Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (37 page)

He felt deep shame over his treatment of Fran; his father’s grief and loneliness was a weight he wanted to share without knowing how. Most of all he kept remembering Victoria’s trust in him, her faith. The past few days all he had been able to think of was getting back to the gorge, finding something, anything. Not enough, he knew now.

He needed to think, to plan. Whatever was in the valley was pure malevolence; it could kill, had tried to kill him, had tried to drive Victoria over the edge of the gorge. He no longer believed in the earthquake he had experienced. It was as false as Reuben. You couldn’t believe anything you saw, felt, heard, experienced in there; and that made the problem impossible, he thought. If observers could have watched him that night, what would they have seen? He felt certain now that they would have seen him tumbling over the ground, falling repeatedly, running frantically, just as he had seen Victoria running and failing. But, he thought with a rising excitement, then she had risen, had ignored the lights and, like a sleepwalker, had simply left the area. That was the starting point. The clue to her escape that night lay in that action: she had walked away like someone in a trance, or asleep.

His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of an automobile, or the cloud of dust from a car, at the top of the hill overlooking the ranch buildings. The car came down too fast, screamed around the curve at the bottom of the hill; the dust cloud increased.

“You want me out here?” Will asked from inside the screen door.

“No point in it. I’ll talk to him.” Farley watched the car careen around the last curve, screech to a stop. The driver was a thin, balding man wearing a pale blue sports coat, white shirt, tie, navy trousers. He made Farley feel hot. He went down the steps to greet Victoria’s father.

“Mr. Dorsett? I’m Farley Chesterman.”

The man ignored his hand and walked quickly to the shade cast by the house. “This is where she came to spend a week? In this hellhole?”

“You might as well come up and sit down,” Farley said. He went up the steps and sat in one of the canvas chairs. “You want a drink? Beer, Coke, anything? That’s a long hot drive.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” Dorsett said shrilly. “I just wanted to see for myself. A pack of lies, that’s all I’ve had from your sheriff. Nothing but a pack of lies. You don’t look like someone almost dead to me. And this sure as hell doesn’t look like any resort hotel where my girl would spend even five minutes, let alone a week. I want to know what happened up here, Chesterman, why my girl came here, what you’ve done to her.”

Farley told him the official story of the campout, the landslide. “I was found and taken to the hospital. They haven’t been found yet.”

“I’ll take that beer,” Dorsett said, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

Farley went in for it and when he came back Dorsett was sitting on the porch.

“Why did your sheriff send people poking around in my affairs? What’s any of this got to do with me?” The belligerence was gone from his voice.

“I don’t know. I guess he’s trying to account for the fact that Victoria and Sam weren’t found.”

“Ha! Because she’s just like her mother—follow anyone who whistles.”

“It’s hard to believe they’d leave anyone hurt, not try to help.”

“Didn’t her mother leave me in a jam? She ran off with one of my buyers, vanished without a word, nothing. Left me with a two-year-old baby girl. What was I supposed to do with a
girl
?”

“Did you ever find her?”

“I didn’t look! She found
me
a couple of years later when loverboy ran out of cash and things got tough.” He drank his beer and stood up. “As for Victoria, she’ll show up again. If you have any pull with that sheriff of yours, just tell him to keep his goddamn nose out of my business. I haven’t seen her and don’t expect to. I wasn’t sure if it was just him, or if you were making insinuations too. Now I know. If it’s a shakedown, he’s bucking the wrong man. I didn’t get where I am today being intimidated by two-bit politicians. You tell him, Chesterman.”

Farley didn’t stand. Dorsett regarded him for a moment, turned, and went back to his car. He drove away in a cloud of dust as thick as the one he had brought with him.

Victoria had said her mother died when she was a baby. Maybe she did, Farley thought.

Farley lay on his back, his hands under his head, on top of his sleeping bag, and listened to his father and Tom Thornton exchange stories. Tom was talking about his dude-rustling days for Leon Stacy, before he had been elected sheriff twelve years ago.

“He says to me right off, ‘Mr. Thorton, I don’t know a damn thing about horses, trails, desert country, nothing else I should know. All’s I know is Egypt, history, pyramids, anything you want to know, I can more’n likely tell you. Now if I agree not to treat you like an ignorant slob because you don’t know shit about my specialty, will you agree not to treat me like one because I don’t know yours?’” Thorton poured himself more coffee from the thermos. “Real fine fellow. Teaches at the university over at Eugene. Came back every year, still does, more’n likely. Nice wife, kids. Questions! Never heard so many questions. And they all listened to the answers. Fine people.”

Farley counted stars, lost track and went over the steps again. In the valley there was enough dynamite to blow up ten acres. On the ridge was the detonator. He had already cut the fence up there, made a four-foot opening. They could step through, observe whatever was in the valley, get out, and set off the explosives. On the cliff and at the bottom gate there were powerful searchlights. “It
will
work,” he told himself again.

But there was nothing to blast. Halfway through their second night the men had seen nothing, heard nothing. The horse tethered fifteen feet inside the area remained quiet.

“Three nights,” Will had said. “If there’s nothing for three nights will you give it up? Admit there’s nothing you can do.”

He had been so certain. Victoria hadn’t waited. Her first night, there it was. When they came again, it was right there. He got up, walked to the
gate,
and watched the horse a few minutes. The starlight was so bright that if it acted up, they would be able to see it. He sat and poured coffee.

“You should get some sleep,” he told Will.

“Intend to. Want to check the ridge again first?”

Farley shrugged. “No point. Not until the horse tells us.”

Tom Thorton unrolled his sleeping bag. “Call me at three.” He grunted several times, then began to snore softly.

“Me too,” Will said. “If there’s a sound, anything…”

“Sure, Dad.”

The night remained quiet and Farley didn’t bother to awaken either of the men. At dawn his father got up first, grumbled, and roused Tom, and when their relief came, two ranch hands who would guard the dynamite during the day, they returned to the house, where Farley went to bed.

The third night was the same.

“Farl, that was the agreement,” Will said stubbornly. “You agreed.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t say I would or wouldn’t. I’m taking the camper up there and staying a few more nights. I’ll hang around during the day. You won’t have to send anyone up to relieve me.”

“It isn’t that, and you know it. If it was this easy don’t you think someone would have done it years ago? That thing comes and goes when it gets ready. It might be quiet up there for months, years. You planning to wait it out?”

“Yes!” Farley stamped from the room, up the stairs. He began to throw his clothes into a pack.

His door opened and Serena slid inside and shut it. “Farley, why are you carrying on like this, giving your father more grief? What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m crazy! Haven’t you learned yet? I’m crazy! Get the hell out of here, Serena.”

“You’re crazy all right. Driving off Fran, driving your father beyond what he can endure. Why don’t you stop all this foolishness and help your father now that he needs you.”

“I can’t help him.”

“You can! Just let yourself instead of rushing off after ghosts all the time.”

“There’s something out there, Serena! I know because it almost killed me! Do you understand that? It almost killed me!”

“And it will kill you the next time! You think your father can stand that?” Serena’s voice rose.

“You don’t understand.”

“
I
don’t understand? You’re the one who doesn’t understand anything, Farley Chesterman! Right through the years everyone else’s had enough sense to leave it alone.”

Farley indicated the door. “Beat it!”

“You pig! You don’t care, do you?”

“
All right!
There’s something out there! A devil. You understand devils, you Catholic bitch! There’s a devil out there and I’m going to get it off this land! That’s what I have to do!”

“If there’s a devil, it’s not out on the desert! You’re carrying it around with you all the time!”

“Shut up and get the hell out of here! What gives you the right to—”

There was a knock on the door. This time it was Will, who stuck his head into the room and said mildly, “I thought you two gave up screaming at each other ten, fifteen years ago.” Serena gave Farley one last furious look and ran from the room, down the stairs. Will regarded his son for a moment, then closed the door gently.

“Bitch,” Farley muttered and sat down on the side of his bed, suddenly shaking.
Bitch, bitch, bitch
.

Although the sheriff had collected Victoria’s belongings to have them delivered to her father, no one had known what to do about Sam’s camper, and it was still parked in the side yard. Farley loaded it, checked the water and food, added coffee to the stores, and left, driving slowly, unwilling to add to the coating of dust on everything in the valley.

At the gorge he told the two hands they could go back to the ranch. He chose a spot near the gate where the camper would have shade during the hottest part of the afternoons; then he climbed the cliff to check the detonator, and to scowl at the cul-de-sac below where something came and went as it chose.

His ribs ached abominably, and his head throbbed; fury clouded his eyes, blurring his vision. Somewhere down there, within the three hundred acres, he knew, the bodies of Victoria and Sam lay hidden. The packs they had carried, his pack and camera, it was all in there, somewhere. Unless, he thought, they had fallen over the gorge and the rushing river had carried them miles downstream. The desert shimmered with heat waves, and in the distance a cloud of dust marked the passing of a jeep or truck—it was impossible to see what had raised the cloud. No other life stirred in the motionless, hot afternoon; no sound broke the silence, and even the colors had taken on a sameness that was disturbing, as if a patina of heat had discolored everything, obscured the true colors, and left instead the color of the desert—a dull, flat dun color that was actually no color at all.

But he had smelled the river, he told himself, and then as if he needed more positive affirmation he said aloud, “I smelled the goddamn river, and I saw the earth move. I felt the rocks of the earthquake!”

And for the first time he wondered if that was so, if he really had smelled the river, really had been in an earthquake. And he wondered if maybe he was crazy. In the intense heat of the desert in August, he had a chill that shook him and raised goosebumps on his arms and made his scalp feel as if a million tiny things were racing about on it.

VI

Victoria watched the swarm of lights with rising panic, until Sam tugged her arm; then they both started to run blindly down the hillside. The lights swirled about them and Victoria stumbled, was yanked forward, stumbled again, and they both stopped, and now Sam was trying to brush the darting specks away.

The lights hovered around Victoria, blinding her momentarily, then left her and settled around Sam, who fell to his knees, then all the way to the ground, and rolled several times before he became quiet. Victoria could no longer see his body under the pulsating lights; instead, it was as if the shape was all light that gave no illumination, no warmth, but swelled and subsided rhythmically.

Victoria knelt beside him, they mustn’t be separated, she thought. She reached for him, hesitating when her hand came close to the mass of lights; she took a deep breath, reached through, and touched and held his arm. The lights darted up her hand, paused, flowed back down and rejoined the others. Presently Sam stirred. There was a tightening in his muscles, a tensing before he started to sit up. The lights dimmed, moved away from him a little distance, and he got up shakily, Victoria still clutching his arm.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes. I think so.” His voice was hollow, distant.

He began to walk aimlessly, as if unaware of her; she held his arm tightly and kept up. Tree frogs were singing, and there was a chirping call of a night bird, and, farther away, the roar of the river. A pale moth floated before her face; a twig snapped. A large animal scuttled up a tree, as if in slow motion. A sloth! she realized. It turned its head to look at her, then humped its way upward until it was out of sight in the thick foliage.

Still the lights hovered about Sam, not pressing in on him as they had done at first, but not leaving him either, and she remembered watching herself—the other woman—surrounded by lights, walking as if in a trance out of the fenced-in area. She began to direct their steps, keeping parallel to the wild river, and suddenly the lights stopped, as they had done before. She and Sam had crossed the dividing line. She jerked Sam to a halt and stared in disbelief. The soft moonlit rain forest continued as far as she could see. She turned, but the lights were gone. Hesitantly she took a step, and they surged toward her from the tree-covered hill. She darted back across the invisible line, and they vanished.

“Sam, sit down a few minutes. Rest. It’s all right now,” she said. Sam obeyed. Victoria began to arrange stones and sticks to indicate the beginning of the three hundred acres. She made a short wall, only inches high, a marker, not a barrier. Sam was still blank-eyed.