Short story alert!!

On occasion, I'll post an original short story here, because heaven knows no one else wants to publish them. . .

The Body of Hector Salazar

By Brian Davidson

The road through the dunes crusts with ice welded to the asphalt by the deep freeze. Wind pushes the falling snow like a plague of fallen dendrite stars. Field stubble and roadside weeds not buried by the snow dance and tremble. A horse, head bowed, leaning into a barbed wire fence, shies as a goat sideswipes its horns at the horse’s chest, bullying, pushing the creature into the wind.

There’s no reason to fight over that particular patch of stubble and snow, Jimbo tought. But the goat persists.Worrying the horse, cut on the barbed wire, freezing in wind blowing 20 miles per hour.

Two other horses watch.

They always watch when you’re hurt, Jimbo thought.

Through the snow, a mile to the east, lies the city of Parker, its cemetery perched on an odd hillock, its water tower proclaiming proudly the city’s name.

The pickup crawled over the ice.

I hope we’re not in the junipers, Jimbo thought.

Walking through the sage brush will be hard enough.

The junipers, conical blots of black on the hills north of the dunes, look like soldiers.
But the junipers pass. The road, red in the summer from the cinders used to pave it, climbs hills, dips into hollows, weaves to the west, to the east, past the junipers, through the fields of sage brush and lava rock and cheat grass and other junk not quite buried underneath the scanty snow.

Two miles past the resort, the message said, there’s a sheep corral. Not sure what side of the road it’s on, it said, but there’s nothing else out there, so you won’t miss it.

He felt nervous, white-knuckling the four-wheel drive on the slick roads. The tires didn’t slip, though the wind pushed the truck over the ice. He drove slowly. He was used to driving on such roads, even if, for the past five years, he’d slid off the road at least once per winter. The radio played, but he didn’t hear it. He didn’t hear the wind. He heard the heater blasting warm air, felt it on its face, on his toes loose in his leather boots.

He saw the horse trailers. An eighth of a mile off, to the left, a cluster of trailers and trucks, all rugged, making the corral look like a used car lot. Past the corral, the road wasn’t plowed. The county probably plowed the road for the search.

Seeing the men strutting around the trailers, harnessing horses, talking, made Jimbo self-conscious. They wore Carharts and Dickies and outfits with the names of Polaris and Yamaha emblazoned on their backs like football jerseys. He saw cowboy hats and boots, face masks, hooded parkas, gold- and purple-tinted sunglasses, beards and moustaches, blankets for the horses, dogs, ski poles, snowshoes. Men wearing bright orange vests directed trucks backing up with trailers of four-wheelers, more horses, cases of water and pop hurried into a tent, bales of straw. Men wearing survival yellow vinyl coats set up traffic cones, directed sheriff’s vehicles, an ambulance to which someone in a moustache attached a hand-lettered sign reading COMMAND CENTER with two strips of duct tape once the vehicle parked.

“It’s amazing where you’ll see qualities of leadership emerge among people you don’t expect it in,” said a small man in a blue parka and grey ski cap. He had clear plastic lenses in his glasses, and teeth. He knew him. Director of marketing at a local credit union, where Jimbo was a member.

He felt more at ease.

Most everyone else who knew he and his wife stayed apart from Jimbo, friendly smiles never reaching their eyes when they said hasty hellos. But he was used to the whispers, the snickers. The frowns. This man tolerates me like a bad check, Jimbo thought. Something to be corrected. He dared use the word redeemed.

Neither one of them had a moustache, though Jimbo hadn’t shaved that morning.

They stuck together in the crowd, standing side by side, Jimbo canting his body in a way to keep his face out of the stinging wind, and out of his companion’s conversation. His chin quivered.

“What a nasty day for a thing like this,” his companion said.

“Yesterday was a lot sunnier,” Jimbo said.

“A lot sunnier.”

Yeah, too bad. So sunny. So sunny. “No wind at all,” Jimbo said.

He felt his incompetence showed enough in the denim pants he wore, through the lack of a face mask for the chin he could no longer feel. He wore layers like they taught him in Boy Scouts: long johns and a pair of pajama pants under the pants – he was at least proud they were Carharts -- long johns and a sweatshirt under the winter coat, with the too-short sleeves. Two pairs of gloves. Fleece hat with a fringe on top and two straps to tie under the chin.

Vivid memories of frigid winter camping, being forced to camp in a snow cave in the scoutmaster’s back yard while “The Wizard of Oz” was broadcast on TV. Of the hike when he forgot his gloves and had to crawl up a snowy embankment to get back to camp and he ended up crying with his frozen hands stuffed into his armpits, while the Scout leader, who pulled him up the embankment, walked in front of him, shaking his head. Of waking up with the stink of spaghetti dinner puke from a Scout who couldn’t find the door to the wall tent and had barfed on everybody trying to get out to go barf in the snow right by the tent door, snow already yellowed by many previous Scouts, bitter that the hot springs they’d hiked five miles to swim in were behind a padlocked gate in a chain link fence. The fence the Scoutmaster hadn’t known about. The fence he wouldn’t let them climb because that would be trespassing.

And colder memories. Much colder.

He liked to be bundled up, hiding his face from the cold. From the stares. But this far from home, some twenty miles or so, in another county where people had others to recognize and to whisper about, he felt almost unrecognizable.

His companion with the glasses and teeth poking out of hat and parka spoke easily, recalling the time he and a brother-in-law – A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy – were lost with wrecked motorcycles God knew where. “He was mortified when I called for search and rescue,” he said. “’You’re mad at me, aren’t you?’ I asked him. We started walking. We got out before Search and Rescue found us.”

Jimbo didn’t tell the tale of being lost on the highways of Los Angeles. Of having his wife call her mother at Disneyland for directions as he went into an Office Depot in Corona to buy a map.
They did find their way, he thought, smugly.

“Is that you, Jimbo?” A brown corduroy coat, hunter’s vest, snow pants, thick Russian hat and moustache greeted him. He recognized Bill, a high school friend of his wife’s. “How’s your wife doing? See her much these days?” The man smiled, stood feet apart, hands balled inside stiff green leather gloves.

“’S me,” Jimbo said. “And I don’t.”

“Good,” the man said. He walked away.

If only we’d start, Jimbo thought, sheltering from the wind between two Fremont County Search and Rescue trailers. One of them bore a cryptic message: To our Lost Members: 45, 64, 87, 90.

We’ve been standing here a long time. Waiting. The snow is falling faster and the wind, which was only gusting this morning, now blows strongly. There’s a lot more standing around to this search and rescue thing, Jimbo thought.

Jimbo didn’t brag he was going to look for Hector Salazar.

He refrained telling a friend in Pennsylvania that he’d have to wait for Jimbo’s copy-editing of his travelogue along the Snake River until Saturday afternoon because he, Jimbo, was off to find Hector Salazar, a despondent man last seen on Thanksgiving Day, driving a mini van, wearing only a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops.

He didn’t tell his wife. She didn’t answer the phone any more when she saw his number on the caller ID. He did not leave messages. Once and a while, when his mother wasn’t home, his oldest son, fourteen, would answer. Talk briefly. Agree to relay messages. They joked, stiffly. Jimbo asked how school was going. Fine, his son replied, invariably. And your sister? She’s fine. And the baby? He’s seven, Jimbo. You can still call me Dad, he said. Mom doesn’t want us to.

Someone found Hector Salazar’s van, stuffed with papers, dirty magazines, books and clothing, abandoned in a sage brush-filled hollow three quarters of a mile north of the sheep corrals a week ago. The sheriff’s department was convinced Salazar was a suicide. They’d searched for a few days, before the temperatures dropped to twenty below, before the winds blew. They stumbled though the ragged terrain, a cluster of lava bombs, pumice, juniper and sage brush twisted by the cold and heat and wind and rain.

“We’ll concentrate our search within about a mile of the van,” said the search and rescue leader, shouting into the blizzard with a crowd of rescuers surrounding him. “Most people, when they’re committing suicide, will only wander about a half mile from their vehicle.”

Jimbo turned. He’d parked his truck – a tiny Toyota, four-wheel drive but dwarfed between massive Fords and Dodges -- where protocol called for.

The man wanted to know how many had brought horses.

Some in the back of the crowd couldn’t hear him. Someone handed him a bull horn. “Is that better,” he shouted into the device.

“Better,” someone in the back of the crowd shouted.

Jimbo had visions of being the one to find the body of Hector Salazar, lost somewhere in the snow-blown sage brush.

“What you’re going to do is this,” the man said. “We’ll walk abreast, about eight to ten feet apart, so what you see and what the people next to you see overlap. When you get to a hill of snow, you’ve got to kick it. Now, remember what we’re looking for. What conditions we’re in. It’s going to be hard. Frozen. So you’ve got to kick it until you know it’s not a rock. It’s easy to forget. I was out here yesterday, and I kicked a few hills. I walked away from one, then walked back and kicked some more, because I wasn’t sure if it was a rock or not. We want to make sure our first trip is a thorough one. Once we feel out trip is good, we’ll do it again. We don’t want to miss anything.”

Some in the crowd had brought poles, ski poles, or long pieces of PVC pipe, to poke any snow hills they found. Jimbo had a long-handled ax in the back of his truck, along with some rope and a mason’s trowel. Maybe the ax. If nobody else was watching. He looked at his leather boots, which he wore to the office. They might kick a dead body today. His toes were cold already in his damp boots. He didn’t have any wool socks. Wore only one thin pair of cotton socks, already wet.
They started to break up into groups of six, five volunteers with a trained search and rescue man as leader. Jimbo and the marketing director hung back, watching as crowds of a dozen or more walked up each time the man asked for five volunteers.

He had visions of finding Hector Salazar. Kicking a snow-covered mound and finding he was kicking a snow-covered buttock. Suspiciously eyeing a lump underneath an exceptionally large sage brush, spotting the hand, poking out of the snow, clinging to the trunk. Even tripping over what he thought was a log only to discover it was a limb. He imagined the Search and Rescue pro with him exulting at Jimbo’s sharp eye. “I’d have missed him,” he’d say. “Glad you were here with us.” He could show his worth, that he was a worthwhile human being. If he did enough good, some day, he might be able to look his family in the eye again.

He resolutely decided to be humble with the news media. They were there, taping the preparations, coaxing shy Search and Rescue people into talking on camera.

“Who’s gonna talk,” the reporter from Channel Five asked.

As a man, the group took a step backward.

“Gotta talk to him,” said a pair of eyes wrapped against the cold. He pointed to a man with a clipboard.

“Thanks, Henry,” he said. He stepped forward.

Jimbo knew he was in the line of sight of the camera. He stepped aside. “I don’t want to be in the background,” he told his friend.

“You’re a journalist. You ought to be used to this,” he said.

“Haven’t been in the business for a year and a half,” Jimbo said. “Besides, it’s always better to be behind the camera, not in front of it.”

His friend agreed.

Snow swirled through the air like water in a river. Wind blew it into fluffy icecaps. Jimbo could no longer feel his chin. He zipped his coat up as far as it would, jammed his chin into the coat’s closed collar. As he breathed, he felt his chin growing warm again.

He thought of the Hot Hands. Packets of chemicals, activated by air, which each rescuer was given to activate and put in pockets as a source of heat as they walked and kicked and searched. His friend had already taken two of the packets, ripped them open and stuffed them in his boots. “They’re not working as hot as I thought they would, but my feet are warmer,” he said. Jimbo kept his in his coat pocket, unused. His feet felt as if he were standing barefoot on ice.

His coat bulged uncomfortably. A sack lunch, two water bottles handed out by the Search and Rescue crews. He felt a little uncomfortable carrying them. He felt thirsty. But drinking the water now would be a waste.

Finally, after two hours of standing around in the snow, the groups began to move. Trucks hauled them off, butts perched on the slick sides of pickup beds as the trucks bounced and rumbled over the packed ice. Some groups walked the hundred yards to the road, anxious to be underway, if only to warm up from the exertion.

His group seemed to be at the end of the line. Apparently, even with the deteriorating weather, they had all day to search. They scheduled the search for a Saturday when many would be off work. It sounded like a good idea to volunteer when his pastor called. It was safe to say yes in his warm study in the basement at home on a Thursday night, when his work was done for the week and Saturday seemed very far off.

They were at the end of the line.

He and his friend left the group, entered a wall tent where they’d seen people emerging with doughnuts and cups of steaming liquid. He had a chocolate doughnut and some hot chocolate, squinting at both as he’d had to remove his fogged glasses in the tent’s warmth. He squinted at the tent’s occupants. They all wore hats and snowsuits and seemed to be cheerful and mostly female. One woman stirred an enormous pot of something on a propane burner. “Watch you don’t burn your butt on that heater,” she cautioned. Jimbo felt the warmth streaming through the seat of his pants into the layers underneath.

Outside, snow fell, determined to bury Hector Salazar until spring.

Why wander off like that, Jimbo thought as he gulped the hot chocolate, stirring lumps with a plastic stick bending precariously in the heat. The police thought Hector Salazar had guns, and hadn’t wandered off into the desert to freeze to death. “Sure, we talked with the family,” the man had said as the groups huddled around him outside. “But what they said has only a 20 percent chance of being accurate. It was a long time ago he disappeared. People have funny memories, even of what happened yesterday. With finding the van, and with what we got from the family, we figure we have a ten percent chance of finding him today. And that’ll go down if the weather gets bad.”

The tent’s flaps billowed in the wind. Jimbo peeked out and couldn’t see the road, all of a hundred twenty yards away, through the migrating snow.

Why wander off like that, Jimbo thought as he held his empty cup. I ran off like that, my wife would be hysterical. She doesn’t like it when I’m fifteen minutes late getting home from work. But then, Jimbo, he said to himself, you have no idea how Hector’s family reacted. Some of them were here today, no doubt, hoping they’d be the ones to find him. To put minds to rest. But not as restful as the mind of the man they searched for.

That’s an odd thought, Jimbo. Hector Salazar left home troubled. Drove his van north, drove off the paved road onto dirt roads, off the dirt roads into rock and sage brush, out of the van, walking, into the desert, thinking, thinking. Maybe he went into the desert to drink. Lots of people did, Jimbo imagined. Too many eyes around here. Nobody buys that Nyquil story. Maybe he was a cross-dressing drinker, like the guy whom the police found hanged from a cottonwood on the banks of the Teton River a few years ago. Maybe he hated his job. Hated himself. So he wandered into the desert. To stop hating.

A woman stirred chili in the huge pot. She was there with the other women, preparing lunch for the searchers inside a wall tent insulated from the wind by walls of straw. She cackled like a witch.

Jimbo went back outside. The other groups were gone, it seemed. A few minutes standing in the snow, and his group began marching toward the road from where they’d begin their search.
His brother would say it was colder than a tin toilet on the shady side of an iceberg.

Rebel, the yellow lab, was there leaping at hands, sniffing crotches.

His owner, a pair of round-lensed glasses poking out of a hat, hood and Dickies, scolded him. “Rebel, leave him alone.” Rebel ran off, sniffing the snowy ground.

First-time volunteers talked like the professionals. They listened in on the radios, conjectures whether the first group, dispatched an hour ago, had already traversed their two miles to the point trucks would pick them up and bring them back for another trip.

Their leader – Jimbo never remembered names – chatted with Jimbo’s friend about the cost of concrete, the merits of pouring concrete in heat versus cold, the cost of hot water and calcium.
Last summer, he and his wife brought their three children to the sand dunes, a few miles south from where he stood, freezing. The sand, littered with charred wood and bits of exploded fireworks, burned their feet. But the kids shrieked with joy and ran across the landscape, pausing to dig holes with their toes to reach the cool sand a few inches under the surface, then racing off again once their feet were cool. Even the two-year-old loped up the dune to the crest to watch the ATVs crawling on the distant hills. And the dog – an 11-pound Dachshund – darted from campfire ring to campfire ring, sniffing, licking rocks, tongue lolling freely. They watched black beetles work their way across the sand, followed lizard trails.

Jimbo in the snow laughed at the memory of their laughter.

He remembered tellins his wife about something or other, how something worked. He was enthusiastic. He loved trivia, loved to share what he learned. He talked about this something for five minutes, ten minutes, ending with a flourish.

He remembered his wife looking at him in that was she had. “That was almost interesting,” she said.

He laughed. So did she. So did the children.

He got to see them every other weekend now that the divorce was final. The separation had been amicable, with her lawyer handling everything. He didn’t want a fight. He knew he’d hurt her deeply. He preferred not to think about it, but the thoughts always found a way to creep in. He told her he was sorry. At the sentencing, even when he got just probation, he told her. He told her he was sorry. He didn’t believe she believed him, but it needed to be said. When a man hurts a woman as he hurt his wife, there are never enough sorrys to be said. A man looks at those kinds of pictures and hurts himself. The only one hurt more is the wife, who knows she doesn’t look like those pictures. Doesn’t want to. Shouldn’t have to. But feels guilty and inadequate and betrayed and insulted. And hated.

She wanted proof he was sorry. Proof he wouldn’t hurt her any more, three times stung. She wanted proof he wasn’t an ass, a pervert, a sub-human. “Show me you’re a real man,” she said. “Then maybe I’ll think about starting to think about forgiving you.”

Jimbo thought hard.

All he could say: “I’m sorry.”

“We may not go out,” the leader said. We may not go out. He’d been listening to the radio. “The wind’s blowing too much. There’s too much snow falling. They might bring some of the other groups back.”

Jimbo and his buddy from the credit union went back to the warming tent. “They’re hauling them back in,” the cauldron woman said. She looked right at Jimbo, in his denim pants and frozen face. “There were too many not dressed for the weather,” she said.

He had more hot chocolate. He watched the woman stir the chili, others setting out cups, counting doughnuts. They laughed and were at ease with the world, though somewhere out in the frozen desert, Hector Salazar lay curled and frozen and silent in his shorts and flip-flops, on the drive of a lifetime.

Jimbo left the tent. A few seconds later, his buddy followed.

“So, whaddaya think,” he asked.

“I’m going home,” Jimbo said. He glanced into the wind, into the blowing snow. Snowflakes spun past his glasses and stung his eyes.

“All right.”

He entered the red trailer, turned in his hot hands, his bottles of water. He handn’t paid for them. He didn’t need them. He watched as the woman in the trailer crossed his name off the list of would-be rescuers. He flinched a little. He was used to having his name on lists.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” the woman said. “This happens. We knew looking for him in January would be a risk. We’ll just have to find him in the spring.”

He left the trailer, walked to his truck through the blizzard.

Find him in the spring. When early flowers poked through the dwindling crust of snow and rabbits and mice and foxes and coyotes come out of the burrows and run and eat and die less cruelly than during the false hope of January thaws.

He started the engine, let the defroster blast cold air throughout the cab as the engine warmed up. He removed his gloves, his hat. He took the lunch bag out of his coat, placed it on the seat next to him. He turned on the radio. Light opera.

He looked into the flying snow.

“I’m sorry,” he said.