All The Way Down

by DaveKearns

  Then the dog started barking frantically. We both froze.

  I flipped the light on and Michelle began buttoning her shirt. I went out into the living room where Colonel stood guard at the front door, still barking. The hair was raised on his back and he looked like he wanted to kill whatever was on the other side of the door. I looked through the peephole onto the front porch. Nothing. I looked out the windows of the living room but didn’t see anyone there.

  I got a large knife from the kitchen counter, held Colonel off at the front door, and went outside.

  I circled the house before checking farther out into the trees which separated Michelle's house from its neighbors. I was keenly aware of the sound of my own breath, the sound of my shoes in the soil, the snapping of twigs underfoot. Everything in my visual field had a sharp edge to it, and I could feel my heart pounding. In the distance I heard a car engine rumble to life. Then it was quiet again except for the muffled sound of Colonel barking.

  Colonel had stopped barking by the time I went back inside. Michelle was sitting on the sofa with her arms folded across her chest. She looked at the knife in my hand.

  "Shit," she said. "That was scary. I could see you out there with the knife. You looked like you wanted to kill somebody."

  I put the knife back where I’d found it and poured myself a glass of water. I wasn’t thirsty but I needed to do something with my hands. They were shaking.

  I thought that whoever had been outside might come back, so I stayed with Michelle until it was dark. After a while we both relaxed again. Michelle put some music on and we slow-danced in the kitchen, holding each other close. Her forehead rested on my shoulder and I kissed the soft skin on the side of her face. Rosalie trudged into the kitchen quietly, still half asleep. Her hair was mussed and needed brushing. She still clutched the orange golf ball in her hand. I pulled a cookie off the tray with my free hand and held it out to Rosalie behind Michelle's back. Rosalie gave me a small smile and sat down on the floor, munching the cookie.

  After a while I helped Michelle fix tacos for dinner. I grilled the ground beef while she chopped the lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese. Rosalie watched us work for a while, then went to the kitchen table and began looking at a coloring book.

  After dinner, I decided that it was time to go. Michelle and I kissed at the door.

  I got on my knees to give Rosalie a hug. When I stood up, Rosalie signed to Michelle quickly with a questioning look.

  "Rosalie wants to know if you'll come back to play golf again," Michelle said.

  I nodded at Rosalie.

  "Tell her I said only if she'll help me with the hard putts." Michelle signed the translation for Rosalie, who grinned, and in that moment I thought that her face looked very much like her mother's. Colonel bumped up against me with his nose, and I rubbed behind his ears for a few seconds, thinking that maybe having a dog around seemed like a pretty good idea. They never seem to want much from their owners, and they have an inexhaustible supply of love to offer.

  I stepped from the porch and began walking back down to the lodge in the darkness. The air was thick with the sweet smell of pine and fir. I looked back over my shoulder towards the cabin. Rosalie was watching me through the window.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Half an hour later I pulled into the parking lot of my motel. The light on my phone was flashing when I got into the room, so I sat on the bed and punched "0." The man at the front desk said I had one message: the loan manager at the bank wondered when I'd be coming back and wanted me to call him Monday morning. I had a vision of myself back at my desk making phone calls most of the day, trying to get a lead on someone else with a wad of the bank's cash. I was in no hurry to call back.

  The next morning I drove down the interstate to a waffle house for breakfast. The place was busy with truckers, soldiers in air force uniforms, and businessmen in short sleeve shirts and ties. I got a table near a window at the front of the restaurant. The waitress brought coffee and took my order. A little cardboard advertisement on the table said that breakfast was free if not served within five minutes. I checked my watch. Then I went outside and bought a newspaper from a vending machine.

  I found what I was looking for in the newspaper at the bottom right hand corner of page one. "Quarry Death No Accident," the column title said. I read through the story, but I didn't see anything that surprised me. The coroner was quoted as saying that the victim had been badly beaten before the accident, and that blows to the head implied that Brick was probably unconscious when the crash occurred in the quarry. There were quotations from Sgt. Bullard and Dean Elliott, as well. Bullard said that the department was aggressively pursuing the investigation, and Dean said that the quarry was a safe place to work, whatever the autopsy showed. At the end of the article there was a paragraph about how Brick was a native of Oklahoma City and that he had worked at the quarry for a year prior to his death.

  "Here's your breakfast, sir," the waitress said. She had four plates balanced on her hands and forearms. I picked up the newspaper from the table quickly and folded it up, clearing a place for the plates. She slid my plate of French toast and eggs off her hand and onto the table and asked if there would be anything else. Her hair was brown and blond. She had a pert nose and blue eyes. She looked at me expectantly.

  "No," I said. "This is great. Thank you."

  "Less than five minutes, too," she said.

  I nodded and gave her a smile. "I noticed," I said. "The service here is excellent."

  I washed down big bites with hot coffee, and the waitress came by to refill my cup whenever I managed to get the level down from the brim an inch or so. She made a big show of giving me the check and telling me to come back again. When I checked the tab I saw that she had written her name "Judy" and her phone number across the bill. I looked up and saw her standing by the aluminum double doors to the kitchen, watching me. She winked at me and turned and went through the kitchen doors, pushing them open with her elbows.

  I paid and walked out into the morning sunshine, admiring the view of the mountains on all sides. When I started for my rental car, I noticed that across the parking lot a few cars down from mine, a blue Chevrolet was parked tail in, nose out. A dead sparrow was jammed into the grill and the hubcaps were missing.

  I stared at the car for a moment, sure that it was the same guys who had given me a ride when I had the flat tire. I went across the lot and got into my little rental car. I watched the front doors of the restaurant in my view mirror, curious about the men I'd met that day.

  After about five minutes, two men in heavy work boots wearing jeans and faded T-shirts emerged from the restaurant and walked toward my side of the lot. They seemed to be sharing a joke and had their sunglasses on already, Marty with the dime store hot pink rubber frames and Ray with the aviator shades. Ray lit a cigarette as he walked past my car. Marty pulled a slim hip flask from his rear pocket, took a sip, and handed the flask to Ray. Once they were past, I turned in my seat and watched them climb into the Chevy.

  I followed them out of town, staying back a hundred yards. I was playing amateur detective, just wasting time until I could talk to Michelle and find out what she had learned about the people who worked the quarry the night that Brick was killed.

  I became part of the flow of traffic headed towards the air force base and points beyond. I knew Ray and Marty were going to their jobs, but I didn't care. I passed a police car on the shoulder and checked my speed. I was doing about fifteen miles an hour over the limit. I tapped my brakes to bring the speed down, but the black and white pulled onto the highway behind me. I felt a surge of adrenaline when I saw the flashing lights come on.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As the police car grew in my rear view mirror, I slowed further and started to pull over to the shoulder of the highway, but the police car blew past me and got on the rear bumper of the Ray's car.

  "At least there's some justice left," I told myself. Ray’s Chevy and the police car were pullin
g onto the shoulder of the road as I went by.

  I drove on to the White Sands monument, looking for something to do. I paid at the tollgate and drove into the National Monument area for several miles, looking at the soaptree yucca and hedgehog cactus.

  After several miles, the road began shifting left and then right to accommodate increasingly tall dunes. A baby blue pickup with a camper on the back and a muffler that resonated like it had a hole in it was in front of me, blocking my view and taking its time on the road. I rolled up the windows, turned on the a/c, backed off a few hundred yards, and enjoyed the view. The dunes were a perfect white. I glanced at the map, which showed that the road went for miles into the desert before stopping at the heart of the dunes area. I put the map back on the passenger seat and watched the dunes slide past like giant waves.

  Ten minutes later I reached the parking area at the end of the road. The lot was surrounded by dunes thirty feet tall. The camper that I had tailed for several miles pulled off to the left of the enormous lot, heading for the portable restrooms and picnic benches. A silver Jeep with a black convertible top was the only other car in the parking area.

  I drove over to the east side of the lot, as far away from the camper, the Jeep, the portable toilet, and the grills as the pavement would allow. I parked the little blue Ford against a dune and got out.

  I picked up a handful of the white gypsum sand and let the crystals drain through my fingers. A slight breeze from the east pushed it against my jeans as it fell, leaving a white powder against the blue. I started hiking up the dune, but the sand was so soft that my feet just created small landslides that covered me to the knees. I backed out and walked around to where the dune trailed gently to ground level. The sand on this side of the dune seemed crustier, as if it had been hardened by drying rain. I crunched up the side of the dune and stood on top of it, looking north into the desert across miles of white gypsum dunes. The sky was an intense blue against the white sand. I sat down on the sand and stared across the tops of the dunes at the San Andres Mountains.

  I think at that moment that I really did understand why Brick had liked living there. There was a strong sense of isolation in the desert, but there was a simple and harsh beauty that balanced things out. Enclosed areas of lakebed the size of football fields lay within the confines of the dunes, and I guessed that the dunes shifted over time with the wind, exposing different parts of the lakebed to light before they were buried again when the dunes shifted. Everything is temporary. Every single thing.

  I walked down the soft side of the dune onto the flats, making a landslide of sand follow me to the bottom.

  Rosemary mint plants and tumbleweeds weren’t the only evidence of life in the dry, hot bowl. I spotted a slender turquoise colored lizard and walked behind it as it made its way across the cracked, buckled surface of the lakebed. The lizard spotted me and ran away, hiding under the prickly branches of a leafless bush.

  I tried hiking up the face of the dune nearest me, this time going slowly, using my hands to steady myself against the near-vertical sand. A large black beetle made its way steadily up the incline of the dune and marched purposefully past me, seeming to swim up the soft surface. I followed the beetle and then stood at the top of the dune. I looked back to the South, the direction from which I had come, and I could see nothing but dunes in all directions.

  It occurred to me how easy it would be to become lost here if you weren't paying attention, or how easy it would be to hide here if you didn't want to be found. Ten miles of gypsum dunes lay between where I stood and the highway. I wondered if anyone had ever walked into the dunes and become disoriented here, wandering around for days looking for the way out. It was difficult to judge distance, but easy enough to tell directions. White Sands lay north to south in a valley between two large mountain ranges. Far to the north, across a sea of dunes, I could make out what appeared to be a large stand of trees. The heat coming from the dunes made the image ripple and twist. I had no way of telling how tall the trees were or how far away they were. They might have been a few hundred yards away or a mile. I headed due south back towards the car, bypassing the long strip of lakebed that had taken me into the dunes and cutting across the tops of a number of huge interconnecting dunes. I hiked for ten minutes, longer than I thought it should have taken to reach the parking lot. It was about noon, dead still, and the sky seemed to glow neon blue through my sunglasses.

  The air was so dry that my sweat evaporated instantly. I sat down atop a dune to think. I knew that if I had to, I could retrace my footsteps carefully and make it back to the car that way. There was no wind to erase my footprints in the sand. My reverie was snapped by the sound of a car engine starting off to the east. I stood up and jogged across the tops of several dunes, moving fast in my jogging shoes. As I reached the third dune, I saw the enormous man-made open space that was used as a parking lot for tourists. I could see the camper leaving the parking lot. The Jeep was still there, and on the far side of the lot my rental car waited for my return.

  I jogged back to the car around the perimeter of the lot, staying on top of the dunes while keeping the lot in sight. I checked my watch on the way. It was nearly lunch time, time to give Michelle a call. I opened the doors and stood clear of the car for a minute to let the contained heat escape.

  On the drive back to the highway I thought about the previous evening with Michelle and her daughter. I didn't understand how Brick could have cut them off. It seemed odd that he just quit talking to her. Maybe he was concerned that she would be in danger if they kept being seen together. Something must have been going on, but what? If Brick was shooting photographs at night around here he wasn't going to see much: a sea of moonlit dunes, maybe some lizards or rabbits. Maybe the photography didn't have anything to do with it.

  I left White Sands and headed back towards Alamogordo at the speed limit. No need to push it too hard. I knew I was lucky that I wasn't ticketed for speeding earlier that morning. I saw the blue Chevy with the bird jammed in its grill parked on the side of the road where it had pulled over for the police that morning. It looked empty. I thought that Ray and Marty might have been busted for drinking and driving, but it seemed surprising that their car hadn't been towed in if that's why they were arrested.

  I called Michelle from the hamburger place where we had eaten lunch the day before. She was too busy to talk, but she said that she would call me back that night. I thought I heard Dean's voice in the background and I told her good-bye.

  I hung up and looked up the number for the Alamogordo police department in the phone book chained to the booth. When I called, an operator answered the phone, and I asked for Sgt. Bullard. The operator said that he was out on patrol, and asked if I wanted to leave any messages. I left my name and asked Bullard to call me at my hotel. She said she'd leave the message and phone number on his desk.

  I ordered a couple of cheeseburgers and a large soft drink at the counter, and took my lunch with me out to the car.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I drove back to the hotel room and ate my lunch. I had the television on and I watched news for about an hour after I finished my meal. I felt edgy and restless. I took my pants and shirt off and did sit ups on the carpet floor. I instantly regretted the decision to do the sit ups without my shirt on. The carpet itched like burlap against my skin but I kept going anyway, working through sets of fifty until my abdomen was burning. Then I rolled over and did knuckle pushups in sets of fifty until my arms blew out.

  It was right at three in the afternoon when the telephone rang. "Del Harper?" the voice said. I recognized Bullard's voice immediately.

  "Speaking." I could hear Bullard's chair creaking in the background. I visualized Bullard leaning back in his chair, reaching for a lighter for another smoke.

  "I'm returning your call, did you need something?"

  "I was wondering if you found anything at my brother's house."

  "We took prints of most surfaces and went through everything. We�
��re still running fingerprints trying to see if we could get a match. Yours seem to be in every room. It’s unfortunate you got there before we did."

  "I’m sorry about that, believe me. Have you made any progress on the investigation at all? Any idea on who broke into Brick’s house, or who shot up my car? Or who killed Brick?"

  I could hear a long sigh coming from Bullard.

  "Look, I think I have a right to know. What's the harm in telling me if you’ve found something?"

  "I’m not at liberty to talk about investigations in progress, but you probably already know that. I will tell you that the best way for us to make progress is for you to let us do our job and to stay out of the way. Try to see this from my point of view. You’re in Brick’s house, you’re driving Brick’s car, and you seem to be dating his girlfriend. And every time there's a new crime you seem to be in the middle of it. Your fingerprints are literally on everything. So please, just stay out of this, stop creating problems, and let us do our job. Okay?"