Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  He laughed in a pro-forma fashion, a quick ha-ha. “Good one. So what’s got sweet Lucy telling dirty jokes all of a sudden?”

  Lucy fought an urge to whirl around at Len and start shouting at him. Give him a good dose of her pent-up rage, really hand it to him. But then she’d have to make a new excuse. She could blame her nerves on PMS, a total laugh, as before these recent “events” she’d never had it. Or at least, not like she was having it now. But blaming her behavior on female hormones was about the last thing she could do. That, too, would make her seem weak. Instead, she raised a hand, mechanically balled it into a fist, and punched Len on the arm. “Just raising our level of intimacy, crewmate. Gonna be tight quarters up there, remember?”

  They reached Len’s classic Corvette. After they had gotten in and left the compound for the nearest highway, he said, “All right, now that we’re for sure and certain alone, Lucy, I’m going to give it to you straight. You look tense to me, and I can’t help but think there’s something seriously wrong.” As she stiffened, he held up a hand. “No, don’t try to stop me. I know you’re a very private person, but I’m going uphill with you in just a few days, and space is not a place for secrets. We’ve trained as a team and if you have a problem, I have a problem, and we address it as a team. So please—give! Because if you won’t talk to me, I’ll figure you’ve got the heebie-jeebies about the flight.”

  At Len’s words, Lucy felt the weight of five gravities. For a moment she suffered near vertigo, as if she were going through the windshield of the car. If her secret came out—if NASA knew that there was a man out there stalking her—they’d scrub her from the roster, and it would be permanent. Her judgment would be drawn into question. Even I doubt my own mind these days, she thought bitterly. After all, I was stupid enough to accept a date with that monster!

  But instead she groaned, and stretched idly, letting her head fall backward and her arms flop at her sides. “No. Len, trust me, I want to be on that flight so badly I’d go without a pressure suit. Nervousness about the mission is about the farthest thing from my mind. I have been wanting to take that ride uphill every moment of every day since I was eight years old and watched Neil Armstrong step down onto the moon. Jesus, Len, I am type-rated in jet aircraft. I’m the best in the crew at spin training and—”

  “No one doubts you, Lucy.”

  I do! I doubt my sanity every night as I think up ways to get away from that son of a bitch! Images of the fortresses she had dreamed up clamped down on her mind. The underground tunnel with trip wires and motion detectors describing a thousand-yard perimeter around its opening. And even that fantasy had not felt safe enough, because she knew she would need air to breath and water to drink, and there was no way to ensure that he could not suffocate her or poison the water.

  Why is this upsetting me so much? she had asked herself for the thousandth time. He’s never gotten closer than shitty little pranks like slashing my tires and cutting the power to the house. He’s never laid a hand on me … but I managed to slam the door that time he was hiding outside. I’ve grown radar on each square inch of my skin, and could feel him waiting there. What did he have in mind? But to Len, Lucy said, “You’re so sweet to worry, but it’s just a little thing about …” Inspiration struck, deeply entwined with irony and the heat of fantasy. “About an old boyfriend. He died. I guess it’s really hit me hard.” Then, to give her story the ballast of verisimilitude, she said, “I chose career over marriage, Len. But some days, I have my regrets.”

  Len let the situation lapse, but Lucy found her last words cutting deep into her heart.

  – 8 –

  Faye piloted us eastward from Utah and over the Rocky Mountains, down across the open plains of Colorado and Oklahoma into Arkansas, where she stopped to refuel at a place called Arkadelphia because she liked the name. As we skimmed at 20,000 feet over the murky green states where magnolias and something slightly ominous called kudzu are fabled to grow, the horizon evolved from a sharp line to a bleary smudge even though the sky was still cloudless. I was in the catbird’s seat, namely the copilot’s position to the right of Faye. Tom was, as usual, using the flight to catch a rare nap in one of the backseats. Life was good.

  For a long time I watched the marks of human civilization snake and jig through the surface effects of geology, but by-and-by I looked up ahead and noticed a wide, ragged arc where the darkness of the ground turned to a shiny steel blue.

  Faye’s voice came through the headphones. “What’s up?” she asked. “You’ve gone rigid.”

  I pointed sheepishly through the windshield. “What’s that up ahead?”

  Faye took a look, trying to divine what feature had caught my attention.

  “Well, just to our right is Lake Pontchartrain. That’s New Orleans to the south, and beyond that, your Mississippi delta.”

  “Then, um, may I discern from this that we are about to fly out over a, er, body of water?”

  “Why, yes, Em, and that body of water would be called the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “But why?”

  “Why would it be called the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “No, why are we going to fly over it?”

  “Uh, because it’s between us and where we’re going?”

  “Uh, very nice, but isn’t there a better route?”

  “Uh, such as?”

  “Such as, why not follow the coastline?”

  Faye cocked her head to one side and evaluated me. “No. We’re headed southeast on a nice, normal, great-circle route between Salt Lake City and St. Petersburg. And as you can see, St. Petersburg happens to be halfway down a peninsula that is called Florida.” She unfolded her chart, which showed that great arm of land cranking south at almost a right angle to the east-west trend of the coast that clips across east of Louisiana through Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle. “Do I, on my part, discern that you perhaps have a problem with that?”

  “Well, the horizon just goes to a blur. Isn’t it safer to keep terra firma underneath us?”

  Faye blinked. “No. See those funny white clouds over there to the east? They sit over the land. As you can see, the air over the water is clear. Much, much more stable air. I was quite sure you would prefer a smooth ride to a bumpy one. I know I do. End of subject, or is there something else you need to tell me?”

  “Um, yes, I would prefer the bumpy ride.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because that’s water out there.”

  “And you have a problem with water?”

  A whiff of panic made me begin to babble. “Yes. Back home in Wyoming, water is a rare thing. If one learns to swim, it is in a stock tank, because a river is something barely deep enough to wet one’s ankles, except during the spring runoff, when one is better advised to stay out of it due to such matters as the hydraulic might of a river in full flood. Mountain creeks are likewise decidedly hazardous, although a great thing to stand beside with a fly rod. And most important of all, ranch children such as I was are warned at pain of excommunication from the tribe to stay the hell out of irrigation ditches; case very sadly in point, my brother drowned in one when we were kids.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I forgot. But Em, you swim beautifully. I’ve seen you do it.”

  “Yes. In swimming pools. I learned to swim in prep school, because great woe betides any adolescent who fails to accomplish certain assigned tasks in front of her peers. I managed to sufficiently compartmentalize my paranoia to construct a special case in my aquatic pantheon for water that is contained within four concrete walls and rimmed with tiling and nice little numbers that do not exceed the height of my chin. The deep end of the pool is decidedly not for me. So need I say, oceans are not my thing. I am a child of the land, and the more arid, the better. Which was why I had agreed to even think about doing a Master’s thesis on African dust. May I at least close my eyes?”

  Faye took both her hands off the control wheel to make a who, me? gesture. “Em, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a
problem with this kind of thing.”

  “Well, I do. I’ve tried to get over this, but it hasn’t worked.”

  “It would cost a couple hundred dollars extra just in fuel to take this thing the long way around, and you’d still have water on one side of the plane. We’d also have to land again to refuel to accomplish the extra distance, and that would take us low over the water twice instead of just once.”

  “Forget I ever spoke.” I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “I’d offer you a Valium, but you’re my emergency backup.”

  I popped my eyes open at her. “You’re carrying drugs on this thing? Aren’t you afraid the federales might confiscate your airplane when we pass customs in Florida?”

  Faye laughed. “Florida is not a foreign country, dear heart.”

  “They have kudzu there. That’s foreign enough for me.”

  “Em, have you ever been out of the United States?”

  “I saw a bit of Canada once from a mountain peak in Montana.”

  “But you have been east of the Mississippi before, haven’t you?”

  “I spent two miserable years in a Massachusetts prep school. My maternal grandmother lived in Boston.”

  Faye slapped the control wheel. “Man! I’ve been on all continents except Antarctica! This is amazing! You’re—you’re like some kind of living fossil or something!”

  “I prefer the term ‘autochthonous.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Formed in place. It is a perfectly good adjective used to describe rocks ‘that have been moved comparatively little from their original site of formation, although they may have been intensely folded or faulted,’ if I accurately recall the wording.”

  “In whose dictionary?”

  “The Dictionary of Geological Terms. Don’t you have one, my dear?”

  “No good library is complete without one, I am sure.”

  “Just so. You, by contrast to me, are allochthonous, meaning moved from your original place.”

  “What a relief.”

  “Pleased to be of service.”

  “I was so afraid I might be as bent as you are.”

  “Oh, no, much worse. Allochthons show the wear and tear of transit. They’re full of overthrusting, recumbent folding, and sometimes even … drum roll here … gravity sliding.”

  “Well, I knew life was a downhill ride, but …”

  “Just fly the plane. But what about those clouds to the south of us? Are we going to run into weather or something ?”

  Faye shrugged. “Yeah, there’s some weather building. It’s hurricane season, and there are several storms bowling across from Africa. One of them is hanging right on the edge of becoming a full-blown hurricane. That’s part of why I wanted to get down here so quickly, get in between the blows. I’m instrument rated, but I prefer to fly when I can see where I’m going.”

  “Well, I’ll take comfort in that, anyway. It looks like a squall line to me.”

  “You nervous Nellie. Yeah, well, you’re right actually; NASA delayed this month’s shuttle launch because of all this mess. But see? I’m threading us in right between the fronts, pretty as you please.”

  “Oh, that really gives me confidence. NASA won’t fly but you will.”

  Faye laughed. “Flying a turbo jet twin at 20,000 feet is a lot different from heaving a rocket into space, Em. They require almost placid skies, and they have to have clear weather at their emergency landing strip over in Spain in case they have to abort before they get into orbit. This is an airplane, built for dodging other aircraft. The shuttle is an overblown kite made of bricks. An entirely different picture, I promise you.”

  “Yeah. Promise me,” I said. “Promise me all the way back onto dry ground, okay?”

  She grinned. “Done.”

  And so we proceeded. I stared up at the sky and hummed an old cowboy lullaby until the clouds near the land soaked us up like a giant cotton wad. We swam blind through the murk for a while, then fell out the bottom of it and skimmed in over a ragged, marshy coastline dotted with little swampy islands (“They call them ‘keys,’” Faye told me) and lined up on St. Petersburg–Clearwater International Airport. Assured that we were over land, I looked down as we descended, and spotted increasing numbers of golf courses and larger and larger houses, their red tile roofs baking in the patches of sun that cooked down between the tall, wooly clouds. The impacts of human life came into focus and revealed finer and finer detail as we swept down to the pavement and landed. Faye taxied the plane over to the general aviation building and gave the guy with the paddles the wink. He gave her a grin, because she is one dishy babe. You can imagine how he dropped his jaw when she popped the door and stood up on the wing and proudly swung her pregnancy into his face. It was a gag she had begun exploiting to the max.

  My enjoyment of her little joke was lost in my experience of the first hit of Floridian air, which descended through Faye’s open door like a hot, humid fist. It must have been close to a hundred degrees outside that plane, and the amount of water in the air teetered at the ragged edge between raining and not. It all but pushed me back into my seat. I glanced at Tom. It was hitting him, too. His eyelids fluttered, and he tugged at his collar.

  Faye arched her back in delight. “Doesn’t this feel great?” she crowed. “It’s like a 10-million-passenger steam bath!”

  Faye stepped down from the wing and gave the ground-crew fellow a friendly pat on the back, just close enough to his buns to give him the idea she’d noticed and just high enough to keep her out of jail if he didn’t like it.

  Tom rolled his eyes, and he and I schlepped the bags onto the baking tarmac and tried to straighten up in the heat. We were just beginning to stooge around and try to figure out what we were supposed to do next when a really strange elder woman trotted out of the building and hailed us.

  “Whoo-hoo! You must be Tom,” she crooned, throwing a well-muscled arm around his neck. She wore dark glasses like something out of the 1950s and a sundress that showed off her leathery tan, and the contrast between her bright red lipstick and brilliant white teeth was dazzling. Maintaining the half Nelson she had thrown on Tom, she dragged him over to Faye, patted her belly with the other hand, and leaned forward for a puckery smooch. “Faye, sweetie, it is so extraordinarily good to see you!”

  Faye gave her a very affectionate hug. “Tom Latimer, Em Hansen, I present my aunt, Nancy Wallace! Ain’t she the coolest?”

  Tom sagged even further. “Charmed,” he said.

  I’m afraid I said nothing at all.

  Nancy shucked Tom and headed off toward the terminal with Faye. “The car’s right here. General aviation is so civilized. This young man will get the bags, and we’ll be off. Don’t want to dally in the heat, do we? You might pop that baby out right here in front of God and everyone. So how was your flight? You must tell me all about it!”

  Faye said, “Em here needs to pay a call on some dude at the USGS. It’s down near the Dali museum or something. Can we drop her off there and then get settled? We can catch up and get a swim in, and then …” About there their voices faded into the distance.

  I turned to Tom.

  He shrugged and mopped his brow, all in one wilting motion. “Welcome to Florida,” he said.

  We drove south into St. Petersburg. My impression-gathering equipment was on full alert, taking in the towering, layered cloudscapes, the sultry older houses built wide and open to breathe with the breezes, the astonishing arrays and varieties of rich green foliage that hung out brash and tropical at every turn. Pedestrians strolled the sidewalks in shorts and tank tops; comely girls and some older women who should have known better wore tight, skimpy blouses and dresses that maximized all curves. I gawked in amazement. There was something subtly or not-so-subtly more sexual about this display than I was used to seeing in Utah. I rode in a state of refrigerated automotive separation, both stimulated and lulled by the display.

  The USGS occupied a two-story, Art Deco, bri
ck building that had once been a Studebaker salesroom and was now externally ossified and internally renovated by dint of having been placed on some sort of historical register. I thought, Just perfect: Don’t know what to do with a bunch of rock heads? Think they’re sort of miscellaneous, unimportant, or otherwise underfoot? Jam them into a space built to sell cars. All in one, you stack ’em in a warehouse and resolve the problem of what to do with that building the society ma’ams wouldn’t let you tear down.

  In fact, it was a very nice building, a lot snazzier than most places geologists get stacked. When I dodged from Nancy’s air-conditioned car through twenty feet of heat and humidity to the air-conditioned building, I found myself in a two-story foyer with hallways leading out in two directions and a modern steel staircase rising up to a balcony. The walls were covered with maps and full-color displays of technical research projects.

  There were a lot of people standing about in the foyer, which was unusual. Geologists do not like to stand around in groups. It offends their sense of individuality and makes them nervous. They are, however, inveterate observers, so many of them turned and looked at me.

  I, in turn, looked at them. Flummoxed to find myself the center of attention, I quickly turned to look at the receptionist, who sat facing me at a desk with her eyebrows raised in qualified greeting. “Are you with the press or the police?” she inquired.

  Without thinking, I said, “FBI.” I was making a joke. Sort of.

  The woman rose from her desk, gestured for me to follow, and headed down the hallway to my right. “Your meeting is right this way,” she said, leading me into a large room full of chairs arrayed in rows. “The press conference will be in here also, as soon as you all are done.”

  Being an adventuresome soul, I trotted right into that room. The good girl inside me—you know, the one who’s usually locked up in a cage with a rag stuffed in her mouth—wanted to explain to the receptionist that I had been kidding, but it was obvious that something was up, and I figured that as long as they didn’t mind giving me a leg up on finding out exactly what that was, I wasn’t going to make things difficult for them by getting particular about who I was and why I was there. Besides, my schedule with Miles Guffey, the geologist Molly Chang knew, was casual at best, a sort of “give me a holler when you arrive” kind of arrangement, so I reasoned that I could check out this action and then go talk about dust. Okay, so I’m an old fire horse and someone rang the bell; my game plan was business first and ask forgiveness later.