Читать книгу Stony Mesa Sagas - Chip Ward - Страница 17

Chapter 10

Luna and Hoppy returned to their campsite distraught and exhausted. Neither felt like eating or talking so they crawled into their sleeping bags and tried to sleep. Luna couldn’t get the images of carnage out of her mind, the torn fur and knots of clotted blood in the grass. She remembered the sodden bodies of two beavers floating in the pond and the others strewn in gun-blasted pieces along the bank. An hour after she lay down, the dam holding back her rage and grief burst and she turned to Hoppy and sobbed uncontrollably. He could find no words to comfort her, so he just held her until she fell into a fitful sleep.

She awoke and he was gone. She pulled her warmest fleece on and called to him. Nothing. His truck was gone. She made a pot of coffee and cooked oatmeal from a packet over an open fire. She thought she should tell others about the slaughtered beaver colony on Sleeping Maiden Mountain but she was at a loss for words.

All morning she waited for him to reappear. She questioned how he left in his truck without waking her. She was not so worried about his absence as mystified. She came up with a half dozen plausible reasons; all of them had benign outcomes. She focused on the best ones.

A day of nagging worry passed. That evening she needed to be back at the Tar Sands headquarters but couldn’t leave while Hoppy was still missing. She walked around the campsite and tried to get a signal on her phone but it was no use. She could receive text messages intermittently but could not send. She cooked some lentil soup for dinner and waited. She watched rock walls light up as they caught the last rays of the setting sun. Their rosy glow contrasted with the dark pools of shadow spreading under the cottonwoods below. I am like that, she thought. I am lit up but standing on the edge of darkness.

Just after seven o’clock she received so many urgent text messages that her phone chimed continually. She couldn’t keep up. Tar Sands Alliance members who had caught the evening news learned that Drexxel was reporting sabotage at their Sea Ledges site. Sand had been poured into the gas tanks of heavy equipment and the bulldozer that was so threatening just days before had been driven over a cliff.

The security guard at the site was interviewed and claimed that the man who did all the damage was wearing a hard hat with a Drexxel logo and claimed he was doing maintenance on the machines. The guard failed to mention that he spent the day playing Angry Birds on his phone, talking to his girlfriend, and downloading porn. He didn’t hear the low rumble of the dozer or the crunch of gravel beneath its treads because he was wearing ear buds and listening to a sad country tune about the loss of love and the subsequent over-consumption of alcohol mixed with self-pity. He didn’t look up until he heard the crash of the bulldozer as it rolled down the ridge. While he ran over to see what was happening, the mysterious worker in the hard hat set fire to the main house-trailer and then disappeared.

Luna’s friends related these events frantically and waited for her to text back and make sense of it for them but she was too dumbstruck to reply even if she had been able to do so. Luna’s stomach knew before she did—Hip Hop Hopi was the saboteur. Damn him! She tried again and again to get a message out but although she could receive she still could not send at all. She considered climbing the ridge above her campsite and hoping for a better signal at the top but she was too shaken to risk climbing over broken terrain with bone-breaking exposures. She was in for another sleepless night as the twin shocks of the past two days mixed into a bitter stew of grief and fear. She lit a lantern after sunset and meditated, prayed, and cried some more. She wanted to run out and find him but wasn’t sure where to start. She wasn’t sure what to think, what to feel, what to do. The first rule when you are lost is “stay put.” So she stayed and waited.

The world was present while she waited. Birds flew homeward at dusk. Bat wings in moonlight swept the air and crickets chanted. She listened to the rasping branches and the shuffling of dry leaves caught in a whorl of wind crossing the canyon floor. The night was all snap and buzz, whispers, and the music of mad croaking. She tried to will into existence the sound of him approaching. Nothing.

As darkness fell she drifted into sleep for just a moment. She dreamed about a goshawk with brilliant eyes and a terrible beak. It was beautiful and she wanted to touch it but was afraid. She awoke to Hoppy standing there above her, backlit by the firelight with an incongruous halo of dim stars adorning his unkempt hair. When Hoppy was missing she calmed herself by breathing slowly and picturing anything but dead beavers, strip mines, and monkey-wrenched machinery. She found his sudden presence jarring.

“Where did you go?” she asked. “And how come you didn’t wake me?”

“I didn’t want you involved. This was my deal.” He looked down and away. He could tell she knew where he had gone and what he had done and he knew she did not approve. He had risked everything, including a promising relationship with her. On the way back to the campsite he had second-guessed his actions. He reviewed what happened at the mining site and worried that he had left incriminating evidence. One small mistake could lead not only to whatever punishment they could impose on him but could also mean separation from Luna. That consequence frightened him the most. Now that he was standing in her presence he was steeped in regret.

Luna pulled herself from her sleeping bag and stood up. “Are you crazy?” she scolded. “Do you understand what you just did? We were so careful to keep it all by the book. Civil disobedience means you accept responsibility, you make a principled stand, and you do it publicly. Destroying their equipment also destroys our credibility and makes us the bad guys instead of them!”

“Sorry, Luna, but seeing those dead beavers . . . I just can’t take it anymore. The people who are wrecking the planet write the rules. They own the system. They get away with murder and they have to be stopped. Resisting isn’t enough anymore, it’s time to stop them in their tracks. Now!”

“Oh so you’re stopping them, huh? You alone, Hip Hop Hopi the superhero to the rescue! Well now you’re a fugitive and I’m probably a fugitive, too. We’re screwed, Hoppy, screwed!”

Minutes passed as they stared silently at the coals from Luna’s campfire, winking in the dark. Finally, he reached over and took her hand. She tried to pull away but he held on. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. I knew you’d talk me out of it so I didn’t. If I’m caught I will take the blame and if I have to I’ll go to jail, whatever. You don’t have to worry. I’ll keep you and everyone else out of it. It’s all on me. Okay?”

Why, she asked herself, am I so deeply attracted to a man who is so flawed? A voice in her mind said “move on.” But he was so good and so right in so many other ways. There was something about him that seemed fundamental and necessary like the desire for salt or the need for air. And here I am, she thought, for better or worse in the middle of a very big mess with him on my hands. What else can I do?

She replied softly, “We’ll figure it out. No more crazy stuff, though, or I’m outta here. Understand?”

“Yes, I swear.”

The words were barely out when the campfire exploded. They jumped, she screamed. Embers rained down through a mist of ash as the exploded campfire settled to earth.

“What was that!”

Then the lantern hung just above their heads exploded. A moment later they heard the report of a distant rifle.

“Holy shit! Somebody’s shooting at us!”

Their first instinct was to drop everything and run. They headed for her truck and jumped in. She turned to him and asked what they should do next, where they should go. He said he didn’t know. That’s when the rearview mirror exploded.

“Drive! Get outta here!”

The backroads were dark and twisted. Luna drove as fast as she could without losing control on sharp turns. They knew that hidden in darkness just off the side of the road were unforgiving shoulders of loose gravel above steep ravines. There were no guardrails or street lamps to guide their way. Hoppy watched out the back window for signs of a vehicle following. They drove desperately for several miles and when there was no sign that they were being followed Luna slowed the truck to a safe speed. An hour later they were thirty miles from their campsite and in the safety of a well-lit town.

“Where are we?” he asked as he opened the glove box and looked for a map. They left their smartphones behind when they fled.

“It’s a back road to Stony Mesa. I’ve been here before. Jeez, look at that ball of light on the horizon. What the heck is that?”

“That must be that giant neon monstrosity in front of the new museum in town.”

They drove closer and saw an enormous pulsing neon sign in front of a museum that was also too big for such a pastoral setting. It hurt their eyes to look straight ahead at the neon giant so they pulled across the street into a motel parking lot and reviewed their options. There weren’t any good ones. They could go to the police and Hoppy could turn himself in. But Hoppy wasn’t ready for that. He was willing to confess and express remorse to Luna but surrendering to cops was a bridge too far. And who was shooting at them? Maybe that was the cops. They had friends who would take them in but neither of them wanted to endanger their friends. To make it more difficult, they had no money or gear. Their backpacks were in the campsite they had fled. Hoppy’s truck was back there. No phones, no Internet. They had the clothes on their backs. Her truck. Loose change. Not much.

They hashed and rehashed the bad news and then fell silent. Two long minutes passed. The interior of the truck was washed with pulsing lights from the sign across the street. Luna tried to slow her heart with long deep breaths. Her fingers clutched the steering wheel tightly. Above them moths batted a street light and flew in dizzying circles. She watched a family unload suitcases from a van and unstrap a toddler from her car seat. The family disappeared into the motel lobby.

“There may be one more option,” Luna confessed.

“What’s that?”

“My father, the one I don’t have anything to do with, has a ranch near here. I visited it once a few years ago on one of my occasional attempts to reconnect. I know where the keys are to the guest cabin. We could stay there tonight. If I can figure out how to get into the main cabin we can find food and probably some cash stashed somewhere.”

Hoppy was incredulous. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Why bother? Seemed irrelevant until tonight.”

“And your father, will he be there?”

“No. I doubt it. He’s probably off making money, selling what’s left of his soul.”

He was there when they pulled in. He saw their headlights from a distance and walked out on the deck to see who was coming down his private road into the ranch. Twin beams of light fluttered through the cottonwoods that lined the long drive. When the truck rounded the corner and drove straight toward him he was blinded by the headlights. He didn’t recognize the truck. A man and a woman stepped out of the truck cab and he saw her under the dim yard light. It would be hard to decide who was more surprised, Luna or her dad, Bo Hineyman.

Luna managed a weak smile and small wave. “Hi Dad. Surprise!” Hoppy tried to smile, too, but he looked more like he’d just smelled a wet dog.

“Betty, is that you?”

“She calls herself Luna now.” Hoppy was trying to be helpful but Bo stared at him like he had just discovered Hoppy had one eye in the middle of his forehead.

Bo ushered them inside. Hoppy entered and looked around. This so-called cabin was nicer than the home he grew up in. Navajo rugs on the walls, track lighting throughout. It looked like a professional decorating job. Who shot all these animals whose eyes stared down at them blankly from disembodied heads along the wall? The coffee table looked like a river of plastic trout.

The ensuing visit was awkward. Luna tapped her toe nervously on the floor and Hoppy was jumpy. She made up a story about how they were robbed while camping. Why not go to the police, he asked? Because the guy who robbed us was an off-duty cop, she lied. We didn’t know what to do and you were nearby. She hoped she might awake some long-dormant parental instinct in him.

They were hungry so he fed them. Bo didn’t do much cooking himself but his fridge was full of food he had taken home from the Bull and Stallion’s café. He had just pulled out a big juicy bison steak as they pulled up to the house. He divided it in three and served that. A halting conversation followed. He told them he was alone because wife number four, or was it five, was attending a doggy jewelry show in Miami with her favorite poodle, Miss Desiree. She rarely visited the ranch anyway because she was allergic to sagebrush, juniper, snakeweed, pinyon, rabbit brush, and prickly pear cactus, which was pretty much the whole damn ranch. They did tests, he said. Bo did not mention that on his wife’s last visit to the ranch Miss Desiree, who despite her rhinestone collar and weekly trips to a grooming salon, was a dog, ate a horse turd she found. She puked it out on the front seat of his wife’s Mercedes. It was hard for Luna and Hoppy to feign interest or sympathy since they had their own challenges at the moment.

Hoppy told Bo he was a freelance photographer for National Geographic. Luna could barely conceal her astonishment but when it was her turn she swallowed hard and said she was waiting to hear from graduate schools, a lie she thought was at least close to the truth since she had considered that option. She decided this was not the optimum time to discuss controversial life choices and grad school was probably an acceptable and plausible direction compared to chaining herself to mining site gates. Uh oh, Bo thought, more tuition.

Bo wasn’t happy about his daughter’s situation. She has nothing to do with him for years at a time and then she shows up dirty, broke, and with some hippy loser at her side. They look like they slept too close to their campfire, their hair coated with ash. They look addled, he thought, as well as disheveled and he wondered if she was back on drugs. Damn, he didn’t need another hefty bill for rehab. What was it with all the women in his life that made them swallow pills? But I’m her dad, he concluded, so I have to help. He gave them fresh towels and the key to the guest house. When they left him he turned back to clear the dishes.

Hoppy’s plate was clean but Luna barely touched her bison steak. Probably doesn’t approve, he guessed. And because he was a man with a big appetite, he picked up Luna’s steak and ripped off a large chunk and stuffed it in his mouth. He felt juice running down his chin and he turned to pick up a dish towel and catch the drip before it stained his two-hundred-dollar western shirt. That was when he looked up and saw the man with the gun.