The dogs are awake. Claire has become a heavy sleeper. Months of hiking and hard work and now her new home’s perfect darkness have rewired her circadian rhythm. But the perfect silence of Claire’s big room rings in Victor’s ears and leaves him alert to the slightest noise.
Claire’s big room is so perfectly black that Victor uses the glow from the alarm clock as a flashlight. He turns the clock face to the kennel and sees the four Karelians stoically sitting with their noses against the chain link fence. Their eyes shine with the eerie glow of mistrust. They have not fully accepted him since the wolf attack. Victor will sometimes cross a line invisible to humans and unintentionally draw a low growl and a lip curling to display a single, white canine. He is confident that his dog biscuits shall win them over, eventually, if he is here long enough.
It is dawn. Now begins the long mountain twilight, building with graduations too perfect to notice until the eastern ridgeline finally shimmers with glare dissolving to a single point at sunrise. Victor knows that the dogs will soon awaken Claire. He will slip out. Victor is rarely there when she awakens. She no longer notices that he is gone. He shall seem as translucent as the dream of an incubus, until next time when his reality returns, obsidian edged.
According to his unwinding plans, Claire’s wariness dulls. Her doubts slacken. Her suspicions become moribund. Finally, Victor’s unpredictability becomes unremarkable. His stripes relax into the landscape as you slowly learn that you can set your watch by him when it counts.
Victor often slips out to make his way through the Industrial Village between shift changes at the hour when senses reach their lowest ebb. Victor is never observed. Even so, he wears his project I.D. card on his belt, just in case he is stopped.
Victor must finish before winter fully sets in, when he would leave fresh footprints in new fallen snow.
He often enters the office of Colonel Jeter to sit before his glowing computer screen in the darkness beneath a black plastic sheet. In the middle of a dark night several weeks after Claire moved into the Industrial Village, Victor removed the core from the lock on the Colonel’s office door and replaced it with a blank duplicate. Then, Victor worked inside an adjacent windowless room to fashion a key.
Victor removed the spring cover plate from the core. Beneath it are eight springs and beneath those are the eight tumbler tension pins. Victor uses a digital caliper, which reads out to three decimal places. He measures and records the length and position of each pin.
Victor brought a key cutter with long handles. He snaps out each part of a blank key according to his notes. He reassembles the original core and installs it back in the Colonel’s door. The new key turns. Now Victor enters as might an image shimmer past the margins of a slow blink.
That first night Victor inserts a flash drive into a USB port of the Colonel’s CPU. The next day, it captures Jeter’s keystrokes and the following night Victor removes it.
Victor now has the Colonel’s passwords. A third night Victor returns with an external hard drive. Within thirty minutes, it engorges with copies of all of Colonel Jeter’s files—drawings, specifications, heat transfer calculations, purchase orders, the results of acceptance tests, destructive tests, local empirical data and Washington’s projections of the national impact of an entire hierarchy of possible eruptions.
In two days, these are in the Russian consulate on University Street in Seattle. The following day these arrive in Vladivostok, sealed inside a diplomatic pouch.
His sabotage will be struck so deftly, and conceived so elegantly, that its victims will argue if it really happened. Even his assassination of a project authority will seem only a wavering mirage seen through rising heat.
Victor never parks in front of the building, but the MPs knew the Jeep and where the owner stays. Victor knows how sullenly they stare at him. Yes, he wordlessly taunts, it is I, Victor Rostov. I am he who sleeps with your lady of Yellowstone. He waves and smiles, charming steadily.
When he sees them at the Geyser, he stands for rounds of beers. They take the free beer with the same expression that Victor sees in their faces driving out, but Victor Rostov is a patient student of human nature and he knows that he will crack them.
Tonight Victor Rostov would be back at his motel in six minutes, and then back to the assembly building for his shift thirty-nine minutes after that, with a bag of Egg McMuffins that he tries to wolf-down before he must suit-up. Victor eats when he can. He sleeps when he must.
Snow Coaches used to make the run from the West Yellowstone Airport up to the ski resorts hidden inside the Madison Range—even though it was a little closer to fly into the Bozeman-Yellowstone International Airport. The metro area used to have over 91,000 people, and like Americans everywhere, they bustled about with business.
Some vacationers wanted a more authentic feel of rugged isolation. And so, if they could afford the charter flights that flew in the wintertime, they landed at West Yellowstone. After leaving the airport in the snow coach, you did not catch even a glimpse of the town, or the new Industrial Village. When they made that left-hand turn north on US-191, you soon felt like you were following along behind Lewis and Clark—at least you had the illusion of that for fifty minutes, right up to the time when you saw an honest-to-goodness stop light and even a Conoco gas station at the corner of Lone Mountain Trail and US-191. That is the turn into the little community of Big Sky, Montana and its ski resorts.
Now is when Brady Aviation makes the big bucks that keep them open. They even take the pontoons off the de Havilland Beaver and mount skis. This gets Cherry into the West Yellowstone Airport when no one else can and she charges all that the traffic will bear. It is only a 280-mile hop north from Salt Lake City—the connecting hub for airport code WYS.
For all the rest of us, WYS was only open from the first of June to the end of September. Of course, it is closed now, but maybe in another year we will see it open once again.
A snow coach can take several forms. The best one is when they take the rear tires off and install a caterpillar tread about six feet long. Then they take the front tires off and install skis.
It is not that Montana is bad about plowing US-191; it is just that they quickly run out of places to put the snow. While the park only gets about five and a half feet of snow each season, up in the higher elevations of the Madison Range, they can get six-times that. They don’t see pavement in the mountains until April.
There are long stretches of US-191 where every last little bit of level ground is taken up by the road and the River. That is how close the Madison Range gets to the Gallatin Range. If not for the river between, they probably would have called all these mountains by a single name.
Victor Rostov does not like sitting around on his day off and the motel room quickly becomes very small. He makes sure that he clears out of Claire’s place long before sunup, during that quiet deadband between shift changes.
Victor ingratiates himself with the snow coach people and manages to get hired-on as a motorman during his two days off each week. When winter settles in, Claire is mostly snowbound except for taking the dogs out on leashes in shifts of two dogs each.
Claire happily takes advantages of free rides up the road when her schoolwork allows and when the snow, the wind, the cold, or all three keep her out of Yellowstone.
Sometimes a corporal’s guard of the rich and famous will mention that great looking babe in blonde pigtails that rides along in the snow coach, the girlfriend of that dude with the foreign accent.
Word of this finds its way back to Cherry Brady. She lets it get to her, sometimes.
People boil over in different ways. So when it happens that Cherry has a group of men in the charter, and if one of them is at least a little bit hunky, Cherry will quietly cut a deal. If he leaves his buddies for one night and reserves the presidential suite, she can wait to fly back tomorrow morning. When he asks if the offer is real, she unzips her flight suit to reveal a tee shirt saying “big sky” except only the word “BIG” can be read. Then she lifts his hand onto her left breast and asks him if now he thinks it is real.
Back home in the elegant sanctum of their scattered offices across America, she becomes the legend known as “sky slut.” But what the hell, she thinks, nothing makes you forget the last one like the next one. She uses what she can to take the edge off.
PBS asked coyly about the rumors. Her classic throwaway line becomes delivered in a cranky deadpan. “That’s all right,” she says casually. “I’m a bitch so I may as well be a slut too.”
We’re just not grown up enough to hear things like that. During Alton Picke’s interviews of Cherry Brady next spring, the buzz will surge for reasons the network does not explain.
But I get it. All Cherry Brady ever wanted was just to fly—and not to be too lonely when she does. That should not be too hard to understand if you’ve got any heart at all.
Sounds of shovels scraping concrete and tractors pushing snow with steel blades were all around Marshal Blevins as he made his way to Colonel Jeter’s office. His boots squeaked along hard packed paths. He carried a box of a dozen donuts fresh baked in town.
He kicked the snow off his boots as he clomped up the steps of the front stoop of Jeter’s office. Warm aromas raced through the opening door into the brisk morning air.
“Bob, you brew the best coffee in Wyoming, or is this Montana? We’re so close, I cannot tell.”
“Good morning, Bill. Just finished. Are you carrying what I think you are?”
“I am. Are you about ready to start up the South Tunnel TBM?”
“Yes. Today sometime. Digger’s taking care of that for me.”
“I like Digger. Handy guy to have around.”
“Don’t know what we would have done without him.”
“How far did the north machine get its first month?”
“Pretty far. We did 7,068 feet.”
“Man! I knew you were breezing along, but weren’t you hoping for a mile a month? This is what? A mile and a quarter?”
“Right at a mile and a third. We’ve gotten eighty-percent utilization so far.”
“If I recall, fifty is normal and you were hoping for sixty.”
“Right. Dempsey said he could do anything if he had the money and I guess he did. Of course, the equipment is still new.”
“So we might beat this volcano, huh?”
“Bill, who knows? The surface bulging is very slow, but it is steady. The earthquakes have died off. Claire’s Helium-3 measurements don’t show near the level of activity that the Canary Islands had before their eruption. I think we’ve got time, but we’re proceeding like we don’t have a minute to spare.
“Plan for the worst. Hope for the best.”
“Yep. Plan for the worst.”
“Old Faithful still dead?”
“Yep. Nobody to watch it now, anyway. But I hate to see it go.”
“A part of America for sure. You like these jelly-filled?”
“Great. Raspberry, isn’t it?”
“Probably. I used to pick wild raspberries when I was a kid. Mom used to bake pies with them.”
“Home cooking.”
Blevins leaned back, speaking wistfully, “Home cooking.”
“Claire’s not getting into the park much the past few weeks.”
“How’s her dissertation coming along?”
“That’s pretty much all she’s doing. And taking the dogs out for walks down to the road.”
“And Rostov.”
“Yeah. And that Rostov character. They say that he parks his jeep a hundred feet away in the middle of the night and is back into town by dawn. Sneaky son of a bitch.”
“You ought to fire him, Bob.”
“He’s our best worker. A leader. Second only to Digger.”
“I know. Just speaking personally.”
“Oh, I agree. I don’t like it either. A girl like that settling for someone like Rostov.”
“She might not have actually settled for anything, Bob.”
“Passing phase?”
“Yeah. But she’s not a kid anymore. What is she? Twenty-eight? Lotsa women have three kids by age twenty-eight.”
“Yeah. Well, soon she’ll have three degrees.”
Blevins leaned back again and exhaled fitfully. “Everything’s a tradeoff.”
“I think she’d be better off with Digger, if you want to know.”
“Yeah! Now there’s a thought! Why didn’t he step in after Bennington left?”
“Oh, I kept him too busy and he got blind-sided. He thought they were still a couple—a long distance couple, but still a couple. And Digger has a shy side, too.”
“That’s his fundamental respect for his fellow man showing through.”
“Yeah, probably right. Never known big men to be shy. Look at you.”
Blevins snorted, and then made it sound final. “We need to bring those two together.”
“Arrange a romantic weekend?”
“Maybe, but there’s no romance around here anymore.”
Blevins could see that Jeter was suddenly onto something.
“Say, remember that junket Digger and I took to Italy?”
“I know that I was not invited.”
Jeter sat up straight. “When we saw Dempsey’s tunnel it was only a mile into the mountain. Now that it is finished and the road inside is open, we really need to inspect it and to get a final report.”
“And who better than two geologists?”
“There’s a ski resort up on top of the mountain at Fai della Paganella and also a hotel in town. I could get the American Ambassador to pull strings for a vacancy.”
“Better make it a suite, Bob. They’re not a couple yet.”
“I’ll find something. We’ll fly them out in a B-52 and we’ll let them come back the slow way, on their own. We really ought to have a final report anyway. I can give them expense monies.”
Blevins was boyishly excited. “And I can feed the dogs!”
She can work on her dissertation just as well on the plane.”
“And Digger’s already been through the PhD process, so he can be her resource.”
Jeter sounds enthusiastic, “Let’s walk over there!”
“One more cup of your coffee and another donut. First things first, Bob.”
“Digger, wow, what a view!”
“And we thought we had mountains back home in the Rockies!”
They stood on a broad balcony, puffing silvery breath backlit by the bright alpine sunlight.
“We can see all the way down the valley to Trent!”
“They said that’s eight miles away! This town has been here since the Roman Empire in the first century B.C.”
“Digger, I just can’t believe how the Colonel is taking care of us.”
“He has a lot of resources at his command, Claire.”
“I mean straight through to Aviano on a bomber, then a helicopter to Mezzolombardo, then a car waiting for us, and a suite at the top of the Alps.”
“And we get to come back in our own good time.”
“I wasn’t able to get into the park very much lately anyway.”
“And the project has got both TBM’s operational now.”
“I guess we may as well.”
“We may as well.”
“Let’s explore the town, Digger!”
“Terrific, lead the way.”
They turned back to the sliding glass doors of their suite.
The Town of nine hundred is laid out along a narrow plateau. The top of Paganella towers nearly 1,600 feet directly above them. Snow whitened pines cling to the mountainsides where there is slope, and some chance for soils to accumulate. Bare limestone faces the vertical drops.
The streets are narrow, like the town. Sometimes the sidewalks are only the margin of the road or, sometimes snow-laden planters at the height of knees bargain space from delivery trucks and speeding autos.
The townspeople of Fai della Paganella have built tall upon their of shelf of level ground. Its buildings are ambiguously aged. Their design could be medieval, but their construction and repair are up to date. Pastels slather across their elevations as gleaming broadsides in the strong sunlight.
Through bright windows, the townspeople watch the beautiful woman and the brawny man stroll across the squeaky hard-packed snow to the ancient stone church. They make up profiles of who these people are and where they might be from.
Their bell tower, beautiful and quiet to visitors in these peaceful times, rings in the minds of the townsfolk with ancient memories of armies marching up the valley of the Adige. Claire feels herself relax for the first time in nearly eight months. The gestalt of events must embed its structure deep within. Although she has been remade, the shrillness of constant warning tails away like echoes.
For Claire, Digger summons feelings of home and the adventure of Yellowstone. He is the only one tied to both, apart from the forgotten Bennington. It is the same in Digger’s mind with Claire.
Claire brings it up, “We really never talked that much. That seems funny now.”
“You’ve been busy with your science and I’ve actually been under ground a lot.”
“How does it feel to be inside the Abyss that you discovered?”
“About like it feels for you to be on the volcano that you discovered.”
“You miss home much?”
“Actually home for me just means being around people that want you there.”
“The heart is not judged by how much it loves, but by how much it is loved by others.”
“Yeah! You know! Most people don’t think that way. Really, the Madison Valley is the first place that has felt like home since I went away to college.”
“Did you like Purdue?”
“Sure. I loved Purdue. Still do. But for me, college was a stop along the way to someplace else.”
“Do you ever think about going back to teach?”
“That would be a nice life, except now we are back to where we started. Do the people around you want you there? Do they need you? That really is pretty hard to find. I don’t know if it really happens to folks very often. They simply do without.”
Digger watched tears well up in Claire’s big eyes. Her lower lip trembled. Her expression contracts into a single brow of emptiness.
Digger reaches for her. “Oh, honey. Come here. What have I gone and said? You look like you just lost your best friend.”
Her voice shakes quietly. “I’m not sure any more if I ever had a best friend.”
“Ooohh. Well, you’ve got me for one. That’s for sure.”
“Really, Digger?”
He wraps her with his burly arms. “Really and truly, Claire.”
She buries her face into his chest. The relief she feels is instant. Remarkable, she thinks. What have I turned into? She worries. These feelings, once arrived, never leave.
Colonel Jeter finally has to telephone to see if they are ever coming back.