Burton had counted on going to court. Had banked on Harold’s not caving in to Holly’s demands; on his being able to demonstrate to the jury exactly what kind of person she was. Now the awful reality was slowly sinking into Burton’s consciousness. He had been outmaneuvered.
Without paying much attention, he downed one drink and ordered another. The problem at the moment was finding a way to regain control. Harold had made up his mind to settle, and once Harold Patterson made up his mind about something, it would be a hell of a job to change it. The biggest difficulty with someone like Harold was the fact that his word was his bond, and so was his hand shake. He’d do what he said he would do regardless of whether or not his name was on the dotted line. It was slimy bastards like Rex Rogers who never made a move until all contracts had been properly drawn, signed, and executed.
Suddenly, sitting there by himself in the booth, Burton Kimball wondered if Ivy knew she was about to be run over by a train; wondered if she had any idea what her father intended to do.
Ethically, Burton didn’t have a leg to stand on, but it wasn’t fair for her not to have some warning. Burton waved to the bartender. This time, when she approached the booth, he asked her if he could use the phone. At first, he thought she was going to turn him down, but then she relented. Directed to the phone in the back room, Burton dialed the Rocking P. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered.
Leaving the phone, a slightly tipsy Burton Kimball returned to the table, where a new Bloody Mary was waiting for him. Now that he’d decided to do it, now that he’d decided to tell Ivy, he could hardly contain himself. He gulped that drink and hardly noticed that this one was much hotter than the other two. And much stronger. When it was gone, he tried the phone once more and ordered yet another drink.
By the end of the fourth drink, Burton Kimball was well on his way to being drunk. He was also more than a little worried. He should never have told Harold he quit. That was dumb. How would he ever be able to lobby on Ivy’s behalf if he was outside the case looking in? He should probably track Uncle Harold down and unresign. Was unresign a word?
Disresign maybe? There had to be some kind of word that said what he meant, but he couldn’t think of it.
There may have been more drinks after that.
Burton seemed to remember singing show tunes with a toothless old miner at the end of the bar.
By the time he finally reached Ivy by phone, Burton could barely talk. Mumbling incoherently he blurted out the news. The dead silence on the other end of the line sobered him instantly.
“Ivy,” he said, when the silence persisted. “Say something. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. But she didn’t sound fine. “Do you want me to come out? Can I do something to help?”
“You’ve done enough,” she said.
When he put down the phone, a subdued and surprisingly sober Burton Kimball paid his bill.
The bartender had been very nice, so he left her a sizable tip. Unfortunately, as soon as he stepped outside, as soon as the bright sunlight hit him, he was drunk again.
Staggering, Burton managed to make it down the street without seeing anyone who knew him.
He found his car and succeeded in inserting the key in the lock on the fifth try. Settling in the seat with his head against the backrest and telling himself that all he needed was a little nap, Burton Kimball passed out cold.
For a fleeting moment, when he first awakened in the shadowy gloom, Harold thought it was all a dream-the same one he always had, the terrible nightmare that had haunted his sleep and hounded him out of bed for more years than he cared to remember.
The dream was forever the same. Harold would find himself trapped in a glory hole, in one of those useless, abandoned exploratory shafts that covered the stony pastures of the Rocking P. And took place in the very same glory hole that was one, the one nearest the summit of the Muleuntairs, high up among the red rock bound, scrub-oak-dotted cliffs called Juniper flats.
In his sleep, Harold’s nightmare prison was just like this real one, measuring eight feet in diameter by thirty feet deep. Uneven slide-prone sides rose in an almost perpendicular fashion from a dank, ram puddled floor to the rounded lip at the top, left by a pile of excavated tailings. Rocks and other things-foul things he didn’t want to think about-littered the floor and made footing uncertain.
In real life, a sturdy barbed-wire fence surrounded the tailings mound and separated it and others like it from the Rocking P’s pasture land.
The fence served as a lifesaving deterrent to thirsty desert-dwelling livestock that might otherwise be drawn to their deaths by the luring smell of water.
In Harold’s dream, the fence never did any good, because it never kept him from falling in and being trapped.
Each time the nightmare opened, Harold would find himself on his hands and knees, his desperate fingers groping and clawing along the steep wall, searching for some hold, some purchase, that would allow him to scramble up and out of his rocky cage, But each movement, each tentative touch, would jar loose stones and pebbles that would rain back down on his body, sending dirt and gravel spewing into his watering eyes and mewling mouth, battering him into the ground like some shamed biblical harlot.
In his terror, he always cried out to Emily “Help me, Em. Please help.”
Of course, Emily never answered his panic stricken cries, and why would she? She’d been dead for five years now and had been out of reach for many years before that. Emily Patterson was long dead but not forgotten.
On this day, though, once his brain cleared, Harold realized this waking nightmare was no dream.
Instead of sopped, sweat-drenched bedsheets beneath him, when he came to himself, there were rocks-real rock that were all too cold and sharp, especially the one that was biting painfully into his shoulder. This time he really was trapped in the dank depths of that very same glory hole, the one he had always avoided whenever possible.
He lay flat on his back and tried squinting up through the darkness at the distant blue far above him. That had to be sky, although he couldn’t really tell for sure, couldn’t actually see it. His glasses had somehow disappeared in what must have been a fall, although Harold couldn’t remember it. Without his trusty spectacles, Harold Patterson was as good as blind.
Blind, he thought grimly, but maybe not helpless. He tried to shift his weight then, to dislodge whatever it was that was digging into his shoulder. But even that slight motion was too much. A crushing wave of pain washed over him-a pain so intense that it flattened him, robbed him of breath, and rolled his eyes back into his head.
Ribs, he thought to himself when he struggled back to wavering consciousness. Shattered ribs. No telling what damage they might do if he tried to move again, if they poked into something vital, a lung perhaps, or maybe even his wildly pounding heart.
So he lay still and tried to think, tried to imagine what he could do to save himself. The glory hole that had for years tormented his sleep was miles from the house, so there was no point in calling out for help. No one would hear him. Unless someone came out there deliberately. Unless they came looking for him.
He tried then to remember how it was that he had come to be near the glory hole in the first place. Had he been out doing chores? Feeding cattle? Working fences? Try as he might, he couldn’t corral his memory into any kind of order. What ever had happened earlier in the day, before he fell into the hole, remained a total mystery, as did the days immediately preceding that. It was as though his memory of the last few days prior to this terrible awakening had been wiped out of existence.