Yuma: A short story romance
By Erin Lausten
Copyright 2011 Erin Lausten
Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona
I should have known I would fall in love on a bombing range. It was scorching. Sweat was trickling down the back of my neck and the only thing between me and the hot Yuma sun was a brown-felt pseudo Indiana Jones fedora. This was not romance, and yet, there I was staring wide-eyed and stupid at the man beside me.
Matthew wasn’t my type. I liked them medium build, blue-eyed, and blond. He was tall, dark, with gorgeous brown eyes. And married.
We threw our backpacks over our shoulders and tucked the clipboards under our arms then spread out 10 meters from each other to continue our way through the desert. Heads down and eyes alert we scanned the ground for traces of humanity; the older, the better.
After we flew through our transects we caught up to the rest of the team plodding along in a desperate bid to complete the survey before the sun touched the tips of the distant mountains. The novelty of the situation was lost on them.
Matthew and I, on the other hand, were riding high on the discovery of WWII era ration cans and tank tracks. The added spice was the very real possibility of being blown to bits by the hundreds of unexploded ordnance half buried throughout the survey area. This was the first archaeological project I’d been on that even remotely felt like an Indiana Jones movie, and I loved every moment.
Behind us the growl of an ATV announced the arrival of Jeremy, our escort from Explosive Ordnance. He swung off the purring machine and sauntered our way. This stocky man was the only thing that stood between us and the agony of shrapnel peppered bodies. We were in good hands.
“The boys back at the shop were wondering if y’all found any gold.” The local Arizona dialect had yet to take a chip out of Jeremy’s thick southern accent. The other archeologists on the team rolled their eyes and kept walking. The search for Spanish gold was always of prime importance to the locals and it got old real quick for most archaeologists.
But Matthew laughed. And my heart danced across my chest in an abbreviated jitterbug. “Yep, we did. But the booby traps kept us from finding the mother lode.”
The two men kept on chatting, but I had to turn my attention to the changing terrain. We reached a small copse of cottonwoods, signifying the presence of a wash.
Locating artifacts was pushed to very edges of my consciousness. Instead, I was scanning the nearest brush for little beasties of the slithering sort. We had already encountered five fat rattlers during this project, more than enough to make me obsessively cautious around the brush.
I was so intent on looking underneath every shadowy bush that I only noticed the rusted red of an artillery shell when my foot was about to land. Shifting my weight backward mid-step I landed on my back in an unladylike sprawl.
“You alright?” A masculine voice yelled from several meters away. My backpack added enough weight to make righting myself a practice in physical comedy.
“Yeh!” I shouted and scrambled to my feet, not wanting Matthew to see me flopping around like a turtle teetering on its shell.
“I found something!” I brushed the dirt and plant debris from my clothes and waited for the others to make their way over to my spot.
“What did you find?” Matthew inquired, as he and Jeremy emerged from behind a rather distressed looking cottonwood.
I pointed at the rusted metal that peeked through a mere three inches of mud. Water running through the wash had all but covered the thing and I wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t spied it through the corner of my eye.
“Yep. That’s unexploded ordnance.” Jeffery commented. Both he and Matthew stood with their arms crossed against their chests, looking down at it with the manly consideration reserved for beat up vehicles, broken garbage disposals, and apparently artillery.
“Is it live?” I asked
“Don’t know.” Our trusty EOD expert replied. He pulled a GPS from his backpack and began plugging in the location for future reference.
“If I had stepped on it would it have blown up?” My mind flashed to the training video we had been forced to watch explaining the dangers of unexploded ordnance and the very real possibility of death or injury.
“Maybe.” He smiled.
I pursed by lips and squinted. “You’re messing with me.”
He shrugged and turned back the way they had come. I glared at his back, then walked a good ten feet around the ordnance and flounced through the brush. Matthew’s infectious laughter caught me before I could outrun it.
The prickly branches grabbed at my cotton t-shirt and heavy canvas pants as I continued along my transect. I was all for adventure, loved it in fact, but not at the expense of a one of my limbs. I felt particularly attached to them. The majority of ordnance had the explosives replaced with concrete in order to test weapons during peace-keeping practice sessions. But some were live, which is why Jeffery was with us and what had me feeling a little shaky.
However, the biggest threat to my survival was the inconvenient attraction I felt toward Matthew. His pure enjoyment of life was so unlike the people I had met throughout my twenty-four years. Everyone always had one complaint or another and never really saw the fun and beauty that could be found in every moment.
I sighed. It was no surprise that someone had plucked him from the pool of eligible bachelors before I had a chance.
I was mulling over the unfairness of life when I noticed another rusty shell pop-up where my foot was destined.
“Dang it,” I muttered, distracted again by the handsome devil and his stupid heart stopping smile and soul enfolding laughter.
“I found another one!” I shouted, and waited as the brush rustled in response.