J. Jance - Day of the Dead

Still pissed at her husband, Sue took Ranger and left by the front door without even bothering to tell Ken they were leaving. She took the whistle-Ranger was well trained and would come on the run after only a single blast from the whistle-and didn’t bother with a leash. This far out in the country, leashes weren’t really necessary. She let Ranger live up to his name by racing along before and alongside her, calling him back only when she saw other people coming their way-joggers, hikers, or bicyclists. Trains were another story. The power-line access road where Sue and Ranger often walked ran along the railroad tracks, and trains spooked Ranger. When he heard one coming, he would race back to Sue and cower with his head next to her knee until the noisy thing had rumbled past and out of earshot.

This morning, though, there were no trains on the horizon as Sue Lammers, still seething with resentment, strode along the rugged, rutted excuse for a road that ran under the power line. Is this why I’m working my heart out all week? she wondered. So I can spend my weekends alone with a dog instead of with my husband?

For weeks she had watched as the round flat leaves of the prickly pear sprouted buds. Now, in late April, the desert was a bright sea of yellow. Somehow, seeing the desert bloom like that made her feel better. Wasn’t that the whole point of going for a walk-to feel better?

Ahead of her, half a mile or so away, Sue spotted a dark-colored vehicle parked on the shoulder of the real road that ran parallel to where she was walking. Seeing a parked car made her uneasy. There was no legitimate reason for anyone to be parked along there-no houses, no businesses. In the distance she could see a figure moving back and forth between a clump of mesquite and the back of what she assumed was a pickup truck.

Sue knew many people were too cheap to pay to go to the dump. They’d rather come out into the desert and use it as a personal trash heap. Meeting up with one of those lowlifes made Sue Lammers uneasy, especially when she was out walking alone-Ranger notwithstanding. She reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out her cell phone. A new tower had recently been erected in their neighborhood, making cell-phone reception better. She was relieved to see that she had a good strong signal.

She was only a few yards closer when the person who had been walking to and from the vehicle-she could see now that it was actually a dark-colored pickup with what appeared to be a camper shell-turned and seemed to see her. He jumped into the driver’s seat and sped off, sending a cloud of dust spewing skyward. Relieved to watch him drive away, Sue kept walking. She had been about to lift the whistle to her lips to summon Ranger back, but with the pickup gone, she dropped the whistle and left Ranger free to explore.

Sue was still a few hundred yards short of where the vehicle had been parked when she heard the distant rumble of a train. Ranger heard it, too. The dog had been a long way ahead of her. Now he came loping back. As he drew closer, Sue saw he had something in his mouth. At first she thought it was a stick, but it wasn’t a stick. It was an arm-a bloodied human arm.

“Drop it!” Sue screamed in horror. “Drop it right now!”

Ranger did as he was told, then scampered to her side as the train rumbled nearer.

Feeling faint, Sue Lammers struggled to get her cell phone out of her pocket. Her fingers felt like thick, clumsy sausages. The phone slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground. Landing on a rock, it bounced once and exploded. The plastic back fell off and the battery popped free. As Sue knelt to retrieve the scattered pieces of her phone, Ranger made another grab at his prize.

“Leave it!” she exclaimed, but by then the train was right beside them, drowning out everything. Whether he heard her or not, Ranger complied, leaving Sue scrambling on her hands and knees as she reassembled the broken phone.

It wasn’t until after the freight train had passed that Sue was finally able to get her fumbling fingers to press the necessary numbers.

“Nine one one,” a businesslike voice said in her ear. “What are you reporting?”

Sue Lammers took a deep breath. “I’m out walking south of Vail, south of Fast Horse Ranch,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “My dog just found somebody’s arm. A bloody human arm!”

Distracted, Erik gave himself permission to stop short of the summit. With his back resting against a warm cliff face in a solitary canyon well below Finger Rock, he pulled out his peanut butter sandwich and savored the first bite. It was made the right way-the way Grandma always made it-with butter on both slices of bread and with the peanut butter slathered in between.

He had traded lunches one day in the lunch room at Hollinger Elementary and had been surprised when his friend’s peanut butter sandwich was hard to swallow. It had stuck in his throat, and once he finally realized what the difference was, he had asked Gladys about it that evening.

“Grandma,” he said, “did you know some people make peanut butter sandwiches without buttering the bread first?”

“Yes.”

“How come you always put butter on it?”

“Because that’s the way you’re supposed to do it,” Gladys Johnson returned. “There’s always a right way to do something and a wrong way. Buttering the bread first is the right way.”

“Is that how your mother did it?”

Gladys nodded. “My mother,” she said. “And my aunt Selma, too. It’s the way everybody did it back home. Peanut butter was a lot stiffer in those days.”

All these years later, even though Erik LaGrange had never met those fabled relatives he had heard so many stories about, he was glad he shared that one small trait with people who would forever be nothing but faceless names. Peanut butter on buttered bread was a tiny fragment of his own lost heritage.

It’s the way I do it, too, he thought.

That fateful President’s Ball had been on a Saturday night. The following Tuesday afternoon, Gayle Stryker rang Erik at his office.

“I offered you a job the other night,” she said after identifying herself. “I thought you would have called about it by now.”

Erik was so taken aback he could barely reply. “I wasn’t really thinking about making a change right now,” he stammered, sounding like a total dork.

“Really,” Gayle Stryker said. “Are they paying you that much?”

That was laughable because the truth was, they were paying him hardly anything at all. “Not really,” he admitted finally.

In actual fact, Erik LaGrange was someone who resisted change wherever it presented itself. For him, staying in a less-than-optimal situation was better than striking off into the unknown. It made for a stable if relatively boring life.

“How about if we get together tomorrow and have lunch?” Gayle suggested. “At El Charro downtown, say, about a quarter to one?”

Erik thought about his ten-year-old plug-ugly but still-running Volvo with its faded orange paint and crimped front bumper. He was supposed to meet the lady for lunch driving that? And what the hell was he supposed to wear? And what was he going to say to his boss? “Well, Dick, I guess I’ll take a long lunch and see about getting a job somewhere else.”

Richard Mathers was a guy who believed in running a tight ship. He was a micromanaging busybody who had to know where his people were at all times. He expected to be apprised of what each was doing and whether it would improve his departmental bottom line. If Erik showed up at work wearing something unusual-for Erik a sports coat and tie would definitely be out of character-Dick would ask a million questions, none of which Erik wanted to answer.

“Okay,” Erik heard himself saying. “A quarter to one.”