Already there was something unreal about it. The campsite was just as Harry remembered, but it had been turned into a ghost town. The tent with its sagging sides. The Rambler. The lonely piñon. Everything was the same and in its place, yet something cold swept through him and he had to remind himself that nothing was wrong. The silver Airstream was there, too, and if Jo weren’t here with him, he might have been tempted to go inside and hunt for his shirt button. A different man had done that. He felt changed and distant from himself.
“This is a nice place,” Timothy said.
Harry opened up the back of the Harvester and studied the equipment and got it straight in his mind what they would be needing.
“I’ll help you,” Jo said
“No. There’s not much.”
“Let me.”
Harry looked at Jo. That night he’d kissed her she’d been wearing a frayed man’s shirt and her unkempt hair had been an afterthought, tied back with a shoelace. Today a different person had showed up. Jo had bedecked herself in a white blouse and orange pedal pushers. A yellow paisley bandana was tied at her throat in the crisp knot of a Boy Scout’s neckerchief. And her sneakers were clean; they even looked new. Their bright pretty yellow grabbed your attention. But they were that cheap kind of sneaker without any arch and just two measly eyelets on each side. You would barely be able to get them tied up correctly, which didn’t really matter since footwear that cheap wouldn’t be around for long. Likely she’d been to the bargain bin at the grocery store. He’d seen the group of young Mormon mothers there buying those sneakers by the bushel. And that stiff bandana was new, too. What he liked about the grubby version of Jo was that it made him believe something more important had taken over. Something beyond herself had made her forget herself, and Harry could think part of that something had to do with him. Love? Love did that to people. If you were a person careless about your appearance, love made you spruce up. But, maybe, if you were someone like Jo, already beautiful, love did the opposite, it made you forget all the finishing-touch paraphernalia. Maybe beautiful people had to put love to the test by stripping the beauty from themselves as much as possible. Harry had certainly passed that test. He loved her dirty, slovenly, hair unwashed, in the ugliest housedress possible or swimming in that lived-in man’s shirt. Not that she didn’t look nice bedecked this way. Timothy had told her so out loud and Harry had certainly thought it. She was brilliant and beautiful in her yellow colors. She shone as brightly as Vernon Rutledge’s painted-on sun and that should have cheered him, but it didn’t. It did just the opposite.
Harry said, “Let’s make sure the helicopter’s here first before we carry all this stuff.” Jo stepped into the Airstream, so he and Timothy went off to find the helicopter. Beyond the horseshoe wall was an open area where Harry expected to see the helicopter. This was the place where the mother had found him that first night, curled over and sick. Everything, every single thing, was different from that night. It was true, his premonition, as he had settled by the piñon tree listening to a mother and two kids inside their tent: something was coming that would change his life.
Timothy scampered up an outcropping to have a look; he called down that he’d spotted the helicopter over the next set of domes. They wouldn’t have to climb the domes to get there, just go through the pass, but still . . . They had equipment to load into the helicopter and now they would have to hike to do it.
Jo was waiting for them at the campsite. “Is it there?” she asked.
“It’s far away there,” Harry said.
They went back to the truck and Harry pulled out the detection instruments, the Geiger of course and the black light. Timothy pepped up at the sight of one thousand feet of extension cord tucked in the back of Harry’s truck. “With an extension cord, sir, we can use the Detectron.” The Detectron Geiger counter, Timothy explained to Jo, had a drill-hole probe that could be attached to an extension cord. Jo offered an encouraging smile to Timothy’s excited explanation, but Harry could see she didn’t get it.
“It’s like this, ma’am. We hook the probe onto this extension cord and then we drop it into the canyon slot from above.” With his rising and dipping hands, Timothy became the puppeteer to this maneuver. But even with invisible dolls acting it out, Jo’s tentative smile didn’t grow any more assured. “From the helicopter. You lower the probe down.” Timothy mimed paying out rope. “You see? Little by little. And we got a thousand feet of lowering we can do!”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Timothy retightened his already loaded backpack. The backpack strained into a taut rectangle. So expertly was it packed, it looked to be compressed into one thing, something military and leaden, a munitions case perhaps, but Harry had watched Timothy pack most of it in town, and in there was food and a stove, and a frying pan and bean pot and extra water and rolled blankets. It looked impossible even to lift off the ground, but Timothy swung it up and Harry guided it over his other shoulder. Timothy twisted into it, then settled comfortably, legs apart.
Jo had packed a rucksack of stuff from the Airstream. She swung it over her shoulders and indicated her two free hands. “Let me help,” she said.
Timothy tossed an ore pick and geologist’s hammer into a bucket and handed that along with a shovel to her.
Harry carefully packed up the Detectron. He left the Mineralight for the second trip. Ax and spare batteries and tube and more cooking fuel. And now somehow this orphaned bottle of Jim Beam that Jimmy Splendid had sampled. There it was rolling around in the truck. Harry stuffed that in, too. On second thought he dropped it into Jo’s bucket. Wouldn’t matter if it broke.
“I can take the ax, too,” Jo said.
“No, ma’am, too heavy. Right here, boss,” Timothy said, swerving his backpack toward Harry. Harry tied the ax to the top of Timothy’s pack. Timothy set down the rifle to help Harry shoulder his pack. Harry’s heart was pounding. He wondered if he looked as intrepid as he felt, a savage jungle guide unfazed by piranhas or charging rhino.
They hiked out over to the knobs with the first load. For Harry it was a storybook hike through an enchanted desert. He couldn’t stop smiling no matter how hard he tried. They found Flaherty sitting in his helicopter, reading a book and eating an orange.
“Hello, fellas.”
“Quite a hike,” Harry said though he had told himself he wasn’t going to mention it. Actually he’d enjoyed the hike, but it might have been too much for Jo. Carrying a heavy bucket in your hands was harder than shouldering a pack. As soon as the helicopter was in sight, she took a break to shake out her arms and asked them to go on ahead. “Was there a problem?” Harry asked Flaherty.
“Everything went like a peach.” Flaherty threw out the orange peels. The bright peels blended into the sand more easily than Harry would have expected, just two or three shades beyond the color of the ground and probably by tomorrow the same shade. Harry glimpsed Charlie’s map on the passenger seat. Not just a panel of it. The complete edition. He picked it up and unfolded the squares of cardboard collected from Mel’s Cleaners and he and Timothy studied it and got out their compasses and the map made pretty good sense. The sand and gradations of outcroppings and the single snake of river were painstakingly colored with the inks Harry had bought Charlie at the hardware store.
Flaherty handed them the single loose panel of Charlie’s map. Harry recognized it as the one they had used for registering the claims. Charlie had colored it in yesterday after coming back from the assessor’s. “Map’s accurate,” Flaherty said. “Not that it matters. Been there with the troops and back.” Flaherty held out the palm of his hand and stroked it—“The only map you’re going to need, fellas, is right here now. Hello there, my fair maiden!”
Jo set down her bucket and waved.
“Have an orange!” Flaherty shouted gleefully.
“Thank you, sir.”
Flaherty laughed at that one. “Yes, you, too,” he said to Timothy.
“Lovely,” Jo said.
“No thanks,” Harry said. “We got another load. We’ll be back.”
“I’ll come,” Jo said.
“Stay here and enjoy your orange,” Vincent Flaherty told her. “Enjoy two oranges.”
“That’s a good idea,” Harry said. “You stay here. We only have half a load left—unless we need to bring the generator, too?”
“Did I say I was going to supply the generator?” Flaherty asked.
“Yes,” Harry said.
“Then it has been supplied.”
Harry and Timothy hiked back to the campsite and they were at the truck trying to figure out how they could possibly carry a thousand feet of extension cord so they would be able to enact Timothy’s grand idea when Harry heard it, another engine. He knew who it was. He could guess now why Flaherty might have landed where he had and he felt stupid for voicing something that must have sounded like a complaint. He heard the box of bullets they’d bought at the hardware store rattling around in Timothy’s shirt pocket, and that sound was the sound of trouble. He wished Timothy hadn’t left his rifle at the helicopter.
“Hello there!” Timothy greeted Leonard Dawson. “How’s that pickup treating you?”
Leonard Dawson nodded but didn’t say anything. He was dirty and scruffed up, not that Timothy looked any better.
“I told it to treat you nice,” Timothy said. “All you gotta do is keep that gasoline in it. She’ll stay happy.”
“Yeah,” Leonard Dawson said.
“Yeah, you just keep that little girl filled with gasoline and you’ll be all right. Keeps the engine going. Well,” Timothy said, looking at the extension cord, “there’s a couple things we can do.” He pulled out his packet of rifle bullets and shook out a bullet and tucked it in the corner of his mouth while he thought.
“Is she here?” Dawson demanded.
“I haven’t seen her,” Harry found himself saying. He was nervous, but he thought his voice sounded pretty normal.
Dawson eyed them suspiciously. “What are you doing?”
“Did you have any luck out there?” Timothy asked.
“What have you found? Where are you going?”
“We got a problem here,” Timothy said, more to himself than to Leonard Dawson. He took the bullet from his mouth, exhaled, then tucked it back in. “How we gonna portage it?”
“You’re up to something, aren’t you? You two.” When they didn’t answer, Dawson demanded, “Where is she?”
Timothy kept working at the extension cord. He looped it into a spiraling pile as tall as his shoulders. Way too high. He undid the pile, then tried again. While he watched Timothy work, Harry ate one of the sandwiches Jo had made.
He was glad to be with Timothy, who didn’t seem upset by any of Dawson’s antics, and he wasn’t playacting either. He was busy relooping the extension cord. Now the pile flung out in a wide, much flatter lariat. Timothy strapped it in two places and they tested it as something they could drag. “It’s possible,” Timothy said. “We need something underneath, to protect it from getting chewed up.” Timothy turned to Leonard Dawson. “You got anything in your truck we might could borrow?”
To Harry’s surprise Leonard Dawson said, “Take a look.”
“Something to slide it on would be nice. A sheet of metal.”
“How about some wood?” Harry asked.
“That’d be all right depending.”
Harry left Timothy in the camp, and hiked out to the toilet and pulled off one of the planks covering the hole. He started to drag it, then backtracked for some toilet paper.
Timothy said he thought they could work with that plank of wood yes sir. He sawed it in half, then set the extension cord on the two runners and roped it. Harry bolted up the Harvester. He shouldered the rucksack with the Mineralight, and he and Timothy each slung an end of rope over their shoulders and pulled the extension cord through the camp, past the steps of the Airstream, where Leonard Dawson sat glaring at them. “You’ll be leaving footprints, you know,” Dawson said.
Harry and Timothy stopped to readjust, positioning the planks like skis.
“I’ll be looking for my wife,” Dawson warned them as they left.
“Good luck finding her, sir,” Timothy said.
They rounded the horseshoe wall, pulling through dirt and tough cheat grass. They mushed the extension cord to the open area. In the deeper sand they pulled up for a break. When Harry turned around, Dawson was following them. So it was going to be like that. Nothing he could do about it.
“How’s my luck now?” Dawson taunted.
Timothy swigged from his canteen. His tongue pushed around the bullet in his mouth. He never turned his head to notice Dawson’s presence. “You help us pull this,” he said, directing his remarks to the canteen, and Leonard Dawson did.
Not surprisingly, Dawson threw a fit when he spotted Jo sitting inside the helicopter with Flaherty. The more he ranted, the more calmly Flaherty peeled his next orange. Dawson threatened to kill them all if they tried to take his wife away and Flaherty said nobody was taking his wife. Dawson yelled that he wanted to kill them all right here and now. And what the hell were they doing if they weren’t taking his wife? And Jo said, “Lenny, please, there’s no reason to use such rude language.” Dawson yelled that he would teach them the meaning of rude once he killed them all right here and now.
Timothy spat out the bullet and began wiping it with a bloody bandana he pulled from his pocket. He slid the bullet into his rifle. There was a sudden lull in the exchange.
“Let’s all have a nice conversation now,” Flaherty said.
Dawson fell silent.
No one spoke.
“Dadadadada for which we are about to receive,” mumbled Vincent Flaherty. “Amen. Everybody ready now for a nice conversation?”
Nobody answered.
“Mr. Dawson, your wife and I and several other colleagues are off to an undisclosed business location.”
“Then I’m coming too.”
“And we would be most happy to welcome you, but as you can see you’ll have to arrange for your own transportation. We’re already too full. You sure you need all this wire here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What is it?”
“Extension cord.”
“Hmm. Therefore . . .” Flaherty said.
“Therefore you’re leaving me here to rot,” Dawson said. “You think I don’t know when somebody’s trying to cheat me?”
“Mr. Dawson, you didn’t let me finish. Therefore, what I’m going to do for you is to disclose to you the exact coordinates of our top-secret business location. Hey—hey! No kicking the helicopter. Here’s a map to our location. As you can see, it’s not far.”
“This is not a map,” Dawson said, sneering down at the panel of cardboard Flaherty had placed in his hands.
“This is one of the finest maps you’ll ever see.”
“This is a kid’s goddamn scribble.”
“Lenny! My goodness, stop,” Jo cried.
“A scribble complete with compass points and topography and a pretty good go at distance. And it’s not that far. If the distance is off by a mile or two, it’s not going to hurt you.”
“Not in a helicopter it wouldn’t,” Dawson muttered.
“You can’t give him that!” Harry said. “That’s Charlie’s map! You can’t give him that.”
“It will be returned to us upon Mr. Dawson’s arrival. Do I have your word on that?”
“This is something you’d put on your goddamn refrigerator!”
“Lenny!”
“Do I have your word on its safe return?”
“Sir, does he have your word?”
“This is not a kindergarten out here, this is a goddamn desert. Yes, he has my word!”
“Lenny, please!” Jo wept.
Timothy sidled up beside Dawson with his rifle.
“Here’s where we are.” Vincent Flaherty let his finger drift in the air at a spot outside the map panel. “And here’s where we’re going.” His finger hovered over the cardboard and plopped down on a fringe of brown triangles.
“This is a rendering of coxcomb cliffs. Dark brown, see that? Because they’re higher. Kid does topography, too. You got a nice set of coxcomb cliffs to lead you in, with an eastern gate of pinnacles. Right here. See that? Simple as pie, my man. Been there and back already.”
“Come back and get me,” Dawson said.
“Would love to. Fuel considerations prevent it.”
“You expect me to walk!”
“The health benefits of walking are widely known, my good man. Bring some extra food when you come!” Flaherty shouted as he started up the engine. “No drinking either. We’re running a dry camp. Stand back, now.”
Dawson, big shoulders huddling, drew back angrily from the slicing rotors. His threatening stance went from larger than life to smaller. Arms tensed in a boxer’s boast, fist against fist with barely the air to beat, his mighty pyramid of a stance yielded nothing more than the point of his head as they rose above him. All of him ceased to exist in another few seconds.
Flaherty’s body erupted in gleeful convulsions. “No worries, my dear,” he shouted joyfully, squeezing Jo’s neck. “That man couldn’t find his way in a two-aisle grocery store!”