The Fresco (4 page)

Six months ago there had been two injured, one dead. A trial date months in the future. And a judge with no more sense than to accept that “don't lock him up, he's a working man” argument. She had explained the situation to his lawyer. Benita's father paid Bert when and if he showed up at the salvage yard. Since he didn't often show up, he wasn't really a working man. The public defender said his first duty was to his client, and it would go easier on him if he were a man with a job and a family to support.

“But he's not,” she said.

The lawyer gave her a mulish stare. “Well, he must contribute something. The house…”

“Right. His mother left him the house when she died. Bert sold his last piece of art thirteen years ago. For the last ten years, I've paid the property taxes and maintenance, because that's the last time Bert worked for money. Last year Bert took out a mortgage on the house so he could pay cash for a new car, which he said he needed for a new delivery job he was taking. I don't know what happened to the job, but he borrowed on the car for drinking and gambling money. When he was picked up for drunk driving, they impounded the car and the finance agency repossessed it. I haven't made any of the mortgage payments and the house is about to be foreclosed. That's Bert's contribution to the family welfare.”

“You didn't make the mortgage payments?” the lawyer had asked, as though she had done something unfamilial.

She had stared at him, making him shift uncomfortably. “It isn't my house, as Bert often reminds me. I didn't borrow on it. Foreclosure is sixty days away.”

“And when they foreclose?”

“Bert won't have anywhere to live.”

“Neither will you,” he challenged.

“I'm moving in with my father,” she said. “Alone. My father doesn't like Bert.”

Actually, she planned to rent a small apartment when the time came, but that was no one's business but hers. As it turned out, nothing she had said made any difference, for the lawyer totally ignored it, as did la raza judge. Typical. As time passed, more and more of the elected magistrates were women, but they were still too few and far between.

She shut the garage door and went into the house, rubbing her forehead. If Bert followed his usual pattern, he'd spend the afternoon with his drinking buddies, maybe Larry, but just as likely that had been misdirection on his part. The police would show up sooner or later, and he wouldn't want her to know where he really was. During the afternoon he'd go through stage one, which was boisterous conviviality, and stage two, slightly morose nostalgia, and when they ran
out of beer, he'd move on to stage three, which might bring him home to tear the house apart, looking for liquor or money he thought he might have hidden sometime in the past. He was always sure one of his old caches was still there and if he didn't find one, it was because Benita had stolen his money or thrown out his liquor. That's usually when he hit her, if she was around. Stage four involved belligerence and violence, and she had this cube-thing to protect. Bert had the car, however, and she had no way to go except, maybe, call a cab, and they were so expensive…

An audible click. Like that little relay switch. There was money. There, beneath her hand, was money. Quite a lot of money. She had planned to leave after the foreclosure, because that would focus Bert's belligerence on the bank rather than on herself. But here under her hand was the opportunity to do it now. So call a cab. Pack a bag. Take Sasquatch to a kennel so Bert couldn't take out his temper on the dog. The money was right there, and even though she hadn't earned it yet, she planned to earn it, she could start earning it!

Right away, here came the marching ghosts. Mami and Papa wouldn't approve. It wasn't fair to Goose and Marsh. The children might not like the idea…

She felt a flash of that same pain she'd felt up in the hills, momentary, fleeting, like a splinter being pulled out, a moment's pang, but then the ache went away, and so did the ghosts, leaving her mind even clearer than before. How very strange. Almost as though she were…emptied out. Like a garbage can, all emptied out and washed with hot water and soap. She'd never been able to banish the ghosts before!

Unbidden, a picture of the aliens came into her mind. They would do her a welcome reversal. A good turn. Yes. They would banish her ghosts. They would go down all her nerves and synapses and exorcise her. They would leave her in clarity. Delicately, as though handling fine crystal, she set the thought aside, knowing it to be true. Obviously, they didn't want a hag-ridden envoy. They wanted someone with her wits about her!

She had almost a month accumulated leave coming. As
she went up the stairs, she planned what to do next: first, call Marsh or Goose at home, tell them there was an emergency. She'd take her new suit she'd saved up for. Several pairs of slacks, the neat ones she wore to work, with clean shirts, underwear, the two new sleep tee's that Angelica had sent for her birthday. Her hands worked almost by themselves, opening drawers, taking down hangers, stuff from the medicine cabinet: hair dryer, curling iron, toothbrush, vitamins, allergy medicine. She always stuffed up in places with high humidity.

High humidity? Where?

Not here, stupid, a voice told her. Washington, D.C. Where else would she find people in authority?

Everything went into one suitcase plus a small carry-on bag. She'd get her ticket at the airport, the airline or route didn't matter. She'd learned to drive when she was sixteen and had never changed the name on her driver's license, so she could buy the ticket under her maiden name. There were X-ray machines. How would the cube react to an X-ray machine? And what about the money? She didn't dare carry that much money in her purse! Or her carry-on bag. What if she got mugged?

She got the sewing kit out of the linen closet along with a strip torn from the end of a worn bedsheet, spread the cloth neatly on the bed, arranged layers of money down the center of the strip, then folded it over twice and basted the cloth into a thick, flexible belt, finishing it off with two ribbon ties. The belt went around her waist to be double-tied in front, like a child's shoelaces. She had kept ten of the five-hundred-dollar bills separate, two in the bill compartment of her wallet and eight of them in the secret compartment of her purse, where they wouldn't show when she paid for anything.

She'd have to leave a note, though it didn't matter what it said. Any attempt at communicating with Bert in writing always made him furious. He liked to disagree or hit out if something annoyed him, and hitting a letter wasn't rewarding for him. In the end, she wrote, “Bert, I've decided to take some vacation time on my own. I'm taking the dog with me.”
She thought a moment. If he was drunk, he would look for her at her father's. Well, nothing she could say would keep him from doing that, but she'd better let her father know she'd left.

The note to her father was brief. “Have to get away, have to do some thinking, I'll be in touch.”

Mami had died years ago. No way to tell her anything. Not that she would have needed telling. Benita made two calls, one to the kennel, one to Goose.

“Goose, sorry to bother you at work, but this is Benita, and I have to tell you an emergency has come up and…No, the kids are fine. This is something else…. No, it isn't. Goose, just listen! I've got to take my accumulated vacation now…. No, I don't need checks in advance, but would you mind depositing them to my personal account until I get back? That's right, the one at First Bank. Thank you, Goose. Tell Marsh, okay?”

When the cab came, she was ready, everything counted six times and everything in the house locked up, put away, turned off. There was a house key on her car key ring, so if Bert came home, he could get in. Sasquatch was on the leash, eager to go anywhere.

As she went out the front door with her suitcase, a police car pulled to the curb. Officer Cain. She knew him all too well.

“Benita, sorry, but Bert's monitor went off…”

“He took my car,” she said, without expression or apology. “He said he was going to Larry's, but I'm not sure he did.”

“You try to stop him?” he asked, looking at her face.

“No. The bruise is a couple of days old.”

“Sorry, Benita, but we have to look for him.”

“I do hope you find him before he kills someone,” she said sweetly, smiling briefly as she got into the cab.

“Head out toward the airport,” she said, settling back in the seat with a slightly queasy feeling. “We'll make one stop, but it's on the way. I'm leaving the dog at a kennel.”

Sasquatch put his front feet on the seat and looked out the window, while Benita ruffled the fur of his neck, taking
a certain comfort from the solidity of him. She and the kids had named him Sasquatch. He'd never been away from home, anymore than she had. Except for the few times she had run to the shelter when the children were little, she had never in her whole life taken off like this. Even when Angelica had begged her to come visit them in California last winter, Bert hadn't wanted to go, and she hadn't wanted to go for fear…for fear of what?

Simple, really. If she'd gone to visit the kids last winter, she wouldn't have come back. At that time, she hadn't been ready to do anything final. Donkey-like, she'd been waiting for the stick to hit her. Well, the house arrest and the foreclosure had been two good whacks, one right after the other. The extraterrestrials and the money were more in the nature of a carrot. Take a bite. Go on, it's delicious!

Stick behind, carrot before, there was no point in waiting for anything. Besides, she'd given her word. She'd claimed to be a person of respect, and she'd given her word. It sounded stupid as all get-out, even to her, but it would just have to do.

SUNDAY

On Pacific time, Rog Wooley's alarm went off, though softly, at four
A.M.
, and he reacted almost at once to stop it before it woke Susan. She hadn't been sleeping well lately, none of the lumbermen's families had, and if she woke at this hour of the morning, she would only mess up his routine with her doubts and worries. His clothes were in the bathroom, and he dressed there, taking care with his socks and the warm layers of shirts and sweaters, being sure everything lay smooth against his body. Climbing a few hundred feet into the air lugging a heavy saw was enough to tire a man without adding socks or clothing that bunched and bound. By the time he'd topped the first tree, he'd be sopping wet and it would be warm enough to take off a few layers.

Outside, the world was dark and chill, with wisps of fog moving around like ghosts. He had backed the car up the driveway and parked outside the garage door, so he could release the brake and roll half a block before he started the engine. His climbing irons were in the car, along with his lunch. He'd fixed that last night after Susan went to bed. He checked his watch. The van would be at the edge of town by five, and it wouldn't wait for late arrivals.

He was on time, one more sleepy, aggravated timber cutter, trying to get to the work site on Sunday, when the damned tree-huggers wouldn't expect them. Later this morning, they would be there to block the road as they had yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Every time one judge signed an order to disperse, some other judge overrode it. Meantime, nobody was making any money, jobs were on the line, and rent payments were coming due. He stared out the window of the van, half dozing, as the jagged skyline emerged from the dark and the sky lightened in the east.

They joined up with several other vans as they crossed the bridge, and the convoy drove the last eight miles in absolute silence. The tree-huggers could be camped out there, and nobody wanted any more confrontations. The bosses were afraid somebody was going to get killed, the toppers and fellers were ready to do the killing, and meanwhile the trees just sat there, benefitting nobody! So they were old growth! That's why they were valuable! Why couldn't the idiot environmentalists see that? Trees that size had to be cut while they were still healthy. They wouldn't do the human race any good if they were left to rot!

They reached the site when the sky was barely light enough to see by, hours before the picketers were out, or the guys that made a big thing out of lying down in the road so the trucks couldn't get by. Steve Buck and Harry Rider were the other two toppers, the trees were already marked for selective cutting—and that was another gripe! No more clear cutting, even though that was the easier way to do it! No worry about topping, let them fall where they would! A man could sure as hell make more money that way, though, hell, something was better than nothing. Selective cutting meant they had to limit and clear the fall zones, so they were back to topping trees. While he was doing his thing, the other men would keep busy clearing fall zones until the first big ones were ready to come down. The tractor men wouldn't even arrive until around nine.

The first marked tree was a monster, so big around that he couldn't throw a line around it until he was thirty feet off
the ground. Even then it took extreme effort just to heave the rope that held him to the trunk while he spiked his way up. A third of the way to the top he shifted around the trunk to avoid the sun, just poking over the horizon dead level with his eyes. The rope bound and rattled, almost as though something was fooling with it on the other side of the trunk. He hadn't seen any stubs from the ground, not this low on the trunk, but then it hadn't been light enough to see very well. He sidestepped to one side, then the other, but the trunk was clear almost all the way up and without many stubs to drop. Jase Steele was below, clearing away anything he dropped. Jase was a careful man, a good man to have on the ground, one who wouldn't take any chances that ended up getting him hurt and getting the man above him fired.

When he came to the first stub, he checked the area below, saw it was clear, jerked the saw into noisy action and took off the branch. It was short, but as big around as his leg. When it hit bottom, Jase came out of the brush and waved; Rog let the saw dangle at the end of its safety line and heaved himself up another ten feet. He was about eighty feet up and the damned tree was just now beginning to taper enough that it was halfway easy to climb. It smelled weird, too. Maybe because it was cold. Sun-warmed redwood, sun-warmed pine, they both smelled clean, but this smell was different. A real stink. Like something died up here.

Jase yelled something from below, but Rog didn't look down. He still had fifty feet to go to the point where he could top this monster. Now that the trunk was thinner, he could move faster. Jase yelled again, a kind of panicky scream, and Rog shifted to the side to block the sun and let him look down, but as he moved he caught a glimpse of something on the other side of the tree, just a quick look at something hairy and big and good lord God in heaven, look at those teeth…

 

In the Gila wilderness of southwestern New Mexico, a small pack of Mexican wolves, introduced the previous year by the Forest Service, lay in the midmorning sun on a rock shelf above a den still in use by the alpha female and her four half-
grown pups. The alpha dog lay beside the bitch, licking his front paws and, occasionally, his mate's ear. Several others of the pack were nearby, and the pups were tumbling over and around him, but he ignored them, eyes half closed in the warmth of the sun and the stone.

The pups were weaned. They were almost big enough to join in the hunt, and this was the time Mack Cerubia had been waiting for. He'd spotted the den months before, a natural tunnel in solid rock that he couldn't dig out, and the mother had been too sly and shy for him to get a good shot at. Mack had killed the last of the former pack sixteen months ago. The Fish and Game people and the Forest Service had a ten-thousand-dollar reward posted for “information leading to arrest,” but nobody had claimed it because nobody knew anything. Mack didn't talk about his intentions, unlike some idiots who stuck their faces on TV, making threats. If you knew wolves were vermin, and you knew they needed killing, but the vermin were protected by the damned greenies, you didn't talk about it. You just did it, making damn sure nobody saw you.

Nobody would have suspected him, anyhow. He didn't run cattle anymore. He wasn't getting rid of the wolves because they threatened his stock, he was getting rid of the wolves because his forefathers had killed every last wolf in the U.S. of A. because they'd needed killing! Right along with cougars and grizzlies and lesser vermin like wolverines, coyotes and eagles that picked off lambs. The country was Godgiven for the people who used and grazed it and hunted on it, and he'd be damned if some government official was going to tell him what was vermin and what wasn't.

He could have shot the bitch months ago, leaving the pups to starve, but it had been early enough in the season that another pair might breed. He'd figured he'd wait until the young ones were a bit grown and the pack was all together. Then he could get the bitch and the dog. Once the alpha animals were dead, the others would be disorganized, easier to kill. He'd made a new kind of silencer and he'd bought a new scope. Yesterday and the day before he'd used fifty rounds with both, sighting in the scope. With any luck
at all, he'd have both alphas and some of the pups before the others knew what was happening.

Just now he was working his way up the slope to the ridge across from the den. It would be about a hundred-yard shot, easy with this weapon. When he neared the ridge, he dropped on his belly and crawled up, stopping once or twice when his sight blurred. He took off his goggles and wiped his eyes. The haziness came and went. He'd noticed it the last time he was here, too. Probably sun-warmed air rising off a rockface down the slope before him.

Raising his head slowly, he looked down on the den. The shelf above it was hip deep in dogs. He counted, eagerly. The four pups. The alpha bitch, the alpha dog, three others. He eased the muzzle of the rifle over the ridge, settled it firmly and applied his eye to the scope, put his finger to the trigger and began to tighten it…

And damn it, something screamed!

It was a sound so vehement, so near that he completely lost the target as he rolled and looked upward where the sound had come from. His first thought was eagle. Eagles screamed, though he'd never heard one as loud as that. Hell, it would take an eagle the size of a truck to scream like that, and besides there was nothing around! Just sky, and trees, and the line of the ridge, and across the canyon…not one damned wolf! Either down the den or gone, hell knows where!

He rolled into prone position again, cursing, staring at the trees around him. Except for the wavery air he saw absolutely nothing. His first clue that he wasn't alone came when something invisible grabbed him by both ankles and yanked him, yelling his head off, straight up into the sky.

A Forest Service officer climbed to the same spot later in the day, to check on the den as he'd been doing at weekly intervals ever since the female pupped. He found the rifle lying at the top of the ridge. All around and on top of it were torn fragments of denim and flannel and knit cotton and leather, some of them bloodstained, like feathers someone had plucked from a chicken. There was no sign of anyone, however. Not even any bloodstains on the ground.

 

Sunday was a working day at the Waving Palms Motel, or what would be Waving Palms when the twelve-acre site was drained. The trick was, so Bubba Miller claimed, to get the acreage drained over the weekend, and do it so fast nobody had time to know about it. That way there'd be no complaints, no EPA challenges, no outcries about endangered species. Besides, it wasn't any big deal, only twelve acres, and it had been in Bubba's family since Grampa Miller took it on account of an unpaid repair bill, back in the fifties. It was plenty big enough for a small motel, and there were no recent changes of ownership papers floating around, requiring surveys or confusing things. The permit to dig a foundation that was posted on the road had been issued for a dry piece of land a half mile away. The permit had a mistake on it indicating that other piece of property. Just two numbers twisted around was all. Nobody's fault, if anybody caught onto it. It just happened that way.

So, Bubba and his brother Quentin, who had fallen heir to the twelve acres along with their cousin Josh, all of whom had agreed to throw in their shares for the Waving Palms project, had Bubba's front loader and a backhoe they'd rented, and they were digging a nice big pond at the lower, western end of the ten acres and running a good-sized ditch into it along the swamp on the north. Bubba didn't own the ground on the north or the south side, where another good-sized ditch led into the swamp. Everything the backhoe dug out of the pond and the ditches got dumped on the eastern edge of the property, along the road, to raise it up. It'd be muddy as hell for a few weeks, fulla dead frogs and snakes and all the stuff that squirmed around down in that muck, but when the eastern end had a chance to dry out a little, they'd dump a few loads of fill dirt and gravel on it, grade it out and really dig the foundations. By that time, they'd be able to fool with the ditches some, make them look more natural, and plant some other stuff around.

“Hey, Bubba,” yelled Quentin, when Bubba cut the engine for a minute to clear some brush from the bucket-teeth. “C'mon over here. See what Josh found!”

Trampling through a patch of rare and endangered orchids, Bubba stomped over to the other two men who were standing in a patch of ferns on a little hillock, one they hadn't planned to touch.

“Why the hell'd ya smash it?” he asked, more interested than irate. The patch of ferns looked as flat as a pool table, though it might be very slightly dished at the center.

“C'mon,” Quentin admonished. “Look addit! We din do that.”

It seemed to Bubba likely they hadn't. The general flatness had been accomplished through repeated pounding by something large, like a section of log, like the heavy tampers used to settle fill dirt around drainpipes, or foundations, stuff like that. Must be a big man or more'n one did it. Something that size would be a heavy ole bitch of a thing, almost two feet across.

“Whaddaya think?” asked Quentin.

“I think somuddy buried somethin,” Bubba replied. “And when he set them ferns back on top, he smooshed the whole thing down tight. Probly, just did it. A week from now, they'd all be growed up again, and we wouldn'a seen it.”

“You think maybe money?” asked Josh, thoughtfully.

Bubba looked around. “Nah. I think more likely a body. It's too wet here for money or paper. Most likely a body.”

“We gonna dig it up?” asked Quentin.

“Why'n hell we do that?” his brother replied. “Get all messed up in somethin none of our binness! Let dead bodies lie, that's what I say.”

They returned to their work, making considerable progress by early afternoon, when they stopped work, parked the machines, and got into Bubba's pickup to drive to the nearest town for sandwiches and beer. After some jollity between them and Dolly, the clerk at the convenience store, they took an extra sixpack, got into their car and drove back the way they'd come. At least so Dolly told the police when they came asking, having found a receipt with the store's name on it in the empty seat of the pickup.

That was the last she saw of them, she said, driving off down the road, waving at her.

“They were okay?” asked the police, “not fighting among themselves?”

“Oh, hell, no,” said Dolly. “Those boys'd have to be sober to fight about anything, and they ain't been sober since high school. I've knowd 'em forever, since then, anyhow. They're just happy drunks.”

If so, they'd died happy. The backhoe was right where somebody left it, and the front loader. The truck the men had arrived in was parked by the road. Scattered around the machines were six empty beer cans, two shoes (unmatching), one shirt sleeve, a pair of dark glasses and a blood-soaked item later identified as a hernia truss. Trodden into the muck were the missing men's bones, all three skeletons, the medical examiner said, when he'd had a chance to sort them out and reassemble them. No flesh. Just bones.