Notes from the Future: Rancher

He sits easily in the saddle. A lifetime on horseback. Anyone watching him knows it, and as he sits on a high ridge overlooking an old dairy farm, he knows that he has become just what his father and grandfather were, exactly as his wife predicted all those years ago: a relic. He'd expected her to leave him, and she did. Twenty years, now. He'd expected to hear next to nothing from his kids in all that time, and he had. He wasn't a cruel man or stern. Just not demonstrative. There is a demon in demonstration, his grandfather had told him once. And it shows.

He turns to the party behind him.

"You sure this is the place?"

The woman has a map on her knees, old map, young woman. Wouldn't say where she got it. Face illuminated by the reflection of the bright LED flashlight she has pointed at the map is ghostly pale, her blue eyes lost in shadow. Looks like a Banshee, he thinks. He hates LED flashlights. She says nothing. She's shown him the map several times. Brandished it like a sliver of the True Cross within minutes of their meeting. He knows she thinks he's an idiot. Silence shouts.

The husband. In the boots. Not even proper cowboy boots, but he clomps around in them like he knows a thing or two. Which he may. Or may not. Jury's out. Either way, young couple in a vintage Jeep, strange cargo, with a very old map. Too old to indicate much with accuracy. Too old to tell us anything at all, he'd told them in his kitchen, hours ago. But they'd insisted. Offered to pay. Way things are going, ain't much use for money these days, he'd said.

The payment they'd offered, there and then, was more valuable than any he could have imagined. Valueless to anyone else, it had been placed before him with the tenderness afforded a great treasure from the most secret and secure vaults of the most precious museum of antiquities. He himself had doubted its existence before that. But even as it had come to rest on his scarred wooden table, the bare light bulb overhead picking out the words painted on one side, he'd felt his life drop away under him. The room turned upside down for a moment. He'd been too shocked to move, or he'd have had the good sense to fall down.

"Where did you get that?" he'd asked.

"Same place we got the map," came the husband's terse reply.

"And that was?"

"An interested party," was all the husband would say. A long silence followed.

"Say I take you there, and there's nothing. Say we go all the way out there and there ain't so much as a toothpick in a dead raven's mouth, what then? You gonna ask me to search up and down for this place?" He had known as he asked that he would do it, if needed. He would do anything they asked, now. Anything for this object they'd placed before him. But he liked to play his cards close. Best not to let on.

"If you take us there," this from the woman. "It will be there. We know it will be there. But you have to take us there. You have to be our guide."

"If it's not there," Husband hasn't looked away or blinked since last he spoke. "You keep this. No harm, no foul. It's yours. It's meant for you. You have a job to do. We know that."

He'd gasped against his will, not a big gasp, nothing demonstrative; just an intake of breath. It felt loud in his mostly dark, empty house. Never in his life had he expected to hear those words. He'd thought he was the only person in the world who knew, who understood.

A dark day, late September, 1946. He'd returned from a dismal, cold weekend in leaking canvas tents with his scout troop to find his house empty, his parents gone -- and his best friend waiting on his doorstep, to say goodbye.

Not goodbye, you're moving (he'd had no idea, he'd loved this house, so many friends here, parents had never said a word); it was goodbye, I'm running away. 

Something had come to him, his friend had said. A very great treasure. He was only allowed to tell one person about it, about its history and its purpose. Then he had to go, alone, and probably never come back.

They'd spent the rest of the day down by the creek, and when dusk had come his friend had turned to the west and said, "If I make it all the way, I'll be in California. Come and find me, someplace with horses, someplace close to the ocean."

When the police had come asking questions about his friend's disappearance, he'd kept his word. He'd said quiet, earnest, boyish prayers about adventure and discovery, maintaining this secret light in the center of his soul for decades. But time has a way of setting aside dusty thoughts, tucking them into forgotten attics and piling old news, tuxedos and mortgage payments into every clear space. He had, eventually, forgotten his promise, even though it was what had first drawn him to California.  

He still hadn't touched it, afraid to dispel a dream. Staring at the tiny words in white on black, he knew. This was meant to be. This was what he'd been waiting for his whole life. He was the final Steward.

"I'll take you," he'd said. Maybe it was his imagination, but after he said those three words he thought he heard, far far away, the lonely throat of a foghorn, the solitary bell of a buoy. He had stood and walked away from the table, nudging the light bulb which swung a little, sending their shadows crazy over the walls.

"You're just going to leave it there?" the wife had asked.

"If that's really what it's supposed to be, I'd better," he'd said, looking into her very blue eyes for the first time. "If I want to come back alive."

Now he sits on Beulah looking down on a darkened farm, precisely as described by these two strangers, precisely where they'd said it would be. His job is done. All he'd agreed to do was take them this far. He could go back to his quiet home and solid bed, away from phantoms of the past and an obligation he'd long ago thought impossible to fulfill. But something doesn't sit.

Dismounting, he leads Beulah near to where the other four horses are tied to a tree -- two extra horses, saddle and all, for what they wouldn't say, insisting that they had to leave the Jeep at his house and travel to the location on horseback. Wrapping her reins once around a dead branch, he kneels next to the couple. "Something don't feel right," he says. "This is the place, you are right as rain in every detail as far as I can tell. But if anyone's down there it's got to be an accident. That place is older than God and empty as my old creaking bed."

"Impossible as it may seem," the husband speaks low, like he's afraid to be overheard. "There is more down there than you can imagine. You know Mount Diablo has erupted; this seemed impossible a month ago. Almost everyone in the Bay Area is dead -- nobody saw that coming either -- help is slow to arrive and city folk like us should be getting away from here, not getting closer to the burning mountain. Right? So everything's already weird. But yes: something in this place feels less right than everything else. I don't know what it is. But I expect we'll find out sooner than we want to. My question for you is, how easily do these horses spook?"

"Depends on what you throw at them," he says, a grudging respect building inside.

"Ever take 'em to a Halloween party?"

October, 1946, the air crisp and smoky, a secret journey to Betty's attic, the old papers they'd read by candlelight -- more memories he's banished for years thrown into sharp relief by the footlights of time.

"Want to know a secret, Talmadge? Want to know something my Mama says never to tell?"

-- only if it gets me a kiss, Betty -- 

He'd never said it.

"Help me open this trunk."

"Are you sure we should be up here? On Halloween?"

"Are you some kind of sissy? It's my house, I know what's up here. Now hold the lid open and don't let it slip, Mama says it's heavy enough to cut off a finger."

How right she'd been.

"No, can't say I have," he says. 

Miles away, a gigantic explosion tears the night to shreds. Flames leap into the sky on the other side of a farther ridge and down the hillsides a ways. Even at this distance, the fire is practically overhead.

"Good Lord," he murmurs. "Must be a gas main, like San Bruno -- like I heard about in Pleasanton a few days ago."

"That's our signal," the woman says. The husband takes his shotgun from the scabbard on his saddle, checks it, his wife doing the same with her longbow. Silent, competent, prepared. This couple might not be as city-slick as they pretended. Jury's still out.

Shaking his head, he grabs his Winchester and joins them on the stony outcropping at the edge of the ridge. "What now?" he asks.

They're silent for a time, the roar of the fire loud and getting louder. The husband looks at him, a little smile in his eyes:

"We wait."