Edward looked at Reslaw. “Anything in your head?”
“Not that I can feel.”
“It’s not impossible,” Minelli said.
“No,” Edward admitted, “but it’s paranoid as hell, and that’s the last thing we need, more fear.”
Minelli turned the paper around to face him and read the article quietly.
“Stella says there have been more people on the highway, stopping at the motel, the trailer park,” Reslaw said. “Most are going out to the cinder cone.” He bit off an ironic laugh and shook his head. “I remember an old ‘Peanuts’ cartoon with Snoopy. The end of the world is coming, so let’s hide under a sheet. With eyeholes cut out.” He made circles around his eyes with his fingers and peered at Edward.
“Stop it,” Minelli said pleasantly. “You’re acting like me. Only one crazy fellow allowed in this group.”
“What gives you privileges?” Reslaw asked, equally pleasant.
“Weak character. It’s on my resume.” Minelli handed the paper to Edward. “This is really going to send them into a tailspin. They call it the smoking gun, whatever the hell it is. We’ve already been shot in the head, maybe, and we just haven’t died yet.”
“You do have a way with words,” Reslaw said, staring at the palm of one hand. The waitress approached and he ordered a milkshake and a hamburger.
Edward finished the article and stood, dropping his tip on the table. “If everybody’s going to be camping on the desert, there’s no sense our looking for solitude. We should clear out of here and get back to Austin and leave these good people alone.”
“Makes sense to me,” Minelli said.
“What about your book deals?” Reslaw asked.
“Fuck fame and fortune. Who’d have time to spend the money?”
Stella had invited Edward to join her on a horseback ride that afternoon. They loaded four bales of alfalfa into the Morgan Company jeep and drove to a run-down corral a mile outside town. Three horses — a roan, a chestnut quarter horse, and a small, energetic pinto-stood with ears attentive in the middle of a broad pasture.
“I haven’t had time to ride for months,” Stella said, lifting a bale from the back of the Jeep and hefting it to a half-demolished feed pen within the fence. All three horses approached warily, tails swishing. “They’re half wild by now.” She smiled at him, flicking straw from the sleeves of her Pendleton. “Up to a challenge?”
“I’m an amateur. I haven’t ridden in years.”
The horses gathered to snuffle at the alfalfa, then settled in to feed. Stella hugged the pinto’s neck and it regarded her with a wild pale eye, though not resisting her caress. “This is Star. Used to be my horse all the time. When I came back from school, I’d ride her all over the desert, out to the opal beds and down to the Indian digs, across the dry creek beds. We had a good old time, didn’t we?”
Star munched.
“You should ride the chestnut gelding, that’s Midge,” she suggested. “Midge is even-tempered. Get acquainted.”
Edward approached the chestnut and stroked its neck and mane, murmuring “Good horse, nice friendly horse.”
After a few minutes of reacquainting the horses with human company, Stella brought two blankets and saddles from the Jeep, Star accepted the blanket skittishly, Midge with resignation.
“I’ll get on them both first,” Stella said. “Try them out and get them used to riders.” She adjusted the cinch on Star and mounted easily. The pinto backed away from the alfalfa and paced around the feed pen nervously, then stood still and hoofed the soft dirt and old straw in a corner. Stella dismounted and approached Midge. Edward backed away.
She mounted Midge just as gracefully. Midge bucked from the feed and reared, throwing Stella on her back in the dirt. Edward yelled and grabbed the reins and kept his feet clear of the prancing hooves. When he had guided the horse away, he sidled it into a corner and went to help Stella to her feet.
“I’m fine. Just embarrassed.” She brushed her jeans with quick, disgusted strokes.
“Gentle, hm?” Edward asked.
“He’s your horse, obviously.”
“I’ll try to convince him of that.”
A few minutes later, Midge accepted Edward’s weight without protest, and Stella rode the pinto beside them. They rode to the far end of the corral and she dismounted to lift the wire loop on a sun-bleached gate.
Shoshone, like most of the desert resorts in the area, sat on a thermal hot spring that poured hundreds of gallons of water a minute out across the desert, and had done so, without letup, for decades. The runoff formed a creek that meandered under California 127, borax pans covered with grass and scrub, throwing up thick fringes of cattails along its banks.
They rode across the creek and into the dry desert beyond, coming finally to a borax-topped decline. With some prodding, the horses slid down the decline. They rode in shadow through the Death Valley sage of a quiet gully, glancing at each other and smiling but saying nothing.
The gully spread out onto a broad plain and the sage gave way to hummocky yellow salt grass. Part of an old narrow-gauge mining railway ran to their left, rails rusting on a long embankment of cinders and gray dirt. Birds called out in the stillness and a thick rat snake slid its meter length through the scrub.
“All right,” Stella said, reining her horse up short and facing him. “I’m just about cured. How about you?”
Edward nodded. “This sure helps.”
She sidled the pinto closer to him and patted its shoulder. “I’ve lived here all my life, with a few years at school and traveling. Europe. Africa. Peace Corps. My mother and sister and I have done everything we could to keep the town together after my father died. It’s become my life. Sometimes it’s an awful responsibility — you wouldn’t think that, would you, since it’s so small? But it weighs on me. Mother takes it in her stride.”
“She’s a wonder,” Edward said.
Stella leaned her head to one side, looking sadly at the gravel. “You know, I said I was a radical. It was my sister who was the real radical. She went to Cuba. She has a complete set of Lenin and Marx on her bookshelves. She loves Shoshone as much as I do, but she had to leave. We think shers in Angola. Lord, what a place to be now. Me, I’m just a capitalist like all the rest.”
“Hard on your mother, I guess.”
“Who, me or my sister?” Stella smiled.
“I meant your sister. I suppose both of you.”
“What about your family?”
“None to speak of. My father vanished more than twenty years ago, and my mother lives in Austin. We don’t see much of each other.”
“And your connections at the university?”
“I’m not sure I’ll stay there, now.”
“No long-term plans?”
Edward brushed at a buzzing horsefly and watched it veer across the hummocks until it vanished. “I don’t see why.”
“Mother and I have been making plans for selling mineral rights. We’ll redo the town’s sewage line with a government loan, but this extra money — that could keep the town going for years, even if the tourists keep flocking over to Tecopa.”
“The big resort.”
She nodded. “What a disaster for us all. Tecopa used to be a bunch of shacks built over hot springs. Rowdy. Now it’s plush. The desert is like that.”
“It’s beautiful here. Something big could happen to Shoshone.”
“Yes, but would we want it to?” She shook her head dubiously. “I’d like to keep it the way it was when I was a girl, but I know that’s not practical. The way it was when Father was alive. It seemed so permanent then. I could always come back.” She shook her head slowly, looking out across the grass to a lava-covered hill beyond. “What I’m getting around to saying is, we could use a geologist here. In Shoshone. To help us work out the mineral rights and figure out what we have, exactly.”