To Sickness

The phone rings in the front office. Two weeks ago our receptionist had gotten her fill of Red Valley and moved out, so Ernie and I have been taking turns answering it. I’m only going through paperwork; the door to my office is open and the phone’s maybe twelve feet from me. But it’s Tuesday, so it’s his turn. Ernie lumbers over, sagging under the weight of the heat. He takes each step like burdened Atlas, but lifts the receiver like it’s a glass of scotch.

“Y’lo?” Ernie says. “Red Valley police.”

I sign my name at the bottom of a goldenrod form that precludes Jet Johnson from filing for another auto dealer license this year. He’ll try again next year, just as he has for the last fourteen years. Every time it appears in my mailbox, I figure one of us will give. Neither of us has.

Outside, three blocks east, I hear Bruce shout, “Welcome to Red Valley, Arizona, the friendliest town in the state!” A minute later I hear the car he shouted at rolling through.

“It’s the truck driver,” Ernie says, torn between listening to the phone and describing it to me. “he’s — says it’s stuck in the ice,” Ernie says. His lips keep moving, but he’s not talking. As I stand up from my desk, he adds, “he’s on the shoulder on Highway 15, few miles north by the sound of it.”

“What ice is he talkin’ about?”

“Says he’ll walk to the gas station,” Ernie says.

“Tell him to stay put.”

“You’d best stay put,” Ernie says into the receiver. “I know, we’ll come fix ya.”

I grab a stained mug beside the sink run it under the tap. Hard to go anywhere thirsty.

“He sounded a bit out of it,” Ernie says.

“I’ll say.”

Ernie chuckles. “Haven’t seen ice in Red Valley in thirty years.”

“Longer,” I tell him.

“No sir,” Ernie says, “I seen it freeze up the creek in the shade back then, around ’88 or so. We even got a little dustin’ of snow, end of December.”

“Always a contrarian.”

“Aim to please,” he says. He accepts the goldenrod form and returns to his office beside mine.

“Might want to call Don, let him know,” I tell Ernie over my shoulder.

“Expect his brain’s fried?”

“Who, Don? Or the truck driver?”

It’s too damn hot to laugh, but Ernie does anyway. “Well, he didn’t sound like he’s hurt.”

“Talkin’ about ice in the middle of this heat?”

“Fair enough. I’ll call Don, let him know we might need him.”

When I open the front door, it undoes the meager work our little air conditioner did this morning. The desert blasts in and coats the room like honey running the wrong way through a funnel.

My pickup is parked across the street, shaded by the thick green canopy of Jet’s gas station. As I drive east out of town, I pass by Bruce. Every day he sits at a card table under an umbrella by the faded “Welcome to Red Valley” sign and greets everyone rolling through.

“Bye, Sheriff Davis,” he shouts.

The people he greets are mostly passing through, or lost on their way to someplace else. Don’t see a lot of visitors in a town of just a dozen people. What’s there to see?

Half an hour north along Highway 15 there’s a white box truck so bright I can’t look at it. My truck rumbles up a cloud of dust as I pull off to the side. Wait for a car and a camper to pass. Cross the highway’s dusty median, pull up behind the truck.

Truck’s off the road. Looking for a shortcut, maybe? Sure found it. Wheels on the left side are a good three inches down into the creek bed that runs alongside the road. As I approach, I note streaks of black soil kicked up by the tires. Tried to drive his way out. Buried it deeper.

There’s a pale man behind the wheel. Young guy with ears like a jackrabbit. His head is tilted back against the headrest with his mouth open like he’s waiting to catch rain. The engine’s running and cool air is drains from the half-open window. He notices me and snaps back to life.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he rasps. “I got the truck stuck.”

“See that.”

“Do you have something to drink? I’m so thirsty.”

“Think I’ve got half a Mountain Dew in my truck,” I say. “But it’s warm. And flat.”

He stares at me, breathing like he just broke the tape at a marathon, and all the time I’m waiting for the punchline. This doesn’t look like a hit-and-run or anything out of the ordinary. Kid’s verging on heat stroke, that’s clear. But some days I expect a gun pulled on me. Maybe I’m still hoping something exciting will happen to break up this placid sheet of eternity.

“Son, this is a refrigerated truck,” I say. “Never occurred to you to go back there and get something to drink?”

He watches me for a long minute. The cars flash by, smooth and bright like river stones.

He grinds the truck into park and lifts his foot off the brake. He’s been holding it still all this time; probably took a deal of concentration even if it wasn’t going nowhere.

I help him out of the cab and around back. He’s got the truck locked up. Must be new; hardly anybody locks their trucks around here. Ain’t nobody around to steal anything.

The truck contains the entire week’s supply of food and water for the town of Red Valley, split between Marla’s and Jet’s gas station. A good quarter of it is cases of beer. I think it restocks the 7/11 in Chilchinbito Springs, too, depending on the week.

The driver pries a particularly squeaky bottle of water from a 24 pack and drains it. Then another. He’s halfway through his third before he starts looking normal.

“You drink that water like Sam drinks whisky,” I say.

“Who’s Sam?”

“Sam Waters. Used to be Red Valley’s barber. Now he just holds down a stool at the bar.”

“The bar sounds pretty good right now.”

“You’ve got a job to do.”

“Right.” he says. “Thanks, Sheriff. Want one of these?”

“Naw. And don’t thank me yet. Still got to get the truck out.”

I help him back out and close up the truck. The glare off my windshield leaves a spot in my vision.

The kid seems to see the truck for the first time. “I though it was stuck in ice,” he says, “but it’s not ice. It’s sand?”

“What’s your name, son?”

The question hits him like a chest pass. He juggles it for a second but doesn’t drop it. “I’m Langdon,” he says.

“I’ve got a chain in the back of my truck. You hop in there and put ‘er in gear, and I’ll set to pullin’ you out, all right, Langdon?”

“Got it.”

With the two trucks linked together, I get mine back on the road and start it rolling. There’s plenty of shoulder to let the traffic go by. Really, it doesn’t take much to pull the truck out of the silt. The hard part is getting it out of the ditch and back on the road. The kid drives with me about a quarter of a mile to a better get-up.

Langdon parks it and helps me with the chain. As we’re working, I glimpse Ernie in the Sheriff truck screaming past with the siren on. I throw the chain in the back of my truck and jump in.

The radio in my truck is already alight. “Twenty-two, I have a second call,” says a female voice. It’s the dispatcher from the town of Page. “Chief’s inbound, ETA ten minutes,” she says.

I swap the frequency and key the handset to get Ernie. “This is Davis. Ernie, What’s happening?”

“Car went off the road in Little Water,” he says. I can hear the vein standing out off his head by the hitch in his voice. In the background his siren throbs and the 5.4 liter V8 roars.

“Need me?” I ask. I’ve already pulled my truck around and started after him.

“Probably not. Thought I’d go, since we’re close. They already sent a cruiser and an ambulance.” The growl of the engine evens out; I can hear other sirens before he takes his thumb off the talk button.

“Sounds like Page has it under control.”

I listen to the scene play out through the Town of Page dispatcher while I follow the white box truck back to Red Valley. They’ve pulled the driver out alive. He’ll be spending his evening in the ICU, but no word on his condition. His Oldsmobile fared even worse than he did. Jaws of Life Cesarean.

“Welcome to Red Valley, Arizona, the friendliest town in the state!” Bruce shouts at the box truck. And then he notices me and adds, “Welcome back, Sheriff!”

Langdon pulls into Jet’s gas station and I park alongside. Across the street, in front of the police station, I see Don reading the newspaper in his van. Closest thing Red Valley has to a doctor and an ambulance.

Jet Johnson braves the heat to meet us outside. He and I used to play football together in high school. Rivals, though we’ve mostly mellowed with age. And aside from a shiny head and a beer gut, he’s mostly the same. Still wearing the red Jet’s Gas polo shirt, still orders it from the same place as when his father owned the place. He’s kept it up, though. Touches up the neat lettering on the storefront every year. On occasion I catch him up there with his steady hand and a pin striping brush. Usually jostle the ladder.

“Whole lotta excitement today,” Jet says. “This the iceman?”

“This is Langdon,” I say sternly. “He’s going to help you unload the truck. But first he needs to use the bathroom.”

The kid makes like he’s going to protest, then shrugs and follows Jet inside.

“That desert’ll have you seeing things,” Jet tells the kid. A sigh of cold air escapes when they enter, and then the door whaps shut with a rattle of sleigh bells.

Don blows the horn, waves me over with his newspaper. I can hear the radio in my truck still gurgling and beeping as Page’s finest clean up. Suppose Ernie had all the excitement today. Let him have it. He was Sheriff for twenty long, boring years before me. Somehow kept his sanity. I play hide and seek with mine on occasion, and I’ve been Sheriff scarcely half that long.

Somehow the asphalt of the road is even hotter than Jet’s parking lot. I walk from the core of the earth to the surface of the sun and feel the sweat burning off my neck. Halfway across, up to my knees in the heat mirage, I stop and wonder if my boots will melt to the street. I cast a glance down the road and see Bruce at his card table. He waves.

I can’t tell whether Red Valley has some kind of magnetism or if we’re all sick. Everyone else had the sense to leave this ghost town long ago. The only shot of lifeblood we’ve had in years, Marla’s young niece, our secretary, lasted all of two years. Started out keeping Marla’s lively, feeding the jukebox and dancing past midnight. Ended up emptying green Heineken bottles at the bar beside my father, bored to tears. And then he did a bad thing to her. Since then, he mostly drinks himself to the verge of death.

Fact is that things tend to linger in Red Valley.

Part of the problem is the land’s flat. Redrock Creek runs through, sort of. It runs some fifty miles out of the San Juan in New Mexico just to die in a pond north of town. Most of the year, as now, it’s a washbasin. A trickle. The old copper mine in the center of town lives on. Few decades more and all its equipment will bake to flinders in the sun. The main thoroughfare splits around it, creating a colossal median of dirt and scrub. Marla calls it an infinity symbol, but I don’t see it.

Don’s hand rests on the windowsill. He flicks the newspaper dangling from it like a cow’s tail, his gaze fixed on the highway. His hair is cut so short it’s hard to tell the top of his head from his five o’clock shadow. He’s thrown on his lab coat over his clothes and shut off the police radio docked on the dashboard.

“Ernie responded to that call, eh?” Don says.

“Page P.D. has it handled,” I say.

Across the street Langdon and Jet with hand trucks jingle the door again and again. Piled with boxes, empty; laden, bare. A crate of sweet clementines; a box marked “Lay’s;” gallon jugs of water, four to each milk crate.

“Ever wonder why so many go off the road?” Don asks.

Over at the Belltower Mills, corner of Snake and Dean, Nokomis starts her hot rod. She revs it a few times. It idles a while. And then she takes it roaring out of town. The exhaust is distinctive. Bell-shaped. At this distance it seems to be blowing raspberries.

“Not paying attention,” I say. “Maybe the heat gets to ‘em.”

“I’ve got a theory. That maybe they got behind the wheel with the intention of going off the road. Knew something was going to go wrong and welcomed it.”

The sun on my back is getting weaker, the shadows longer. “Morbid talk, don’t you think, Don?”

“Well,” Don says, folding the newspaper into his lap. We notice Langdon crossing the street toward us with a cold bottle of pop in each hand. At his approach, wrens surge around the police station like a sheet of noise and settle the bushes around Jet’s.

“Sam Waters been at the bar since this mornin’,” Don tells me.

“Should I be surprised?”

“No. But he ain’t there right now.”

“Good. Let him putter around the garage or something.”

The bottle Langdon hands me is so cold and wet with condensation that I almost drop it. The fizzy drink inside is a little vacation. I don’t particularly notice what it is, only that it’s cold. Don opens his with the key chain dangling from the ignition, and then starts the van rumbling while he drinks.

“Sam waters?” the kid says. “That the drunk fella you talked about?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I let the words evaporate off my lips. “We’re all worried about him, but him and his ways are something of a fixture.”

“Man has troubles,” Don says. He clears his throat, once, twice. I’m starting to wonder why he started the van if he’s not going anywhere.

“Can’t always fix another man’s problems,” I tell the kid. “Hell, truth be told, he’s my father. I’ve tried, I’ll tell you.”

Don leans in close, and in a tone just proud of the growling engine, he says, “I didn’t want to tell you this, but that was his Oldsmobile. Ernie radioed me to read off the plate number. Maybe thought he was sparin’ you”

And what was the last thing dispatch was saying as he ascended to the horizon in a helicopter? Unknown condition? Might make it, might not?

He’s turned down my help for the better part of ten years. All he’s got now is the flip of a coin. In that moment I can’t tell if it’s hatred or grief that makes my stomach tighten. Two faces on the same coin.

Don lets the clutch out just a fraction. Wheels start to turn. “Visiting hours at Flagstaff Medical Center run ’til eight,” he tells me. “Could be in surgery a few hours. They’ll let family visit past midnight; probably make it if you get going soon.”

I down the soda and right away I can feel the sugar hit. “Not in a hurry to see him,” I say to Don. Not interested in rehashing my powerlessness.

I glance back at the kid. He is watching the glare of a car cruising toward town off the 15. Three blocks down, at the faded “Welcome to Red Valley” sign, Bruce shouts, “Welcome back, Officer Ernie!”

Langdon takes the empty bottle when I hand it to him. Don’s truck rumbles to the street and he waits for Ernie to enter the police station parking lot before he drives back toward home.

“Thanks, Langdon,” I tell the kid, and gesture him back toward his truck. He goes across the street resolute. The wrens start and cascade into the desert.

Ernie parks the cruiser and hops out like there’s a firecracker under him. He slaps his hat onto his sweating head and marches over, but I deflate him with a look.

“Don tell you?” Ernie asks.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “Reckon you can get back to watching the phone.”

“You going?”

“Yes. Guess I’ll stop and see him.”

Ernie puts a hand on my shoulder and then enters the police station. There’s a waft of cool air from within that’s borne away on the thermals.

“Not a hero nor a good man, but my father.”

There are four streetlights in the town of Red Valley and they always pop on early. Their filmy light comes on like our sparse summer rains: sudden and diaphanous. Night will soon spread across those far mountains and for once I can’t say that I know what it will bring. It is a fear and it is a comfort.

When I cross the street to Jet’s and enter my truck, Langdon is already in his and backing out. He waves at me, but there’s no smile. The box truck crunches through the sand in the road and its long shadow swings across me.

The drive to Falstaff is not terribly long and I will have the sunset. But there is no downhill, nothing to get me rolling, as is always the case here. Things linger in Red Valley. Maybe it is a sickness. But nothing I can do will change my father’s fate, whatever mercy or damnation he’s earned.

I start my truck and roll slowly out around the copper mine and its ruined hoists and ramshacks. There is a bar stool growing cold in waiting. Perhaps I am heir to it. But to drink in his honor would be a disservice; as I cradle a glass at Marla’s cramped bar, I find a loophole in drinking to his health. As I raise the bottle, I watch my reflection in the greasy mirror behind the bar. The jukebox is not playing. Billiard balls clack laconically below the haze of cigarette smoke.

I find that I do not want to know which way the coin falls yet. Tomorrow a message will be waiting on my answering machine. Or maybe before then: Ernie will receive the call, lock up, and join me here.

Should he die, I’ll be rid of him. We will be rid of him. Maybe the sickness was his. A bell will ring and I will finally leave Red Valley and its memories behind to bake to flinders.

And if he lives, perhaps I’ll take the stool between him and Ernie and we’ll drown the last of possibilities.

To our health. And to our continued sickness.