Maelstrom

A Novel

CHAPTER 1

Gus Willard throws the heavy hydraulic jack into the back of the pickup and spits in the dirt.  “Goddamn sheet-rock screw.  Now what the hell is something like that doing out here?  Forty years of drivin’ around the prairie, and that’s gotta be a first.”  With a gloved finger, he takes a perfunctory dig at the offending piece of metal stuck in the tire-tread, and spits again.

Remington Brandt obviously takes the question as a rhetorical one, because he ignores him and dumps the flat tire into the bed.   Then, he walks around the front of the old Dodge truck, climbs into the cab on the passenger side and slams the door. 

Gus watches him glance through the back window at the big fifth-wheel trailer they’re towing, settle into the dilapidated seat, and then take out a big blue bandana to mop his neck.  “Kids,” he mutters, then yanks open the driver-side door and grunts his way behind the wheel.  “Any coffee left in the jug?” 

Gus is a large man with a solid-looking, square-jawed face and hands whose size would more suit a gorilla.  He lifts a battered felt hat off his head with one hand, and wipes the sweatband inside with the other.  “That sun’s enough to blister a lizard.”  He claps his hat back on and settles it around his ears with a firm tug on the brim.  Then, with a weary puff, he switches on the ignition, waits a second for the start-light to come on, and fires up the diesel engine.  “Well, ya gonna shake that Thermos or not?” he grumbles as he stabs the A/C MAX button on the heater control panel.

Rem snorts.  Young, tall and lanky, he seems to be all legs when sitting in the cab.  He reaches under the seat for the stainless-steel jug and shakes his head as he clamps the sage-green container between his thighs.  Deftly, he removes the thoroughly-dented cap, unscrews the stopper, and a few seconds later, hands Gus a nearly full cup of steaming coffee.  “Don’t make no sense, coffee when it’s hot enough to make a pot on the hood of the truck.”  After re-closing the Thermos, he toes open the red-and-white six-pack cooler between his feet and retrieves a can of Pepsi.  With an imperious sniff, he snaps open the top, and quickly drains over half the can.

“Good cup of mud’s better’n that sweet crap yer suckin’ down,” Gus says.  He takes a long, hissing slurp of coffee.  “’Sides that, the hot stuff fools the body into b’lievin’ it’s not the scorcher ya think it is.  That way ya need to sweat less.”

He chuckles mentally as Rem wrinkles his nose and curls his upper lip.  “Say what?  That’s gotta be the dumbest damn thing ever said.”

“Bull shit.”  Gus says it as two distinct words.  “Dumbest thing ever said was the boss sayin’ you was hired.  All I needed was a greenhorn to look after all summer.”  He blows air across the cup and takes another drink.

“Ya know, Gus, you’re right.  That was one of my life’s dumbest moments.  Just think, if he’d only thought about for another day, just twenty-four lousy hours, I’d be home in the cool green hills of Washington, spraying apples, or workin’ on a dairy.  Instead?”  He sweeps his hand broadly across the dashboard.  “I got this.  Mountains with no trees, the Lost River—and why not—it ain’t got no water, ground so dry grasshoppers can’t spit, and YOU!”  He punches Gus on the shoulder.

“Goddammit,” Gus howls as hot coffee sloshes down his red and black, checkered shirt.  “You wannna wear the rest of this?  Damn moron.”  He pinches a bit of cloth between his fingers, pulls the wet shirt away from his skin and glares at the skinny kid grinning back.  Giving the cup another quick puff, he empties it and is about to set it on the dash when he catches something out of the corner of his right eye.  Looking to the east, past Rem, he studies it; eyes narrowed and squinted.  

“What?” Rem’s smirk fades away.

“Look over there.”  Gus gestures east with the empty cup.  “Somethin’ odd goin’ on.”

Rem shifts in the seat and looks out the window.  “Dust devil?” he asks, but the tone of his voice doesn’t convey a question.

“Not shaped like that.”  Gus leans forward to better see past Rem.  “Sumbitch is straight-sided as a beer can.”

“It’s gettin’ bigger as we sit here.”  Rem opens his door and gets out of the truck.

A few seconds later, Gus is out and hurries around the front to stand beside him.  “How far away, ya think?” he asks.

“Three, maybe three and a half miles.  Seems to be moving north—towards the highway.”

“Can we beat it to Jack’s Place at Hawes Junction?”  Gus shades his eyes with his hand.

“Why bother?”

“It seems to be movin’ that way.  What if it changes direction?”

“Why would it?”

“I ain’t gonna get caught in a sandstorm.  Been there, done that–twice.”  Gus turns on his heel and quickly rounds the nose of the pickup.  “Git in ‘er git left,” he shouts across the hood.  A second later, he climbs behind the wheel, grinds the transmission into second gear, and releases the clutch.

Rem barely gets his feet inside as the rapid acceleration slams his door with a crash.  “Christ, Gus, it ain’t like it’s gonna chase us there.”

“Oh, yeah?  Look.”  The big cowman tilts his head toward the windshield.

“Holy shit, it turned.  Step on it, Gus.”       

*          *          *          *

Heading due west, the tires protest with a double-thwack sound as they slap across yet another patch in the worn asphalt.  Porter Gentry likes to drive fast and pushes the sand-colored Cadillac Escalade hard across the deserted, treeless landscape.  He’s an athletic-looking man of medium build, whose blue eyes are hidden behind a pair of Oakley sunglasses.  Clean-shaven, his smooth skin belies fifty-seven years of life, as does his full head of dark brown hair.

Some five or six miles ahead, barren foothills merge into the equally stark mountains behind.  The highway dips in and out of shimmering mirage, snaking left and right as if to escape the relentless sun that hangs directly above.  From the road ahead, his gaze moves quickly to the rear-view mirror, drops down to scan the instrument panel, and then briefly surveys the surrounding countryside.  “I wonder if this place ever gets any rain.  I doubt it,” he muses to himself.  At that moment, he senses someone looking at him and glances at his passenger.

Candace Carswell is seven years his junior and her athletic figure still draws the attention of the twenty-something crowd; openly lecherous stares from the men and covert, envious looks from the women.  “I don’t know why you insist on taking these back-roads.”  She sounds mildly irritated but there’s also a faintly fearful undertone.

  Porter looks at her and grins.  “Three hundred miles in a straight line is not my idea of seeing the country.  I hate freeways.  Besides that, when I looked on the map, I wondered what they did out here.”

“Like they’re going to ask you to come on in and take a look?  Have you forgotten about those little signs stuck in the ground like lemon lollipops, the ones that say ‘Do Not Enter’?  And how about Sylvester Stallone in the forest-fairy gear standing by that parked patrol-car we passed?  He was armed to the teeth.”  She folds her arms and lets out an exasperated sigh.

The warning markers she refers to are set about twenty yards back from the edge of the highway.  Small rectangles about twelve inches wide and eight high, they’re spaced about a hundred yards apart.  He knows that because he’d stopped soon after passing a billboard-sized sign that informed them they were entering a federal reservation and that remaining on the road was imperative.  Not exactly those words, but that was the gist; that, and an admonition to drive safely.  As soon as he’d climbed out of the Caddy, a feeling he’d nearly forgotten settled over him; that slightly breathless sensation that comes when you’re doing something wrong—and know it.  He’d glanced up and down the deserted highway, and then walked over to see exactly what the signs said. 

The wording on the boundary marker had been clear enough, complete with several official-looking regulatory citations that probably gave them the right to shoot him dead if he stepped across that invisible demarcation line.  His mouth slightly dry, he’d scurried back to the car, his haste almost an embarrassment.  The hint of a smirk on Candace’s face only added to his discomfort.  Before ducking into the air-conditioned chill of the SUV, he looked out across the arid prairie at the uniformly gray buildings shifting eerily in the distance.  One had the distinctive shape of a nuclear-reactor containment dome and another looked like an enormous airplane hangar.  A hangar with no runway in sight?  Just what the hell did they do out there in the middle of nowhere?

Porter writes novels, and has always made it a point to live in, or at least tour extensively, the locale where his stories take place.  That tenet has taken him all over the United States and to a dozen foreign countries, and now has him on his way to Nevada, and currently driving across a desolate patch of Southeast Idaho.  He and Candace live in a secluded log house in the north-central mountains of the state where she paints and sculpts, quite successfully of late, while he scribbles out his fantasies, which have not sold as well as they used to.  They were married to each other for nearly ten years but the formality of that arrangement seemed to stifle them both, so they divorced.  The divorce  seems to have worked, because in the twenty years since they’d lived together quite happily.  Together—happily—till now.  Like all fires that burn a long time, the one that warmed their relationship needed some more fuel.  He was acutely conscious of it, but was having a hard time deciphering just how Candace felt.  As private with her thoughts as he tended to be, he was hoping that this trip might rekindle something that appeared to be about burned out. 

“Would you try to relax,” he chides.  She rolls the beautiful grey-green eyes that drew him to her in the first place, and pushes an errant stand of soft-brown hair back over her ear.  He still finds her sexy as hell. 

Candace sniffs.  “Show me a Texaco station, or a Wendy’s, or something even vaguely resembling a town, and I’ll consider it.  Until then, I’ll keep my shoulders hunched, thank you very much.  I swear, you should drag a sheep-herder’s wagon behind.”

“It’s not that far across here.  The last sign said thirty miles to Hawes Junction.”

“And listed only one other place, another town I’ve never heard of that probably appears only on old survey maps–of the 1850’s.  You’re insane.”

“Yeah, but ya still love me, don’tcha?”  He scrunches his lips and blows her a noisy smooch.

“Don’t push your luck, cowboy.”  She can’t hide the slight frown.  Suddenly, her eyes are seeing past him and they’ve opened widely. 

He turns his head to look out the window.

“What do you think that is?” she asks.  Her voice is slightly unsteady.

The sight makes him tap his brake to release the cruise, and the car starts to slow.  Out in the desert, a small section of the uniformly dull brown landscape seems to have lifted.  Mirage?  As he switches his eyes from the phenomena, to the road ahead, and back again, whatever “it” is has gotten darker and gained elevation.

“Don’t stop, Porter.”

He touches the brakes lightly, and drifts the car to the right until he feels the offside wheels sag into the gravel shoulder.  By the time he’s maneuvered to a stop, “it” has risen well above the horizon.  How far away?  It’s hard to judge distance out here.  Ten miles?  Give or take ten.   The sound of his key alarm startles him when he pops open the door.  “How far away is that, CC?”

“Not far enough.  Don’t get out.”  She grabs the bottom of his shirtsleeve.  “Please.”

“Just for a minute.”  He pushes the door open and stands up in the furnace-heat of the desert.

The top of the formation has risen a little more and he can see movement.  The cloud, and that’s what it looks like now, a dark, brown cloud, is turning counter-clockwise.  And he can hear it.  At least he thinks he can.  If not hear it, he can feel it in his head.  Carefully touching his front teeth together, he instantly feels a buzzing vibration.

“Porter!  Get in here and let’s turn around.”

“Turn off the engine, CC.”

“What!”

Stooping inside, he switches the Cadillac off, and stands back up.  He lays his hand on the top of the hood and jerks it away from the blistering surface, instead, touching a side window.  The same vibration that he felt in his head is there.  He can see movement now, and it’s coming toward them.  What was once only a small dust-cloud has now grown considerably.  And the sound he thought he could hear?  Now there’s no doubt.  It’s a pulsing, low-frequency hum and it’s growing in intensity as the cloud builds.

The menace is much closer now; he can clearly see that it’s spinning like a top at an incredible speed and it’s headed right for them, rapidly.  Despite the intense heat, he feels a chill, as though someone has opened a giant refrigerator door.  He swallows hard, ducks back into the car, and twists the key.  The powerful V8 catches instantly and he spins the tires in the pea-gravel as he accelerates toward the hills.

“Turn around, Porter.  Get back to the main road.”

“I don’t think I can get around it going back.  Hawes?  That was the name of the town, wasn’t it?  Hawes.  It can’t be more than five or six miles.  We can find a place there to get out of its way.”

Even as he says it, he has absolutely no confidence.  He’s seen tornadoes in Oklahoma, cyclones in Bangladesh and hurricanes in Cuba, but never anything like this.  Supported by nothing above, it doesn’t have the familiar funnel shape.  This is a massive rotating cylinder about a quarter mile across and not more than a couple thousand feet high.  In a cloudless sky, on a calm day, this maelstrom formed, and in a matter of minutes, has grown to the monster he sees out his window.  It simply sprang up from an empty desert.  Empty, except for maybe something he can’t see, something protected by little yellow signs, the sheer vastness of the high desert and a single camo-garbed man with a black rifle.  He glances at the speedometer and grips the steering wheel more firmly as the indicator approaches 120.

CHAPTER 2

Aaron Hollister sits with a friend at a worn linoleum-covered counter and watches Jack, the tavern owner, scrape an old blackened grill with an equally old spatula.  The way Aaron understands the story, corn had kicked Jack Olsen’s ass the last time some twenty years before, and he’d learned to live with his addiction by being where the whiskey wasn’t.  Hence, Jack’s Place, the only commercial establishment for thirty miles in any direction.  It isn’t much: a drab clapboard affair that appears to lean into the hillside for support.  It’s the only building at Hawes Junction where the narrow, paved secondary state highway coming west, turns south, and a dusty gravel road follows a canyon that wends north.  The interior of Jack’s is hot and sticky, the effects of a lethargic swamp-cooler blowing tepid, damp air through a lint-laden grill in the ceiling.

Jack’s exact age is hard to guess.  About six feet tall, he’s slim, with an angular face topped by a head full of sand-colored hair.  He has alert, bright, hazel eyes, but the color of his weathered skin is an unhealthy-looking gray.  When he moves around behind the bar, it’s obviously painful to use his right leg.  He chases off a fly that’s buzzing around the grill and turns to watch it land on the bar.  Nonchalant, he grabs one end of his bar towel between thumb and forefinger, and with a quick flick of his wrist, turns the insect into a bloody smear on the counter.

“Aw, God, Jack, now throw that towel in the dirty-dish tray.”  The young man sitting next to Aaron wrinkles his nose in disgust, and looks at him.  He’s the same age as Aaron, twenty-six, and is dressed alike as well: hiking-boots, dusty jeans and a sleeveless tee shirt that exposes tanned and muscular arms. 

Aaron snorts.   “What?  C’mon McCoy, after only one measly fly.  I’ll betcha lunch you can’t find the spot on that towel that offed the pesky bug.”  He raises a challenging eyebrow.

Jack chuckles and inspects the end of the stained dingy-white cloth.  “Aaron’s right.  Clean as a whistle.”  He uses the spatula to smash two hamburger patties on the grill.

“Aaron is not right and he knows it,” McCoy says adamantly.  “Flies are unsanitary, notoriously so.”

Aaron nods at Jack and grins.  “And all this time I thought his degree was in geology.  But—I hasten to add—that’s a Berkeley degree.”

“And I suppose the one you claim you earned in physics at Washington is a better one?” McCoy says.

Aaron forces a smirk.  “Only a Berkeley grad would doubt it.”

“If I didn’t know you two yahoos, I’d say you couldn’t stand each other,” Jack says.  He flips the two patties over and settles a bun on each.

“I only take him on these field trips for his strong back,” McCoy replies and gives Aaron a sly wink.

“Sure ya do,” Aaron says.  “He who has to use a magnifying glass to identify gneiss.”

“You guys finally doing any good up there?” Jack asks.

“Getting real close to the good stuff,” McCoy answers.  “In the second ravine to the right, about half a mile up that creek-bed you told us about.  You sure have a handle on that country up there, and we appreciate you telling us about it.”

Jack sniffs derisively.  “Busted my ass for nearly twenty-five years as a game warden ‘round here—for what that’s worth.  Yep, I’ve seen most of it.”

McCoy clears his throat.  “Ya know, Jack, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Uh-huh, “ Jack responds without turning around. 

“Well, if you knew there might be silver up there, why didn’t you stake out a claim for yourself?”

Jack turns around and grins at them.  “And what makes you think I didn’t?”

Aaron looks at McCoy and sees in his face exactly what he himself is thinking.

Jack’s wide smile turns into a burst of laughter.  “I had a general idea, but I needed some smart young pups to sniff out exactly where.  Appears you’ve done that.”

Aaron continues to look at McCoy for several seconds and then chuckles.  “We’ve been had.”

“Seems so,” McCoy replies, shaking his head.  “We looked for the white poles, Jack.  You had to mark the claim.”  He’s obviously hoping.

“Two rocks, one stacked atop the other.  That’s all that’s needed and that’s all I did.  I own that wash all the way to the top.”

Aaron sighs deeply.  “McCoy?”

“Technically, he’s right.”

“I’m a physicist, you’re the mineral expert.”

“Not fair, Jack,” McCoy says.  “Not fair and you know it.”

“I waited all summer to hear an offer to share in anything you guys might find based on the pointers I give ya.  Now tell me what’s fair and what ain’t.”

“We were going to,” Aaron says but can’t meet Jack’s eyes.

“You young folks has got yer priorities all screwed up.”  Jack turns around and expertly flips first one burger, and then the other onto a pair of plates he’s readied with a slice of tomato, some lettuce and a long pickle spear.  Placing the second half of the bun beside each patty, he sets the dishes in front of them, adds two packs of potato chips, and steps back.  “There, eat, and then we’ll talk about what’s fair.  Want a beer with that?”

“Coors if ya got it,” McCoy replies.

“I got it.”

“Full Sail for me,” Aaron says and chuckles at Jack’s blank stare.  “Didn’t think you’d have it.  Coors is fine.  Can we buy you one?”

“Nope.  Can’t stand the stuff.  Told ya, I’m an alcoholic, and besides, beer always reminds me of a real drink that once was.”  He chuckles at his own joke, pulls two tall bottles out of the cooler, and pries the tops off.  “There ya go, yer all set.”

Feeling a little sheepish, Aaron is just about to pick up his burger when he hears the sound of wheels sliding in gravel out front.  Swiveling around, he and McCoy watch the door until it opens and four men come in. 

Bare-headed, they are dressed identically in khaki clothes and all four carry a holstered pistol in a well-appointed service belt.  Dark glasses hide their eyes.  Two of them move to the right.  One of them stands out; he moves almost furtively, his slim, lithe body seeming to glide over the floor, and his head jerks quickly from side to side as he examines the room—a predator.  The larger of the two on the left, obviously the man in charge, points at them.  “Stay right where you’re at, gentlemen, and we’ll get along fine.  Jack, come around the front where I can see you.”

McCoy instantly stands up.  “Who the hell do–”

The predator-like one crosses the floor in two quick steps, and before McCoy’s aware he’s there, slaps him on the side of the head with a short leather sap.  Without a sound, McCoy crumples to the floor.

“Lee!” Aaron shouts, and makes a move toward his friend.

The boss-man’s hand drops to the butt of his pistol as he takes half a step toward Aaron.  “Wanna dance, Skippy?”  His right cheek twitches with a nervous tick as he stares at him.  He then turns to Jack.  “We’ve got some visitors coming, Jack.  Visitors we hadn’t expected.  Treat ‘em nice.”  The Boss curtly nods at McCoy’s unconscious form and then addresses the man with the sap, “Get him out of sight and check him for a cell phone.”  The other man on the right comes over to help drag the limp body around behind the bar. 

Aaron can’t stop his teeth from grinding as rage starts to build.  He catches Jack’s eye, and the older man gives his head a barely perceptible shake as the two intruders come around to the front again.  The slim one tosses a set of keys to Boss.  “No phone,” he says and pushes Aaron away from the bar.  Quickly and expertly he pats him down.  “He’s clean,” he says and steps back.