Outages in Wyoming and Montana Result of Vandalism
According to the article, communities including Red Lodge and Laurel, Montana, and Lovell and Powell, Wyoming, had lost power for most of a day after someone had felled trees on the high-voltage lines in rural locations.
Employees of the Beartooth Power Alliance who repaired the damage were left convinced that a crime had occurred.
“I’ve never seen anything so intentionally malicious,” lineman Jay Baldwin, 34, of Red Lodge said. “The location and manner in which those trees were brought down doesn’t really leave any question about an accident. Someone intended to knock some lights out, and they did.”
There was a picture of Baldwin accompanying the story; it showed a man standing beside a utility truck. He held a hard hat in one hand and a radio in the other and appeared weary but not worn-out. It was a compelling shot, really-he looked like the exact sort of man you wanted responding to emergencies.
Mark fixated on the picture, and when he blinked back to reality, he blamed the Ambien for the pointless level of scrutiny of a simple photograph. He closed the computer. It was time for bed-past time, in fact-and he’d be jet-lagged tomorrow after the flight to Montana.
The state’s name chased the photo of the lineman through Mark’s brain in a spiral of odd images as he drifted toward an unsettled sleep. That name had texture, somehow, rough and jagged and ready to wound: Montana. It got nothing but love from tourists, but tourists didn’t understand it. You had to see it through four full seasons to know a damn thing about Montana.
Mark had seen it through plenty more than that.
The dreams that came for him were varied and vivid. He dreamed first of Ridley Barnes, more memory than dream, Ridley in the endless dark of Trapdoor Caverns, warning Mark that great responsibility and great pressure awaited him on the surface. Then Ridley was gone, replaced by an unfamiliar man with no hands standing in a moonlit stairwell with odd symbols painted on the walls behind him.
She held all the beauty of the world, the man said. Her only mistake was her taste in men. The way she died wasn’t her fault, you know.
In the dream Mark said, I know, it was mine, because he thought the man was talking about Lauren. By the time he realized that the stranger wasn’t, it was too late, because a wave struck the house, a tremendous splash of gray-green salt water like a hurricane’s storm surge, and it swept up the stairs and drove the handless man away from Mark. They were in the water together and Mark thought that Lauren was too and maybe someone else, a woman he knew but couldn’t name, but as the waves rose and fell, they all drifted farther apart until Mark couldn’t see or hear the others anymore, and he was alone in an empty sea. The waves were towering and powerful but never drove Mark under. Instead he rode them through sleep and toward dawn, and though he’d lost track of the others in the water with him, he didn’t feel any panic, because he knew they were merely out of sight and earshot, not truly gone. The storm was raging, but they were all in it together.
The water faded then, receded in the abrupt fashion of dreams, and mountains replaced the waves. High, menacing peaks.
The mountains just sat there, lonely and wind-whipped, impenetrable and unyielding. All the same, Mark was grateful for the alarm that shook him from sleep and forced the image from his mind. The hurricane dream had somehow been more peaceful than the mountain image, despite all of the crashing waves and the loud power of the storm.
In that dream, he had not been alone.
26
The phone began to ring when Jay was three blocks from the police station. Unknown number. He stared at it without answering, let it go to voice mail, and continued walking. Almost immediately, the phone chimed with a different tone-not a voice mail, but a text message.
GO BACK HOME, JAY.
He stood dumbly on the sidewalk, looking from the phone’s screen to the empty streets around him. There was nobody in sight, no watchers. And yet…
The phone rang again. This time he answered.
“Jay, Jay, Jay.” Eli Pate sighed like a disappointed parent. “You’re not making wise choices. Certainly, you’re not thinking of Sabrina. What a risk you just took! Imagine what could happen to her. Imagine what you could have just provoked. Why, Jay, I might have been incited to do terrible, horrible things. Just think about it! Can you picture those things? My God, what you have invited into her life!”
Jay said, “Please, don’t.” His voice broke.
“Please? Well, okay, since you said please.” After a long pause, Pate spoke again, and the humor was gone from his voice. “Go home, Jay. I expected you to try once. I’d have been wrong about you if you hadn’t. But I’ll tell you this: I do not expect you to try again. Because now you know better. You’ll go home and think about the things that might have happened, and you’ll think about electricity in wires and wonder how on earth you could have made any decision other than to simply do as you’ve been asked. Go home. When you step inside, please wave to the camera.”
The camera. He had a camera. Where in the hell was the camera?
Eli Pate began to laugh. “Lord, you really believed that would work, didn’t you? A vacuum, Jay! That is brilliant.” His laugh, rich and carefree, boomed through the phone again. “Oh, that was beautiful. But I don’t have the time to waste letting you try again, I’m afraid. You’re going to need to understand that. Do you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll believe you this time. But Jay? I can replace you. Can you replace her?”
The call disconnected.
Jay Baldwin lowered the phone, looked up the street toward the lights of the police station, and then turned and walked back to his dark house.
27
They were thirty thousand feet in the air somewhere over the Dakotas when Lynn Deschaine fell asleep with her head on Mark’s shoulder.
She’d been dozing on and off for a while, and so it was likely that she’d slipped down in her seat a bit and was unaware of the contact.
He was very aware of it, though. He was frozen by it. He could smell her hair and feel her warm, slow breaths on his neck, and he didn’t want to so much as blink for fear of waking her.
He also wanted to push her away.
As they flew through the cloud cover, Mark was both grateful for her presence at his side, the touch of her skin, and angry with himself for enjoying it. He realized there was no need for the latter-you can’t cheat on the dead.
Explain that one to your heart, though. Anyone who’d ever had to try, Mark thought, would understand.
When the flight attendant came down the aisle to see if anyone needed fresh drinks, Mark made the slightest motion possible, a tiny shake of the head that came more from the eyes: No, thanks, and please don’t disturb her. The attendant moved on in polite silence, and Lynn didn’t wake, and her breaths came steady and slow against Mark’s skin and his throat tightened and he closed his eyes and made himself think of his wife.
At some point, Lynn woke, realized her position, and moved away from Mark quickly. He felt her turn to him, no doubt prepared to apologize, but he kept his eyes closed so she’d think that he was asleep, and she didn’t say anything. He was glad of that. His neck cooled as the memory of her touch faded.
He didn’t open his eyes until they touched down, but he never slept.
There were only four gates at the Billings airport-A and B, 1 and 2. Mark was struck by how small it was and said so upon landing. Lynn looked at him with surprise.