“Then we can have our own football team. If one of them goes pro they can buy us a house and we can retire.”
“Would you settle for a basketball team? They make more money than pro football players.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Let’s start out with five and then play it by ear.”
“Deal.”
“So… can I call my folks and give them the good news?”
“Why don’t you wait a few days? I called while you were sleeping and made an appointment with my doctor. Our parents will have a million questions we can’t answer until after that. We’ll call them on Tuesday after my appointment, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And there was something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t think you’re going to top the baby news.”
“No, this is minor. How would you feel if I took a trip to Yellowstone National Park for a few days?”
“Yellowstone? Why on earth would you want to go to Yellowstone?”
“My company won a government contract to do a survey up there.”
“A survey? You’re going to collect a bunch of rocks and ask them questions?”
He shifted to a falsetto voice and mocked her, pretending to interview a rock.
“Good morning, Mr. Granite. How do you feel about the current state of the economy?”
“Not funny, honey.”
But it was too late. He was already on a roll.
“And you, Miss Shale. What’s your favorite laundry detergent?”
“Oh shut up, you.”
Chapter 8
But Tony kept it up, past the point where he became annoying.
“You know, Tony, I can wait until you fall asleep tonight and make some modifications to your anatomy that will assure this will be our one and only child.”
Tony swallowed hard and the silly grin left his face.
“Um… I think I’ll shut up now.”
“You’re a very wise man, Tony. Now then. It’s not that kind of survey. They just want us to drill into the earth. To take some rock samples beneath the park. Take temperature readings at different depths. Analyze the water and sulfur content of the rocks at different levels. That kind of stuff.”
Tony feigned a yawn.
“Sounds fascinating.”
“To me, it will be. To you it’ll be like watching paint dry. But you’ll suffer through it.”
“Wait a minute. I’m going too?”
“Well, you don’t have to. But I’m hoping you do.”
“Well, I could take a couple of weeks off from my main job. But they might not let me off at the Quickie Mart. Now granted, selling lottery tickets and gas at the Quickie-Mart isn’t glamorous, but it helps pay the bills.”
“That’s just it, Tony. That job is part-time. And your hours and days are flexible. Six months ago they scheduled you to work fifteen days in a row so a couple of the other guys could go on vacation. Remember?”
“Yeah. It almost killed me. But… so?”
“So… if they did it for two dirt bags like Tim and Roland, they can certainly do it again…”
“For a dirt bag like me, you mean?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you were going to.”
“Maybe. But I would have said it with love.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My point is, if you ask them for ten days off you can not only get a break from hearing your customers whine to you about the stuff on the grill being old and cold and covered with mold. You can spend ten glorious days with me in one of the most beautiful places in North America. And money won’t be a problem.”
“How can money not be a problem if I miss ten days of work?”
“Because I talked my boss into hiring you as an independent contractor for the ten days. You’ll be helping us carry equipment and collect samples and such. And he’s going to pay you three times what you’re making at the Quickie-Mart.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t know. It’s going to be boring and isolated, and…”
“Boring and isolated and we can lose ourselves in the woods every night and do naughty things. Under the stars and the moon.”
“But you’re pregnant. Are we allowed to do those things anymore?”
“We better. That’s the only reason I married you, you know.”
“Really?”
“No. Not really. But… maybe.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Next month on the twenty first.”
“I’ll have to ask Stuart. And you know he doesn’t like me. He’s the worst boss in the world.”
“Lean on him. Remind him you’re the only one who mops the floor and stocks the shelves without having to be yelled at.”
“That’s just it. He might not want to give me time off because I’m the best worker he’s got. He won’t want the floor to go ten days without being mopped. Maybe I should just stay here.”
“You’d rather stay home and miss the chance to make love to me under the stars?”
“Honey, you’re pregnant. I’ve already done my duty.”
“Your duty?”
“Oops… I guess I shouldn’t have put it that way.”
“Ya think?”
“Look. I think it would be better if I just stayed home. Protected the home front. Made sure the apartment didn’t burn down or something.”
“You just want to play video games all night long for ten days.”
“Um… maybe.”
“Okay. Suit yourself. I’ll just take those rangers up on their offer.”
“What rangers? What offer?”
“Oh. I guess I forgot to tell you. Our team had a video teleconference with the ranger station at Yellowstone this morning about the survey. They offered to assign two of their rangers to us to help us find our way around the park. Protect us from bears. That kind of stuff. I suppose I could ask one to be with me when I lay under the stars each night. Just to protect me from bears, of course.”
Hannah knew which buttons to push to get her way.
She had him on the ropes, and she knew it. So she turned the screws a bit tighter.
“I’ll tell you what, they must hire the most handsome guys they can find to be park rangers at Yellowstone. Every
one of them was a ten or better. And oh, the muscles on those guys…”
“Okay, okay, I’ll go.”
“No, honey. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you should stay here and help Stuart keep the floors mopped. I’m sure I’ll get along just fine without you. I don’t think the rangers will mind escorting me wherever I go… taking care of all my needs…”
“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Immensely, yes.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll talk to Stuart tomorrow. You win.”
She smiled, and he couldn’t help but notice the twinkle in her eye.
He enjoyed it when she won. She was most beautiful of all when she was happy.
Chapter 9
The work in the park wasn’t particularly demanding. It did require an awful lot of walking, though. And some of the places they had to go weren’t accessible by vehicle.
Still, it was outside, it was in one of the most beautiful places the United States had to offer, and it turned out to be way more interesting than Tony ever imagined it would be.
He was actually having fun.
Hannah hadn’t been kidding about the handsome rangers assigned to the project. They’d met them in park headquarters when they had their inbrief. But none of them were detailed to the research team. Instead, they were given a beautiful brunette named Julianna, who looked as good in the drab brown uniform of the National Park Service as any hunky man ever could.
Way better, in Tony’s opinion.
Hannah wasn’t necessarily pleased. She saw Tony looking at Julianna the way most men look at a pretty girl. He was totally faithful and totally devoted to her. She knew that. And she also knew that a man’s wandering eye was mostly a thing they couldn’t help. It was born through thousands of years of evolution, and probably went back to the caveman days, when men had only two jobs: surviving and breeding.
Still, Hannah was pregnant now. And although she hadn’t yet started to show, her hormones were already out of whack. She woke up moody more often than not, and it didn’t help that she’d had to give up the two glasses of wine she’d grown accustomed to having to relax every evening for several years.
She switched to decaf and swore off sugar in an effort to limit the weight gain in her first trimester, on the advice of her doctor.
And, most of all, her mind was running away with her. She envisioned herself, six months later, as being “big as a house and ugly.”
Tony certainly hadn’t helped to ease her fears when he said, “You could never be ugly. Not even if you looked like Bigfoot. And you won’t be as big as a house. A two-car garage, maybe. But not a whole house.”
It had been Tony’s attempt to inject humor into the situation, to make her smile and see how ridiculous the whole ugliness notion was. But it failed miserably. It made her feel even worse, but she tried to keep it to herself. She swore to herself she wouldn’t express such concerns to Tony ever again.
Or at least until after the baby was born.
In the meantime, she dealt with her body’s changes and the impact on her psyche all by herself.
She sulked and fumed, and occasionally snarled at whoever was unfortunate enough to cross her path.
Julianna was assigned to the team mostly for two reasons. One, of course, was to be their official escort as they wandered through the massive park, doing their thing. The other was to protect them from bears and wolves. She carried with her a side-arm, a Smith and Wesson .45, that Tony knew would pack a hell of a punch.
She also carried a more lethal weapon, a Browning BLR bear rifle, slung over her shoulder.
Just in case.
At one point, on the second day, Tony had been served up a blistering portion of attitude from Hannah, who woke up grouchy and got worse as the morning went on.
He commented to Julianna he didn’t think they’d have any problems with wild animals on that particular day.
“You could have left your weapons at the camp,” he’d said. “There’s no way any bears will mess with us the way Hannah is acting. If they do she can just growl at them and chase them away.”
Hannah had heard the remark, as was his intention. And she wasn’t too pleased about it. Her glare told him he went too far, and he spent the rest of the day trying to smooth her ruffled feathers. For his own self-preservation more than anything else.
By the end of the third day, however, Hannah was adjusting well to her new lifestyle and was in better spirits. She’s gotten over any reservations she had initially of Julianna being assigned as their escort. Yes, she was drop-dead gorgeous, and Hannah still caught Tony eyeing her on occasion.
But Julianna was genuinely sweet as well, and a great conversationalist. And she impressed Hannah as being capable and well up to the task at hand.
The three of them were becoming fast friends.
The other member of the team, Ron, was little more than excess baggage. Ron hated the outdoors. Hated it with a passion. And he wasn’t ashamed to say so. He bitched constantly about the mosquitoes, the lack of running water, the ever-present risk of animal attack.
Tony took Hannah aside at one point and suggested they send him back to the motel to cool his heels with her boss until they were finished.
“What good is he here, anyway? All he does is complain. I’d be willing to carry his share of the equipment just for the pleasure of not having to listen to him whine anymore.”
“I’d like nothing better, baby. The problem is he’s our technician. He’s just along to troubleshoot any of our equipment that malfunctions and to see if he can get it going again. He don’t look like much, but he’s more tech-savy than all of us put together.”
“Well, that explains it. He looks like a basement-dweller. I guess he got a pass from his mom to come along.”
“Well, baby, you can look at him in another way that might help you feel better.”
“Huh?”
“Look upon him as bear bait. If we encounter a hungry grizzly who wants to have one of us for lunch, we can have Julianna shoot him in the leg. Then the rest of us can run like hell.”
“I like the way you think.”
“Thought you would.”
Chapter 10
For the first three days they did most of their traveling in a four-wheel drive Jeep. A vehicle that reminded Tony of his good friends’ “crawler.”
He’d known Kenny and Juana since high school, but had lost track of them when they went to a different college a thousand miles away.
He’d happened upon them a few months before and Tony asked what they’d been up to.
“We have a new hobby,” they told him. “We go crawlin’ every weekend.”
Tony was intrigued. Especially since the only crawlin’ he ever did was crawling back to Hannah to ask for her forgiveness whenever he screwed up.
They invited him to come along that weekend. And he got to ride in a bare bones vehicle with huge knobby tires, and a ground clearance of twenty inches.
“It looks like a dune buggy on steroids,” Tony remarked.
Kenny said, “It’s the most expensive hobby I’ve ever had, but also the most fun. Something pretty much breaks every weekend, and every Monday night I come home from work and have to weld something back together or overhaul something.”
“So why do they call it a crawler?”
“Because it quite literally crawls up the side of a mountain, damn near vertical. There aren’t many places this baby won’t go.”
And to be sure, the vehicle they had on the park project took on some pretty tough terrain with ease. Boulders slowed it down, but just barely. It scoffed at streams and creeks, and took the mountains with ease.
One of the pieces of technology Ron was tasked to operate for them was the GPS system. It wasn’t the type one had in their car that gave them verbal commands where to turn. It was a scanner which only Ron could interpret, and he took on the role of navigator.
Arriving at the very first location, Ron instructed the others.
“Okay, we have to sample within twelve feet of the stake, according to the specs of our contract. Help me look around and find the stake. It’ll be metal, and will look like a railroad spike. Only much longer, and it’ll have the numbers 4355 stamped into it.”
“Um… okay. But what does the number signify?”
“Beats the hell out of me. It’s just the number the U.S. Geological Survey team assigned to it when they planted it back in 1955.”
It turned out they weren’t the first team to crawl around Yellowstone National Park in a Jeep, taking core samples and temperatures and fondling rocks.
The federal government had been contracting out the task every ten years since Eisenhower was president.
And long before any of the current team members were even born.
Heck, long before their parents were born.
Hannah explained to Tony, “The first team came out here and took core samples every ten feet down to seventy feet. They also took temperature readings at every ten feet down to two hundred feet. The temperatures were very precise, up to a thousandth of a degree. Back in the fifties the equipment was extremely high tech and they had to haul it in on an Army deuce and a half. These days we can do the same thing with the equipment in the back of the jeep, with a one inch core. The first time they did it the core was four inches, which required a hell of a drill.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
“A heck of a drill. Happy?”
“So why do it way out here, four miles from nowhere? Why not do it back at the campsite? Why make us crawl over mountainous terrain when we could have drilled where it was flat and easy?”
“That’s a decision they made back in the 1950s. The scientists determined back then they wanted to monitor the hotspot from several different locations to avoid putting too much emphasis on any one place because of an anomaly.”
“Whoa there, Miss Brainiac. Hotspot? Anomaly? What in heck are you talking about?”
“It’s really over my head, Tony. I’ll let Gwendoline explain it to you in detail later if you want. She’s the expert on it. Basically, though, Yellowstone sits atop a super volcano. You can’t see it, because it’s buried deep under the ground. But it’s down there, burning and fuming. That’s where the geysers come from. Superheated water from the volcano that has to escape, so it escapes through cracks that bring it to the earth’s surface.”
The Yellowstone Event: Book 1: Fire in the Sky Page 3