C Box: Below Zero

She smelled smoke and gasoline on his clothes when he climbed into the cab and started the motor.

“Man,” he said, “I hated doing that.”

Robert said, “Move out quick before the fire gets out of control and somebody notices us. Keep cool, drive the speed limit all the way out of here…”

She noticed how panicked Robert’s tone was, how high his voice was. For the first time she saw that his scalp through his hair was glistening with sweat. She’d never noticed how thin his hair was and how skillfully he’d disguised it.

Stenko said, “That old couple-they were kind of sweet.”

“It had to be done,” Robert said quickly.

“I wish I could believe you.”

Robert leaned across the console, his eyes white and wild. “Trust me, Dad. Just trust me. Did they give you the numbers?”

Stenko reached into his breast pocket and flipped the spiral notebook toward Robert. “It’s all there,” he said. The girl thought Stenko was angry.

Robert flipped through the pad, then drew his laptop out of the computer case near his feet. He talked as he tapped the keys. “Sixty to eighty thousand miles a year at eight to ten miles per gallon. Wow. They’ve been at it for five years and planned to keep it up until they couldn’t. They’re both sixty-five, so we could expect them to keep driving that thing for at least ten to fifteen years, maybe more.” Tap-tap-tap.

“They were farmers from Iowa,” Stenko said sadly. “Salt of the earth.”

“Salt of the earth?” Robert said. “You mean plagues on the earth! Christ, Dad, did you see that thing they were driving?”

“They called it The Unit,” Stenko said.

“Wait until I get this all calculated,” Robert said. “You just took a sizable chunk out of the balance.”

“I hope so,” Stenko said.

“Any cash?”

“Of course. All farmers have cash on hand.”

“How much?”

“Thirty-seven hundred I found in the cupboard. I have a feeling there was more, but I couldn’t take the time. I could have used your help in there.”

“That’s not what I do.”

Stenko snorted. “I know.”

“Thirty-seven hundred isn’t very much.”

“It’ll keep us on the road.”

“There’s that,” Robert said, but he didn’t sound very impressed.

As they cleared the campground, the girl turned around in her seat. She could see the wink of orange flames in the alcove of pines now. Soon, the fire would engulf the motor home and one of the people in the campground would see it and call the fire department. But it would be too late to save the motor home, just as it was too late to save that poor old couple. As she stared at the motor home on fire, things from deep in her memory came rushing back and her mouth dropped open.

“I said,” Stenko pressed, looking at her in the rearview mirror, “you didn’t watch, did you? You promised me you wouldn’t watch.”

“She lied,” Robert said. “You should have left her in Chicago.”

“Damn, honey,” Stenko said. “I didn’t want you to watch.”

But she barely heard him through the roaring in her ears. Back it came, from where it had been hiding and crouching like a night monster in a dark corner of her memory.

The burning trailer. Screams. Shots. Snow.

And a telephone number she’d memorized but that had remained buried in her mind just like all of those people were buried in the ground all these years…

She thought: I need to find a phone.

Saddlestring, Wyoming

FIVE DAYS LATER, ON A SUN-FUSED BUT MELANCHOLY SUNDAY afternoon before the school year began again the next day, seventeen-year-old Sheridan Pickett and her twelve-year-old sister, Lucy, rode double bareback in a grassy pasture near the home they used to live in. Their summer-blond hair shone in the melting sun, and their bare sunburned legs dangled down the sides of their old paint horse, Toby, as he slowly followed an old but well-trammeled path around the inside of the sagging three-rail fence. The ankle-high grass buzzed with insects, and grasshoppers anticipated the oncoming hooves by shooting into the air like sparks. He was a slow horse because he chose to be; he’d never agreed with the concept that he should be ridden, even if his burden was light, and considered riding to be an interruption of his real pursuits, which consisted of eating and sleeping. As he walked, he held his head low and sad and his heavy sighs were epic. When he revealed his true nature by snatching a big mouthful of grass when Sheridan’s mind wandered, she pulled up on the reins and said, “Damn you, Toby!”

“He always does that,” Lucy said behind her sister. “All he cares about it eating. He hasn’t changed.”

“He’s always been a big lunkhead,” Sheridan said, keeping the reins tight so he would know she was watching him this time, “but I’ve always kind of liked him. I missed him.”

Lucy leaned forward so her cheek was against Sheridan’s back. Her head was turned toward the house they used to live in before they’d moved eight miles into the town of Saddlestring a year before.

Sheridan looked around. The place hadn’t changed much. The gravel road paralleled the fence. Farther, beyond the road, the landscape dipped into a willow-choked saddle where the Twelve Sleep River branched out into six fingers clogged with beaver ponds and brackish mosquito-heaven eddies and paused for a breath before its muscular rush through and past the town of Saddlestring. Beyond were the folds of the valley as it arched and suddenly climbed to form a precipitous mountain-face known as Wolf Mountain in the Twelve Sleep Range.

“I never thought I’d say I missed this place,” Lucy said.

“But you do,” Sheridan finished.

“No, not really,” Lucy giggled.

“You drive me crazy.”

“What can I say?” Lucy said. “I like people around. I like being able to ride my bike to school and not take that horrible bus.”

“You’re a townie.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Townie’s are… common. Everybody’s a townie. There’s nothing special about it.”

Lucy affected a snooty, Valley Girl inflection: “Yeah, I’m like, common. I should want to still live out here so I can curse at horses, like you. You’re the weird one, Sheridan. I keep telling you that but you don’t believe me.” She flicked a grasshopper off her wrist. “And I don’t constantly have bugs landing on me.”

“Stop talking, Lucy.”

Lucy sighed, mimicking Toby. “How long do you think Mom is going to be in there?”

“A long time, I hope,” Sheridan said.

Marybeth Pickett, Sheridan and Lucy’s mother, had brought them both out to their old house on the Bighorn Road. Their mom owned a business-consulting firm, and she was meeting with Mrs. Kiner, who was starting a bath and body products company using honey or wax or something. Phil Kiner was the game warden of the Saddlestring District, the district their dad used to manage. Because of that, the Kiners took over the state-owned home that was once occupied by the Picketts when the family moved to their Grandmother Missy’s ranch for a year, and then to town to a home of their own. Toby had been one of their horses growing up, and when Sheridan saw him standing lazily in the corral, she’d asked if she could ride him around until their mother was done. Lucy tagged along simply because she didn’t want to wait inside and listen to business talk.

“I’m getting hungry,” Lucy said.

“You’re always hungry,” Sheridan said. “You’re like Toby. You’re like his lazy spawn.”

“Now you shut up,” Lucy said.

“ Lucy Pickett, ” Sheridan said in an arena announcer’s cadence, “Lazy Hungry Spawn of Toby! I like the sound of that.”