Freeze Frames

  Leslie leans back in the seat and runs her fingers over the splitting plastic of the steering wheel. The car sits in the red dirt driveway that runs up to a dark wood and glass A-frame cabin, her mother’s house, once, hers now that Mom has finished drinking herself to death. In the rearview mirror of the car she can just see the house front, a huge triangle of plate glass reflecting pine trees that march away down a long slope to a far valley shrouded in resinous mist. Behind the cabin, the mountains of the High Sierra rise, corrugated with forest. Every now and then a bird calls; otherwise, not a sound, not even a rustle of wind. She leans out, grabs the door handle, hesitates. She should just stay home. If she goes into town, she can check the post office box. If she’s lucky, she might have a letter from her father, who’s teaching in England at the moment, too far for regular phone calls. But if she’s stranded? What’s she going to do, sleep in the damn car all night?

  Pressure starts building behind her eyes. She can think of no other label for this peculiar sensation, a heat that seems to center in the front lobe of her brain and push outward, as if some small warm-blooded animal were burrowing toward the surface from deep in her mind in order to look out of her eyes. Yet she feels no physical pain, merely this ghost of pressure as if from a memory of a migraine, and with it an emotion that does not belong to her, a very faint sense of apology. Without a thought she screams aloud. The sensation vanishes, the pressure, heat, apology—all utterly gone.

  “Not in the daytime, damn you! That’s not fair.”

  She slams the door shut, buckles on the frayed shoulder harness, and starts the car. As she drives off, the engine noise seems to hang round her like a bubble, sealing her away from the hills.

  o~O~o

  Although he’d rather drive the truck, Richie (or Little Rick as his family called him till he put his foot down about it) harnesses up the pair of horses and takes the wagon into town to save what ethanol there is for emergency customers. He’s only nineteen, but he handles the team a lot better than his dad, Big Rick. Richie started riding when he was three; he learned to drive the old surrey with its single horse when he was twelve, long before he could legally drive the half-ton pickup. A lot of the older men are talking about coming to him for lessons, when they bow to the inevitable and buy themselves a wagon and a team.

  Goldust shelters about four thousand people in maybe a thousand buildings, most of them wood with high-peaked roofs, spread along one side of the highway and reaching back into the pine forests of the foothills on a disintegrating grid of side streets. Behind the foothills loom the High Sierra, the peaks covered with thin dirty snow under a sky tinged with yellow. They form a barrier between California and the rest of the country that’s almost as hard to cross, now that the highways are falling apart and airfares are climbing higher than the planes, as it was in the pioneer days when the settlers poured through Donner Pass, which isn’t far from Richie’s house and the family’s ethanol station. The town looks west across the highway where the forests fall lower and lower down the long slopes that lead to the rich farms of the Central Valley, to Sacramento and far beyond to San Francisco on the Pacific coast. Richie has relatives in San Francisco, Aunt Janet and her daughter, Amanda. As he jounces behind his team on the dusty road, he wonders how they’d feel if he showed up on their doorstep, begging to stay awhile.

  The Feed and Grain stands on the edge of town, a tin-roofed quonset hut, a roofed yard stacked with galvanized tubs, bales of hay, and cords of firewood. Out on the concrete loading dock Mr. Crawford sits on an upturned crate, hands slack on his massive thighs, his paunch resting on his wrists. He heaves himself to his feet to watch as Richie turns his team and backs them, fighting the buckboard and the ruts, till the wagon bed stands flush with the dock. Red dust plumes around them, then settles.

  “You do that like a pro, kid,” Crawford says, spitting. “Just like one of them guys in the movies on TV.”

  “Thanks. Dad said he called ahead about the oats?”

  “One dozen fifty-pound sacks. Got ’em ready.”

  Crawford’s young son comes out to hold the horses’ bridles and keep them calm. As Crawford shoves the sacks over the edge of the dock and Richie slings them into place, the wagon bed creaks and shudders, making the team prance and snort. By the time they’ve finished, both men are sweating, and Crawford’s face shines a dangerous shade of red. Puffing and blowing, he rubs it on his sleeve while Richie signs the chit.

  “Meant to ask you,” Crawford says at last. “Tanker been through yet?”

  “Nope, not yet. We’re expecting it real soon.”

  “It’s been what? Over a week since the last one.”

  “Close to two weeks, now. But it’ll come. Leastways, they haven’t called up from Sacramento to say it’s not coming.”

  Crawford merely grunts.

  “Well, they got a contract,” Richie says. “They can’t just go breaking it.”

  “Yeah, kid? I’ll tell you what I think is going on. I think it’s like when you catch a lizard by the tail. Tail breaks off in your hand, and the business end of the lizard gets away. The cities—Frisco, LA—they’re the lizard. We’re the goddamned tail.” Crawford laughs in a brief creak. “All us little towns, the farms, too, not counting the damn agribusinesses. They got money to buy votes, thanks to their goddamn ethanol. We don’t got the goddamn votes the cities do, and we don’t got the money to buy us some pols, and so we get shafted.”

  “Well, it’s the roads that are the problem.”

  “Yeah? And what pays for the roads? Tax money, that’s what, our goddamned tax money. It goes down to Sacramento and that’s the last we see of it.”

  “Yeah, guess so.”

  “And it’s going to get worse. You mark my words, kid. Worse and worse.”

  When Richie leaves the Feed and Grain, he heads deeper into the crazy-quilt spread of the town. Most houses have big yards, with vegetable gardens and some chickens out in back and a decaying truck or car sitting in front. As he jounces by, Richie sometimes sees a woman or a girl hanging out laundry. When they see him, they wave. In about six blocks the houses back up to the main street of town, a bank, a post office, a straggle of shops, a shoe repair place, the old Safeway supermarket with its new name that no one ever uses. Down at the end stands a coffee shop with a dirt yard round back where Richie can water and tie up his team, out of the way of what automobile traffic there is.

  Here in the middle of the afternoon the pale green diner’s mostly empty. Two men sit at the beige formica counter and drink coffee while they stare at the TV hanging on the wall between the square red Budweiser sign and the round red Coca-Cola clock Apparently the satellite dish out back has picked up an East Coast station; in a faint swirl of static an announcer reads the evening news. The waitress, a stout woman with bright hennaed hair, looks up from polishing the counter when Richie shuts the door behind him.

  “More riots in New York City,” Maureen says. “Sure as hell glad I don’t live there.”

  The two men nod agreement.

  “Yeah, guess so,” Richie says. “You never hear about riots in San Francisco, though.”

  “You will, honey. I’m just waiting. Don’t see why you’re always talking about that awful place, I really don’t. All those weirdos and perverts, and that earthquake’s on the way, too. Preacher was talking ’bout that just last Sunday. They’ll get their due, they will.”

  Richie nods vaguely. Down at the far end of the counter, a woman’s brown suede jacket hangs over the back of one of the red Naugahyde swivel chairs. Looking at it makes Richie’s heart tremble in his throat.

  “Leslie around?” He keeps his voice as casual as he can.

  “Just in the ladies’. You want some coffee? And there’s layer cake today.”

  “A burger, thanks, with everything. And fries. And coffee, yeah.”

  Richie lays one hand on the back of a counter chair, then hesitates, struck by an idea so bold that he can’t resist it. He walks down, picks
up Leslie’s jacket, and takes it with him to one of the red booths on the window side of the diner, puts it on one seat and sits in the other. His heart pounds so badly that he leans back against the cool vinyl and gulps once for air, but he’s sure that she’ll prefer sitting in a booth to the counter. Maureen enforces her at-least-two-to-a-booth rule with an iron hand, even when the place is empty. Sure enough, in another minute Leslie emerges from the back, sees him and smiles, strolling over to slide into her side of the booth as casually as if they’d planned the entire thing.

  “Now that’s real nice of you. I hate the counter.”

  “Yeah. Kind of thought you did.”

  While she arranges her purse and jacket beside her, he can only grin and hope he doesn’t look like a fool. Leslie’s a tall girl (or woman, really, since she’s three years older than he), willowy slender with a heart-shaped face dominated by enormous blue eyes. She has a quirky smile—a twist of perfect lips, always glossed a soft red. Her blonde hair curls in the latest fashion around her cheeks, which are fashionably pale, a milky white that speaks of the best in sunscreens and a city life protected from rising UV levels and winter winds both. Even her hands are pale, perfectly smooth, the nails unchipped and polished the same red as her lips. Her clothes, too, the artificial silk shirt, the blue jeans worn skintight rather than baggy for working in, could only come from a city, from the world outside.

  “Whatcha doing down in town?” she says.

  “Picking up oats from the Feed and Grain. What about you?”

  “Hoping to get some eth.”

  Richie makes a sour face.

  “Well, we’re real low. Dad says emergency vehicles only. Supposed to get a delivery tomorrow.”

  Leslie bites her lower lip hard.

  “Don’t you have enough to get home?” Richie says.

  “No, ’fraid not.”

  Maureen bustles up, plops a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich and a dome of slaw down in front of Leslie, then scowls Richie’s way.

  “Yours ain’t done yet. I’ll bring the coffee.”

  She heads back for the counter, returns with two mugs and a full glass pot with a wooden handle.

  “Milk?”

  “None for me, thanks,” Leslie says.

  “I know Little Rick don’t take none.” Maureen smiles in his direction and pours the coffee.

  Once the waitress is gone, Leslie leans forward and whispers over her sandwich.

  “You must hate it when they call you that.”

  “I do, yeah. Habits, just old habits, Dad says, but it gripes me anyway.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Her sympathy keeps him bold.

  “Well, say, I could give you a ride home in the buckboard. Tanker really is supposed to come tomorrow, and if it does, well, I’ll give you a call, come pick you up.”

  “Could you? I’d love a ride home.” She smiles, all the reward he needs. “But I’ve got a bike out in the garage. I can ride it into town tomorrow. I mean, it’s all downhill coming into town. I don’t think I could peddle all the way back, but one way would be easy.”

  “Okay, then, whatever you want.”

  His burger arrives, and a bottle of ketchup. As he starts eating, Richie realizes that he should have pressed the ride of next morning upon her, said something like “No, no, no, can’t have you biking all the way into town,” but the moment’s passed.

  “How’s your grandmother doing?” Leslie says once he’s had a few bites. “Maggie, I mean.”

  “Real good. She blows me away, she really does, how together she is. I sure hope I’m as healthy when I’m her age.”

  “What is she now, seventy-something?”

  “Seventy-three, yeah. Still chopping her own kindling, though she lets me split the big logs.”

  “That’s really something.”

  “You bet. Say, she mentioned wanting to have you over for lunch one of these days. She’s got those snapshots to show you, the ones she told you about. You should give her a call.”

  “I’ll do that. I’d like to see her, too, talk to her about the stuff. Mom’s papers, I mean. I’ve kind of gotten into this habit, calling them The Stuff.”

  “How’s that going, sorting them out?”

  “Oh God.” Leslie looks away, her mouth drooping. “It’s weird, Richie, really really weird. It’s like there were two moms. My father says she came down with what he calls OSS—old scientist syndrome—but then, he’s still mad at her, because of the divorce. But I guess this syndrome thing happens a lot. A scientist does something really great in their field, but then they go off on some weird tangent. There was this guy a long time ago who was a physicist, and then he went off the deep end and started a sperm bank to preserve superior genes, and then there was another dude who believed vitamins would cure anything. My dad told me about them. And here’s my mom, loaded with all those prizes she won, and then. Well.”

  “Your mom was a physicist?” At that moment Richie bitterly resents the limits of Goldust High School. “I thought she was an astronomer.”

  “Sort of both. She did research in spectral analysis and the distribution of star types.”

  Leslie might as well have intoned a magical spell for all that Richie understands what she means. He nods in the best thoughtful manner he can muster and lays the remains of his burger onto the plate.

  “There’s a lot of unpublished research notes on her computer,” Leslie goes on. “It has to do with testing for the presence of iron and carbon in old stars. I don’t understand it, but I can see it’s important, and I’m making copies and collating it and all that kind of thing. This old friend of hers down in Berkeley is going to help me with it. He’s a prof there, I mean. But it’s the other stuff that bothers me.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Well.” She hesitates for a long moment. “Telepathy. And contacting alien races. She spent the last few years doing research—well, she thought it was research—into something she called xenopsionics. And she wrote it all out by hand in green ink into these notebooks with fancy paper on the covers.”

  “Uh, well, jeez, Les. I didn’t know your mom well or anything, but she was drinking pretty heavy there toward the end. Everyone knew that.”

  “Oh yeah.” She picks up her paper napkin and begins wiping her fingers, very carefully and slowly, one at a time. “I guess it’s the drinking that’s responsible for the stuff. I know it’s crazy, her ideas I mean. But I started keyboarding it, and it’s weird, but it kind of gets you after a while. Like a good sci-fi flick does. You start thinking, well, it could be true, because it all hangs together so well.” She looks up, straight into his eyes. “You know?”

  Richie can only stare in return. After a moment he smiles and shrugs.

  “Well, if you say so.”

  Leslie looks down at her shredded napkin. All at once Richie is oppressed by the feeling that he’s somehow failed her.

  o~O~o

  In the chill twilight Leslie stands in the front of her cabin and listens to the rattling, jingling, clopping sounds of the team and buckboard moving away. In the trees birds call, a sleepy warding against the night. For a moment she wants to run screaming after Richie and beg him to stay for dinner, to stay the night in her bed, even, if that’s what he wants, if that’s what it’ll take to keep him there. She spins round, looking up at the mountains. Snow on the peaks catches the last sunset and gleams, streaks and patches of gold among black rocks that haven’t felt the sun for millennia. The sound of the buckboard passes away beyond recall. She goes inside.

  One long room with a kitchen and bathroom partitioned off at the back and a sleeping loft in an open mezzanine, the cabin stretches grey and heaped with shadows from the twilight oozing in through dusty windows. Leslie reaches for the light switch, misses, feels her heart pounding until at last her fingers brush plastic. White light floods the heaps of books, the flowered furniture, the long wooden desk with the computer, nestled in stacks of papers and notebooks, d
isks and cartridges. Shadows flee to the loft and hover around the sandstone fireplace. Leslie weaves her way through the clutter, flicking on lamps until the room blazes with painfully bright light. Although she would like to leave them all on, her eyes begin to water. She returns to the door, flicks off the overhead, and watches shadows spread round pools of gold.

  She should, she supposes, eat dinner, a salad or maybe some yogurt, something low-calorie anyway, to make up for that grilled sandwich at lunch. What she really wants is chocolate, but there’s none in the house, and her car is far away, parked behind the fuel station. She can’t possibly go off her diet tonight, she tells herself smugly. Maybe she should just fast? The sandwich was thick and pretty greasy, she ate some of Richie’s fries, well, just three, but they were greasy, too. Bad girl. Eating too much, flirting with that poor kid. If you can call it flirting when I kind of really do like him. Bad bad girl. Fasting sounds like a good idea, the more she thinks about it. She can have the yogurt in the morning or maybe if she’s good before she goes to bed.

  The long, crowded desk faces a wall and a plasma screen, opalescent in lamp light. Leslie sits down at the computer, flips it on, and watches the little icons arrange themselves into a menu as the system boots.

  “Please choose a work area.” This particular machine’s voice is soft, almost syrupy.

  Leslie hesitates. She should tell the computer to bring up the archive program storing her mother’s statistical studies. She should bury herself in the struggle to understand mathematical data and processes at a level years beyond what she’s had so far in college, to analyze at least enough of a given note to place it on the correct branch of the data tree she’s so painfully building. She should.

  “Please choose a work area or tell me to wait.”

  “Text.”

  The screen changes, dissolving to the pale blue start-up of her mother’s word processor. The computer’s voice becomes brisk and masculine.

  “Which directory should I load?”

  Leslie hesitates again. She could write to her father. She could in fact exit this session and call her father to wake him in the middle of a British night. No, wait till it’s morning there, then call him and beg him for the plane fare to leave this cabin behind and join him. He might send it. More likely he’ll tell her that she needs to develop a more mature attitude and finish what she starts.