The bonfire smolders, a thin grey soot within a ring of scattered bodies. Once the sun is up and shining on their sleeping figures, last night’s revelers gradually come to their feet and begin to stagger to their cars, their hands absently pawing their pockets for car keys. Once again, the ranch has lived up to its billing.
I’ve been awake through it all, the scene from the night before playing in my mind again and again. I doubt I’ll ever see Lucille again. She apparently has everything she thinks she’ll ever need.
At thirty-seven, I find myself discarded in favor of a ranch hand and his newfangled moonshine. In the glare of first light, the panic is still there. Then, as the morning advances, the feeling mutates into a weird mixture of jealousy and rage, a mixture that obsesses the mind. Rage, it would seem, is the more liberating emotion, obsession’s natural solvent.
Once everyone has left, I head out to the shed Clyde said he had filled with hayseed. The door is still locked, so I go back for an axe used for last night’s bonfire and begin hacking at the door. I have an idea of what I’m about to find, but nothing can quite prepare me for the bizarre reality.
The interior is aglitter. Everywhere, shelves and shelves of Pyrex glassware in the form of beakers, massive funnels, oversized test tubes, everything stained with a dull opaqueness. Propane tanks are stacked in a pyramid. It’s all so weirdly neat yet filthy, like the lair of Dr. Frankenstein. And then the smell hits my sinuses: a scalding chemical stench, a distilled acidic pungency like a stagnant pool of cat urine. The air itself seems corrosive. With my shirt over my face, I shuffle over to a Coleman cooler and lift the lid. Inside are quart-sized plastic containers labeled in block letters etched on rectangles of athletic tape: RED PHOSPHOROUS, IODINE, PSEUDO-E, ACETONE, MURIATIC ACID, ACETONE, DENATURED ALCOHOL. Turning about, I see in the corner a tipi of automatic rifles and a stack of paper targets of human silhouettes. I’ve seen enough.
By noon the sheriff’s department has arrived in force – eight men with eight automatic rifles, sidearms and body armor. After leading them to the shed a potbellied deputy with a thick black mustache pokes his head into the broken door, and then immediately orders everyone back to the house. With his head bobbing in familiar recognition, he says, “This isn’t for us.” His breath is labored as he walks beside me toward the house. “The county just got its own team for collecting evidence at meth labs, special criminologists who know this kind of thing.” Apparently the ranch is now, in the deputy’s words, “a hazardous crime scene.” If Clyde comes back, he points out, “he’ll be armed to the teeth and pissed-off. I mean, these guys are freaks for violence, just cuckoo for Ko Ko Puffs.”
Within the hour two new officers show up in a dated fire truck pulling a trailer marked “HAZARDOUS MATERIALS.” It takes a full hour for them to dress in what they call their personal protection equipment, which includes a full-face air purifying respirator, a futuristic looking Tyvek suit, a pair of heavy chemical-resistant gloves and oversized moon boots. We then lead them to the shed where they begin taking samples using an assortment of spatulas and pipettes. As we look on, one of the suited officers turns to see us and then waves us away until we are a hundred yards or so from the shed. The potbellied sheriff’s deputy hands me a pair of tiny binoculars.
“You’re living next to a poison factory run by a psychopath,” he says as I squint through the tiny lenses. “He mixes that red phosphorus with hydroiodic acid and it makes a phosphine gas. Couple of whiffs of that’ll kill you.”
“So you see this kind of thing a lot?” I ask.
“Oh, shit,” he says breathlessly. “My brother-in-law got my sister on meth. Now she’s serving a fifteen-year sentence for shooting her neighbor’s ten-year-old son with a deer rifle. It’s everywhere.” The first time he saw a lab, he goes on, his partner was blown up. A can of ethyl ether ignited the room when he flipped the light switch. The only time he’s ever been shot at has been at the scene of a clandestine meth lab, and, as he says, “You never get used to that.” So he says he’s abundantly careful now, doesn’t even mess with these labs anymore. He sees one, he calls in the forensic chemists, and they come in with plenty of heavily armed backup. Turning to me, he says with deadly seriousness, “I hate these people.”
The deputy is familiar with the scene indeed. As I watch through the binoculars, he keeps up a running commentary: “Now they’re looking for any finished product…” A few seconds later, he continues on cue, “Next they’ll put a silica gel desiccant on the rifles…” From time to time he takes the binoculars and seems to be instructing the forensic chemists telepathically. “All the documentary evidence goes in the clear Kapak bags. Good job. Seal it and mark it. Contaminated evidence. Bingo.” A few minutes later he says something that makes me feel suddenly weak: “Looks like they found one of those scrunchies women wear in their hair. They love these guys. The drugs make ’em skinny and super horny. So we have a barter system of goods for services.”
Later in the day my father arrives to point out exactly where he found the chemical stash all those months ago. He’s excited, his voice fluted with unspoken sorrow and apology. He won’t say as much but he feels the terrible burden of having brought Clyde into the picture. I keep it light. “They’ll find him,” I say.
Moving about calms his inner strings. As we traverse the ranch, there is a sense of dawning comprehension, a sense that we could find anything out here – scattered bones, a human skull with a hole in the temple. And as we move away from the shed, the atmosphere becomes spooked. All that remains is something of a cave, a whorl of dried timothy hay that once encased so much evidence. Then comes a startled voice from across the way.
A detective at the edge of a far-off pond is waving his hands. His delayed voice arcs over a dell, then his whistle pierces the distance. As we approach I see his eyes are tearing uncontrollably.
“I found the dump site,” he says, palms in his eye sockets.
The rest of the afternoon is spent at the sheriff’s office, where we talk about the Aggies and prepare a statement. Who is Clyde’s wife? I know her, I tell them. Could she be an accomplice? Not a chance. They’re getting divorced. Someone asks for investment advice on various Internet stocks that aren’t worth a shit. Eventually one of the forensic chemists approaches.
“Any girlfriends you know of?” he says.
I feel my face go hot.
“No idea.”
“People don’t just go out and do this by themselves. Not a big operation like this.”
“I can’t even speculate on Clyde’s confederates,” is all I can manage, and this would seem to be entirely satisfactory. Someone asks me where SunMicro will be in six months from now. “Down twenty.” Half an hour later, I’m back at the ranch.
That evening, Colette’s car appears in the drive. She steps out and stands within the arc of the opened door.
“I hear my story got some back-up,” she says.
I approach the gate and lean my elbows on the orange surface rust.
“How’d you find out?”
“The cops showed up at the house a few hours ago.”
“Imagine how surprised I am right now, Colette.”
“What all did ya’ learn?”
“The whole enchilada.”
She closes her eyes very slowly and nods.
“So they’re still looking for Clyde,” she says.
“Where is he?”
“Somewhere out there,” she says, indicating the world at large. “Rambling about with your wife.”
Colette thoughtfully withdraws a cigarette from a Marlboro pack and offers me one. As we stand there smoking with the gate between us, she says, “You need to be careful. When Clyde finds out what happened to his operation, he’s gonna be pretty steamed.”
“Colette, I only hope he comes after me.”
“You don’t want that. He’s smarter and meaner than he looks. He’ll keep tabs on you – watch your house, watch you go to work, come back, figure out when you’re not ready for him.”
“And I’ll keep tabs on him.”
“Paranoid people are hard to sneak up on and they always seem to have a lot of time on their hands. They live in Crazy Town, and they have a way of pulling you in.”
“Clyde might be mean,” I say, “but he’s not smart.”
“He gets off on figuring things out for himself. He’s too cheap to buy his own drugs, so he figures out how to make them. A few weeks ago he’s in the yard tearing apart a bunch of lawn mowers, exchanging parts, trying to make one of them work… He’d love nothing better than to smash the brains out of whoever made off with his livelihood. And he’ll do it while you’re asleep.”
“What a lovely thought, Colette.”
She shrugs.
“It ain’t lovely, Sterling, but it’s your life.”