Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series) (11 page)

He cleared his throat. “Of course. We must get down to the road. We must be visible.”

I relaxed an inch.

W
e sat five minutes more, gathering ourselves.

I wondered when Soliano would take note that he hadn’t heard from us, whether he’d check his watch and calculate that we must, by now, be over in Greenwater Valley, in which case the most direct route from the talc mines was not via the West Side Road. If he didn’t find us elsewhere, though, sooner or later he’d surely come this way. Two people on the West Side Road would stick out like sore thumbs.

That is, until it got dark.

I roused myself and got the flashlight from the tire-changing cubby.

Walter rose, gathering our meager belongings. He stuffed them into my emptied pack.

I took my field knife and Hap’s bandana from my pocket. I sawed the cloth in half, then dipped the halves in the radiator water. The red cloth darkened to hematite. I gave Walter one half and he understood. We squeezed the water over our heads and bodies, repeating the process until the radiator was dry, then draped the wet bandanas around our necks.

“You are a genius,” he said.

“Girl Scouts.”

We had to laugh.

He recovered his hat and shades.

I put on mine. I cleared my throat. “Well, pardner?”

“Let’s vamoose.”

I scooped a handful of dolomite-weathered soil and put it in my pocket. We’d come up here for samples and I was not leaving without a sample.

W
e headed downcanyon.

At the fork there were scuffed prints heading into the south canyon. Further down, around a gentle bend, there were tire tracks. Not ours. Smart place to stop, because there was room enough to turn around.

I said, “You
did
hear a car on the West Side Road.”

“We should have waited.”

Wouldn’t have helped. The perp, tailing us, wanted to remain unseen. She comes around that curve, sees our car stopped beside the saltpan, backs her car up. Rolls down her window. Waits until she hears our engine start again. Then creeps around the curve, sees our rooster-tail going up the fan. Follows when it’s safe. Comes just shy of the bend, gets out to walk. Takes the south fork and climbs its ridge. Maybe she sees us; maybe she just hears us. We don’t hear her because we’re singing our fool heads off. She gets inspired. Yells for help. We head downcanyon. And she scrambles down from the ridge and does her business. Then, while we’re up the north fork, she escapes downcanyon with her prize: the ice chest, the soil map, all our work. She gets in the pickup, does her three-point turn, and exits the canyon.

At least I had to hope she’d exited.

We followed her tire tracks out of the canyon. At the head of the fan we paused, scanning the landscape below. No white pickup. No FBI-RERT convoy, either.

We started down.

The giant fan was veined with channels, some several feet deep, in which a person could flatten herself and her shotgun and not be seen from the road that cut down the center. I did not brood on that for long. I did not have the strength. I brooded instead on the heat that rose from the desert pavement and sucked the radiator water from my clothes. The ground was paved in rock chips mortared with sand. We could fry an egg on that hot smooth pavement, had we an egg. We could bake a quiche—the rock surface had collected a coating of iron and manganese oxides and that black desert varnish reflected heat like a convection oven.

Frying eggs. Egg McMuffin. My stomach turned

We tramped down the road until our faces were varnished red and then Walter croaked “need a break” and I croaked “okay.”

We left the road and cut across the desert pavement to the nearest channel. It was blessedly unvarnished, washed clean by floodwaters. We climbed down into the sandy gravel bed and huddled against the southwest wall, which cast a lip of shade. We could see just over the rim. The Badwater basin spread below us. If I saw a car anywhere in the basin, other than the white pickup, I planned to get up and wave.

We drank the water down to a trickle.

When my saliva had thickened, I put a pebble in my mouth. I passed one to Walter. “Suck on it.”

After a time, Walter mumbled, “Could’ve shot us. Didn’t.”

I thought that over. “Good.”

He was silent. I turned. His Sahara hat was pulled low and all I could see was his jaw working.

I said, “So you
do
think it’s her? Shotgun.”

He removed his pebble. “Men carry guns too.”

True. But whoever it was evidently got what he wanted. She wanted. Therefore we didn’t have to worry any more? I spat out my pebble. “Perp might still shoot us.”

“Then I’d be wrong.”

We had no more heart for talk.

Five times, we saw cars on the Badwater Road across the saltpan and I roused myself and stood and signalled. The sixth car, I didn’t bother. We sat until shadows reached the head of the fan. The sun dipped behind the peaks above, reddening the clouds. We removed our hats and sunglasses and brooded on the nuclear sunset.

“We must go,” Walter finally said.

I nodded. Going to get dark. Nobody going to see us up here.

We rose, shaky. I shouldered the pack. We crossed the desert pavement to the fan road. There came a hot breeze that lifted the sweat-plastered hair from my scalp. The breeze went away. My feet swelled with each step. The ventilating mesh did not ventilate enough. I feared my boots would burst. We descended and, astonishingly, reached the West Side Road.

We collapsed and sucked the last drops from the water bottle.

An eternity passed. Three more cars passed on the other side of the basin.

I tried to speak but my tongue had stiffened. I elbowed Walter, and pointed across the saltpan at the Badwater Road. We rose, shakier than before. I tried to estimate the distance. Couple of miles? Five? More? Who knows? Everything looks closer than it is out here.

We broached the saltpan.

Life clung at the edge. We bypassed bristling shrubs and scuffed through sand and silt and then passed onto blisters of salt. Still, there was life. Rubbery plants, here and there. Pickleweed. Stems like stacked pickles. You want to break one off and pop it in your mouth. We Girl Scouts tasted it. Puckery. Walter fingered it, in passing.
Adaptable
, he mouthed. I nodded. My mouth was sealed. Nothing to say. No spit to say it with. No sound out here but the crackle of salt beneath our boots. We walked on meringues awhile and then the ground hardened and smoothed. Floodplain. White and flat, a frozen lake. Looked like hell froze over.

Not even pickleweed out here. Nothing adaptable enough to live out here.

My tongue quilted. We were in a giant bathtub but there was no water. Too hot. Water had evaporated and left bathtub rings. Rings of salt. Saltpan shimmered in the dying light. Looked like water. My throat swelled. I thought I might drown.

I thought of the thing I’d seen from the car, eons ago. Well, hours ago. Hotter than hell on the saltpan then. What living thing would be out here? Creeping through hell.

Must have been a mirage.

“Rest,” Walter croaked.

We sank onto the hard pan. I touched the salt and licked my finger. Sodium chloride. I giggled. If I had an egg I’d salt it.

“Look.” Walter was pointing back to the West Side Road.

I looked. It was so near. We’d come through rings of salt—carbonates and sulfates and now we were in the zone of table salt and yet we hadn’t come far at all. Salt rings. They rang around my head. Telling me something. I reached for the rings and they shattered. Grains of salt now. What was it I was reaching for?

“Look,” Walter said, still pointing.

The road. That’s it. We’re mired in salt rings and we haven’t come far at all. I would have cried if I’d had water for tears.

“Plants.”

I did not care.

“Faults,” he said.

It took me a very long time to process this, to look again where he was pointing and see the dark smudges at the foot of the fans, here and there. I projected the line of the smudges upfan, to the offset of the fault scarps. I thought this over. Faults grind rock. Faults build dams. Faults trap runoff. Faults make springs.

Smudges grow around springs.

I licked my lips. What kind of smudges? Salt-loving smudges? No. Not that salt-loving or they’d be on the pan.

I rasped, “You are a genius.”

We rose, on hope. We angled southwest, aiming for the closest smudge. By the time we’d waded back across the floodplain to the pickleweed, night had edged in. We left the saltpan. The smudges resolved into shrubby trees with droopy branches. They gave off a smell in the hot night air.

My nose pinched. Fourth of July. Mesquite. Dad grilling burgers. Beer and sodas and sparkling waters in a trash can of ice.

We reached the stand of mesquite. I stared at the sandy ground. There was no beer. No sodas. No Evian or Arrowhead or Crystal Spring. There was no spring.

Walter fell to the ground and began to dig.

I came down beside him.

The sand grew damp. I ransacked the pack and then we dug with spatulas, seeing by flashlight. And then when it took more energy to dig than we had to spend, we sat back and waited for the seep to percolate through the sandy soil and find our hole.

After a time, Walter slumped.

Digging digging digging and then in wonder I was unearthing diamonds. They winked and disappeared. I dug harder and now I saw white worms among the diamonds, and now I laughed recognizing my own white fingers. Just keep digging. Greedy for diamonds. And now Walter was beside me, and I was willing to share with him but he got greedy too and scooped up diamonds and brought them to his mouth and sucked them up and I thought, oh Walter that is so crude. But then I was sucking diamonds too, crude as Walter, sucking up the salty wet diamonds until our fortune was spent.

We dozed.

Something was caressing me. I slapped my neck and came away with a crackling mess that gave off a bitter smell that cleared my head. I knew what to do. I wiped my hand clean, rolled to the dig, and scooped a palm of water. The silt had nearly settled out and it tasted less salty now. It left my hand silky smooth. When I had guzzled enough, I tied Hap’s bandana over the mouth of the water bottle and sank it in the muddy seep. What a fine gift Hap had given me. Then I slept again, dreaming of salt rings and abysses and vibrating shapes and a woman powdering my face with talc until I could not breathe.

Walter woke me and said, “Look.”

We stared across the saltpan, that great white starlit belly, to the Badwater Road where a pair of white eyes traveled north. It’s them. They’re looking for us.

We capped the water bottle and drank one last time from our oasis and then once again we broached the saltpan.

The night air was velvet now, not brutal, and we walked lightly across the crackling ground, and I thought we’d make the Badwater Road in no time at all. Except it was taking forever to reach the floodplain. Walter’s old-man shuffle was slowing us down. My rubber legs were slowing us down. There came another pair of eyes on the Badwater Road, and that spurred us on, and at last we waded onto the floodplain. And then the saltpan changed again, bunching up, and we walked on tufts of salt that grew and grew as we picked our way deeper through this miniature forest.

There came a shriek.

We turned and Walter’s flashlight caught it and I knew
that’s
what I’d seen from the car and then I ducked because this was no mirage.

Walter stumbled.

I grabbed his arm. We went down together and I sliced my palm on a fin of salt.

It came at us low, skimming the tufts and then wheeling to avoid a pinnacle, and then it tumbled, wing over wing, and hit the pan.

We froze.

It picked itself up, pale wings unfolding. It screeched and came our way.

I kicked a chunk of rock salt free and heaved it and the bat shrank back, and then, insanely, came at us again. Not creeping. Attacking. Rabid. Walter tried to blind it with his flashlight and in the beam the bat eyes shone red. It stopped. Mouth opened to let loose another shriek and the teeth shone, bloodied. We shoved ourselves up and took off, scrambling through the salt forest until we reached another floodplain and our legs gave out.

We sat back-to-back, Walter sweeping the flashlight beam to and fro, me listening for bat wings.

S
omeone bent over Walter.

I reached for the flashlight, which had rolled away, its beam now dimmed.

She turned to me.

The moon was up behind her, silhouetting her. Her face was in shadow. All I could make out was her long black hair, feathered like a shawl. She crouched, one hand cradling Walter’s head, her lean body twisted toward me, other hand braced on her knee. She was still. She was a pillar of salt.

I croaked, “Who are you?”

From her shadow face came a high young voice. “An alien.”

And she turned back to Walter. She lifted his head and took a water bottle from the sling around her hips and put it to his mouth. “Drink, grandfather.”

I
heard water running. Splashing.

I dove into the cold pool below the waterfall. It was heaven.

“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

I lay on a cloud. I fought through fog.

“If you’re happy and you know it, croak like a frog. Rrrribit, rrribit.”

I opened my eyes.

Hap Miller leaned over me. His heart face was inches above mine. “Welcome back. Long time no see.”

“Where am I?”

“You’re in fantasyland, Buttercup.”

I made a slow survey. I was in a Spanish villa: sand-colored walls, arched stone fireplace, carved-wood furniture. I lay in a cloud of soft pillows under a heavy flowered spread. I began to remember being carried on a litter, transferred to this bed. A needle. My left arm lay on top of the spread, needle in my vein. Tubing ran up to an IV bag hung on the brass bedstead. Ceiling fan sent down a warm breeze. It wasn’t enough. I pushed back the spread and breeze tickled my bare skin. I smelled of sweat and salt. I was in my underwear. I yanked up the spread.