Badwater

3

Roy Jardine stood frozen in the desert-night furnace and thought about his life.

It was a life of one crap job after another.

In his workaday career he had mastered the details of seventeen crap jobs, and on the eighteenth crap job the details tried to kill him.

So he’d taken job eighteen commando.

And look what happened. It had not gone as planned. In fact, things went way out of control. They had a saying for this, in job eighteen. Going critical. Things had really gone critical tonight and Jardine needed a new plan, fast. He was not good at this — thinking on the fly. He liked to chew on a plan for as long as it took. So after the truck crash he’d gone home to lay low. And he’d chewed. Two hours later he had a bellyfull of undigested plan. The problem, he’d realized, was making a plan in a vacuum. He needed to know what was happening.

So he’d gone out to reconnoiter.

He’d driven back close to the crash site and pulled off the road onto the desert hardpack. Then he’d crept up a little knoll and raised his binoculars to scope the site. Hells bells, the place was swarming. Everybody was masked and hooded but he imagined their faces. Their expressions. Serious.

He liked that.

For the first time since things went critical, he recaptured his grand vision. He came alive. If he had not been afraid of being heard, he would have howled.

Footsteps sounded.

He froze. The sounds were at a distance. That gave him hope. At a distance, in the dark, he’d look like a post. The joke was, Roy Jardine was so skinny that if he turned sideways all you’d see was his shadow. As a matter of fact, Shadow was his nickname. He’d earned it on job number three, refrigeration mechanic, shadowing his supervisor’s every move in order to get it right. He’d once read up on his personality type and diagnosed himself as borderline obsessive-compulsive. No sidewalk-crack counting or anything. Just a need to master the details.

The sound came closer and now he identified it. Claws on hardpack dirt. Coyote. If it started to bark he’d howl in relief along with it.

He found he’d sweated through his shirt.

He plucked the shirt away from his ribs. He swiped the back of his neck, lifting aside his ponytail. It was a thick black snake that made people ask if he was part Indian. He wasn’t. He’d grown the ponytail on his first crap job — one-hour photo clerk — to look like he was in on the joke. He’d kept it because females liked to braid it and dudes noticed it instead of his perfectionism. And after the incident on job eighteen it gave them something to look at instead of his face.

Shadow, the long lean dude with the outlaw tail.

Go for it, dude.

He knew what he had to do. Recover control. There was already a plan in place: the grand vision, the mission, a long careful time in the making with attention paid to the details. And it was still an excellent plan. But now he needed to make adjustments, adapt to the new situation. He told himself: you can do that, Roy. What happened tonight changed things. You have new enemies. The cops are in it now. They’re going to try to stop you. Don’t let them, dude.

I won’t, he promised.

He hooked his thumbs in the loops of his jeans and strolled back to the pickup.

He turned on the engine, revving it. That sounded ace.

But as he drove onto the highway he worried that somebody might have heard and he lectured himself for being cocky and even though he saw no other cars he made himself sick on adrenaline.

He’d overreacted. As he drove past the crash site nobody came to chase him. He was just another drive-all-night roadie going about his business.

He tooled along highway 95, riding high now, and he gave himself another lecture. Listen Roy, you’re doing good. You’re incognito for now but very soon you’re going to step out of the shadows. They won’t call you Shadow, then.

He pressed his shoulders against the seat. He felt his chest swell. He’d heard of people doing this, being thrown out of their comfort zone and growing stronger. That’s what he was doing right now: growing into his destiny. He was like the outlaws of the Old West who start out being ordinary dudes going through their crap days and then some villain kicks them in the comfort zone and they turn into outlaws. Not low-down outlaws. Outlaws with a mission.

He suddenly wondered if he should have a hideout. Just in case.

Yeah.

He knew just the place. It was already set up for the mission but there was plenty of space he could make his own. He liked that so much he decided to name it. He put on his thinking cap. He was a bit of a history buff and since he was now an outlaw he wanted to name the hideout after a famous Old West outlaw lair. It came to him: Hole-in-the-Wall. That’s where famous outlaws like the Wild Bunch had their base of operations. That wasn’t just in the movies, that was a real place, up a narrow pass, hidden in the rock, impossible for the enemy to approach without being seen. Jardine’s hideout was like that. If the enemy got on his tail, he’d make a stand at Hole-in-the-Wall.

The Long Lean Dude was back in the saddle.

Getting ready to take on the enemy.

He’d never counted sidewalk cracks but now he counted his chances.