The Longest Night (24 page)

He hesitated. “Yes, she paid me.”

“Did you have to talk to her?”

“Um.” He squirmed. “She talked a little.”

“She scares me half out of my mind,” Nat confessed. “Especially since Paul punched her husband in the face.”

“What?”

“It was terrible. I'm not even sure why he did it. He's not
like
that! He could have lost his job. He still might, really; I don't know what's going to happen in his next promotion cycle.” She felt herself chewing her thumbnail and lowered her hand back to the steering wheel.

“Anyway, I think that's the main reason Paul got sent to Camp Century. He got himself into a fine fix.”

“That's terrible,” Esrom said.

Signs flapped on telephone poles they passed; Nat glimpsed the word
MISSING
and the blurry black-and-white image of a smiling, braided young woman. She pointed: “That Zeigler girl's still missing,” she said. Sixteen-year-old Marnie Zeigler had disappeared three weeks before from the tiny town of Arco to the west. Signs covered every telephone pole and tree trunk, flapped wordlessly from shop windows, occasionally came loose and tumbled down the street as if to haunt the locals.

“We raised the Zeigler barn,” Esrom said, “about a decade back.”

Nat felt she was having an eerie brush with celebrity. “You
knew
the Zeigler girl?”

“A little bit, yeah. Went to church with them for a few years. That was back when my dad associated with other families.”

“Huh,” Nat said. She peeked at Esrom's face and noticed his tense posture and shaded expression. “Can I ask what the story is with your own family? I don't mean to pry, but you seem sad when you talk about them.”

“Oh.” He shifted uncomfortably. “You know, me and my dad just have some trouble. There's eleven of us, you know.” Nat felt her eyes widen—she hadn't known. “I'm the oldest. He wants all of us to stay on the ranch forever and help him, which maybe we would if he weren't such a damn a-hole all the time.” He said this last part in a hushed, gritted voice because of the girls. “We don't see eye to eye on religion matters. We used to, when I was young, but then I just lost my heart for it. It wasn't calling to me. Some of the things just fell away from my heart, is the only way I can explain it.”

“I understand,” Nat said. “The same kind of thing happened to me.”

“Really?” he said, looking at her. Then he shook his head: “He's a jerk to us boys and he's a monster with the girls. Won't let them go to school outside the house anymore; makes my ma teach them. Caught my sister Abra with a lipstick in her pocket and locked her in the bedroom two days. She's fifteen. I understand not wanting her to be worldly and all, but I don't see punishing a fifteen-year-old girl for wanting to try on some lipstick.” He grimaced. “It was light pink. She wore it once.”

Nat nodded, thinking how she allowed Sam and Liddie to smear their faces with her cosmetics, their tiny eyelids heavied with blue shadow, their lips ringed like circus clowns'.

“I don't want to talk too much about it. Works me up. Plus, your girls.” He gave a nod toward the backseat, cleared his throat, and sat up straighter. “So I got my own place. I go back home every couple days to check on things, but I don't stay long anymore. My pa's worse with the other kids if I rile him up.”

“I feel awful now,” Nat said. “I mean, life must be so much harder for your sisters, and here I'm this pampered thing—”

“No,” he said firmly. “There's no point in comparing yourself. Whatever good you have in life, you deserve it.”

He pointed a right turn ahead, and she saw that they had reached a part of town untouched by the recent boom. Her car (her car!) bumped over the train tracks and down a slope, past a house where some young men sat outside at midday, a ditch freckled with litter, a stray dog who looked at them with depressed shoulders and yellow eyes. They reached a brick apartment building and Esrom pointed. “Right here.”

“Okay,” said Nat, trying to keep her voice bright, but the condition of the place bothered her. The yard was a patch of weeds and dirt. Esrom didn't climb out of the car immediately—Sam had him from behind by the ears, tilting his head this way and that, making him laugh, while Liddie bounced around the backseat in delight—and Nat felt another, more acute bother: the recurrent misgiving that she should not be taking this car. God, she was an emotional basket case. In her mind she saw Jeannie Richards's face again, the accusing expression she'd worn as they passed her on the street.

“Samantha,” she said, “please cut it out!”

Both Sam and Esrom looked surprised. Sam released Esrom's ears and slid back to her seat, eyes brimming. “We were just playing,” she said.

“Is something wrong?” Esrom asked.

“No. I don't know,” Nat said. And here he'd just recovered from talking about his family. She blurted, “Do you think this is all right?”

“Is what all right?”

“This. You giving me this car.”

“Well, it's all right with me,” he said, smiling. But he must have noticed her discomfort because his face changed a little.

Nat pressed the rim of the steering wheel—it was so clean, he must have shined it, polished every inch, before he brought the car over—and tried to think of what to say. What she wanted to express was how grateful she was for his help, and how much she enjoyed his company, and how relieved she was that he'd come back even though she'd been so rude to him in front of Jeannie Richards.

Jeannie Richards: She had seen Esrom and Nat together on several occasions now. This sent Nat into a little spiral of anxiety. Of course, they had done nothing wrong. But if Jeannie, who lived three blocks away, had seen them, then her neighbors must have noticed Esrom's truck at her house at different times, too, and she didn't mean to be snide, but these women were busybodies; their hawk eyes scanned the neighborhood for anything out of place, for any change, for any event that was, by other people's standards, not an event at all. Someone's garbage can lid laying to the side and not securely clamped on the can: That was an event. The lone beep of a car horn at two
P.M.
: That would be considered an event, and a mystery.

But she glanced over at him and thought the bright hot incriminating thought
If I have to stop seeing him I will never make it through this terrible summer
. So she forced a smile and said, “Never mind. It's nothing.”

“Someone's coming,” Sam called.

A short, stocky man in cowboy boots waved nervously as he walked up to the car. Nat recognized him as one of Esrom's friends from the diner, though he looked like he had aged in the interim.

“Oh,” said Esrom, glancing up, “it's Russ. Excuse me.” He opened his door partway.

“Hey, Ez. Where you been? I'm locked out,” Russ said.

“Locked out?” Esrom said. “All right. I'll let you in.”

“I lost my key,” Russ said.

“Oh, my,” said Nat. “What happened to his face?” There was a large square of gauze taped to Russ's cheek, something shiny seeping through it.

“He rides rodeo,” said Esrom quickly. “Hey, friend,” he said again, as if Russ had not heard his first greeting. “You lost your key again?”

“I lost my key,” Russ repeated. Nat wondered if they were just going to call out the same things to each other, over and over. She thought that something was not quite right with Russ; something seemed heavy, or dull. He tried to smile at her, but his eyes bounced away at the last second. “I was locked out,” he was saying to Esrom, “and I was worried those guys was gonna come back.”

“Well, they ain't here, are they?” said Esrom, in a way that was somehow soothing. “Look, you go back around. I'll be right there.”

“Who's your friend?” Russ asked, grinning again in Nat's direction; his eyes roved over the top of the car. “You all make a nice family.”

Esrom rolled his eyes and pivoted Russ around. “I'll be right there.” He turned and smiled at Nat, then slid his hat onto his head and tipped it to the girls with a wink. His face looked strained. “Thanks for the ride,” he said.

She cleared her throat. “Well, thanks for the car!”

“No trouble.” Esrom gestured to a couple of cars on blocks at the end of the lot. “It's raining cars around here, as you can see.”

As he turned to walk away, she suddenly felt the senseless, overwhelming urge to call him back. It would likely be no more than a couple of days before she saw him again, but even this seemed too long, which made no sense because she'd just been telling herself they'd been seen together too much.
Stay in your seat, Nat Collier,
she thought—this was ridiculous, this outpouring of confused feeling, and she feared that she was about to embarrass herself—but her unwise heart won out, and she turned off the ignition, slid from the car, and hurried around the front. The two men swiveled in surprise.

Now, standing before them, Nat had no idea what to do with herself. She hopped awkwardly forward and folded Esrom into a quick hug. Her heart pounded from this silly boldness, but he returned the hug, gingerly. “You've been very kind,” she said, stepping back and gently gripping his shirtsleeve. “I'm so grateful.”

He nodded, looking self-conscious and pleased. “All right,” he said.

She was still holding his sleeve.

“I need to get in the house,” Russ keened. “You wasn't home, or Jacob. I was just sittin' out here.”

“You're fine,” said Esrom, and added quietly, “Take care, Nat.” She took her hand back, and scratched behind her ear for something to do.

Esrom gave Russ a gentle shove and the two men moved around to the back of the building, Russ with a tilting shuffle that Esrom had to shorten his stride to accommodate.

Nat walked back around to the driver's seat and slid inside. She watched Esrom and his friend for a moment, feeling curious and sad.

“I miss Mr. Esrom already,” Sam said.

“Me, too,” said Liddie.

The men were behind the building now. Nat glanced up and saw another man out on his very small balcony, looking down at them with a sort of insolent curiosity. She started the car and backed it up, moving out toward the road. A coyote slipped out of the grassy field to their left and trotted across the dirt in front of them. “Girls, look,” Nat cried, and they clambered up onto their seats to watch the animal as it made its way down a street lined with collapsing decks and abandoned Victorian era houses.

“This isn't like our neighborhood,” Sam observed.

The man on his balcony threw down a wad of trash; it tumbled through the dry grass and came to rest in a little pile, with rusty tin cans and paper bags that had long ago begun to fray and melt into the dirt. He was fumbling with the top of his pants and Nat had the sudden, certain fear that he was going to urinate off the balcony. She put the car in gear and thunked out onto the road, the girls sliding in their seats behind her.

“Mr. Esrom will be fine,” she said when they were at a distance, then realized this hadn't responded, really, to anything anyone had said.

P
aul pulled his face into the collar of his jacket and clenched his fists in his pockets. His reactor was at the farthest end of Camp Century's center tunnel, called “Main Street,” and the walk felt long in the still, subzero air. He strode quickly into the breath cloud that his nostrils made, listening to the crunch and echo of his boots against the packed ice floor.

Ahead, clanks and clatters. A group of soldiers scraped the walls with long-handled shovels, cutting seventy-pound blocks of ice and dragging them to the surface on sleds. Mayberry had told Paul, with a sort of perverse delight, that the ice was moving over an inch a day, filling in the tunnels the Army had made.

One of the guys on scraping duty raised his hand to Paul. “Collier,” he called, “we've got an extra shovel.”

“And I suppose it's got my name on it.”

“Say hi to your nuke friends for us. Don't forget your lead underwear.”

“It's nice of you to care about my underwear.”

“He must be getting desperate!”

“See you,” Paul said, passing them. Though it was a favorite myth about the nuclear operators, they did not, in fact, wear lead underwear. There were other tales about them, such as the one about their bodies becoming hairless the longer they worked the reactors, or that they only fathered girls (this last one, at least for Paul, had come true). But the job seemed so lacking in mystery and intrigue to Paul by this point that the rumors only made him laugh. You could get used to anything if you did it every day.

Halfway down the tunnel he heard someone call, “Hey, Collier,” and looked up to see Mayberry striding toward him, juggling an armful of papers. He hadn't ever mentioned the incident with Nat's photo, for which Paul was grateful. It humbled him every time he realized how much more forgiving other people were than he.

“Hey, yourself,” Paul said. “How's the ice cave?”

“Brilliant. Got some great samples in there.” He shook his head as if describing a gorgeous woman or a classic car. “Say, did you hear we're getting some guests from out your way?”

“Really? More guests?” A week prior they'd had to freshen up and look nice for some senators from the East Coast and an obscure member of the Danish royal family. Mayberry had had to cut his hair and trim his beard; he was still a little miffed about it.

“Not till mid-September, actually.” It was late August now. “Just when I get my beard grown out again, they'll make me trim it. Now where did I…ah. See?” He riffled through his armful of papers and plucked one from the middle. “There's a supe from your other reactor coming. The Idaho place, the CR-1, right? Yep, here he is: one Master Sergeant Mitchell Richards. Do you know him?”

Paul felt as if all his internal organs had just grown tiny hairs and bristled.

“You know the guy?”

“I do.”

“You tensed up there, kind of.” Mayberry eyed him. “What's he like? One of those controlling master sergeants or a lazy, drunk one?”

“Well, both,” Paul said. “Listen, there's some bad blood between me and him.”

“What's the story?”

Paul hesitated.

“Come
on,
” Mayberry said.

So Paul talked, though he didn't enjoy telling any of it: started with Richards ditching him at their first, awkward meeting; skipped over his boss's drunken overtures to Nat and the ugly business at the Calico Saloon, but briefly mentioned the mounting problems at the reactor and wrapped it all up with hitting Richards in the jaw. At that finale Mayberry whooped, lifted one leg off the ground, and hopped in a circle, all his papers flapping.

“You need to get out of that cave more,” Paul said.

“Paul Collier, man of action! You going to teach him another lesson? It'll be the Showdown on Ice!” Mayberry shuffled his papers back together, chuckling. “This is the most exciting thing to happen to us in five months.”

“Wish I could be as jazzed as you.”

“We don't get a fight? Really?”

“I sure hope not.”

Mayberry sighed. “All right, I get it. Just try to avoid him, maybe. Steer clear.”

Paul gave him a look.

“You'll get through it.” His friend clapped him on the shoulder and started in the opposite direction, still grinning. “See you back at the boudoir.”

Paul shook his head, reaching for a cigarette as he made his way down the tunnel, then giving up because his thumb was too cold to flick the lighter. Goddamn that Richards—it was ridiculous, perverse even, for him to show up here. Amazing how you'd be kept from the folks you loved, and the last damn person you wanted to see just popped up in front of you like a paper silhouette at a shooting range.