Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  She pauses when a stream crosses the trail, dips her hand in the water, and splashes the cool liquid on her head and down her back. She steps gingerly across the rocks that rise above the water to get from one side of the stream to the other.

  After a lifetime, she reaches Adams Falls, which is near the official park boundary. There are a dozen hikers and tourists milling about, holding out phones to take pictures, chatting, gawking at the bedraggled young woman heaving and wincing as she refuses to make eye contact with them.

  She weaves through the crowd, holding her body close together so she will not have to interact with anyone against her will. She comes upon a tall tree, half-burned and failing. Streaks of black and rust color twist around the barkless shell. Deep channels from knife carvings of the initials of graffiti artists scar the base of the tree.

  She blinks, and now finds herself in the dirt parking lot next to the East Inlet trailhead. The last few minutes seem to have vanished, but she’s finally at her destination.

  She is so physically drained she can barely move. With a thud, she sits in the middle of the lot, surrounded by a half-dozen dust-drenched cars. She should feel excited to have reached the end of the trail, but she’s still not home. Too tired. The brain keeps moving, the body wants to stop.

  What does she do now? She can walk the road next to Grand Lake, but it’s still two or three miles to the other trailhead, and she doesn’t know if she can stand again. Regardless, she’s not sure if she knows the exact way to get to the dirt turnoff that leads to the North Inlet trailhead, without the GPS on her phone to guide her.

  “Oy.” A voice from behind her.

  She twists her body to look, which drills the pain in her stomach so hard she almost vomits. There’s a tall man fifteen feet behind her, with a large camera on a tripod, slung over his shoulder like a spear. He’s wearing the same kind of utility vest that fishermen wear, except instead of lures, camera lenses poke out of various pockets.

  “That’s maybe not a great place to sit,” he says.

  His accent sounds like Spoon’s. Reagan notices the hand holding the camera steady has a wedding band on the third finger, gleaming in the sunlight. She trusts him but doesn’t know why.

  “Are you Australian?” she says.

  “Not quite, but pretty close. New Zealand. Queenstown, exactly.”

  “My boyfriend is Australian.”

  “Sweet as. He a Union-man or a League-man?”

  Reagan pulls her body to face the New Zealander, grimacing from the effort. “Huh?”

  “Rugby. Rugby Union or Rugby League. Which one does he support?”

  Thoughts flash and speed by. “He likes AFL. Says rugby is ‘for tossers,’ or something like that.”

  The New Zealander lets loose an unrestrained belly laugh, and the sound is glorious. Reagan then notices how handsome this man is. Square jaw, broad shoulders, tanned skin.

  He rests the tripod on the ground in front of him. “You waiting for a ride, Miss AFL-boyfriend?”

  At first, she doesn’t know how to answer. She trusts him, but she’s been wrong about that before. Her head shakes, back and forth, and she’s not sure why she’s doing it.

  “Does one of these cars here belong to you?”

  “No. My car got lost along the way. Part of the journey but all that has changed. I need to get back to my car so I can catch it. Not even my car, actually. My dad’s car. He’s gone too, not in the world but somewhere else. He was supposed to go into Nanita, but I left him in Verna. Not what I wanted, but circumstances change everything. That’s what I’m learning.”

  He twists up his face, looking puzzled. “Did you need a lift?”

  She stands, nearly yelping from the sizzling pain in her stomach. “Yes.”

  He points to a small green car and starts walking. She follows him, now fully aware of the blisters and bruises on her feet. The trail hides much of the pain.

  In his car, he turns on the air conditioning, and the cool air on her hot skin is the most amazing thing she has ever felt. Then she becomes aware of how bad she must smell, after thirty miles trekking without a shower.

  On the way to the other parking lot, he tells her a story about going to university in Sydney, how fickle Australian girls seemed to him. But now that he looks back on it, he was the one that was fickle. He often laughs while telling the story, and Reagan finds his words comforting, but he frowns at many of the things she says in reply. She doesn’t know if it’s a cultural barrier or if there’s something else going on. She forces herself to say as little as possible, although the temptation to interject plagues her every few seconds.

  When they pull into the North Inlet parking lot, a cloud of dust obscures the cars parked there. When it settles, she opens the door, gives her thanks to the New Zealander, and steps out. Dad’s car is unscathed, unchanged since she left it on Tuesday.

  But Dalton’s car is already gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  3:15 pm

  Spoon sensed something hard pressing against his face, his hands, his hips, and his legs. Reminded him of the rigid wooden pews he sat on at church when he was little, how he fidgeted and shifted but could never get comfortable.

  As he drew in a breath, the ache in his chest revved like a motorcycle, and he remembered someone punching him. Gus, that was his name. Tyson Darby’s associate, or employee, or hired-muscle… one of those. Spoon had endured a stream of punches by two fat blokes inside a lawnmower shop and hadn’t landed a single blow on either of them. His old boxing coach wouldn’t have been pleased with that outcome.

  He opened his eyes, but the left one refused to cooperate. Something held it closed, something painful. As the right one opened, yellow beams became overhead lights and it dawned on him that he was staring up at floodlights hanging from some kind of carport. No, that wasn’t right. Much taller than a carport.

  He angled his head and the yellow beams turned into a flashing red and blue. Ambulance. Across the parking lot, idling, its lights rotating and alternating.

  He pushed his hands against the ground and lifted his body a few centimeters. He was in front of a hospital, crumpled on slick concrete. Had it rained? He wasn’t sure.

  He hadn’t felt this bad since the morning after his eighteenth birthday, when he’d drank so much he woke up sprawled on the hood of his mate’s car with his grundies around his ankles, the cold morning air having shrunken his old fella to the size of a thimble.

  As he turned, he noticed his crutches on the ground next to him. Someone had put them there. Someone had put him here. Must have done, because he had zero memory of driving himself anywhere. He dug a hand into his pocket and found the Lexus keys, but the car was not within sight. Neither was the blue Chevy Tahoe. He clicked the remote lock button a few times and listened for the horn honk, but no car gave any response.

  The other objects he’d stashed in his pocket this morning were still there, so he breathed a sigh of relief for that.

  A set of massive glass doors opened with a swish and a man in blue scrubs rushed to him. “Sir, are you okay? Are you injured?”

  Why had Tyson and Gus dropped him at the hospital? They obviously weren’t around. “I don’t know.”

  “What happened to your eye?”

  Spoon touched his closed eye and felt a swelling as if the lid above had ballooned to twice the size it should be. “I had an accident.”

  “Do you need medical attention?” the man in scrubs said, enunciating each word.

  Spoon shook his head, which felt like jelly wobbling inside a bowl.

  “I think you should come inside and talk with Security. If you’ve been assaulted, they’ll want you to speak with the police before you see a doctor.”

  The idea of explaining everything to the police had some appeal, but they would want him to go to the station, give statements, tell the story a hundred times, and meanwhile, Tyson would be looking for Reagan. Spoon had to talk to her first. She should be on her return from her b
ackpacking trip now, and she might have no idea what trouble awaited her. Had Tyson said something about her cousin Dalton going with her, how he had some kind of plan? That sounded familiar.

  “No,” Spoon said. “I was just walking and I slipped here. I’m fine, thank you, but I don’t need to see anyone. Sorry to have caused so much fuss.”

  He pushed himself up, then grabbed his crutches and stood. He had so many aches and pains in his body he couldn’t separate them all.

  The man in scrubs crossed his arms. “You don’t seem fine.”

  Spoon had only been to American hospitals in Texas, not in Colorado. He knew that sometimes the laws were different in different states. Could they compel him to go inside? Better to avoid any hassle by getting out of here as soon as possible.

  He gave the man in scrubs a nod and limped toward the parking lot. A thousand cars littered the lot in all directions, with a handful of businesses lining the edges and across the street. He set his sights on a Subway restaurant at the edge of the lot and changed direction.

  On his mobile, he tapped until he’d found out his location. Still in the suburb of Broomfield, at the Exempla Good Samaritan Medical Center. He checked his missed calls and voicemails, but there was nothing from Reagan. He phoned her, but it went straight to voicemail, just as it had for the last three days. Staggering through the parking lot, he grunted as slashes of pain wriggled from his knee up through his leg.

  He opened the door of the Subway and went inside, at first blinded by the strength of the fluorescent lights bearing down on him. He walked straight to the bathroom while pretending not to notice the stares from the workers behind the counter.

  Inside the loo, he groaned at the mess looking back at him in the mirror. One eye was bruised shut, and several small cuts crossed his cheeks and forehead. Gus or Tyson must have been wearing a ring. Seeing his mug in this horrible state made the injury start to throb, as if his face were a bass drum.

  “Alright, Spoon. Get ahold of yourself. She’ll be done with the walkabout soon and she’ll ring you. You have to be patient.”

  He left the bathroom and limped toward the counter, now feeling dizzy and nauseous. The two teenage girls in their matching uniforms and visors went slack-jawed.

  “Oh my God, what happened to your face?” one of them said.

  “Do you reckon I could have a plastic bag or something?”

  The other girl scrambled to grab a sandwich bag and thrust it over the counter. He filled it with ice from the soda machine, chunks thunking into the bag. The ice stung as he pressed it to his face, but it also soothed his skin and eased the bass drum from heavy metal to jazz.

  He returned to the seat where he’d left his crutches. Sitting pulled his stomach muscles like shoelaces stretched to the breaking point. The dizziness abated, but his breaths came in short snatches. They’d seriously kicked the shit out of him.

  He took out his mobile and stared at it, trying to decide what he would tell her if she called. Where to start? Some things, she maybe shouldn’t hear, like her drunken stepmother trying to seduce him. And what to do about losing his job? With everything else going on, his sudden lack of employment seemed insignificant.

  Then his mobile lit up and started to vibrate.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  4:30 pm

  Reagan speeds out of Rocky Mountain National Park and connects with highway 40 toward Winterpark. She bounces in the seat as she drives, distributing some of the energy from her body into the car, helping it seek its purpose of propelling her along. She’s no longer tired, having drawn from the energy of motion to refuel her stores.

  The steering wheel wears a thin layer of grime, still containing Dad’s DNA through the years of his sweat and skin cells accumulating on its surface. She touches the remnants of him as she drives.

  Spoon Spoon Spoon. She can’t wait to see him again, his deep reflective eyes, his adorable accent, his scent, his warm body. The anticipation approaches an orgasmic level.

  The lyrics to a Devotchka song repeat in her head and she thinks that she now fully understands them. She never appreciated the band when she lived here, but now that she’s back, she can understand the appeal. That crooning voice over such complex rhythms. Who wouldn’t like it? She should start a blog analyzing the music. It would be crazy popular.

  But what she wants more than anything is to return to Denver and reunite with her man. At first, she slows anytime she passes a convenience store, but not one of them seems to have a payphone. Do payphones even exist anymore? She wishes she’d left her phone in the car before beginning the trip, but there’s no sense in worrying about that now. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.

  Maybe she can stop at one of those convenience stores and ask to borrow someone’s phone. But there’s risk in doing that… since Dalton’s car was already gone, who knows where he’s been or who he’s sullied? Any of the people she may meet could be compromised. Compromised people are unable to accept healing. These people need her educational center.

  What should she call it? Opening The Mind? No, too clichéd.

  She has to get to a phone. The desire becomes powerful, like a churning freight train. It permeates everything, beginning to wash out all other thoughts. Phone phone phone.

  At the edge of the skinny mountain resort town Winterpark, she exits the highway and parks at the office of Grand County Travel Agency. She checks the dashboard clock. It’s Friday afternoon. They should still be open.

  She sits in the car, watching through the window. There’s a lot of glare, but she thinks she can see two people inside the small office building. Two desks and a door between them. Possibly, leading to a kitchenette-type room or storage? She will have to ask. If there are others in the back, they will have to come out and identify themselves. It’s the only way she can trust them to speak openly. Secrets spread sickness.

  Swinging the car door open, energy pulses through her body, fighting the grit and exhaustion of four days in the national park.

  She opens the front door, bell jingling, and a man and a woman smile back at her from their desks. It’s a tiny operation. The walls are plastered with the same fake wood she last encountered when visiting some vague relative’s house many years ago. Trailer-park walls. She frowns because that’s judgmental and it’s poisoning everything, and she feels guilty for what she has done to these nice people. They might see the poison already.

  “Can we help you?” asks the woman. She has a foofy perm and a billowing blouse that hides any sense of shape of her body underneath.

  “I don’t care about the walls,” Reagan says. “In case you thought I did. Most businesses fail in the first year. At least that’s what I heard. Just saying, if you’re still here, good for you.”

  The man and the woman share an uneasy glance.

  “I’m sorry, what?” says the man.

  “None of that is important. I need to use your phone. It’s an emergency.”

  They glance at each other again. Reagan pauses, wondering why they’re doing that. Sharing information without telling her is not a good beginning to this relationship.

  The woman nods at a phone perched on the edge of her desk, a green telephone like the one anchored to the wall in Reagan’s kitchen when she was little, the one Dad was always talking on as he leaned back in a chair and ran gentle hands through his thinning hair. He was so handsome, and the expression on his face always affirmed the kindness within. Or at least that’s what she saw. Maybe she’s wrong about that.

  Sitting opposite the foofy woman, Reagan smells lavender on her hands. It’s lotion or some kind of salve.

  Reagan picks up the phone and stares at the keypad. Oh, no. Spoon’s number. She’s had it stored in her phone for so long, she doesn’t know if she can recall the number from memory.

  “Is everything alright, sweetie?” the woman asks.

  “It’s a memory thing. Seven, plus or minus two. Phone numbers, that’s why they’re all seven digits
long. But the phone knows the number, and the phone is in the top panel of a backpack that’s either near Lake Nanita or on its way back to Denver.”

  The man and woman again slant their eyes at each other.

  “Please stop doing that,” Reagan says.

  “Stop doing what?”

  A flash of memory hits her after she visualizes Spoon’s contact page on her phone. “Never mind. I got it.”

  She presses the buttons, and some of them feel sticky with something like spilled coffee or the glaze of donuts. The rings blast her ears.

  “Hello?” The voice on the other end is shaky but unmistakable.

  A rush of excitement whips through her. “Baby!”

  “Reagan?”

  He wouldn’t have recognized the phone number. She looks up at the man and woman at their desks. They’re staring at her, waiting, watching, judging.

  “Yes, of course, it’s me. My baby boy, I’ve missed you so much. I can’t wait to see you. I have so much to tell you. Light, darkness, the moose, the New Zealander. How much do you already know?”

  “How much do I know about what? What’s this number you phoned me from?”

  He doesn’t know anything, and she doesn’t even know where to start. “My phone is back in the park. It’s gone. Lost. Not coming back. Dalton has it, probably. He’s sick, baby, and he needs healing. I can heal him but not from here. I need to come see you. Are you at my dad’s house?”

  “Reagan, are you okay? You sound like you’re coked-up.”

  She purses her lips. He seems to be missing the point. “I’m okay. I can explain it all when I see you.”

  “Okay. I’m not at your house. I’m in Broomfield, at a Subway restaurant near the Good Samaritan hospital.”

  “What are you doing there? How did you get there?”

  “I got in a fight. It’s a long story, but you need to hear it.”