The Fire Night Ball (7 page)

An Alexander Calder mobile slowly rotated in the Wyoming wind that somehow managed to insinuate itself through fifty glass panels.

But the most spectacular of her innovations was a glass elevator for transporting guests up to their fourth-floor ballroom without their missing the spectacular view down the mountainside. The glass elevator had replaced not only a hideous electric chair for elderly guests but also the massively ugly, ornate, grand staircase that Lila had always feared tumbling down, ala Scarlett O'Hara.

Despite these improvements, Drake's Roost had the dank airlessness of a Gothic fortress. After the first year of marriage, Lila had patently refused to invite guests who were friends of hers to spend the night, until Harry built ranch-style Plover's Nest on the grounds of the former Plush House Inn to house them.

When one day this estate belonged to her, Lila thought, she would sell it or give it away to some worthy cause her husband would loathe. Smiling at Harry's eventual comeuppance, she drew out the piece of paper she had tucked inside her black lace bra. It was Drummond’s most recent, tear-stained letter (the tears were his), begging her to visit him in California at some guru's campsite. She read it again, crumpled it up, and threw it into the stone fireplace.

Something in her gut continued to warn her the time was past when, bored to madness by Drake's Roost, she could fly to an inspiring rendezvous.

Her favorite bower of bliss with Drummond had been atop a skyscraper in San Francisco. Unluckily for them, Harry’s friends belonged to the Union Club, not the Bohemian Club. When word got out, the club's founding families made it clear to Lila's lawyer they didn’t approve of flagrant transgressions by a member’s wife. In the end, she had chosen to heed their warnings and had sent Drummond packing.

A lot of good it had done her! Harry hadn’t been so impressed by her show of repentance as she would have liked, and patient Griselda was not her best role.

However, it was only a matter of time until she prevailed in the contest.

The young woman who had masterminded B. L. Zebub's and wore a construction hat over her curls at the Grand Opening was no more than a talented fool. Slowly but surely the slut was becoming irksome to Harry; at this point, it was a waiting game between them. And though she was highly intelligent, Marlena Bellum didn’t grasp the simple concept that skulking will eventually wear out a man’s desire.

Lila felt sure enough of her present advantage to put it to the test. She planned to show up at the Fire Night Ball in an outfit that would rock Bellum back on her heels. Let the annoying competition prance about in hard hat and décolletage and stoke the bonfires with the boys. Let her just try to out-fox Lila Coffin.

As a result of smooth sailing during the shopping jaunt with Faith, Marlena felt positively light of heart as she drove up to Mill’s Creek-- unprecedented, actually, her feeling of high spirits. Queen came on the radio, and she began to sing along, deliberately ignoring an ominous darkening along the horizon.

But, as she reached the top of the winding, half-mile long driveway to Mill’s Creek, icy rain and hail began to pelt the windshield. The stone house appeared totally deserted, with no workmen in sight.

She ran to the front door and found it was locked up tight.

Dripping wet, rummaging through her purse for the house key, her memory provided a sudden flash of where it was. She had left it on the dashboard of the rental car. Fighting her way back through the wind and drenching rain, she finally got to the car door, whereupon she beheld something truly horrifying: the car key, dangling in the ignition.
Why is this happening to me? I never forget anything!

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

She stamped her foot, splashing rain water with each expletive. Then she ran back through the hail, wind, and rain once again and stood on the porch, wet as a mermaid, the small projection of the roof her only protection against the punishing elements.

Shivering, she called for help. She could hear her voice growing scratchy; she was losing it. She told herself to calm down, that the mishap wasn't life threatening and she was feeling more panicky than the situation actually called for.

Then, just when she was considering whether to take to the road on foot and find shelter at a neighbor’s home, there arose out of the mist, the rolling thunder, and the pelting sleet the Nordic figure of a young man, tall, blue-eyed, and muscular, with white-blond hair. He was coming toward her around the side of the house at a slow run.

“Thank God you’re here!” she cried out as Apollo reached her side. “I’ve locked all my keys inside my car!” she yelled at him through peals of thunder.

“No one’s home!" he yelled back. A mixture of snow and rain was streaming down his face. “They're both in town. I don’t have my key to the house. But there’s shelter in the barn."

From under his arm, he pulled out two wool Indian blankets. "Here, put these around you.”

She put one over her head and wrapped the other around her waist.

"Follow me, miss.” He took her hand and dragged her along. The terrain seemed as treacherous under the high heels of her shoes as the surface of the moon.

She quickly got mired in the dirt path. This happened several more times, but each time she got stuck, Apollo would pull her forward. Wrapped like a papoose, she blindly followed, swaying in the howling wind, staggering and slipping through the snow. In the distance, she could make out the lighted doorway of the barn.

Finally, they were dragging themselves inside. As he closed the door behind them, she could smell the musty odor of wet hay. Her eyes were still adjusting to the low light, but she could see he was moving around.

“Watch your step,” he said, leading her by the hand along the stalls, which were all empty with the exception of one at the very end. It held Pathetic Fallacy, the descendant of Chloe’s Morgan horse, old Dickens. She wondered momentarily if the beast still mourned the loss of his partner, Indian Paintbrush, from the mishap six months ago. Chloe had not been in town at the time, having given her permission via telegram for the use of her horses in the parade.

But that was ridiculous; animals didn't have memories of their losses, did they? Still, looking at the sad eyes on the horse made her feel guilty, and she made a mental note to ask Chloe how the horse was faring.

“Is this where you hang out?” she asked Apollo, throwing the blankets aside and looking at him with snow-fringed eyelashes. Her voice sounded oddly hollow, as though it were coming from somewhere else. Her legs felt leaden, as though she had been walking on alien turf.

“It’s my office. You can get off your feet and keep warm. I’ll make us some coffee while you dry off.” “How did you know to come for me?”

“I thought I heard something. Then I remembered seeing Miss Chloe put the porch light on before she left. She only does that when she’s expecting someone. So I thought I’d better check.”

“Good thing you did. I might have drowned at the doorstep.”

She shuddered involuntarily.

“Coffee’s coming right up.”

“I didn’t expect that storm. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I locked myself out of the car just as it hit. And the key to the house was in the car. Stupid cow!”

She sat down on the chair he pulled out for her, and he patted her arm awkwardly, as if to comfort her. Then he said: “Storms come up pretty fast here. One time when I was camping I got caught out at the Hat in a terrific storm, hail big as golf balls, lightning everywhere. The storm picked up all my gear, tore the tent right out of its moorings.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get hit by lightning and killed.”

He laughed. “Oh, lightning don’t strike any of the Nelson clan, like it do some other natives around here.”

“Is there a story behind that claim?”

“More than likely.”

“May I have one then?”

“Well, you asked for it. Here’s your coffee. Take anything in it?”

“No thanks.”

Her blue lips were still chattering, but she tugged the blanket snugly around her shoulders and settled in on the dilapidated horsehair chair that constituted, along with a three-legged desk, the office furniture. It reminded her of Grandpa Bellum's chair in the basement of the pink house. He would sit and tell her tall tales of the Old West while she braided his shaggy gray hair.

Apollo cleared his throat. She could see his breath in the air. He put one muscular arm on his leg and the other on the rickety desk and leaned in, fixing his light blue eyes on Marlena’s eager, upturned face.

There was nothing in the world she loved so much as being told a story.

“My old man was up in his cabin in the mountain one night, when the lightning strikes and the thunder was a-comin’ at him all at the same time, hail and seventy mile-an-hour winds. Between the bangin’ of the thunder and the crackin’ of the lightning, he was pretty near deafened.

"He had his bird dog with him, Baldy was his name, and the bird dog was hidin’ his head under his paws, he was so ascared. All of a sudden Fred--that’s my old man-- hears a really loud C-R-R-A-A-C-K-K and out he jumps through the door to see what’s been hit.

“It was the big juniper tree right beside the cabin that was hit, and now it’s just a smolderin’ piece of ash in the shape of a tree. Well, my old man stays out a minute longer to take a leak. When he tries to get back in, Baldy won’t let him; he growls at him and bares his teeth, protecting his turf from whatever’s out there in the storm.

"'What the hell’s a matter wid you, dog?’ old Fred yells at him through the door. ‘Cain’t you count? One out and one in.’”

“My old man told everyone his wife had shot a bear dead, which they all knew to be true. He also told 'em his dog Baldy could count, but that they refused to believe. He insisted. He told 'em he’d been out with his pals on Hatter’s Field, huntin’ for pheasant. Baldy went out in the bush and sniffed around; then he came back and tapped his paw three times. Sure enough, three pheasants went flyin' out of the bush.

“One day his pal Pinky said, ‘Hell, Fred, that don’t prove nothing. There ain’t no dog that can count.’

“‘Well, jus’ try ‘im once and see for yerself,’ ses my old man.

“So Pinky and the dog goes out to the bush and the dog sniffs around. Then he starts a-humpin’ on ol’ Pinky’s leg. Pinky gets mad and tries to shake him off, but Baldy hangs on for dear life.

“‘See what I mean?’ says Fred to Pinky. 'The dog's a genius.'

“‘Why, this dog don’t count. He was just humpin’ my leg to beat the band.’

“'That’s right, Pinky,’ my old man ses. ‘He’s tryin’ to tell you there’s so many fuckin’ birds out there he can’t count ‘em all!’”

Marlena laughed delightedly while the young man kept a straight poker face.

His boiled blue eyes were trained on hers, which meant he wasn’t through entertaining her, as she was willing him to go on. But as she waited for him to fulfill her wish, she was also beginning to feel drowsy.

“I was out on the mountain once with Fred in an old beat up truck when one a’ them lightning and hail storms struck. I never been so shit scared in my life.

"It was comin’ down all around us, and we couldn’t go anywhere. Our truck was mired deep in the mud from the rain, and we couldn’t get out to fix it with the lightning striking.

"My old man kept on saying, ‘Just don’t touch anything that’s metal, Apollo. Don't touch, dammit!’ I was too scared to sass him, pretty near wet my pants, because I was only a little cuss, and pretty near everything on that truck was metal.

“Finally the storm was over, and somehow we had made it through. I’ll never forget how beautiful everything was after that in my eyes. There was rainbows everywhere, and the smell of the ozone and the wet sagebrush---why, it was heavenly, made it almost worth the trouble, even though it took us four hours of sweatin’ in the sun with boards and chains to get that truck out and running again.”

Marlena opened her eyes and smiled up at Apollo. He was gently shaking her by the shoulder. She felt more rested than she had in weeks.

“What about my story? Oh my, I must have dozed off,” she said, realizing what had happened.

“What time is it, Apollo?”

“Miss Annie just now pulled up the driveway. You’ll be able to get into the house now. I called old Fairwell about your car; he's a cabbie who's also a locksmith. He'll be here shortly to take care of getting the lock picked for you.”

She slowly untangled herself from the blankets. “You’re a nice boy. I hope you’ve got a girl who appreciates you.”

“Ain’t no boy. Ain’t got no girlfriend neither,” he said plaintively.

“I'll remember every word, Apollo.”

Because of her special powers, she knew that even the words she had heard in her sleep would remain in her memory banks. What would she do with them? She thought of her old notebooks.

Apollo rubbed his chin.

"Aw, they wasn’t worth much,’” he said, but the deep blush crawling along his jaw-line belied his modest statement.

At half past six, Ron Huddleston was sitting at the bar chatting up one of the female bartenders, a blonde, buxom girl named Shirley.

Marlena suddenly appeared at his side, carefully hiding her slim body within the shadow of his sturdy physique.

Farther down, she had spotted Sally Honeywell holding court with three young women in heavy eye makeup and bell bottom jeans, the sum total of feminist sisterhood in these hinterlands.

The wealthy older lesbian was in Marlena’s sights as a business prospect. They'd met earlier in the week. Sally and Stretch, her young, Amazonian girlfriend, were guests at the hotel. Stretch had relatives in town, the Bloods, whom they were visiting for the holidays.

Coincidentally, Sally was rehabbing a mansion in the Florida Keys and therefore hot on the track of a top-tier architect for the project.

One thing had led to another. Tonight Marlena would be dining alone with Sally, with an eye to rehabbing her 14,000 square foot Italianate mansion near the Southernmost Point in Key West. Could it be the next rung on the ladder to career success?

If so, she would have to cut the umbilical cord with PAD. Was she ready to do that? She'd spoken at length to Coddie on the subject, but then, suddenly, their conversation had gone haywire, when she made the colossal mistake of confiding her personal troubles.

Today, she reflected, had been very abnormally stressful. Would she later look back on it as a watershed in her life, or was it the beginning of the end? Ominous signs were everywhere, and the Key West mansion was perhaps a mere pipedream at the far end of the line.

"Sorry I'm late, Ron. Locked my keys in the car, had to get rescued by a cowboy."

Then she segued into storytelling mode, sharing Apollo's colorful anecdotes, word for word.

Meanwhile Ron gazed at her dopily, savoring every syllable and marveling at how she glowed in the dim lighting.

I used to take one of those red-gold curls into my hand and dip it into my inkwell, he thought.