Badwater

28

Field day.

The morning sun already savaged us. I slumped against the Jeep. Walter shifted, sweating, stirring up dust. Soliano wiped his brow.

Pria hugged herself, fixing her hopes on her aunt.

The small gray-haired woman with the sour face — Ruth Weeks — was on Soliano’s cell phone. She listened with a tight mouth.

I expected the answer to be no.

It was surely a no-looking kind of place, of dusty trailers and adobe cabins, and the only thing good I could say was that it seemed temporary. I looked across a short stretch of desert to a wall of palms and tamarisks and caught a glimpse of green green grass. A small white ball flew above the trees and I imagined a curse in German. I turned and squinted uphill at the Inn, which docked at the head of the fan like a cruise ship in palm-green water. I turned back to this sad outlier of the village of Furnace Creek and thought, everybody around here has water to spare, but them. Even their mesquite looks thirsty.

Ruth Weeks returned Soliano’s phone like it was contaminated. “Jackson says you’re one of them.” She eyed our borrowed Park Service vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee offroader. “His car. He’s responsible.” She shifted her lawn chair so that it faced her mobile home, giving us the back of her head.

Pria bounded to the Cherokee. It will be fun.

Walter slid into the front passenger seat as if by choice, and I took the wheel as if by default, and Pria piled into the backseat beside Soliano.

I drove past the sign at the end of the dirt road — Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, and below that, Radio 91.1—and Walter reached for the radio and Pria said, “You won’t get nothing. It’s Thursday. You could try tomorrow.”

Soliano, in my rearview mirror, nodded as if he’d known. Maybe that’s the way it was where he grew up, stations on and off the air unpredictably so all you can do is shrug. Shooting victims in the road and all you can do is wait for them to die. Soliano was on Pria’s wavelength. He’d made his pact with her earlier when he found her waiting outside his room. Undoubtedly looked at his watch. No time, and here’s Miss Desert Alien who knows this area like none of us could know it, who volunteers her services. Dios mio, this is her homeland. What can one do? Refuse the offer?

Well—Walter had said to me on the way to the parking lot—she’s nearly fifteen.

I’d been twelve when he first took me into the field.

I hit the asphalt and and took the road back up the fan and dropped Soliano at the cruise ship and picked up our escorts, two FBI agents in another Park Service offroader.

Our third escort, Hap, took Soliano’s place in the backseat beside Pria.

Something was wrong with Hap.

He didn’t ask why we were heading for talc country. He made no dire warnings to take care out here. No yak, no Buttercup-baiting.

No apology for last night at the pool. Then again, he’d been frank about what he wanted last night. Brutally so. It was me who’d been slow on the uptake. I really should paste a warning label on my forehead: romantically needy but touchy as hell. It seemed like a dream now, anyway, in the brutal light of day. The night, the stars, the heat. Fantasyland.

Walter seemed not to notice Hap’s tense silence. Walter was busy explaining the passing landscape to Pria. “Look Pria,” he pointed at a black ridge, “what do you think carved out those rocks?”

She looked; star pupil. “Timbisha?”

“It would have happened before people came along — but it is an ongoing process.” He kinked in his seat and inflated his cheeks and blew.

“Wind!”

I waited for Walter to call the rocks by their name, ventifacts. Teach her the Latin, ventus, for wind. That’s the way I remembered the lessons back when he was teaching me — in between instructions on extracting soil from the shoes of a murder suspect — straightforward and no-nonsense. Certainly, no cheek inflating.

I waited for Hap to step in with a snarky comment. Blowing some hot air, Walter? Hap was mum.

Maybe Hap wished he was overseeing the borax cleanup with Ballinger and Scotty, instead of babysitting us.

Maybe he’d picked up a chill at the pool last night.

Or maybe his weird silence had something to do with whatever he was reading on his cell phone.

At Chickie’s talc mine, our trip officially began.

If we have it right, here’s what happened, time after time: Jardine and Beltzman made the swap, and the radwaste driver took the cargo with the dummy cask to the dump. And then, when the time was right, Jardine drove the offroader rig with its hot cargo from the mine down the dirt road to the highway.

Our itinerary, today, was this: follow Roy Jardine.

We took the dirt road, sampling along the way. Layer one of the fender soil map.

Then, there was a break in the map as Jardine traveled on highway pavement.

We, too, turned north onto highway 127. Two days ago, we’d traveled this highway southward on our way from Beatty to talc country.

I checked Hap in the rearview. Pale, silent. Phone now in his T-shirt pocket, a slight lump over Homer Simpson’s right eye.

Who the hells knows. It’s Hap. I refocused on the highway ahead, on the pools of water shimmering in the distance. The kind of mirage I like. No running figure. No creeping bat.

We passed the cinder block town of Shoshone and everybody’s heads turned, because it was Chickie’s town. Which one of the squat tin houses was hers? I spotted a white pickup pulling out of a Dairy Queen parking lot and twisted for a longer look.

“That’s not her,” Pria said.

“Her?” I said.

“The one people say messed you up.”

“You know Chickie?” Walter asked, a tick before I could get it out.

“She’s my mother.”

We passed from California into Nevada. We came to the town of Lathrop Wells, and turned northwest onto highway 95.

We came mostly in silence, digesting Chickie and Pria.

Pria hadn’t had much more to say, other than that Chickie and Pria and Ruth had all lived in the trailer with Peter Weeks — Ruth’s brother, Pria’s father, Chickie’s husband. Peter had died of lung cancer when Pria was six. Chickie then left the village because she was not Timbisha. Pria, who was half-Timbisha, remained with Aunt Ruth. Pria had no more to say, other than that Chickie was the devil and that’s why people said it was Chickie who had left us to die.

Hap’s eyes had widened in surprise and then narrowed. “Devil’s play,” he’d said, when Pria finished. His first comment of the day.

I agreed. Whichever devil it was who’d bushwhacked us.

Highway 95 shot straight through the high wide plain of the Amargosa Desert. Keep going on this road and we’d come to the crash site, and then the dump. A lifetime ago we’d been there, wondering what we’d got ourselves into.

Pria said, “The school bus goes this way, to Beatty.”

I checked her in the rearview. She was watching Walter, twisting a strand of hair into a cord. It shone like obsidian. If she didn’t have the devil for a mother and a sourpuss for an aunt, someone might have put that hair up in a cool French braid. She was waiting for Walter’s response. High school’s not his strong suit, so I stepped in. “So, Pria, what’s your favorite subject?”

“Softball,” she said, grudging.

“What position?”

“Pitcher.”

“Cool. I played soccer in high school. Midfield.” I waited for her to acknowledge the coolness of soccer and when she remained silent I looked again. She yanked the cord of hair so that it bisected her face, then crossed her eyes. I yanked my gaze away from the wild child back to the highway.

Walter said, “Up ahead.”

Up ahead, to our left, an ungraded road snaked up the gentle fanglomerate of the eastern flank of the Funeral range to its rough-hewn summit.

I slowed. This was it: the road we figured Jardine took. This route had been on our list from the get-go, along with many others, but Hap’s spilled glass of water last night jumped it to first place. I said, “You know that road, Hap?”

“No.” Second comment of the day. In my rearview, he was studying it.

Well, we were betting Roy Jardine knew that road. If we were right, here’s where he left the pavement. Why he took this route was a matter of speculation but we speculated that he preferred to re-enter Death Valley by the back door, the route no ranger patrolled. Because he didn’t want company.

Neither did we. I was glad to have the FBI on our tail, instead of the devil.

Soliano had given us a new toy — a satellite phone — so that we could stay in contact while in the canyons. Walter used it to phone our escort and tell them we were about to go offroad.

I turned onto the fan road and the FBI followed. I stopped to sample the coarse-grained alluvium, layer two of the fender soil.

From here, Jardine’s itinerary led up the flank of the Funerals. So did ours. We crossed an old railroad grade, climbed gently, then dropped into the wide pebbly wash of the Amargosa River. Layer three — playa mud and sand. This time, we all piled out.

The FBI kept watch, submachine guns nodding.

Hap leaned against the Cherokee. Nothing for him to do until, unless we encounter something requiring a Geiger check.

While I sampled the soil, Walter resumed his lessons.

Pria stared at the dry riverbed. “You said we were chasing the water.”

“We are.” Walter smiled. “When this river floods, water ends up in Death Valley.”

I wondered if she’d get the significance of the river’s course. It runs through this desert along the eastern border of Death Valley, then cuts down to its southern tip — talc country — and thence takes a hook northeast to exhaust itself three hundred feet below sea level on the Badwater saltpan.

I pictured the dinner table last night, Hap’s spilled water taking its path along the wood grain and then over the edge. That had sent my thoughts along their own path: if Jardine was trying to nail Ballinger for the leak at the dump, maybe he was following the path of the leak. That path led down into the water table, and thence into the flow system that brings water into Death Valley. On the hydrology website I’d learned there are two major flow paths. One is the Amargosa River, whose riverbed runs somewhat in line with the radwaste truck route. It also runs close to Chickie’s mine. Maybe it had led Jardine there. Maybe he’d been scouting for a site to stage his attack. He’d certainly found a place to stash his equipment and a use for the talc. I wondered if Pria knew we had visited her mother’s mine.

Walter stood behind Pria, pointing upfan to the crest of the Funerals. “That’s the water we’re chasing today.”

That’s the other flow path into Death Valley. That’s the one we’re betting on.

Hap looked where Walter pointed. I wished I could read Hap’s face but it was shadowed by the huge sombrero.

Pria sighted uphill. “Water goes downhill.”

“So it does,” Walter said. “Then how do you think water crosses the Funerals?” He gave her time to knit her brows and then he took a chisel from the field kit and stuck it into the ground. “Wiggle it.”

She knelt and wiggled the chisel. Star pupil.

“You feel the give?” Walter asked. “Where the chisel finds a crack in the soil? Way down beneath us is an aquifer. It’s a big tub of water that flows through cracks in the underground rock. And because Death Valley’s elevation is the lowest in the region, that’s where the water goes.”

“Look out!”

Pria dropped the chisel. We spun around.

The two FBI men were backpedalling. The trim black guy named Darrill Oliver now morphed into that primal stance that needs no interpretation, and the blocky sunburned guy named Hal Dearing was grabbing Oliver’s gun arm. Oliver shook him off.

“What is it?” I said, “what’s wrong?”

Dearing jerked his subgun toward the scrub brush. “Snake.”

Walter recoiled.

“King snake.” Dearing hissed, then grinned. “I happen to know they’re harmless but my bro here thinks they bite.”

Oliver lowered his weapon, a flush darkening his obsidian face.

Walter threw Oliver a look, fellowship of the phobic. “Good eye.”

The scrub brush shimmied and a thick banded shape disappeared down a hole.

“Should have shot it,” Hap said. “Snakes eat bats.” Third comment of the day.