Over the Moon at the Big Lizard Diner

by Lisa Wingate

  But I was determined to do it, and I did. I married Geoff and took off seeking buried treasure. Now here I was fixing windmills. Strange, the twists and turns that life takes …

  I had the feeling that Zach was looking way too intensely through the portal into my past, and was about to send in a probe, so I changed the subject back to him. “Jocelyn said you travel often. How is it that you travel so much?” Actually, He never comes home, was what she’d said. Why would he avoid this place when he seemed to love it? He seemed as much a part of the landscape as the towering sky and the brooding live oaks.

  “The USDA job comes with a fair amount of travel. I’m a section VMO, so that means I cover anything that comes up in my area, and then assist in other areas across the country when something big happens.” We crossed a dry creek bed, and he gunned the engine to make it up the other side. The view out the back glass went straight down as we scratched and clawed our way up the narrow trail. I wondered if this was a good idea, if maybe we needed a mountain goat rather than a pickup truck to make it to the top.

  Zach approached the climb with perfect confidence, hitting the gas, then letting the truck roll and bump over washes of loose gravel. He kept right on talking, his attention focused partly on the road and partly on the conversation. “If there’s an outbreak—Exotic Newcastle Disease, West Nile, possible mad cow, things like that—it falls under USDA jurisdiction.” He shrugged, making the job seem routine. “We chase a lot of phantoms, especially the last few years with the whole bioterrorism issue going on, but then we get involved in a lot of the real stuff, too. We were on the Navajo reservation during the outbreak of HPV.”

  “Oh, I read about that,” I said, thinking back several years to an issue of National Geographic I’d read in the pediatrician’s office during one of Sydney’s appointments. “Something like twenty-six people died before they tracked down the cause.” I remembered staring long at the image of a young Navajo woman in blue jeans, sitting forlornly by the grave of her daughter. I’d imagined how it would feel to lose my little girl, and tears had fallen on the page.

  Zach confirmed my recollection of the story with a solemn frown. “It was a tough bug to chase. Turned out to be bacteria in dust contaminated with rodent urine—a strain of hantavirus. It can lie harmless for years, but when it’s stirred up and goes airborne, it’s a killer bug.”

  “Sounds bizarre,” I agreed, imagining him traveling the reservation with a vet bag and a biohazard suit, placing himself in harm’s way to save lives.

  “Not as much as you might think,” he replied. “It’s something fairly common in Asia, but not in the U.S. until recently.”

  I imagined Zach, the hero, holding up a microscope slide, hollering across a makeshift field lab, I’ve got it. Here it is! “Seems like interesting work.”

  “Sometimes,” he allowed as we topped the hill and drove along a mesa. Below, the valley floor spread for miles, and ahead, a windmill stood like a sentinel tower. “I needed a change. I’d already been doing some work for the USDA, and the section VMO job came up. It’s been … hmmm … five years now.”

  A change, after the divorce? I wondered, but of course I didn’t ask. Five years since he was Becky’s brother-in-law?

  The questions went unanswered as we pulled up to the windmill. I stood at the edge of the butte while Zach unloaded the parts and a toolbox and arranged them at the bottom of the metal tower. Overhead, the windmill squeaked softly like a suffering animal, its arms motionless in the wind.

  “What a view,” I said, admiring the rolling pastures, crisscrossed with streams and strewn with limestone boulders and groves of trees. Here and there the naked cones of prehistoric volcanoes jutted above the landscape, surveying what had once been the floor of a primordial sea. I breathed the moment in like heady incense, filling my lungs and body and mind with this quiet place, unchanged and unchanging.

  “You ought to see it from up here.” Zach climbed the metal skeleton that held the windmill fan high overhead. “The view goes all the way to Loveland.”

  “Really?” Standing on my toes, I shaded my eyes from the late-afternoon sun, trying to make out the town in the heat mist on the horizon. “I can’t see it from here.”

  “Come on up.” He settled himself on the wooden platform beneath the windmill head, his long legs straddling the tip of the tower as he wound a rope around the disabled rudder and bound it securely.

  Squinting upward, I considered the prospect of teetering twenty-some feet in the air on top of a cliff. “I … don’t think so.”

  Shaking his head, he grinned down at me, then proceeded to take the case off the windmill head and balance it on the platform. A bolt came loose and clattered down the tower like a pinball, ping, ping, ping, then landed in the grass near my foot.

  “Hand me that bolt, will you?” He waved his wrench in the general direction of the ground.

  The next thing I knew, I was climbing up the windmill tower, playing Jane to his Tarzan. He leaned down to receive the bolt, and our fingers met for a moment, so that I didn’t notice I was twenty feet in the air atop a cliff. I just felt the warmth of his hand and the urge to go wherever he was.

  It was a powerful sensation, and strange. A compulsion that was almost irresistible. Climbing back down the tower, I stood at the bottom, trying to decide if I’d ever felt anything like that before. There were few enticements on the face of the earth that could have convinced me to climb that high. I’d lived in Colorado for six years, but I didn’t ski because I was terrified of the lifts. I’d never been across the Royal Gorge, even though Sydney begged me every time we were in Canyon City. I was petrified of both the suspension bridge and the gondola. It was all I could do to stand at the edge and look through the chain-link fence.

  It occurred to me that I’d been looking at life through the chain-link fence ever since Sydney was born. For eight years I’d been afraid that something would happen to me and Sydney would be left alone. I’d been playing it safe.

  Afraid of life.

  And the thing was, that wasn’t me. Before I became an abandoned single mother, I’d been a risk taker who loved hiking and rock crawling and sports of all kinds. A world traveler who didn’t worry that I couldn’t speak the language.

  Now I had the lily-white complexion of a woman who hung around in basements being careful.

  Squinting against the late-day sun, I watched Zach perch atop the tall, pyramid-shaped tower, his long legs spraddled, boots hanging off the platform. He wasn’t the least bit worried about the height. He drove like a crazy person and climbed towers like Spiderman. He had a mysterious past and lived a thousand miles from where I lived. He definitely wasn’t safe.

  Yet when I was with him I felt grounded, even on top of a tower dangling on the edge of a cliff. Even handling a thousand-pound horse or driving breakneck across a pasture. I felt like I’d found the one place in the whole world that was right.

  It made absolutely no sense, but it was impossible to deny.

  I studied him, trying to figure out what it was—the it that made me feel like a giddy teenager. I tried to piece together the mystery as I would re-create an artifact, making suppositions and educated guesses where there were no facts, filling in the absent parts. The problem was that I barely knew him. There were too many missing pieces.

  I watched his hands sliding deftly over nuts and bolts and gears. I liked the way he moved, confidently, slowly, as if he’d never drop a bolt by accident.

  I fantasized that he’d dropped it on purpose, to get me to climb up.

  Glancing down, he smiled, and breath caught in my throat. I forgot all about puzzle pieces, and just enjoyed the lighter-than-air moment. Maybe that was the point, I decided—not to overanalyze, but to enjoy the temporary rebirth of a part of myself I had thought was lost and gone forever.

  Yet in the back of my mind a voice warned that it was going to be hard to go back to the basement after this, difficult to be satisfied with life behind the chain-l
ink fence.

  “Hand me that gear oil. The red can by the toolbox,” he said.

  I scooped up the oilcan and was up the tower like a rocket.

  After that we were a precision surgery team. Wrench, grease gun, screwdriver, rag, knuckle buster, pipe wrench, oilcan, rag, bolt, socket set, small soft-sided nylon bag with some kind of jars inside, crescent wrench, larger screwdriver, wrench, and …

  The windmill was done, successfully doctored by the crackerjack team of Zach and Lindsey. I was vaguely aware that we’d been there a long time, and I wasn’t going to make it to the riverbed today, but somehow that didn’t matter.

  Zach gave the windmill a pat as he tightened the last bolts on the bonnet. “Good as new,” he said, swinging his legs around so that they dangled beside the ladder. “No Bales brothers windmill service needed around here. This old girl will go a few more years.”

  “Congratulations, Doctor,” I joked, standing back from the tower. “Drop the tools down and I’ll put them away.” One thing I’d learned from years of hanging around my father’s woodshop was that tools should always be stored in the proper place.

  “Sure.” He pitched several tools off to the side, where they landed safely in the grass. I put them in the box. Zach was surprisingly organized. One more thing to like about him.

  “I love a woman who knows her tools,” he said. I found him watching me from the top of the windmill tower. The amber glow of the setting sun silhouetted his form, so that I couldn’t see his expression.

  Ignoring the twitter inside me, I finished putting away the screwdrivers and wrenches and returned for the bigger stuff, which couldn’t be tossed down from the tower. “Hand down the socket set and the bag with the jars in it,” I said, climbing a few steps and reaching toward him.

  “Come up and get them.” He was occupied with wiping the grease off his hands. His face was hidden beneath the the cowboy hat, so I wasn’t sure I’d heard him at first.

  “What?”

  “Come up and get them,” he repeated, patting the empty spot on the platform beside him.

  “Ummm … no.” Bracing my hands on my hips, I tried to appear flirtatiously stubborn, yet firm. But deep inside I knew I was already sold. I was going to climb the windmill tower and sit up there with him. It could have been five hundred feet in the air, and I probably still would have done it.

  “You’re missing the sunset.”

  “I can see it from here.”

  “I’ve got drinks up here.” He held out the nylon bag with the jars inside, which I now realized was a soft-sided cooler of some sort. “Cold drinks.”

  “Well”—pretend to think about it—“in that case”—pretend to think some more, act charmingly coy, gaze at sunset. Gorgeous sunset—“all right, then.” Grabbing the bottom rung of the ladder, I started upward one step at a time, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the rails. The tower seemed to sway beneath me as I neared the top, and I stopped two rungs below the platform.

  My head whirled and I felt sick. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  Zach’s hand slipped over mine easily, naturally. “One more step,” he coaxed.

  “Two,” I corrected, letting my head sag between my arms.

  His chuckle slipped over me like warm water. “All right, two. The view is worth it. Trust me.”

  Trust me. The words repeated in my mind. Once again I stood at the dividing line between fear and faith. Zach’s hand drew me across, and I climbed the last two steps, then inched onto the platform beneath the motionless windmill fan. Zach held tight, the circle of his fingers warm and solid as I scooted to the front of the tower, where the ground beneath dropped off so sharply that it felt like we were flying.

  “Wow,” I breathed, taking in the valley and the layered violet of the far hills. Overhead, the sky was painted with an array of colors only God could have imagined. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so amazing.”

  “Me either.” Zach leaned close, his body warm against mine, his gaze capturing me with a power that made everything else fall away. I closed my eyes, and his lips brushed mine, lightly at first, then with more intensity, with a deeper passion that sent my mind swirling. All the thoughts, worries, fears, questions were swept into the torrent of desire and disappeared like leaves in a gale—small, unimportant things that could not withstand the power of the storm. Pressing into him, I lost myself in his kiss, felt the steady drum of his heart beneath shirt and skin, imagined that my heart was now beating in time. Two moving as one.

  When our lips parted, I caught my breath like a dreamer awakening too suddenly. He blinked hard, as if it were a mystery to him, too, as if he were surprised by the awesome longing, the electric desire and invisible connection. His fingers traced the outline of my cheek, brushing away a stray strand of hair, skimming my shoulder and the curve of my arm to where my fingers clenched the cool metal frame of the windmill tower.

  A low chuckle made him smile. “Holding on?”

  “I think I’d better,” I breathed, and we sat gazing at each other for a few minutes before he finally cleared his throat and turned away, seeming embarrassed, or maybe just uncomfortable with the intensity of it all. I should have been, too. I should have been stunned, and afraid, and worried that I was starting something I couldn’t finish. But at the moment all I felt was contentment. There was no room for anything else.

  Reaching into the cooler, he brought out two glass soda bottles, pried off the caps on the edge of the windmill head, and handed me one.

  “Wow, Dublin Dr Pepper,” I said, still so light-headed that the presence of real Dublin Dr Pepper in a glass bottle seemed miraculous.

  Zach raised a brow. “You’re easy to please.”

  Me? Easy to please? I couldn’t recall anyone ever saying that to me before. Not once in my entire life. “Thanks,” I said, unable to imagine anything that could make the moment more perfect. “It’s been a really great day.”

  “Yes, it has.” He raised his Dr Pepper in a toast. “Here’s to tilting at windmills.”

  “Absolutely.” I tapped my bottle against his. The sentiment seemed particularly appropriate for the two of us, sitting atop a tower at the edge of earth and sky. Together we raised our bottles in a salute to the setting sun, in honor of impossible dreams, and tilting at windmills.

  We sat quietly for a long time, watching the day surrender and the first evening star twinkle to life overhead.

  “I guess it’s time go,” I said, facing the fact that it was getting dark, and we should head back before everything turned pitch-black. Zach seemed surprised or disappointed, I couldn’t tell which, so I added, “I mean, shouldn’t we get back to the road while there’s still some light?”

  He squinted speculatively. “Afraid to ride across the pasture with me in the dark?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Zach, I’m afraid to ride across the pasture with you in the broad daylight. You drive like a maniac.”

  He chuckled, raising a boot and bracing it beside himself. The platform shook as he shifted toward me. I grabbed on with both hands.

  “I’ll have you know,” he said, “that driving on this caliche soil is an art. One minute it’s mud, the next minute it’s loose gravel, and after a rain it has all the traction of axle grease. What seems like maniacal driving is really just years of training and experience in action.”

  I rolled my eyes at the lame argument. “You are so … ” I didn’t finish the sentence. He was going to kiss me again, and it seemed like a fine idea, so I raised my lips to his, taking the offensive for the first time in years. Zach seemed impressed. His hand slid into my hair, and his lips played hard on mine. I clung to the tower as a heady swirl of passion spun through my senses, whisking away all the normal frames of reference.

  When our lips parted, he studied me for a long moment. There was a question in his eyes, but in the end he didn’t ask it. Slipping his hand over mine, he loosened my grip, lifted my hand and kissed it, and pointed toward the horizon
with our fingers intertwined. “There,” he whispered. “Right there.” I followed his line of vision as a gigantic orange moon lifted from the hills just off the tips of my fingers.

  “How did you know where it would come up?” I asked.

  “Years of experience,” he answered against my hair, then chuckled and added, “Pop used to do that to me when I was a kid. For years he had me convinced that the moon wouldn’t come up until he called for it. It worked for me, because I was sure he hung the moon, anyway.”

  I smiled at the image of Pop as a younger man and Zach as a boy. “You’re lucky to have grown up so close to your grandparents. My dad’s mom passed away when I was fairly young. I always wished we lived near my mom’s folks. Sometimes I feel like I’m only giving Sydney half a life, because I can’t give her that grandparent relationship.” It was a surprisingly honest admission, one I’d never shared with anybody, not even my twin sister. “She barely remembers my mom, and my dad’s not really the touchy-feely type. There’s no family on Sydney’s father’s side. Not that he keeps in touch, anyway.” I left out the fact that, until this summer, Sydney hadn’t had her father, either.

  “I can tell she’s got a great mom.” Zach gave my hand a squeeze. “Some kids don’t even get that much.” The way he said it made me turn and look at him. It sounded like he was speaking from experience. A flicker of pain crossed his face.

  “What’s your mom like?” I asked, and he raised a brow at the question, seeming to think it came out of the blue. Nudging him on the shoulder, I added, “Come on, spill. I’m trying to figure you out, in case you haven’t noticed. You can tell a lot about a man by how he feels about his mom.”