By morning the air had cleared. Morgret glanced out the window. The creek winding down from the mountains had swelled from the rainstorm. In the distance, he could see a few wild horses trotting around in the meadows.
He got up, stepped in a puddle of cold water, and sat down on a card-table chair to peel off his soggy, threadbare socks. After using the crapper out back, he shuffled to the two gasoline pumps under the rickety aluminum awning. He had nothing better to do than spend the day waiting for customers who would never come.
Highway 178 wound through the mountains, descending into the great desert basin of dry lake beds, military testing ranges, and Death Valley. Morgret hadn’t seen any traffic on the road for two days, and the last car had not stopped by. No traffic, no customers. No customers, no income. No income, nothing to pay off the creditors.
The gas—both regular and unleaded—smelled awful even to him, and worse yet, it wouldn’t burn. Some environmental shit, probably, and that frightened him. If the government found out, he’d probably have to rip out his buried tanks and install new liners. In that case, Morgret would just up and abandon the gas station, leaving it for the crows.
The Oilstar tanker truck had not come up from Bakersfield with his delivery this week—but Morgret had no money to pay the driver anyway, and his credit was as good as wet toilet paper. Morgret wondered if he was liable to the oil company for contaminated gas.
He laid an old newspaper on the seat of his lawn chair to keep his pants from getting wet. The morning remained cool, but he sat in the shade because the air was bound to get warmer and he wouldn’t feel much like moving in an hour or so. Morgret lounged back to watch the world go by.
Except the world wasn’t going by. No traffic. Nothing.
Toward midmorning he heard a hollow, clopping sound coming down the road; it took him a moment to recognize the sound of shod horses, not the roaming wild herd. In a moment, three riders came around the curve. They wore canvas panchos dotted with dark splotches from leftover raindrops. All three had long hair; the smallest, youngest-looking man had a thin moustache, but the other two were cleanshaven. Morgret recognized the broad-shouldered Hispanic man on the black stallion at once. Morgret struggled to get up from his folding lawn chair by the time Carlos Bettario rode up to the gas pump.
Years spent outdoors had given Bettario’s skin the look and feel of well-worn leather. He tied his long, pepper-colored hair in a ponytail that hung behind a flat-brimmed Clint Eastwood hat.
They nodded nonchalantly at each other. “Howdy, Carlos,” said Morgret. He looked at the stallion, then at his gas pump. “Fill ‘er up?”
The other two riders, ranch hands he supposed, chuckled. Bettario patted the stallion’s muscular neck, and said without the slightest trace of an accent, “No thank you, sir, I think this one still has a full tank.”
“Just another piss-head who doesn’t want any gas! What brings you down from the dude ranch, Carlos? Inviting me to a church social?”
Bettario owned and operated Rancho Inyo, a popular tourist ranch near Lake Isabella, where the idiot vacationers could pretend to be cowboys. It had made Bettario a rich man.
“Hell, if you had any gasoline, I’d buy every drop. But I don’t expect you’re better than anybody else in the country.” Bettario laughed. “No, I came to rescue you, my friend.”
Morgret scowled at him and sat back down in his creaking chair. How had Bettario known the gas pumps had gone bad? “Rescue me? What are you talking about, Carlos?”
“From the plague, man. What’re you going to do with yourself now? Your station was barely surviving before.” With a gesture of his chin, Bettario indicated the dilapidated house trailer, the sign that still said LAST CHANCE.
Morgret narrowed his eyes. “What plague?”
The ranch hands exchanged glances. Bettario took off his hat. “Man, you must be kidding me! Don’t you watch the news?”
“Gee, Carlos, I must not have paid my cable TV bill for the month. I’ve been thinking about getting one of those two-thousand-dollar satellite antennas—but it wouldn’t do me much good, since I don’t even own a damned television! I ain’t got a newspaper that’s less than a month old.”
Bettario shook his head. “Man, a plague is wiping out all the gas, and now plastic too. People are going nuts. We’re lucky we live up here away from the chaos.” The stallion snorted, as if he disagreed with Bettario’s opinion of ‘lucky.’ “Me, I’m smart enough to realize that we’re going to have to pull together and work our cojones off to make it through the first year.”
Morgret squinted at him, but Bettario wasn’t the type to play practical jokes. And it did explain the bad gas, the total lack of traffic, the week-late gas tanker. “So, you’re coming to rescue me, huh?”
The stallion nosed around for something to nibble on. Bettario jerked the reins to raise the horse’s head. “We got rid of the tourists at Rancho Inyo, and I have room for a few people who know what they’re doing. You’ve been around a long time, Dick. You’re full of bullshit, but you’ve also got a lot of common sense, and you know how to work. I need men to help keep the larders stocked, which means hunting and fishing and working with the livestock. We’re going to round up the wild horses, because without automobiles, horses will be worth more than gold.
“You also know how to fix things,” Carlos continued. “Rancho Inyo gets its power from the hydroelectric plant by the reservoir. Even without oil to burn, I suppose a dam and a waterwheel can keep working—if we figure out a way to keep them lubricated.”
Bettario smiled down at Morgret standing in his coveralls. “Come with me back to the ranch, Dick. My boys here will help you pack up whatever you want to take along.”
Morgret raised his eyebrows, then gestured expansively toward the leaking trailer, the fouled-up gas pumps, the empty highway. “Let me get this straight, Carlos. You want me to leave all this just so I can hunt and fish the whole day long? Round up some horses, chop some wood, for free room and board at a place where the city slickers pay a hundred dollars a night?”
“A hundred fifty, last year.” Bettario nodded. “Yeah, sums it up pretty well.”
“Sounds better than getting jabbed in the eye with a sharp stick.” Morgret glanced around the small patch of land he owned by virtue of squatter’s rights. He had grown roots here, but somehow it didn’t feel like he was leaving anything behind.
“Carlos, get your boys to help me take down this LAST CHANCE sign, then I’ll be ready to go.”
Chapter 37
A pounding on the door pierced through the layers of fog that enveloped Jeffrey Mayeaux’s mind, waking him out of a blissful few hours of sleep. He hated the constant interruptions that came with being an “important man.” Well, in another year he could forget all that bilgewater.
Mayeaux woke up, smelling the disorienting strangeness of new sheets. Pieces fell into place. Two-story resort apartment in Ocean City, a getaway Weathersee had arranged for him a month ago. And nobody was supposed to know where he was. Pickled crawfish! Weathersee must have blabbed.
The pounding returned from somewhere outside the darkened bedroom… the front door. It was too damn early for a person to think. Besides, this was what, Sunday?