Читать книгу Improbable Fortunes - Jeffrey Price - Страница 5

PROLOGUE

By morning, several theories would circulate Vanadium as to why their town had been destroyed. Vanadium’s First Church of Thessalonians would put forth the notion that the Almighty had finally gotten around to clearing off His cluttered desk only to discover a stack of neglected outrages, perpetrated in these environs, so great as to demand His immediate retribution. Some of the standouts were the Spanish Conquistadors’ introduction of Vanadium’s first native inhabitants to slavery, small pox, and syphilis; the Mormons’ massacre of the Utes; the range wars of the 1870s; the many murders over water, women, and the receipt for the uranium mined—not two miles from Vanadium’s Main Street, that was expedited to Japan via the Enola Gay. The pagans in town believed their misfortune was caused by the Curse of the Utes—a hex put upon this land by shamans and trotted out whenever anything went wrong. But in the cold light of day, when everyone had settled down, they would come to the consensus that what had befallen them was simply because Marvin Mallomar, one of the richest men in the United States, had moved there from New York City and formed an unlikely friendship with a dim-witted local cowboy by the name of Buster McCaffrey.

It had been raining for seven days straight, and on this auspicious night, most of Vanadium’s regulars would decide to “drink in” rather than venture into the wet. It was now 1:30. The neon light of the High Grade Bar switched off. The Busy Bees, the area’s anarchistic motorcycle gang and Lame Horse County’s largest manufacturers of methamphetamine, saddled up their Harleys and pulled out of the parking lot. Although business this evening was slow, the Busy Bees were up 9.5 percent for the second quarter. Their success was no accident, for Cookie Dominguez, the gang’s leader, had modeled his sales and distribution system on an organization he much admired, that being the Mary Kay Cosmetics Company.

Here they came now, grim-faced and rain-slickered, throttling down Main Street heading back to their secure compound twenty miles to the west, giving the town one last defiant crankpin exhaust blast as they passed the town’s proudly misspelled welcome sign suggesting that everyone: “Quit Your Damn Bellyachin’ Your in Vanadium.” As the Geiger Motel sign, with its neon Geiger counter needle that twitched from “vacancy” to “radioactive” shut off, the town was officially closed.

Two bug-encrusted sodium lights illuminating Main Street’s convexly-graded stretch of black asphalt created the image of the back of a giant sperm whale skimming krill near the surface. Water, from gutters and downspouts, poured down both sides of the whale’s spine—flushing its skin clean of cigarette butts, candy wrappers, dead cats, flattened blue jays, snuff spittle, and horse manure. This sluice was then hurried into Vanadium’s storm drains and sent westerly into the San Miguel River. There, it descended two thousand feet into the valley where it took the Dolores’ hand in muddy matrimony and poured through the slickrock canyons of Escalante—rolling like a marble along the linoleum floor of the Great Basin through Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, and out kitchen faucets where Vanadium’s fulsome appellation was unwittingly quaffed by people in Los Angeles. At least, that’s how people in Vanadium liked to think of it. Vanadians were, by way of geography and the fact that most of them were direct descendants of Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, a naturally xenophobic and suspicious lot. This original outlaw breeding stock was attracted to the canyon in the 1890s for its remoteness and defensibility. Vanadium was miles from the railroad, the transportation of choice for Pinkerton agents—who were, by and large, city boys out of their depth chasing bandits in the backcountry on horseback. If Pinkertons, or any other kind of lawmen, were foolish enough to attempt a sortie on Vanadium, they would find themselves riding the gauntlet of its one steep road into town. The slow-climbing pace the incline demanded offered countless opportunities for boulders to be pushed from above and the children of outlaws to hone their marksmanship skills on live targets. The reputation of Vanadium as a dangerous and hard-to-get-to place stuck. For those living outside the law, Vanadium became the perfect place to raise a family—especially if the breadwinner was away most of the year robbing banks in the neighboring states or stealing cattle across the border in Old Mexico.

Generation after generation had struggled to live on this land—parts of it, beautiful. One might say this community existed much like its native bristlecone pine, which during long periods of drought, allowed itself to mostly die in order to keep alive a small, tiny ember of life until better circumstances presented themselves. For Vanadium and greater Lame Horse County, desiccated and exhausted from years of poor land management and cattle ranching, toxic from reckless mineral mining, that life-saving ember came to them in the form of the atomic bomb. Uranium was everywhere in the hills surrounding Vanadium, and the US government along with its proxy, the Atomic Mines Corporation, wanted as much of it as they could get. And so began Vanadium’s “go-go” years starting with the US Atomic Energy Act of 1946. One need only visit the town’s salvage yard to identify Vanadium’s outlandish prosperity in those years: impractical DeSotos, Cadillac Eldorados, Studebaker Hawks, Buick “Deuce-and-a-Quarters,” stacked one atop each other. And these were only the ones that escaped the bank. Old timers would say it was the one-two punch of the 1982 Start Treaty followed by the accident at Three Mile Island that turned off the bubble machine forcing Atomic Mines to shutter its facility. Vanadium let itself slowly die for twenty years. Then, Marvin Mallomar came to town.

The mud-filled clocks, retrieved in the aftermath of the flood, were in general agreement that it was 2:34 when all hell broke loose. It started with an explosion above the town, muffled by the rain and lightning. A few moments later, there was the horrible sound of trees cracking and boulders thundering as a giant wave of red mud and rocks came crashing down Piñon Street, taking a hard left onto Main. The lava went in and out of escrow at the town’s newly installed Vanadium Premier Properties—smashing its contrived western storefront. It flattened Nature’s Grains Whole Foods, which, until Mallomar came here, had been the Feed and Saddle Shop. It pushed his Einstein’s News and Books off its slab and sent it hydroplaning westerly down the street toward Utah—where some of Professor Einstein’s ideas were first tested underground. It pushed the meat freezers from Lugar’s Prime Meats out the front of the store and sent them careening through Boho Coffee and Poet’s Corner—which used to be El Cid’s Guns before Mallomar arrived—scouring all the books containing the answers to how the planet might be saved, while grabbing hundreds of pounds of gourmet roasted coffee beans, kneading and folding them into the moving brown meringue that already contained similar-looking deer and elk feces. All of Main Street was suddenly moving. A parked car, obediently waiting for its owner to consummate his assignation at the Geiger Motel, was carried away. A dead horse, with its legs up in the air, was swept past the Rodeo Arena—where perhaps it had seen better days. And then a man came moving by. Fighting the muddy undertow, he held an arm up in the air as if calling for help from a lifeguard on a beach in the Hamptons. Then, he too, was gone.

The Vanadium Volunteer Fire Department had been the First Responders. Most of the men were either drunk or hungover when they climbed aboard the two old fire engines that sallied forth into town. By the time Sheriff Shep Dudival showed up, the wheels of social order were already coming off. There was much shouting, obscenity tossing, and blaming. The sheriff stood tight-lipped as he witnessed two volunteer firemen fighting over a five-thousand-dollar Rancilio Epoca Italian espresso maker that they had salvaged from the mud. It was the sheriff’s experience that men often became unglued in the face of an overwhelming task. The cleanup would certainly qualify as that. Authority needed to be established quickly. He let the men see him as he walked to the edge of the mud field and lit a generic cigarette. He wanted to provide the two looters an opportunity to relinquish the espresso maker and regain their self-respect.

Down Main Street, the sheriff could see the hooves of the dead, upside-down horse heading west toward Egnar. A pickup truck was stopping for a naked hitchhiker covered with mud. Lucky sonofabitch, the sheriff mused to himself, some drunk that just missed being swept away. He turned his attention back to the looting firemen who, disappointingly, were not deterred by his presence. They were still squabbling over the booty. The sheriff walked calmly to the first man and kneed him in the vastus lateralis—the “Charlie Horse” muscle as it’s called in schoolyards. He slapped the other man in the Adam’s apple. Both men doubled over in pain and quickly relinquished the espresso machine—letting it drop into the arms of the moving mud. There was some muttering under breath, but nobody had the guts to take it further.

Despite Main Street being a complete disaster, there would be no help from FEMA. There would be no help from the governor in the form of road crews, nor the National Guard, or building loans. There would be no speeches from the president about how all our thoughts and prayers were with the people of Vanadium. The shuttering of Vanadium’s once strategic industry, the Atomic Mine, had reduced them to the invisible status of any small western town with a population of three hundred and sixty-seven. But then, Vanadians would never want the damn government, anyway.

The sheriff would probably be calling the high school principal later in the morning asking if he needed any dirt for the new ball field. The larger ranchers could be called upon for heavy equipment. Vanadium could supply the dump trucks. A full day—maybe two—and the road would be open to traffic. But where exactly had the mud come from? That was the plate of beans in front of the sheriff now. As he peered through the rain, he coolly reverse-engineered the mud’s path. His eyes tracked up Main Street to Piñon to the top of Lame Horse Mesa. He thought for a moment, then flipped his cigarette into the mud. Some men had just arrived with a Caterpillar D9. “Hey, can you fellas get me up to the Mallomar place?”

It was dawn by the time they cleared the road well enough for a rescue team to get to Mallomar’s Big Dog Ranch. The rain, at this higher elevation, was coming down as stinging cornsnow. The sheriff let it gather on his eyebrows as he squinted at the jumble of aged Montana logs, glass, steel, and broken furniture that had once been the forty-thousand-square-foot residence of Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Mallomar. It was just last April that it had been on the cover of Architectural Digest. Mallomar’s French architect boasted that there were more steel I-beams used in the construction of this house than the new American Embassy that he had recently completed in Dubai. And yet, the mud had gone through the reinforced Adirondack/Frank Lloyd Wright-style edifice as easily as a black bear going through a screen door. The once magnificent lodge now looked ridiculous—its massive Corten roof having accordioned down on itself like a clown’s top hat.

One hundred yards away, a late model Audi Q7 and a black Mercedes AMG could be seen standing nose down in the mud, their rear ends sticking up in the air like ducks feeding on a pond. When the sheriff ran the plates, he came up with what he already knew. The cars belonged to Dana and Marvin Mallomar. Mallomar was often out of town on business. When he was, Dana, his young and beautiful wife, was left at the ranch with the twenty-one-year-old foreman, Buster McCaffrey. There had been rumors in town about their relationship, but gossip held no interest for the sheriff unless it helped him solve a crime. Right now, he was hoping no one had been at home when this happened. An ambulance was ordered anyway. Sheriff Dudival hiked up the hill following the mudslide. On a flat bench above the house was an emptied reservoir. Everyone in town had made fun of Buster McCaffrey for bringing a douser to the property to find water to fill a reservoir above the house, but dammit if he hadn’t done it. Unfortunately, for some reason, the levee had failed and let loose twenty acres of water on the residence and the town below. Several hours later, with the help of two bulldozers and a Bobcat, they uncovered the wrought iron front door. It was pinched shut from the weight bearing on it. Four men put their shoulders to it, but it wouldn’t budge. A bulldozer was suggested, but they didn’t want to do any more violence to the house for fear of further cave in. One of the men eagerly suggested using his acetylene torch that he had brought with him in the back of his truck. Another man suggested placing hydraulic jacks on either side of the door to take the pressure off the jams. The sheriff considered both ideas and went with the hydraulic jacks. This caused the acetylene torch man to throw his shovel and stomp off in a fit of pique. People in this part of the country typically carried odd things in the backs of their trucks for years in the hope of one day using them in a heroic and manly fashion. So, one can only understand the man’s frustration, being so close to finally using his equipment—only to be edged out at the finish line.

The jacks were installed and everyone eagerly gathered around the door for the big question: were there any dead people inside? The sheriff was well aware of the Volunteer Workers’ Dark Little Secret: in exchange for having to get up in the middle of the night to ride on the back of the fire engine or drive the Emergency Medical Technician Ambulance two hours to Grand Junction, they got to witness only what doctors, police, and priests were allowed to see. The Burned Beyond Recognition, The Head That Went Through the Windshield and Rolled a Hundred Yards Down the Road, The Blue Teenagers’ Bodies Pulled From the Frozen Pond, and The Surprised Expression on The Man’s Face Whose Wife Spotted His Car in the Parking Lot of the Geiger Motel and Shot Him With His Own Elk Rifle. The sheriff always figured that voyeurism had something to do with this volunteer business. That’s why he never prevented the men from having a good eyeful before body-bagging the victims.

The sheriff nodded to one of the two young men standing by the door to go ahead and open it. Cautiously, he turned the handle. The door swung open surprisingly easy. So far, so good. Then suddenly a three-year-old Galloway steer, wide-eyed with fear, mucous blowing from its nostrils, came charging through the doorway, trampling the men.

“Shit!”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Goddammit!”

And again, another “Shit!”

After the initial astonishment had passed, the men, of course, said “shit” and “goddammit” a few more times then laughed to relieve the tension and embarrassment of being frightened in front of one another. Finally recomposed, they turned on their Petzl headlamps and tentatively entered the breech once more. No sooner did they take their first step into the darkened shaft that another steer bolted out at them. And then another, and another, until forty-nine by the sheriff’s count had blasted past them—shitting themselves with fear.

There’s a detail for the journal, the sheriff thought to himself.

Now, no one seemed quite so eager to go back into the house. Who wanted to risk having their ribs broken by a six-hundred-pound animal trapped in the dark? There was a metallic clanking of Zippos as they lit up cigarettes to mull this over. Suddenly there was a voice behind them.

“Howdy, boys.”

Everyone slowly turned to see a tall, skinny cowboy squinting into the daylight from the doorway. The buckle of his belt was missing, and his pants were half undone. In his arms was a semi-conscious woman in her thirties, raven-haired and as beautiful as a movie star.

“Well, goddamn…it’s Buster.”

“Crap,” said the sheriff as he threw his latest generic cigarette down into the mud.

Buster McCaffrey smiled sheepishly, and even a half a smile was something to behold. Tall and thin as a stretch of barbed wire, his teeth were as big as a horse’s—big enough to accommodate Eskimo scrimshaw of Whale Hunting in the Bering Sea—and freckles formed a saddle over the bridge of his wad-of-bubblegum nose. His hair was reddish and fanned around his small jug ears like twists of dried hay. Above each eye was a brow bent like a piece of angle iron in permanent amazement. Taken separately, his characteristics would seem odd, one might even say freakish. And yet, gathered all together, his appearance, for some reason, comforted people. If you asked them why this was so, no one could ever say. But whether they realized it or not, Buster subconsciously reminded people of Howdy Doody.

“Hey, uh…some mess, huh?”

The men turned their attention to the woman in his arms. She was wearing black satin cargo pants and a somewhat soiled white top that provided a gauzy view of her nipples. Clutched in her hand was a piece of black metal.

“What’s that there she got, Buster?”

Buster looked down to see what the fellow was referring to.

“Ah b’lieve that’s a burner from that ol’ Vikin’ stove top. She was diggin’ in the mud with it.”

“Mrs. Mallomar?” said the sheriff.

Mrs. Mallomar just looked at him blankly. Buster jiggled her to get her to respond.

“Uh, you r’member the sheriff, doncha, ma’am?”

When she still didn’t speak, Buster winked to the head Emergency Medical Technician on the job. “Ah think she’s gonna need some seein’ to.” The EMT nodded with tacit understanding. It would actually take the better part of four months before anybody understood the half of what had transpired in this house.

The EMTs came forward to relieve Buster of Mrs. Mallomar, but she clung even tighter to his neck.

“No, I’m staying with him!”

Everyone looked back to Buster. He visibly blushed, knowing that none of Mrs. Mallomar’s antics were being lost on the sheriff. Buster, trying his best to avoid the sheriff’s eyes, turned to Mrs. Mallomar, cajoling.

“They’re jes’ gonna take ya down to the clinic and check ya out, ma’am. Ain’t that right, fellers?”

“That’s right, ma’am,” one of them said to Mrs. Mallomar’s bosom.

Now came the hard part. Buster pried Mrs. Mallomar’s fingers from his neck and tried to pass her over to the EMTs, who, by this time, had a stretcher with restraining straps waiting. Mrs. Mallomar, obviously disoriented by the ordeal of the last six hours, resisted their help with punches and kicks as well as a jazz-scat stream of profanity—the verbal thrust of which dealt mostly with different forms of sodomy.

Buster waited out her solo and then said, “It’s all right, ma’am. They’ll be nice to you down there. We’re jes’ gonna put this back, ma’am,” and gently pulled her fingers from the stovetop burner. “We’re done with our diggin’ fer now.”

“No, please!”

“Ma’am, it’s for the best.”

“Ow, my god! What was that?”

A female EMT had surreptitiously brought a syringe from the vehicle and plunged fifteen milligrams of Versed into Mrs. Mallomar’s exposed left buttock as the others wrestled her onto the gurney.

“It’s just a little something to help you relax.”

“But you didn’t even ask me if I was allergic to anything!”

“Are you allergic to anything?” the EMT said, a little late in the game.

“Why don’t we just see if I go into cardiac arrest, you stupid bitch?” Even in her weakened state, Mrs. Mallomar was formidable.Buster tried to be helpful.

“Uh, did ah mention…she ain’t allowed to have nuthin’ with wheat in it,” Buster said.

It seemed like an eternity—with the sheriff staring a hole in him—before Mrs. Mallomar was stowed into the ambulance. Buster shook his head and blew a low whistle.

“Jiminy, look at that house!” Buster said. The sheriff was still silent. “I guess you’re pretty disserpointed with me right now, ain’tcha?”

“Buster…” The sheriff began to say something, but stopped when he noticed two of his deputies eavesdropping.

“Don’t you have something to investigate?” the sheriff barked. They snorted insolently and sauntered away.

“What’s there to investigate? The house jes’…done fell down,” Buster said nervously. The sheriff sighed like the last of the air from a flat tire.

“Buster, I’m gonna have to ask you a few questions.”

Buster scraped the helix of his right ear with his little finger and scrutinized what had accumulated under his fingernail.

“Shoot.”

“Where’s the mister?”

“Uh, ain’t he with you?”

“No, he is not.”

“Maybe he drove hisself away.”

“His car’s still here.”

“It is?”

“It is.”

The sheriff studied Buster’s face as it momentarily clouded with that new piece of information.

“Is he in that house somewhere?”

“Ah don’t rightly think so. Ah b’lieve he left the house.”

“You’d tell me if anything had happened to Mr. Mallomar…”

“Ah know what yor thinkin’, Sheriff. All’s ah can tell you is he was fine last time ah seen him.”

“And when was that?”

“Las’ night.”

“Last night. He came home last night and you were here in the house with his missus?” Buster squirmed at the implication.

“Well, sir. Ah were in the house tryin’ to get them cattle out.” This, to Buster, was the big news of the evening—that a herd of cattle had actually been inside a house. “Did y’all see ’em?”

“Musta been ’bout fifty head in there,” one of the rescue men answered convivially, but slunk away when the sheriff glowered at him.

One of the deputies emerged from the house, wiggle-waggling something above his head.

“Mr. Mallomar’s wallet!”

The rescue workers were now watching the sheriff’s reactions. As far as they were concerned, there was enough evidence to hang the foreman.

“Do you know why Mr. Mallomar would leave the house without his wallet or his car?” Buster scratched his head, cogitating on that.

“It’s a booger, Sheriff.”

“Yes, it certainly is a booger.”

The sheriff led Buster further away from the others.

“Remember what we always said about lying?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you having sexual relations with Mrs. Mallomar?”

Even Buster, who had never read a newspaper in his life, knew how much trouble a former president of the United States had gotten into with this question, and how better off the president would have been by just telling the truth. But now, when it came time to his turn at bat, he, also, looked for the same nuance of language to hide behind. Unfortunately, he lacked the language skills to pull it off.

“Ah ain’t at liberty to say,” he offered weakly.

“Why not?”

Another man came through the doorway holding a rope that had been fashioned into a noose. Once again, the sheriff turned to Buster.

“What’s this?”

Buster looked at it every which way—as if seeing a rope for the first time in his life.

“Lord, if ah know. It’s got kinda a loop on the end of it.”

“It’s called a noose!” Buster flinched. “Why would they have a noose just laying around the house?”

Buster took a deep breath.

“Ah ain’t at liberty to say.”

“You ain’t at liberty to say? Where’d you get this kind of talk?”

“That’s what Mr. Mallomar used to say when he dint wanna tell somebody somethin’,” Buster said glumly.

“Used to say?”

“Says. That’s what he says all the time and ah guess ah took it up.”

“I’m sure Mr. Mallomar is gratified with the results of his mentorship. That is, if he’s not laying dead under that heap of a house over there.” The men were all waiting for this conversation to conclude in the only way it could.

“Buster, I got no choice but to take you in.”

“Aw, but Sheriff, ah ain’t killed nobody…”

“That’s what he always says,” someone muttered.

“Turn around. I’ll have to cuff you.” Buster almost burst out in tears, but complied docilely. As the sheriff escorted him to the back of his cruiser, Buster called out to the diggers.

“Hey, fellers, keep an eye out for my ro-day-oh buckle, will ya?”

Sheriff Dudival pushed his head down to fold him into the back seat.

“Buster, that’s the least of your damn problems.”

b

Down at booking, the corrections officers gave Buster a more thorough pat down. Then they fingerprinted him, photographed him, and collected his personal effects. He surrendered a bag of Bugler with some rolling papers, the keys to his Chevy Apache truck, his lucky Ute arrowhead, and his Colorado State Fair wallet with four dollars in it. The corrections officer looked up and smirked when he found a dried buttercup pressed between his social security card and an unpaid parking ticket. He was told to unstring the shoelaces from his manure-covered White’s Packers so they couldn’t be used to commit suicide. They took his hat. They gave him an orange county uniform and a towel, and then led him to lockup.

Someone, probably the sheriff, had sent down orders that Buster be put in the “suicide watch” cell. It was brightly lit with a big porthole-like window that faced the correction officer’s desk so he could keep a constant eye on him. Buster sat on his bunk and looked around his new digs. The toilet was a one-piece stainless steel job, as was the sink. There was no mirror and, worse, no window. Was it possible for someone who had spent his entire life outside to survive the rest of it inside? He could already feel his strength ebbing. He would surely die if he couldn’t be out under the sky. That is, if they didn’t execute him first.

Buster sighed and looked at his hands. They were as big as Rawlins baseball gloves and just as broken in. What made him think he could make his way in the world with his brain instead of these? Probably Mr. Mallomar. He was always overvaluing, pumping things up. Maybe his friends had been right when they’d told him not to get mixed up with people like the Mallomars. There was going to be plenty of time for regret. He wasn’t going anywhere. In his mind, he began to flip through the stupid events leading up to this—as if they were the embarrassing red-eyed snapshots the sober person always takes of the drunks at a party.

Dudival stormed past Janet Poult, his secretary, who’d already heard what had happened at the Mallomar ranch on the police scanner, and slammed his office door behind him without even a “howdy-do.”

He sat at his desk and rubbed his face with tedium and aggravation. Under the harsh florescent light, his face was a craggy composite of avalanche chutes, scree slopes, and deeply cut drainages, the result of forty years of wearing a badge in Lame Horse County. When he opened his eyes he saw that his lunch had been brought in—a paper plate of beef taquitos that Mrs. Tejera, the cook at the High Grade, had made especially for him. White fat had begun to congeal at its borders—the chalk outline of a murder victim on a sidewalk. Dudival knew that she was an illegal but left her alone. Vanadium couldn’t afford to have their best Mexican cook sent back to Chihuahua. She made chicken mole from scratch, and he would be damned if he’d send her packing. As the highest ranking elected official in the county, it was the privilege of the sheriff’s office—a precedent set by his predecessor Sheriff Morgan—to adjudicate most matters himself, without the help of judges or outsiders. But what he could do for Buster?

Having no appetite, he threw his lunch in the trash and unlocked the top drawer of his desk removing his private journal. He opened it from the beginning and read in his own faded handwriting the narrative that he began recording over twenty years ago.