“I apologize,” Glenn said, breaking the icy quiet, “for the way we got started back there.”
“Forget it,” she said, looking out the passenger's window.
“You caught me by surprise. I thought you were going to be a guy.”
“Story of my life,” J.D. said. “So did my father.”
Ouch, Glenn thought; that hurt. Okay, it was going to be a challenge. He was the boss. The boss meets his challenges. “I'm Glenn Merrill,” he said, extending a hand. “The little people call me chief but I will answer to Glenn under certain circumstances.”
She eyed him suspiciously, then smiled. “Jennifer Davies,” she said. “People call me J.D.”
“I'm pleased to meet you, J.D. And looking forward to working with you.”
She shook the hand and studied the face of the smiling chief ranger with serious eyes.
The Park Service vehicle continued on to the Canyon Village junction. Glenn turned right at the same time that an old, green bus pulled from the gas station lot on his left. The chief ranger locked up his brakes in time to keep from hitting the other broadside. The bus continued across the road and into the Canyon Village complex, oblivious of Glenn and J.D. Glenn eased his Suburban behind the bus and started to pass when a small pre-teen boy peered through the rear window, below a Cub Scout Troop banner, and stuck out his tongue. The chief drove on; that guy had trouble enough.
*
Aboard the bus, the harried driver, Scout leader, baby-sitter, big brother and surrogate dad, Rob Jones, was about out of steam. He'd accidentally cut off a Suburban at the last interchange, a park policeman no less. Thank goodness the ranger at the wheel had been alert, or he'd have had no choice but to broadside them. Wouldn't that have been a sweet halftime event in their park tour? Jones needed a break. Who wouldn't, five days into a ten-day trip with this bunch of hooligans? Strike that, Jones thought, checking his attitude. This group, twelve total, of excited and energetic 10 year-olds. A dozen fourth and fifth graders, uniformed in blue, beneath a bold banner reading Webelos Pack #182, in a rented green bus and, after a long morning ride, ready to explode. He parked in an elongated space at the back of the lot, among the oversized motor homes and vehicles with trailers. Then he took a deep breath and faced the screeching heads, poking above the bench seats like shooting gallery targets.
“Listen up.” Nobody did, of course. “Hey,” Jones called, “quiet down a minute.” Half of his contingent obeyed. He raised the volume again for the remaining half. “Hey, you guys, quiet!”
As the last of the rumble died and the bobbing heads became stationary, a small figure burst into the center aisle. He dashed forward and slapped a larger boy on the back of the head.
“James,” Jones yelled. “That's enough!”
As quickly as he'd come, James returned to his seat. With the face of an angel and the heart and mind of an imp, he lowered his blonde head to hide his smile.
“What's the Scout Slogan?” Jones asked.
“Do a Good Turn Daily!” James replied.
“Think about that.”
James nodded solemnly. He'd been pinched, but that was okay. He'd managed to collect a debt with Greg, the bully of the bunch, first.
“Greg,” Jones warned, “Retribution is not on the list of attributes in the Scout Law. Got it?”
The bigger boy nodded too, but he was wearing a frown.
Jones decided to let it go and hope for the best. “Listen up, everybody,” he told his scouts. “You guys have thirty minutes before we move on. Be back on the bus on time. As you off-load, come by single file and I'll dole out ten dollars each from your fun money.”
Cheers, and high fives, erupted.
“All right,” Jones said with a sigh. “Spend it any way you like but remember, you guys have five more days on this trip and you have to make it stretch. And behave yourselves. You are not only representing yourselves, but also this Webelos Troop and your families back in Pocatello. Have fun and be back on the bus in thirty minutes.”
Eleven of the twelve blue-clad bodies exploded from their seats, grabbed their cash, and scattered like wind-blown leaves throughout the complex. James waited until Greg was well gone, and then eased out the bus door.
“Mr. Jones,” he said, “can I buy anything I want?”
“Anything ten dollars will get you.”
“All right,” James shouted, heading for the gift shop.
Jones smiled. James was a good kid but, seriously, he was going to get killed messing with Greg. He shook his head and stepped back onto the bus for thirty minutes of well-deserved peace and quiet. Jones fell into his seat, gratefully closed his eyes, and just missed seeing a pickup truck the color of sunbaked red primer pull from a parking stall without any regard. Had James not jumped to the side, he'd have been a goner. The truck, driven by a mean-looking twenty-something kid in a faded blue Chicago Cubs ball cap, continued out of the lot without slowing.
*
“Mr Jones. Mr. Jones!”
Rob Jones had no clue how long he'd been out. It felt like seconds but, for all he knew, had been hours. He was still in the driver's seat of the bus; literally, asleep at the wheel. One of his scouts was excitedly trying to wake him.
There was trouble in the gift shop, he was told, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the likely problem had two first names, Greg and James. Sure enough, upon arrival he found the dynamic duo, James looking sheepish, Greg defiant, standing beside a post card rack that looked blasted to smithereens, in the presence of a scowling middle-aged shop clerk who looked ready to do some blasting herself. “What happened?” the alarmed, and still slightly comatose, Jones asked.
“I heard them arguing, all the way from the front counter,” the clerk said. “When I got back here they were shoving each other and the display looked like this.”
This was a disaster. This was every card that had been in the rack, pulled out and thrown down on the floor; scattered to kingdom come. Every card save one, that is. One stack. Each card in that stack featuring the same image. That one post card remained front and center in the rack; a picture of a four-legged, white-coated creature in the wild. Exactly which animal was not immediately apparent, for each and every one of the remaining cards had been ripped in half, with the hind portions of the pictures left in the rack and the head portions missing. Where they'd gone, the clerk had no idea, as they were not among the littered mess on the floor.
“Why Cub Scouts, of all people, would want to do something like this is beyond me,” she declared indignantly.
“I didn't do it,” Greg said.
“I didn't either,” James insisted.
“You were going at it tooth and nail when I got back here,” the clerk barked. “Don't deny it. I saw you. I told you to quit.”
“We were arguing,” James told Mr. Jones. “I am sorry for that. But we didn't do this.” He pointed at the floor and shook his head. “Honest!”
“Well, there was nothing wrong with the rack this morning. I opened. I ought to know.” Her mouth was a thin, angry line. “In fact,” she said, pointing at the rack. “I know there was nothing wrong just a short while ago. Hasn't been twenty, twenty-five minutes ago I sold one of these very post cards. The white elk. Sold it to a young man, along with a counter full of groceries and camp supplies. He most certainly would have said something if the rack had been damaged then.”
She didn't add that that young man had been memorable himself. He'd given off what she could only describe as a creepy vibe the whole time she'd dealt with him. Just struck her as wrong. But then, some folks did that. You couldn't get along with everybody. And it had nothing to do with the matter at hand. Fact was, creepy or not, he'd bought a post card, that post card, and hadn't mentioned any problem with the rack. Clearly these boys had destroyed the display in their fight.
The boys held fast to their denial. The clerk remained unmoved and insisted that, once the rack was restored, the damaged cards be paid for. Jones saw cl
early what needed to be done. The boys soon had the mess cleaned up. The clerk had rung up a bill of sale. Jones had split the damage three ways. He would pay a third for failing to supervise them, and Greg and James would each pay a third, if not for damaging the display, for causing a scene in the store in the first place; a charge for which both were clearly guilty. “It isn't fair!” Both scouts complained together.
“No,” Jones agreed. “Many things in life aren't.”
With that day's fun money devoured by the ugly incident, Greg and Mr. Jones both left the store empty-handed. James, on the other hand, insisted on being allowed to take part of his purchase with him. He left the gift shop with one of the cards, the huge, white, headless elk tucked neatly in his shirt pocket. The first post card he'd ever bought.
*
For Glenn it had been a long, long morning. The early drive south, the sad hours at Mary Bay with Bear #113, the rough start with J.D. (the park's new bear biologist silent there in the seat beside him), the long road all the way back north again. With Lake Village, Canyon Village, and Tower-Roosevelt behind them, Glenn decided he needed some air. “Have you seen much of the park?” he asked J.D.
“No. I haven't had time to breathe since coming down here. This is a busy place.”
“Just wait. You don't know the half of it,” he said. “Would you care to make a stop?”
J.D. groaned. “I've had all the tourists I can take for one day.”
Glenn laughed. “I agree completely. This is different. This is my anti-tourist spot.”
They crossed Blacktail Plateau, chatting only occasionally but much more amicably like two strangers after a war discovering they were in fact wearing the same uniform. Suddenly, and quite without warning, smiling like a naughty boy with a secret, Glenn applied the brakes and made a U-turn. He pulled the Suburban to the right edge of the road and parked beside a sign she'd missed seeing on the way past, and couldn't read now for the angle. She inspected her surroundings out the windows and, other than the usual grandeur of northern Wyoming, couldn't for the life of her see anything in particular the sign might be pointing out. Dropping her voice to the deep and silly range, she turned and asked the chief ranger, “Y-es?”
In answer, he climbed from the vehicle. She followed and met him on the shoulder of the road. “This is it,” Glenn said. He swept his arm before them to the south. “Apparition Lake.”
What lay before them was a fifty acre depression in the ground, resembling nothing so much as a massive oblong salad bowl complete with salad. The bed looked like a hay field with the long brown grasses of fall mixed with the last of the summer's green growth overwashed with ten inches of muddy standing water. The green-brown matte swayed as a breeze rippled the puddle.
“This is a joke, right?”
“No joke,” Glenn said. “This is a temporal lake. It appears and disappears seasonally based upon the amount of precipitation. The last couple of years haven't seen any water in it at all. Other years it fills up nicely. With all the snow we had this last winter it gathered some moisture, and the cool summer left a lot of it behind. It's not very dramatic now, but it is a hint of what it might look like during another of its ghostly appearances.”
“A phantom lake?”
“Apparition Lake,” Glenn said.
“Weird.”
“Yeah,” Glenn said with a laugh. “A few years ago, I was patrolling out this way and saw a guy planted on the bank under those lodgepole pines.” He pointed into the distance. “On the other side. He was fishing.”
J.D. did a take and laughed. “Bet he wasn't having much luck!”
“That's just it. I was going to be a nice guy and tell him; explain the situation. I suggested he try one of the other lakes in the park because, being seasonal, Apparition Lake was dead. No fish.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, the guy said, `I'm not going anywhere, and you can't make me. I can fish here if I want to.' So, stupid me, I'm still trying to help out. I said, `Sir, I don't have any intention of making you do anything. I'm just trying to tell you, there are no fish in this lake.' ” Glenn turned to J.D. looking gob-smacked. “This guy stood, stepped up, put his face in mine and said, `You're a liar. I know there's fish in here. I've caught them here before.' ”
J.D. laughed. How could she not, picturing the chief ranger being barked at by an irate tourist. “So what did you do?”
“I took a deep breath,” Glenn said. “I smiled, wished him good luck, and told him to have a nice day. Then I walked off and left him to his fishing.”
J.D. cupped her hand over her brow and scanned the distance. “Do you think he's still here?”
“I hope so,” Glenn said making a point not to look. “Nothing but a skeleton scratching his skull, holding a fishing pole, and wondering why they aren't biting.” They laughed together, gently, wearily, letting the tensions of the morning drain away.
Suddenly J.D. stopped as, out of nowhere, an icy shiver ran up her back and vibrated her slight frame. She hugged herself and groaned, chilled by a cold breeze coming across the low water. “Wow,” she said, zipping her jacket. “I don't mean to be critical, but your phantom lake is suddenly a little creepy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don't know exactly.” J.D. was still laughing but the joy had gone from her voice. Now it was an embarrassed and nervous laugh; a fearful laugh. “Who knows? Maybe it's the skeleton. All at once I feel something, I don't know… eerie. Maybe it's just the name? You don't happen to keep apparitions at Apparition Lake, do you?”
Glenn hesitated, turning from J.D. to the lake. “Not that I… know of.” Suddenly he was feeling it too. It was a coldness, a darkness that seemed to well up within him. He'd visited Apparition Lake a hundred times, passed it hundreds more, and had never felt that way before.
It wasn't a foot race back to their vehicle, not exactly, but neither of them wasted any time getting there. Glenn wasted no time in pulling away.
Had they stayed, the two would have seen a subtle change take shape over the water. Despite the bright sunlight and moderate temperature of the morning, a gray mist began to form over the lake. It moved up and out, swirling and changing with the breeze, settling finally into a strange blanket of fog broken only by green and brown shoots of foliage cutting through from below. Beneath the fog the dead waters of Apparition Lake began to whirl of their own accord.
Chapter 4
A small step back in time will show that the Yellowstone rangers were not the only ones having a rough day. Early that same morning, Glenda Ewing sat alone in a cozy little booth with a window that opened toward the Shoshone National Forest. It was a tiny café; across the street from the motel room they'd occupied the night before on the western edge of Cody, Wyoming. She admired the glow of the sun as it lit up the eastern slopes of the mountains in front of her, but was nonetheless disappointed. Glenda had wanted to be up in those mountains when the sun came up. As it was, she sat quietly, sipping hot tea and waiting on her husband.
Jason Ewing had been his usual mulish self when she'd roused him that morning. He had told her to leave him be for a few minutes; he'd be right along. That had been an hour ago. Glenda still loved Jason, but he certainly had become hard to live with over the past thirty years.
The waitress had been by several times to check on her, and was headed her way again as Jason strode through the door. In the race to the table it was a tie between the waitress and Jason's booming voice. “Mornin', good lookin'.” Jason arrived a few seconds later, ignoring his wife. “How about a big ol' cup of coffee?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, shoot. You don't have to call me sir. Name's Jason,” he bellowed, broadcasting to all of Cody. “'Course my friends call me Stubby. You can call me Stubby too, darlin'.”
The waitress made an abrupt about-face then, unseen, made a face, rolling her eyes as she headed into the kitchen.
Glenda's pink embarrassment quickly turned to red frustration. �
��I don't know why you insist on being so… so flamboyant.”
“Talk English, woman,” Stubby grunted as he sat across from her. “Or don't talk at all.”
“Where have you been?” Glenda asked. “You knew I wanted to see the sunrise this morning.”
“Well fer cryin' out loud, Glenda. Look out the window already,” Stubby hollered. “The sun's arisin' while you jabber on.” Then, as his mind wandered back, in a satisfied tone he said. “I got tied up. I was talking to an associate about a… plumbing situation. Geothermal plumbing, that is. Besides, they was doin' a special on the Cowboys on that mornin' talk show.”
Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, there were only two things in Stubby's life worth consideration; commercial energy and the Dallas Cowboys. Energy, because that was how he'd earned his fortune, and the Cowboys, because of those cheerleaders.
Glenda had little interest in either. “I don't understand how you ever expect to get away with tapping into the park's…”
“The park's… nothin',” he barked, cutting her off. “Mother Nature give it to us to use as we see fit. Now stop goin' on about something you know diddly-squat about, cause I ain't half in the mood for none of your whinin' about the poor bunnies and antelopes.”
The waitress returned with Stubby's coffee and more hot water for Glenda's tea. “Will there be anything else?”
“You betcha,” Stubby said, eying the poor girl into her own embarrassment.
“Jason, I'd really like to get going,” Glenda pleaded.
“Horse pucky! I'm gonna have me some breakfast first. What's the hurry, fer cryin' out loud, sun's up already.” He turned to the waitress. “Make that biscuits and gravy, couple eggs sunny, some crisp bacon, why don't you throw a short stack on the side, and if you need help carrying it, darlin', you just give ol' Stubby a whistle.”
*
Breakfast had taken entirely too long to suit Glenda's tastes, but finally they were on the road and her anticipation and excitement climbed with the terrain; up Sylvan Pass and into Yellowstone National Park. The Ewing's had never been to Yellowstone before but, of course, Stubby was certain he'd already been everywhere that was important.
Apparition Lake Page 3
