ruined. It was the river, the irrigation source flashing down at the bottoms of the fields to his right, that made the farms possible. After several miles of following his directions, making two turns and taking one fork to the right, he crossed a cattle guard and passed a sign that said BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT. Federal land. Abruptly, there were no more farms.
He drove on. All along the gravel road jackrabbits had been killed by passing vehicles. Some of the bodies were fresh. Some were dry and flat. Back by the farms the road was littered with them, but here they became occasional. They were a measure of traffic. He saw a herd of mule deer running away from the road. They jumped a fence one after another, fifteen or more of them, their bodies going up and coming down, shining in the light like a snake sliding over a stick. They ran across a field, descended, darkened, and vanished into an arroyo. The road swung away from the river and wove through sedimentary formations—tall, weird shapes, eroded and hollowed out, leaning precipitously. The jackrabbit bodies became rare. A hawk crouched over one at the roadside, then as the truck bore down the hawk spread its wings and flew straight up with entrails dangling from its beak.
He was angling nearer the pale-green cliffs again. He passed a welldrilling operation, a dark derrick poised high in the sky. Two men were there. He passed a big field grown wild with alfalfa, oats, and thigh-deep weeds. The field was marked with Day-Glo-pink survey flags. That was the site. As the road swung right, he saw more of the field. It crested and sloped downward. At the crest stood Phil Grimes's tractor and lowboy trailer, and next to them the LeTourneau, and then down low on the slope he saw a ranchstead—a metal building, old barn, rock silo, outbuildings, and a house. Just past the house lay the river, curled against the base of the cliffs. He geared down and took a hard right toward the ranchstead. He leaned forward and peered expectantly over the dash. Jones peered with him. The trailer tugged and clanked on the rough roadway. He turned into the ranchstead and circled, passing first a pair of loaded semi-trailers with yellow tarps drawn tight over their cargoes, then an ancient crawler tractor, a pickup, a silver Mercedes-Benz sportscar, a low-slung outbuilding, the barn, a string of small outbuildings joined by corrals. In the spaces between the outbuildings he glimpsed the overgrown field, sloping upward now, and the fluttering markers. He stopped in front of the house. A dense cloud of dust billowed over the hood of the truck. No one was in sight. He switched off the engine and climbed down.
Jones followed him. She squatted. The sharp scent of dog urine rose on the dry air. He moved around the front of his truck. The blazing sun hung at thirty degrees. From the distance he heard the drilling operation—the running engine and clanking of pipe. Jones rolled in the dirt, nuzzling it and happily kicking her legs. Lafleur looked down at the Owyhee River, which was hardly more than fifty paces from the house, its surface smooth and oily-looking. The dust his rig had raised had blown across the river, and now drifted slowly up the face of the limestone cliffs. He followed the dust with his eyes, tipping his head, and tried to gauge the cliffs' height—two hundred feet, maybe more. Looking made his head hurt. He told Jones to stay and headed for the house. He reached around and picked his damp shirt away from his back. He heard the clanking of drilling pipe more distinctly. The noise came at him from two directions—from the corner of the field and also reverberating off the cliffs. The porch of the house had a new board nailed in amongst the old ones and it moaned when he stepped on it. He had his fist poised to knock on the screen door when he heard voices.
He heard a woman say, “Where do you get off?” He heard a man say, “No, no. When do I get on?”
He heard the woman say, “Try climbing out of the ditch first.”
The man's bright, coiling laugh made Lafleur arch his back and bring his hand down.
“I need a hand up out of the ditch,” the man said.
“Not from me,” the woman said.
“Who else?” the man said, chuckling. The voices, the man's elastic tenor and the woman's alto, Lafleur recognized as the ones he had spoken with by telephone.
“Listen,” the woman said. “Slippery is one thing. Screwing a guy like Smythe is still one thing. But this business with that soldier of fortune, as you call him, is another thing altogether.”
“Not your concern,” the man said.
“It wasn't,” she said, “until his personnel file popped up on the screen.”
“Forget it.”
“For all you know that guy's a killer. Somebody's going to end up with him in their face. Then what?”
There was a pause, a profound silence from the house, and Lafleur rocked back without moving his feet. He wanted to get out of there, but he was afraid that if he moved the board would creak again. He thought about trying, anyway. He thought that if it creaked and the pair inside heard it, he could change direction and come up to the door and knock as if he had just arrived. Maybe he could just jump clear. Or maybe, he thought, he should take his chances and knock right now. Maybe they wouldn't know what he'd heard.
He raised his arm and held it up indecisively. A movement at a window on the side of the house caught his eye. It was a woman, bending over. The light played on her naked loin, side, and arm. Her hair glistened. Lafleur's arm lowered as if under its own power.
“He's not,” the man said in a low voice, “but you got to figure somebody like that's always going to be around.”
“Not around me.”
There was another, shorter pause, then the man said, “We need a demilitarized zone. A place where we can be ourselves. One would think it'd be the bedroom.”
“You're changing the subject,” the woman said.
“Or certainly the bed,” the man said, his voice filled with mockery.
“Bull,” the woman said.
“Beds. We've got two of them for God's sake. If one doesn't work, we could try the other,” the man said.
The woman straightened up. She was thin and tall and dusky-looking behind the screen. Lafleur's breath caught in his throat. She drew a blouse over her head, wriggled into it, then stepped out of sight. Her words emerged muffled as if she were leaning into a closet. “There's the barn. Maybe you could get stirrups on one of those pigs.”
There was another pause. Lafleur stared fiercely at the screen door in front of him. Whatever the conversation was about besides seduction—files, beds, pigs, a soldier of fortune who might be a killer—he had no idea and didn't want to know, but a strange thing had happened to him: While his sympathies were unquestionably with the woman, his body had been gripped by a craving wantonness. He found himself picturing the woman bent into a dark closet, her naked buttocks out in the light. He detested having been carried across the barrier to voyeurism, and yet he was definitely there, alone, helpless. An animal tingling filled his limbs.
He stiffened when he heard footsteps. The footsteps stopped. He glanced at the window and back through the screen door, but saw no one. The woman spoke, her voice angry and clear. “You don't get what you want whenever you want it, not with me. Not now. Not every damn time I take a shower.”
Lafleur thought: of course, the shower. They'd been in the bathroom when he rolled in and neither one of them had bothered to look out the window. They had no idea he was here, but then he thought: Here. And he wondered: Where?
…standing on the porch of an old ranchstead that was tucked into federal land, a sloping field full of survey flags on the other side of the house, out in the barren, high desert, alone here, seized by carnality.
He shifted his weight uneasily. The porch creaked. He froze.
“I guess I'll just have to learn how to surprise you,” the man said. He sounded as if he were about to spring.
“There've been too many surprises, already,” the woman said. “You're a surprise.”
The man said, “Then I'd better find a way to take surprise into a new dimension,” and then he laughed again. Because of the tone of his voice, and because of the sound of the laugh twisting