Sleepwalk (22 page)

“I’ve just been up at the dam, Otto,” Frank said, steel in his voice. “And I want to know what the hell is going on. The shaft’s ready to blow, and that didn’t happen overnight.”

“Now just a minute,” Kruger broke in, his face livid. “Max Moreland ordered those maintenance cuts, not me—”

He’d given Frank the opening he was waiting for. Staring straight into the other man’s eyes, he finished the sentence for him. “And Max, conveniently enough, isn’t here to defend himself, right, Otto?”

Though he’d been careful to make no direct accusation, the implication was clear. Without another word, he turned and left the office.

Paul Kendall stared at the door Frank had just slammed, then turned to Kruger. “What’s going on with him?” he asked. “I thought you had him under control.”

Kruger’s eyes fixed malevolently on Kendall. “He’s shooting blind,” he said. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Kendall regarded his plant supervisor darkly. “Well, if that’s the way he wants to fight, there’s a few things I can do too.”

“Listen to Frank,” Max said.

Rita Moreland froze. She felt suddenly cold, although above her the sun was blazing down, and she could feel the midday heat radiating from the sandstone boulder on which she sat; her legs, clad in a pair of
worn jodhpurs, curled beneath her, her back as ramrod straight as ever.

She wasn’t certain how long she’d been sitting there, high up on the mesa above her house, gazing out over the town.

It lay spread out before her, the sun glinting off the tin roofs of its small rectangular houses. Beyond the town she could see the refinery, and even a few of the oil wells. And then, in the distance, the mouth of Mordida Canyon, its sandstone walls sloping gently down to the desert floor, a winding double row of cottonwoods lining the banks of the Mordida wash as it emerged from the confines of the canyon itself.

She knew why she’d come to the mesa; it had always been one of Max’s favorite places, indeed the only place where he could stand and gaze out over everything he and his father before him had built.

Gone now, all gone.

Her jaw clenched as she turned to look at Max.

He was standing a few yards from her, his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the distance. When he looked up, Rita’s eyes instinctively followed her husband’s.

High up, almost invisible against the brilliant blue glare of the sky, an eagle soared, its wings outstretched as it effortlessly rode the invisible currents of a thermal over the mesa.

As she watched, the bird drifted lower, and she imagined that it was coming down to look at her.

“He knows,” Max said. “He knows everything.”

Rita’s eyes left the soaring eagle and returned to Max. Now he was smiling at her and his hand was outstretched, as if to take her own.

She stood up and took a step toward him, then another.

But he was no closer, and she suddenly felt a stab of fear.

She took another step, and then another. Then she was running, stumbling toward Max along the rough path hewn out of the mesa’s crumbling sandstone. But no matter how fast she ran, Max seemed only to slip farther and farther away from her.

And yet he still smiled, and his hand was still outstretched. Then, so abruptly she didn’t realize it had happened, her foot slipped and she lost her balance. She stumbled, fell, slipped over the edge of the path.

“Max!”

And then she was falling, tumbling through the air, and the eagle was swooping down toward her, its talons extended.

“Max!” she cried out again.

This time, as she cried out her husband’s name, she woke from the dream.

She blinked in the late-morning sunlight, her whole body still trembling from the memory of the dream. Slowly she regained control of herself. She was all right, she repeated to herself. She was at home, in her bed, and nothing had happened to her at all.

Automatically she reached out to touch Max, reached out to feel his solid strength next to her in the bed.

He wasn’t there; would never be there again.

Her hand, feeling suddenly heavy, dropped to the sheet, and for just a moment she wondered if she would be able to get through this day.

In only another hour she was going to bury Max, lay him to rest in the small graveyard on the edge of town, next to his father and mother.

Summoning her will, she threw off the covers and
left the bed, moving to the window to close it against the growing heat of the day, but pausing to glance up toward the mesa. Even from here she could see the spot from which she’d fallen in the dream. High up, it was a dangerous place in the path, a place that Max had always warned her about. Even now, fully awake, she half expected to see him there. Almost against her will, her hand came up to wave to him.

But the path was empty, the mesa standing in its placid majesty like some great sentry looking out over the desert. And then, soaring high, she saw the eagle.

Now, in the morning sunlight, it looked exactly as it had in the dream, its wings fixed, circling slowly on whatever faint traces of breeze there might be, its eyes hunting the ground below for prey.

Except that, as in the dream, Rita had the strange sensation that the eagle was watching her.

Shivering despite the warmth of the morning, she closed the window and began dressing. But even as she slipped into the simple black silk dress she would wear to her husband’s funeral, she heard once more the words he’d spoken to her in the dream.

“Listen to Frank.”

She seated herself at the small vanity in her dressing room, then willed her hands to stop trembling as she began carefully applying the mask of makeup that would hide her emotions. One hour from now she would sit in the church, trying to look at Max’s coffin without really seeing it, for she knew that if she let herself truly accept that it was Max inside that dark mahogany box, she might well lose the bulwark of self-control she had so carefully built since the moment she’d been told he was dead.

Finally satisfied with the image she saw in the mirror,
she went downstairs, where Greg
was
already waiting for her in the breakfast room at the back of the house.

He stood as his aunt came into the room, and his eyes seemed to search her, as if looking for a chink in her serene armor. “Are you all right, Aunt Rita?”

Rita managed a slight smile. “I dreamed I was falling this morning,” she said, apparently out of nowhere. Greg gazed blankly at her. “And it’s odd, but Max was there, trying to help me,” Rita went on. “But of course he couldn’t, and it seemed I couldn’t help myself either.” She took a sip of coffee. “Have you ever dreamed you were falling, Greg?”

Greg frowned, trying to puzzle out what his aunt was saying. If there was some hidden message in her words, he couldn’t fathom what it might be. “Everybody dreams of falling,” he said at last.

Rita’s eyes clouded for a moment as she remembered once more the words Max had spoken to her in the dream. “I haven’t,” she replied, setting the cup back on its saucer. “And I don’t think I ever shall again.”

An hour later Rita, with Greg at her side, watched the pallbearers slowly lower her husband’s coffin into the hard ground of the cemetery. A dense crowd surrounded her, for nearly the whole town had turned out for Max Moreland’s funeral, but still she felt alone, even with Greg on one side of her and Judith Sheffield on the other. At last, as the pallbearers stepped back, she moved forward, stooped down, and picked up a clod of earth. She held it for a moment, and then, feeling eyes on her, she looked up.

A few feet away, on the other side of Max’s grave, Frank Arnold stood watching her, his eyes glistening with the tears he refused to give in to.

Rita hesitated a moment, and yet again Max’s words in the dream sounded softly in her head. Her eyes met Frank’s and she smiled at him.

Her fingers closed on the lump of earth in her hand and the clod broke up, sifting down onto the coffin in the grave.

Rita looked up into the sky. There, as if at her command, the form of an eagle appeared, hovering for a moment, then wheeling around, its wings beating strongly. A moment later it disappeared over the rim of the mesa and was gone.

Rita stepped back from the grave, and as if accepting her silent signal, the townspeople began filing past, some of them adding their own small lump of earth to Max’s grave, others pausing only to murmur soft condolences to his widow.

Finally Paul Kendall appeared, his face grave, his eyes dark with concern. “Rita,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

It was as if she didn’t hear him, didn’t even see him. Her eyes swept past him as if he didn’t exist, and came to rest on another person, a person who seemed to have been waiting silently for the right moment to approach her.

“Frank,” Rita said, her voice carrying clearly through the morning as she beckoned him to her side. “Come and stand with me, will you? Help me say goodbye to Max.”

Paul Kendall’s jaw tightened and his right hand clenched into an angry fist, then relaxed. He moved on, stepping aside so that Frank Arnold could take his place.

A few minutes later Kendall found Otto Kruger in the crowd.

“I’ve had it,” he said, drawing Kruger aside. “I’ve had it with both of them. Clear?”

Kruger nodded, his lips twisting into a cruel smile. “Clear,” he agreed.

At four o’clock that afternoon Frank Arnold wheeled his pickup truck into the dusty lot in front of the refinery gate and shut off the engine. There weren’t many cars there—all but a handful of men had been laid off yesterday, and today more would go. It was only temporary, according to Kruger, but Frank didn’t believe him any more than he believed Kendall. Why should they start up the refinery again when they could make more money by simply selling off the crude as it was pumped out of the ground?

An eerie feeling came over him as he moved through the refinery. The usual cacophony of hissing steam and clanging pipes was silent now, and there wasn’t even the usual racket caused by the rattling out of the pipes during a regular shutdown.

Today the refinery had an atmosphere of death about it, and Frank kept glancing back over his shoulder, as if half expecting to see some strange specter closing in on him. But there was nothing there.

He came finally to the catalytic cracking plant at the far end of the refinery. When it was built thirty-odd years ago, the plant had been Max Moreland’s pride and joy. It was a semiexperimental installation back then, and Max had been one of the few men in the country who was willing to take a gamble on the new refining process.

Now, though, it was as obsolete as the rest of the
refinery. In the control room, as Frank began scanning the gauges, he wondered if maybe Max hadn’t been right in selling out to UniChem. Now, with the deal done, and his own dream of taking the place over gone forever, he began to realize just what an expense it would take to bring the plant up to date. He sighed, but as the crew began drifting in for the afternoon shift, the sigh gave way to a frown.

“Where’s Polanski?” he asked Carlos Alvarez.

Carlos shrugged. “Same place as Phil Garcia. Laid off this morning.” He forced a humorless grin. “Good thing they’re shutting us down, eh, amigo? There’s nobody left to run it anyway.”

“I’ve got to tell you,” Frank said to Alvarez and the others who had gathered, his voice somber, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the layoffs come today. We should be done by ten or eleven, and if I know Kruger, he’ll be out here with the checks and the pink slips, even if it’s the middle of the night.”

Alvarez spread his hands philosophically. “So what can we do? It’s not your fault.” Then he brightened. “Anyway, I hear they’re gonna move a lot of people up to the dam. Get it fixed right away, huh? Then we’ll all be back in business.”

Frank nodded, wishing he could believe it.

But that night, exactly as he’d predicted, Otto Kruger was waiting for them as he and the rest of the men came out the front gate.

“Damn it!” he heard Carlos mutter. “Here it comes.”

Kruger, an appropriately serious expression on his face, handed out the envelopes, then turned to face Frank, his eyes glowing with malice. “I need to talk to you in my office,” he growled.

Frank’s eyes narrowed angrily as Kruger turned and fairly swaggered away, then he heard Carlos Alvarez’s cautioning voice.

“Take it easy, Frank. Don’t let him get your goat. Come down to the café afterward, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

As Alvarez and the rest of the crew climbed into their cars, Frank headed toward the supervisor’s building. Inside, Kruger was lounging in his chair, hands behind his head, legs sprawled across his desk. “Don’t bother to sit down, Arnold,” he said, a satisfied smirk spreading across his face.

Frank remained where he was, standing next to the door. “You can’t lay me off too, Otto,” he said. “You’re still going to need a mothball crew around here, and I’ll be part of it.”

Kruger shook his head. “It seems Kendall has something else in mind for you,” he said. “He thinks—and don’t ask me why—that your talents would be wasted around here.”

Frank shifted his weight uneasily. From Kruger’s smug look a few minutes ago, he’d been certain that he too was going to be laid off, despite the union rule dictating that his seniority would make him the last man to go. But apparently that wasn’t going to happen. “Okay,” he said, when it was obvious that Kruger would wait for him to ask about his new assignment. “What is it?”

“The dam,” Kruger replied. “It seems Kendall’s been studying the union rules, and given an emergency situation, he can assign you to pretty much anything he wants. At least,” he added, his smirk broadening into a malicious grin, “for as long as the emergency lasts.”

Frank tipped his head in silent concession. It was
true, though it hadn’t occurred to him that Kendall might use the emergency provision like this.

Kruger’s grin spread even wider. “You don’t know enough about the dam to be a foreman,” he went on, “so you’re going to be on one of the labor crews. Chopping concrete, Frank. Working down there in the shaft, where it’s cold and dirty and cramped. Breaking up old concrete, and building forms to pour new. How do you like that?”