Black Ember

by Ruby Laska

  He saw her trying to figure it out. If he had to guess, she hadn’t eaten a thing since her shift started, since all they served at Buddy’s was popcorn and pretzels and, if Opal felt like baking, the occasional batch of oatmeal raisin cookies.

  “Okay,” she said in a very small voice. “Which way?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “What made you decide to move to North Dakota?” Caryn asked after they had walked ten minutes in silence. They were keeping to the edge of the road, which was lit by the full moon and a thick spill of stars that was unlike anything Caryn had ever seen before. At first Caryn kept checking behind them for oncoming cars, but when none came, she decided she was more likely to be killed by a marauding bull or moose than a traffic accident. Actually, she wasn’t sure what sort of wildlife lived here; for all she knew there were also wolves and bears.

  “Jobs,” Zane said, giving her a perplexed look, as though the answer was obvious.

  “All…seven of you?”

  “Actually, there were six when we decided to move up here. It’s kind of a long story.”

  “It’s kind of a long walk,” Caryn shot back before she could stop herself.

  It was strange. Her disguise—the hair, piercings, and clothes she’d selected to change her appearance as much as possible—seemed to be having an effect on her personality. Or maybe it was just the sheer exhaustion from being on her feet for nine hours, on top of the early morning and long flights. And no food—when Zane had asked her when she last ate, Caryn realized that other than a coffee and a banana in the airport this morning, she hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday.

  So maybe her irritability was just the result of low blood sugar. And getting her things stolen. And coming all this way just to find out that her bio-dad was off gallivanting with some woman named Melanie for the three-day weekend, and she could be back in her beautiful apartment, ordering sushi for delivery and watching old movies and sipping a nice merlot. Monday would have been a perfectly good day to come to North Dakota—but that was a second thought, and Caryn was trying really hard not to give in to second thoughts, which were a close cousin to regrets, as her mother always said, and once you started giving quarter to regrets, you were doomed.

  Her companion gave her a long, veiled look. He was good at that, she was noticing; Zane seemed like the kind of man who had a lot going on in his head, more than he let on, anyway. Which wasn’t at all what Caryn would have expected from an oil worker. Not that she’d ever given oilmen much thought before today, but she would have guessed they’d be dirtier than Zane, not to mention coarser and a whole lot less attractive.

  Attractive? —the little voice in her head asked mildly. The little voice sounded a lot like her mother, and had been giving her unwanted counsel for most of her adult life. Caryn would never have admitted it, but whenever she was stuck, she often had a What-Would-Georgia-Do moment. She didn’t always follow the advice from the voice, but she couldn’t seem to shake it, either.

  She was pretty sure her mother would be horrified to know that she was walking down a dark and deserted country road with a total stranger—a working man, no less. But then again, Georgia was the reason that Caryn had never been introduced to her father, which was the reason she was here in the middle of nowhere, so Georgia didn’t exactly get a say in things.

  “You sure you want to know the whole story? Because I wouldn’t want to bore you.”

  “I’m sure. What else are we going to do, sing camp songs?”

  Caryn wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw him crack a smile. Moonlight gleamed on his teeth, at any rate. They were nice, white teeth, not that she was noticing or anything.

  “Okay. Well, I went to high school with the rest of them. Matthew—that’s the guy who’s getting married—and Jayne, that’s his fiancée. Well, she wasn’t then, she was just a friend. Or not really a friend, because they couldn’t stand each other, but—”

  “You’re not much of a storyteller, are you?”

  “You’re not much of a listener, are you?”

  Caryn smiled to herself. It was sort of exhilarating, this back-and-forth trading of barbs. She never behaved this way; at work she was polite and professional to a fault, always aware that she represented not just her own brand but also her mother and stepfather’s reputations.

  Caryn had first appeared in the media when she was only eleven, when a photographer had snapped a picture of her between Georgia and Randall at a holiday performance of the Nutcracker. She’d never forgotten how Georgia whisked her off to the ladies’ room for her first lesson on appearing in public. It wasn’t quite the “Never let them see you sweat” speech that she delivered in later years, but she impressed on Caryn that when photographers were present, one smiled, kept one’s chin up, and never, ever scratched any part of one’s body, no matter how itchy. And if asked a question, one answered politely, no matter how sad or mad or hungry or late one was that day.

  “So, Matthew and Jayne, and who else?” she prompted.

  “Well, there’s Chase, from back at the bar, and Jimmy—he’s the one with the glasses who looks like he could lift a car by himself. And Cal, the one I was telling you about who’s a police officer. That’s all six of us.”

  “And you all spontaneously decided to move up here at the same time. Did you all live together in Arkansas too, like some kind of southern version of Friends?”

  To his credit, Zane chuckled. He seemed to be hard to ruffle. Which was probably why he was the one who got stuck playing Good Samaritan after all of his friends left. “No. We were all doing different things. Matthew was a trucker, and he found out he could make more money up here. Since he was driving his rig up anyway, he had room for passengers in the trailer. Jayne was just looking for an adventure, though she ended up being the trucker, ironically, and Matthew—well, you’ll see what Matthew ended up doing. Cal had always wanted to be a cop, and he had some problems getting on the force down in Red Fork, so this was a way for him to get a fresh start with a rapidly expanding department. And the rest of us, me and Chase and Jimmy, we just wanted to make money, and the oil rigs pay really well. It’s hard work, but if you don’t mind putting in twelve-hour days, seven days a week, you get a few weeks off between hitches to do whatever you want, and you can’t beat the paycheck.”

  “What did you do before?”

  Zane said nothing for a moment. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “Something different.”

  “Yeah, but what?”

  “Just a job I didn’t enjoy. Something I should never have gotten into. What did you do before you came here?”

  Caryn knew he was just evading her question, which made her even more curious, but if she pressed too hard then he might feel entitled to ask more questions about her own past. Which wasn’t okay, because Caryn hadn’t bothered to come up with much of a backstory for herself.

  “Oh, this and that,” she said, as airily as she could. “I’ve had lots of different jobs. I’m kind of a…drifter, I guess you’d say.”

  She liked the way the word felt on her tongue: drifter, as though she were a bit of dandelion silk, floating wherever the wind blew, landing far from where she took off, letting fate decide.

  But from Zane’s frank gaze, she could tell he wasn’t buying it. Time to change the subject, fast.

  “So how did you all end up living together?”

  “That’s an easier question: we didn’t have any choice. You probably know it’s just about impossible to find a place to stay up here.”

  Actually, she didn’t, which was further evidence of the rashness of her decision to simply jump on a plane. She’d never really thought through what an oil boom meant for a town. Of course the workers would need a place to stay. And there would be competition for any apartment or room that was available. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Matthew had decided to come up here before the rest of us. He was calling motels and hotels and apartment complexes every single day, hoping someone would give up their room a
nd he would just happen to be the first to inquire, but he was getting close to giving up when he just happened to see the bunkhouse listed on craigslist. He called and said he’d take it, even though the rent was $6,000 a month and there were six rooms.”

  “Six thousand?” Caryn gasped. That was on a par with rents in her own posh New York City neighborhood. “What is it, a castle?”

  “Hardly. You’ll see pretty soon. Sugar Hill Ranch was a working ranch until about five years ago. Some of the acreage is still leased out to contract farmers, but the main house burned and the barn is too unstable to use. Mimi, the woman who owns the ranch, needed money and she got the idea to rent out the bunkhouse.”

  “What is a bunkhouse, anyway?”

  The look Zane gave her was even longer and more perplexed, and Caryn realized she’d made a misstep. People who lived in the country probably all knew about bunkhouses—and ranches and oil rigs and everything else in this town. If she weren't careful, Zane would start putting two and two together and realize she wasn’t from anywhere near North Dakota.

  “I mean I know it’s where the cowboys live,” she said hastily, remembering the Gunsmoke reruns Randall used to watch when he was preparing for a role in a contemporary western with Matt Damon a few years back.

  “They prefer the term ‘hands.’ As in, ranch hands. Seasonal workers, who come to help out with harvest. Or sometimes on a larger ranch they might live there year round. Sugar Hill was once one of the biggest ranches in the area. There could be up to a dozen hands at the busiest time of year, though that was a tight squeeze—two to a room and six to a bathroom.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yeah, well, we still only have two bathrooms. Matthew remodeled them—he does work on the place for our landlady in exchange for rent—and they’re pretty nice, but that’s not much of a consolation when you’re trying to get out the door so you can clock in on time, and Chase is in there plucking his eyebrows or whatever he does.”

  Caryn giggled. The one named Chase had arguably been the most boisterous, leading the others in rowdy songs. He was a nice looking guy with hair that grew a little too long and a plaid shirt that looked like he’d owned it for years, if not decades. She doubted that grooming played a big part in his life.

  Zane, however…Zane was a different story. His cotton shirt was neatly pressed, and his jeans were barely worn. His boots were neat and polished, and his belt buckle—she couldn’t be sure, but it sure looked like the one in the ads for a well-known men’s designer. His haircut looked expensive, too, and now and then, as they walked, she got a faint whiff of a cologne that was either very expensive or worked perfectly with Zane’s chemistry.

  It wasn’t that she thought he was lying, but she was growing ever more curious about what sort of work he’d done before trading it in for an oil job.

  “So you pay a thousand dollars a month to live in a run-down outbuilding,” she said. “Does it at least have electricity and running water?”

  “You’ll see for yourself in a minute,” Zane said, taking her arm. “Careful here, there’s a cattle guard.”

  Caryn didn’t have any idea what a cattle guard was, but luckily she looked down before stepping onto the metal bars set into the road. She walked gingerly, holding onto Zane, glad she was wearing boots and not the stilettos she usually favored for work. Weeds grew up through the bars and the air was generously scented with what Caryn was pretty sure was cow poop.

  “They don’t, um, relieve themselves in the road, do they?” she asked when they got safely to the other side.

  “Who, my roommates?”

  “No! The cows.”

  Zane laughed again. “You never know. They sort of just let loose whenever the spirit moves them. Very uninhibited that way, cattle.”

  Caryn clutched his arm a little tighter. That would be the perfect end to a perfectly awful day, to step in a cow pie. Her discount store boots were synthetic, so presumably they could be hosed off, but it wouldn’t do to meet new people smelling like she’d been rolling in a barn.

  “Could you, um, kind of steer me around the, uh…”

  Zane patted her hand on his arm gently, as if she were a child. “No promises, sweetheart, but I’ll do my best. It’s only a little farther—you can see the lights on.”

  Caryn concentrated on watching her steps, glancing up at the ranch buildings as they came closer. The landscape was lit by the silvery moon. Some sort of crops swayed lightly in the breeze; dark lumps on a hill were probably the cows, tucked in for the night. Caryn wondered if they slept standing up—it was hard to tell from this distance. Light shone through the windows of a long, low building that had to be the bunkhouse. An old barn and a house covered with scaffolding were lit by spotlights. A row of trucks was lined up in between, and at the rear was a large blocky shape that looked like a trailer with no cab. And beyond the buildings, forest stretched as far as the eye could see, back in the direction of town.

  The most amazing thing was the way the stars filled the sky, like glitter spilled on a piece of black paper. Caryn had never seen anything like it. She’d heard that stars were brighter when you got away from city lights; Randall had occasionally waxed nostalgic about his childhood growing up in rural Pennsylvania. He had promised to take Caryn to visit someday, when he and Georgia were first married, but that plan, like so many others, fell to the wayside.

  Maybe Randall went there with his new wife and family, Caryn thought, with an uncharacteristic wave of melancholy. Really, she hardly thought about what she’d missed out on any more. There wasn’t any reason why she couldn’t take herself to see stars, if she felt like it. A camping trip, maybe with one of her friends in the city. Although once she got back from this little adventure, she’d have to double down on both work and her social obligations, making sure to be photographed at her mother’s events so no rumors regarding her absence could spread…

  Caryn shook her head, unwilling to think about any of that now. “The stars are amazing,” she said instead.

  “Yep.”

  “Do you, um, know any constellations?”

  Zane looked at her. “Is that a trick question?”

  Caryn felt her face redden. She was only trying to make conversation, but the gulf between them seemed enormous. “No. I can see the big dipper—and that one there looks kind of familiar—but the rest looks like a Jackson Pollack splatter. I just wondered how anyone ever sees pictures in the stars when there are so many.”

  Zane regarded her for a moment, steering her around a lump in the road. “Forgive me for asking, but just where did you come from that you didn’t look up at the sky and you never saw a cow?”

  Caryn’s heart did a little skip. This was definitely not where she wanted the conversation to go. So far, her disguise seemed to have fooled everyone, but she didn’t need people figuring out the details of her life.

  Still, she wasn’t going to be able to pass as a country kid. She would probably reveal more ignorance as time went on. Best to take the bull by the horns now—she almost smiled at the irony of that figure of speech—and tell him something to throw him off.

  “Grew up in the projects,” she said. “In a bad part of Queens. I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  “Huh.”

  That kept him quiet the rest of the way. When they reached the lawn in front of the bunkhouse, Caryn let go of his arm, a little regretfully. It had been…nice, the way she could feel his warmth through his shirt, and especially the hard, smooth feel of his muscles underneath. Working on the rigs clearly kept a man in good shape, and Caryn couldn’t ignore the stirrings inside her, stirrings she hadn’t felt in a very long time. Not even before the devastating breakup six months ago.

  It probably ought to have been a sign, which was something she could examine later—maybe with her therapist, when she was back home.

  “Thank you for keeping me out of the, um…”

  “Dung,” Zane said. “Or manure, if you prefer. Course, that’s not what
we call it around here, but you don’t seem like much of a cusser.”

  “I can cuss,” Caryn protested. Actually, she made a policy of never doing so; Georgia always said vulgarity made a woman seem coarse. But speaking the way Georgia taught her wouldn’t do anything to promote the image of herself she was trying to maintain: Carrie from the projects—Barracuda—a girl who’d seen and done it all. “I can say shit!”

  There was a rustling from the darkened end of the porch, and then a female voice called out “Hello?”

  Zane laughed. He seemed to find all of her gaffes amusing, which made Caryn both embarrassed and furious. “Hey Jayne, hey Matthew. I’ve brought home a stray. This is Carrie, our very attentive waitress from the bar. Carrie, these are two of my roommates, the ones who are getting hitched on Saturday.”

  If Matthew was surprised, he hid it well. As he and the woman rose from what Caryn could now see was a porch swing and walked toward them, she tried to cover her dismay. This was definitely not the way she liked to make new acquaintances—in the dark, her cheap clothes wrinkled and dusty, feeling grimy and sweaty from the long shift at the bar, and cursing like a sailor.

  On the other hand, Carrie wouldn’t care one bit if anyone heard her say “shit.” And she was going to have to try a lot harder to stay in character, at least for a couple more days, until she’d had a chance to meet her bio-dad, check that off her bucket list, and return home where she belonged.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said, forcing a little swagger into her voice. “Congrats on your wedding.”

  “Carrie’s got herself in a bit of a jam,” Zane said. “She’s new in town, and she got herself hired over at Buddy’s, but she doesn’t have anywhere to stay.”

  “Just for tonight,” Caryn said hastily. “I’ll find something tomorrow.”

  Matthew and Jayne exchanged glances. “Sure,” Jayne said, sounding as if she was anything but.