The Old Blog in the Desert

Lucas Hale had known fear in the usual ways a man learns it, flash floods roaring down a gulch without warning, the sudden buzz of a rattler too close to his heel, or the long, lonely nights when the wind could make a fellow think someone was calling his name from out in the dark.

But nothing in all his wandering across Nevada had readied him for the dread that settled on him along the frozen rim of Lake Lamoille. Once the old reverberatory furnace caught and the fire inside the boat roared to life, once the smoke climbed in heavy, black ropes and the heat bowed the ice beneath it, Lucas found himself edging back.

Something in him, instinct, grief, a kind of old-fashioned respect for the dead, kept pushing him away from that burning container until he stood near the far bank, boots slipping on the glass-hard ice. He didn’t know how long he stayed there.

Time stretched thin. His breath came in uneven bursts, small white puffs torn away by the cold wind.

The wind itself prowled around him, tugging at his coat like a hand with too much familiarity. Far off, the wild dogs howled, sharp, mournful notes that made Lucas start like a greenhorn his first night out. The silences between those howls were worse, hollow and wide, as though the whole basin held its breath.

He pulled his arms tight around him and watched the blaze. The flames inside the furnace leapt and twisted, throwing long strokes of orange across the snow-covered bowl of land. Somewhere in that flame-wrapped hulk lay Andy Mercer.

Lucas felt his knees give way, and he dropped in the snow without quite meaning to. He steadied himself with a hand on the frozen crust, as if he could brace against the weight gathering in his chest.

“How long have I been here?” he wondered, but the night kept its silence.

Little by little, the fire eased into a steadier burn, as the sky above began to change with it. Darkness thinned in places, and faint pricks of light showed through. They wavered at first, shy as camp lanterns in a distant line, then brightened until the whole Nevada sky looked like someone had spilled a box of silver dust across it.

As the cold deepened and the fire settled to a sullen glow, the stars began to quiver. Not truly moving, but the frozen air made them seem to sway, each one a small lantern hung from an unseen string.

When Lucas finally found his voice, it scraped out thin and rough.

“Alright,” he told himself, “a man can only sit scared so long.”

He forced himself upright. His legs trembled under him, and his stomach tightened like a cinched rope.

Everything in him warned against going back to that smoldering wreck in the dark. But a promise is a promise, and now that the worst of the fire had passed, he needed to know the truth, for Andy’s sake, and for his own.

“I’ll just take a look,” he muttered, trying to put iron in his tone. “Reckon he’s cooked. Time I checked.”

He started across the ice, each step crunching in the hush. Warmth pressed against him as he neared the furnace, still fierce, still dangerous, but no longer enough to broil a man’s skin.

At the warped hatch, he stopped. Smoke curled out in lazy threads. The sand around it was blackened and split, and the wind whispered through the pines like it carried secrets.

He let his hand hover over the door, gathering himself. Then, drawing a steady breath, he closed his fingers around the heated handle and hauled it open.