Murder in a Hot Flash by Marlys Millhiser
“The morning I cooked you two breakfast. But she was using you as a threat against John B. So she could have exaggerated.”
“Was this before or after you took a swing at Gordon Cabot?”
His eyes had been restlessly searching upriver above her head but came now to rest on hers. “I never took a swing at him, Charlie. But I almost did. John B. and Sid stopped me. How did you know?”
“Because I’m psychic, remember?”
“Have any intimations about whether or not we’re going to get out of this alive?”
“Not without my crystal ball.”
“You’ve revived enough to be sarcastic. We might get you out of here yet. Hell, we’re almost halfway to Dead Horse Point.”
“We’ve done the downhill stint, the easy part. It’s all uphill from here. Where are we going to get the energy? With no food, no water? Much more sun and we won’t have any more skin. And how are we supposed to get across the damned river? There’s probably quicksand and suckholes and God knows.”
“Well, it is spring, and we generally get an afternoon shower or two that tend to leave water in the potholes in the slickrock. Once we get across the river, and before we leave it, we rub mud all over our skin to protect it from the sun, and if you’ll glance upriver a ways, you’ll see a sandbar you have seen before. Which means we don’t have to cross the whole width of the river at once. You’ve seen that sandbar before because it happens to be just past the concrete pile that was once a washed-away hotel or something.”
“Where Homer stopped the boats the first time?”
“Exactly. I may not be psychic, but I know where I am.”
“Bullshit.” Since she was about to die she might as well quit trying to quit swearing. If she’d had the chance she’d have given up struggling not to clean up her plate even. All the little perks life offered must seem very dear to the dead. “How could you know?”
“Because I saw the rubble from above before we started down here and the sandbar too. And you know what else? I saw the outline of the road they built to get the concrete rubble there to begin with. It has switchbacks, Charlie, it’s not that steep or exhausting. That takes care of everything but the food and who killed Gordon Cabot and Earl. You really can’t have it all, you know.”
“Why do they call it Dead Horse Point?” Charlie asked when they sat sodden and exhausted on the narrow tail of the downriver side of the sandbar. They were now supposedly, officially halfway to the Point.
The Colorado River might have been shallow in places but it was damn deep in others and the strength of the current belied the silent stealth of its flow. They’d started as far upstream of the sandbar as there was navigable beach to traverse and still almost missed it in the crossing.
“There’s a neck that narrows where your ‘bow’ juts out from the headland between the campground and the overlook. And the story goes that some cowboys once put a gate across it to keep the horses corralled out there and then never got back to let them out and they all died.”
“The horses.”
“Yeah. Haven’t you been down to the basement at the Visitors’ Center? They’ve got talking displays on everything.”
“I didn’t even know it had a basement. I no more than got here, remember, when murder started happening. Which brings us back to who killed Gordon Cabot.”
“I’d be interested to know why you’ve decided it wasn’t me all of a sudden. After suspecting me for so long,” he said as they threaded their way through half-drowned tamarisk and fanciful bushes coated with tiny yellow flowers and fair-sized bees.
Was he being patronizing again or was she especially edgy with the wind drying the river water on her skin and clothes already, leaving a gritty coating to chafe literally every wrinkle, dimple, or crevice her body possessed when she moved it or her clothes moved against it?
Charlie wondered what kind of deadly germs were getting into the clotted wound on the back of his head. “Because you believe in psychic powers and that I possess them. You’d have left me to die out here long before now so I couldn’t psych out some clue to prove you did it. My decision is based on logic and has nothing to do with one enchanted evening in the honeymoon suite at the Pit Stop Motel.”
When they reached what looked to be the narrowest part of the other half of the Colorado River he took her hand. “Maybe I just didn’t want to die alone out here either.”
They waded in wearily and were toppled by the current about the time the water reached their knees. Probably getting slowly nuked by all the uranium tailings seeping in from upstream anyway. They soon lost hold of each other and he yelled as he was swept by, “Or maybe I’m just acting.”
And the accusation he managed to convey in the accompanying but swift glance made her what-should-have-been-torpid-by-now blood boil.
“Oh right,” she sputtered and coughed up half a lung full of nuclear waste when he pulled her on shore by her poor hair, “just punch my guilt buttons like Edwina. See where it gets you. ‘Maybe I’m just acting.’” She flounced up on another natural-sucking-yucky beach. He was right about the mud in the water. It left grit on her teeth.
He pulled off her tattered sweatshirt and plastered her with more mud, cool and soothing but smelling like buzzard breath. Then did the same to himself. Then gave her the famous smile. If his smile gleamed when his face was clean, the world should have seen it encased in a muddy beard.
“How much does a mouth like that cost?” she asked in wonder when he turned away so she could muck up his bare back.
“Let’s just say it’s insured by Lloyd’s of London.” His answer came in that oily voice he used to convince an audience he was the villain instead of the hero when the audience knew better by the way the billing was organized.
“Scrag must be the murderer because he hit you on the head. I think it’s bleeding again by the way.” They walked mud-coated, heads covered with shredded shirts woven into makeshift hats. “Doesn’t it hurt?”
“A tall bottle of aspirin would look pretty good about now.”
Charlie realized the softening of colors and blurring of edges in the landscape around her didn’t mean just that she was having a near-death experience. “Mitch, I’ve lost the other contact lens.”
“You wear contacts? I didn’t know that.”
“That’s the whole point.” But I’m very nearsighted without them. You want to walk off and leave me now, it sure won’t take you long to get out of sight.
His stomach was growling, but hers wasn’t even hungry. Maybe she was working off thigh fat cells.
“I’m not actually sure it was Scrag. I didn’t see him,” Mitch admitted. “But I knew it couldn’t be John B. or Sid, and Scrag was the only one left out here with us by then. I heard kind of a low chuckle and a crunch when my head caved in. And I think I remember a sort of sweaty smell.”
“Which used to be Scrag Dickens, but now it’s any of us. Why did you three separate?”
“We split up the provisions and fanned out to look for you.”
“Why couldn’t it be John B. or Sid?”
“Because I know them well enough to know they aren’t capable of murder, just like you knew your mother wasn’t.”
“Anybody’s capable of murder, Mitch, given the right circumstances. The circumstances were not right for Edwina. And she wouldn’t have used an ax.”
“What would she have used?”
“I don’t know. But we all know she didn’t, especially after Earl was killed while she was in jail and maybe Tawny. Which is the problem. I can see the connection between Tawny and Earl, but Cabot doesn’t fit anywhere. There’s no sense to this. Maybe John B. killed Tawny and Earl, and Sid killed Cabot.” All of which doesn’t matter anyway, since you and I are going to be dead soon too.
In their deteriorating condition the thousand-foot climb up out of the inner canyon turned out to take a lot longer than they’d thought it would even with the switchbacks. And Mother Nature decided not to bother raining that afternoon. Th
ey made it about halfway up and found a rock to shelter against to spend a silent, mostly sleepless, and very cold night.
When a blurry dawn finally made the vestige of road even vaguely visible they started off again to get warm and make as much time as they could before the sun got too hot.
Charlie thought her misery complete, until Mitch Hilsten stopped her dead in her weary tracks.
“If we get out of this alive, Charlie … I heard the scuttlebutt when the press blew into town … is it true Eric Ashton has backed out of the engineer’s role in Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel? I also heard that your agency handles Cyndi Seagal and you handle the screenwriter, who wrote it from a jail cell. Charlie, do you think it’s possible I could be considered for the part? I’m not that much older than Ashton. Could you at least mention my interest to your boss and the producers?”
Chapter 31
It already seemed as if they’d been walking for days under an unmoving, unrelenting sun by the time they’d crossed the arid benchland to the wall of the outer canyon and the next thousand-foot climb. This was the illicit road to Moab from the Point and a lot steeper than the one they’d used to get to this level from the river.
“It’ll be a pull, shape we’re in,” Mitch said as they stood, swaying, at the bottom of the road looking up. “But there’ll be some shade on the curves. It’s once we get to the top that’s got me worried. It’ll still be a long way to the ranger station and Visitors’ Center, and damned easy to get lost.”
They stopped to rest in the shade of each curve so it took longer than forever. At the first curve-rest-stop, Mitch asked, “Why are you so pissed all of a sudden?”
“I’m not pissed, I’m livid. And it’s not all of a sudden, you were just too dense to notice.” And she told him the reason for Richard Morse’s phone call to Room Eight at the Pit Stop Motel.
He chewed on that in silence for the next two curve stops and then exploded. “Shit, we’d already screwed half the night. I didn’t think you’d ever get enough. What’s the big deal?”
“If you have to ask that question, you wouldn’t understand the answer.”
“Oh, pardon me,” he said with a punch-drunk bow. “Sorry if I’m being politically incorrect here. But I’m the one worn to a nubbin.”
“Well, just put in a claim to Lloyd’s of London, why don’t you?”
At the next curve they took a look at each other and grinned. They would have laughed had they the energy.
“Nubbin,” said she.
“Is it the mud, or do all nearsighted women have such huge eyes?” asked he.
“Do you really believe in UFOs or was that just a come-on to get sympathy for a romantic evening?”
“I really do. And, hey, you’re the one who backed off a cliff trying to get away from one. And you saw what happened to the bats and rats around here.”
“Why are you so sure the two are related?”
“For the same reason I believe three murders are related. But like you, I haven’t figured out the motive.”
By the next curve they began to doze in each patch of shade. Charlie decided that, if the impossible happened and she survived this ordeal, she’d never take a walk again. Not even around the block.
“You know,” she said as they started off once more, “it’s funny, everything hurts but my stomach. Used to be the other way around. Maybe nature stress is different than city stress.” Maybe this ordeal had shocked her stomach into submission. Maybe it had given up hope for survival, so considered burning a hole through her middle not worth the effort.
By the next stop it didn’t matter, and the dozing was less helpful. It was difficult to gather strength from a rest period while working so hard to avoid the thought of water. When she dozed off, she dreamed about water. When she woke, it was the first thing on her mind.
The only consolation was that her myopia made the heights less threatening and the vast distances less noticeable.
But, after an incredible grind, they made it to the mesa top. The patches of shade and their mud coatings had saved them. And at the top they found the tire tracks from the production company’s illicit supply missions to guide them across the scrub forest.
Charlie was watching those tracks when she walked headfirst into a dead-tree skeleton. She fell over backward and lay looking up at the fuzzed rings in the sky that harbored the deadly sun. She tried to call Mitch, but her throat wouldn’t work.
She closed her eyes against the sun rings and felt the coolness of a shadow flow over her. She thought Mitch had come back but instead it was the shadow shape of a bird. A bird the size of a sailplane. It moved like one too, tipping instead of flapping. A wingspan that filled the sky. An obscene breath. It sailed low enough to become more than a shape, lowered its landing gear and hissed.
A blink later it was gone and Mitch bent over her. “We’re going to make it, Charlie. We’re almost there. Don’t give up on me now.”
“Rings and wings—”
“I chased the vulture off with a rock. Where’s your shirt? You were supposed to keep it on your head.”
“My shirt—”
“Take off your pants.”
“My pants—”
“Put them over your head. You’ve got to protect your brain, Charlie.”
“Put my pants on my brain.”
When the Visitors’ Center appeared out of the blur, Charlie cried dry tears and gravelly sobs.
Mitch pulled her along by one wrist, his mud mask faded and evened out until he looked like a blue-eyed Indian. “Where the hell are your pants? You lost them too?”
Charlie whimpered an apology that didn’t quite make it to words—just weepy “I’m sorry” sounds.
He hauled her into the shade of the covered breezeway that connected the building’s two sections. There was a soda machine, an ice chest, bundles of wood for the cooking grates in the campground, and a water fountain.
Charlie drank. Mitch drank. Charlie drank. They splashed water at each other and on themselves beneath a sign warning them not to waste a drop because it all had to be trucked in. Charlie noticed her feet calling to her. They were stained with dull red sandstone dust and bright red blood.
His chin still dripping, Mitch lurched up the redwood steps to the door that led to the information desk, the phone you could never use, and the rangers’ offices.
Charlie opened the door on the ice chest and lifted out one of the plastic bags of crushed ice that had to be hauled in by truck too. She stood there in her dirty bikini panties, her bra, her mud-streaked, sun-blistered skin and cellulite, hugging the bag to her as she would a lover. “Libby, baby, I’m coming home to you after all.”
The plump, healthy, and cheerful young ranger, Tim Pedigrew, offered Charlie more scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, which she hated to refuse. But she was so sated with water, orange juice, and coffee she thought she’d float.
All the other rangers were out searching for the superstar (oh, and his latest squeeze—what’s-her-name) except Tim, who was holding the fort here.
Charlie and Mitch had showered and lathered and shampooed recklessly. They’d slathered themselves and each other with Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion with Aloe and Lanolin, and ointmented abrasions with antiseptic salves. They sat dressed in borrowed uniforms, looking more like convicts in their bruises and Band-Aids than like park rangers. Tim had even found a pair of soft bedroom slippers for Charlie.
Mitch accepted the offer of more food. Guys could go through ordeals and come out robust, looking rugged and cute. Women looked like shit.
“You know,” Mitch said, holding a potato slice aloft on the tines of his fork, “why we made it, don’t you?” He popped the potato in his mouth and chewed while staring at her expectantly.
“We could be the luckiest people on earth.” And your ideas about keeping our brains and skin covered probably didn’t hurt.
“I don’t know about you, but at times I felt guided either by your psychic responses or by an alien p
resence. We did not do this astonishing thing alone. We had help.”
Which is not what our hero told the press and TV crews, for whom Charlie refused to appear. But she could hear most of it from a back bedroom where she hid with an EMT who checked her injuries, sunburn, and feet. He decided she wouldn’t die right away and then got irate when she refused medical evacuation. Instead she crawled into some ranger’s bunk, pulled his blanket over her head, and refused to play.
It wasn’t simply that Mitch was acting the hero that society expected him to be out there with the press. Or that he could never be her hero if he was dumb enough to believe in “psychic responses” or “alien presences.” And Charlie was grateful for his intuitive man thing (the logic of the mud and head covering bit).
What she could not stomach was his insistence that now they’d conquered the challenge of imminent death, could she not see her way to reconsidering his modest request that she mention his name to the producers of the upcoming epic Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel for the role of the train engineer?
Okay, part of it could have been that her stomach was acting up again. Because she was back in civilization or because she’d cleaned up two plates of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes with onions, garlic, and chopped peppers, and watched him start in on a third just as he questioned her reasoning about “one goddamned simple role in a movie to a man out of work.”
“You’re Mitch Hilsten, you don’t need some little literary agent in a two-bit agency you’d never even heard of a few days ago mentioning you anywhere. Talk to your agent.” Here they were saved from the jaws of death and …
The poor rangers still hadn’t returned from their search—to discover Charlie wearing their clothes—before John B. Drake, Scrag Dickens, and Sidney Levit arrived. And shortly thereafter, Rita Latham and Sheriff Ralph Sumpter. (Their former river mates had all been rescued at the beach within hours of losing Charlie and Mitch.)
Somehow they all ended up in the bedroom which Charlie had refused to leave.
“You look great, darlin’,” Scrag whispered, and pulled back the blanket. “You don’t have to hide.”
“Was this before or after you took a swing at Gordon Cabot?”
His eyes had been restlessly searching upriver above her head but came now to rest on hers. “I never took a swing at him, Charlie. But I almost did. John B. and Sid stopped me. How did you know?”
“Because I’m psychic, remember?”
“Have any intimations about whether or not we’re going to get out of this alive?”
“Not without my crystal ball.”
“You’ve revived enough to be sarcastic. We might get you out of here yet. Hell, we’re almost halfway to Dead Horse Point.”
“We’ve done the downhill stint, the easy part. It’s all uphill from here. Where are we going to get the energy? With no food, no water? Much more sun and we won’t have any more skin. And how are we supposed to get across the damned river? There’s probably quicksand and suckholes and God knows.”
“Well, it is spring, and we generally get an afternoon shower or two that tend to leave water in the potholes in the slickrock. Once we get across the river, and before we leave it, we rub mud all over our skin to protect it from the sun, and if you’ll glance upriver a ways, you’ll see a sandbar you have seen before. Which means we don’t have to cross the whole width of the river at once. You’ve seen that sandbar before because it happens to be just past the concrete pile that was once a washed-away hotel or something.”
“Where Homer stopped the boats the first time?”
“Exactly. I may not be psychic, but I know where I am.”
“Bullshit.” Since she was about to die she might as well quit trying to quit swearing. If she’d had the chance she’d have given up struggling not to clean up her plate even. All the little perks life offered must seem very dear to the dead. “How could you know?”
“Because I saw the rubble from above before we started down here and the sandbar too. And you know what else? I saw the outline of the road they built to get the concrete rubble there to begin with. It has switchbacks, Charlie, it’s not that steep or exhausting. That takes care of everything but the food and who killed Gordon Cabot and Earl. You really can’t have it all, you know.”
“Why do they call it Dead Horse Point?” Charlie asked when they sat sodden and exhausted on the narrow tail of the downriver side of the sandbar. They were now supposedly, officially halfway to the Point.
The Colorado River might have been shallow in places but it was damn deep in others and the strength of the current belied the silent stealth of its flow. They’d started as far upstream of the sandbar as there was navigable beach to traverse and still almost missed it in the crossing.
“There’s a neck that narrows where your ‘bow’ juts out from the headland between the campground and the overlook. And the story goes that some cowboys once put a gate across it to keep the horses corralled out there and then never got back to let them out and they all died.”
“The horses.”
“Yeah. Haven’t you been down to the basement at the Visitors’ Center? They’ve got talking displays on everything.”
“I didn’t even know it had a basement. I no more than got here, remember, when murder started happening. Which brings us back to who killed Gordon Cabot.”
“I’d be interested to know why you’ve decided it wasn’t me all of a sudden. After suspecting me for so long,” he said as they threaded their way through half-drowned tamarisk and fanciful bushes coated with tiny yellow flowers and fair-sized bees.
Was he being patronizing again or was she especially edgy with the wind drying the river water on her skin and clothes already, leaving a gritty coating to chafe literally every wrinkle, dimple, or crevice her body possessed when she moved it or her clothes moved against it?
Charlie wondered what kind of deadly germs were getting into the clotted wound on the back of his head. “Because you believe in psychic powers and that I possess them. You’d have left me to die out here long before now so I couldn’t psych out some clue to prove you did it. My decision is based on logic and has nothing to do with one enchanted evening in the honeymoon suite at the Pit Stop Motel.”
When they reached what looked to be the narrowest part of the other half of the Colorado River he took her hand. “Maybe I just didn’t want to die alone out here either.”
They waded in wearily and were toppled by the current about the time the water reached their knees. Probably getting slowly nuked by all the uranium tailings seeping in from upstream anyway. They soon lost hold of each other and he yelled as he was swept by, “Or maybe I’m just acting.”
And the accusation he managed to convey in the accompanying but swift glance made her what-should-have-been-torpid-by-now blood boil.
“Oh right,” she sputtered and coughed up half a lung full of nuclear waste when he pulled her on shore by her poor hair, “just punch my guilt buttons like Edwina. See where it gets you. ‘Maybe I’m just acting.’” She flounced up on another natural-sucking-yucky beach. He was right about the mud in the water. It left grit on her teeth.
He pulled off her tattered sweatshirt and plastered her with more mud, cool and soothing but smelling like buzzard breath. Then did the same to himself. Then gave her the famous smile. If his smile gleamed when his face was clean, the world should have seen it encased in a muddy beard.
“How much does a mouth like that cost?” she asked in wonder when he turned away so she could muck up his bare back.
“Let’s just say it’s insured by Lloyd’s of London.” His answer came in that oily voice he used to convince an audience he was the villain instead of the hero when the audience knew better by the way the billing was organized.
“Scrag must be the murderer because he hit you on the head. I think it’s bleeding again by the way.” They walked mud-coated, heads covered with shredded shirts woven into makeshift hats. “Doesn’t it hurt?”
“A tall bottle of aspirin would look pretty good about now.”
Charlie realized the softening of colors and blurring of edges in the landscape around her didn’t mean just that she was having a near-death experience. “Mitch, I’ve lost the other contact lens.”
“You wear contacts? I didn’t know that.”
“That’s the whole point.” But I’m very nearsighted without them. You want to walk off and leave me now, it sure won’t take you long to get out of sight.
His stomach was growling, but hers wasn’t even hungry. Maybe she was working off thigh fat cells.
“I’m not actually sure it was Scrag. I didn’t see him,” Mitch admitted. “But I knew it couldn’t be John B. or Sid, and Scrag was the only one left out here with us by then. I heard kind of a low chuckle and a crunch when my head caved in. And I think I remember a sort of sweaty smell.”
“Which used to be Scrag Dickens, but now it’s any of us. Why did you three separate?”
“We split up the provisions and fanned out to look for you.”
“Why couldn’t it be John B. or Sid?”
“Because I know them well enough to know they aren’t capable of murder, just like you knew your mother wasn’t.”
“Anybody’s capable of murder, Mitch, given the right circumstances. The circumstances were not right for Edwina. And she wouldn’t have used an ax.”
“What would she have used?”
“I don’t know. But we all know she didn’t, especially after Earl was killed while she was in jail and maybe Tawny. Which is the problem. I can see the connection between Tawny and Earl, but Cabot doesn’t fit anywhere. There’s no sense to this. Maybe John B. killed Tawny and Earl, and Sid killed Cabot.” All of which doesn’t matter anyway, since you and I are going to be dead soon too.
In their deteriorating condition the thousand-foot climb up out of the inner canyon turned out to take a lot longer than they’d thought it would even with the switchbacks. And Mother Nature decided not to bother raining that afternoon. Th
When a blurry dawn finally made the vestige of road even vaguely visible they started off again to get warm and make as much time as they could before the sun got too hot.
Charlie thought her misery complete, until Mitch Hilsten stopped her dead in her weary tracks.
“If we get out of this alive, Charlie … I heard the scuttlebutt when the press blew into town … is it true Eric Ashton has backed out of the engineer’s role in Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel? I also heard that your agency handles Cyndi Seagal and you handle the screenwriter, who wrote it from a jail cell. Charlie, do you think it’s possible I could be considered for the part? I’m not that much older than Ashton. Could you at least mention my interest to your boss and the producers?”
Chapter 31
It already seemed as if they’d been walking for days under an unmoving, unrelenting sun by the time they’d crossed the arid benchland to the wall of the outer canyon and the next thousand-foot climb. This was the illicit road to Moab from the Point and a lot steeper than the one they’d used to get to this level from the river.
“It’ll be a pull, shape we’re in,” Mitch said as they stood, swaying, at the bottom of the road looking up. “But there’ll be some shade on the curves. It’s once we get to the top that’s got me worried. It’ll still be a long way to the ranger station and Visitors’ Center, and damned easy to get lost.”
They stopped to rest in the shade of each curve so it took longer than forever. At the first curve-rest-stop, Mitch asked, “Why are you so pissed all of a sudden?”
“I’m not pissed, I’m livid. And it’s not all of a sudden, you were just too dense to notice.” And she told him the reason for Richard Morse’s phone call to Room Eight at the Pit Stop Motel.
He chewed on that in silence for the next two curve stops and then exploded. “Shit, we’d already screwed half the night. I didn’t think you’d ever get enough. What’s the big deal?”
“If you have to ask that question, you wouldn’t understand the answer.”
“Oh, pardon me,” he said with a punch-drunk bow. “Sorry if I’m being politically incorrect here. But I’m the one worn to a nubbin.”
“Well, just put in a claim to Lloyd’s of London, why don’t you?”
At the next curve they took a look at each other and grinned. They would have laughed had they the energy.
“Nubbin,” said she.
“Is it the mud, or do all nearsighted women have such huge eyes?” asked he.
“Do you really believe in UFOs or was that just a come-on to get sympathy for a romantic evening?”
“I really do. And, hey, you’re the one who backed off a cliff trying to get away from one. And you saw what happened to the bats and rats around here.”
“Why are you so sure the two are related?”
“For the same reason I believe three murders are related. But like you, I haven’t figured out the motive.”
By the next curve they began to doze in each patch of shade. Charlie decided that, if the impossible happened and she survived this ordeal, she’d never take a walk again. Not even around the block.
“You know,” she said as they started off once more, “it’s funny, everything hurts but my stomach. Used to be the other way around. Maybe nature stress is different than city stress.” Maybe this ordeal had shocked her stomach into submission. Maybe it had given up hope for survival, so considered burning a hole through her middle not worth the effort.
By the next stop it didn’t matter, and the dozing was less helpful. It was difficult to gather strength from a rest period while working so hard to avoid the thought of water. When she dozed off, she dreamed about water. When she woke, it was the first thing on her mind.
The only consolation was that her myopia made the heights less threatening and the vast distances less noticeable.
But, after an incredible grind, they made it to the mesa top. The patches of shade and their mud coatings had saved them. And at the top they found the tire tracks from the production company’s illicit supply missions to guide them across the scrub forest.
Charlie was watching those tracks when she walked headfirst into a dead-tree skeleton. She fell over backward and lay looking up at the fuzzed rings in the sky that harbored the deadly sun. She tried to call Mitch, but her throat wouldn’t work.
She closed her eyes against the sun rings and felt the coolness of a shadow flow over her. She thought Mitch had come back but instead it was the shadow shape of a bird. A bird the size of a sailplane. It moved like one too, tipping instead of flapping. A wingspan that filled the sky. An obscene breath. It sailed low enough to become more than a shape, lowered its landing gear and hissed.
A blink later it was gone and Mitch bent over her. “We’re going to make it, Charlie. We’re almost there. Don’t give up on me now.”
“Rings and wings—”
“I chased the vulture off with a rock. Where’s your shirt? You were supposed to keep it on your head.”
“My shirt—”
“Take off your pants.”
“My pants—”
“Put them over your head. You’ve got to protect your brain, Charlie.”
“Put my pants on my brain.”
When the Visitors’ Center appeared out of the blur, Charlie cried dry tears and gravelly sobs.
Mitch pulled her along by one wrist, his mud mask faded and evened out until he looked like a blue-eyed Indian. “Where the hell are your pants? You lost them too?”
Charlie whimpered an apology that didn’t quite make it to words—just weepy “I’m sorry” sounds.
He hauled her into the shade of the covered breezeway that connected the building’s two sections. There was a soda machine, an ice chest, bundles of wood for the cooking grates in the campground, and a water fountain.
Charlie drank. Mitch drank. Charlie drank. They splashed water at each other and on themselves beneath a sign warning them not to waste a drop because it all had to be trucked in. Charlie noticed her feet calling to her. They were stained with dull red sandstone dust and bright red blood.
His chin still dripping, Mitch lurched up the redwood steps to the door that led to the information desk, the phone you could never use, and the rangers’ offices.
Charlie opened the door on the ice chest and lifted out one of the plastic bags of crushed ice that had to be hauled in by truck too. She stood there in her dirty bikini panties, her bra, her mud-streaked, sun-blistered skin and cellulite, hugging the bag to her as she would a lover. “Libby, baby, I’m coming home to you after all.”
The plump, healthy, and cheerful young ranger, Tim Pedigrew, offered Charlie more scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, which she hated to refuse. But she was so sated with water, orange juice, and coffee she thought she’d float.
All the other rangers were out searching for the superstar (oh, and his latest squeeze—what’s-her-name) except Tim, who was holding the fort here.
Charlie and Mitch had showered and lathered and shampooed recklessly. They’d slathered themselves and each other with Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion with Aloe and Lanolin, and ointmented abrasions with antiseptic salves. They sat dressed in borrowed uniforms, looking more like convicts in their bruises and Band-Aids than like park rangers. Tim had even found a pair of soft bedroom slippers for Charlie.
Mitch accepted the offer of more food. Guys could go through ordeals and come out robust, looking rugged and cute. Women looked like shit.
“You know,” Mitch said, holding a potato slice aloft on the tines of his fork, “why we made it, don’t you?” He popped the potato in his mouth and chewed while staring at her expectantly.
“We could be the luckiest people on earth.” And your ideas about keeping our brains and skin covered probably didn’t hurt.
“I don’t know about you, but at times I felt guided either by your psychic responses or by an alien p
Which is not what our hero told the press and TV crews, for whom Charlie refused to appear. But she could hear most of it from a back bedroom where she hid with an EMT who checked her injuries, sunburn, and feet. He decided she wouldn’t die right away and then got irate when she refused medical evacuation. Instead she crawled into some ranger’s bunk, pulled his blanket over her head, and refused to play.
It wasn’t simply that Mitch was acting the hero that society expected him to be out there with the press. Or that he could never be her hero if he was dumb enough to believe in “psychic responses” or “alien presences.” And Charlie was grateful for his intuitive man thing (the logic of the mud and head covering bit).
What she could not stomach was his insistence that now they’d conquered the challenge of imminent death, could she not see her way to reconsidering his modest request that she mention his name to the producers of the upcoming epic Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel for the role of the train engineer?
Okay, part of it could have been that her stomach was acting up again. Because she was back in civilization or because she’d cleaned up two plates of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes with onions, garlic, and chopped peppers, and watched him start in on a third just as he questioned her reasoning about “one goddamned simple role in a movie to a man out of work.”
“You’re Mitch Hilsten, you don’t need some little literary agent in a two-bit agency you’d never even heard of a few days ago mentioning you anywhere. Talk to your agent.” Here they were saved from the jaws of death and …
The poor rangers still hadn’t returned from their search—to discover Charlie wearing their clothes—before John B. Drake, Scrag Dickens, and Sidney Levit arrived. And shortly thereafter, Rita Latham and Sheriff Ralph Sumpter. (Their former river mates had all been rescued at the beach within hours of losing Charlie and Mitch.)
Somehow they all ended up in the bedroom which Charlie had refused to leave.
“You look great, darlin’,” Scrag whispered, and pulled back the blanket. “You don’t have to hide.”