Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? (10 page)

Amos and Buford passed a bottle of Old Crow back and forth in front of my
face. About every third pass, one or the other would remember his manners and
offer me a pull. I always refused.

While I was intrigued by the heady smell of the amber liquid and filled with
an intense desire to be one of the boys, both Amos and Buford chewed while they
drank. Between rounds, as the bottle rested in Amos's lap, I noticed about half
a dip of wintergreen snuff floating contentedly on the surface like the Spanish
Armada. The idea of straining the snuff through my teeth was more than I could
bear.

Hunting was fine. Amos and Buford knew what they were doing. By noon they'd
both bagged the limit. We made a pass by the truck, where they left the birds
and packed up their own shotguns. Now it was my turn.

They led me across two fields to a wooded draw that cut partway down the
hillside. They explained the procedure. They'd been saving this particular draw
for me. I was to stand at the downhill end of the draw. They would start at the
uphill end and work the draw, driving the birds before them. The birds would
run as long as there was cover. Reaching the far end, where I'd be waiting, the
birds would take flight right in front of my face. I was admonished to keep
firing and reloading until I saw Amos and Buford emerge from the bottom of the
draw.

Before it was over, I'd emptied both barrels four times and downed two
pheasants. One cock, one hen. Oops. The guys weren't finicky. Meat was meat.
They led me back to our campsite with a series of hugs and congratulatory claps
on the back. Whatever failings I'd shown as a drinker, I'd more than compensated
as a hunter. We ate the hen. Nothing had ever tasted better. I'd never felt
more alive.

What I remember most vividly was that night around the campfire. Amos and
Buford built a huge bonfire at the bottom of the little rocky wash we were
using as a windbreak. It was early October, and while the day had been warm
enough to raise beads of sweat on my upper lip a I'd trudged up and down the
rolling foothills, the minute the sun went down, it got cold in a big hurry.

After depositing several logs bigger than my body on top of the fire, Amos
and Buford rolled themselves into their meager bedrolls as close to the fire as
they dared and summarily fell into comas.

I lay in my Sears mail-order sleeping bag and watched the stars. There was
no middle ground. The front side of me facing the fire threatened to blister at
any moment, while the back half of my body struggled to shiver. I'd never known
such extremes. No matter how hard I closed my eyes, the lapping flames intruded
into my sleep. The glow forced its way under my eyelids. The ripping and
popping of the fire poked me from sleep like insistent fingers.

I sat up with a start. Amos and Buford were long dead. I didn't hunt
anymore. The kid's cabin was a raging, white-hot inferno. Flames tore through
the roof and escaped through the blown-out windows. I was better than a hundred
feet away, shielded by a wall of vegetation, but the flames made my face
fell  as taut as if it were caked with dried mud.

I scrambled out of the bag and ran headlong out into the driveway, branches
tearing at my exposed face. I didn't get far.

Forty feet behind the truck the heat became so intense that I couldn't force
myself any farther. The fire was white as a welding rod. I raced back and
grabbed my sleeping bag.

I put on my jacket, unzipped the bag except for the very bottom, which I
draped over my head, and began to inch my way toward the truck.

The cabin was beyond redemption. The roof over the kitchen end had collapsed
already. Nothing in there was alive. If the kid hadn't escaped by now, he
wasn't going to. That left the truck.

I could smell the exterior of the sleeping bag by the time I reached for the
truck. The door handle burned my hand. I pulled my hand back inside the sleeve
of my jacket and, using the sleeve like an oven mitt, jerked open the door. the
plastic steering wheel was beginning to sweat. The truck would be the next to
go. I leaned across the seat.

I opened the glove box and scooped the contents down the front of my jacket,
where I hoped the elastic would keep it pressed to my body. One of the tires
closest to the house exploded with a pop. The truck settled. I found the seat
release and pushed the seat forward. A long Nike gym bag was behind the seat. I
grabbed it and retreated without closing the door.

I'd made it halfway back to where I'd been sacked out when the truck went up
like a rocket, throwing me to the ground. My lungs empty of air, I forced
myself up and, dragging the Nike bag behind me, crawled another thirty yards
down the driveway.

    My sleeping bag was smoking. The green
nylon on the outside had melted, exposing the wispy goose down to the breeze.
Feathers, drawn by the chimney of the superheated air, rose up into the night
and joined the funnel of debris floating sixty feet over the cabin. I realized
I'd been unconsciously sobbing. I sat on my haunches, locking my arms around my
knees, and tried to catch my breath. The air was too heavy for breathing.

I turned the sleeping bag inside out and stood on it. It was hotter standing
up. I unzipped my jacket and let the contents of the glove box fall among the
feathers. The zipper was hot to the touch. I threw the gym bag on top, bundled
up the corners into a makeshift sack, threw it over my shoulder, and stumbled
up the driveway. The little house hissed and popped behind me. I kept walking
all the way to my car.

The inferno wasn't readily visible from the road. Only the white glow in the
distant treetops suggested that something was amiss. It could just as easily
have been mercury vapor lights. Occasional cinders, propelled upward by the
force of the fire, broke the tree line, burned themselves out, and fell
harmlessly back to earth. No sirens split the air.

I sat back on the willow branches that were draped over the hood of the Fiat
and dropped the bundle at my feet. The hood clicked shut.

My heart stopped. I slid carefully to my feet again and backpedaled out to
the road, dragging the ruined sleeping bag with me. Maybe I'd hit the hood
release on my way out. Maybe I was just being paranoid. Maybe.

By the time I'd liberated the clothesline from the front yard, I could smell
my own hair burning. The kid wouldn't be needing the clothes. I left them in
the yard. The cabin had sunk in upon itself to form a homogenous pile of
glowing rubble, fed from somewhere down inside by the same white-hot jet of
flame I'd seen earlier. I'd sweated my way through my leather jacket. The heat
from outside, the water from the inside. By the time I made it back to the car,
I was walking along in my own little steam cloud.

I beat my way through the bushes to the driver's door. I unlocked it. I
attached one end of the clothesline to the door handle and carefully popped the
latch without moving the door itself. I played the rope out behind me as I
groped my way through the underbrush. When I ran out of rope, I stepped behind
the largest bush I could find, got down on my face, and pulled on the rope. I
heard the door squeak open. Nothing. I pulled harder.

I thrashed my way back down the rope. The door was open. So far so good. I
untied the rope from the door handle and repeated the whole process on the hood
release. This time from behind the car. I heard it pop.

My thick fingers made it difficult to tie a loop in the end of the rope. I
managed on the third or fourth try. I tightened the rope over the edge of the
hood onto the locking mechanism. The hood opened backward. There was no second
release. I dragged the rope out onto the street and gave a tug. The branches
were holding it back. I used two hands, and the hood bulged the willow branches
up and out as it snapped up on its springs. Nothing.

I walked tentatively over to the driver's door. Trying not to move the car,
I reached in the backseat and extracted the black flashlight from my pack.
Careful not to lean on the fender, I played the light over the engine
compartment.

I didn't need an expert for this one. Two wires, one red, one black, ran
from my battery terminals, over the top of the engine, and on through the
firewall. I knelt down by the driver's door and looked beneath the seat. The
two wires were imbedded in what looked like an unbaked loaf of sourdough bread
that was wedged beneath the front seat. My knees threatened to fail me. I sat
down on the cold ground.

    Only the thought of having to explain my
actions to the local authorities got me going again. I retrieved the rope from
the hood. With the care of a brain surgeon, I tied another knot around the two
wires just behind where they were alligator-clipped to the terminals. I fed the
line around the side of the hood.

Once I was at the end of the rope, I gave it one quick, short tug for all I
was worth. Nothing. I walked slowly up to the side of the car.

The alligator clips dangled harmlessly over the side. I was careful not to
touch them together when I loosened the slipknot.

I repeated the process under the front seat. I jerked what appeared to be
two aluminum test tubes from the spongy mass. Carefully, I worked the substance
out from under the seat. It was, as I'd suspected, soft to the touch, like an
enormous glob of beige Play-Doh. It smelled like nail-polish remover. I
gingerly put it in the trunk. I went back to the front of the car, picked up
the sleeping bag, and set it lightly on top. I closed the lid.

Back inside the car, I pulled one wire and then the other back through the
firewall. I broke off one of the clips, yanking it through. I wound the wire
around the aluminum tubes and put them on the passenger seat. I was breathing
like a distance runner. I'd been lucky so far. I needed to get the hell out of
here. The Fiat started right up.

I jammed it into first gear and blasted out of the little hiding place. The
willow branches tore the antenna loose. It dangled, banging, against the side
of the car. I got out, tore the wire off, stuffed the wire back in the hole,
and threw the antenna to the ground.

I was off the reservation, through Marysville, and halfway to Everett before
I stopped shaking. The moment my sanity returned, I realized that there could
well have been another device in the car. The one now in the trunk could have
been a decoy. The shaking followed me all the way home.

"How in hell can anybody lose a Buick station wagon? You can lose your
wallet. You can lose your job. Hell, you can even lose your way, but it's not
possible to lose a Buick station wagon."

"We didn't lose it, Leo," whined George. "We just don't
happen to know where it is at the moment."

"I thought I t old you guys to stay together."

"Jesus, Leo. You look terrible."

For once Ralph had a point. For Ralph, even the most obvious connection to
reality was a step in the right direction. Early this morning, I'd had much the
same reaction to my face. Something had drawn me directly to the bathroom
mirror. I was still wearing my partially fried leather jacket. The stuff I'd
collected was down in the Fiat.

I had stood in front of the mirror and run my unsteady fingertips over the
collection of scrapes and scratches that criss-crossed my face. Both my
eyebrows and the front of my hair were badly singed, the ends rolled up and
brown. When I ran my hand over them, small brown whiskerlike ends fell into the
sink.

"Never mind how I look. Where's Buddy and the car?"

"He told me to go look for Ralph," said Harold.

"Where in the hell was Ralph?"

"I was looking for George," he answered.

"Where in hell was George?"

"I was in the can." Progress of sorts.

They all began to babble at once. I put a stop to it.

"Cut it out," I said. "Let me see if I've got this straight.
After I left, you guys followed her back to the Save the Earth building,
right?"

"Right," they said in unison.

"What happened then?"

"Nothing," in unison again.

"She just went inside and waited." George again. I was losing
patience.

"Then what?" I growled.

"Then George had to go to the can." Ralph.

"He was gone forever." Harold.

"I had to walk all the way up to the fucking train station."

This started an argument as to other, more convenient venues where George
might have been able to meet the call of nature. The guys were experts in this
area. I squashed this enlightening discussion in a hurry.

"So, Buddy sent Harold to look for George. Then what?"

"Then he was gone forever too," said Ralph.

"The Mission was closer. I thought George would go over there,"
said Harold.

"There was a huge line at the Mission," George said, tapping his temple.
"Today's Friday, right? Wednesday night's meatloaf night over at the
Mission, remember?"

"Oooooh." They all nodded knowingly.

"So he sent Ralph to look for both of you." How desperate, I
wondered, did a man have to be to send Ralph looking for somebody? "Then
what?"

George took over. "I ran into Harold on my way back from the train
station, and then we both ran into Ralph on our way back to the car."

"Then you all headed back to the car?"

They looked from one to another. George started to open his mouth, thought
better of it, and stopped. Harold studied the carpet. Ralph dug around in his
ear.

"You fellas didn't by chance stop off for a short one on the way back
to the car, did you?" George and Harold tried hard to look offended.

"Just one," said Ralph. The other two stared at him in disbelief.

"Fuck it," said George with a sigh. "Yeah, we stopped at the
Lantern and had a few. We were gone maybe forty minutes, no more. When we got
back, Buddy and the car were gone. No more than forty minutes, I swear to God,
Leo." He held up his hand like a Boy Scout reciting the oath.