Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  I stood outside until my jeans turned stiff from the cold, then checked my watch. Six-twenty. I was early.

  I waited eight more minutes and then went in.

  *****

  There was nobody to be seen in the vast central orb of the building. This is the heart of the Community Center, the Circle Room. A skating rink could fit in here. Radiating from this hub are corridors which lead to offices.

  I didn’t know which corridor led to Krom.

  I gravitated to the room’s centerpiece, a great pit within which seems to float a good deal of Mono County. I began to circumnavigate the relief map. I saw him then, some thirty degrees northeast, hunched on one of the split-log benches that face the pit. He motioned me forward. I came along, my boot soles squeaking like mice on the tile floor.

  He rose. He had the Mammoth Times in hand.

  I stared, like he’d just risen naked and steaming from the waters of Hot Creek.

  But of course he was dressed. Tan parka, brown cords, brown cowboy boots. Brown hair wet-combed into submission. Tanned face smooth-shaven. His eyes, though, were reddened like he’d not been sleeping well.

  He waited until I got close and then tossed the newspaper onto his bench. “Seen this?”

  No chitchat, no attempt to explain, no bullshit about consenting adults. Still, I could not help reading the headline for the umpteenth time. CZAR TRADES SAFETY FOR SEX. It was worse, this time, because the subject of the headline was standing in front of me.

  I found my voice. “I’ve read it.”

  “And?”

  “That’s not why I asked to see you. I want to talk to you about Hot Creek, yeah. But not…” I scrupulously avoided looking at the paper, “not about you and Jeanine. You and Georgia.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “That was a private matter.”

  “Not anymore. Lindsay told me.”

  “I hadn’t taken Lindsay for a common gossip.” He glanced at the newspaper. “ I hadn’t taken Lindsay for a blackmailer, either.”

  I almost didn’t let that pass. “Lindsay told me about you and Georgia at the creek because there’s sulfur and calcite in the evidence.” That was stretching the truth; she told me because she bears a grudge against him. “Meaning, the last place Georgia walked might have been near a hot spring.”

  “She die at Hot Creek?” he asked, blunt.

  “No. No match there. But I wondered if…after the creek…Georgia might have gone looking for another spring.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily follow.”

  “I’m speculating.” Wild-ass leaping, more like it. “Georgia had a romantic streak—I mean, going to the creek, to that chunk of limestone to dig out a crinoid for you. That’s not how she normally shopped. But what a perfect gift. I know what that’s like, wracking your brain to find the perfect gift for your boyfriend. When you’re in love—or in lust, whatever—you go the extra mile, so to speak. You get a little black dress, a sexy number to wow your guy. So the crinoid was her sexy black dress. Metaphorically speaking. And it worked. Wowed you enough that you two ended up in the creek.” I ran out of breath. I waited for him to say something.

  He didn’t.

  I leapt onward. “If it were me, I’d want to, I don’t know, repeat the encounter. If I were in love, or in lust or whatever.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “She sure liked it. Enough to tell Lindsay.”

  “She liked the experience. But Hot Creek was too public for her.”

  “Then why’d she bring you there?”

  “She didn’t. I brought her. After she told me where she got the crinoid, I wanted to have a look. I collect. And there we were. I like the place.” He looked hard at me. “As you well know.”

  I held his look. I thought, if a shrink got hold of him there was probably a diagnosable condition. The intense need to control. The over-compensating ego. The delusions of grandeur. The almost symbiotic relationship with the volcano and its offshoots.

  I said, raising my question again, “Well then, if she liked the experience, I’m wondering if she went looking for another hot spring. Less public.” A place, I thought, where the soil was rich in sulfur and calcite and pumice and cinders and granite. And gunpowder. And where in the Sierra was that?

  Krom suddenly reached for me.

  I flinched.

  He grazed the small of my back and turned me to face the relief map. “Have a look. You tell me where she went.”

  I looked down at the map. It was eerily real. If you flew over over the actual landscape in a small plane, it would look a lot like this relief map. The flat oval of the caldera is ringed by mountain ranges, like a broad barrel. It always puts me in mind of that carnival ride where you’re spun inside a barrel and the floor drops out, which is pretty much what happened when the old magma chamber vented and the valley floor dropped a mile. The mapmaker had pinched up the mountains into folds so that you can look down upon the topography and feel the climb in your legs. The lakes and streams are so blue they splash. Mammoth Mountain’s broad summit and muscular slopes are sculpted to ski, and beneath, the town in tiny jewels clings to the brawny land.

  But the mapmaker could not show change.

  There was no indication of the rapid swelling in the caldera, where magma’s forcing its way up. There was no depiction of the churning evolution at Hot Creek. Hot Creek was just a slash of pretty blue.

  I turned back to Krom. “I don’t see anything.”

  “You don’t?” He pointed. “There’s Casa Diablo, where you taught me how it’s done.”

  It took all the will I possessed not to look down.

  “And just to the south is Hot Creek. Where the safety of your town is being toyed with.”

  “That’s a bit over-dramatic.”

  “Is it?” He pressed his hand again into my back, like a dance partner, turning me. “Let’s go to my office. I want you to see what’s at stake.”

  He escorted me to a corridor and we passed closed doors—Georgia’s office, still unoccupied, Parks and Rec, Senior Volunteers, the men’s room—and came to the office at the end of the hall. Door was open. I looked in. Prime real estate, double size, the back wall a window with a view of the woods.

  He said, “Georgia set me up here.”

  We went in.

  Busy office, big desk, phone bank, in-box stacked to the roof. Computer hutch. Storage cabinet. Maps on the wall, calendar filled in. Aerial photos; roads highlighted with black marker. Sketch of Pika Canyon, the new escape route he pitched at the Inn. On top of a bookshelf was a display of rocks—obsidian and lapilli and Pelee’s tears and all the other stone faces of volcansim. Tucked in amongst disaster was a fossil sea lily, the crinoid gift I assumed.

  He turned me to the near wall.

  Photographs. A mural of death. Aerial shot of three bodies in the bed of a pickup, composition in gray, landscape and truck and bodies fuzzed in ash. Mount Saint Helens; I’d seen that shot before. Other things I hadn’t seen. Closeup of an arm, carbonized, the hand terminating in stubs. Another closeup, mummified face cooked to the color of sunset. Medium shot of a charred family—about to run?—frozen in motion. I’d heard of that, when volcanic fire burns so hot the muscles go spastic at the moment of death. More photos, closeup, long shot, group, color, black-and-white, and that hard to tell from ash gray. Melted flesh, arms, legs, feet in shoes, not one part connected to the other. A lone head, open mouth plugged with ash.

  He said, “A reminder.”

  He didn’t have to turn me again. I moved as far from him as I could and came to the wall flanking his desk. Another mural, a wall of framed certificates. In grateful recognition of. For outstanding devotion to. In appreciation for. Service. Professional conduct. Excellence in Management. Courage. Courage was the one that held me. No gold seals, no Gothic font, no long-winded dedication. Just a plain paper that read in block letters To Adrian Krom. For His Courage. From the people of Homer, Alaska.

  He said, “That’s what I bring to
your town.”

  I turned.

  “And now my reputation is on the line.” He stuck his hands into the pockets of his brown cords. “You see, Cassie, I got a phone call this morning, early, from Len Carow. You remember Len, the man who wants to achieve nothing more in his professional life than to take my scalp. He’s back in D.C. Lindsay emailed him a copy of your newspaper and he’s emailing it up and down the line. Doesn’t matter I was set up by a small-town slut. My side of the story won’t carry. Len’s concerned, Cassie. Len fears I’ve made light of my own safety measures. Made light. And I’ve been getting calls from the Council as well. Instead of deciding escape routes, they’re diverted by gossip. So your little town might just get what it’s after. You know the saying—be careful what you ask for.” His hands formed fists in the pockets, deforming the drape of his trousers. “So, Cassie, you see enough at the creek the night you followed me? Enough to tell your chum Lindsay?”

  I flinched, yet again. “I’m not sure I understand what I saw.”

  “You saw a man who challenges his enemy.”

  “The volcano’s your enemy?”

  “Yours too.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But my problem is, you see our volcanologist as the enemy too.”

  He laughed, mirthless. “And how would you describe her? The architect of that fiasco in the creek.”

  “I don’t approve of that,” I said. “And I don’t approve of you trying to undermine her.”

  “Enough.” He circled the desk and sat in his chair. “Let’s repair the damage. Let’s snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Another saying. Something you should know about me—I like sayings.”

  I knew. Abandon hope, ye who enter.

  “Let’s strike a bargain. You help me and I’ll help you.”

  “Help you with what?”

  “Find me what Georgia found. If that involves hunting a hot spring, go hunt your hot spring. But find it.”

  “I plan to. It’s my job.”

  “Oh it’s more than that, with you. I’ve watched you. I see you.” He assessed me, the way I’d assessed his wall of merit. “You look again and again, you keep going, against all odds. I understand that about you. Never say die. Right?”

  I nodded, stiffly. He got that right.

  “I want you to keep me in the loop. Because Georgia found something that alarmed her. No way out. It’s almost a saying, isn’t it?”

  “Could mean something personal.” I sounded like a broken record.

  “You’re after a hot spring,” he said. “What does that say? Aside from your little black dress. It says volcanism.”

  “You saying she did go looking? You thinking she found a new spring?” Hot springs live off the roots of past eruptions, or new dikes of magma, but one new spring wouldn’t herald an eruption. Then again, it would certainly be of interest.

  “Whatever she found, I want to know when you find it. But I want more than that. I want you to tell me where you’re looking, where you’re even speculating about looking, so that I can report to the Council, and to Len, that the mayor might have found something noteworthy and that I am being kept apprised of the progress of the search.”

  “You mean you want something to spin? To play politics?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. So that I can get the focus back where it belongs. You give me the heads-up and I’ll take it from there. All I need is the spin, because I’m fighting the spin your chum cooked up at Hot Creek.”

  I took that in. “And what’s your end of the bargain? How do you help me?”

  “I stay on the job. I save you. You and your town.”

  “And what if Georgia didn’t find anything? What if it doesn’t matter?”

  “Then I need time to prepare.”

  “Prepare for what?”

  “Foretelling the future.”

  I thought, in wonder, my God he is nuts.

  He came out of his chair and leaned against the desk beside me. He unbuttoned the right cuff of his brown flannel shirt and folded the sleeve in neat packets to the elbow. He rolled his arm so that the inner forearm showed. It was a remarkably graceful gesture.

  I stared at his forearm.

  The scar was white and raised, as Jeanine had described, and covered with a swirling tattoo. I understood why she couldn’t have read it in the dark at the creek. Hard enough with his office light ablaze to follow the trail of words snaking round and round in ever tighter circles. He held his arm still, rigid as the family on his wall burned into spasm. He gave me the time to read.

  In the fourth gulf of the eighth circle of hell are those who presumed to foretell the future, their heads fixed face-backward on their necks.

  “Dante,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Our eyes fixed on each other.

  He said, “I’ve been in that circle of hell.”

  “At Rainier.”

  “Yes.” He dropped his arm. “Know this, Cassie—I won’t go there again.”

  I was in my own maze, trying to find the right path. Keep the emergency-ops man in the loop, so he can save his rep? I stared at the swirly tattoo. And save us in the process. I glanced at his wall of merit, at the sincere thanks from the folks of Homer, Alaska.

  “By the way,” he said, “you could take ‘foretelling the future’ as a metaphor. But it’s damn close to my job description.”

  I thought, Lindsay’s too. I said, “Anything I find that has to do with the volcano I’ll report first to Lindsay.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything else.”

  I said, “I’ll want to run this past Walter. He’s doing field work too.”

  “Good idea.” Krom stuck out his hand.

  I took it. We shook.

  I intended to keep my part of the bargain but with eyes wide open. In fact, I intended to undertake this hunt with my head fixed face-backward on my neck.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I entered the fog.

  At times it clung so low I could see no more than the red slick of my skis, and at times it peeled from canyon walls to reveal iron-oxidized cliffs. It was the fog that darkened the red stain of the cliffs and put me in mind of blood.

  Of course it was hematite, not blood—soft earthy iron oxide that colors soil and rock red. Hematite, from the Greek for blood, loosely translated as bloodstone. I squinted at the cliff rock. A kind of purplish red color, really. Come to think of it, a color much like the livor mortis on Georgia’s skin, where the blood pooled.

  She died on her back and lay there long enough for livor to fix.

  Wherever there was.

  I heard a sound and turned my face to look backward. Nothing to see. Could have been a whitetail jackrabbit, shusshing through the snow.

  Getting a little jumpy, lady? Nobody around but you and the bunny.

  When I’d parked in the lot near Lake Mary, there were no other cars. As I’d looped the lake, there were no other skiers. When I’d left the lake and begun the climb up Coldwater Canyon, I’d encountered the fog. Fog wrapped and hid me and then capriciously lifted to reveal me. Every time I turned, I saw shapes through gray veils. Tall thin-trunked shapes that could be nothing but lodgepole pines and the smaller shapes that were likely young hemlocks whose droopy tips put me in mind of hands.

  No Jeffrey pines here—I was climbing above their range. At any rate, the Jeffrey-pumice mix I’d found in Georgia’s mouth had tested negative for cyanide, which deepened my conviction that it was of a different origin from the rest of the evidence. It was a mystery, to be put aside and taken up later, like the gunpowder.

  I headed up the canyon which glaciers had long ago bulldozed between Mammoth Crest and Red Mountain. Red Mountain, beneath its snowcap, is in places lava-patched granite.

  Gold country.

  Over the years I’ve picked up a few sayings of Walter’s, regarding the metallic ores. He says, where two different kinds of rock meet, that’s a clue that precious ore might be found. It was, here, a century ago. Tun
nels were dug, ore was crushed, and for awhile some got rich.

  I too was on a treasure hunt, only the treasure I was after was liquid and steaming.

  My talk with Krom had bolstered my theory that Georgia went hunting for a hot spring, a good source for the sulfur and calcite in the boot soil. And the cyanide suggested that spring was in the neighborhood of a mine.

  I halted and pulled out my compass and maps. Walter had downloaded a map of mine sites from the net, and we’d compared it with a geologic map of the region, and marked sites where mines intersected with deposits from hot springs. We’d split the sites, each of us canvassing a different neighborhood.

  I checked the next mine on my half of the map, got my bearings, and pushed on.

  The fog-hung canyon narrowed and I had to stop again and again to dig out snow clots that wedged between my boots and skis. As I knelt, I looked back. I could not help but leave tracks, which anyone with a pair of skis could follow. Even in fog.

  I told myself once again to get a grip. There is no other skier. There is nobody, nothing, not even the rabbit. All was quiet.

  The silence up here was palpable as the fog, giving this country a funereal feel.

  *****

  I said, “I have nothing of interest to tell you.”

  Krom motioned me to join him on the split-log bench overseeing the relief map. “Where did you go?”

  “Up Coldwater Canyon.”

  “What took you there?”

  “Pumice. Sulfur. Calcite. Granite. Trachybasaltic cinders…”

  “What’s trachybasaltic?”

  “Extrusive rock intermediate in composition between basalt and…”

  “Never mind the geology lesson. What did you find?”

  “Nothing of interest.”

  “No hot spring?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about Walter? Where did he go?”

  I told him where Walter went and what Walter found. Nothing of interest.

  “Christ, Cassie, give me something.”

  I said, “I really don’t think this is working. It’s not helping you and it’s a waste of my time.”