Lone Rock

by Duane Lindsay

  “I’m not ready,” she said definitely. “Not yet.”

  “Nonsense,” said Adrian, permitting himself to be an expert on a subject of which he knew nothing, another human trait. The Fiero shot past a yellow light at University and Evans, on their way, eventually, to the Denver Zoo.

  “I’m not ready,” Maggie said again. “I don’t play well enough.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “And my voice is too sweet.”

  “I think it’s great.”

  “There’s something odd going on at Control-logics,” she said.

  “You’re changing the subject,” Adrian protested.

  “You bet.” Maggie’s expression had become tight, her lips closed and her eyes staring straight ahead, which was a good idea for driving. But she’d also begun to speed up, plunging the orange sports car through ever smaller breaks in traffic.

  Adrian, oblivious to the mood, definitely noticed the change in driving. “Watch out for that bus!”

  With a very small twist of fingers on the wheel. Maggie slid the Fiero around the RTD bus blocking the right lane. She accelerated and shot past two slower moving cars, and darted into a right turn on Alameda Blvd. “Let’s just go to the damn zoo.”

  Adrian stood next to the monkey house, baffled. “What’d I say’?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” Maggie watched a Capuchin Monkey spin in endless circles around a tree branch. It might have been a commentary on the human condition.

  If Adrian had more experience with women—and up until now he had none—he would have heard volumes of meaning in the word, “nothing.” But with no guide to help him, he blundered on.

  “Was it about your playing? Was that it?”

  She turned from the cages. “You’re just so stupid sometimes, you know.”

  He considered that, accepting the comment at face value. “No; I didn’t. Why?”

  “Because...maybe I don’t want to perform someplace. Maybe I’m happy the way I am.” Another monkey ran over to hit the other with a stick. The first monkey shrieked and stopped swinging.

  “But that’s not true, Maggie. I know you want to perform, I don’t understand why you don’t just—”

  “Shut up, Adrian.” Maggie turned on him with a fury. Her fists clenched, her face was red with anger. Adrian glanced around to see if anyone was watching; he imagined a crowd forming, people staring, someone selling popcorn. There was no one but monkeys nearby. In the distance a lion roared.

  Maggie stared at him as if about to speak. She opened and closed her mouth twice, then spun around and walked rapidly away. Softly he heard, “I don’t want to talk to you.” He might have heard more, but decided not to imagine what.

  With Maggie gone he walked disconsolately around the zoo wondering what to do. He also tried to figure out what had happened. He bought a bag of peanuts and sat on a stone wall near the monkey house waiting for her to calm down and come back. Silently he shelled the nuts, dropping the husks and gaining the attention of six squirrels, a small family of ducks and three long tailed peacocks. The day was sunny and warm for November, the sky a pastel blue. The grass was brown and the squirrels were becoming impatient at his doling out of food. One of them hopped onto the wall and approached him tentatively, darting back and forth, each time getting closer.

  “Want some of these, little guy?” Adrian took a peanut and tossed it gently. The squirrel grabbed it and ran a couple of feet and began chewing, fists to face. This in turn emboldened the ducks who clambered at his feet. Peacocks, the royalty scavengers, stayed in the distance as if above this sort of behavior.

  Soon the peanuts were gone and Adrian crushed the bag, holding out empty hands to show his group the truth; the nuts were gone. Soon, so were they.

  And so was Maggie. Adrian looked up at the sky as if he could tell time from that, then at his watch. It was over an hour since she’d left and he was beginning to worry. Where had she gone? When would she be back?

  He thought about what happened. Maggie sang all the time. She played piano beautifully, in his admittedly biased opinion. She should perform. He shrugged, it made perfect sense. Why had she become so angry? If she didn’t want to, why get mad? If she did want to, why didn’t she?

  It was a puzzle and Adrian liked puzzles and he couldn’t go anywhere anyway, so he leaned back against a tree and sighed. What was the matter? A new squirrel hopped over and peered at him. “I don’t have anything.” Adrian said. and the little rodent bounded away.

  Maggie had gotten angry. Adrian remembered last week when she and Pieburn were pushing him about Control-logics, harping about the inconsistencies there. “Something’s wrong, Adrian,” Maggie had said, over and over. When Adrian recalled his own reaction: he’d gotten mad.

  Struck by the sudden and unexpected insight he said, “I got mad when she pushed me to do something I’m afraid of.” He nibbled on his lower lip, staring at nothing. Maggie got mad when pushed to perform, ergo, Maggie’s afraid of performing. The idea struck him like a gong. She was afraid.

  Ridiculous. Maggie Powers spoke to people all day long. She made cold calls, chatted endlessly to complete strangers. She was the very epitome of the public speaker. She played music so well that she couldn’t be afraid. But that was it, Adrian realized. Somehow, he had stumbled on a truth greater than the situation.

  “She’s afraid,” he said. The idea made him feel ashamed at himself and closer to her than he’d ever felt about anyone. He felt a sense of kinship with her, as if they shared a guilty secret. But why guilty? What was wrong with being afraid? Certainly it made sense to be fearful of the bus gang, for instance. And it made sense to be afraid of Corley Sayres, though he didn’t want to stop and examine why.

  And it would make sense for him to have stage fright about performing—he didn’t know how. But how could Maggie feel fear? Maybe, he thought, fear doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s just the way we feel, a response to things inside us that we can’t begin to understand.

  Maybe he was tired of thinking about this. Adrian had plumbed his own depths of understanding and come up with an insight. To go further with it seemed like beating a dead horse. It was time to find Maggie. He got up and dusted off the back of his pants, stretched and looked back to the monkeys.

  No Maggie. Perhaps if he wandered back toward the car he’d meet her on the way. He walked slowly, examining faces that weren’t hers as the sun began to sink and the shadows lengthened. Eventually he was at the gate, unsure of what to do. Should he leave to go to the car? Should he wait?

  He compromised on getting a purple ink stamp of a lion on his left hand and went through the lot, remembering where she’d parked. When he got there the Fiero was gone. She’d left him.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t feel angry. A strange sense of having touched something basic between them kept his own feelings in check, but he knew it was important to see her. He walked out to the road until he reached Colorado Boulevard. trying to recapture where he was in relationship to anything else.

  The city was that way, she lived South of downtown which would be...there...so maybe a bus downtown would work. He found a bus stop sign and waited for a green and tan monster to approach him. He had a brief feeling of dread getting aboard, but it was a shadow of the past and faded quickly. How long had it been since he’d seen Jesus lurking around? How had he forgotten? He swayed down the aisles, fingertips touching the cold plastic of the seats, sensing the passage of time.

  The bus lurched its way to 17th Ave and flounced west like an affronted dowager. Adrian got out. By now it was dusky and the sun had vanished behind the mountains. The air was chill and his lips were turning blue.

  But another bus both warmed him and took him south and by full dark he was walking down the narrow sidewalk to her porch. He knocked and got no answer. Maggie wasn’t home. Groaning he sat down on the cold concrete next to her door and huddled in on himself to wait.

  At nine-fifteen Maggie came and stood at the edge of the stairs, mouth
open, looking like she was about to cry. Adrian creaked to his feet, cracking joints with every move.

  “Adrian,” she started.

  “C-c-cold,” he said. “T-talk inside.” He smiled weakly, a ghastly greeting, but all his frozen cheeks would allow.

  “Oh, God.” Maggie rushed past him, fumbled forever with keys and dragged him inside. She turned on lights, turned up the heat and brought him an orange wooly afghan. She shoved him forcefully onto the couch and covered him to his chin.

  “I was mad at you, so I drove away. I wasn’t going to stay long, but I got hung up in traffic and couldn’t find a place to park and when I got back the zoo, you were gone.” The statement sounded a lot like an accusation.

  “I waited for you, and went to the car.”

  “I parked somewhere else. We probably missed each other. How did you get here?”

  “Bus.” Adrian was beginning to feel his toes again and his cheeks felt as if they were melting. He couldn’t feel his nose.

  “You took a bus? How did you know your way here?”

  He decided that wasn’t the important question and managed, “I had to talk to you. I was a jerk and wanted to apologize.”

  “I’ m sorry, too. I felt so bad—later—about leaving you. I shouldn’t have gotten mad.”

  “That’s okay. I think I understand why.” Before she could ask he said, “there’s room under this blanket. Would you like to join me?” He sensed another lesson here: sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all.

  Maggie sighed and curled around him under the afghan. “You’re freezing!” She hit him when he put a blue hand just above the belt, under her sweater.

  An hour later they turned off the lights and went to her bed. In the dark he said softly, “I’ll talk to Ruth tomorrow.”

  “Why? What happened to change your mind?” Her head was against his chest and her voice was muffled and low.

  “Nothing.” he said, truthfully. “Everything.” And that was also true.

  “Hey Ruth, got a second? I’d like to talk to you.” Adrian leaned on the counter.

  Ruth smiled. “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Well...” Adrian peered up and down the halls to see if anyone was listening, though he knew there wasn’t. Worry made him cautious and he looked again. Ruth rose up from her chair and also watched both directions.

  “Are we going to cross the street now?” Ruth was impressed with her own wit. She was the gatekeeper at Control-logics, it’s telephone voice, it’s pretty face. She was the person the customer saw first, the voice who chatted amiably. In the prison like paranoia of the office, she was somehow immune; a ray of sunshine through the clouds, a rose in the snow.

  She liked Adrian. It was apparent in her jokes when she phoned him, her furtive playful flirting. Around Ruth it almost seemed as if they worked in a normal office. As Wally’s assistant her position was privileged, her movements not bound by the odd conventions at Control-logics.

  “Not here,” Adrian said. She was leaning forward, her face inches from his and she smiled wickedly at his discomfort. She was barely twenty-three and always well dressed, her clothes expensive and always changing. She drove a powder blue Miata.

  “Will you come with me to lunch?”

  “Is this a proposition?” Ruth ran her tongue over the tip of perfectly white teeth, the result of extensive dental work.

  Adrian drew back as if burned and Ruth laughed. “No.” he said. “I just want to talk to you about...something.”

  “Ooh, a mystery: ‘ Ruth said. “Does this have anything to do with Ms. Maggie Powers?”

  “What? No. What do you know about Maggie?”

  “Just what I hear. I do answer the phones, and the fake names she gives me don’t fool me at all. I’m not an idiot, you know.”

  “Have you—?”

  “Told anybody? Of course not! But, sure, I’ll go to lunch with you. Today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, but we’d better go separately. How about meeting at Roselli’s?”

  “Good. See you there at noon.”

  Seated at a table at Roselli’s, Ruth said, “It’s so mysterious. I love it.”

  You might not, Adrian thought, after you hear what I want. “You know we work in a very weird place.”

  “Sure.” Ruth nibbled on a salad. “It’s been that way since Corley showed up. Used to be a lot more fun.” She shrugged. “But what can you do?”

  “That’s what I want to know. I want to find out what’s going on at the office, and I don’t know how to find out. I was hoping you’d help.”

  She cracked a bread stick with an audible snap and Adrian winced. “What kind of things?” Her voice held neither suspicion nor interest. It was flat and neutral and Adrian didn’t know if he was asking a potential ally or the friend of an enemy.

  “Why the paranoia?” Adrian asked. “The locked doors at lunch. Everybody out at five. No overtime even when we’re behind. How come no one’s supposed to talk to anyone else?”

  “You’ve been here since February. I remember when you showed up.” Ruth studied him with a genial sort of interest. “You were a mess, let me tell you. When you first hobbled in on that crutch, all covered with bandages on your face and casts everywhere, I almost fainted. You looked awful.”

  “I did,” Adrian agreed. “So why did I get hired? I interviewed a couple of times in those first few months; nobody would talk to me twice. I looked repulsive, one guy said.”

  “They didn’t!” Ruth gasped at the blunt insult. “But you did,” she admitted.

  “So why did Wally hire me? It was as if he was pleased at my injuries.” Adrian reflected on something he hadn’t thought of in many months. “I always thought that he hired me because I was beat up.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. But he argued down the salary, too, and insisted I start right away, even though I had things to do. He absolutely insisted. It was like it was a test and by giving in to him, I passed. He hired me when I caved.”

  They ate for a moment in silence.

  “And there’s purchasing.”

  Ruth looked momentarily pained, as if with gas, or reluctant to go further.

  “Why don’t the engineers order their own materials? Every other company does it. And why can’t sales reps come over? In every other shop I’ve ever heard of the reps are welcome, here they’re prohibited. Why?”

  “Adrian, I don’t think—”

  “And there’s Corley’s mysterious trips that just happen to coincide with equally mysterious deliveries of exactly the materials we need for a project. I’ve checked with the other guys, they all tell me the same thing. Pieburn even said Corley threatened him once when he was asking questions.”

  “Adrian—”

  “And Maggie says we used to buy from Carlson. We were one of her biggest customers, she said. But just about when Corley showed up, it all stopped. And she says that the stuff Corley brings in are impossible to get without her knowing about it.”

  “Adrian, stop.”

  “So how does he get it? Is he stealing it from someplace?” He paused and frowned, puzzled. “But that doesn’t make any sense either. Where would he steal it from? The stuff has to be ordered.”

  The break in his conversation gave Ruth a chance to interrupt. “You shouldn’t be talking about any of this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because...because it isn’t safe.” She stared at him moodily, and shrugged as if telling him, “There, I’ve said it.”

  “Not safe? Why?”

  “Adrian; will you just stop? There was an engineer, Randy Birmingham. You replaced him actually. He was asking questions like you are. One day he said he was going to meet with Corley and after that I never saw him again. He never came back for his check or personal things. Okay? It isn’t safe.”

  They turned to their food silently, each nursing their own thoughts. Ruth kept her head down, and crunched on her salad. Adrian took a
large bile of lasagna, chewed, swallowed, drank a sip of lemonade and said, “I’m not afraid.”

  Ruth looked up at him and frowned. “You should be. This isn’t something to play around with. Can’t you just let this go? Just let it go, huh, Adrian?”

  “Ruth, I need to know,”

  “No; you don’t. This is all just some sort of macho bullshit. And personally, you’re the last person I would have accused of that.”

  Something clicked inside Adrian when she said this...the last person...that was important. Why? Was he hired because he was the last person anyone would expect to make waves? He thought back to his early interview and knew he was right. He’d been hired because he was weak.

  “It’s that Powers woman, isn’t it? She’s putting you up to this. You wouldn’t have done it on your own.”

  Wouldn’t he? Adrian didn’t like to admit it but he felt she was right. Without Maggie he probably would never have interfered with the company. Even with Maggie’s pushing he had been too afraid to pry.

  “Ruth,” he said at last. “I need your help.”

  “No.” Her voice was a whisper.

  “What?”

  “I can’t help you.” She looked up and Adrian was surprised at the anger in her eyes. ‘“I won’t help you. Dammit!” She threw down her napkin with a barely contained fury, ‘“I have a good thing going here. I get a great salary, I have authority and I’m respected. I get to buy nice clothes and drive a really nice car. Where can I get that somewhere else, Adrian? Where? I’m only twenty-three and I have a good job.”

  She stood up, her movements stiff. ‘“I like you Adrian, but I won’t screw this up. I don’t want to lose my job.” She turned away, adding over her shoulder, “I’ll see you back at the office.”

  Adrian sat at the table for ten minutes more. She was afraid; he could understand that. He thought back to the gang on the bus. He thought about the physical threat of Corley and his own instinctive, almost primitive reaction to the man. He thought about monsters in the night and knew there were real reasons to be afraid.