by Bud Crawford
Because the trees had not yet formed leaves, they could see through to the shape of the ground pushing up towards them as they drove along the ridge. Views opened sometimes to the northwest, an overlap of ridge after ridge, hazier and more blue at the limit of sight, Virginia into West Virginia. Sometimes the view opened southwest, towards North Carolina, looking across the valley at the twin ridge, which became behind them all the Blue Ridge there was, until they ran together up into the Poconos. A hundred miles ahead, the mountain ranges swelled wider, until they reached their maximum breadth through the Great Smokies Park, with its generally higher elevations. Sometimes they had both views at once, northwest to the right and southwest to the left, when the road was at the exact apex of the ridge. The Parkway, including the north-east end called the Skyline Drive, stretched along five-hundred-seventy miles of Appalachian forests and peaks.
Geoff drove without stopping for the first fifty miles, a relatively low-lying stretch just out of Roanoke. Rolling hills wrapped farmland, even a few clumps of houses. Once up into the mountains, he pulled off at every overlook. Sometimes they just idled a minute or two and resumed driving. Sometimes they walked to the edges of the parking lots for longer views, shot some photos, and peered up or down the trail heads. They read the plaques and feasted on near views of wildflower, grass, lichen, fern, moss and rock. Sometimes they walked out a few hundred yards along the shorter trail loops.
"We live here," Geoff said, back on the road, "we see this all the time. It is a silent unending orgy for the eyeballs. I counted twelve different lichens on one rock, back there. But why do we have to drive hundreds of miles to notice what's in our own yard?"
"Well, one thing is, we're focused on noticing, it's a trip. And it is different up here, because you see so much at once, so far away. From our house there's one view down the cove. Up behind us is the woods. Climb to our ridge and you see some more. But it's not presented, like this, over and over as you go along, framed by that huge sky." Ellen stepped her camera through the pictures she'd just shot. "I got some pretty stuff. I saw you snapping, too, have you looked yet?"
"No. You'll remember I'm the one who never minded waiting a week to get pictures developed. They're good or they aren't, seeing them doesn't change them, and they mean more later." He had the cruise control set at the 45 miles-per-hour the parkway allowed, but they rarely traveled more than one or two miles without having to reset. Gawkers would suddenly brake, bicycles wobbled up the road, motorbikes cruised side-by-side, hikers crossed. The Parkway was always a glorious drive, not ever a swift one.
Even so, they made good time, in Parkway terms, and crossed into North Carolina a little before noon. They pressed on another half-hour, then stopped for lunch at the Doughton Park overlook. There were a dozen or so sets of picnic tables, as few as two, as many as ten. They parked where there were four wood tables, twenty yards into the woods from the parking lot; three were in use. While setting up on the farthest table Ellen noticed a young couple standing uncertainly at the end of the path from the parking lot, both wearing loose baggy shorts and bright baggy tops; the woman held the handles of a plastic cooler, the man carried a picnic hamper.
"Come on," she waved to them, "everybody else is already spread out. We'll just take one end here, you guys can have the other end." She put the cooler on the ground; and Geoff helped her lift the lunch stuff up onto the table.
Netty and Art Jordan were so relieved by Ellen's invitation, quelling the discomfort of having nowhere to settle with their brand-new wicker hamper, that their bashfulness changed almost immediately into a confiding eagerness. They were honeymooners, Netty didn't blush but Art did, just this morning started out from Boone, North Carolina, where they were graduate students. They'd rented a cabin for a week up in Virginia, in Fancy Gap. They were going to hike and just spend time together. Someday maybe they'd take a longer trip, maybe a cruise, but they only had spring-break. Lucky it was really late this year.
Geoff and Ellen shared the half bottle of Cabernet in a four-way toast. The Jordans babbled on top of each other with such happy ease that they just ate and listened, tossing out brief questions whenever the pace slowed. Netty and Art were finishing degrees in education, in June. She was in history, he was in science, and they hoped to find a high school in Charlotte that would hire them both. They planned to rent an apartment and save up money for a house, her family would help. Netty knew exactly how she wanted the house to look. She pulled out a two-year-old Dream House magazine folded open to a article called 'Design Focus: Making Your House Work for You, Room by Room.' It was a way of thinking, she explained, about how to put things together, based on how each room would be used, so your house expressed the way you lived.
It was the analytical approach that appealed to him, Art said, setting up rooms and picking out furniture based on what you wanted to do, not just because they looked a certain way. The article wasn't the only thing, of course, Netty said. There was a lot of chemistry between them … this time they both blushed … but finding out they agreed so completely about how to put a house together had been one of the things that helped them realize they were right for each other.
"Pretty silly," Art said, "it was just an article. But it sort of locked us in."
"Oh, it's not silly," said Geoff. "Ellie Armstrong pieces are famous for romantical efficacy. You're not the first to fall under her spell. We've been married thirteen years, and I can still remember the first article I saw."
"Don't pay him any attention." Ellen started gathering what was left from lunch. "He's being foolish. It doesn't matter what brought you together. We're sure you're about to have a fantastic week." She stood and lifted the cooler onto the table in one motion. "It was great to meet you at such a special time. Good luck with your teaching contracts." Stepping from the table with the cooler in her left hand, she shook hands with Art and hugged Netty with one arm. "Come on, Geoff, we promised Stephanie we'd meet for tea."
Geoff lifted one leg, then the other over the bench. "Just remember, kids, it's okay if your partner starts before you do, because it can't happen until you're there, too." Ellen had disappeared up the path to the parking area. He followed her, pausing to turn and wave at Art and Netty, who hadn't said anything since Ellen left. He smiled at them, and they smiled first at him, then at each other. His temples were pounding, his step was a little uncertain.
~
James Richter remembered, after a minute, where he was. Nodding off, middle of the afternoon, wasn't like him. Of course, since he also remembered last night, which had kept on until about three AM, it wasn't so hard to figure out why the nap after today's sex. She wanted a gun, he wanted to fuck, a pretty straight up deal. Tit for gat. The normal wait for a new customized Ed Brown pistol ranged from a couple weeks to a couple months, depending on the modifications you wanted. He made it happen in two days, and in exchange got to play in her bed for an hour. The shower was running across the hall. Time he cleared out.
He assessed the core question, as he always did: it was his good this time. Couple thousand dollars worth of gun, plus the delivery timing. She was pretty hot, but in balance, he was up on this one. Friends with benefits, the college kids called it? Maybe just that, maybe he'd need her architectural expertise some day. Life was good, James decided, it just was. Blue jeans, tee-shirt, ball cap? Well, an outfit was an outfit, but now the gun running was done, he'd upscale a bit. At least he'd kept the brim in front, and it was a Dodgers cap. Brooklyn Dodgers, so he still stood for something, even if nobody else knew. He had hidden a single rose stem in the bag with the pistol. He slipped it out now from the paper sack, unfolded the plastic wrapper and laid it across the 1911 automatic, the suddenly fragrant flower just past the hammer, set onto one of his cards with the embossed "J". He was out the door just as the water stopped running.
chapter fourth
Ellen was in the driver's seat, the cooler already packed. Geoff got in and Ellen put them back on the Parkway.
"I
'm sorry," she said. "That must have been hard."
"Yeah. Not right away, there was a little shock, and I thought that was all. Then it just kept building. Thanks for the extraction." Geoff reached across to put his hand on her leg, on the skin below her shorts.
"I saw you. It looked for a second like your eyes turned inside out." She put her hand on his.
"They've been on my mind a lot recently, I don't know why, it cycles around." He pulled his hand back and pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes. Darkness decorated with little flashing arcs and points. "She would be seventy-two now, he'd be seventy four. Fifty, fifty-two when they died. Only a few years older than we are. Twenty-two years ago."
The arithmetic wasn't comforting, it was just something to focus on, off to the side of what he was feeling. Chris and Robin Fletcher, Geoff's parents, had been teachers in the Denver Public Schools when they had been killed. They didn't teach in the same school, and not history and science. But Netty's and Art's dew-eyed eagerness had triggered a flashback into unresolved and still frightening places. He had been twenty, his brother seventeen, his sister fifteen, when they suddenly became orphans. The shock had never faded. It would recede, sometimes for long periods, but when it returned, it was always at full intensity. The deaths had been ruled accidental, though they probably weren't, but no one had been charged or even seriously suspected. The family home had burned to the ground one day, with Chris and Robin alone inside when they should have been at work. No serious effort was made at rescue, because the house was presumed empty. There had never been an explanation … just five lives suddenly ripped apart.
He and his siblings discovered they were well-off orphans, over the following months. The inheritance from grandfather Fletcher had never been mentioned to the children. They'd lived comfortably but frugally on two school teacher salaries. Geoff and his sister continued to live that way, as if it was still a secret, handy in times of crisis, invisible in daily life. His brother had invested portions of his share in a dozen sure-fire money-multiplying schemes, none of which had worked for long. Geoff missed his kid brother, but hadn't much sympathy or patience with the adult he'd grown into. The breach between the brothers was as painful as his parents' early death, was joined with it, like a scab over a wound, picking at which forever kept the underlying injury from healing.
Geoff lifted his hands off his eyes and was momentarily blinded by the brightness of the April afternoon. As his pupils adjusted, he saw up the road an angry thunderhead, strange and unreal, black against the otherwise unbroken blue of the sky. The Parkway led them directly into the cloud. Two minutes later the sun was gone and they were deafened by the shatter of raindrops against the roof of the van. It got louder a minute after that as the rain turned into pellets of hail assaulting the sheet metal. Ellen pulled onto the shoulder of the Parkway to wait out the storm. For ten minutes wind rocked the van and hail seemed about to break through the roof and the windshields. They could not talk, could not think. The din softened into heavy rain, that became steady rain, then light rain. Then it stopped, and the sun pushed the cloud up the road behind them. Somebody else's storm now. The rain had washed away the hail except a few scattered clumps in the grass.
Ellen pulled back onto the pavement. If another car had passed while they waited, she hadn't seen it. "Well, I'm impressed. How did you summon that?"
"Strangely, it helped, kind of blew away the blackness inside." He reconnected the seatbelt, which he'd unhooked during the storm to feel a little less like Prometheus on the rock while the birds, or the hail, pecked at his liver. The day was as sparkling and untroubled as it had been when they pulled off for lunch, forty-five minutes before. "Suit yourself on the overlooks. I'm okay with driving straight through. I'm okay with stopping." He remembered that they were going to see Stephanie in a couple hours. He stretched out his arms and legs as much as he could, strapped in the seat.
Ellen skipped most of the little overlooks, but pulled off at the major ones, for brief walks and picture-taking. It was actually later in North Carolina than it had been in Virginia, botanically. They were traveling through time, as they climbed into the mountains. Being more southerly trumped the higher altitudes. Along the highest ridge tops, at the edge of vision, there were just silver and gold buds glowing. In the valleys below tiny new leaves had begun to open.
Neither of them had driven on the Linn Cove Viaduct, the final section of the Parkway to be built, finished just a couple years earlier. They stopped before the viaduct, in the middle, and again at the end. They walked the short trail underneath. It was an Appalachian version of the platform over the Grand Canyon that the Utes were building, a perch in the sky. The visitors' center answered, with photographs and film loops, all of their questions about the engineering.
But after six hours, Ellen thought to herself, it was beginning to seem like work, reaching inwards to find sufficient appreciation for the wonders in view. Extreme beauty, long enough sustained, wears out the spirit. There's a slogan for a t-shirt. Geoff, as she looked across at him, was inertial as always, once in motion content to stay in motion. She was ready to light for a while. They were close. She skipped all the remaining invitations to linger.
By three-thirty, she had pulled off the parkway onto Town Mountain Road. Geoff paged through the maps he'd printed out last night, he was comforted knowing where he was. He didn't bother to advise Ellen, who could never be lost, because being someplace new wasn't lost, as she had explained so many times, it was how you learned new things. Wriggling three miles down among the fancy new houses and the older not-so-fancy houses, she snaked them off the mountain into the grid of streets across the expressway from downtown Asheville, into the Montford Historical District, and pulled up along the sidewalk outside Juniper House.
"So where are we?" she asked.
"Right here," he touched his finger to the center of the top sheet.
"The map is the territory?" She unbuckled her seat belt and finished the last swallow of cold coffee from her cup.
"Semantics is not the territory. Sometimes I have been very helpful to you. Sometimes finding out about new places matters less than getting where you're supposed to be."
"Let's go," she opened the door. "and get us some tea."
~
It was four-thirty, David saw. He enjoyed doing that, checking his watch, the crystal as clear as air, the gold case solid and warm against his wrist, the chain-mail links of the gold band (though plated, unlike the case) also warm and buttery soft. The diamond studs circling the face were discrete, not garish. The face was gold and cream with clean black hands, golden Roman numerals, with gem specks to mark the exact hours, emerald and ruby alternating. You could ask, it was a reasonable question, whether it was possible for a wrist watch, a mere watch, to be worth twenty-six thousand dollars? Abstractly, it was reasonable to ask. But wear it for a minute, or even just hold it. Feel the smooth density of the living mechanism, the incredibly delicate double-click as the escapement releases a tiny discrete quota of energy from the spring to the gears that pivot on even more jewels inside the case. Sense the constant whisper-smooth reloading of the spring as the pendulum shifts inside with every movement of the wrist. Press it to your cheek. The question answers itself. David wrapped his fingers around the band, caressing.
Well, anyway, four-thirty. Busy week coming at Metrocor-Charlotte. Centurion meeting tomorrow morning, whole staff Wednesday. By Friday all the March reports had to be finished. And they should be able to get a rough summary of pre-tax-return transactions, IRA contributions and draw-downs chiefly, as well as all regular business for the first half of the month. By the end of the month, just two weeks away, he'd need to settle the 2005 bonus awards for Centurions and the regular sales staff. Then all the district offices would be reporting in with finished March figures and preliminary April ones. Good thing he'd get Harold back for the last push, there weren't really any of the others who could be trusted with final numbers. Harold was error-free, a
lways.
Wish he was here this week, but David couldn't really argue with the anniversary trip, not after all the extra hours Harold had put in the first two weeks of April. He'd earned a break, but he'd probably be too worn out to get the good of it. Crying shame to waste Stephanie. A little skinny to David's taste, the dancer thing. But you get thinking about the flexibility, the legs opening up like they can do, and skinny doesn't matter so much. He hadn't got very far with her at the Christmas party. Not clear if she just needed a little more pressure, or if he'd have to work out a play of some kind using Harold. Get something on him, tell her he had something, anyway, then offer a chance to save her husband's ass. That would work, the simplest variations always worked best. Sexy clever bitch, little Stef, but it wouldn't be necessary to invent anything new to take her down, just find the right angle of approach. Let the April dust settle out first, of course.
Meanwhile, get used to the idea of a week of actual work. Maybe hit the roads this weekend. He loved his Porsche, his scarlet harlot, never had a better car, but it feels foolish commuting in it. Twelve miles a day, forty miles per hour, like a watch spring that was all winding up, no release. It was four-thirty four. He'd be stuck here at least until nine or nine-thirty, but he needed a little release, now. He reached across his desk to the intercom. "Gert," he said to his office manager, "have Tina to bring me the Fender file, right away." All code of course, Tina wasn't completely unqualified for work in a brokerage, but her highest use was non-technical; and though there was a Fender file, nothing was in it. Tina knocked lightly on the door, less then a minute later, and slipped inside. She locked the door behind her, set the empty folder to his desk, and stood facing him. Arms at her sides, smiling, happy to be there. She was pretty with dark curly hair, pale pink skin. It didn't matter if she really was happy, but he liked that she considered it part of her job to make him think she was. He pointed to her blouse and flicked his fingers upwards, with a little double pulse.
