by Gwen Moffat
Orville Fraser was working on the carburettor of a pick-up. He greeted Miss Pink politely and, wiping his hands, moved to a tall old desk in a corner. It had been his father’s, he told her when she admired it, and had come with his dad from Denver, Colorado. Miss Pink ran her finger over the old wood, remarked how drying was the desert air, asked if Molten were the only place to buy petrol—gas, she corrected herself quickly—when one stayed at Sweetwater. He told her they had their own pumps at the ranch. She thanked him for his service and went next door, needing writing paper.
She found a kind of mini-market with a little of everything on the shelves: from toothpaste to tinned meat, brooms with heads like outsize whitewash brushes, sneakers, ice cream, an insecticide of a type long banned in Britain (and probably in the U.S.), to sweets and cigarettes and beer and extremely sentimental greetings cards.
The check-out girl was little more than a child, dark and petite, with the eyes of a half-grown kitten.
‘No school today?’ Miss Pink asked genially.
‘It’s Saturday.’
‘I lost count. Have you some writing paper?’
The girl put down her copy of Glamour and led the way to a shelf. Miss Pink bought some chocolate bars and cookies which she didn’t need and they chatted. The girl was Karen Fraser and she attended school in Calcine, lodging with a family and coming home at weekends. Miss Pink suggested that Molten must seem quiet after Calcine. Karen said it was dead.
‘Is there no one of your own age? No brothers or sisters?’
Karen hesitated. ‘I’ve got a sister but she’s away. I help Mrs Webber out—used to. Some of the guys have got cars but my dad doesn’t like me going with them either. He says they’re wild drivers.’
‘I’ve seen no guys.’
‘They come out at weekends. Their people own cabins on the Calcine road.’
‘I was wondering about those. So they’re just used at weekends?’
‘When they haven’t been vandalized.’
‘Where do they get their water?’
‘They cart it themselves from town. And my dad’s got a trailer. He takes water to anyone who wants it, three hundred gallons at a time. It’s bad water, but we drink it. That’s why not many people use their cabins. They inherited them, but the water’s so bad they don’t care if the places fall down. Better than getting cancer, they reckon. Although we can’t be that sick yet, not till the water’s radioactive.’
‘What? From underground nuclear tests?’
‘No, ma’am, you can’t do anything about those. They’re going to dump radioactive waste at Molten.’
‘They can’t.’ The reaction was automatic, but then Miss Pink remembered where she was. ‘Don’t you have official inquiries in such cases? The village—the townspeople must object …’
‘It won’t make any difference. The stuff’s got to go some place, hasn’t it?’
‘What kind of waste?’
‘Oh, you know: gloves and things, suits that have been used in nuclear plants. Janice says there—’ She stopped and looked down at the counter, riffling the pages of her magazine. As Miss Pink opened her mouth, the girl went on quickly, ‘—there’s no problem with grown-ups, it’s just young people who are going to have families. You know: birth defects? It doesn’t bother me; I’ll be gone before they start dumping.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To L.A. We’re—’ her eyes shifted, ‘—I’ll get a job as a maid, see if I can squeeze my way into television.’
‘In my day it was the film studios.’
Karen knew exactly what was implied. ‘Someone’s got to succeed,’ she said levelly, ‘and I’d rather be a maid in Beverly Hills than stuck behind this counter the rest of my life. Anyway, Mom couldn’t afford to pay me. Which would you rather be, a servant in L.A. or an unpaid check-out girl in Molten?’
Miss Pink considered this seriously. ‘If I had a choice of only those two jobs, I’d compromise and do six months of one, six months of the other. You’d always have a backstop then. Who’s Janice?’
‘Not Janice. Alice. I said Alice. She’s my friend at school.’
‘I’m somewhat hard of hearing. Why is there no water in the showers at the motel? I saw no one to ask this morning.’
‘Mrs Webber turns it off. We don’t just have bad water, we don’t have much at all. Dad and Mrs Webber are always carrying on over him carting water to the cabins—’
The door opened and a dumpy woman in slacks and a Hawaiian shirt entered. She’d tied a scarf over her plastic curlers but had failed to cover them.
‘Hi, Karen.’ She stared at Miss Pink, nodded, and plodded to the back of the store. ‘Did your mom get the Low-Fat, Karen?’ she called.
‘Sorry, Vi.’
‘Oh, God.’ A door was opened and squeezed shut. The woman came to the counter lugging a gallon of milk. ‘Have to take more exercise, make up for this. How’d it be if I ordered one of those exercise bicycles, Karen?’ She wheezed with laughter, surveyed Miss Pink’s solid form and went on portentously: ‘Where did we go wrong? Hard, spare pioneer stock, and look at us: can’t drink plain milk without worrying about cholesterol and arteries and coronaries. I tell you, I need a calculator to keep track of all those calories I shouldn’t be eating.’
‘Living has become very complicated,’ Miss Pink said.
‘Say that again?’
‘It’s hard when you like your food.’
‘Huh. You’re not from this country.’ She surveyed the sage-green safari suit, now sadly rumpled. ‘And that wasn’t made in New York. Wish I could get something cut like it in Calcine. Don’t take no notice of me: I’m just old Vi: speaks her mind and to hell with ’em. That right, Karen?’
‘It’s a pretty colour,’ Karen told Miss Pink. ‘I was admiring it, ma’am.’
‘It’s useful,’ Miss Pink acknowledged. ‘It can look smart, but I feel as if I’ve been wearing it for a week. Probably I have.’
‘Come far?’ Vi was airy.
‘A very long way.’ Miss Pink smiled, thinking how far away Land’s End was, and not just in space. ‘But,’ she added, ‘I’m only a few miles from my destination.’
Vi raised plucked eyebrows. ‘There’s nowhere within fifty miles of Molten.’
‘There’s Sweetwater Ranch.’
‘Oh.’ It was not surprised enough, Miss Pink thought. Karen said nothing. ‘They’ll kill you there,’ Vi said darkly.
‘How will they do that?’
‘You ever hear of those geese? They stuff food down their gullets to make their livers swell. Then you eat the livers ground. What’s it called?’
‘Pâté de foie gras.’
A darkly camouflaged jeep with a soldier at the wheel cruised down the street. ‘Well, that’s it,’ Vi said quickly, and picked up her milk, making for the door.
‘Were you suggesting I would eat pâté or become pâté?’ Miss Pink asked, smiling.
Vi stared at her with utter incomprehension, twitched her lips, said automatically: ‘Been nice talkin’ to yer,’ and hurried out of the door and along the street. Miss Pink paid for her purchases and followed. She turned left for her car but glanced right. Vi was trudging across the empty highway to her shop where the military jeep was standing.
Chapter 3
The back window blurred as a dust cloud rose behind the Toyota. On the map there were instructions telling her what to do if there were a duststorm: pull off the highway and extinguish the lights. Could Seale have been drunk when she wrote that letter? More likely she was considering only the alleviation of arthritis. Miss Pink hadn’t felt a twinge in days; indeed, she could turn her head now, had forgotten that this time last week she was unable to reverse her car. She’d wanted a warm, dry climate, and she’d found it but, ruefully, she recalled that she’d also expected it to be civilized. She ploughed on through the sand at fifteen miles an hour, watching for the pass.
Unlike the straight highway of yesterday, the dirt road had a w
inding character and she realized that when you got into the desert it wasn’t flat at all. There were low swells and long dips, and dry watercourses laced by channels in the sand which proved that sometimes it not only rained, but torrentially.
The sun was behind her and visibility was perfect. She soon saw that she was heading for a low break in the range on the right of which towered an angular red cliff. The trail rose gently, giving her no trouble; she anticipated that there would be a similar short slope on the other side leading to a desert valley. She envisaged Sweetwater as another dark smudge in the middle of this and was amazed, when she came to the top, to find that it was a false summit. Ahead of her lay, not a desert, but more mountains, and there were no valleys, but ravines of vast proportions: V-shaped, steep-sided. The largest was directly below, the others were lateral: hanging side-canyons bare to their crumbling headwalls.
The road was cut out of slopes of rubble reminiscent of moraines and there appeared to be no escape from the main canyon into which she was descending. It seemed to be completely enclosed by mountains, but she was looking down the rift; when she looked up she saw that the road, having crossed the bottom, climbed on a great diagonal, perhaps two miles long, then came a break, and the line continued at another level, considerably higher. The apparent hiatus would involve two hairpins. She’d never get a car up there; even in a Land-Rover she would need the auxiliary gear box. No one had warned her. A bit rough, Orville Fraser had said; all right if she took it easy. So this was nothing out of the ordinary? For one moment she considered turning round and going back to Molten, and then she thought she would go a little way, try it out; if the surface were smooth the Toyota might cope with the gradient.
She continued to descend below slopes in subtle shades: jade, rose madder, ivory. She crossed the wash in the bottom and started to climb.
Anticipation had been worse than reality; the surface was rough but she could avoid the worst stones, the projecting bedrock. There was no parapet of course, and she was well aware of the increasing drop. If you left the road here, you’d tumble a thousand feet, spraying petrol all the way and ending up an illustration for a text book on forensic pathology—but as with all dangers the menace evaporated, most of it, when she contracted her world to the road beyond the bonnet. She drove carefully and well, and found that she was starting to enjoy herself.
On top of the pass was a notice: private property. no admission. no hunting. It had been riddled by bullets.
Beyond the pass the road dropped to run the length of a wide basin, a place of stones. There had been no trees since the clump at Molten. Again she failed to discern the line of the road but she had crossed the divide, and westward the heights were not more mountains but lateral spurs descending from the main ridge. Beyond the points of the spurs stood a high range with snow on the tops.
She crept down steep loose hairpins and the road debouched in the basin, running in a wash where the banks of eroded clay were a hundred yards apart but only a few yards high. The ridges above were like a funnel, appearing to rise higher and steeper and closer as the road dropped, while constricting the basin to the stem of the funnel through which the road must go, yet still she could see no outlet to the desert that must lie beyond.
The road ran straight at a rough wall, grey as elephant hide, curved and skirted its base. She bent her head and squinted upwards. The wall overhung. The track swung at right angles and now there were walls on either side: she had entered a slit in the precipice several hundred feet in height and scarcely wider than the road.
The surface was gravel, channelled by wheels. The way was serpentine: the road aiming for a wall—always undercut on the bend where flash floods had scoured away the base—and then it swung to right or left as occasion demanded: a good little road, ostensibly level, an ordinary trail—except that it ran in the bottom of this chasm where the walls must now be three thousand feet high. On the northern side, sunlit high up, plants grew in crevices: regular clumps of some golden stuff that caught the light, bouquets of spears with fallen stems that looked like dead trees, a thin bush silhouetted against the sky.
It was the scale of the place that awed: sweeping convolutions where the earth’s crust had strained and folded, or broken to form jagged crests layered like a cake. It was all loose: to be admired, never touched; gouged by caves, fretted with holes, resplendent in its outrageous unconformity.
It was dark and cool in the depths, and vaguely sinister. When she stopped the car and walked away a few yards her footsteps in the gravel made too much noise. It was silent as the desert, but then this was the desert, which doesn’t have to be a plain or valley but can be mountains, plateaux, canyons, anywhere that there is no water.
She emerged dramatically to sunshine, to a wide valley, and snow on the western range; to green trees, marshes and the gleam of water. White walls glowed in the shade of palms and there was a confusion of roofs under terracotta pantiles. Advancing daintily towards her came a palomino pony carrying a slim man in levis and blue work shirt, a black hat, broad belt and a gun. He came round to her window and she saw that he was quite young, nineteen perhaps, not quite muscular enough for a man, the face a little too rounded. In contrast the eyes were bleak, but then it was fashionable for young people, even the girls, to cultivate mobster eyes. The fellow sat his horse well and he had good manners. He touched the brim of his hat. ‘Miss Pink? Did you have a good trip, ma’am? We were expecting you last night. I’m Hal Brewer.’ He smiled and was suddenly charming. ‘I’m one of the wranglers.’
‘And what is a wrangler?’
His jaw dropped. ‘Don’t let Jack hear that. A wrangler looks after the horses. He said you rode.’ It was an accusation.
‘I ride,’ Miss Pink said stoutly. ‘Why are you armed?’
He kept smiling, exuding confidence. ‘The West was won by the gun; it’ll be held by the gun.’
‘Good gracious!’
‘It’s a Sweetwater maxim.’
‘Is it indeed.’ She was grim. ‘Perhaps you will show me the entrance to the ranch.’
‘Just follow me, ma’am.’
He put the palomino to a gentle lope and Miss Pink followed up a drive, past stone walls and palms and shrubs with crimson flowers to a shadowed yard at the back of the ranch where he saluted and retreated down the drive. It was not a large space but it seemed crowded with vehicles, albeit neatly parked. Miss Pink had an impression of dusty nondescript pick-ups before her attention was claimed by people emerging from the house.
A small bouncy woman, in khaki trousers and a butcher’s apron, was coming down wide stone steps, followed by a dark man of indeterminate age with squat features, his collar-length black hair worn in a low fringe on his forehead. He wore neat black slacks, a white shirt and a thin dark tie. He made for the Toyota’s boot and, finding it locked, he waited while the woman greeted the new guest.
‘Good morning, you must be Miss Pink. I’m Miss Ginny, the housekeeper. Did you have a good trip? Give Myron your keys and he’ll take your luggage up. Mr Jack’s out after the bitterns, and Mrs Nielsen’s disappeared somewhere to take pictures. Hal Brewer will have gone to tell Mr Jack you’ve arrived. I’ll take you to your room.’
‘I hope Mr Nielsen doesn’t come back because of me.’ Miss Pink was alarmed. Bitterns!
Miss Ginny chuckled. ‘If he’s watching a bittern he won’t come. Otherwise he’ll gallop back to collect you. You just got time to change.’
They went along a passage floored with dark polished stone. One side was pillared, and opened on a paved courtyard where there were huge old earthen jars, some pots containing shrubs, and feathery trees rooted in squares of sand. Flights of stairs led upwards, arched at their base. Windows opened on the court, some with iron grilles, others with pots of bright flowers like jewels in the shade. Offset in the paving stones a small fountain played. Miss Pink halted for a moment and realized immediately in this ambience why the sound of a fountain was cool.
Miss Ginny le
d the way up a staircase, its risers in green and white mosaic. The Indian, Myron, who must have gone up another way, came to the head of the flight and stood back. His eyes looked straight into those of Miss Pink without expression.
‘See that Breeches is saddled, Myron,’ the housekeeper said. ‘And tell them to put up food and a flask for Miss Pink.’
‘Sure, Miss Ginny.’
The first-floor passage was stone too. Miss Pink said: ‘ “Ranch” is a courtesy title in reverse. It’s a large country house.’
‘It’s still a ranch. We’ve got a horse herd, a few cows; we grow all our own food except oats, and a lot of the table food.’ They entered a shadowed room.
There was not much colour because of the lack of light but the bed was canopied in something fine that stirred in a draught from the screened but open French windows, and it was swagged and flounced and ruffled, as were the easy chairs and the small sofa. Everything matched. Miss Pink was astonished. ‘I was expecting a rather superior Molten. This is another world.’
‘Molten—’ Miss Ginny began coldly as if the word carried an infection, but Miss Pink had crossed to the windows, opened the screen and stepped out on a balcony balustraded in wrought iron. The room faced north and she looked sideways down a vista through palm fronds to the valley on a lower level, far enough below for her to see sheets of water and acres of reeds interspersed with yet more trees. She caught glimpses of sandy paths at the edge of the pools.
