Chapter 9 Taking Rastafarian to Wyoming
Musical theme, New Rising Sun by Jimi Hendrx
Dave laid down in the sleeper. He had the sensation that she was driving too fast. “Be safe, Jainie.’
“Sure, Dave.”
He heard the gears shifting smoothly. She had to do it well, he thought. She was trying to impress a man who had showed her how to shift without the clutch, with one fingertip on the shift lever. He thought about flicking the shifter from 5th to 6th, which is in the same place as first, but you hit the range button on the way through neutral. He had done the whole shift with one finger on the range button, pushing at just the right moment. She was Jainie. What she had seen, she had to do herself. He had done it showing her that you didn’t need force on the shifter; that it was all about gear speeds. She had seen it, and known that it was not just gear speeds, but magnificent skill and timing, and so she had to do it, too. Something not one out of a dozen truckers could do. You could predict a lot of things about her. If you put your head in the lion’s mouth, she had to do it, too. ‘Do as I say’ was the most inane line in the entire litany of cliché’s. She would do what he did, and try to do it just like he had. Of course she wanted to work the Clarissa Marlene. She probably wanted to be a sniper, too. He drove down some horrible visions of her wounded like some he had seen.
He was struggling with an integral. He kept trying trig substitutions, but they didn’t work. Why couldn’t he use the sine of theta? It was not coming out.
“Dave. Dave. We’re in Colorado. Dave, are you all right?”
He opened his eyes, alarmed by the terror in her voice. “Jainie, what’s wrong?”
“I thought something happened to you.” Her tears were falling all over his face.
“I’m fine, honey. I just, I had this dream where I was trying to solve an integral, but everything I tried didn’t work. That’s all it was.”
“A mathematical nightmare.”
“That’s all it was.”
She was holding him against herself. She was wearing a soft wool sweater now. He could feel tears dropping onto him still. “I’m fine, honey, nothing is wrong.”
“You had a nightmare in integral calculus.”
“That’s all it was.”
“I’m sorry, honey. Your eye makeup is all smeared.’
She wiped her face with a towel. “I couldn’t see you in this light, and I thought something bad had happened.”
“It didn’t. I’m fine.”
“You’d better be.” Trying for her old bravado. “Do you know how hard it is to find a mathematician who knows what tintinnabulation is?”
“Isaac Newton probably did.”
“But he died in?”
“1727, I think.”
“Another perfect match for Danielle.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“She wants you.”
“I understand men wanting my place, but I don’t understand why women want yours. A girl with your looks could get someone better looking than me in about 15 seconds.”
“It’s because they know I must have a mathematician who knows what tintinnabulation is. Since there hasn’t been one since 1727, it follows that they have to get mine away from me. Now if you’re ready to fend off all those Victoria’s Secret models, we can go in.”
He opened the refrigerator door, and saw there was no milk. “Well, I want some milk, anyway. Are you ready to sleep?”
“No. My adrenaline is too high for me to sleep for the next few hours. I’ll wake you up, maybe in Wyoming.”
She looked at herself in a mirror. “Well, I guess I look all right. Let’s go inside.’
“I like going inside.”
“If you had a round in the chamber, I would ask you, but it’s too soon.”
They went in the store, and Jainie went to the fuel desk. Dave got a gallon of milk, and some pistachio nuts. Jainie said she just sort of liked them, but if they were around, she ate them. Dave thought they were probably no worse than most of the things she ate. He went back to the truck, and put one of Marti’s tacos in the truck’s microwave. He looked back at the store, and there were two masked men holding it up. Dave reached under the seat, and pulled out Jainie’s Colt Kodiak. He walked into the store, and shot each robber once in the head. He put the Colt in his hip pocket, and found Jainie. He took her out to the truck. He started to pull out of the lot, and police cars were all around him. He opened the truck door, and held his hands out.
“Step out of the truck.”
He did.
“Are you armed?”
“In my right back pocket.”
“Put your hands up against the truck, feet back and spread them.”
He did so, and was handcuffed.
They put him in the back of a police car and took him to jail. The only thing he said was “I am former law enforcement, and request protective custody.”
They put him in administrative segregation. He did not speak to anyone. In the morning, they brought him out to talk to a detective.
“I’m detective Giles Neddis. I’m interested in how you came to be at this store at this time, and why you shot those two bandits. It was some very good shooting. I don’t have anything to link you to them, but before I let you go, I want to be sure you are not involved in some way.”
Dave did not say anything.
He turned, and cursed. “Krystal Lanaie.”
“Detective Neddis, I represent this man, and insist that you cease to attempt to engage him in conversation.”
“All right.”
“I would like to speak with my client.”
Detective Neddis walked away.
“Dave, I need to know what is going on.”
He said nothing.
“I’m your attorney.”
He still did not speak.
Detective Neddis came back. “We’re releasing him.”
When they finally did, Dave walked out to the street. A young black man asked him if he was Dave. Dave did not answer. The Baby drove up, and he got in. “Don’t ever say anything to anyone about this, Jainie. Don’t ever ask me about it, either.”
She nodded, and drove on. She pulled into a truck stop, and they went in to pee. They bought some coffee, and came out. Dave motioned her over to the outside unit of a refrigeration unit.
“I’m going to tell you some things, hypothetically, just so you understand what you are not going to know. Face the wall.”
“You work for some kind of spy agency.”
“No. Don’t ask questions, all right?”
She nodded.
“We’re standing next to this unit because it makes white noise. You can’t usually listen in on someone when there is a lot of white noise. The Baby could be bugged. I doubt it, but there is no reason to take chances.”
He held up his hand to stop the question. “Suppose you and I and Danielle worked for an alphabet soup agency. You are going to give her something to give to someone else. I have a top secret clearance, trusted employee for 30 years. What do you tell me?”
“Whatever you ask.”
“No. What I need to know, and nothing else. You tell Danielle to give this thing to someone who will be recognized by a code phrase or something. She gives it to him, she does not know what it is, and she does not ask or speculate. If he shows up on the store’s video, she throws the tape in the incinerator. She never tells anyone anything. You don’t even tell me that she works for the same agency you and I do. If some bad guys come and want to know your business, they don’t bother me, because they know you would not have told me anything. If there is a leak, you know it is not me because I did not know.
“Military guys sometimes get told to do something, they don’t know why, and they don’t ask. And then down the line, other things might happen that have something to do with the past that never happened, and they don’t know anything, they don’t tell anyone anything, and they don’t ask. If you are in a situation where something like that could be going on, then you do that. And if there is something that could get someone charged with a major felony, and you don’t want that happening, then you don’t say anything, you don’t tell anyone anything, you don’t ask, you don’t know, you don’t speculate, and you don’t keep anything around that might be evidence of anything.”
“Hypothetically speaking, someone might have left fingerprints on a Colt.”
“When I clean guns, I use throwaway latex gloves to keep that yucky Hoppe’s smell off my hands. When I load one, it stands to reason I am still wearing them. So this hypothetical person’s fingerprints would not have been on the Colt, or the ammo, not that this person, to my knowledge, ever touched it anyway. I don’t know where it came from, and I do not want to know. I invoke my fifth amendment right not to say anything to anyone, ever.
“Some guy named Dale Gordon shot a couple of robbers at a truck stop in Colorado.”
“When you don’t know anything, you’re the perfect spokesman. Probably someone who doesn’t know this Dale guy told some reporter all about it. Hypothetically. We don’t know, because we were never at that truck stop, nor will we ever be.”
“The cops would have taken the surveillance tapes.”
“I imagine. They might have lost them, though. I mean, if this Dale Gordon guy was, you know, an ex-military guy or something like that. Hypothetically.”
“We never had this conversation?”
“Of course we did. We just happened to be facing the wall, and nobody could read lips, and we were next to that unit, so nobody heard us. We were talking about Rastafarian.”
“We should check on him.”
“Yeah.”
Rasta was fine. Jainie gave him some water, and also the cows. Dave split a bale of wheat between them. Rasta rolled his eyes at Dave.
“He is still afraid of you.”
“As well he should be.”
“It isn’t his fault.”
“You believe in personal responsibility. So you can’t say something isn’t his fault.”
“He can change.”
“Your sweet love will redeem him and make of him a new and different horse. Or he will hurt you, and I will hurt him.”
“Sometimes I don’t really know you.”
“Anyone worth knowing is complex enough that there is always new stuff to find in there.”
“That Dale Gordon. Why do you suppose he went in with that gun?”
“It said his sister was being threatened by the robbers.”
“His sister?”
“It was in the paper. It must be right.”
“Well, I think we have talked enough about that story.”
“Then let’s go to Wyoming.”
She opened the driver’s door. “Slide on over. I’m still driving.”
He did.
“If you could be anything you wanted to be, what would it be?”
“A Quasar.”
“A television set?”
“An astronomical object. They might be 100 million times the mass of the sun. They throw out energy like nothing else. Some astronomers think they are black holes, and the radiation is from an ‘accretion disk’ of stuff being sucked in. I don’t believe in black holes myself, although I concede the math works.”
She put the truck in gear. They pulled out of the truck stop. “I was thinking more on the lines of if you could be a human, doing something.”
“I would want to be with you, honey. Doing something. We could come up with something better than bull hauling.”
“What would it be?”
“Maybe at sea. I’d like to run a little coaster. A ship that runs up and down the coast. I don’t know if you can make a living doing something like that any more.”
“We could do it if it didn’t go way in the red. We don’t need to make any money, but I’m against losing it, of course.”
“What will become of your money when we’re gone?”
“Our money. Danielle and Marcie are lined out with some payable on death brokerage accounts and stuff like that. I hold the mortgage on the house, and it’s forgiven on my death. Marcie hasn’t paid in years, but she got me some real nice rags.”
“Designer dresses and such?”
“Lots of the clients don’t want the dress back after the photo shoot. One of them told me ‘we are not in the business of selling used clothes, madam.’”
“You wear the same size?”
She seemed to be blushing. “We’re the same height, but she’s a little slimmer than me.”
“You’re pretty slim. Sleek. If I’d had you custom made, you would look just about the way you do, with that wonderful hair, and those cobalt blue eyes.”
She took an off ramp. She stopped the truck. She threw her arms around him, and kind of burrowed in close, squirming around until she was as close as she could get. Her cheek was against his neck. “Keep telling me those things.” She disengaged, and put the truck back in gear, and went up the on ramp and back on to the highway.
“I’m insecure about my looks.”
“You’re about even with the best looking woman I ever saw in a centerfold. So why should you be insecure about your looks?”
“I don’t know. Marcie is, too. It might have to do with getting turned down for modeling jobs. They get 30 beautiful women, and look them over and pick one. The other 29 think their neck is too long or something.”
“They do good when they get picked, though.”
“They do. Marcie’s best gig this year was a weekend photo shoot in the Bahamas. All expenses paid. What do you suppose her fee was?”
“Three thousand.”
She laughed. “Fourty.”
“Wow.”
“Here is one for your record book. An executive at an advertising agency wanted to hire her for the night.”
“I suppose that goes on.”
“It does. She said no, in spite of the fact is, she sleeps around kind of a lot. I mean, I don’t want to run my cousin down, but she likes to play under the sheets. What do you think he offered her?”
“A thousand bucks.”
“He offered her ten. Can you imagine making ten thousand dollars on your back in one night?”
“Shucks. You could get me for that times ten to the minus five.”
“That ‘you’ better just mean me, personally.”
“That’s who it means.”
“Well, that’s good. Now, my mathematician, explain this ten to the minus five.”
“Well, ten to the first power is ten. Ten to the second is 100. Ten to the minus one is one tenth, so ten to the minus fifth is ten five times as the denominator of the fraction. That is, one one hundred thousandth. Ten cents.”
“Is that negotiable?”
“We can discuss that when we park the truck for the night.”
“We may as well go all the way to the ranch. I probably will be tired before we get there, but you can take it for a few hours.”
“I could take it for ten.”
“Well, get back there and rest, and be ready, pampered kitty that you are.”
“Pampered kitty? The Ship’s cat works for a living.”
“Meow at someone else about that. Get back there and rest your eyes. You can still try your wit at me.”
“You like that.”
“I like it as much as you do.”
He laid down in the sleeper. “I’m resting my eyes.”
“That’s good. The ship’s cat has pieces missing from his ears, claw marks and all that. I know he needs to rest.”
“He isn’t decrepit, though.”
“Oh, no, not that. At the ambush, what I saw took my breath away. Really. You’re a real rough and hard kind of handsome, but I like that. You ain’t no pretty boy, for sure. Tom Cruise is a thousand times prettier than you probably ever were. But I don’t think he could last 15 seconds against you in a fist fight. I like how hard you look. I like it a lot.”
“Wow.”
“You’re more of a Clint Eastwood kind of character to me. Like, I could see you picking up a gun and going to settle things with the bad guys.” She looked back at him, and he pointed at his eyes, then his lips. Watch what you say.
“Who is your favorite actor?”
He hummed. “I guess Charles Bronson. I like Clint a lot, too, especially for the Man With No Name trilogy. I realized, watching those, how good Sergio Leone is, and how directing can come through in a movie. Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone. It doesn’t get better than that. Sharon Stone, not only beautiful, but a really first rate actress. Halle Berry. She was really awesome in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. I liked Catwoman, too, but. Calista Flockhart. If I couldn’t have you, she would be my second choice. Lucy Liu. Jackie Chan for his incredible stunt work. How about you?
“Henry Fonda and Kurt Russell. Chuckie B. coming right along in there.”
“Favorite movie?”
“I bet you know.”
“So do I. Once upon a Time in the West.”
“I like Julia Roberts. I wish I was as sexy as her.”
“Julia Roberts is hot, but she’s a full thousand degrees short of you.”
“Nah.”
“Certainly 500.”
She giggled. “Harrison Ford. I thought he was as good as they come right up until the ambush.”
“Arnold?”
“He’s fun, but compared to Henry Fonda, he is no actor at all.”
“Not many people are. Fonda should have been elected in 1980. If the people wanted an actor, they should have gotten a good one.”
“Reagan did B movies because there was no such a thing as C.” She hissed.
He sighed. “Last good president we had was FDR.”
“Unfortunately, you’re right. Truman was sorta kinda ok.”
A really bad driver tried to go around the truck on the right.
“Lose some speed. Stay away from him, Jainie!”
She lost some speed. The car went onto the shoulder, then came back into the lane where the truck had been. It continued in the lane without much control.
“Lose ten miles an hour, honey.”
She did it.
Cars zipped past her, some honking their horns.
“Call the cops.”
“I don’t like them.”
“Fergawdsake! He jumped up, and took the CB handset. “Smoky, if you have your ears on, we have an out of control goofball in a yellow four wheeler northbound just past milepost 121.”
“Smoky here, on the way. Please identify yourself.”
Dave tripped the mike button several times. “Breaking up.” He said, then he hung up the mike, and stepped back into the sleeper.
“Make your speed 45, Jainie. We will argue later.”
She slowed to 45, and a State Police car ripped by them doing at least 100. The CB squawked ‘Brake check.” Jainie slowed down some more.
“Take the exit.”
She did.
“Pull into the TA. We’ll get some fuel and eat. No point in being up on the highway in the Staters’ way. We’ll look for a back road way around the accident.”
“You don’t know there is one.”
“There is, honey.”
They parked and went toward the store, Jainie in the lead, because Dave had been putting his shoes back on. A biker type guy accosted Jainie. Dave trotted up. “Don’t touch her.” He said.
The biker type guy smiled. ‘Or what?”
Dave stared at him.
The guy stepped back. “Just fooling around.”
“I’m sorry if I got the wrong idea.”
“No, man, just funning.”
“OK, then we got no problem.”
They went in to the fuel desk to get the pump turned on, and Dave left to turn the fuel on. He nodded to the biker type guy, who avoided his eyes. When the tank was full, Dave went back in. The guy was gone.
Janie came over to him. “You were really mad.”
“I’ll get over it.”
They paid at the fuel desk, and bought some snack foods. ‘Dave, we still have some of Marta’s stuff, and the milk you bought.”
“Then we’re good.”
As they came out the guy was there with a friend, but they just sat on their bikes. Dave took the wheel of the Baby. As they pulled out of the fuel island, the bikes left, going the other way. Jainie sighed in relief.
“I thought something was going to happen.”
“So did I.”
“He looked at you, changed his mind. What were you going to do if he did something to me?”
He didn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought. Just asking.”
He stopped for a moment and looked at the battered remains of a Rand McNalley truckers’ atlas. He put it back, and pulled out of the truck stop, heading away from the highway. He took the first turn North, and wound his way through some river country. He came out a few miles later, and then turned back toward the highway. He took an on ramp, and they were back on the highway.
“Would you put one of Marti’s tacos in the microwave for me, Jainie?”
“So you do speak.” She put the taco in.
“You have never had someone like that do something to you.”
“Wrong. My stepfather did it when I was a child.”
“He is still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Just like that?”
“Yes.”
She handed him the taco. “I don’t think of things like you do, Dave.”
“No.”
He checked the instruments and mirrors, then opened the taco. “You wanted a lion. You don’t understand why your lion does not want you to go off doing dangerous things. That’s the only thing you don’t like about me. Why does the king of the Serengeti object to his lioness running around doing dangerous things? So far as my looks, you don’t so much care. That’s why you’re with an older man. You say I am handsome in a rough sort of way. The rough part is what you like. You would have loved to see me rip that hyena at the truck stop to pieces. And I almost did. Why wouldn’t you think I know payback is a motherfucker?
“I can’t believe you would say that to me, Dave.”
“Not ‘I don’t want to do anything like that.’”
“I don’t. Dave, I don’t want the lion loose. My former stepfather will make his own fate. I would kind of like you to shred him, but I would never let you do it. What you did with the hyena was perfect. Let someone else kill him somewhere else.”
He pulled into a truck stop. She jumped on him with one leg on each side, awkwardly sitting on him. She gripped him with all her strength. “Please, Dave, let me have my mathematician back! The lion is too scary. I don’t want anyone torn to pieces, even if they deserve to be!”
“OK, honey.”
She got off him. “Can I take my mathematician into the truck stop, get a cup of coffee, and put everything back like it was? We’ll hold hands like sweethearts. We’re still sweethearts, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, we are.”
She got a 64 ounce insulated cup. “This is all we need, isn’t it? I’ll put lots of milk in it like you like. And then everything will be back right?”
“Everything will be back right.”
They went into the store with her holding his left hand in her left, as close as she could manage behind him, the 64 ounce cup in her right hand, as she tried to hold him with that hand, too. She was in limpet mode.
They went into the store, and she took the cup, and washed it in a little sink by the coffee machines. She filled it with coffee, and put in a lot of half and half. She made sure the top was closed, and then went to Dave, who was talking with a woman considerably older than Jainie.
“This is my wife, Jainie. Jainie, this is Sue Ann. Sue Ann runs a quarry that is only about 40 miles from our ranch. She can supply us with gravel at some pretty good prices, and she has a slam banger we could use.” Sue Ann gave Jainie her card. “I’d like to sell you a few dozen loads before the weather shuts us down. Dave has driven slam bangers, and he says you have the angel touch on the gears. It’s a match made in heaven.”
“Jainie will need to get a doubles endorsement is all. She has a regular Class A with air brake endorsement, of course.
“This is so great. When you guys get back from Kansas, you have to come over and have dinner at the quarry.”
“Do you have an old school det?” He motioned with both hands.
“I have everything dating back to the invention of dynamite, Dave.”
“Jainie wants to use one of those.”
“Hon, how would you like to blow up a half million tons of rock next week?”
“That would be so cool.”
“Well, there is three thousand pounds of plastic on that truck over there. I’m going to load it this week, and you can shoot it about 10 days from now.”
“Half a million tons of rock?”
“You’re going to blow the side of a mountain away.”
“Wow! We’ll be there.”
They got back in the Baby, and headed for the ranch, Jainie too excited to let Dave drive.
“I’m going to blow the side of a mountain off! Half a million tons of rock.”
Dave thought about it. Three thousand pounds of plastic. That would be a massive shot, no doubt. If Sue Ann was firing straight plastic, she was going to shatter a lot of real hard rock. The shot would not look like what Jillian imagined, but she would probably brag on it for ten years anyway. There would be a puff of dust, then a kind of crump sound. Then the dust would be all over the place, and a half million tons of shattered rock would slump into the quarry.
They headed down the highway. “Dave, what’s the difference between plastic and dynamite?”
“Plastic has a much higher expansion rate. If she was shooting to move material, she would be using amfo. If she was shooting stumps, she’d be using dynamite. What she is doing is blowing hard rock to shattered rock. So she is going to hit it hard and fast. Awesome power unloaded in microseconds. The whole side of the mountain will be shattered in a thousandth of a second. Then it will slide down into the quarry.”
“Why is she let