17
Paranoia on River Road
Terry Rich Hartley
Cover Art: Designs By Rachelle
Published by Mind Wings Audio at Smashwords
This story is also available in audio CD and MP3 formats
Copyright 2009 Terry Rich Hartley
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
On June 16, Deputy Sheriff Lita Echeveria pulled the Jeep Cherokee off Highway 30 onto a freshly paved lane. The old, hand-painted sign reading “Billington's Dairy and Meat Rabbits” was gone. Its replacement, a ten-by-ten gray stone slab with the name “CANYON CREST HOME SITES by STEELE DEVELOPMENT” and a laser-engraved map of a new subdivision, greeted her. Nothing stays the same, she thought, slowly rolling by chunks of concrete that had been the foundation of a farm house. Ahead lay a grid work of roadbeds dotted with survey ribbons. She took the road that led straight east and continued on for an eighth of a mile until she saw the backhoe the dispatcher said to look for. Just beyond it, the road ended in a cul-de-sac. She pulled up by a parked white Ford F150 Supercrew. Two men were in it. The one in the driver's seat stepped out.
“Hello, I'm Tory Steele,” he said.
“Lita Echeveria,” she returned with a firm handshake.
“I called the Sheriff's office, but it was my heavy equipment man, Joe Mendenhall, who made the discovery. He's the big guy there in the cab. I'll walk you over to the excavation. Joe doesn’t want to go near it.”
Following the handsome developer, Echeveria knew from dispatch pretty much what to expect, but sometimes expectations don't live up to reality. This was one of those times. Steele stopped at the excavation where the backhoe had bitten out fresh earth and stared into the hole.
“Native Americans roamed the river plain for thousands of years, and I've had to stop construction for an antiquities inspection twice before at another site. That's why I thought Joe stopped digging and called me. But this is different. I don't quite understand what I'm looking at. Ever seen anything like this?”
“Frankly,” the deputy answered, “I thought the dispatcher was drunk as a peach orchard bull. And no, I've never seen anything like this. I doubt if anyone else has, either.”
Steele scratched at his gray-streaked temple and mused, “And to think Joe wasn’t supposed to dig here. This area is going to be a small park. Some girl talked him into it.” Seeing the deputy gaze around, he added, “She wasn’t here when I showed up. Joe told me about her.”
“I’d like to hear this,” Echeveria said, walking back to the pickup. Seeing her coming, Mendenhall uncurled a beefy arm through the passenger window frame and flipped a smoldering butt into the dirt. Mid-twenties, she guessed, cheeks ruddy from too much weather and probably alcohol. After exchanging niceties, she said, “So, tell me about it.”
“Uh, I was start’n a basement where those colored stakes are—right back there—and this girl walked in front of the backhoe and waved for me to stop. She asked if I would please dig a hole over there.”
“You know her?”
“Never seen her. Cute blonde. Real cute. And she was eighteen.”
“You know her age without knowing her?”
“It’s what this was all about. Said her dad buried a secret gift years back and told her she could dig it up when she turned eighteen. I asked ‘What is it?’” Mendenhall ran enormously thick fingers through a Viking-red beard. “Told her I needed to know so’s not to break it with the bucket. She laughed at me and said that’s what makes it a secret, not knowing what it is. So, figured the boss wouldn’t care if I took ten minutes. Besides …”
“She was cute.”
“Yeah,” he chuckled, “kinda hard to turn down.”
“Where’s she now?”
He shrugged. “I’d grabbed only three or four scoops and she stopped me to talk a little. Then I started to dig another, and when I looked up, she was over there walk’n toward the highway with a big dog all covered in dirt. Looked like I dumped a full bucket on it, but I don’t remember seeing a dog before then, so don’t know how I coulda.”
Echeveria glanced back toward the hole, then fixed her charcoal eyes on Mendenhall. “You said the young lady stopped you to talk for a while. Can you remember what she said, anything at all, maybe her name or where she lives?”
“No.” His ruddy cheeks took on a distinct rose color.
“Mr. Mendenhall, I need to know everything. This is important.”
“Well, she really didn’t talk much. Uh . . . her halter top was undone in back and she climbed up on that step by the cab so I could tie it.”
Spreading her most disarming smile, the deputy said, “OK, so you wouldn’t have seen a herd of buffalo approaching, much less a dog.”
“You got it.”
“I do now. But you did see a dog walk away. If I can find it, I might find the girl. What breed?”
“Beats my ass. Sorry. Looked like a dirt clod with legs. Big, though. Like a Lab, only hairier. Thought they’d come back to see what was in the hole, but never did. Anyway, so then I started diggin’ again and the bucket teeth flipped over . . . uh, whatever that is in the hole. What kind of surprise is that for a guy to leave his daughter?”
“Not one that would earn him father of the year.”
#
Two years earlier, on one of those bite-your-face cold days in February, Doug Anderson and his German shepherd, Wolfgang, began their hike up the old frozen roadbed cut into the southwest slope of the Snake River Canyon. Unlike the opposite canyon wall of sheer vertical basalt, this side formed a steep slope where the canyon started to broaden into Mystic Valley.
On private, unoccupied property, an abandoned and unfinished roadbed—the width of a bulldozer blade—ran north at an angle of about 15 degrees, then turned sharply west and increased to 25 degrees for 200 yards to the top. At the turn, Doug stopped to suck in several lungs full of frigid air and then focused his eye through the viewfinder of a brand new Panasonic Lumix camera. Through his breath, he peered down at a hundred or so Canadian geese bobbing in the river. Several flotillas of coots worked the water for lunch, the black waterfowl taking turns diving to the bottom, then popping up with a mossy plate of snails, zugbugs, and other tasty, crawly morsels. Here and there within the flotillas, widgeons had positioned themselves to snatch food from the beaks of successful coot divers. Some things never change, Doug thought, pressing the auto-focus and remembering that he'd watched the same sequence of snatch and gobble since he was a kid. Only then, things were different, at least emotionally, when his family getaway house was a site for adventure, for fishing, hiking, softball, and sibling rivalry. Once, when he was thirteen, Candice Olsen had come out with his family and the two of them hiked this very trail. She was Candy, the neighbor girl and good friend then. That was before she became Candice, his high school steady for more than two years. He grinned, remembering that the two of them had their first “tiff” higher up the trail when she wanted to turn right and go cross country and he wanted to go left across his parents’ property. But that was then, when this place was for fun. Now, though, was now, when this place was for healing the bitter wounds of a shattered marriage.
The psychic burn had been healing, too—his strategy succeeding. Taking hiatus from the sociology department at the University of Nevada, Reno, Doug had escaped to convalesce in south central Idaho. Mom hadn't used the vacation home much since Dad passed. Doug's only sibling, Monica, was a physician in New York City who had briefly occupied the place only once in five years—and then for less than two weeks. So he just took it over. Leave the phone hookup dead; to heck with that. Don't activate the satellite dish; double heck with that and the Internet. Leave the cell phone in Reno—just another nuisance. Peace and quiet, that's what he needed. Quacking and honking from water birds and the eerie call of raptors—the songs of nature—were welcome, even the occasional roar of fish trucks moving trout from the hatcheries down river to the processing plant upriver—but no calls or e-mails from lawyers, bankers, marriage counselors, do-gooders, do-badders, and most of all, no contact with his cheating wife or her Neanderthal lover, Chase Honhorst.
Indeed, the isolation was good. He'd always loved the log house that his architect father had designed, originally for Uncle Rex, his dad’s bachelor brother and the owner of a small flying service in nearby Glensford. After Rex flew into a storm and consequently a mountain, Doug’s dad kept the place for a family getaway. The building pad was bulldozed 150 feet upslope from River Road and could only be reached via a steep gravel driveway that crossed the front of the house, and ended at the garage and an adjacent parking pad. A great room formed nearly half of the house's floor space. In that room, two massive pine beams crossed horizontally between the high ceiling and oak floor. Six tall windows faced toward the opposite canyon wall and the Snake River below, which was separated from River Road by a narrow strip of land. A high-efficiency fireplace was set into rock that took up most of the south wall. This place was a tidy sanctuary where you never wore shoes inside because the floors were toasty no matter how bitter the winter was outside—the result of a thermal well and a constant trickle of warm water running through flexible pipes under the floors. Even the garage floor was heated. In the summer you just turned six small valves and cold water replaced the hot, turning the floors into passive air conditioners.
So that’s the way it was: just Doug, Wolfgang, television, and radio hooked to an antenna planted behind the house and higher up the canyon. Three compilations of decades-old Calvin and Hobbes comics and a library of The World's Great Classics provided eclectic reading. The pantry and liquor cabinet were well supplied, as was the firewood shed. Splitting wood; shoveling snow off the drive, deck, and walks; hiking with Wolfgang; and just absorbing nature were doing wonders. In two short weeks, Doug began to sleep again, something he hadn't done much since discovering Yvette's treachery. After a month, the anger and sorrow slid from chronic to occasionally acute. He was going to make it. He WOULD make it!
Then, at ten-oh-seven on this Tuesday morning, the unmistakable sound of gravel crunching under tires broke the solitude. Wolfgang usually barked when someone turned in the driveway; once it was the electric meter reader, a few other times just wayward motorists using the driveway entrance to turn around. On this morning, though, the huge dog didn't move a whisker. Doug arose from the rocker, from which he'd been reading a short story by Stephen Foster, and stepped to the windows. In a millisecond his stomach went from calm to full churn, his heart pounded, and cold sweat broke from every pore. He felt like puking. How in God's name had Honhorst found him here? It couldn't be! But there he was, smirk on his craggy face, peering out the side window of his glossy black '72 Oldsmobile four-four-two. That was the same cherried-out babe magnet Honhorst had driven since early their senior year in high school. A gift from Daddy. In fact, it had been his daddy's before being refurbished. What sort of mental basket case still drove his high school car in his mid forties? The same basket case who always turned up like a bad penny. The same one who last year turned up as a professor in the psychology department in the same building at the same university where Doug taught sociology. The same basket case who scoped out Doug's wife and fellow sociology professor, Yvette, and who...sullied her. And that's what he always did—Honhorst—took what he wanted. And what he always wanted was whatever Doug had. Doug's position on the high school wrestling team. Doug's chance for first string quarterback. Doug's teen heartthrob, Candice Olsen. Then, decades later, his wife. And now...what? His solitude?
“What are YOU doing here, Honhorst?” Doug roared.
Well, he meant to roar. But his voice took on a raspy squeak, the whine of a kicked poodle. Charging out the front door, off the redwood deck, and down the driveway, he confronted the bad penny. It never occurred to Doug that he was shoeless until icy gravel jabbed into the soles of his feet—not like that would prevent his adrenaline-fueled charge—or that he was in green-and-white striped boxer shorts and a coffee-stained, sleeveless undershirt. Steam poured from his mouth like smoke from a dragon.
“What…are…you…doing…here?” he hissed.
“Just saving an old friend from loneliness,” Honhorst answered from the open driver's window with all the sincerity of a politician at a fundraiser. His pocked face was split with the same manure-eating smile he'd apparently been born with. Why women found him handsome was beyond Doug.
“Don't do me any favors,” Doug returned. Glaring at Honhorst, Doug mentally compared his own receding hairline with Honhorst's full one, his own average musculature with his nemesis' bulk, his own crappy luck with Honhorst's golden touch. That infuriated him all the more. “Back up this piece of work and get out of here.”
“Or what?”
“Or…you'll regret it?”
Was that the best he could do, you'll regret it? God, Doug thought, why such paralysis around this cretin?
“Ooooh, I wouldn't want that,” Honhorst mocked. “Come on, Dougy, you're just pissed about Yvette. Hey, she came after me, I didn't move on her.”
“Just like Candice, I suppose.”
“Oh, jeez, you're going all the way back to high school…”
“Damn right I am! What are you doing here, anyway?”
In Doug's fury he wanted to punch the face framed in the window, smash it to a bloody pulp. But when a Cocker Spaniel assaults a Rottweiler, the results are predictable to the 99 and 9/10th percent. Whether by cowardice or common sense, Doug resisted.
“Well, Doug, I hoped we could have a serious talk. Friends?” He held out a hand.
“Not friends,” Doug said. “Tell me why you're here.”
Chase Honhorst's face metamorphosed from smirk to serious.
“We need to forget our differences, Doug. Something's come up that requires our unified effort.”
“You and me? Never!”
“Never's a very long time. Too long in this case. Yvette needs you now.”
Doug's head snapped back like he'd caught a sucker punch. He thought, What would Yvette need me for? She made the decision to quit needing me when she started sneaking around with Pizza Face here.
“Doug, are you with me? I said Yvette needs you NOW.”
“Her last requirement was fulfilled when I signed the divorce papers. She's out of my life and I want you gone,” Doug said, turning back up the driveway.
“Doug, she's pregnant.”
The words were a scythe slicing through his soul. For years, Doug had tried to convince Yvette to start a family, as they had originally planned; for years she stalled. When the subject grew too contentious, he pressed her into counseling with a marital and family therapist. It was there, during the third session, that the truth came out: she feared that the pathology which had overwhelmed Doug's dad and had led to his suicide was genetic, and, after skipping a generation, would reappear in their children. What was unsaid was what cut to the quick: Doug was inferior, so inferior he shouldn't leave progeny. From there, the whole made-in-heaven relationship rapidly sunk to hell. Counselors—how many counselors—all sided with Yvette about adoption, or about using a sperm donor. But to Doug, his kids or no kids.
Then…then one Chase Honhorst showed up on campus right in the same building where Doug and Yvette worked. What was the chance of that? In all the buildings, in all the universities, in all the cities, in all the states, in all the United States of America, what were the chances that one Chase Honhorst would show up? And not any Chase Honhorst, but the same one who in high school smelled like raw testosterone when he got you in a headlock, who strutted the locker room like a stud bull, who boasted a jockstrap the size of Utah—that Chase Honhorst!
“Doug, Doug Anderson, anyone home?” Honhorst asked, his knuckles rapping the air in the direction of Doug's forehead. “Earth to Anderson.”
“Yvette's having a baby?” Doug whispered, his face like flour paste.
“Uh…that's what pregnant means. Hey, I made a boo boo. But I'm no good at playing daddy. Uh-uh, tried that once before. Dude, Yvette needs you. You got a kid to raise.”
“Your spawn! Your spawn, pothole face!” Doug screeched, his cheeks crimson, body shaking, arms flailing in a neurological spasm. The next words came straight from the furnace in his belly. “I'll kill you, you filthy animal!” To Doug's right was a rectangular brass solar light, extended on a two-foot arm that rested in a hole in a concrete post. Snatching the light by its arm, he charged and swung at Honhorst's head with all his hate-fueled might.
Too late. Honhorst, anticipating the move, shifted into reverse and hit the gas pedal. A corner of the lamp grazed along the windshield, smashing down and plowing a deep gash into the retreating hood. “Damn it, nobody does that to my car. Nobody!” Honhorst bellowed.
“DIE!” Doug screamed, slinging the lamp so hard it flew clear over the Olds, took one violent bounce off the driveway and clanged across the first lane of River Road, finally stopping and rocking on its top, dead center in the pavement. Growling like a raging badger, Doug swept up a football-sized rock from beside the driveway and cast it at the front of Honhorst's retreating car. Maddeningly, the rock fell short, bringing Doug to grab a handful of gravel and chase the Olds down the driveway. Slinging the missiles, he didn't wait to hear them bounce off the Olds like buckshot against a tin wall before grabbing and throwing another handful, then another.
The Olds plowed backward onto River Road, then sent twin horizontal tornadoes of blue-black smoke into the air as it launched forward. Honhorst extended his hairy arm from the driver's window, middle finger extended as his vintage machine raced off. “I'll kill you for messing with my car! I’ll kill you and bury you! I'll kill your stinking dog!”
Doug's arms were waving like a windmill in a hurricane when he screeched back, “No, I'll kill you, you crater-faced pig from hell!”
Then, slobbering, bawling and shivering, he staggered back up the drive, never noticing the maroon Escalade stopped some twenty feet in front of the battered brass lamp. As the Cadillac SUV crept around the debris, four seasoned faces inside stared up the slope. “Crazy dopers are everyplace these days,” one of them muttered.
#
At two o'clock plus or minus a minute or so, Doug and Wolfgang reached the top of the canyon. Doug stopped to take a breath as Wolfgang sniffed an elm stump. To his left was the game trail that went across the top of his parents’ property. To the right was the frozen hulk of an ancient, abandoned Alice Chalmers 12-cylinder bulldozer, the same mechanical behemoth that had cut the roadbed Doug had just hiked. The rusty machine hadn’t fired up for years, just sat there as a monument to a shattered dream. Way back when, the Winkler family had planned to build their dream home up here, but then cancer struck Mr. Winkler, and the project wilted. Doug had examined the dozer before, but always at a distance. The landscape was gently rolling earth, crisscrossed here and there with barbed wire fencing—easy enough to walk and unmarked with trespassing signs—but Doug had always felt uneasy about entering someone else's property. Indeed, this is exactly where he and Candice Olsen had argued. Neither won; she went her independent way across private property and he took the familiar trail left. He’d never forgotten the scolding his mother gave him for coming home without her.
“Candy is our guest. She doesn’t know her way around, and you just let her take off. What is wrong with you?”
Another hour passed when Mrs. Anderson, fit to be tied, started to call 911 for a missing child search. Then, thank God, that nice dairy farmer from above the canyon pulled his red pickup with the door sign “JESUS LOVES” into the driveway and brought Candy home all in one piece.
“She was a little bit lost, that’s all,” the farmer laughed. “Once she described this house, I knew where to bring her.”
And that should have been the end of that. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot. There was one week of vacation left and that was one long week for Doug, because at least once a day Candy would break into tears and that would cause Mrs. Anderson to launch into Doug.
Reaching into the right pocket of his tan rough-out coat, Doug pulled out a granola bar, tore at the wrapper and laughed inside at how simple things were then: a scaredy-cat girl and a mad mom. Chewing, he let his eyes roam back over the canyon. Below to the left were thirty barn-sized greenhouses, which operated year round thanks to geothermal heating. A little farther, steam rose behind trees, a familiar sight that marked Mystic Hot Springs—an Olympic-size swimming pool and hot baths. Above the canyon, sixty miles to the north but visually yards away, Soldier Mountain formed a white pyramid against the even taller mountains that surrounded Sun Valley. Doug envisioned flying over the rugged area in a Cessna as he had in the old days with Dad and Uncle Rex. He wished he could just spread his arms and glide off, away from thoughts of his father's hellish fate, of Yvette, and most of all, of this morning’s confrontation.
He needed something distracting and Wolfgang provided it in the form of a short grunt, the dog’s way of forcing attention. It was almost as though Wolfy was getting bored with this inane human moping behavior. “Quit feeling sorry for yourself,” he seemed to snort, “and let’s get on with the business of doing…anything.”
So, Doug did. He followed the dog to the bulldozer. It was the closest he had come to the machine and he couldn't help but sense the irony that a solid steel link had been removed from the enormous left tread. That's what cat skinners, or bulldozer operators as they were called, did to keep their equipment from being stolen. And it must have worked, he silently mused, because this old hulk hadn’t moved an inch since Doug was a kid. Laying his right hand on the rust-encased tread, Doug grinned, thinking what it would look like crawling over Honhorst's Olds. What would Honhorst's face look like watching his prized honey wagon fold up like tin foil? Even better, what expression would Honhorst have from inside said honey wagon as the bulldozer slowly subsumed the front bumper, then the hood, then….
Then, in half a heartbeat the tables turned completely. The movie in his head vanished, replaced by a deep growl, the thunder of feet, and the movement of a large mass in his right peripheral vision. In a cloud of dust, the mass sprung toward him, obliquely striking his right shoulder and sending him into a half spin, where he landed in a sitting position atop the bulldozer tread.
“Don't,” he screamed, folding both arms over his head and drawing knees upward. From this fetal position, Doug first heard then saw Wolfgang rush past him. Peeking between his arms he caught sight of a doe mule deer bounding across the plain and disappearing on the other side of a grove of Russian olive trees.
“Jesus,” he muttered, realizing how primed he was for fear. For just a moment, he'd imagined that Honhorst had laid in wait behind the bulldozer. But that made no sense. Honhorst had no way to know Doug was going on this hike. For crying out loud, Doug himself didn’t even know he was going to do it until he did it!
Still, there was reason for concern. Sooner or later there would be a confrontation. Chase Honhorst never let anything go. He certainly wasn't going to forget the gash Doug had carved into his prized possession. No indeed! Right now, Honhorst was probably working himself into a lather. Maybe he was drinking. Maybe not. Either way, he was one evil son of a bitch when he was angry. And that crease down the hood of his car guaranteed he was angry. The more Pizza Face looked at the damage, the more that he thought about it, the more he would begin to realize he should have climbed out and pulverized Doug's head when Doug first swung that light. When would it happen? Would Honhorst show up at night? Or would he be waiting when Doug got back from the hike? Could Doug depend on Wolfgang to help him in a fight? He'd always thought of Wolfgang as protection, but why hadn't Wolfy raised Cain when Honhorst appeared in the driveway earlier? Wolfgang always growled and carried on when anyone got near the property.
Brushing himself off, Doug realized he wanted to go anywhere but home right now. He headed north at a brisk pace, crossed a barbed wire fence, and began to walk across snow-dusted range grass toward where Highway 30 cut through farm land a mile and a half to the west. All the while, a nagging thought about his four-legged buddy rummaged through his mind. Why hadn't Wolfy become aroused when Honhorst drove into the driveway? Maybe, Doug wondered, Honhorst had somehow stolen the dog’s allegiance. Maybe Yvette had helped Honhorst get to Wolfgang behind Doug's back—the same way that cheating Jezebel had done everything else behind his back. Maybe now at night, Wolfy would just let Honhorst break in and catch Doug in helpless sleep. Or maybe after the hike, Honhorst would be waiting outside the house and Wolfgang would run with wagging tail right up to him. Is that it? Is that the way everything in this world worked—with treachery? Would even his dog sell him out? Wasn’t that what happened with the first Wolfy, the one way back when in high school? If the first Wolfgang hadn’t been loyal, why would its namesake be loyal?
Doug stopped and looked at his dog. Wolfy, as if on cue, trotted up and slipped through Doug's legs from the front, turned and came through from the back in a game they'd played since he was a pup, only now Wolfgang had to lower his head to fit Doug’s inseam. Then, sitting and staring at Doug with those soft brown eyes, he seemed to offer assurance that he was still faithful pack mate to his alpha male.
“No,” Doug said, smiling. “You'd never sell me out.”
Looking west, Doug aimed the camera and played with the optical zoom, scanning to where grass and bitterbrush range met with cultivated farmland. He figured that would be a good point to hike to before turning north, which should eventually take them to a gravel crossroad cutting between River Road and Highway 30. He'd decide then whether to return home via River Road or retrace his steps back across the range. Whichever, it was good to just walk in the thin snow, to feel the crisp air on his face and watch his dog range like its pack ancestors. Letting the camera dangle from his neck, he set off west about a half mile, down into a creek bed, then headed up a shallow gully toward a wooded area of scraggly elm and Russian olive. Now they were only about fifty yards from where he planned to turn north. Doug caught a breath, held it, then made twin billows of steam exit his nose. Not much wind, he thought, the steam drifting lazily out and up.