Blue Field(19)
Another tank shrieked. You cunting slut, Leo yelled at no one in particular.
More beer. She decided that when she finished she’d order another. Below her Leo reached with his sinewy arms for the offending cylinder and then straightened, slim-hipped and wide-shouldered, in Rand’s weathered Bend-A-Friend tee—what all the other wannabes wouldn’t give for one. It was a limited edition doled out at a cave-diving conference in the south attended by the usual elites. Like Rand—who literally gave Leo the sweaty cheapo shirt off his back when he’d fussed over it, pestering like an undeserving brat. She recalled that they’d been on a ride back from some northern dive site—some dive she herself had nailed, unlike Leo, she consoled herself by thinking now. But Leo fronted complimentary air fills and cookouts and boat trips. In exchange Rand adopted a shut-up, put-up arrangement. Something else she knew about, she thought, observing the glister of fat on her chicken until her appetite deserted her. She wished she were home, at her desk graphing stoma and denta divorced from anyone she’d ever met. She pressed the tines of her fork into her palm. She wished for canker and boil. For septicemia. For any rash undoing of the body in what used to seem to her—before her near-death in the wreck, before her parents’ deaths—an adventuresome unfolding, lush and wild although mostly these days she just worked grim and grimmer. But better that than playing tag-a-long. Guilting Jane. Wishing she could guilt Rand.
She took another pull on her drink and ignored the sharp mix of voices from the street. Light flared a few feet above her—sun banking off a circling gull. More voices. Leo was climbing from his truck. A few of his guys milled about while he pirouetted in the road, chest thrust forward. He’d always struck her as tightly strung, jittery and high-handed. She pegged him as a premature ejaculator—needy and pushy and unable to hold himself back and therefore not much fun to tease, perspiring overly onto the sheets. Even so she balled her paper napkin in her lap and plastered on a smile. Beggars can’t be choosers, her mother used to tell her.
She called from her belvedere. Much ado about nothing, Captain?
He shaded his eyes with both hands and looked up. Who’s that? he said.
Forgot me already? Marilyn?
He lowered his arms. Shit, he said loudly to his mini-militia. Gets worse, don’t it.
She considered tossing her glass but really she wished for thunderbolts, then more reasonably for bulbous tumours or raisin-sized nodes. Any kind of flesh-wreck. Special delivery, Leo. Even so she took a few seconds to rehearse her next line. What’s that? she finally trilled. Didn’t catch you.
He cupped his hands around his mouth. Something’s wrong, he bugled. Someone’s missing.
Sunlight ignited his hair. A burnt tang seared her nostrils. Her head rolled.
When she came to she was on her feet. Amber streamed onto the decking and she stepped out of its wake and righted the glass. Garble roiled her mouth. She wondered how long she’d been gone.
That’s all I know, Leo shouted, then his silhouette moved shiftily around as if facing a disagreeable decision. Yeah, he said after a moment. You’d better come too.
18
She crowded between Leo and some Tim or other in the heat-stink of the truck’s cab. Leo slammed it onto the two-lane highway, the tanks racketing in back. The leaves crimped red on the stupid trees clumped like leftovers on the stony abandoned farmland to either side of the road. She swam her tongue dumbly in her mouth. Leo soon slowed onto a dirt road that quickly yielded to tire tracks rutted into burnt grass. The tracks ended at the fringes of a wood and the men clambered out and padded around Rand’s shiny black ark of a trailer, his dreadnought-black truck. Here too were his portable compressor and booster pump—when running they shrieked and clobbered like an army of pneumatic drills in a child’s nightmare—and a pyramid of tanks stacked beneath a tent awning that also sheltered a workbench arrayed with toolkits and spare hoses. Tim cut an admiring whistle—apparently unlike Leo he’d never been to this mostly secret site.
A sudden breeze beat open a small gap at the edge of the woods and then the gap quickly shut—the trail. It lay several miles inland from the huge bay on one side, the great lake on the other, veining the narrow peninsula and leading directly to the cave. She scrambled now from the truck only to fold at the waist and nearly puke. The scrappy grass turned black then white. She straightened and wiped her dusty mouth on her wrist. Even the sky looked X-rayed. Even Rand’s stuff and Jane’s—her small extra suit airing next to his large one on a picnic table and her tool kit tucked neatly under the bench. Marilyn’s mind shuffled these and other stark details. So much to go wrong—sometimes she woke in the middle of the night with a wall of water in her face, cold sweat brining her skin. She’d reach for Rand, the cascade effect of fear—the body’s soaring, plunging chemical transactions—mimicking the old lust. But after—as he dryly kissed her and settled on his side of the bed— she’d feel only her own pulse tapping in her fingertips as if trying to get out. Sometimes even the sex failed.
The sky seemed to clamp over her now like a lid. Leo and his guy kept at their busy buzz and she involuntarily swatted the air. And then with a minor roar another truck jounced along the rutted tracks. Soon a cop cruiser and SUV appeared from behind the truck’s hovering cloud of dust and Leo and crew commenced waving, self-important as politicians. True—someone had called Leo instead of her. Wife, best friend. Her mind rumbled and she fought to take stock. Someone had called. Someone was missing. I’m going, she announced.