Chapter 21 #2
“Because you’re not a fucking chinchilla! Of course I yelled at you about the salad dressing! I’m yelling about it again, actually! Right now!”
“I noticed!”
As soon as the shout left Tean, a flash of heat ran through him.
But then Jem shot him a grin, and for some reason, Tean grinned back.
Although being in a relationship with Jem for almost a year now had accustomed Tean to the conversational curveballs, there were still interactions that left him off-balance, disoriented, and frankly confused.
What he’d found, though, was that those feelings—with Jem—were also strangely liberating.
That was, perhaps, one of the things that attracted him so much to Jem, that sense of benevolent—or at least benign—chaos.
And, with it, the sense that maybe Tean didn’t have to make everything perfect. Or at least, not always.
“It’s not actually a fish cannon. That’s just what they call it. It’s a truck that’s specially designed to transport fish, and there’s a chute they use to release the fish into the lake. It does kind of look like the fish are being shot out of it, but it’s more like a water slide than a cannon.”
Jem groaned. “How did you actually manage to make it sound more awesome?”
Tean laughed. “I’ll find out when they’re going to stock it in the spring. We’ll come watch.” Before he could stop himself, he added, “If I still have a job.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Just joking.” But when Jem drummed his thumbs on the wheel, Tean said, “Death and despair. We’ll probably end up homeless and eating cat food. Scipio will have to get a job as a security dog.”
Jem let the moment pass before he said, “That was pretty weak sauce.”
“It wasn’t weak. It was accurate. It was specific.”
“Weak sauce, babe. Weak sauce.”
“I have no idea what that means or why you keep saying it.”
“I know.” Jem’s hand found his knee and squeezed. “That’s why I love you.”
Dark washed the valley like a vast flood by the time they reached the sign outside Myton that read WELCOME TO THE UTE NATION.
Around them rose the signs of change—the basin was in the middle of a transformation.
For a long time, money had flowed into the Uinta Basin for coal, and mining had been the primary occupation.
Now, the oil boom had come to the basin, and pumpjacks worked tirelessly under high-pressure sodium lights.
The communities, though, were the communities of people who lived there because they had to: spread out, with stretches of empty lots and a mixture of old brick and post-frame buildings with steel siding, so that everything looked like either an antique post office or an econo-lot storage unit.
They passed a drive-in movie theater, the screen dark, moonlit, tattered.
They passed a county health center with a flickering blue sign.
The newest thing Tean saw was a Burger King that couldn’t have been more than a year old; all the lights were on, but it looked empty inside, like a glowing glass box that had ended up here by mistake.
The Maps app took them down a two-lane, where the blacktop had cracked and split after too many freezes.
A stream ran alongside the road, creating a narrow strip of green in contrast to the brown and dusty olive of the high steppe they’d driven through.
Several uprooted trees—salt-cedar, cottonwoods, a willow that Tean guessed had been rotten before it had finally fallen—now lay across the flow of water, creating improvised dams where the water pooled and glistened in the Subaru’s headlights.
Raw scrapes showed in the soft soil of the bank. A flash flood, Tean thought. Recent.
A hundred yards later, a sign announced STRANGE LIGHTS CAMPGROUND – UTAH’S EXPERTS IN THE UNKNOWN.
Tean refused to make his point again, mostly because he knew Jem would enjoy it.
It was past dusk now, the sun gone, the horizon a red thumbprint against the gathering dark.
Stars filled the sky above them. Their headlights swept across the campground as they turned in, providing a glimpse of it: a gravel parking lot, with RV hookups branching off it.
Then, where the gravel didn’t reach, sandy-gray soil, clumps of sage and rabbitbrush, and red rock.
The only hint of artificial color was the lengths of magenta twine staked at the perimeter of each hookup—probably necessary for dividing the space fairly, but clearly not needed now, with the campground empty.
A building with ribbed steel siding and a flat roof sat on a small rise ahead of them.
Weren’t they worried about snow, Tean wondered.
They drove closer, headlights bobbing as they rocked over the uneven ground, gravel swishing under their tires, and someone moved on the porch.
Jem parked in front of a sign that showed a flying saucer, with the words UFO PARKING ONLY – ALL OTHERS WILL BE ABDUCTED.
“And probed,” Tean said. “And killed.”
“But probably not before being subjected to, like, vivisection. Oh shit! What if they had to vivisect each other?” Jem paused, probably to let the brilliance of that idea sink in. “Now that would be a good movie.”
Tean blinked at him.
Jem grinned as he turned off the car.
It was too dark to see whoever was on the porch, so they made their way to the steps.
Another alien met them there, this one a rusting metal statue that came no higher than Tean’s waist. It was modeled on the Gray style of aliens, which Tean only knew about because of the three weeks Jem had spent bingeing a show called Roswell.
(In Tean’s opinion, surprisingly gay. In Jem’s opinion—considered at length, and aloud, over four separate dinners: not gay enough.)
“Hello?” Jem said.
“Kai,” a woman called. “You got somebody!” And then, to them, “You can come on up.”
They stepped onto the porch as a light flicked on.
Two metal folding chairs, the kind Tean remembered from overflow rooms in church meetings, were angled toward each other on the porch.
A woman sat on one of them, her legs stretched out in front of her, one foot resting on the other.
She had dark hair with a tint of red, fiercely plucked eyebrows, and a lot of make-up.
She wasn’t dressed for the cold—a shirt that wasn’t much more than a bra and leggings that left nothing to the imagination.
Green nail polish marked the tips of her toes.
“You’ve got to wait for Kai,” she said. “Kai!”
The door opened, and a man came out. He wore his dishwater-blond hair long and swept to one side, and he was stocky, like someone who did manual labor for a living rather than a bodybuilder.
His long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and boots all suggested rancher to Tean.
He took them in at a glance, seemed to come to some sort of judgment—Tean couldn’t tell if it was positive or negative—and said, “You want to camp?”
“This is a great place,” Jem said. “It’s beautiful out here.”
“Yep. You want one night or two?”
“Actually,” Tean said, “we wanted to talk to you.”
The man didn’t frown. His face didn’t even really change. But something about his expression—or the lack of expression—unsettled Tean, and Jem tensed next to him. “You want to talk to me?”
“Just a few questions,” Jem said in what Tean had come to recognize as one of the voices Jem used when he was working on someone.
“Then we’ll get out of your hair. We’re investigating a death, and what I understand is that someone on this property found the victim.
Found his body, I should say. Brennon Lee. ”
The man didn’t say anything, but the woman said, “Kai! Oh my God, it’s that man.” She swatted his arm. “They’re talking about that man!”
“It wasn’t any of us,” Kai said. “It was a woman. A camper.”
Tean gave the lot and the RV hookups another glance; all empty.
“Did she leave any contact information?” Jem said. “We wanted to ask a few follow-up questions.”
“Who are you?”
“She’s still here,” the woman said.
“Be quiet, Tess,” Kai said.
“But she’s still here. We’ve got more hookups around the side of the mesa. You just keep going that way.”
Still nothing on Kai’s face. Not frustration. Not anger. Not annoyance. The eyes watched Tean with a cold, clear intensity that didn’t waver.
“We don’t like people wandering around—” Kai said.
“That’s great,” Jem said. “We won’t bother her for long. Just go that way, you said?”
“You can’t miss it,” Tess said.
Jem nudged Tean to go down the steps first. He followed, and Tean noticed he was careful not to turn his back entirely on the two on the porch.
They crunched over the gravel, following the lot around the rise of the land—which, Tean now understood, was part of a mesa that he hadn’t been able to identify in the dark.
When they’d put the mesa between them and the little office, and the porch light was no longer visible, Tean said, “What was that?”
“Really fucking freaky,” Jem muttered with another look over his shoulder. “There is something seriously not right about that guy.”
“He did seem…” But words failed Tean, and he finally settled for “Strange.”
“Oh yeah,” Jem said, and then he spat, as though clearing a bad taste from his mouth.
True to Tess’s word, it was impossible to miss the RV.
For one thing, it was the only one in the campground.
For another, it was painted purple, with flying saucers and gray men and yellow cones of light that Tean thought were tractor beams. An awning stretched out over a rectangle of Astroturf, where camp chairs were arranged around an empty fire pit.
The handle for the trailer’s door was engraved with a little alien head.
“Hello,” Jem called, and then he gave a light knock. “Sorry to bother you.”
The sounds of movement came from inside the RV, and then a woman said, “Just a minute.” Hurried steps went back and forth a few times, and then the door opened on a woman in sweats, brushing hair out of her eyes.