Stephen White - Warning Signs

The earlier bombs had mostly hit their marks. Two were dead in the amusement ride at Elitch's; two more were dead in the offices at Coors Field. The target at Union Station had escaped injury because she was down the hall in the bathroom when the bomb went off in her second-floor studio.

I t was stillunclear whether Ramp would get his wish about public dialogue.

At first, the attention of the media was mostly on the carnage. The seemingly endless news footage of the final conflagration on Broadway proved to be enough of a magnet to attract temporary nonstop national and local coverage of Ramp's Rampage. That's what the event had been nicknamed by the loud blond guy who did Hardball on cable, and the moniker had stuck to the events like a bad cold.

Marin's rape, Leo Bigg's retaliation on the rapist, and Ramp's mother's tragic death were all chronicled and rechronicled. Herbert Ramp's role in the demolition of Las Vegas was broadcast and rebroadcast for no other reason, it seemed, than that the tape was available and that it was pretty spectacular to watch the hotels fall down all over again.

L ucy was holding two pine twigs like chopsticks to scratch at the rough granite boulder that we were sitting on. She said, "There are some things in life that Sam can't forgive. I suspect this is one."

"He's a good friend, Lucy. I think you can trust him."

"It's not about trust, Alan," she explained. "You know him. Sammy has a simple view of the world. Simple in a good way. Uncomplicated. He's not an imaginative person. He still gets surprised at what's up on the screen when he goes to the movies. On his own, his mind would never travel down the road where I would have to take him. Not on his own, no way. And the truth is, he doesn't belong there. He'd try to understand what I did, why I did it. He'd try to make sense of it because he's a good guy. But he wouldn't be able to understand, not really. As much as he's been exposed to in life, he's still an innocent in some ways. To forgive me he'd have to find a way to understand what I did. And he could never ever do that."

I still didn't know what it was that Lucy had done, nor was I sure she was planning on telling me. I suspected that her secret had to do with Royal Peterson's murder, but I didn't know whether it was as simple as explaining why she had been at his house that night or whether it was as complicated as explaining why she had killed him. I did know that I was maximally ambivalent about hearing it, whatever it was. My recent experience had taught me that some confidences of this nature, maybe most confidences of this nature, weren't worth knowing. The burden of the knowledge was often greater than any benefit that accrued from harboring the private facts.

L ucy and Ihad run into each other while visiting Cozy as he was recuperating at his Victorian on Maxwell Street. It was just before noon a couple of days after the morning of bombs in Denver, and Cozy was home from the hospital, though he was still far from agile. His neck was immobilized in a plastic structure that looked as though it had once been part of an architectural model for a single-span suspension bridge.

As we left the house together, Lucy told me she would like to talk and asked if I had a few minutes for her. When I said I did, she led me to her red Volvo and drove us up Flagstaff, taking the sharp curves up the mountainside carefully, as though she was fearful that a tire on her car was about to blow.

The extension of Baseline that twisted up Flagstaff Mountain was the steepest and most curvaceous paved route out of Boulder. Vehicles over thirty feet in length were banned because they couldn't maneuver the curves. The upside was that a minute after passing the Chautauqua complex on Baseline, Lucy and I were afforded the kind of views that in most environs were available only to birds.

"You come up here often?" she asked me.

I shook my head and was going to leave it at that until I realized that Lucy would have to take her eyes from the road to read my head motion. I quickly added, "No, but maybe I should." The truth was that I found the view from the high foothills disconcerting. The perspective from the mountains toward the east was too infinite for my comfort, the Great Plains spreading out like a petrified ocean. I preferred the view from my house toward the west, believing that, visually, Colorado was a place that should be experienced either in the mountains or toward the mountains, but not away from the mountains. This vista, from peaks to plains, was too much like looking at the state from the rear-facing third seat in my parents' old station wagon.

"I do," she said. "Sometimes I like to be above it all."

She continued to drive, taking us high above the Flagstaff House Restaurant. I was beginning to suspect that our destination was the summer 2000 burn near Gross Reservoir until she pulled the car to a stop in a clearing off the shoulder of the narrow road, touched me on the leg, and said, "Come on, this way."

I followed her out of the car and down a dusty path that wound around sharp rock outcroppings and dodged rugged ponderosa pines.

An old-timer had once told me that Boulder had been named by the first pioneer who ever tried to put a shovel into the dirt. The old-timer then laughed and said he knew the story was apocryphal because if it had really happened that way, the town would be called Oh Shit.

He hadn't actually said "apocryphal." He'd said "bullcrap."

I joined Lucy as she scrambled across a rough slab of granite and perched on the edge of a boulder the size of a two-car garage. As she lowered herself to a squat, I examined the position she'd assumed and knew that I hadn't managed that particular posture in about ten years. Maybe fifteen. I sat on my butt and side-by-side we gazed at the oasis that the city of Boulder forms on the border of the endless prairie. We were a little too close to the edge of the cliff for my comfort. My thoughts were rarely far from my daughter anymore, and I was thinking that I wouldn't allow Grace to sit as close to the edge as we were.

That's when Lucy began to tell me about Sam's lack of imagination.

R emember what youtold me about intimacy?" she asked me.

"Of course," I said, but my radar was tweaked and I was wary of where we were going.

"There are natural limits, aren't there? With some people, I mean. Like with Sammy, he doesn't really want me to open up to him. He doesn't really want to know my secrets. He gives me lots of signals that tell me when to stop."

I shot a quick glance toward Lucy. She was looking east. A split second before, I'd been looking in the same direction, busy imagining that I could perceive the gentle curvature of the earth on the horizon.

I replied, "In a relationship, intimacy can be restricted, or enhanced, by either person." My words sounded banal. "Sorry, Lucy. That sounds trite. I don't mean it to. What you're saying is true. At least it is about Sam. He draws lines in the sand sometimes. We all do."

She waved a hand, dismissing my apology. "No, it's fine."

Wind whistled through the pines in a short burst. It wasn't a melodic tune-it was more acid than sugar. The sound reminded me of the first gasp of gas escaping the green cylinders on the back of Ramp's truck. Though the day was warm, I felt a chill as the memory hissed at me.

Lucy stood. She towered over me. From our precipice she appeared to be a diver contemplating the degree of difficulty of her next jump. The image troubled me. I didn't stand beside her.

I wondered about Lucy's recklessness, about what despair could have fueled her compulsion to be taunting fate. I knew I wouldn't have let Grace stand there-when she could stand, anyway. I got lost temporarily contemplating how many more weeks that might be and wished I'd paid more attention during the human development class I'd taken as an undergraduate.