Burn Out

Wednesday

For the greater part of the week after my outing to the Food Mart, I stayed on the ranch-reading, watching old movies on TV, sleeping, and steadfastly avoiding any thought of the future. And every evening, in spite of my vow, I returned to the same place on the bluff to watch the moon rise.

I didn’t ride Lear Jet again, but after a day I did go to the stables at the time that Ramon returned from exercising him. I’d watch while he groomed and fed the horse, sitting on a bale of hay in amicable silence.

Ramon, I knew, had made overtures to Hy about buying the ranch, but out of sentiment Hy didn’t want to sell. He’d grown up there, and it had been willed to him by his mother and stepfather. He’d returned there after a tumultuous stint as a charter pilot in southeast Asia. He’d lived there with Julie and eventually watched her waste away. He’d grieved there, and recovered there. And we’d first slept together there. While we didn’t visit often now, the moments we shared in the high desert were precious. Ramon had understood: sentiment ran thick in his veins too.

Sometimes when he was done with the horse, he’d join me and talk about our heritages. “You know, our tribes generally had good relationships,” he said one afternoon. “Maybe that’s why we get along so well, huh?”

“Maybe it’s got more to do with the fact we’re both quiet.”

“Well, that is a virtue.” He took out a cigarette, lit it, and doused the match thoroughly. With Ramon, I never worried about accidental fires; he was too mindful a man.

“Sara, God love her, she chatters,” he added. Sara was his wife of thirty-some years. “Of course, when I married a Mexican, I knew she would. And chattering’s not such a bad thing; how else would I know what’s going on in the world? Now, that man of yours doesn’t talk much.”

“He’s getting better at conversation.”

“Since he met you. When I first came to work here for him, about a year after his first wife died, he barely spoke at all. A more depressed man I’d never met.”

We sat in silence for a while, Ramon smoking his cigarette, then grinding it out on the floor and putting the butt in his shirt pocket.

“You’re damn depressed yourself,” he said.

I shrugged.

“You want to talk about it?”

“… I don’t think so. Not now, anyway.”

“You change your mind, I’m here.”

The next day I brought Ramon a book on Shoshone tribal customs that my birth father, Elwood Farmer, had given me. Lear Jet glowered at me from his stall. Did he think I should’ve brought him something? No way, not after he’d thrown me.

Throughout the week I had contact with the outside world, of course. Daily calls came from my operative Patrick Neilan, to whom I’d turned over administrative matters at the agency, as well as my office manager, Ted Smalley. Just general reports: everything’s okay here, we wrapped up the so-and-so case, three new jobs came in today. It was all I cared to know about a business I’d nurtured lovingly for years. And that unnerved me.

Mick had relented and located the person who’d been using my credit card: a deliveryman employed by a Chinese restaurant in our neighborhood who frequently delivered takeout to us. Citibank and the police were dealing with him.

There was also a daily call from Hy, who was restructuring the corporate security firm-formerly RKI, now Ripinsky International-of which he’d become sole owner after the death of one partner and the decampment of another. He’d moved their world headquarters to San Francisco, turned over marginal accounts to other firms, and closed unnecessary branch offices, and was busy creating a corporate culture that-unlike the old RKI’s-was free of corruption. His calls further depressed me, although I did my best to hide it. I’d never heard Hy so vibrant and optimistic, but could only briefly get caught up in his enthusiasm. His feelings about his work were so opposite to how I felt about mine that once the calls were over, I wanted to crawl into bed and bury my head under the pillows.

Which I did most nights, falling into a restless sleep that was repeatedly visited by the dream of the pit, as well as an odd new one: an Indian girl standing in the cold shadows outside a large white building. She looked at me in the glare of passing headlights, eyes afraid, and then the earth at her feet cracked open and swallowed her up.