He looked up quickly and said, “Julie Ashburn sent me out to see if you could work tomorrow night. The Curling Club is having a dinner.”
I reached back, pulled my hair into a ponytail.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Horace. I just started helping her out. Sort of a gofer. Lucky to get the job.”
“Well, you’ll have to tell her that I can’t do it this time, Horace.”
“Oh, okay. That’s fine, I mean…” He glanced once more at the article, then back at me, becoming breathless. “I’ll let her know. Should I tell her you’re going on vacation? That that’s why you can’t?” I just stared at him and slid my hands into my pockets, fingering the cold metal of the handgun, trying to talk myself down from the paranoia. He doesn’t suspect anything. He’s acting strange because he’s strange. World’s full of strange people. Nothing more than that. He doesn’t know who I am.
“The reason I say vacation,” he continued, “you know is just cause I notice you have a suitcase out over on the uh, the thing over there.”
“Yes, I’m going away for a little while.”
“Well, okay, then I’ll uh, I’ll tell Julie.”
He couldn’t help himself. For the third time he looked at the article.
“Why don’t you take it with you?” I said. “I’m finished with it. Crazy stuff, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s…wow. Well, look, I’ll uh, I’ll let Julie know.” He picked up the article, then said, “I’m very sorry to bother you.”
As Horace walked by and opened the front door, I realized how paranoid I’d become. He stepped out into the afternoon darkness and I lingered in the doorway, watching him climb into a Land Cruiser and head back up the driveway. The noise of its engine soon faded into woodland silence and there was nothing but the whisper of wind in the firs.
I walked back inside to finish packing, my thoughts returning to how I would find Luther Kite in this wide wide world.
Driving home through the cold Yukon darkness, Horace Boone could hardly contain his joy. Having read Andrew Thomas’s manuscript, Desert Places, he understood perfectly well what was happening: on the supposition that Andrew was telling the truth, Luther Kite had survived the desert, was now alive and wreaking havoc, and Andrew was going to find him. Though it would devour all his savings, Horace would follow.
This was as much of a story as any writer could dream of.
I lay awake in bed, the sleepless hours ticking away. My suitcase was already packed in the Jeep and when I woke in the morning I had only to walk outside, climb behind the wheel, and drive away. Whitehorse, Yukon was 158 kilometers to the east. There I’d catch a flight to Vancouver and from Vancouver, on to America. In a storage locker in Lander, Wyoming, there were things that might help me find Luther Kite-my brother’s journals containing poetry, photographs, even a record of his and Luther’s activities. I’d put it all in storage after fleeing Orson’s cabin seven years ago because some of it incriminated me.
Now something was needling me about Luther and how I would find him. It seemed I’d read somewhere in Orson’s journals that he’d grown up on an island.
There was a cracking in the distance. I knew this sound.
My first autumn in the Yukon I woke in bed one night petrified by a mysterious cracking in the forest. Unable to fall back asleep, I dressed and crept through the trees, arriving at last at a frozen pond where a bull moose was stamping his hooves into the ice. I’d watched him finally break through and dip his muzzle into the frigid water for a drink.
Hearing that sound again, I imagined it to be a goodbye of sorts and it threatened to unglue me. But I wouldn’t cry anymore tonight. I’d loosed all the tears I was going to shed and now existed in a state of shock-shock that I was willingly leaving my harbor to sail back into madness. It was the uncertainty that haunted me, mostly for Beth Lancing, selfishly for myself-as I lie in bed watching fireshadows dance along the rafters of my precious home, I couldn’t purge the thought that I would never see this place again.