“I just left her.”
“Wasn’t a thing you could’ve done, so you might as well start letting that go. But what I’m trying to tell you is this. Twenty years ago, a woman got away. She went to the Aspen police, told them everything that was done to her, how they murdered her husband, and you wanna know what happened?” The old man points a long, dirty finger into Ron’s shoulder. “She died in prison four years ago. Convicted of drugging her husband and setting him on fire in their car while on vacation in the peaceful town of Lone Cone. You can’t go up against a whole town, son. You hear what I’m saying? They’re already preparing for you to come back with law enforcement making crazy claims. Don’t do it. Don’t ever go back there. You walk into that hospital and tell them you and your wife got lost in the mountains, and you barely made it out.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s the only chance you got.”
Ron opens the door, climbs down out of the enormous truck.
As he turns back to close the door, the old man reaches across the seat and slams it shut himself.
The truck’s knobby tires squeal as it roars away from the hospital.
-37-
Ron stands once more on the corner of Main and 3rd.
He squeezes his wife’s hand, says, “I’m gonna go in here for a minute.”
“I’ll walk down to Starbucks. You’ll come meet me?”
It feels good stepping out of the maddening August heat and into the theatre—a hundred and fifty-two years old according to the plaque on the brick beside the entrance.
Ron passes through the lobby, through the archway, and climbs two flights of stairs on his tired legs.
He doubts he’s plopped himself down in the same seat he occupied that night, but the view down onto the stage looks exactly like the dreams that still plague him.
Below, a janitor emerges from underneath the balcony, pushing a mop bucket down the center aisle.
-38-
“Excuse me, sir?”
The janitor looks up from his mop bucket, says, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“The door was unlocked.”
As Ron arrives at the base of the stage, the janitor’s eyes fall on what remains of Ron’s left hand—everything lost to frostbite but the thumb.
Ron places the janitor around seventy, the man small and wiry. He asks, “How long have you lived here, sir?”
“Forty-five years next month.”
“No kidding.”
“Look, I gotta finish up here.”
“Could I just ask you one little favor?”
“What’s that?”
Ron’s heart pounds under his Hawaiian shirt, his mouth gone dry.
“I want to see the golden bear.”
“What the hell are you talking—”
“The brazen bear you bring out every winter solstice.”
The janitor smiles and shakes his head, leans against the mop handle. “You’re one of those people, huh?”
“What people?”
“Once or twice a year, some conspiracy freak comes along asking about the winter solstice celebration, and didn’t this town used to—”
“I’m not asking, and I’m not a kook. I was here, sir, twenty-nine years ago, December twenty-second, Twenty-Aught-Four.”
“You must be con—”
“I watched from the balcony while you roasted my wife inside the golden bear.”
For a moment, the theatre stands so quiet, Ron can hear the murmur of traffic out on Main, the janitor staring him down with an oblique combination of anger and fear.
Ron says, “I didn’t come here to hurt any—”
“I told you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you—”
“And I got work to do.”
The janitor turns away and pushes his mop bucket toward the far right aisle that in Ron’s dreams are always lined with white-masked executioners.
-39-
He walks slowly down the sidewalk among the throng of tourists, sweating again after half a block.
The waterfall has dried up, and the sky, so blue and pure all those years ago when he and Jessica first came to town, has faded into a pale and dirty white.
Main Street looks the same, although the two lanes have been divided into four to accommodate the tiny vehicles, and there are traffic lights and automated pedestrian crosswalks now at every intersection. Some of the older buildings have been demolished, but most remain to be dwarfed beneath the five- and six-story apartment buildings.
The “Welcome to Lone Cone” sign boasts a population of just under nine thousand.
Ron glances at the hillsides above town, overridden with condos and trophy homes.
Above them all, a Wal-Mart sits perched on a manmade plateau, and behind it the immense gray peaks stand snowless under the brutal summer sun.
-40-
Ron waits twenty minutes in line for a cup of dark roast, then joins his wife at a table near the window.
“How’s your latte?” he asks.
“Delicious.”
Starbucks world music trickles through speakers in the ceiling like a slow-drip IV.
“Could we spend the night here, Ron? It’s so beautiful—”
“I’d rather not.”
She reaches across the table, holds his hand.
“When we leave here, do you want to show me where you stumbled out of the mountains? Maybe we could stop on the side of the road, say a few words for Jessica?”
“Sure, we could do that.”
“You regret coming here.”
“No, it’s not that. I always knew I would.”
“Must feel strange after all this—”
The knock on the window startles them, and Ron glances up to see the janitor peering through from the sidewalk.
-41-
Ron and the janitor sit on a bench at the termination of 7th Street, on the bank of a filthy pond inhabited by a single mangy-looking duck.
“We thought you’d come back,” the janitor says. “Right after, I mean. Wise you didn’t.”
“Town’s changed,” Ron says.
“Beyond recognition.”
“Does Lone Cone still practice—”
“God, no. People went soft, couldn’t stomach it. Quit believing in the usefulness of such a thing.”
“Usefulness?”
“You hear about the avalanche?”
Ron shakes his head, swats away a swarm of flies that have discovered the sweat glistening on his bald scalp.
“Second winter after we quit the blot, we caught a blizzard. Hardest we’d ever seen. The slide came down that chute right there.” The janitor points to a treeless corridor on a nearby peak that runs right into the town. “Destroyed fifty homes, killed a hundred and thirty-one of us. I still hear them, broken and screaming under the snow.”
“Some might call that divine retribution.”
“I lost my wife and two sons that night. Almost everyone left after that. Sold their land to developers. Then the second homes started cropping up. Chain stores. Texans and Californians.” He sweeps his hand in disgust at the bustling little city, heat shimmering off the buildings and streets. “Until it became this. I keep saying I’ll leave one of these days. Nothing really left for me, you know? Not my town anymore.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“‘Cause you at least saw this place when it was a piece of heaven. When it was perfect. I almost feel a kinship with you.”
“I had to quit practicing medicine,” Ron says. “Lost everything I’d worked for. Fucked me up for a lot of years.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“But then I met a beautiful woman. We had three beautiful children.”
“Glad to hear that.”
Ron pushes against his legs, groaning slightly as he struggles to his feet.
“My wife’s waiting for me in the Starbucks.”