Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  But on this day, he rode to war against an enemy whose face he could not see, and the targets on his radar screen told him that he must first evade the enormous dark clouds that stretched along the eastern flank of the Rockies from north of Boulder clear down past Colorado Springs. The cloud mass was forty thousand feet tall. Because—as the lack of tailwinds advised him—there were no winds aloft, a strange and ominous condition in itself, the tops of these behemoth thunderheads had not blown over into the classic anvil shape. Any pilot worth his salt knew what that meant. The hot, moist air was rising with terrifying force and probably carrying hail the size of golf balls. He’d have to divert far to the north or south to avoid them, continue east out toward Kansas and then turn west again before making his approach into Centennial, rather than risk being thrashed to splinters in the titanic updrafts those clouds represented.

  He focused his mind on the job of flying. He was flying to Centennial, where he’d pick up a car and continue to Castle Rock, where he would find Em. Find her and keep her safe, because each time he looked inside his own soul, he saw her, bright and shimmering, looking out at him.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE BIG, SPLASHING DROPS OF RAIN COALESCED INTO a cold, hammering downpour as I jacked the Jeep up to attach the spare tire. In no time at all, the air around us went dark with slanting lines of water. It covered the road until it glistened and began to run off. It hammered the roof of the Jeep. It wet us to the skin and chilled us to the bone.

  With water coursing down my nose and dripping from my hair, I turned the crank as fast as I could, first up to get the blown tire off and the spare tire on, and then down almost too fast, dropping the Jeep back onto the road. Julia stood by helplessly, her knee so stiff and painful now that she held it straight.

  “Get back in the car,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do out here.”

  Julia raised the back door of the Jeep and got out a jacket with a hood. “Here, wear this at least,” she said.

  I put it on to humor her, but I was already soaked to the skin. It was a faded red and had MCWAIN GEOLOGICAL CONSULTING embroidered across the right breast pocket, to match the logo painted on the doors of the Jeep. “When did you have this made up?”

  “Just before we bought the ranch. I thought Afton would like it. It seems I didn’t understand his ethic or at least the one he was changing to. Something about being made in a Third World country where they use child labor and adult semi-slavery.”

  “There’s some truth to all that, isn’t there?”

  “Yeah, but as long as he’s feeling so tender-hearted about children and overburdened adults, how about the ones he left behind in Denver?”

  I shook my head as I cranked the second to the last lug nut back into place.

  Julia huddled underneath the raised tailgate and shivered.

  It began to hail. Big, white Ping-Pong ball–sized lumps of ice came spitting out of the sky like a Dr. Seuss story gone deadly. I jumped under the cover of the open tailgate. Julia motioned for me to climb in with her so she could lower it in case the hail started breaking glass. When she managed to pull the thing down on her foot, she began to invent whole new combinations of swear words.

  The drumming of the hailstones on the roof of the Jeep was deafening. The individual stones came larger and larger. A particularly large stone hit the windshield, breaking the glass into a perfect spider’s web of cracks, and I could see them ricocheting off the rental car. I shouted, “Both vehicles are going to look like golf balls when this is over!”

  “Sons of bitches, bastards all,” growled Julia.

  “How’s your insurance?” I inquired.

  “Passable. Big deductible.”

  “Life sure can suck.”

  “Amen, sister.”

  The hail passed, but the rain kept coming, even faster. The ruined windshield coursed with water, but held, letting only a thin stream of water through. “I’m going to finish up quick while I can,” I said.

  “If you insist on going back out there, use this,” she said, handing me a hard hat emblazoned with the McWain logo.

  I loosened the fitting band and put it on. “You might have given this to me earlier,” I said. “It would have spared my coiffure.”

  “Yeah, you and the gilded Gilda. Hey, now that we have four tires under this thing again, let’s drive up to the ranch and spin mud all over her fucking yurt.”

  “Whoa there,” I said. “You want to watch that temper of yours, Julia. If that Upton guy doesn’t file a complaint on you for punching him out, then mixing it up with Gilda will certainly do the trick.”

  Julia growled, “You’re right. I’d better keep my distance. If I get within striking distance of that bloodsucking tick, she’s dead.”

  “Watch who you say that around, Julia.”

  She broke into fresh tears. “You don’t think I’d actually do something that stupid, do you?”

  “No. You’re stupid enough to marry a man so selfish he leaves you without a spare tire in a field vehicle, and you’re stupid enough to drive up a dirt road without replacing it, but both of those are stupidity against yourself. You are not so stupid that you’d be stupid at someone else.” I launched myself over the back of the seat and ventured forth again into the downpour.

  A fresh onslaught of rain came rushing down the hill like an advancing curtain. Just before it drove down upon me, Julia rolled down the window and cried, “What’s that?”

  I turned to see where she was pointing, up toward the McWain ranch. “I don’t see anything,” I hollered.

  “I thought I saw something moving up on the nearest ridge, just a couple hundred yards away.”

  I squinted into the rain but saw nothing. “Do you still see it?”

  “No …” She was huddled in the car, shivering. Afraid.

  I set to work, hurrying as I tightened the final lug nuts. In half a minute, I was done, and I climbed back into the Jeep, this time in the driver’s seat. For a moment, I contemplated the mess the hail had made of the windshield. I could barely see through it.

  Julia climbed forward over the seats. She said, “I’ll drive.”

  “The hell you will. This thing has a standard shift.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll just pull up next to the rental car. You can drive that. You need to get back to Denver, right? It’s your left knee that’s messed up, but you can drive the automatic shift just fine.”

  “But I’m not listed on the insurance.”

  “I can phone the rental company and have you listed. What, would you prefer I drive you to Denver? And then figure out how you’re going to come back and get the Jeep? No, we’ll switch and I can drop the Jeep off and pick up the rental on my way to the airport.” I started up the Jeep and eased it forward to pull up next to the sedan, watching through the right-hand window to make sure I wasn’t getting too close, because I could barely see through the windshield. “The keys are in it,” I said. “I’ll meet you at your house in an hour or so.”

  She looked at her wounded leg. She tried to bend it. She winced. Then she grabbed her cell phone out of its cradle on the dashboard and prepared to get out. “You’re following me, aren’t you?”

  “I have one more thing I want to do first.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “I’ve got to sample a few of those red clay soils, like just along here toward Johnson’s ranch. And chert pebbles. I saw some sticking out of a cut bank down by where Jarre and Plum Creeks come together.”

  “N-n-no!”

  “No?” I put a hand on her. “You’re shivering, Julia. Get into that rental car and push up the heat.”

  “I can’t leave you out here by yourself! What if you got hypothermic? And what if I have trouble driving that thing? Follow me, Em, please!”

  “Come on, I’m a tough old ranch girl. I want to go home, and I can’t go until I grab those samples. I’m already up here and soaking wet, so what do I have to lose? It’ll take me f
ive minutes and I’m out of here. You run along. If you have any trouble, I’ll be coming along behind you. Take 67 to 85 and 85 to I-25. It’ll be safest. You have trouble, call me on my cell phone.”

  Her eyes shone with anxiety and her teeth were bared in horror.

  I said, “Julia, get out of here! Your lips are turning blue. Come on, the hail’s stopped. I want to get those samples and get my butt home to Utah.”

  Julia at last did as I said, giving me one last bedraggled look and slipping quickly from one vehicle to the other. She started up the rental car and drove away.

  I waited for a minute, listening to the rain, trying to let it be okay that I simply couldn’t tolerate another moment of Julia’s craziness. What had happened to my old friend? Had life become so damned disappointing that she couldn’t pull herself together any better than this? Small thoughts trickled through my mind, the kind that point toward partings of the way, little justifications and rationalizations and one great big, nasty, in-my-face realization that some people move on with life and others fall behind.

  The windshield wipers slapped back and forth, doing almost no good against the fractured glass. The clouds and rain had settled in so thickly now that I saw fit to turn on the headlights. I looked at the clock on the dash. It was only three in the afternoon, but it looked like dusk.

  I took a deep breath and put the Jeep back in gear, but did not let out the clutch. Now that I was alone, I discovered that I was in fact feeling a little anxious myself. Why would grabbing a sample frighten me? I asked myself. I’m simply saving an extra trip. I’m not nosing around on anybody’s property. And it’s not the storm; I’ve ridden horseback twenty miles in rains as hard as this. So what’s my problem?

  Okay, I admitted to myself, so the windshield’s screwed up and three of your tires are bald. How’s that so different from driving Dad’s tractor to harvest alfalfa?

  I tried to calm myself, tried to think of something quiet and reassuring. The image of Fritz opened in my mind like a deck of cards fanning out smoothly, lined up by number and suit, except for one joker where a Jack should be, which made me smile. What had Julia said? I should look at him as a mirror?

  Another bolt of lightning hit, followed within ten seconds by a crash of thunder. The center of the storm was moving closer. It was time to grab my samples or give up.

  I glanced around to make certain that there was plenty of higher ground around me so that I wouldn’t become a lightning rod. Twisting my face with the mental effort of trying to see through the small portion of the windshield that wasn’t smashed, I headed up the dirt road that led toward Bart Johnson’s ranch and drove along past the corner where the fence turned to the juncture with his entrance track. I was almost sad that the Rhodesian ridgeback wasn’t there to bark at me. The place was just a sea of running rain and mud, disconsolate and cold.

  I set the brake and hopped out, leaving the Jeep in the center of the road so it wouldn’t slide off into the ditch, the engine and the wipers running for whatever good they might do, and scratched quickly at the bank where it was dripping red like the blood of Mother Earth. Stuffing a wad of clay into the pocket of my jeans, I hopped back into the Jeep, closed the door, and removed the hard hat at last. My hair stuck to my forehead like paste. I thought of digging for another plastic bag for my so-called evidence but decided that it made no substantive difference whether it was hermetically sealed at the site anyway—this evidence was hardly conclusive of much of anything—so I left the muck where it was, cold and wet against my thigh.

  As I eased the Jeep back into gear, I felt the tires slip. Cursing Julia for driving a car that not only lacked a spare but needed new tread, I put my foot on the brake and reached for the lever that would shift it into four-wheel drive. As my hand landed on the lever, I heard a horn sound behind me.

  The lever wouldn’t go into all-wheel gear. “Old-fashioned piece of junk!” I cursed, trying it a second and a third time.

  The horn sounded behind me again, longer, more insistent.

  I switched on the rear wiper blade, straightened up, and peered into the rear-view mirror. All I could see through the coursing rain and gloom was the muddy glow of a pair of headlights, high up like another SUV, but wider, like a truck. Cursing my luck at finding myself in front of a rancher in a hurry, I belayed the attempt to put Julia’s Jeep in four-wheel drive and instead pressed down on the accelerator. The tires spun then caught and the Jeep began to roll forward. Racking it up through the gears, I glanced into the mirror again. The other vehicle was still close behind me, even closer now, and the driver again sounded its horn. I drove faster, then tapped the brakes to flash red lights in the driver’s eyes, get him to back off. The truck careened in and rammed my rear bumper. Stunned, I glanced backward over my shoulder. In a flash of lightning, I saw two fists clutched across the top of the steering wheel of the vehicle behind me and above that, the brim of a hat. The driver was so intent on riding up my back that he was bent almost to the wheel.

  My heart rattled in my chest. Half scared and half furious, I stepped on it, hurrying to get away from this idiot. The horn sounded again. In one last glance at the rear-view mirror, I saw the high headlights hurtling toward me. Again he rammed me, jerking my neck. No longer thinking about what I was doing, I stood on the gas pedal so hard my butt lifted off the seat.

  Acceleration did not happen. Instead, I began sliding. Panicking, I racked the Jeep into lower gear and again floored it, hoping I could regain traction. The Jeep’s wiper blades slapped frantically, but did nothing to clear the shattered glass. I felt the road pitch downhill. I was going at least forty miles per hour on an exquisitely slick surface with rocks to both sides. In a flash of lightning, I saw the vague outlines of the road swerving off to the right. I tapped the brakes then released them. I was caught between two hells, afraid to accelerate but certain that I should not stop. My back end swung out madly to the left. The big truck slewed wildly up on my right and turned toward me, ramming my rear wheel well. I felt the Jeep spin. It pirouetted crazily across the road, hit the ditch with a sickening lurch, and began to roll.

  The world spun around me. I felt a giant’s thumbs pushing into my ears and knew I was taking high G’s. My neck snapped this way and that. Objects flew around the cab of the Jeep.

  It took me a while to realize that the Jeep had come to rest. The world slowly spun down to a lazy, sickening swaying sensation. Precious moments passed. As I collected my wits, I noticed that the top of my head felt odd and with that, knew that I must be hanging upside down. I braced one hand downward against the ceiling and released the seat belt. I fell like a sack of wet cement, bruising my hip on the dome light, which for some reason had turned itself on. That means a door is ajar, I remember thinking, but I couldn’t reason out which one.

  I smelled gasoline.

  I knew I couldn’t stay in the Jeep—it could catch fire, and the other driver would be checking to make sure of his kill—but I couldn’t get my mind to understand which way to go to find the window openers. Are they hand-crank or electric? I wondered and noted numbly that I had not taken the time to familiarize myself with the vehicle before agreeing to drive it. Daddy taught me better than that, a tiny little girl deep inside of me whimpered.

  I rolled my head left and right and heard a nasty crackling sound in my neck but was at last able to ascertain which end of the box I was in faced forward. I aimed my feet that direction and kicked as hard as I could. The glass gave way softly, sending a painful jolt through my bruised body as my legs overshot their mark.

  The space between the dashboard and the roof of the car seemed narrower than I remembered. I squeezed out into the sodden ground, trying through my shock to get my bearings. Water was running through the shattered windshield, carrying sand and bits of plants. Something sharp jabbed into the palm of one hand. I wiggled like an eel, squeezing through the space between the wrecked hood of the Jeep and the rocks it had landed on. The sounds of rushing water and rain and the
slapping of feet sounded on the road. I broke free of my prison, sprang to my feet, and ran for my life.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I STUMBLED FRANTICALLY THROUGH THE SCRUB, NOW smelling sage, now something sweeter, climbing for high ground and the cover of a jagged outcropping of rocks that I could see above me. Once on top of the ridge I ducked in behind a line of boulders and kept on running, hoping I was heading toward Jarre Creek, the paved road, and the hope of finding the highway. The thought shot through my mind—What if I flag down the guy who just rammed me?—but I pushed it away and put everything I had into my clattering run over the rain-slick stones. I climbed, grit biting into my hands.

  Burning lead filled my lungs, and I fell in between two boulders to catch my rasping breath. My saliva ran hot and burned my throat like acid. I gasped and wheezed, my rib cage working like a bellows.

  I yanked in a breath and held it, listening.

  Nothing.

  Cautiously, I let out my breath and forced it to come in slowly, quietly. My head pounded and my hands felt like they were full of glass. I peered down toward the road.

  I could not see the truck that had hit me. Where had it gone? Was the driver close by, out of sight below the rocks? Had he gone up a ranch road to come at me from another side? I listened. I could hear nothing over the driving rain, and it cut the visibility to a hundred yards or less.

  My body was stiff with pain and growing colder by the instant.