Chapter 10 Leaving Rasta in Wyoming
Musical theme: Chain Reaction by Michael Franks
Jainie kissed Rastafarian’s nose, and walked away from his stall. She came out to the Baby. She walked around the big truck. The trailer was full of cattle. All she needed was her husband. She opened the door of the truck, and stepped up. Dave was in the sleeper, sleeping. She stepped back down, slightly embarrassed. She thought of Nan’s words:
“Girl, you will be lucky if you ever find a good man. There are nowhere near enough to go around. If you do, he looks all right and all, then you stake your claim and you don’t ever let go. Most women will never find a good one, and the chance you let a good one go, and find another good one, it’s more likely you will be struck by lightning. If you are really lucky, you will find a prince. He might be barefoot and wearing jeans with holes in them. But you will know a prince by the way he treats you. If you find a prince, you latch on him like a limpet on a rock. And you thank God every day for sending him to you. Honey, no woman lets loose of a prince and finds another, ever.
Jainie pushed the door to the truck closed gently, just so it latched. She had been pushing Dave too hard. Not just asking him for sex all the time, but driving around in the truck, and wanting him to do one thing and another. He never refused her anything, and she was wearing him out. She went back in the ranch house. She gathered up some things for lunch, and took a gallon of milk out to put in the refrigerator of the Baby. She fiddled with things, and finally went out to the Princess Baby Doll, and put the stuff in the refrigerator. She checked the restraints of the sleeper. She got in the driver’s seat and put the truck in gear. She took off down the driveway, trying to avoid the potholes she intended to fill next week. She got on the highway, and headed south for Emporia, Kansas.
The huge Volvo ate up the miles as they headed south. They came to Colorado, and kept on going. Dave was still sleeping, breathing evenly. So she kept going. Finally, after about 5 hours, she had to pee. She woke Dave up, and went into a truck stop. She got lined out at the fuel desk. Dave had gone in to pee, and back out to the truck. She fueled up, and went in to pay. She filled up her 64 ounce insulated cup and put in the milk Dave liked. She could drink it black, but with a lot of milk, like Dave liked it, was fine too. They had a little coffee maker in the truck, but she didn’t know how to work it. Dave could make any machine do what he wanted, but at least she could drive the truck.
She finally came to IBP, and was assigned a very difficult bay. She backed, and pulled ahead a few times. Dave woke up, put on his shoes, and got out to look. He got behind the wheel and snaked the rig into the very tight spot as if there was nothing to it. He took his shoes back off, and laid down. “You might as well come back and cuddle, Jainie. They are not going to unload us for a while, all these trucks here.”
She came back and lay beside him and he gently caressed her face and neck, kissed her, and took her in his arms. She felt better than she had for a long time. She was being held by her prince. She had one, never mind the rest of the women in the world.
The CB squawked. “Princess Baby Doll, we are ready to unload you.”
Dave put his shoes back on, and went out to deal with trucker things. Jainie had noticed two things about this. Dave always knew what was going on with a precision she lacked, and the receivers liked to look at her, but they didn’t take her very seriously. Dave spoke softly, and immediately had their respect. They treated him like he was General Patton.
They unloaded the cattle, and Dave got a receipt for the weight. He stood alongside the Baby and called in on a cell phone, and got a firm price from the buyer. He wrote the amount, the buyer’s name, and the confirmation number on his receipt. He climbed into the cab, and put the receipt in a zip up binder. “Well, wildcat, we have it all done, and we just got to go to the ranch, unless you want to go to Texas or Louisiana.”
“Let’s go to Texas.”
“South to the Lone Star State.” He took off, and took the highway south. “We only need to get back up to Wyoming in around 10 days. Sue Ann will not want to wait too long for you to blow up the mountain.”
“I’m not missing that.”
Sue Ann was very unlikely to let that happen, Dave thought. She was hoping to sell a lot of rock to Jainie, and Dave was prepared to buy it. The ranch’s major roads would turn to slop without it, and they had bought a motor grader to fix them. Dave was a second rate grader operator, but it was better than nothing. If he could find a real grader operator, the machine could plow snow all winter. Sue Ann was looking at at least 10 slam bangers full of graded rock. She intended to either drive the truck herself, or have Dave do it, which he could. The talk about Jainie driving a slam banger was not very serious. At a minimum, 500 thousand pounds of rock. 250 tons. Dave thought they would probably use 500-700 tons. Sue Ann, like all northern quarry operators, would like to make money in the fall more than any other time of the year, because the quarry would be snowed in in the winter, and it would make no money at all until the roads were plowed in spring.
Sue Ann’s fall harvest would start when she turned about $20,000 worth of plastic and detonators into a magnificent 100 microsecond impulse. By the hour, blasting is pretty expensive. This shot would cost about 200 million dollars a second, or about 720 billion dollars an hour. If it went well, it would produce half a million pounds of smashed up rock, most of which would not even need the crusher to size it. If the shot did not go well, you could write your own scenario, starting with possible boulders in the way of the loaders, and getting worse from there.
When the first part of the shot goes off, it sends a shock wave into the parent rock. The behavior of the next shot is considerably affected by the timing. You can tear a sheet of paper quite easily, but you cannot pull the whole sheet loose at once. You can break a loose rock pretty easily, but you can’t break one that is part of a mountain without an immense amount of force. Large shots are usually sequenced. One thing happens at a certain time, and another a tiny bit later. It’s very difficult to know what happened, because instruments that could detect things in that time frame are expensive, and it is difficult to site them without having them destroyed by the explosion they are there to observe.
Even the basics of sequence blasting are in doubt. Sue Ann could rig a particular charge with a delay of a certain time. But would it actually fire at that time? Whether the shot went well or not, she probably would not have a lot of the facts. Blasting caps are often found after explosive work has been done. Caps that were placed in large charges of explosives, and intended to initiate the explosion. What are they doing blown free of the explosion they were supposed to initiate, unfired and not even destroyed by the blast? Clearly what actually happens in blasting is not what the engineers think will happen. If you drill a hole 50 feet into rock, and put a charge at the bottom of the hole, do you really know that it will fire at T plus 220 microseconds? Do you know it will fire at all? If it does not, and you return to the vastly changed landscape, and drill into the unfired charge, it could ruin your whole day.
Sue Ann was dealing with all these kind of worries, and like most small quarry operators, she could not afford to blow $20,000 on a bad shot. Her father, who died of cancer before he got a chance to pass on his knowledge to his daughter, had once fired off a triple sequenced shot, that peeled three layers of rock off the face. About six million pounds of rock was shattered, and piled up against the wall. A perfect shot. Had it failed, he would have lost his home and the quarry, and his equipment. As it was, he spent the rest of his life crushing and selling the rock from that shot.
While Sue Ann was thinking about these things, the Princess Baby Doll was rocketing through Kansas, once again being driven by the wildcat. Dave was in the passenger seat, watching his girl tear up the highway at a speed no company truck governor would allow. She had already proven that the Volvo could do 100 miles an hour fully loaded to 80,000 pounds gross. We were not, here, dealing with such mundane speed, but Dave was sitting still for it. At over 100 miles an hour, the gentle reader will not ask the humble author how he knows, but the brakes on an 18 wheeler don’t work. I don’t mean they don’t work right, I mean they don’t do anything. The reason for this is, when you try to brake, the system throws the pedal right back at you. You need to slow down with compression, or, if you have it, a Jake brake. Otherwise, you can just wait until it gets down to about 80 before the friction brakes will work. The Baby had a Jake, but the Jake only slows the drivers, which is the two axles in the back of the tractor. You can dump some speed that way, but slowing the tractor while the trailer wanders around back there, 53 feet behind the kingpin, well, that can be real trouble.
Dave knew all this, but he was sitting with his feet up against the firewall. He wasn’t trying to tell the wildcat what she should not do, because she already knew she shouldn’t be doing it. She could afford a speeding ticket, but this could be charged as reckless driving, a criminal offense, and the ugly back door of traffic law would be open. She could even lose the CDL she didn’t need.
“We’ve seen her do it.”
“Are you afraid, Dave?”
“You’ve never been shot at. I have been shot at and hit. I’ve been mortared, I’ve been bayoneted. So if you’re brave because you are driving a truck at 100 knots, well, you’re brave. I hope whoever is in front of you is, too.”
“Do you think I should slow down?”
“I am absolutely certain that you should slow down.”
She backed off the accelerator.
“Not too far too fast. You have a lot less control just now than you may think. Ease off.”
“You’ve done this, too.”
“Do it once, you know what it’s like. Then don’t do it again, because you could kill someone. I’m willing to risk it, but maybe not the next driver ahead of you. I didn’t tell you not to put the pedal to the metal, my little wildcat. I just said now that you’ve done it, put it away as one of those things you have done.”
“I’m sure I can brake now.”
“Try it gently.”
“It bounces back.”
“It will work all right at 80 or so. Maybe 90. It’s a Volvo.”
“It’s taking.”
“Gently. You start to jackknife at this speed you will not be able to stop it.”
He looked ahead at clear road. “You’ll lose speed pretty quick. Keep her straight.”
“You knew how dangerous this was, and you let me do it.”
“You can let it lose speed.”
She did so.
“I don’t seem to be able to limit your risk taking.”
“What if I had dropped the throttle at 120?”
“We would be dead.”
“You never told me.”
“You don’t listen. To tell you not to do something is to tempt you to try it.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“Well, I can’t remember a single time I told you not to do something, but that you did it. I may have forgotten about telling you not to touch the bus on the electric main panel.”
“I guess I think I can do things.”
“You can. But not everything you want to. You continually play with fire.”
“I’m not like that.”
‘Realizing that you are like that would help you to be more careful about yourself. You think, once in a while, what it would be like for me to lose you?”
“That won’t happen.”
“It might. What if I jumped out of the truck right now?”
“You’d get killed for sure.”
“I would. What then? You would be looking at a bunch of blood and guts and stuff that used to be me.”
“Stop it.”
“And there would be parts you recognized. Like maybe my hand would be mostly intact.”
She pulled over and rolled down the window, and puked.
“You could have done that just now, with your speeding thing.”
“Stop.”
Death doesn’t stop. How about you hit a car with some little kids in it? Perhaps a baby with its head severed.”
She threw up again, this time dry. She spat. “I think you’ve made your point.”
He handed her a bottle of water. She washed her mouth and spat, then took a small drink.
“Get back into the sleeper. I’ll drive for a while.”
She did.
He put it in gear, and headed south. He checked the instruments and the mirrors, and went up through the gears. He took the right lane at 5 under the speed limit.
“I won’t ever do that again, Dave.”
“Next time it will be something else. Do you do these things because of me? If I cause it, maybe you should leave me before you end up dead.”
“I’m not leaving my mathematician.”
“Will you stop doing these pointless dangerous things?”
“Maybe. I feel awful about doing them, and then I do something else.”
“Before you knew me?”
“It isn’t your fault, Dave.”
“That isn’t really an answer.”
“I’m not the only person in this truck who ever didn’t answer a question.”
“Right.”
“Will you show me how to use the machines in your shop?”
“Will you obey all the safety rules? No milling without your safety glasses on, or anything remotely like that?”
“Pretty tall order.”
“I won’t. If you worked in a machine shop, they would expect you to agree to follow the safety rules, and if you didn’t, they’d fire you. I won’t let you in there if you won’t do safety.”
“Why do you have all that stuff?”
“Uncle Jack bought almost all of it. I had it appraised once when I was thinking about selling some of it because I was short on money. My favorite small tools were worth a little something. Stuff like that big planer is all so old that nobody would buy it for what it would cost to move it.”
“Does it work?”
“Yeah, but it’s 100 years old. It wouldn’t be cost effective. Too hard to set up and maintain. And no antique dealer wants a ten ton cast iron antique, apparently.”
“Isn’t there any work for it?”
“I got a job on it once. A big pile of rough cedar they wanted surfaced. But usually, in West Texas, you are not going to see wood long enough to mill in that thing, and if you did, it’s not able to compete anyway.”
“Long enough?”
“It will jam up or miscut on something under about 8 feet. 11 feet is about right as a low end. I can’t plane pieces of big mesquite trees and stuff we have around here in it, which is all I get asked about.”
“The band saw mill?”
“I didn’t know you knew it was one.”
“Well, how about.”
“It will cut up the mesquite logs and the mulberry, but I can’t surface that stuff because it’s too short.”
“Mesquite would make a real nice floor.”
“Very expensive milling and selecting. And you would need to be able to make tongue and groove material to make it practical. I could make the rough material, but I have no practical way to finish it. I could do it, but it would be abominably expensive the way I would have to do it. If I could make ¾ finished tongue and groove in 4 or 6 inch random length, that might be worth doing. Still probably cost five times what oak would to put it on a floor, but a Dallas billionaire might not care about that.”
“That’s who we would sell it to.”
“Too hard to get the rough logs in that large of sizes and without borer holes. Too much money in finishing equipment. If someone brings us a bunch of big logs, and wants them milled rough, we will do it for some totally outrageous price, but there will be no takers.”
“The rest of your big machines are the same old story?”
“Sure. Who blacksmiths on a 1500 pound anvil? They weld fabricate, pound it down with trip hammers, shape it with hydraulic benders, and so on.”
“Cut it from heavy plate with numerical control laser and plasma cutters.”
“Right.”
“And the same kind of reasons for the rest of your stuff?”
“Yeah. Already paid off, in a cheap labor part of the country. Sited in a good shop. If they can make money anywhere they can do it there. But probably they can’t.”
“Let’s go into that truck stop up there.”
“OK.”
He took the exit, and pulled into the fuel islands. “Might as well get some fuel.”
They went in and got the pumps started. They left a fuel card. They went back out, and started fueling the truck.
Suddenly, a bunch of motorcycles came into the truck stop. “Hang up the nozzle. Get behind the wheel, Jainie, and lock the doors. If they mess with you, run them over with the truck. I’ll go in and pay.”
He went in. The cashier seemed to take the bikers as no big problem. “We want to pay and go.”
“I’ll need to get my manager to do the fuel card. I just started yesterday.”
“What’s our total?”
“$90.40.”
Dave handed her a $100 bill, and left. He got in the Baby, and told Jainie to roll.
“You really don’t like bikers, do you?”
“No.”
He made a note to claim the $100 as business expenses, and zipped it into the binder.
“Lions hate hyenas.”
“How did you know that?”
“Wildlife film. A hyena matriarch urinated on the lions’ territory. What do you think the male lion did?”
“Ran her down and ripped her to pieces.”
“So you’ve seen that movie too.”
“Or one like it.”
“I guess that’s what you expect from a 500 pound cat on testosterone.”
“Barbourofelis was only a little bit larger than that, and he killed mammoths.”
“Oklahoma isn’t a very pretty state, is it?” She looked out over the plains.
“West Texas isn’t either. Some parts of East Texas aren’t too bad.”
“It’s so bleak.”
“It looks a lot nicer in grass and wildflowers in spring and early summer.”
“This is the bible belt, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Life here is so miserable that you have to believe something better lies ahead, or you’d put a gun in your mouth.”
“I wish you wouldn’t think of such things.”
“So long as I have you, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I mean, I know how you would feel. But if I ever lose you, I might do it then.”
“Sounds like a threat.”
“Well, it isn’t. But it is something that could happen.”
“I may be good to you, I hope I am, but I can’t be your reason for living.”
“Don’t tell me what my reason for living is, my mathematician! Don’t you ever tell me something like that, because you just don’t know.”
“You weren’t out of gas that night down by Opelousas.”
“Just out of nerve. You figured it out. I guess I should have expected you would, sooner or later. I should be surprised it took you this long, really. You and Kevin Lake. Half the brains on the fucking planet in two guys in overalls and Red Wing boots.”
“But why? The girl who had everything?”
“You better see what I did not have. You want to know when I knew you were the one?”
“Yes.”
“Just before I put my suitcase in your car. Right there on the shoulder of I-49.”
“Maybe that was just you telling yourself you were all right.”
“It was the Fates, Dave. They took me to the limit of my endurance, and then they gave me what I needed.”
“Does this have anything to do with you doing crazy things?”
“It might. Do you want to put me in therapy? I won’t go.”
“I’d ask if it was Freud, but since him, nobody has much impressed me with their understanding of people.”
“They know almost nothing. They make lots of money off people they can’t be any help to. If I wanted to thrash my past for some understanding of my faults, I’d talk to Kevin Lake.”
“He is amazingly perceptive.”
“Are you going to tell him about I-49?”
“Not unless you ask me to.”
“I’m not asking.”
“He will know somehow, some time. But I won’t tell him.”
“You will neither confirm nor deny.”
“Right.”
“Does everyone refuse to tell war stories like you do?”
“No. In fact, would you like to meet an honest to the Corps HOG?”
“HOG?”
“Hunter of Gunmen. I know a guy in Oklahoma who will tell you all the war stories you want to hear, and most of it will be true. His name is David Lee Sondermeyer. It’s been too long since I have seen our little angel.”
“You call him an angel?”
“During Desert sham, they called him ‘The Angel of Death.’”
“With good reason?”
“With very good reason.”
“He’s a sniper?”
“And an up close and personal unarmed hand to hand combat guy.”
“Wow. Is he a nice guy, or a menacing monster?”
“Nice guy.”
“Let’s see if we can visit.”
Dave pulled out his cell phone. He dialed. “Hey, David Lee! Ship’s cat. Oh, I’m fine. You missed my wedding. Yes, I did. You’ll envy me when you do. We’re in Okie home already. You do? Listen, we’re making good money. We want to take you out to some good restaurants. Well, we’ll take her, too. Jainie wants to hear some war stories. I know that. With Denis Davis? Wow. He is a living legend. Yeah, well you know what that is all about. OK, I am diddling with the gps thing. I don’t know how it works. Well, maybe so. I’m putting it in now. It says 3 hours 20 minutes. You have my number in your caller ID? Yeah. Actually, she is probably trying to undomesticate me. She’s a wildcat. OK, we call you when we’re an hour or so out. Ok.”
After he hung up, she said, “Denis Davis. A living legend. Who is he?”
“A mercenary captain. Well, a security contractor, that is. That’s a merc who works for the GUS.”
“Government United States?”
“Otherwise known as YourGovernment.”
She smiled. “So David is working for Denis?”
“Right. They call themselves the Wayfarers. They don’t really exist, of course.”
“And of course they are the real thing.”
“Oh, yeah. Veterans of the world’s most elite military units and intelligence agencies. U.S. Navy SEALS, Russian Special forces, East German intelligence guys, British Special Air Services, KGB, you name it. You want a Kurdish guy who speaks Latvian, and is an expert in hand to hand combat, and has a law degree from a Lithuanian university, they probably have him. Has your executive been kidnapped in Afghanistan, and taken to Uzbekistan? Want him back? Want everyone who helped in the kidnapping to disappear, never to be heard from again? Denis Davis might be the man you want to know.”
“Sounds kind of sinister.”
“He is, but he wouldn’t work for Bin Laden.”
“An ethical mercenary?”
“Most of them are, but they may not share your ethics.”
“Point taken. David got married?”
“We were talking about me. He married a cutie a couple of years ago.”
“Is that demeaning to women, or is it just me?”
“I’d say it’s just you. If I said my wife is a cutie, would you be offended?”
“No.”
“If you think of it, the man hating feminists have gotten away with a lot of linguistic manipulation. Think of guys and dolls, dudes and chicks, boys and girls, lads and lasses, whatever. The feminine version is considered sexist, but men accept the masculine version without question. Some of these really messed up women want to be called wymin, or something like that, because they don’t want ‘men’ to be in the name of their group. Could you imagine a man getting into such bullshit? Can you imagine me being offended if you said I was a cutie, hot, smokin’, a looker, a stud muffin, a foxy dude, fold out bait, or what the hell, you name it. Can you imagine it?”
“No. I’m going to look closer at those kind of words. I could say I married a hard looking guy with cordy looking muscles, and a sweet smile.”
“Of course you could.”
“Describe me.”
“She’s a tall, sleek girl with a fabulous figure, cobalt blue eyes, and a huge bunch of naturally curly strawberry blonde hair. She has pert breasts, a fabulous tummy, a wonderful little tail, and marvelous legs, right down to her cute little toes. Did I leave anything out?”
“Unimportant details.”
“She has the nicest unimportant details I have seen.”
She pulled into a rest stop and put the curtains up. “I hope you have a round in the chamber, because you are going to be expected to make sweet love to a tall sleek girl with a fabulous figure, cobalt blue eyes, and a huge bunch of natura