Hot Springs (16 page)

She went straight to the dining room and the liquor cabinet. There were still a few bottles in it, and she found a fifth of Black Bush that was half full. She wondered why her dad would have left this behind. He enjoyed fancy booze. They had always lived like people with money—it was all part of the big lie. She took the bottle into the kitchen and found a glass. In general, the house was as she remembered it, with the occasional gap where a table was missing, or a picture removed from the wall. It looked as if the people who lived here were simply away.

When she was little there had been moments—while getting out of the third-floor shower, or searching for a toy in her closet—when her mind would suddenly open like a door onto the past, and she was sure she could see back in time. She never saw people, just rooms. Her bathroom was no longer the peach color her mother had painted it, but an unpleasant green, and the steamed mirror held no image, even though she should have seen her blurry self in it. These glimpses never lasted long, and she’d shake herself from the daydream and be
back in the unremarkable present, but they had left her with a certain persistent distrust of reality, the sense that if you didn’t pay attention to it, it could simply slip away from you.

She finished her whiskey and got a glass of water, letting the tap run while the ancient pipes clanked and complained. A car alarm went off somewhere outside, followed by an ambulance siren. All that time driving, listening to the radio, and there hadn’t been one mention of an abducted Colorado child and her distraught parents. Why not? What were they waiting for? Where was the Amber Alert?

She’d thought maybe being back here would feel comforting, normal even. But mostly what she felt was afraid.

L
andis drove across the dry, flat expanse of eastern Colorado as it tipped ever so slowly down toward Kansas. His remaining belongings were in the back of the truck: a duffel bag full of clothes, some shoes and sneakers, a box of books, another of CDs, his tools, a pair of good cowboy boots, a sleeping bag, an Ovation guitar he’d accepted from a guy in lieu of the two hundred dollars he was supposed to get paid for fixing a hole in a wall. He had nothing from his childhood, with the exception of an old collegiate dictionary he sometimes enjoyed paging through, looking for curious words.
Ameliorate
.
Feckless
. His parents had retired and moved to Florida a few years earlier, after his father finally gave up on the insurance business, which he claimed was giving him ulcers, and within a year he was dead of pancreatic cancer. His mother had an apartment in Tampa where she smoked cigarettes and watched television. She
called Landis once a year on his birthday, but never had anything to ask him, talking instead about herself and her elaborate social life, the details of which Landis was convinced she made up out of bits of movies and TV shows. She had at one time been a catalog model for Sears, and Landis owed his generic good looks to her. His father had had large ears, sad downward-sloping eyebrows (Landis had inherited these), and a way of carrying himself that implied he was uncomfortable in his own skin. Landis was an only child.

Some country singer he’d vaguely heard of was on the radio being interviewed about the self-help book he’d written after surviving his own bout with cancer. Testicular. Landis shifted in his seat as he rolled the word around in his mind. The singer, whose name was Hoyt Crudup, claimed that after first becoming depressed about his diagnosis, he had a talk with God, then decided to take matters into his own hands and be positive about his life. “I embraced it,” he said. “Every day, in every way.” Landis snorted. He had no doubt that embracing life was a good idea, but it was no substitute for chemotherapy, which old Hoyt had gone through, too.

He’d eaten a big lunch at the McDonald’s in Limon, where he’d hopped on the interstate, and was now making good time, having passed Arriba and Flagler, with Burlington perhaps an hour away. The Ford’s big V-8 engine hummed powerfully in front of him; occasionally a crosswind forced him to correct course. The sun was high and behind him, and the world looked pretty. Flat and lifeless, but still pretty in its own stark way. Every now and then he’d see a distant cluster of buildings with a few cottonwoods planted around them. He passed a cattle yard that stunk of ammonia and manure, the mottled browns and blacks of the steers a complicated patchwork spread over a vast number of muddy lots.

Besides his truck, Landis owned one thing of real value, a Neumann U47 condenser mic from the early sixties that had been used at Motown, though he wasn’t sure exactly which stars might have actually breathed into it. Smokey Robinson? Diana Ross? Sometimes he told himself it was likely to have encountered them all at one time or another. The mic had left the studio with an assistant engineer in the early seventies, after Motown moved to Los Angeles. That man, Russell Braithewaite, ended up in Denver years later, teaching at the Denver Sound Institute, where Landis earned his certificate in recording and live sound technology. Landis substituted a reproduction U47—it had cost him six hundred dollars—for the original, which Russell kept displayed on the bookshelf above his enormous mixing console. It was not a premeditated theft. He’d bought the new mic after hearing Russell go on and on about how wonderful his was. It was just the two of them that afternoon, and Russell left him alone for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, and Landis took the mic down just to hold it. His own was in his knapsack—he’d been planning to show it to Russell, but then suddenly felt embarrassed, because what did he think, that owning a fine mic was going to automatically make him an engineer? And then the thing in him that was given to snap decisions, almost always the wrong ones, the genetic predisposition to larceny he’d inherited from his grandfather on his mother’s side, who’d embezzled from a bank in Camden, New Jersey, back in the twenties, kicked in. He saw what he
could
do, if he wanted to. And he did.

In five years he hadn’t used the mic once. He was afraid of it. All the work he’d done in the Springs was live stuff, and the U47 was a condenser mic. He hoped to make it the centerpiece of a studio someday, but he knew that was unlikely. Recording was all about computers now, and he was no good with them—at DSI they’d worked with ProTools, and while he’d done a lot of nodding, it was
like being back in high school chemistry class, that sense of drowning while trying to appear that he wasn’t. His lab partner had helped get him through the computer mixing and editing. What Landis was good at was live sound. He liked the physicality of the equipment, the weight of the speakers, the questions of placement and power, amperage, ohms, crossovers. When he looked at the mic, all he saw was a physical manifestation of his own bad judgment. More than once, he’d thought to mail it back to the man, but that would be admitting what he’d done, and he wasn’t sure he could.

Russell Braithewaite had worked with Marvin Gaye. And yet, there he was in Denver, part owner of a recording studio that was just scraping by. And here was this Hoyt Crudup, trying to sell books since no one listened to his songs anymore. You were never really safe. You thought you had it made, but then time came along and put cracks in the foundations you’d laid, and before you knew it the walls were coming down around you. People built little houses for themselves—Bernice going to stay with the Hardings, he with his relationship to Bernice, which he’d burrowed right into without ever thinking hard about it—but none of these shelters were permanent, and it was just arrogance to assume otherwise. Or willful ignorance.

At some point in this reverie, he’d fallen almost totally asleep while still moving at slightly over seventy miles per hour, and it was only the sound of his tires that brought him back to consciousness. He’d drifted onto the gravel shoulder, and now the truck was rocking back and forth. He braked and tried to keep himself going straight as well as he could, and after another twenty-five yards or so he managed to bring the truck to a safe stop. A tractor trailer flew past him with a warning blast on its horn.

“Fuck you!” he shouted. His heart banged in his chest like a windup monkey. He tried to remember the last thing he’d been
awake for, but could not. There had just been a warm cozy feeling, then this. He’d been inches from dead.

The radio was still going. “That’s what you got to understand,” said Hoyt Crudup. “We’re not human beings who occasionally have spiritual experiences. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Landis breathed more slowly. The sky had grown dark and a wind was kicking up, and then within seconds hail pounded down on him in a deafening rush of ice on metal, the white balls hitting the ground with such force that they hopped up two feet into the air. A few more moments and then the sun returned, illuminating a strange, steaming landscape that appeared to be covered in wet aspirin.

In Burlington, he got more quarters and fed a gas station pay phone, then dialed the number Gillian had given him. When no one answered, he called information and asked for Donald Click. The number was different, but he tried anyway.

“Yes?” said a man’s voice.

Landis hesitated. “Have you got, that is—can I speak to Bernice, please?”

There was a long pause. “Who is calling?”

“Landis.”

“What an interesting name.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t find his name interesting at all. He’d had an uncle with that name, although he’d never met him. “Have I reached her father?”

“That’s right.”

“Listen, I really have to talk to her.” He didn’t know why this guy was being so cagey, but it was starting to make him nervous, because
he’d seen enough TV shows to know that when they tried to keep you on the line, it was usually for the benefit of the geeks huddled a few feet away, triangulating your position with their laptop computers.

“What about?”

“I just need to, that’s all.”

“Are you the father?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m the father.”

“Well, she’s not here.”

“Can you give me another number?”

“No, I’m afraid I can’t.”

Landis wasn’t sure what to say next. He could smell the bathrooms, which were around the side of the building, not far from where he stood. “Can you tell her I called?”

“I don’t know. Is that something she’ll want to hear?”

“Absolutely. We had a misunderstanding.”

“I see.”

Landis had the sense that this was not going well. It was odd to think of Bernice as having a father at all—he’d sort of imagined her arriving on a shore in a clamshell like the naked woman in the poster she’d had taped up to her bedroom wall. “Are they all right?” he asked.

“Landis,” said Don Click, “is there a reason why they would not be all right? Is there something you want to tell me?”

“No,” said Landis.

“Well, then.”

Landis could feel him getting ready to hang up. “Wait,” he said.

“Yes?”

He felt peculiar—it was as if his body were a loudspeaker’s copper voice coil, heated now, gathering resistance. “Nothing,” he said, as the operator broke in to suggest he buy more time. He looked out past
the highway where a bunch of cranes had landed in a field, wings held momentarily aloft like maestros preparing to conduct a symphony. Hoyt Crudup was right—he
was
a spiritual being, parked at this particular moment in the body of one Landis James Ford, standing in the late-day heat in eastern Colorado at a pestilent gas station, but no less connected for that to the higher meanings and purposes of life on earth.

T
essa Harding sat behind the wheel of her Jimmy and watched the windows of the small house on San Rafael, imagining what was going on behind those drawn shades. It was a pleasant little house, with a garden alongside that had tomato vines and pretty purple flowers. This was a house for a single woman to live in, and from her position—elevated, curbside—she mentally roamed the interior, imagining a small refrigerator with a few diet items in it, yogurt, apples, bottled water from Italy or France. Perhaps there were postcards on the refrigerator door of some niece or nephew in a Halloween costume, or fluffed and combed and decked out for Christmas. Thinking of this brought back the knot in her chest that had been there almost continuously this past week, and she thought of all the photos she’d dressed Emily for. She kept the albums by her bed now, looked through them each night before going to sleep.

That her husband was cheating on her explained a lot. It made sense—his withdrawal, his moodiness. But she’d had Emily to focus on, and so she’d deluded herself, constructed a little space that wasn’t real, or wasn’t realistic, anyway. What she couldn’t understand was how, in the face of the current crisis, he could still be inside this cute little house, having sex. If she got up the nerve to ring the doorbell, which was her intent, that was what she wanted to ask him. She wanted to shake him and say, “What are you thinking?”