Diablo Mesa(44)
Bitan, obviously in a hurry, went off with only a few more words, toward his half of the search pattern. Skip began tracing his own, hiking first one way, then the other. Bitan soon dwindled to a black dot on the plains, and then he vanished entirely.
After noon, the heat came up and at length Skip decided to take a rest and eat his lunch. He was starving and wolfed down the duck rillettes and Camembert sandwich he had prepared on French bread. Mitty got sardines in olive oil. Even though Skip was in good shape, he was starting to feel the trek in his legs.
He continued on, Mitty now following behind, long red tongue dangling. There was nothing to see, no indication of a UFO crash, just a flat white alkali crust that seemed to go on forever; but as he went back and forth, the inviting-looking hills got closer, and finally, around four o’clock, he entered them. At the first corkscrew oak, he took another rest in the shade, drinking the now-hot water from his canteen and sharing more with Mitty. He was starting to regret bringing the dog; it was so hot. Bitan was nowhere to be seen, but Skip wasn’t worried: he knew exactly where he himself was, his position indicated by a little blue dot on the Google Earth image.
He went on. The hills were magical, covered with deep grasses that swayed and rippled in the wind, filling the air with the scent of verdure, the scattering of oak trees giving the landscape a parklike feel. And it was cooler, thank God. The buttes and mountains beyond formed a dramatic backdrop. He began to encounter faint trails winding this way and that, and quickly realized they were not human, but horse trails—wild horses. It excited him to think he might glimpse some. Horse Heaven Hills—the place lived up to the name.
The only problem was, as he tramped the hills, he could see no sign of an alien crash site. He checked his watch and, at four thirty, realized it was time to make a beeline back to their rendezvous point. He dropped a Google Earth pin to note where he was on the search pattern so he could resume later and headed back out of the hills.
He arrived at the rendezvous point at five sharp. There was no sign of Bitan. He checked his phone, but of course there was no cell reception.
The sun sank lower in the western sky, and the air cooled, the wind dying away. A pleasant evening commenced, golden light striping the hills and mountains beyond, the air as clear as a spring pool. He waited an hour. Still no Bitan. He thought about heading back, but then considered what would happen if he left and Bitan showed up to find him gone. The man would be furious—and might stop taking him into his confidence.
This was an annoying development, but perhaps not unexpected. Bitan was enthusiastic and easily carried away. On the flat plain, there was no hill Skip could climb to look for him. He felt a buzz in his phone, glanced down, and noted the battery was down to 20 percent. He quickly turned off the GPS and closed Google Earth, and for good measure put the phone in airplane mode to conserve its battery.
As dusk gathered, he settled in to wait.
27
CORRIE SAT IN the one truly comfortable chair in her apartment—a Peter Max–decorated beanbag relic from the previous tenant—trying to read a heavily abused paperback. The Sunday-evening light streamed through the windows that looked out onto the Jade Park neighborhood, throwing stripes across the floor that resembled prison bars.
At one point, she realized she wasn’t actually reading anymore, her eyes merely scanning dumbly the printed words on yellowing paper. She mustered the willpower to try again:
Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, similar to an actress who doesn’t have to be onstage for a while, and so goes into the audience to watch the rest of the company a moment, keeping in the background so as not to distract. I liked to see her image reproduced in books and paintings, though they were quite different from the ones I enjoy today…
“Fuck!” she yelled, flinging the paperback across the room. It hit a small shelf holding a potted teddy-bear cholla, and the cactus, shelf, and book all crashed to the floor, scattering dirt and potsherds across the tiles.
In high school, back in Medicine Creek, Kansas, she had been an avid reader. She’d take her Gremlin and park under the power lines and read everything she could get her hands on—trashy science fiction, thrillers, horror novels, even the occasional classic. It was all good, as long as the book took her far away from Medicine Creek, her screeching alcoholic mother, and the bullies and “cool” kids at school. Out of principle, she hadn’t paid much attention to her teachers, but one writer her English teacher had mentioned had stayed with her: Marcel Proust, a French author who, the teacher said, wrote books that rambled on endlessly about his experiences growing up. Somehow that odd idea, of a man who spent his entire life reliving his childhood, stuck with her—the sheer self-absorption of writing a million-word monologue about oneself. And so, one day she picked up Remembrance of Things Past and dipped into it. It was tough, tiresome going at times, especially since nothing ever seemed to happen, but slowly the sheer wistful dreaminess of it captivated her and became her go-to escape reading.
But not today.
Today, nothing helped her escape.
Corrie knew that spending more time grieving obsessively would be unhealthy. Her mentor’s sudden death made her realize just how alone she was: in this new job, in this strange town, in this desert state. She’d thought of calling her father, or even—strangely enough—Nora Kelly, but neither of them was close enough to the situation to really understand. The only person she wanted to turn to would have been Hale Morwood himself…and of course, he was gone. Only too late she realized he’d been more than a boss. He’d been a stabilizing influence on her: not a father figure, but the solid, steadying person she needed at the start of her career.